[In the following essay, Dussinger perceives the structure and style of "The Bear" to be modeled on the Romantic quest story, which narrates the integration of private and public aspects of the hero's self-identity.]

I

Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841 defined the transcendentalist by pointing to his peculiar affliction—double consciousness: the transcendentalist is aware of living two lives, of the understanding and of the soul; his anguish grows out of the fact that the two "show very little relation to each other." By 1852 Emerson had penetrated his own dual nature to its depths and there divined its value. In "Fate" he proposes double consciousness as the "one key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge." A man, Emerson advises, "must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature. . . ."¹

The insight that every man is born twins—his private and public natures identical in source, yet as separate in existence as biological twins—marks an advance and complication of Romanticism. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this advance is to show its effect on the basic Romantic fable—the quest. The Romantic quest begins when the hero becomes aware that traditional social values are not valid in themselves. He goes off into the woods or jungle or sea or any location devoid of civilization in search of a source of value. After discovering the wellspring of value, pure identity, the Romantic hero must undertake the second part of his cyclical journey—the return to society; for only when measured against society does the self gain permanence and meaning.

By contrasting an early quest (Teufelsdröckh's journey from the Everlasting No to the Everlasting Yea in Sartor Resartus) with a later version (Marlow's journey up and down the Congo in Heart of Darkness), one can observe a real development in Romanticism. The assumption that the Romantic hero could return and, using the divine authority surging through the self, redeem society, led authors like Carlyle into confusion and eventually into endorsement of temporary tyranny. In the years between Carlyle and Conrad, Western man came to know himself in his psychological polarity as a tension between nature and society, between essence and existence. Consequently, Conrad's version of the quest has a different ending. The hero, Marlow, must penetrate to the heart or remain a Pharisee like those in the Belgian office. But after he glimpses man's real nature, he must come out of the jungle. At the heart of darkness exists chaotic power without form, libido without ego; it destroys Kurtz. Once back in society, Marlow cannot measure by the absolute standards discovered in Africa. He proves his understanding that existence differs from essence by lying to Kurtz's betrothed.

II

William Faulkner in "The Bear" presents a modern version of the Romantic quest. Matched against the quest framework, the story makes explicit Faulkner's judgment upon Isaac McCaslin as Romantic hero manqué. Isaac goes into the wilderness and finds his essential self; the sense of union with the vast, breathing whole of nature so enthralls him that he refuses to return to society. He consciously denies the existential fact. That Faulkner intended such a reading of "The Bear" is apparent in his direct statements, narrative structure, and style.

First, Faulkner by direct statement tells us that Isaac McCaslin has the double consciousness which is both the curse and blessing of modern man. He proves that the two selves are inherent in the boy by making Isaac's unconscious the source of his characteristics. That is, Isaac does not acquire knowledge from outside himself; he simply becomes conscious of what was already present below the threshold of consciousness. From his spiritual father, Sam, Isaac inherited his essential or natural self. The inherent, natural self is manifested in the following quotations: "It ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it";² "It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet" (p. 193); "which he knew now he would never fire at it, now or ever" (p. 203); "to keep yourselves from having to find out what this boy was born knowing" (p. 250).

From his material father, a composite of Old Carothers McCaslin, Uncle Buck, and Cass Edmonds ("who sired . . . his thinking," p. 174), Isaac inherited his existential or social self. The inherent social self comes to the surface of consciousness when the sixteen-year-old boy enters the commissary to learn the lesson of the ledgers: "He knew what he was going to find before he found it" (p. 268). Isaac salutes the snake as grandfather "without premeditation" (p. 330), acknowledging instinctively his inheritance of Original Sin. Finally, Isaac admits to himself, though he keeps it from Cass, how much of "that evil and unregenerate old man" (p. 294) he was taking with him even in escape.

Faulkner is using the organic metaphor, developed by Goethe and Carlyle, that the individual contains in seed all he will become. The goal of each person, according to this Romantic doctrine, is to bring to fruition all his potential. Now, Isaac possesses a dual nature as the above quotations show, yet he presumes he can accept one half of it and reject the other. His motivation for rejection of his social self is clearly escape (pp. 283, 288, 293, 294); he wishes to avoid the suffering that his social inheritance entails. Deliberately ignoring the real conditions of existence, Isaac declares himself free from the "frail and iron thread strong as truth and impervious as evil and longer than life itself and reaching beyond record and patrimony both to join him with the lusts and passions, the hopes and dreams and griefs" (p. 299) of all men since Adam.³

A further indication of Faulkner's intent is the narrative structure. The author has buttressed "The Bear" with a prologue, "The Old People," and an epilogue, "Delta Autumn." The first concerns Isaac as a young boy, the last as an old man; the first concentrates on the wilderness theme, or essence, the last on the Negro-white theme, or existence. The central story, "The Bear," begins with the wilderness theme and moves on in Part IV to the theme of Negro-white relationships. Taking place on Isaac's twenty-first birthday, the largest section of Part IV thus represents Isaac's social birth. In the action of the latter part of "The Bear" and of "Delta Autumn" can be traced the infanticide of Isaac's social self by an overpowering natural self.

"The Old People" serves as prelude to the fully orchestrated wilderness symphony of "The Bear." Faulkner's inimitable evocation of what Wordsworth called the "Presences of Nature" allows the reader to feel the "profound, sentient, gigantic and brooding" (p. 175) woods as a palpable reality. The story introduces Sam Fathers, the wild man whose blood runs pure and straight from man's source in nature. Having tutored the boy Isaac in the ancient lore of the wilderness, Sam consecrates him in the blood of his first deer. Because of his reverential attitude toward nature, "loving the life he spills" (p. 181)—that awesome sense of the organic which Coleridge expressed in The Ancient Mariner—Isaac is vouchsafed a mystical vision. Sam takes him behind the arras-veil of phenomena to an experience of the noumenal world in the form of a majestic buck.

In "Delta Autumn" Faulkner presents a vision of a man who has developed only one side of his being. By choosing to live apart rather than accept the contamination of social intercourse, Isaac has surrendered his moral force. Roth Edmonds' scorn for the maxims which his kinsman should have lived but which he merely mouths flashes out in his question, "Where have you been all the time you were dead?" (p. 345). Faulkner tells us that when the old man talked, "The other two paid no attention to him" (p. 346). Another sign of Isaac's ineffectiveness is his outraged cry to the girl: "Get out of here! I can do nothing for you! Cant nobody do nothing for you!" (p. 361). Admittedly the solution of the racial problem exceeds the power of any individual, but each is urged by his compassion to try. Isaac prefers to lie back on his stained cot and think about God's retribution on evildoers.

"Delta Autumn" exposes the incompleteness of the Romantic journey begun in "The Old People." Isaac McCaslin returns, physically, to Jefferson, but his heart remains in the woods. Although he has a house in the town, "he spent the time within those walls waiting for November" (p. 352). The tent is his home, the wilderness is his land, and the hunting companions are his kin (p. 352). Meaning for Isaac is bound up with the wilderness, the place of his self-discovery. Fearful that his self may be buffeted by other selves and thus lose its acute individuality, Isaac strives to preserve it in its pristine setting. As a result, he becomes a cipher socially. Paradoxically, he cannot keep his selfhood even in the wilderness, for the self is not an entity but a complex series of relationships with other selves. The old Isaac McCaslin of "Delta Autumn" is a nothing, lacking all power for evil or for good.

Faulkner reinforces this interpretation of Isaac as failed Romantic hero through the structure of "The Bear." In Parts I, II, and III of the story, Isaac is presented sympathetically, so sympathetically that, were Part V to follow immediately after Part III, the reader would have to accept without question Isaac's value judgment on the passing of the wilderness. By inserting Part IV prior to the section narrating Isaac's return to the hunting camp, Faulkner gives a glimpse of the limitations of his protagonist, enabling the reader of Part V to separate Isaac's feelings from Faulkner's. The destruction of the woods carries a special horror for Isaac because all his meaning is centered there. For Faulkner this destruction manifests the world's dynamicism: "change is going to alter what was. That no matter how fine anything seems, it can't endure, because once it stops, abandons motion, it is dead."⁴ Isaac's reaction to the cutting of the timber illustrates his escapism; instead of doing something about it, he will simply return no more (p. 321). Instead of campaigning for conservation or selling his farm to purchase some wilderness land as a sanctuary, Isaac merely closes his eyes to the ugly logging operation and sees, in his mind's eye, the magnificent woods of his boyhood, as changeless and as unreal as the scene on the Grecian urn.

Faulkner makes his intent manifest once more by a stylistic change in Part IV, alerting the reader to analyze with care Isaac's monologue in the commissary.⁵ The speech, when stripped of its inflated rhetoric, turns out to be a rambling, self-contradictory, even ludicrous redaction of traditional Christian theodicy.⁶ That critics could have accepted it as Faulkner's message to a mechanistic, unnatural twentieth-century civilization suggests that they failed to translate it into standard diction. Moreover, they failed to read it in context as part of the characterization of Isaac McCaslin, an error equivalent to taking Keats's "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" as a philosophic generalization.

But the real significance of Isaac's monologue for the interpretation forwarded by this paper lies in his feeling constrained to justify his act of repudiation. The natural man does not reason logically, seeking motives for his actions. He acts instinctively, and his deed contains its own justification. If Isaac, like Nancy Mannigoe in Requiem for a Nun, would simply affirm, "I believe," no complaint could be made against him. But the fact that he tries to conceptualize his feelings testifies to the very real presence within him of the social man. Language and other abstractions are unnecessary in nature; they become valuable only in society, where they lend communicability and permanence to emotions which, in their immediate state, are private and transitory. The commissary speech is a further proof of Isaac's dual nature and of his conscious denial of the existential circumstance.

III

By characterizing Isaac McCaslin as modern man with his inescapable double consciousness and by narrating Isaac's aborted journey, Faulkner gives form to one of Romanticism's most crucial concerns: man's duality, his twin role as subject and object, as a part of nature and of society, as being and becoming. The artist's method of dramatizing his idea was daring indeed. He created a boy sensitive enough and brave enough to penetrate the veil of appearance; then he showed that ideal youth unable to meet the challenge of existence. The daring in Faulkner's approach involves the danger of being misunderstood, of Isaac's infatuating the reader to the point of blindness.⁷ Had Faulkner, on the other hand, portrayed Isaac's mystical experience any less genuinely, he would have opened the way for another interpretation: that Isaac failed to realize his social self because he failed to see his essential self clearly, that is, because he lacked real self-knowledge. But in the first three sections of "The Bear," reinforced by "The Old People," Faulkner has presented a flawless, incontrovertible account of a confrontation of the noumenon. No critic dare imply that Isaac McCaslin has not seen "into the life of things." Therefore, and this is Faulkner's triumph, "The Bear" proclaims powerfully that the apotheosis of half a man is not enough—no man is good unless he is whole.

Faulkner's moral vision, as shown in "The Bear," seems more Nietzschean than Christian. The idea of polarities—good and evil, light and dark, form and power, essence and existence, stasis and change—has been a constant anguish for Western man. Out of this conflict of poles, the Romantic philosopher Nietzsche evolved a theory of antinomies: opposites are not only unreconciled, they are not meant to be reconciled, for in the tension between them is life and joy. Joy wants the opposites, Nietzsche declares; "all joy wants eternal being for all things."⁸

In "The Bear" Faulkner manifests his belief in polarity by incorporating both good and evil in his symbols. Sam Fathers, Old Ben, and Lion, the three "incorruptibles," are alike in encompassing life and death. Sam's reaction to Lion is the same as his reaction to Ben—arched nostrils and a fierce milkiness in his eyes (p. 217)—signifying his equal valuation of both. Although Sam is akin to the spirit of the wilderness represented by Ben, he trains the bear's destroyer. Lion has "impersonal malignance like some natural force" (p. 218); yet his color resembles a blued gun-barrel, and the gun is antithetical to nature: Isaac had to leave his behind in order to see Old Ben. Old Ben himself, symbol of the wilderness, is three times compared to a locomotive (pp. 193, 211, 238); then in Part V the locomotive of the logging train comes to signify the destruction of the primeval woods. Each of the three—Sam, Ben, and Lion—contains his own antithesis, and thus they embody Faulkner's sense of the dynamic.

In Isaac McCaslin's separation of the dual elements of life—he considers Ben good and the train evil, though each is both and therefore neither—we witness his flaw. Isaac went into the wilderness and discovered his whatness; he went into the commissary and discovered his thatness. He found essence simple, pure, changeless, and peaceful; he found existence complex, tainted, changing, and turbulent. So Isaac pronounced nature good and society evil, failing to grasp that both are amoral, that both gain value only through the dynamic power of personality. Isaac's rejection of his existential self can be explained theologically by his fear of God's punishment of sin, ethically by his fear of the moral ambivalence of society, psychologically by his fear of the challenge of other selves to his identity, and aesthetically by his fear of the effect of time upon beauty. But by choosing only half of life, Isaac McCaslin forfeited life.

Notes

¹Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 204, 351.

² William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (New York: The Modern Library, 1955), p. 193. Subsequent page references to this edition will be included in the text within parentheses.

³ Isaac's misuse of the word free discloses his misconception of it. To be free in a philosophic sense means to be self-acting, to be able to institute causal series rather than to be the pawn of inexorable forces. Early Romantic heroes such as Carlyle's Teufelsdröckh gained an exhilarating sense of freedom when they discovered the self; they became free moral agents instead of parts in the universal machine. But Isaac's freedom is never freedom to; it is always freedom from. Isaac insists that he is free from the entanglements that define the human condition.—The narrative about Fonsiba and her husband forms an ironic parallel to Isaac's story. In the Fonsiba section, Isaac himself serves as reality's voice, assuming the same relationship to the Negro dreamer that Cass takes to him in Part IV. Isaac shouts at the self-deluded Northern Negro who sits placidly in the midst of incredible desolation, "'Freedom from what? From work? Canaan?'" (p. 279). He fails to understand his own message: he who hopes for Eden, for the kingdom of God on earth, must work for it (though he may never earn it). One wonders how Isaac ever got past Fonsiba, cowering half-dead in the corner of the kitchen, without experiencing a shock of recognition at her words: "I'm free" (p. 280)!

⁴ Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (eds.), Faulkner in the University (Charlottesville, Va., 1959), p. 277.

⁵ Others have noted the shift in style: Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study (New York, 1951), p. 188, considers Part IV much inferior to the rest of the story. He finds this section "often inflated to Confederate rhetoric." Herbert A. Perluck, "'The Heart's Driving Complexity': An Unromantic Reading of Faulkner's 'The Bear,'" Accent, XX (1960), 35, equates style and meaning: "The turgid rhetoric of the section, enforced by McCaslin's scorn, reflects the struggle Ike is undergoing."

⁶ Since no one has published a translation of Isaac's world-view, I offer the following:

First God created the world and found it good, then He created the animals and finally man, to whom He gave stewardship over His creation. Somehow man got dispossessed of Eden (Isaac doesn't say how) and men fought through the bloody history of the Old World. God was not impotent, condoning, or blind; yet He ordered and watched the whole terrible mess. (These clauses are surely contradictory.)

Then God decided to give man a fresh start in the New World. But he saw that the New World was spoiled because the Indians weren't proper stewards; they were tainted by what white men brought from the Old World. So God decided to wipe out the sins of the Indians by using sinful white men who would enslave the Negroes, but whose descendants might begin freeing the Negroes. In an aside at this point, Isaac tells Cass that he doesn't accept everything in the Bible, only what his heart intuitively finds true. (His subjectivism is socially invalid.)

After the digression concerning Carothers's miscegenation and incest, Isaac resumes his argument on page 282. God saw that the South was really bad, but He didn't give up on man for three reasons: (1) "because He had already worried with them so long," (2) "because He had seen how in individual cases they were capable of anything," and (3) because He had to accept their evil or admit the existence of an equal. (The third reason makes God the source of evil, a conclusion Isaac bypasses.) The situation seemed nearly hopeless, because even His elected and chosen such as Grandfather didn't show much promise of producing a savior for the Negroes whom God had allowed them to enslave. Then God became really disgusted with the South He had so richly blessed. He looked to the North for a savior, but the Abolitionists were just talking. He might have destroyed the whole creation at that moment had it not been for John Brown, who acted upon his belief that Negroes should not be bound by whites.

So God turned once more to the South He intended to save, and, realizing that the people would "learn nothing save through suffering" (p. 286), He brought on the Civil War. He gave the South gallant and audacious generals because only such men could frighten the North into unity. He planted in Southern men a courage extreme enough to make them challenge so powerful an adversary. (According to Isaac, it took some contriving on God's part to get the Civil War under way; man, left to himself, would never have been able to manage it.) The painful aftermath of the war—with the Southerners, the Negroes, and the carpetbaggers beating, lynching, and robbing each other—was what God got, although Isaac isn't sure that's what He wanted (p. 289).

Having brought the history of man up to his own day, Isaac defends the Negroes in spite of the fact that they misused their freedom. He claims that they will endure and supplant the whites eventually because they are better and stronger. While the land and the McCaslin blood are cursed, Isaac alone is free because he has been chosen by God and granted a special insight into God's plan through fourteen years of training under Sam Fathers.

⁷ How authentic that danger was has been proved by the history of criticism of "The Bear." Until the late 1950's Isaac McCaslin was almost universally venerated as a contemporary saint. More recent studies register a disenchantment: Olga Vickery, "Initiation and Identity: Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust," in The Novels of William Faulkner (Baton Rouge, 1959), p. 133; William Van O'Connor, "The Wilderness Theme in Faulkner's 'The Bear,'" in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (New York, 1960), p. 329; Melvin Backman, "The Wilderness and the Negro in Faulkner's 'The Bear,'" PMLA, LXXVI (1961), 597; Perluck, pp. 23-46; David H. Stewart, "The Purpose of Faulkner's Ike," in Bear, Man, and God: Seven Approaches to William Faulkner's The Bear, ed. Francis Lee Utley, Lynn Z. Bloom, and Arthur F. Kinney (New York, 1964), p. 332; John W. Hunt, "Morality with Passion: A Study of 'The Bear,'" in William Faulkner: Art in Theological Tension (Syracuse, 1965), pp. 137-68.

⁸ Quoted by Morse Peckham, Beyond the Tragic Vision (New York, 1962), p. 366.