Faulkner's gothic vision

““It ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it. It looked and towered in his dreams before he even saw the unaxed woods where it left its crooked print, shaggy, huge, red-eyed, not malevolent but just big—too big for the dogs which tried to bay it, for the horses which tried to ride it down, for the men and the bullets they fired into it, too big for the very country which was its constricting scope. He seemed to see it entire with a child’s complete divination before he ever laid eyes on either—the doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with axes and plows who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, through which ran not even a mortal animal but an anachronism, indomitable and invincible, out of an old dead time…”--William Faulkner“The Bear” is not so much a long short story as it is a short novel…but in our meeting, we should be able to do justice to the depth and complexity of this work. “The Bear” is ostensibly a coming of age story, but the narration also probes the cracked surfaces of human relationships—between mentor and child-man, between slave and master, between hunter and prey…Equally potent are the relationships between man and the pulsing world: between the beast and man and the wilderness around and within him. Go Down Moses is the collection of stories that contain The Bear; the collection described as the most spiritual of Faulkner’s work.While most of the five sections of this 100-page story centre on the hunt and Isaac’s growth, it is the difficult fourth section that has attracted the most critical attention, ‘possibly of any work in 20th century fiction’. Through close consideration of the text, reading aloud and sharing our responses, insights and questions, we will work towards an understanding of the story and Faulkner’s craft while situating the text in hits historic and cultural context.