Dewey Dell, the mourning woman who cannot cry. She keens when her mother’s soul leaves her body and cannot cry afterwards. Her grief is both overwhelming and numbing. As too powerful to cope with immediately she can only scream, then empty herself and feel nothing. The relationship Dewey Dell has with her baby is also the one she has with her grief, she is in the liminal space of aloneness and not-aloneness, of the pain of grief and overwhelming numbness. 

Keening is the action of wailing in grief for a dead person. It is a soporatic combination of singing and screaming meant to convey the deepest of despair. Deweys name is of celtic origin meaning ‘beloved’ so it follows that this would be her method of grief. Keening is both overwhelming and sudden, usually out of the keener’s control, a spontaneous melodic scream. After her mother has passed on however Dewey cannot cry, repeating it to herself like a mantra. The keening was her first expression to the grief of her mother’s death and the only one she allows herself to .

According to myth, keening was created by the Goddess Brigid from Irish Mythology to mourn her son who was killed in front of her. Keening became a tradition for Celtic funerals with a group of keeners often being hired to keen at funerals, the practice is still alive today, however not as common. It is an ingrained tradition in Celtic countries such as Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. The act of keening also shows some of the Bundred cultural background, perhaps Scottish, perhaps Welsh since this is Dewey’s first and only expression of grief.

Darl is an intelligent character who is ostracized by a society that would burn witches if the lord told them to. The act of insanity for which Darl is sent off to an asylum is actually very reasonable compared to the entirely unreasonable quest the family is on. This journey is clearly beyond the Bundren family’s ability as seen by the perilous obstacles they encounter. The request for a poor family to travel for multiple days to bury someone a state away is absolutely unreasonable and impractical. The most extreme and tragic result of Addie’s request was the loss of Cash’s leg which was broken along the way and rotted until it was unusable. The family also had to trade a horse to acquire donkeys to cross the river, while not as severe of a consequence as Cash’s decaying leg, for a family living in poverty this is no small price as well. Seeing all of this unfold around him I am absolutely able to follow Darl’s logic in wanting the coffin gone so the family could be done with this terrible journey. ‘As I Lay Dying’ presents the Joker-esq question “Is he crazy or was it society that was crazy all along”. 

The premise that the society is crazy is prevalent in many parts of the novel. We see this with the characters’ many hypocrisies like the false pieties of Cora and Whitfield who present christian values but go on to lie, sin, and gossip. The novel’s satirical exaggeration of how incompetent and disconnected from society the family is, in examples like putting the body in the coffin incorrectly, also serve to paint the picture that the society Darl encompasses is crazy. 

The clearest case for the argument that burning down the barn was not only not insane, but not even truly perceived as insane by the family, was made by Cash. “It wasn’t nothing else to do. It was either send him to Jackson, or have Gillespie sue us.” (p232) Cash clearly states that the family is sending Darl to an institution solely to avoid repercussion for their actions and does not actually think Darl is insane. 

I do not think that Darl loses his mind at all. Burning the barn was impulsive and not thought through, but the decision to do so was rational. Wanting to end this perilous journey in which Cash’s leg was currently decaying, was a very practical desire.

From the first several chapters and sections of As I Lay Dying, the topic of death is ever present as Addie Bundren is laid to rest. As this a very challenging text to interpret, as there are so many layers and characters to unpack, I have titled this post “An Adventurous Death” for two reasons: 1.) The group of 15 characters are quite literally on a journey to bury the deceased Addie Bundren, and 2.) The narration of how each character perceives death is an adventure in and of itself. It is rather quite interesting how Faulkner has written some diverse narrations of how these characters come to grips with a person to whom they all know, and who eventually dies. Most of the characters guide their grief and preparation for the burial through Christian biblical teachings, others are more constructive and hands on with the preparations. Cash, for example, literally constructs a casket with his carpenter skills to honor his mother, while some characters like Daryl, who are not even present at the time of Addie Bundren’s death, has a sixth sense of knowing that she has indeed died. Perhaps it is a religious awakening or calling of some sort.

            What I found most interesting in these previous sections is the depths of which the group is willing to go to honor the life of Addie Bundren by enduring some of their own suffering during the journey. In addition, there are also an incredible amount of parallels of the group’s journey to that of biblical references and moral teachings. Especially when taking her body to Jefferson, the group encounters severe rains, which almost drown the group in the river crossing. Maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but it reminded me of the biblical story of Noah and the cleansing of the earth and all of its sins with great floods created by God. Perhaps this was a test for the group to wash away whatever sins they may have committed during the life of their (very religious) mother and to complete the ultimate redemption arc by carrying the coffin to its final destination. In way, bearing the cross of their suffering. Another moment of Christian parallel is with Addie herself in which she has her own narration even though she has died earlier on in the progression of the story; resembling an almost Christ like resurrection and aura to her omnipresent narrative.

She says at the end of section “One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray to, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them Salvation is just words too (276).” It seems that these characters, both dead and alive, are on a journey not to just honor the dead, but to prove their own Christian worth and atone for their own sins. Almost like a race to cleanse themselves individually and to “one-up” each other of whether they can prove to be above their sinful pasts and wrongdoings.

In one of the stranger moments of As I Lay Dying, Cash, here for the first time serving as narrator, produces a numbered list of reasons why he made Addie’s coffin on a bevel, the eighth of which is something he calls “animal magnetism” (83). It’s a term from the mid 18^th century particular to the short-lived practice of mesmerism, which, according to its founder, Franz Mesmer, was the practice of utilizing magnets in order to heal and improve people’s health as well as potentially hypnotizing them (Neely). This magnetism, I think, is a kind of sleight of hand by Faulkner; he’s trying to conceal one thing as another: namely, what John Keats’ called negative capability as animal magnetism. I think if we understand this animal magnetism as negative capability, it will provide keener insight into the weirder dimensions of AILD, specifically Darl’s seeming clairvoyance. To do so, though, requires I make a kind of historical argument, or just an explication, as to the origin of mesmerism.

First, I think we can’t understand the development of mesmerism divorced from the development of Romanticism. Similar to mesmerism, Romanticism was a project profoundly preoccupied with changing people’s minds, a preoccupation inherited from folks like Adam Smith, who articulated a philosophy of sympathy in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The figures which compose English Romanticism—Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, etc.,—read Smith, and were challenged by him to formulate how the limits of sympathy can be pushed, especially in the wake of the violence of the French Revolution, which they saw as the bloody outcome of a crises of differing and irreconcilable sympathies. That’s why education is such a significant motif in Romantic poetry: it was on this basis that the Romantics thought people’s sympathies could be transformed, only it was never education as such but rather in the form of walking in nature and seeing a mountain and inexplicably acquiring some preternatural intuition about society and one’s place in it. Nature was thought to provide a space in which a person could learn to see, to perceive, to judge, which would in turn refine their sympathies. So, in short, the Romantics couldn’t get enough of these sympathies.

And in much the same way, mesmerism was concerned with sympathies—though it saw to christen this project as a science, reaping the prestige that entailed. But even so, it’s not uncommon that the practice of mesmerism is described as a “romantic science.” What’s more, Tim Fulford writes, “This incipiently romantic cure depended on ‘the power of feeling… the pain which another suffers’” (67). And he goes on to even mention Wordsworth: “The healing of the body depended on the renewal of the emotions—for De Mainauduc, even before Wordsworth—it was ‘the hour of feeling.’” Fulford’s article mainly goes into how Coleridge conceived of mesmerism as an apt metaphor for the political enthrallment of his age, but I want to turn to a figure who was more aesthetically inspired by mesmerism. I mean, of course, John Keats.

Now, mesmerism is thought to have influenced many of the Romantics, but few of them outright concede this influence like Coleridge, who brought it up by name in a number of letters and essays. In the case of Keats, though, it’s not hard to make out that mesmerizing impression in his formulation of what he called “negative capability.” In many ways, negative capability is simply an aesthetic animal magnetism. His only real articulation of it, in a letter to his brothers, is: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…” How this differed from other Romantic conceptions of sympathy was that, where someone like Wordsworth thought it was a matter of accumulating sympathies, Keats thought sympathy, or this radical form of sympathy, was characteristically not additive—which is why he calls it negative capability. That is to say that Keats thought the highest form of sympathy possible was one which saw the sympathizer negate themselves and as such be able to see as the person or thing they were sympathizing with—though it could not be understood as sympathizing with but rather sympathizing as. There is a real supernatural, hypnotic element to this kind of sympathy, in much the same way mesmerism was the actual practice of a supernatural hypnotism. The caveat for Keats was, of course, that only poets could achieve this condition—poets like himself.

Now I can return to Faulkner. If we can understand this allusion of Cash’s to animal magnetism as actually a subtle evocation of Keats’ negative capability, I think we can read his section as foreshadowing this interaction between Vardamann and Darl:

But my mother is a fish. Vernon seen it. He was there.

“Jewel’s mother is a horse,” Darl said.

“Then mine can be a fish, cant it, Darl?” I said.

“Why?” Darl said. “If pa is your pa, why does your ma have to be a horse just because Jewel’s is?”

“Why does it” I said. “Why does it, Darl?”

Darl is my brother.

“Then what is your ma, Darl?” I said.

“I Haven’t got ere one,” Darl said. “Because if I had one, it is was. And if it is was, it cant be is. Can it?”

“No,” I said.

“Then I am not,” Darl said. “Am I?”

“No,” I said.

I am. Darl is my brother.

“But you are, Darl,” I said.

“I know it,” Darl said. “That’s why I am not is. Are is too many for one woman to foal.”

(101)

It’s that very last sentence Darl says that I think reveals in him a kind of negative capability, which would account for his sections featuring a glimpse into the perspectives of folks nowhere near him. It’s the concession of multiplicity that gets me, really: Vardamann says “you are” so as to reassert the fact of Darl’s being, but then Darl turns it around to assert a kind of plurality within him. And that plurality, to me, could only be these different perspectives that he is somehow privy to. Moreover, negative capability is thought, as I said, to be a poetic trait, which critics of AILD have argued Darl to have (Neely). So it’s interesting that there is, if I’m correct, this entire Romantic dimension to Darl. His visions, then, are really these renderings of a radical Romantic sympathy. And so if my argument is sound—which it might not be—we have to read these moments as distinctly sympathetic.

I have to imagine Faulkner was familiar with folks like Keats a lot more than folks like Mesmer, especially seeing how capable he is of appropriating the Romantic idiom for unromantic means—a lot like Melville. And so I think this allusion to mesmerism is really only a disguise. It is interesting, though, that this Romantic power comes to the Bundren family as a pseudoscience. It’s not totally unprecedented, though. If you go out to the midwest you’ll find the barely remaining ruins of spiritualist communes founded in the mid 19^th century, places like Utopia, Ohio, which was meant to be one of many “phalanstries” which would dot the American landscape—phalanstries being these kinds of communes that the French philosopher Charles Fourier thought up of and which somehow gained traction with Transcendentalists and Spiritualists. Mesmerism would have probably traveled in much the same way, traveling far and wide until it became this passing notion from a turn-of-the-century Southern carpenter.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Vintage, 2004.

Fulford, Tim. “Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 43, no. 1, 2004, pp. 57–78.

Keats, John. “On Negative Capability: Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 December 1817.” John Keats, the “Negative Capability” Letter, mason.gmu.edu/~rnanian/Keats-NegativeCapability.html.

Neely, Nick. “Animal Magnetism.” Yoknapedia, jallred.net/wordpress/yoknapedia/wiki/animal-magnetism/.

I was honestly struggling to find a fresh and unapparent blog topic for As I Lay Dying this whole week, and it wasn’t until my South-Asian Literature class this morning that an interesting idea caught my attention. The professor asked if any of us had ever read Faulkner, and then began discussing how Faulkner’s use of blameworthy subjects (at the time he was writing) were bravely used to divulge some of the American South’s most pressing problems, similar to the works of Pakistani writer Hasan Manto. This led me to think about how both writers were writing at times of distinct liminality, the slow-coming modernization of the South for Faulkner, and the division and violence of partition for Manto. I will mainly focus on how Faulkner’s depiction of death mirrors both the traditional and modernized values of the Southern 1920s.

When thinking about the ways in which AILD depicts the liminality of the South as it navigates between different thresholds of defining death, I immediately think of Cora. Cora lives and breathes religion, for her the Bible isn’t just a text that guides her morally, but a dignified stepping stone that she can use to raise herself above all others. Cora makes a point of allowing religion to do the dirty work for her, she doesn’t have to cope through symbolic fish or horses, but only needs to reflect on conceptions that have already been laid out for her. She says, “I have tried to live right in the sight of God and man, for the honor and comfort of my Christian husband and the love and respect of my Christian children. Not like Addie Bundren, dying alone…glad to go” (Faulkner 23). These lines almost present her as a sort of one-sided poster girl for the righteous Southern, Christian lifestyle, but we see that even Cora, who seems to strictly adhere to pre-modern values, holds a sort of vexed darkness within her. Religion was a way of life for many Southerners at the time, and to pick at its ethics was to question God. Faulkner uses Cora to portray how religion was used as a false ego booster and a way of making death a spectacle, a popularity contest. And it’s not too longer after Cora’s misguided, religious riff, that we transition into the more philosophical, views of characters such as Vardaman.

“My mother is a fish” is the striking single phrase that appears on page 84 of As I Lay Dying. However, this is not the first time we hear of fish, as it’s early on in the novel that we witness Vardaman catch, prop, and gouge at the newly caught specimen. The fish is described as being “ashamed of being dead”, it’s cut apart, becomes “not-fish”, and eventually “bleeds quietly into the pan”. The Bundren’s meal becomes something bigger, a life of its own, capable of shame, being, and a quiet death. The importance of the fish in young Vardaman’s narrative seems to not only be a symbol of coping and understanding death, but an interesting marker of liminality. In hearing of his mother’s death, Vardaman doesn’t rely on God or linger at the Church, but finds himself pondering what it means to exist and not exist. He doesn’t need to read Kant or any other philosopher, but seems to have discovered himself through overlapping events that his mother and the fish are more similar in more ways than one. At least to me, there seems to be an abrupt difference between the religious woman who equates death with reputation and the young child, who ponders “fish” and “not-fish”, as they seem to mark the eventual altering of the Southern belief system.

I’ll admit that I might have gone in too many directions the past few paragraphs, but what I’m basically hinting at is the idea that Faulkner used his characters to highlight slow-coming societal changes, and that these religious and philosophical writings were surprisingly controversial at the time. For a rural 1920s reader, not everyone was so keen on the depiction of selfish Christians or animals being portrayed as equal to human. But like Manto, who wasn’t afraid to poke at the faults of his own country, Faulkner cleverly presents the unravellings of a changing South.

In his 2015 op-ed for the New York Times, “My Own Life”, renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks confronts his recent terminal diagnosis with typical grace, candor and an inspiring depth of perspective. He reckons with philosopher David Hume’s rumination on his own mortality – the piece a cheeky echo of the latter’s 1776 memoir – finding much to mine in the account of a clear-eyed but “speedy dissolution”, or “great decline of [a] person”, chafing, however, at the thinker’s professed “detachment from life” as he reaches that chapter’s conclusion. Sacks instead insists that he feels “intensely alive” and, in possession of “sudden clear focus and perspective”, wishes to dispense with “anything inessential” so as to “achieve new levels of understanding and insight.” He admits that he feels fear and allows that this will involve a sort of active detachment – he talks of giving up the News, not for lack of care but because of the finitude of time – describing his state of mind as an “increasing consciousness” as he confronts his mortality and looks forward to his end.  

To anyone familiar with Sacks, his calm and clarity should be of little surprise. But upon revisiting the piece I was bowled over by its radical present tense. For a piece on death and dying if feels full of life. And indeed, what Sacks seems to be contending with is our problem in the West of giving dying its due. Rather than assent to the binary of Life and Death, with nothing in the middle, our Sacks, “sentient being…thinking animal”, plants his flag in the present moment and proclaims it to be something unique, active. He is dying and it is different than anything that came before.

Though he did not write As I Lay Dying in possession of the same first-hand experience as Sacks, I’d contend that Faulkner had a kindred perspective and as keen an interest in the in act of dying, and that a central interest in framing the novel around this liminal state, both universal and unique to every human, was to examine the ways we cast Death as the end of Life but often deny Dying its due. By employing a panoply of narrators Faulkner invites the reader to a sampler-platter of the ways in which the bereaved choose to engage or not engage with the death of a familiar (I hesitate to say ‘loved one’…).

As we toggle between the perspectives of the Bundren clan and their neighbors, in the hours before and immediately subsequent to Addie’s death, we bear witness to the ways in which mortality can drive us away from the present moment, further into ourselves. Cash, the eldest, fixates on the construction of the coffin, fulfilling Addie’s final wish and imagining her participation from her death-bed; Darl, evidently deteriorating and/or ascending to the astral plane, has taken to referring to his mother by her full name – “Addie Bundren will not be” (AILD, p.80) – and in between bouts of clairvoyant seeing, is tangled in the existential questions of tense, not sure if he ever was let alone is; Jewel, the bastard torch-bearer of his mother’s animal ire, alienated from his siblings by his inherent other-hood and his mother’s doting, can’t even bring himself to say ‘coffin’ as he and Darl miss the moment alltogether; Dewey Dell, though physically present at the moment of death, is elsewhere entirely, fixated on her problem and “process of coming unalone” (AILD, p.62); Vardaman, the youngest, in his state of un-tended-to trauma at bearing witness to his mother’s demise, denies that she is really gone — “It was not her. I was there, looking. I saw. I thought it was her, but it was not. It was not my mother. She went away when the other one laid down in her bed…she went away…” (AILD, p.66) – and proceeds to transmute her into the fish he has just gutted, which, despite being cut into pieces of “not-fish”, he seems to insist exists in a state of ‘not-death’; Anse, sits on the porch rather than with his dying wife – laying the grounds for all we come to learn about his sterling character – missing the active moment of her death and continues for the duration of the narrative to refer to her in the active voice (“her mind is set on it” he tells Samson once they’ve set out on the trek into town).  Crucially—though the language and tense each character uses to refer to Addie and her death is different—none of narratives for the first third of novel afford Addie any real personhood in spite of her breathing. Tull, the neighbor, describes Addie as “…waiting to die and to do all over again” (AILD, p.137), allowing that she is technically still alive, but casting her state in terms of Life and Death (not to mention, a spiritual return to Life, and then Death, etc etc etc forever and ever amen). Even Peabody, the doctor, arriving too late to be of any real service, ruminates on the situation — “…I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.” (Peabody, AILD, p.43-44) – but does not functionally engage with the real person in front of him. He comes closest to recognizing that Addie is in a state separate from the forced binary of Life and Death, but he does little to engage with what that might mean for her, or for the rest of the family. For most of a novel centered around a dying woman, there is a profound lack of Addie.

Given Faulkner’s avowed interest in the temporal experience of consciousness, I find it fascinating that he chose to position the novel just prior to Addie’s death and to deprive us – until much later in the novel, and from a vantage removed from the active narrative – of Addie herself. While much is done to provide a panoramic view of people struggling to contend with Life and Death, they are all firmly rooted, one way or another, in that binary. Perhaps he intended for Addie’s narrative absence– much as he did with Caddie’s in TSAF – to shine a light on the our human insufficiencies, but I cannot help feeling – especially given that we’re already dipped into the supernatural or hyperreal with Darl’s clairvoyance – that giving Addie a narrative chapter from her deathbed would’ve elevated the text more. Even a character as a committed to practical misanthropy as she – stage-managing her own death, “[preparing] to stay dead a long time” – would not doubt have been activated by Sack’s notion of “increased consciousness”. I would have been fascinated to get a glimpse into her radical present.

The assumption that the Bundren’s have a tendency for telepathic episodes with animals isn’t that far off. This gift, or underclass social linguistic penalty reads like a genetic trait that the Bundren’s seem to inhibit in their lineage. Darl seems to be everywhere, know everything, Vardaman seems to have an innate ability to communicate with fishes, Dewey Dell with a cow, and Jewel with his horse. There’s that, but it doesn’t certainly have to mean that they’re actively communicating with them through telepathy, but rather the Bundren’s use animals to understand what is happening around them when they prove incompetent at dealing with their issues on their own. Could Faulkner be saying that animals are capable of more concise speech, thought, and rationalization than humans are? Maybe, because the Bundren’s surely rely on animals to wrap their heads around their qualms. It could also be some kind of social commentary that because of the Bundren’s disconnection with the thriving outside world, they are ultimately uneducated enough to understand on their own, and that even the lowing and shuffling animals seem to have clearer understandings.

          Darl says Jewel’s mother is a horse and associates a flashback of when Jewel first got his horse to the overall remembrance of his mother. In a way, it reads as an instance of jealousy of the favoritism that Addie had for Jewel. And, if we take Cora’s previous assertion that Darl seems to be the favorite, we can argue that Darl wanted to be the favorite but ultimately continued to live in the shadow of Jewel. Darl uses this horse as a symbol to understand his mother while she was alive instead of actually remembering his mother for who she was. Maybe he can’t separate himself from his philosophical voice and continues to use signs to understand the world around him. It’s interesting if this is why Darl calls Jewel’s mother a horse while Jewel doesn’t necessarily share the same association. The symbol of the horse for Jewel is a substitute for his idea of freedom from the Bundren family who stay isolated up in their bluff away from the society on its uprising. Jewel ignores his work around the house because he’s too exhausted from working elsewhere in order to buy his horse, signifying this detachment from familial expectations and bonds. For Addie, this horse could also be signifying the separation from the Bundren’s that she might have secretly wanted but never got close to while she was alive. This explains why she’s so adamant about having her body buried in Jefferson.

         Further on, in order to understand his mother’s death Vardaman studies the fish that he just caught. He sees the way the fish has changed and he uses this a framework to compare his mother’s death to. Vardaman and Darl have an unhealthy way of looking at death because they are unable to make sense of it without injecting some outside force as guidance. Instead of facing the situation, they look away and try to find meaning elsewhere further incapacitating the lower-class human characters. Also, Dewey Dell is preoccupied with a cow who is swollen with milk symbolizing Dewey Dell being swollen with the burden of possibly being pregnant. Dewey Dell has lost her only other female relative so she embraces the only other female around which is the cow whose simplistic need of milking parallels Dell’s.

Jewel’s mind, as we find his only section, is intently focused on his mother, even as his actions are often focused on and through his horse. The horse functions as a substitute mother for Jewel, upon which he can act out fantasies of physical closeness as well as violence: “Jewel kicks him in the stomach; the horse arches his neck back, croptoothed; Jewel strikes him across the face with his fist and slides on to the trough and mounts upon it,” (13) He calls the horse “pussel-gutted,” (13) as in large-bellied, like a pregnant woman. Furthermore, the deceit he practices to get the horse mirrors the deceit Addie practices to conceive Jewel–a link that is made explicit by Darl.

Throughout the novel Darl is intensely focused on Jewel. Darl’s chapter on p. 180-183 illustrate the depth of Darl’s focus on Jewel typographically: most of the chapter is in normal type, but the sentences and clauses referring to Jewel (not referred to by name in the section) are italicized, indicating perhaps an unconscious resonance that separates Jewel from all others. But it is only Darl’s longest section, at the exact center of the novel, in which Darl recounts the story of how Jewel got his horse, that we understand why.

In that section, we learn that Jewel for month sneaks away to work at night, to raise money for his horse. At first the only evidence noticed by the family is his extreme tiredness. Later Cash spies on him, but he and Darl conclude that he is in a sexual relationship. Darl, who in the present time of the novel can often see through deception, has surprisingly little insight into Jewel’s behavior, and is apparently as clueless as the rest of the family about the real reason for Jewel’s nighttime excursions. He begins to make an important connection, however, when he notices Addie, concerned for Jewel’s health, sneaking him extra food. Darl is struck by the hypocrisy of her deception: “I first found it out, that Addie Bundren should be hiding anything she did, who had tried to teach us that deceit was such that, in a world where it was, nothing else could be very bad or very important,” (130). The evening when Jewel’s deceit is fully revealed, Darl has his epiphany:

“That night I found ma sitting beside the bed where he was sleeping, in the dark. She cried hard, maybe because she had to cry so quiet; maybe because she felt the same way about tears she did about deceit, hating herself for doing it, hating him because she had to. And then I knew that I knew. I knew that as plain on that day as I knew about Dewey Dell on that day.” (136)

As we later learn, Addie had many years ago betrayed her family, sneaking away for her assignations with Whitield, her “secret . . . in the woods,” (175) resulting in her pregnancy with Jewel–just as Jewel sneaks away, betraying his family by forcing them to do his chores and feed him extra food, and gets not a baby but a horse. Darl makes the connection. This recapitulation of the primal scene unlocks something in Darl’s mind, and seems to be the origin of his uncanny penetrating insight. When Darl says “I knew that I knew,”, that is, that Jewel is illegitimate, he links that moment to his unexplained knowledge of Dewey Dell’s affair. It also appears to be the origin of Darl’s intense focus on Jewel.

As the betraying figure in the horse affair, Jewel now acts as a lightning rod for Darl’s resentment toward his unloving philandering mother. Jewel has so totally taken over this role in Darl’s mind, that Darl no longer views Addie as his mother, and refers to her as “Addie Bundren” rather than “Ma” or “Mother.” Darl’s displaced resentment suffuses the novel and drives much of its action. His constant taunts are the just most obvious manifestation. Why does Darl insist on taking Jewel on an excursion to earn $3 just as Addie is about to die? Not for the money–unlike every other family member, he’s not planning on buying something in town. Rather, he pulls Jewel away from his dying mother as an act of revenge against both of them. Without this delay, the family most likely would have crossed one of the bridges before they were washed away. And why does he try to burn the coffin? Cash assumes it’s an attempt to end the disgraceful cortège with a rotting corpse at its center, but we have no direct evidence for this. Instead, like the $3 errand, it can be seen as a triple act of punishment: at directly at Addie, but also at Jewel, both by burning Jewel’s actual mother and negating Jewel’s sacrifice of his mother substitute–the horse–which was sold to make the journey possible.