Tag Archives: As I Lay Dying

Darl’s Obscurities?

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Classmates, I need some help. I’m trying to better understand Darl’s language within the humor of As I Lay Dying. Throughout his richly illustrative narrations are passages that surpass mere description and enter a realm of ‘excess.’ Each instance is ‘excessive’ to a different degree, on one end bearing a more coherent or ‘comprehensible’ relationship to the characters and their experiences that Darl describes and, on the other far end, capitulating to inscrutability – or so it seems to me. What I’m unsure of is whether the latter instances are in fact inscrutable or if I’m simply misunderstanding them. And if they are so obscure, did Faulkner write them this way intentionally to humorously convey something about Darl’s character, or are they earnest flourishes? 

The most prominent examples of Darl’s ‘excesses’ are in his descriptions of Jewel, at times grotesque (his skin shifting from red to green), surreal (his face becoming wood and eyes growing paler), and, when Jewel is interacting with the horse, sometimes arrhythmic and disjunctive. Many, perhaps all, of these moments have a kind of clarity. For example, Jewel’s wooden back might suggest his virility, or at least a virility that Darl perceives (he originally thought that Jewel was sneaking out to sleep with a woman, as we discussed in class last week). 

But there are also moments in which Darl’s language becomes so hyperbolic that Faulkner seems to have written them as humorously ironic gestures that hint at the limits of Darl’s narration. The first time we witness Jewel interacting with his horse, Darl describes Jewel moving “with the flashing limberness of a snake.” Then, in the following sentence, he describes Jewel’s body as “free, horizontal, whipping snake-limber” (12). Characters repeat themselves often throughout the book, and in this instance I wonder if Faulkner is poking a little fun at, or at least calling attention to, Darl’s penchant for the grandiose and symbolic.
 
Another moment potentially in the same vein: Cash and Vernon are finishing the coffin the night following Addie’s death. Pa stands with them outside in the rain, dithering around, being a nuisance. When Cash tells Pa to go back in the house, “Pa looks at him, his face streaming slowly. It is as though upon a face carved by a savage caricaturist a monstrous burlesque of all bereavement flowed” (78). The hyperbole of Darl’s vision of his father – whose face is a caricature AND a character in a burlesque, an object of savagery AND monstrosity – is then contrasted, perhaps downplayed, by the following paragraph, when Pa is once again wavering around, quietly mourning: “fall[ing] to shifting the planks, picking them up, laying them down again carefully, as though they are glass” (78). Is Darl’s exaggerated description sound or merely ridiculous?

Then there are moments of seemingly downright obscurity. The white road sign for New Hope Church, “wheels up like a motionless hand lifted above the profound desolation of the ocean” (108). Whose hand? God’s? Is this vision original or Biblical? (I couldn’t find it in the Bible.) Was the hand originally motionless or is it motionless to match the stillness of the sign?
 
Pa’s “humped silhouette partak[es] of that owl-like quality of awry-feathered, disgruntled outrage” (49). I’ll submit that owls have feathers that grow in different directions, but outrage is not a quality I’ve ever heard associated with them. Not just outrage, but “disgruntled outrage!” Why the redundancy? Is Faulkner idiosyncratically testing conventions of literary economy for emphasis or is he just ‘taking the piss,’ as the British say?
 
Or is he doing both, humorously limning the borders not just between subjectivity and objectivity, but of Darl’s subjective narration itself: between its potential to achieve a poetic, “ecstatic” truth (per Werner Herzog) vs. its susceptibility to failure, of failing to ‘land.’ Surely, Darl succeeds far more than he fails, which is why I’m wrestling with this question with such uncertainty.

I’ll close with a quote from Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason that I think brilliantly speaks to the topic at hand: “The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.” 

3. Blood guilt and the fish

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Anse Bundren doesn’t understand the concept of responsibility unless it is to make demands of the people around him. Whether he is aware of it or not, he takes advantage of his status as patriarch. As Carolyn Porter describes, “Consider that he does no real work. He depends on his children, his neighbors, and the good Lord to take care of him” (79). His only action is to reject help as a show of his pride. The death of his wife, Addie, comes as a result of not sending for a doctor sooner.

The fact that he does not take responsibility for her death is apparent in two places. First when he says, “God’s will be done” (AILD 52) right after Addie’s death. Second and more significant is before her death in an interaction with Vardaman after he cleans the fish he caught, “Vardaman comes around the house, bloody as a hog to his knees… ‘Go wash them hands,’ I say… ‘Pa,’ he says, ‘is ma sick some more?’ ‘Go wash them hands,’ I say” (AILD 38). It is notably odd that even though Vardaman is bloody “to his knees,” Anse only tells him to wash his hands. It is possible to read this in the classic sense of washing one’s hands of metaphorical blood. In other words, cleaning themselves from the responsibility of a killing. On page 37, Anse tried to downplay Addie’s condition to Dr. Peabody. This, combined with how long it took for him to call the doctor, implies he might be suffering from subconscious guilt in his response to Vardaman. Anse’s avoidance of Vardaman’s question of Addie’s status by repeating his command is indicative of this.

Additionally, this is possibly the reason Vardaman becomes fixated with the fish and later associating it with his dead mother. Because Anse told him to only wash his hands along with Vardaman having been the one to have caught the fish in the first place, he could be misplacing the responsibility of the death onto the one who last physically dealt with the deceased. Later Vardaman seems to be having a breakdown in the barn when he repeats, “He kilt her… She never hurt him and he come and kilt her” (AILD 63) about the doctor. Doctors often deal with patients by surgically opening them up to fix them. However, it seems that Vardaman’s earlier act of cleaning and gutting the fish became associated with the doctor’s role of surgeon. He thinks that just like he killed the fish, the doctor killed his mother. The concept of blood guilt could have been introduced to him first by his father, Anse, because he was told by him to wash his hands even though he was almost entirely covered in blood.

This shows the dysfunction of the Bundren household. Through Anse making demands without partaking in his responsibilities, his children have twisted misperceptions of themselves and their roles. Vardaman, in particular, is actively processing what blood guilt means by equating his mother to a fish. This is the result of his father’s inability to take responsibility.

No Need to Speak

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From the very start of As I Lay Dying, Darl is established not just as a primary narrator in the novel, but also as the most eccentric character. Often, narrations given by other characters are sandwiched between his own in a constant affirmation of his primacy. At the same time, though, his peculiar perspective only sets him farther apart from, rather than above, the rest of his family; indeed, it alienates him from them, as sometimes his singularity elicits an almost prophetic nature. I argue, however, that this capacity for clairvoyance runs through the Bundren family with more fluidity than readers, or the characters themselves, may naturally perceive. Granted, Darl often appears to be the common force bestowing this special ability upon the others; still, in different degrees they all reflect a common sensitivity.

Products of their parents, the Bundren children (excepting Jewel, on account of his only partial biological relation) all reflect the strange influence of Anse and Addie’s complicated union. In other words, the way the Bundren children relate to their world is inherently based on how they relate to their parents’ idiosyncrasies: their collective criticalness of Anse’s moral deficiencies, and simultaneously, their inheritance of his tendency towards metaphor; from Addie, they assume a drastic stoicism and a confused relationship with words, names and labels. Indeed, even Addie’s sole narration in the novel reveals, for example, a likely source of the similarly existential crisis Dewel Dell experiences in her own nightmare-state: “I couldn’t think what I was I couldn’t think of my name I couldn’t even think I am a girl I couldn’t even think I” (121). Similarly, Addie’s assessment of words combined with Anse’s metaphorical reasonings regarding the physical formations of all God’s creatures seems to similarly influence Vardaman’s conception of his mother as a fish, his brother Jewel, a horse.

Moreover on the discourse of words, Darl and Dewey Dell exhibit a relationship in which words are often unnecessary, if not outright irrelevant. They communicate, the both of them, and comprehend each other, “without words” (27). In fact, as Dewey Dell notes, the certainty of their mutual understanding would actually be compromised if the expressions were vocalized: “[I]f he had said he knew with the words I would not have believed that he had been there and saw us” (27). The notion that non-verbal expressions can manifest such power is further emphasized by Dewey Dell when she describes the immense capacity embodied in Darl’s eyes: “The land runs out of Darl’s eyes; they swim to pin points. They begin at my feet and rise along my body to my face, and then my dress is gone” (121). In this instance, Darl doesn’t just successfully express a simple sentiment to Dewey Dell; he penetrates her psyche, disarming her with one sweeping, yet incisive look.

Darl and his older brother Cash, too, reveal an ability to understand one another outside the realm of verbal communication. Before the catastrophe at the river, for example, Darl describes this nature: “[Cash] and I look at one another with long probing looks, looks that plunge unimpeded through one another’s eyes . . . When we speak our voices are quiet, detached” (142). Clearly, the brothers engage more naturally through facial expressions than verbal ones. Indeed, twice more in the same narration, Darl and Cash communicate without words. First, Darl describes a memory of Addie holding Jewel on a pillow longer than his infant body, but he doesn’t speak his remembering. So when Cash so casually responds as if, with ease, he could hear Darl’s thoughts aloud, readers may almost miss the unspoken transmission that has taken place between the brothers. And again, as they reach the place where they will attempt the river-crossing, Cash must merely look at Darl in order to ask if he join in the undertaking.

Eyes Like Candles, Drowning

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Within the very first pages of As I Lay Dying Cora provides readers with some initial foreshadowing of the novel’s exploration of liminality, which can be defined here as existing before or throughout a threshold or transitional stage. As she reflects on Addie’s laying, dying, liminal state Cora notes that despite her deteriorating physicality Addie’s capacity to communicate prevails: “If we were deaf we could almost watch her face and hear him, see him” (8). Thus, in keeping with the old proverb, “The eyes are the windows to the soul,” Cora’s observation reflects the profound duality between the death of a body and the death of a mind; Addie’s nearly lifeless body in contrast with her still expressive face combine to form a unique threshold being. And indeed, when Addie does choose to communicate verbally, even from her deathbed, her voice is described as “strong, and unimpaired” (48).

Eyes are consistently the most symbolic organ throughout the novel. Faulkner uses the word seventy-six times over the course of his two-hundred and sixty page novel, on average once every three pages. Faulkner is not only interested in the eyes of his characters’, but also those of his horses, fish, owls, and sun; pale ones like Jewel’s, and those black as Dewey Dell’s. As Cora narrows in on Addie’s “windows to the soul” she notes, “Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks” (8). By relating the drowning phenomenon of a candle on the verge of burning out to Addie’s own fast-approaching extinguishment, Cora once again highlights the unique state of liminality; the fitful flickering, likened to the body’s final instinctual yearnings to stay alive, becomes less and less potent with each flare; Addie’s last breaths, a candle’s. And at the actual moment Addie crosses the threshold between life and death, Darl makes a similar observation: “…[H]er eyes, the life in them, rushing suddenly upon them; the two flames glare up for a steady instant. Then they go out as if someone had leaned down and blown upon them” (48).

Cora and Darl’s descriptions hold additional symbolic significance in their foreshadowing of the trials Addie’s dead body will endure before finally being laid to rest–– trials reiterated by Cora when she quotes Addie’s blasphemy of worshiping Jewel in place of Christ: “‘He is my cross and he will be my salvation. He will save me from the water and from the fire’” (168). As previously mentioned, a guttering candle elicits the act of drowning; though already dead by the time her family attempts to cross the bridge, Jewel first saves Addie’s coffin from drowning in the river. And later, he saves it again from burning up in the fire Darl has set to it in the barn.

That Jewel feels compelled to continuously rescue Addie’s already dead body lends significance to the discussion of liminality in As I Lay Dying both because it reveals his dedication to fulfilling Addie’s transition from laying alive to laying dead, and also because it reflects the powerful force that can remain in a departed being. Returning to the distinction between death of the body versus death of the mind, then, we come across an interesting passage from Peabody when he first arrives at Addie’s deathbed: “…[W]hen 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 the bereavement” (43-44). It is important that these words are delivered by a doctor, someone who, presumably, is more familiar with death, and has a stronger scientific background, than the average person in Yoknapatawpha Country because despite these details, Peabody still embodies a spiritual perspective on death. This is how he can suggest Addie has been dead ten days before he arrived; though a few more breaths of physical life remain in her, her will to live has passed, she has no more mind for life. Conversely, once she has both physically and spiritually passed on, Addie Bundren manages to live on in other people’s lives, strangers even: “…I imagined a lot of things coming up between us, but I be durn if I ever thought it would be a body four days dead and that a woman” (117-118).

Similarities between the Compson and the Bundren Family

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As I Lay Dying has many analogous ideas and themes to The Sound and The Fury. Many of the contrasting ideas and themes are metaphoric representations of the protagonist through different objects, time unable to move forward, and similar character roles each family member play. In As I Lay Dying there are various accounts of human- animal interconnections that relate Addie to a fish and a horse. Similar to The Sound and the Fury, Caddie is symbolized to Benjy as fire, a caddie in golf, and a slipper. Faulkner uses these projections to symbolize that Caddie and Addie are always internally present within their family despite Addie’s death and Caddie’s lack of presence.  On pages 53, 67, and 84, Vardaman’s narrative focuses on the dead fish to embody Addie’s existence. Vardaman’s paranoia arises as he becomes unable to articulate and differentiate Addie’s existence from the fish’s existence and concludes someone killed Addie while she has been dead in her bed for ten days (54). Through Vardaman’s narrative, Addie is able to remain present in society only if the fish is devoured by each family member thus each family member will embody a part of Addie’s spirit (66-67), an example of animal magnetism;  “A magnetic charm or appeal” (Merriam Webster) towards the perseverance of Addie’s existence.   Furthermore, instead of an embodiment as a fish, Jewel perceives his mother as a horse. On pages 135-136, Jewel purchases a horse with his own money saved from “cleaning up forty acres of new ground Quick laid out last spring,” he also tells Anse the horse will never eat anything that belongs to him which shows Jewel’s separation in the family as well as his affection for the horse. By comparing his mother to a horse, we come to the realization Jewel isn’t cruel or mean hearted as Cora perceives him to be (21), instead he’s misperceived.

“Without stopping it overends and rears again, pauses, then crashes slowly forward and through the curtain. This time Jewel is riding upon it, clinging to it, until it crashes down and flings him forward and clear and Mack leaps forward into a thin smell of scorching meat and slaps at the widening crimson-edged holes that bloom like flowers in his undershirt” (222).

The movement of the river rushing the casket downstream compares to a wild horse attempting to thrust Jewel off it. From the beginning of the novel it is clear Jewel treats his horse with tough love, caring for it through derogatory movements (13), but for Jewel to risk his life to safe the casket would emphasis his care for his mother is a mere reflection for his care of his horse. Thus, for Jewel to state his mother is a horse only further indicates his feelings towards his mother is more personable and more profound which leads to the question if Jewel is not able to perceive his mother as a horse would he have rescued his mother from the river?

Time unable to progress forward is made clear from each family member’s inability to cope with Addie’s death. After Addie’s death each family member develops onset of problems: existence for Darl, sexuality for Dewey Dell, and the parallels of reality for Vardaman and Jewel. This exemplifies Addie’s death only hinders each family member’s ability to progress in life.  On page 146, “It is as though the space between us were time; an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between,” implicitly draws upon the burden of Addie’s death as an entropic effect not only on her children but on time as well. The idea that separation of Addie and her children is not a spatial factor but a temporal factor implies Addie’s death disrupted the continuous rhythm of time moving forward, instead, time is now hindered and doubling backwards into the past. A disastrous foreshadowing for the Bundren family once Addie died. This is very much contrasts to Quentin’s narrative in The Sound and the Fury; his constant battle to irrevocably attempt to escape time and his past leads him to commit suicide since the progression of time and the memories from the past are inescapable.

Lastly, from Addie’s narrative it is clear Jewel is the “black sheep” of the family due to an erroneous affair Addie has with Whitfield. Addie favors Jewel and firmly believes Jewel will be her salvation saving her from water and fire (168), similarly to Mrs. Compson with Jason in The Sound and the Fury, she believes Jason will rescue her from the downfall of the family’s name as she constantly reminds him he is a Bascomb and not a Compson. Dewey Dell relates to Caddy as they both are impregnated out of wedlock and is at a threshold between womanhood, Benjy and Darl would relate to one another due to their observant personas but Darl is able to comprehend what he sees, every character but Anse would relate to Quentin due to them repressing time and their inability to cope with their past, and finally, Anse and Mr. Compson are both not present/ active father figures in the story since Mr. Compson’s most indicative role in The Sound and The Fury is to leave Quentin at a threshold between time and the meaning of life in comparison to Anse who sells Jewel’s horse