The Keatsian Moment

Abstract

With Go Down, Moses (1942), we return to the debate between nature and civilisation in the South, this time seen through the eyes of Ike McCaslin. Like Sutpen, he is enamoured of innocence and baffled to understand why his countrymen’s pursuit of the good should have produced such catastrophic results. If

Once, man entirely free, alone and wild, Was blest as free—for he was Nature’s child. He, all superior but his God disdained, Walked none restraining, and by none restrained: Confessed no law but what his reason taught, Did all he wished, and wished but what he ought.

how was it that he could have stooped to slavery and exchanged his freedoms for life lived (guiltily or not) under the moral law? And how was it that, for generations, he could have continued like this, despite all the encouragement he received? Yet continue he did, until the Civil War threw his Dream into eclipse. Since that time, the future has ground increasingly to a halt; in Quentin and Ike, it does just that. All that remains is the prospect of an over-populated, heterogeneous, mechanised civilisation covering earth like a blight, Armageddon in slow motion.