상상적 순수로의 복귀-윌리엄 포크너의 『내려가라 모세야』읽기

Abstract

In Go Down Moses, Faulkner returns to the issue of miscegenation, the historical trauma of the South, which was confronted in Absalom, Absalom!. but whose overcoming was still left unresolved. Instead of repeating the same trauma, Faulkner in this later novel tries to find an ethical way of the white descendants' repenting of the historical sin of their ancestors and mourning for the death of the victims sacrificed by slavery. Ike's discovery of his grandfather's abominable act of miscegenation and incest and his repudiation of his patrimony are undoubtedly the central work of mourning of the novel. But Ike's repudiation cannot be a proper response to the specific tragedies of the victims. Though repudiating his tainted legacy and demystifying the ideology of innocence that framed the Southern white generation, Ike evaporates the specific objects of his negation. Besides this ahistorical evaporation, what vitiates his negation is that the very idea of innocence is still kept within the wilderness into which he withdraws. Underneath his retention of the idea of innocence is lodged his deep-seated fear of miscegenation. Though Faulkner keeps an ironic distance from Ike's adherence to untainted innocence and freedom, revealing its limit through Roth's black mistress's rebuke to Ike, this distance is not unfiilingly maintained. He shares much of Ike's acts, including his repudiation and ritual hunts in the wilderness. His creation of Lucas as the image of a Confederate soldier is a displaced expression of his fear of racial pollution by incorporating the black figure into the very ideal of the white Confederate father.