350
PARTISAN REVIEW
Times
about the crash of an Italian airliner trying to make an instru–
ment landing at Idlewild Airport in bad weather. The pilot, William
Faulkner maintains, "was victim of that mystical, unquestioning, al–
most religious awe and veneration in which our culture has trained
us to hold gadgets- any gadget if it is only complex enough and
cryptic enough and costs enough." The pilot crashed,
in
Faulkner's
opinion, because he did not dare to rely on his experience, his instinct,
or "the seat of his pants." "We all had better grieve for all people
beneath a culture," he says, "which holds any mechanical (gadget)
superior to any man simply because the one, being mechanical, is
infallible, while the other, being nothing but man, is not just subject
to failure but doomed to it."
The imaginative parallel to this letter is to be found in "The
Bear," where Isaac McCaslin in search for Old Ben realizes that he
has to relinquish all the gadgets with which civilization has provided
him: first the gun, but that is not enough; he has to leave
his
old
silver watch and the compass too. Only then is he able to meet the
bear, "epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life." The question
is whether this and
all
it implies is "primitivism," or not rather a
form of humanism, since it is marked by a reliance on the purely
human qualities under exclusion of all the mechanical inventions with
which civilization has armed mankind. And the rejection of civiliza–
tion, whether in the
Fable,
or in
Go Down, Moses,
is not linked to
savagery or paganism. It means a closer communion with the wilder–
ness, and at the same time leads both the Corporal and Isaac Mc–
Caslin to an
imitatio Christi.
His shadow had already been invoked
in
The Sound and the Fury
and
Light in August.
He now becomes
more and more dominant; not the son of God or the founder of
Christianity, but Christ the archetype of man suffering, and of those
who expiate the guilt of civilization by renunciation of the power and
the privilege: Quentin Compson, Isaac McCaslin, and the Corporal.
