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the allegorical and elusive bear (184 85). If the Bear in its most prosaic in-
terpretation represents nature, this tells us volumes about the birthright
Isaac believes has been given him, supported and mentored by the mysti-
cal black Indian Sam Fathers. Ike means for his desire to appear exculpa-
tory: with a convenient Indian ally resurrected from the obsolescence of
his earlier vision, he seeks to emancipate nature from man s proprietary
claims; but the endeavor is deeply compromised by his tacit assumption
that he has  inherited the moral graces and the prey necessary to carry out
the noble task. A more mature Ike is known by the next generation of hunt-
ers for his self-promoting quip:  man is a little better than the net result
of his and his neighbor s doings (330). He posits value not in bank state-
ments but in evidence of neighborly and communal goodwill respectable
Southern traits by the most standard definitions. Yet his version of neigh-
borly benevolence and moral decency does not extend to the light-skinned
black female who lives near the hunting camp and has a sexual tryst with
her own white cousin, Carothers Edmonds, producing yet another mixed-
race heir. Ike berates and dismisses her with a parcel of money, bemoaning
inwardly,  Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years in America. . . . But
not now! Not now! (361). For all his attempts to bury the past, Ike refuses
to move forward. It is not the bereft, lovelorn young woman he pities, and
52 melanie r. benson
his lament is not for the revivified dishonor and usury in the family line;
rather, he evinces an almost classically supremacist disgust over the perva-
sive intercultural  breeding and spawning the affair typifies (364).38 The
collision of races not the system that drove them bitterly apart to begin
with is what Isaac McCaslin ultimately scorns. Indeed, Ike s next genera-
tion of entries in the commissary accounts actually serves to codify another
line of modern slaves in the form of emancipated sharecroppers: in his
merchant s log, he  ration[s] the tenants and the wage-hands for the com-
ing week (241). While he is distributing commissary goods on credit, the
grammar here makes the tenants and wage-hands themselves the rations,
converted into figures and entered into the columns that permanently sub-
divide the South s social classes, communities, and souls.
In the end, the novel s mixed-race offspring suffer most for their deten-
tion within the governing priorities of the ledger. Carothers s black mis-
tress tries to spurn the money Ike hands her, wanting only an uncompro-
mised love Ike promises her she will never receive. Lucas Beauchamp,
part-black heir in the Edmonds line of the family, is more preoccupied
with his own accounts, perhaps because he knows he is still not their pri-
mary custodian. After searching for a buried treasure night after sleep-
less night, Lucas finally capitulates. His surrender completes what seems
to be a perverse trilogy: a third version of the Haiti-Mississippi plantation
parables. He reflects:  a heap of what [man] can want is due to come to
him, if he just starts in soon enough. I done waited too late to start. That
money s there. Them two white men that slipped in here that night three
years ago and dug up twenty-two thousand dollars and got clean away with
it before anybody saw them. I know. I saw the hole where they filled it up
again, and the churn it was buried in. But . . . I reckon that money aint for
me (126 27). The hardy sweat, toil, and ruthless profiteering Ike envi-
sions become pure subterfuge in Lucas s estimation: instead of digging and
raising crops, as both Sutpen and Ike variously witness, these white men
simply steal a massive amount of money from the earth and then attempt
literally to cover their tracks. And as in Sutpen s and Ike s chronicles, no
one sees it happen. In a distinctly postplantation perversion of gathering
coins rather than crops, ex-slaves and disenfranchised whites continue to
fixate on what is  due to come to them at last, until they are forced to
admit defeat by white artifice, relinquishing their just rewards as money
that  aint for them.
But Faulkner s apparent sympathies for defeated men like Lucas are
undercut by his more pronounced investment in the futility of Ike s noble
sacrifice. What he and other Southern writers seem ultimately to register
throughout their works is an ambivalent desire to both recuperate and re-
 Fetish of Surplus Value; or, What the Ledgers Say 53
nounce the contaminated social codes of plantation slavery, while bitterly
critiquing the advent of a capitalist order that offers little better or dif-
ferent. What these unsettling, global purviews announce is the degree to
which moral choice itself has been hijacked by a colonial nightmare that
simply will not end but rather expands and replicates of its own accord.
Whether any are willing to take responsibility for it is another, more trou-
bling matter. For now, I ll end with a turn to Quentin, the archetypal proxy
for Faulkner s own voice, and perhaps the most reliable vessel to conclude
the colonial narrative Faulkner repeatedly unearths. In The Sound and the
Fury (1929), Quentin is at Harvard but thinking
of home, of . . . the niggers and country folks . . . and my insides would move like
they used to do in school when the bell rang.
I wouldn t begin counting until the clock struck three. Then I would begin,
counting to sixty and folding down one finger and thinking of the other fourteen
fingers waiting to be folded down, or thirteen or twelve or eight or seven, until
all of a sudden I d realise silence and the unwinking minds, and I d say  Ma am?
 Your name is Quentin, isn t it? Miss Laura would say . . .  Tell Quentin who
discovered the Mississippi River, Henry.  DeSoto. Then . . . I d be afraid I had
gotten behind and I d count fast and fold down another finger, then I d be afraid
I was going too fast and I d slow up, then I d get afraid and count fast again. So
I could never come out even with the bell. (88)
Quentin evades the Southern schoolboy s imperial lessons; while he botches
a simple internal counting exercise, another student effortlessly places the
Spanish conquistador De Soto at the  discovery of the Mississippi River,
taking Ike s vision of Indian eviction one step further by implying that the
Natives were never there at all. Significantly, it is a memory of  niggers and
country folk that prompts Quentin s classroom memory, continuing the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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