Faulkner places the Bundrens, the family of our focus in As I Lay Dying, within settings with specific topographical features that illustrate certain aspects of the family. The Bundrens’ house in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi sits upon a hill, at the base of which there appears to lay a field. Woods are also mentioned, presumably a little ways beyond the open field. It becomes clear that the voyage up the hillside appears to require a certain amount of effort in order to reach its summit. The heavyset doctor, Peabody,  reckons it would take fifteen minutes, “even with the horse… to ride up across the pasture to the top of the ride and reach the house,” adding that the path “looks like a crooked limb blown against the bluff” (42). The hill sets the family apart and the woods further remove them. Assembling them in such a landscape illustrates the family’s isolation and detachment – physically and psychologically – from any sense of community and simultaneously their detachment from one another. There is a road that passes close by (which one could argue clearly stands for the fast approaching modernity of early twentieth century America) though Anse Bundren, the somewhat pitiful patriarch, bemoans its very existence. “A-laying there, right up to my door, where every bad luck that comes and goes is bound to find it” (35), he gripes.  It should come as no surprise that Anse is not the sort of person who in keen on any sort of progression into the future. Jewel Bundren, on the other hand, imagines forcing all of his family members and neighbors to the bottom of the hill, keeping only his mother by his side at the peak, essentially because he’s sick and tired of everybody. “It would just be me and her on a high hill,” he thinks, bitterly, “and me rolling the rocks down the hill at their faces.” (15). Their journey to bury Addie therefore gives them a reason to abandon their solitude.

I was relieved to find that Faulkner chose to incorporate far more humor into As I Lay Dying than he did with The Sound and the Fury, which is something I really didn’t fully grasp the first time I read this book. Although, in all likelihood, after the complete lack of all comedy in The Sound and the Fury, I was probably just desperate for a laugh. Despite the dark, tragic, even grotesque, subject matter, there is a great deal of comic effect at play.

Anse is certainly something of a caricature. He reminds me of Ebenezer Scrooge, someone whose surly attitude is so absurd it’s silly. (Unfortunately, it seems there is little hope Anse is going to recover any unadulterated compassion for the world – probably because he had so had little to begin with). Backwards, lazy, and painfully unaware, Anse spends the days surrounding his wife’s death day dreaming about the teeth he’s going to pick up once they get to Jefferson to bury his deceased wife’s body. Few characters have good things to say about Anse. Actually, nobody ever says anything good about Anse. Even the doctor, Peabody, upon receiving word from to come visit with Addie, proclaims “‘He has wore her out at last.’ And I said a damn good thing, and at first I would not go because there might be something I could do and I would have to haul her back, by God” (41). (It also occurred to me while writing this post that by demanding to be buried in Jefferson and forcing her family to haul her dead body halfway across the state, Addie is essentially, finally, having the last laugh).

Though much of what he says is really quite poignant, the voice Faulkner employs to portray the youngest Bundren boy is simultaneously endearing and amusing which provides a thread of comic relief within his experience. Vardaman’s thoughts are often scattered, distracted, even somewhat fretful, as he deals with the trauma of his mother passing. “Dewey Dell said we will get some bananas,” Vardaman muses, “the train is behind the glass, red of the track. When it runs the track shines on and off. Pa said flour and sugar and coffee costs so much. Because I am a country boy because boys in town. Bicycles” (66). Vardaman comes to understand his mother’s death – and really the reality of death as a whole – in relation to the fish he caught and killed earlier on that day but, regardless, the idea of Addie lying in her coffin terrifies Vardaman. “I got shut up in the crib… I couldn’t breathe because the rat was breathing up all the air. I said ‘Are you going to nail it shut, Cash? Nail it? Nail it?'” (65). So, later that night, Vardaman drills a few holes through the top of the coffin and winds up putting a couple in Addie’s face in a well meant, but hilariously misguided and grotesque, attempt to allow his mother to breath. These idea’s which Vardaman pieces together to make sense of what he knows about life not only illuminates the genius of childhood logic but hints towards a deeper understanding we will see Vardaman come to hold later on in the novel.

Of course, we could not discuss the humor in this novel without mentioning Cora and Vernon Tull who provide a great deal of comic relief through their painfully off-mark and pious judgements. The quintessential nosy neighbors – although genuinely helpful – the Tulls certainly make it a point to be involved with their neighbor’s business. “For the last three weeks I have been coming over every time I could, coming sometimes when I shouldn’t have, neglecting my own family and duties so that somebody would be with her in her last moments,” (22), Cora muses to herself as she sits at the bedside of the dying Addie Bundren. Not that Cora minds terribly. She later insists on waking her husband and driving back over to the Bundren household in the middle of the night, in the rain, when she learns of Addie’s death because (as she declares to her husband), “it’s my Christian duty. Will you stand between me and my Christian duty?” (69). In an amusing testament to her faith and to her status as an upstanding citizen, Vernon later remarks, “I reckon if there’s ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter how He was running it” (73-74).

Just a note to inform you that I’ve made slight changes to the assignment due dates to both syllabi and included my office location (duh).  The most pressing change is that MAs have an extra week to post their second “medium” wiki entry.

In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner is able to create a multitude of characters worthy of heavy analysis, consideration and characterization. The book resists a distinction of having a “most important character”- a case could be made for most of the major characters in the book as being the most important, in terms of plot, or message, or underlying force. But I think it can be argued that this book falls on the shoulders of the patriarch of the Bundren family: Anse Bundren. He charges himself with the restoration of the Bundren family by way of setting his wife in the ground in Jefferson (while having ulterior motives). But while I consider this a story of restoration, so to speak, I think that ultimately Anse fails.

Anse is first presented to the reader as sort of an incompetent, impotent male figure on the Bundren property. Unwilling to move, unwilling to work and often with a look on his face that resembles a stunned animal, the novel reveals him to be a shrewd manipulator of sorts, one who can conserve and negotiate to attain things he may have no right to have in the first place. A description of him was thrown out in class as a “Machiavellian rube.” While I particularly like that characterization of him I think it’s only appropriate to modify it to read something more like a “rube with Machiavellian ambitions”, however less catch-phrasey that may be. Because I think that throughout the entire novel, Anse is operating at a loss. For all his engagement with modernity and the commodity exchange culture philosophy he embraces, he can never seem to get beyond his starting point, and while he gains things of symbolic value, the economic value of his decisions is questionable at best, and disastrous as worst. He is simply an unlucky man. He knows it as well, alluding to his luck by stating, “I am the chosen of the Lord, for who he loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if he dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like” (110) as well as previously alluding to the bad luck that is able to access their home due to the presence of the road (35). The reader sees the transitive philosophy of wealth and exchange that the Bundren family seems to hold in a description of why Jewel is so angry with Darl for burning down the barn, and this philosophy highlights exactly what Anse is: a rube.

Throughout the novel there are examples of objects and ideas standing in for each other (Vardaman’s mother is a fish, Darls mother is a horse, Cash’s identity is in his tools) and for some reason the Bundren’s (and Anse in particular) think that this “stand-in” philosophy can apply to their economic sensibilities. This is I think best exemplified by the gesture from Anse at the end of the novel, when he walks up with the graphophone, presumably to give it to Cash. Cash’s enjoyment of music is noted in an earlier passage as is his desire to at one point bargain with Surret to get a graphophone himself (“I believe I could have dickered Surret down to five dollars on that one of his. It’s a comfortable thing, music is. (236)) Of course, this is ruined by the injury to his leg and subsequent damage done by the cement. The reader is supposed to acknowledge Anse’s acquisition of the graphophone as part of his new wife’s dowry as a symbolic replacement for Cash’s leg. And while that’s all very nice (sort of), I think that the reader is supposed to look further and acknowledge that Anse’s engagements with modernity ultimately fail. He has the right idea for a person in his situation trying to get above the tide: to maximize utility and conserve and manipulate to his own ends. But when you see the outcome of his dealings/manipulations/conservations you (or at least I) wonder if it was worth it at all. The rationale behind using the ten cents worth of cement was that if it was bought it must be used. But when that use maims the only skilled worker in your family to the point where not only can he not perform the skilled work that he was doing prior but he can’t continue on to do the regular work required of him at the household as well as perform prior engagements (fixing Tull’s barn) to repay debt, was a graphophone really an appropriate recompense for all of that? And that’s not including the medical bills he will undoubtedly have to pay Peabody as well as any potential accommodations he may have to make for Cash should he lose his leg. He essentially added two mouths that won’t do any labor (Cash and the new Mrs. Bundren) and lost two (and possibly three) able bodied workers in Cash, Darl and possibly Dewey Dell (her eventual labor will prevent her from doing her household duties).  For every small gain Anse gets with his ability to deal, or manipulate, or whatever you want to call it, he is set back significantly in another way.

Darl’s departure is something that aids in this characterization. His laughter can indicate the ridiculous amount of trouble the family went through to get where they are at the point at which he leaves, and he acknowledges that they are way more screwed than he is at this point. He sees Anse’s attempts to employ modernistic practices as the futile efforts of the farmer engaging the modern world, much in the same sense that Jason views the farmer in relation to the NYSE.

The description of Anse in the beginning of the novel is particularly apt: “He looks like right after the maul hits the steer and it no longer alive and dont yet know that it is dead. (61)” Anse is that steer to the very end. While he may be doing his deals and maximizing the utility of what he has access to, he’s dead already and he just doesn’t know it yet. This recalls the passage from Addies chapter where she utters that exact sentiment. “He did not know that he was dead, then. (173)” So, in a broad sense to recap where Anse leads the family- he loses one wife and sets out to replace her (to bury her too, but we all know why he wants those teeth- and it’s not just for “victuals”). He lost two mules crossing the river, but traded Jewel’s horse to get two more mules. So they are down one horse. He gets some shelter and some food but ends up having to lose his son for it. So now he’s down one horse and one son and one wife. He gets some cement with good intentions, but due to his frugal nature he decides to use it in an ill-advised medical application and loses his son’s leg (or ability of a leg, and therefore a son as an able bodied and skilled worker). So by the end of the novel he has acquired a graphophone, some cement, teeth, a wife and a grandchild, while losing two sons physically (and potentially three considering Jewel most certainly blames him for the loss of his horse and would be prone to running away or sacrificing his nights again to work elsewhere), a horse, some cement and indebting himself to numerous other characters along the way. And that was just the way there- the journey back will most likely be as difficult and present many of the same problems, but with two less men to help. To me, that does not sound like the workings of someone who is particularly skilled at business (or manipulation).

            Brace yourselves everyone you’re in for a shock: there is actually something I liked about As I Lay Dying. Or I guess I should say someone. I know it’s probably a sign of the apocalypse. But, it’s true; I not only liked but maybe even loved the character of Cash Bundren. There is something so concrete about Cash; he is solidly and firmly rooted in his own identity in a way the rest of the Bundrens are not. When Darl first considers Cash he does not say he is his brother but that he is “a good carpenter” (Faulkner 4). Reading Cash’s narrative chapters gives one the comforting sense that Cash knows who he is and what is all about. This is especially true when he is compared to his brother Darl who is considerably more fluid in his understanding of himself or Vardaman who has connection to his identity only through those around him. The confusion that momentarily undoes Vardaman when Darl declares, “Jewel’s mother is a horse” would not throw Cash for a loop at all (Faulkner 101). Cash is a carpenter; this is his complete and total identity. One gets the sense that a Cash Bundren who is not a carpenter is not really a Cash Bundren at all.

            This strong understanding of his own identity is perhaps the reason Cash is so silent. The first several times Cash is mentioned by other characters they speak not about what Cash says but about the sound of his saw making Addie’s coffin. Jewel describes the sounds of Cash’s carpentry as saying, “See. See what a good one I am making for you” (Faulkner 14). Cash is so identified with his carpentry that is easy to understand how the “voice” of his tools becomes an extension of his actual voice. There is no need for Cash to speak when the “snores” of his saw moving “steadily into the board” can convey his feelings (Faulkner 46). The constant presence of that sound in the time leading up to Addie’s death is a substitution for the sounds of Cash’s mourning. Cash does not need to put words to his feelings because his profession can speak for him.

            Once his ability to speak through his tools is taken away from him Cash is almost forced to become more vocal. However, his first narrative chapters seem almost as if he does not remember how to use his physical voice. They are tentative and easily interrupted, as though he cannot get his words out. The first chapter we hear in Cash’s voice is not speech but a list. The list is vocal; it is an internal organization of his thoughts, but it is not spoken. One can almost hear what it would be like for Cash to read his list; the interruption of point 6, the single word “Except”, is almost yelled (Faulkner 83). Yet we do not really hear him speak. After Cash breaks his leg he becomes entirely unable to use his profession as his voice and so his narrative chapters become actual narratives, much like everyone else’s. He becomes removed from his defining characteristic, his sense of self, and so he becomes like every other member of his family.

            Cash’s strong identity allows him to anchor the story of the Bundrens. One never really knows how anyone else in the family will behave but one can feel certain that Cash will always be a carpenter. Perhaps it is this solid identity that makes Cash the logical choice to end the novel. He is almost removed from the fluidity of the rest of the Bundrens and is able to see his family from the outside. So it makes sense that his voice should be the last we hear as the Bundrens move on to their new life. Everything is changing around him but he will almost certainly always be Cash Bundren, the carpenter.

Faulkner’s fictional county, which serves as the setting in many of his works, Yoknapatawpha county, represents his native Mississippi Lafayette County, where he spent most of his life. The Yocona River, which runs through the south side of Lafayette County, was once called Yockney-Patafa by the Chickasaw tribe. Faulkner claimed it meant “water runs slow through flat land” (AILD 267). Faulkner’s famous Yoknapatawpha county is flat land where time, like Yockney-Patafa’s water, runs very slow. The Sound and The Fury and As I Lay Dying share the common theme of acute awareness to time and preoccupation with the past or future. The Compsons and the Bundrens, though financially two different classes, express a similar unrest to time. The agitations that time inflicts on Faulkner’s characters cause them to fantasize or at the very least become guided by their awareness to it. Almost every one of them is either caught up with time that’s past or a future that’s unclear.

Quentin, from The Sound and The Fury, is stuck in the past and although most of the time he is away from Yoknapatawpha county, it’s slow and dreadful movement like trekking through the mud, travels with him. Faulkner uses Quentin’s obsession with time and his watch to convey the Civil War’s impact on the South’s adherence to modernism. Quentin wants to live in the past as many southerners do, to reclaim former power and escape modern assimilation. Benjy, though not completely conscious of his ability to relive moments in the past, is so engrossed with his memories because everything around him reminds him of his inescapable past. Vardaman, from As I Lay Dying, is very young but he already reveals his sensitivity to time: “The barn is still red. It used to be redder than this. Then it went swirling, making the stars run backward without falling. It hurt my heart like the train did” (225). Already he feels the pain of time slipping away, which hurts him more than his impatience for Christmastime.

Darl doesn’t necessarily look to the future or past for salvation from his constant stream of questions; rather he conveys agitation to his present circumstance. From acute observations of his family and the rest of existence that surrounds him he is unable to comprehend the reasons for it all, “How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls” (207).  The “dead gestures of dolls” refers to all the people around him who live without questioning, like wood, they ignore or otherwise never even come into conflict with the absurdity of life with no answers. Darl is uneasy with the drudgery of living in the fixed movement of time in which he lives, “If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice” (208). Faulkner develops these introspective characters with the same internal conflict which leads them to either give up on life or become removed by those made out of wood. 

In many pieces of modern literature the theme of ‘passing’ is often explored. ‘Passing’, is a term used to describe someone who is bi-racial and is either light skinned or dark skinned enough to pass as one race or the other.  In Light in August the character Christmas and Lucas Burch/Joe Brown are examples of people who are passing.

Bryon is puzzled by Lucas Burch’s name proclamation as Joe Brown. Symbolically the reader can see that his name Brown is an indicator of his African American roots. Brown is also often described as someone with a “mobile face perform[ing] one of those instantaneous changes” (45). This description of Brown being a man of changing faces displays his ability to ‘pass’ as a white man. In addition, Lena and Byron’s description of Brown as “Tall, young. Dark complected;”(55) also aides to the fact that Brown is of mixed race.

Similarly, Christmas is also a character that is bi-racial. However, Christmas’ racial background is made much more apparent than Brown’s. In one of the first descriptions of Christmas the reader learns of “his face [that is] darkly and contemptuously still” (31) with “flesh a level dead parchment color” (34).  Christmas is able to successfully pass as a white man when the racist foreman hires him. “‘Did you ever hear of a white man named Christmas?’ the foreman said. ‘I never heard of nobody a-tall named it” (32).  As the chapters progress, and most evidently in chapter four, it becomes more apparent that Christmas is mixed race.

In chapter four, Byron begins to tell the story of Miss Burden’s house catching fire. After Brown had been caught at the scene of the crime and brought to the sheriff’s office for questioning he uses his knowledge of Christmas’ racial background to pin the offense on Christmas. Brown admits that Christmas “admitted” to him he was “part nigger” (97-98) when he was drunk one night and instills shame in the sheriff when he accuses him of “accus[ing] the white man and let the nigger go free. Accuse the white and let the nigger run” (97).  Brown is able to successfully pass as a white man and use his lighter skin tone to his advantage. The reader sees Brown turn on his ‘whiteness’ by calling his own work “the work of a nigger slave”(95) as well as using Christmas’ racial roots to be set free.

Additionally news of Christmas’ mixed racial background is perhaps most jarring to his foster father, Joe McEachern.  Thus far, McEachern, is the most violent, abusive, and racist character in the novel. In a private thought and after a fight with his foster-father Christmas admits he would tell his foster-mother his secret. “I dare you to tell him what he has nursed. That he has nursed a nigger beneath his own roof, with his own food and his own table” (167).   Here, Christmas admits his passing in with his white foster-family, but knows that he can use his secret to somewhat destroy his evil foster-father.

While in TSAF, the use of third-person narration allows Faulkner to tie the previous three first-persona narratives together, the technique seems to have a more sinister effect in Light In August.  Rather than resolving a complicated narrative, it serves to complicate it further by featuring multiple characters and their inner thoughts and contextualizing these characters with sometimes extensive back-stories.  By the conclusion of chapter seven, it seems as though two separate novels are occurring simultaneously.  Almost opposite to the approach in AILD, the reader is inundated with information.  The exposure of characters’ private information for pubic consumption occurs often and creates spectacles for the townspeople to observe and discuss.  A sense of claustrophobia and surveillance is created by the narrative mode, sometimes omniscient third-person, and intensified by the language with the frequent use of the words look and watch.  

In the first chapter, there are multiple accounts of men watching Lena covertly.  Armstid observes her hands and profile from “the corner of his eye” (12).    “Slowspitting and squatting men watch her covertly” as she passes (27).  This occurs again when she boards the wagon to Jefferson in a scene in which neither she nor the driver look at each other, at least not overtly:  ”Apparently he has never looked at her, not even when she got into the wagon.  Apparently she has never looked at him, either” (28).  Of course, this driver covertly observes Lena “from the corner of his eye” while she eats (29).  In all of these cases, the men Lena interacts with are trying to help her find the father of her unborn child, even though they all seem to think it is a hopeless pursuit.  Perhaps they cannot overtly observe her for the same reason they feel compelled to help her, guilt for the position she is in because of a man.  Unlike Dewey Dell who could still hide her pregnancy from everyone (except Darl), Lena’s personal predicament as an unwed pregnant woman is on display for everyone to see, discuss and judge.

The word look certainly has a different connotation from watch.  When Lena and Armstid’s wife meet, they are not only looking at one another, but also watching: “They look at one another, suddenly naked, watching one another” (18).   It is interesting that the more aggressive watch (rather than look) is first attributed to two women looking at each other rather than a man looking at a woman. While the use of watch seems to imply suspicion or judgment, it’s difficult to discern Mrs. Armstid’s reaction to Lena.  She seems to both hate and pity Lena, but ultimately sides with womankind as also condemns the “durn men”(16) for Lena’s plight, which motivates her to give Lena her hard-earned egg money.

The adolescent Joe Christmas gets caught “watching” the orphanage dietitian having sex with a doctor from the county hospital, in a scene of accidental surveillance (121). Joe doesn’t understand what he overhears on the other side of the curtain and instead of succumbing to the role of voyeur, “he seemed to be turned in upon himself, watching himself sweating, watching himself smear another worm of past into his mouth which his stomach did not want” (122).  Christmas is too young to interpret the dietician’s actions.  Because he is so young, he is also not aware of the social constructs of virginity.  As a result, he is incapable of judging her behavior.  Despite his innocence, the dietician is still convinced that Christmas will reveal her secret and imagines him “watching her with the profound and intent interrogation of an animal” (123).  Christmas embodies the guilt she feels for trespassing against the southern womanly code.  As she continues to spiral into madness, the dietician approaches the janitor who she “has watched for five years” and knows has been “watching” Christmas, a sort of neurotic circular surveillance where everyone is watching everyone else (127). 

The usually unwitting young Christmas perceptively senses the janitor’s surveillance.  However the narrator guesses at how Christmas might examine it without providing Christmas’ actual reaction.  An older Christmas would think: “He hates me and fears me.  So much so that he cannot let me out of sight.”  A more educated child might have thought: “that is why I am different from the others: because he is watching me all the time” (138).  It is interesting that Christmas’ thoughts are no included here and are instead replaced by the narrator’s own speculation.  Not only does this suggest that the narrator is not omniscient, but it suggests what is at the root of this watchful community, hate and fear.  Both interpretations have a cause and effect relationship.  The adult interpretation is that he is watched because he is different and the youthful interpretation is he is different because he is watched.  Either way, his identity is social constructed literally through the eyes of others. 

There are a number of other examples of surveillance, spectacle and spectatorship.  When the Burden house is on fire Byron knows that people will gather to watch it burn (81).  Joe Brown a.k.a. Lucas Burch is also the subject of the town’s voyeurism when questioned during the investigation into Joanna Burden’s death:  “they had locked the door, but the windows was lined with folks’ faces against the glass” (97).  Hightower is also at the center of a town spectacle as a result of his wife’s promiscuity and eventual death, and later as a result of his employment of black servants.  Hightower rises above the town speculation as his name implies, and remains in spite of their efforts to push him out.  Sensitive to the town’s mob mentality, Hightower is described as watching as opposed to listening, while Byron while he tells his story of the search for Joe Christmas (80, 82, 83).  Hightower’s name could also signal his advantageous vantage point.  According to Byron, he is the only person who knows that Hightower “sits in that window from sundown to full dark every day that comes” implying that Hightower is able to survey the street, in view from his window, without anyone knowing (73).   

 The narrative seems to indict the townspeople for their surveillance and the unfounded assumptions that result from them and the constant focus on observation in the novel makes the reader aware of their complicity in this voyeuristic society.