Family Tree in Narrative Form (Landres)

Because I don’t have any time to waste at St. John’s, I sometimes rely on literary family trees while I’m reading. I helped myself to this online, extra-textual implement for War and Peace, and I have done the same since beginning Go Down, Moses. Surely this usage thwarts Faulkner’s purposes of keeping the reader in suspense and in need of untangling the familial relationships herself, but for me this would all be done on a second reading, with meticulous care, to which I can’t commit during school; so I use the family tree. 

The family tree visually, blatantly displays the wrongs committed by the McCaslins, beginning with Carothers McCaslin. These transgressions include the presumed rape of Eunice and Tomey and the incest. Furthermore, the tree displays the more paradoxical aspects of the family: the tenacity of the tree to remain a whole, and the striking conclusory reunion of the two family lines. The picture presents a synoptic “narration” of the convoluted history of the McCaslin family.

But this kind of comprehensive and simultaneous narration, which a picture affords, is not possible (nor perhaps even desirable) in the unfolding narration of which a written work is composed. A written narrative work must find another method of showing the past continually manifesting in the present. Further, a unitary picture of a family tree can suggest intricate relations, but it cannot describe the experiential ramifications of the familial relations on a character’s life. This latter effort Faulkner models in “The Fire and the Hearth” to begin to reveal to the reader Lucas’s relations to his family. Faulkner’s frequent recursions in his narration to Lucas’s or Roth’s memories presents their family and socio-national history not all at once but like a palimpsest. A family tree branches off, but the narration of Lucas’s and Roth’s lives and memories shows a layering of experiences that have formed them.


Comments

  1. Krishnan VenkateshMay 2, 2021 at 9:33 PM

    This is surely right, Ms. Landres. A family is a dense 3-D web of relationships far more complex than the 2-D tree. For me the image that is key to "reading" these relationships is Isaac's giving up of gun, watch, and compass on entering the woods -- implying a kind of courage and humility in the face of something that one cannot objectively understand (or understand as "object"). Do we then even try to figure out the tree? is it essential?

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