The Game of Genre

Masculinist sport and games are interconnected with property and law in representing racialized society in Go Down, Moses. In the social state of Faulkner's text, sport and games derive meanings from an effort to duplicate the competition for and control of property within the circumscription of law. Both law and games are forms of social control and discursive bodies of social commentary. Legal boundaries are, however, all arbitrary, but also compensatory for players whose moves are regulated by rules displaced or dislodged from the assumptions of law within the social state. These seemingly disparate modes of thinking about the text contribute to an interpretive strategy for reading Go Down, Moses – one that allows for the multivocality and density of ideas (both compatible and competing ideas) in Faulkner's text.