Abstract: Most critics of crime fiction focus on detective stories and crime novels. But Faulkner's full exploration of crime is far more nuanced. Crime imbues much of his oeuvre, from minor infractions to rape and murder. In Go Down, Moses crime takes center stage. Faulkner manipulates the use of the stories that constitute this text in order to consider racial crime and to move beyond his focus on modernist angst towards a broader awareness of the cultural context of crime and the ways in which narrative form proves as destabilizing as crime itself. This book, possibly the pinnacle of his treatment of race, relies on its structure and its interpolation of crime to unmask the ways that traditional narrative reinforces racist hierarchy. Employing numerous voices and decentering narrative form and authority, Faulkner detaches crime from definition and thus makes visible a racist order, one which defies justice—and thus defies crime. As he explores these tensions, he adds a subtle twist of genre to the mix and thereby opening up new angles on modernist criminality.
Deborah Clarke (Fri,) studied this question.