Delta Winter: Faulkner’s Nature and Repudiation
For young Isaac McCaslin in William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” nature is the plane of repudiation. It is the place where the eternal striving of man and animal blood becomes not simply contest but art, frieze noble and enduring as the pediments of the temples of the Greeks. It is the only subject, in the end, worthy of the best talk, talk of “the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded documents:—of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it, of Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey.” It is the place which, even as it recedes beneath the pressures of commercial industry, nonetheless exerts a call immitigable and unanswerable except by going out into the wilderness and trying once again the old ways of the heart, which will endure until the last light goes out of the world and the last tide falls flat and unutterably still upon the final colorless rocks of non-being.
At the outset of “The Bear,” Isaac is sixteen, having come out now to the big woods for six years and having for six years hunted as a man hunts. Going out in search of Old Ben—the bear who has defied all attempts against him, the two-toed bear who has destroyed traps and fences and dogs and who holds in his hide the shot of ineffectual guns—Isaac has left behind at last compass, bottle, and gun. These are the implements he learned to use through long apprenticeship to the hunting lives of his elders and whose abandonment he has gathered from Old Sam Fathers, half-native and half-black, the staid representative of those who, in Isaac’s estimation, repudiated some share of sovereignty over that swathe of Mississippi land by imagining it to be something they could sell for money. He does meet the bear, which rises like a mountain before him, bearing baneful stars upon its shoulders, overwhelming him only to leave him intact.
The progress to Old Ben’s death swells as steadily as God’s project of redeeming his people out of Israel. Major de Spain’s company of hunters attracts, through family connections and auspicious visitations, just that cast of characters needed to achieve the death of the bear. There are Sam Fathers and Boon Hogganbeck, both in part of native lineage, the former nobly and with the grace of one who has spent his life in contemplation of nature, the latter with a sort of slipshod and grungy intensity. There are Walter Ewell, the cool-headed marksman, and noble General Compson. And there is McCaslin Edmonds, Isaac’s cousin, the one who first brought Isaac to the woods. Their ranks are joined by Katie the one-eyed mule, the one who will not scare at the scent of bear, and by Lion, the mixed blue Airedale giant who has in him that fierce pride which will set itself against the sublime presence of the bear.
When death comes to Old Ben at last, it is not at the sure clap of Walter Ewell’s rifle but under the frenzied knife of Boon Hogganbeck. Boon, who has nurtured Lion for the fight, who has slept with the dog and given him his share of meat, throws himself upon the bear as it strikes Lion down and plunges his blade into its throat:
For an instant they almost resembled a piece of statuary: the clinging dog, the bear, the man stride its back, working and probing the buried blade. Then they went down, pulled over backward by Boon’s weight . . . then the bear surged erect, raising with it the man and the dog too, and turned and still carrying the man and the dog it took two or three steps toward the woods on its hind feet as a man would have walked and crashed down.
In the moment of his death, Old Ben draws together man and wilderness as if in a great statuary monument. Rising on his hind legs, this bear with a man’s name surges with the man and the dog (who, though wild and indomitable, loves and serves man) toward the woods from whose shrinking borders his name and his terror have sounded against the suffocating but puny tools of the men who have hacked and hacked at its horrible sublimity.
George Catlin, Weapons and Physiognomy of the Grizzly Bear, 1846-1848. Smithsonian American Art Museum
The conquest is complete, and already as the bear’s blood cools the color begins to drain from the world. Old Sam Fathers, stricken by some paroxysm of a realm of being that no longer needs him, falls motionless on his face in the trampled mud like Adam returning to the clay of the world’s first river. Lion dies the next day at sundown, and Sam dies soon after.
And then Isaac is twenty-one. As he promised his cousin, he has studied and studied not only the material of school but also the Scriptures and the faded family ledgers in which his uncles have in cryptic conversation with each other recorded the history of their plantation. In this latter examination Isaac discovers what in another way he has known since he was born—or at any rate since the day he went out ten miles into the woods using just his compass to see a bear that had haunted his dreams and defied the dogs and weapons of decades of men. He has learned that the land which is his patrimony is not his. It is not his in that it was not the Chickasaw chief Ikemotubbe’s to sell and was not Thomas Sutpen’s to purchase. The former, failing to establish a just society and thinking, moreover, that he could commoditize the land, lost, as Isaac sees it, whatever right his original occupation may have offered. The latter, arriving out of the fog of antebellum history to seize, with monomaniacal purpose, his hundred square miles of land and establish his own dynasty, forfeited his gains by his very obsession. The land was no one’s in view of that sin of slavery which was borne into the land; man was dispossessed of it as surely as he was dispossessed of Eden in his first moment of grasping to become like God, to seize what was in fact already his in the sonship of covenantal filiation.
The understanding toward which Isaac labors through study and, deeper, his apprenticeship to the woods where for years men tried their sinew and nerve against the terror of the two-toed bear, is indeed a covenantal understanding. The world is the Lord God’s creation, left in trust to man.
He created man to be his overseer over the earth and the animals on it in His name, not to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title forever . . . but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood, and all the fee He asked was pity and endurance and the sweat of his face for bread.
Against his cousin McCaslin’s attempts to remind him that Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy, those nominal lovers and beloved of God, were not the first to sin by owning plantations and passing on the land to their descendants, Isaac responds simply that he knows and that nonetheless he must let go his alleged rights. He must repudiate what in fact, as he sees it (and he avers that there is just one truth, whether seen or not), was never his to repudiate. By the white man through whom the hideous sin was brought upon the land, Isaac holds, perhaps God means to draw the sin from the land, just as the venom was drawn from the people in the sight of the bronze serpent lifted in the wilderness and as sin was drawn out by the sinless man’s becoming sin on the Cross.
It is, again, as much if not more by reading the book of creation itself as by lingering over the Book or Buck and Buddy’s ledgers that Isaac comes to this understanding of covenant. It is in the big woods that art and nature and man’s place in each arise to become his teachers along with Sam Fathers and Major de Spain and General Compson. Under this education his own view enters more deeply into the wilderness and the transcendent experience it provides.
As the woods have more and more been chewed into obeisance, relegated to a distant space which may during a week’s vacation or company retreat be but momentarily accessed, the prevailing view of being has turned ever more horizontal. It is impossible that most of us should in the contests of man and beast see images of classical sculpture, because there is no longer, for most of us, a God who, entrusting the world to man, conceives man and world creatively. No longer does covenantal memory call for the repentance of each man’s sin, but sin having been repudiated, fear of the death of an idol world demands instead the sacrifice of certain classes of men. Our gaze having fallen cause to effect, we play the part of blind reactionary, striking not against sin but against each other.
The Faulknerian gaze, turning as much to Greece and Jerusalem as to the big woods of the Mississippi Delta, calls in the grandest distillation of the modern tongue for the restoration of our memory. In Isaac, the sacrificial son, he calls us to remember covenant with the God who, like the bear in his vastness, calls even in dreams for us to return to the depth of being, to each other, to himself.
Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of the novel Only the Lover Sings. His new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, illustrated by sculptor Timothy Schmalz, was published this year in celebration of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death.