The Bear

Overview

The Bear is a hundred and ten pages and it is not quite a standalone work. It is the fifth of seven linked pieces in Go Down, Moses, published in 1942, and it depends on the others: the McCaslin family, the ledgers, Sam Fathers and Lucas Beauchamp are all established elsewhere in the volume. Faulkner insisted the book was a novel rather than a collection, and he was right enough that reading The Bear alone means reading it with information withheld.

There are also two versions. A shorter one, without the fourth section, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and is sometimes anthologised; the full five-part text in Go Down, Moses is the one that matters and the one courses assign.

The fourth section is the obstacle and the point. It runs to fifty pages, abandons chronology entirely, and is written in sentences that go on for pages, with nested parentheses and no clear speaker. Faulkner is trying to render the experience of a mind holding an entire family history at once, and it is not a failure of craft; it is deliberate and it is very hard. Readers who give up usually give up there.

The prose elsewhere is the other Faulkner, and the hunting sections are as clear and as physically exact as anything in American writing.

What happens

Parts I to III: the hunt. Isaac McCaslin is ten when he is first taken to the camp in the Mississippi bottom lands for the annual November hunt. The men return every year, ostensibly for deer and bear, actually for one bear: Old Ben, enormous, two-toed from an earlier trap, who raids corncribs and kills livestock and has never been caught, and whom the hunters treat with something close to reverence.

His teacher is Sam Fathers, the son of a Chickasaw chief and a quadroon slave, who lives at the camp and who is, in every sense that the story recognises, the boy’s father. Sam teaches him the woods, and the teaching is specific: how to move, how to wait, what the marks mean.

The central episode of Ike’s education is his first sight of the bear, and it requires an act of surrender. Sam tells him that as long as he carries a gun and a compass and a watch he will not see it. So the boy leaves the gun, and then the watch and the compass, and gets lost, and finds his way back by the method Sam taught him, and the bear is there, looking at him, and then not.

Sam catches and trains a wild dog, Lion, big enough and fearless enough to hold Old Ben. In the third section the hunt succeeds: Lion fastens on the bear, Boon Hogganbeck, a man of great strength and no intelligence who loves the dog, jumps on Ben’s back and cuts his throat with a knife. The bear dies standing. Lion dies of his wounds the next day. And Sam Fathers, who had been standing nearby, collapses, and dies within hours, of nothing the story names.

Part IV: the ledgers. Chronology dissolves. Ike is twenty-one, in the commissary of the plantation he is about to inherit, arguing with his older cousin McCaslin Edmonds, and the argument runs backwards and forwards across his whole life and the family’s.

The ledgers are old plantation account books, and Ike has read them. In the cramped, semi-literate entries made by his father and uncle he pieces together what happened. His grandfather, Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, bought a slave named Eunice, fathered a daughter on her, Tomasina, and twenty-odd years later fathered a child on that daughter. Eunice walked into the creek and drowned herself on Christmas Day, six months before the second child was born. The ledger records the drowning and one of the brothers has written that he cannot see why she would do it.

Ike’s conclusion is that the land is cursed, that it was never anyone’s to own because God gave the earth to be held in communal usufruct and not in fee, that his grandfather’s title was theft twice over, from the Chickasaw and from the people he bought, and that the only thing he can do is refuse. He repudiates the inheritance, hands the plantation to his cousin, works as a carpenter, and lives in a rented room on a small stipend.

McCaslin’s answer, which the story gives full weight, is that repudiation changes nothing, that the land will be owned by somebody and that the people who live on it still need someone responsible, and that Ike has bought his own cleanliness at the cost of any power to act.

Part V: after. Ike, eighteen, returns to the camp. A logging company has bought the timber rights, a planing mill and a spur line are going in, and the woods he knew are being measured for cutting. He visits the graves. At the end he finds Boon under a gum tree full of squirrels, hammering at the dismembered barrel of his shotgun, shouting at him not to touch them, that they are his.

How to read it

Read Go Down, Moses entire if you can, and at minimum read Was and The Fire and the Hearth first. The ledgers in Part IV assume family relationships established there, and the puzzle is much harder without them.

Read Parts I to III straight, at normal pace. They are clear and they are among the best hunting writing in the language.

Then slow right down for Part IV and expect to reread paragraphs. A working technique is to read it once without stopping, to get the shape, and then again to follow the ledger reconstruction line by line. Faulkner is withholding on purpose: the reader has to assemble the incest from bookkeeping entries, exactly as Ike did.

Hold both sides of the argument in Part IV. Ike’s case and McCaslin’s are both given properly, and Faulkner does not adjudicate. The rest of Go Down, Moses, and Ike’s appearance as an old man in Delta Autumn, is the verdict, and it is not kind.

Watch the two dispossessions run together. The wilderness is being sold and cut, and the land was stolen twice, and the story insists these are the same story. Whether that equation holds is the best question it raises.

Questions it raises

• Is Ike’s repudiation a moral act or an evasion? McCaslin says it leaves the land owned by someone else and the people on it unprotected.
• The story treats the theft of the wilderness and the theft of human beings as one inheritance. Are they the same kind of wrong?
• Sam Fathers is the boy’s real father and cannot be acknowledged. What is the story doing by making the teacher a man of Chickasaw and Black descent?
• Ike has to put down the gun, the watch and the compass to see the bear. What is being asked of him, and is it available to anyone who intends to kill it?
• Part IV is deliberately hard to read. Does the difficulty earn itself, or does it protect the material from scrutiny?
• The last image is Boon under a tree full of squirrels shouting that they are his. What has the story concluded about ownership?