McCaslin Family Trees (Venkatesh)

http://www.people.virginia.edu/~sfr/FAULKNER/09gdmgen.html 

I've posted above a very useful link to genealogical diagrams for the whole McCaslin family. If it helps, it helps -- as long as we grasp firmly that these trees are arrived at after reading the whole of Go Down Moses. But do such diagrams of the whole backdrop actually help us in experiencing the book, or do they reduce the experience of the relationships here to a web of abstractions? It's a bit like walking through an art gallery and reading the signs and labels before looking at the painting. 

   Even in multiple readings of this book the primary questions are Who? and When? Who is this character? Who is he related to? When did this incident take place? Look how subtly and carefully Faulkner unfolds the family background of Lucas Beauchamp, every few pages or so dropping some details of his precise relationship to the grandfather of everyone -- and when this information is given it is always appropriate to the situation at hand. The Who is amplified and revealed within the sequence of events, not as a backdrop to it. Why does Faulkner do it this way? Is it because who we are is always dynamic, all the past that constitutes us as it is touched and manifested in present situations? We ourselves might not be aware of what it all means, since much of our relationship to family is visceral, unarticulated, maybe even primal. Who is Lucas? And who are we? Are we completely constituted by our history, and by the histories of those before us and around us? What part of us stands outside these histories? I know that one part does, the one that can ask these questions of history -- but are there any others?


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