THE THEME ANNOUNCED by the falling spire of Soldier’s Pay, continued as a subsidiary and peripheral interest in the talk of Mr. Wiseman in Mosquitoes, suggested by the image of the “black and savage stars” of Sartoris, and implicit everywhere in The Sound and the Fury, is squarely at the center of Faulkner’s fifth novel, from the title to Anse’s last words, “Meet Mrs. Bundren” —the new Mrs. Bundren.
The structural metaphor in As I Lay Dying is a journey through life to death and through death to life. Literally, the journey is undertaken to bury the dead and get some new teeth. Another and unexpected result is a new Mrs. Bundren. Behind a story at once grotesque and elementally traditional lies a search for a lost center of value, a direct probing of ultimate questions, a continuation of Quentin’s futile search for human meaning. In The Sound and the Fury a recalled way of life led to the question of what effect our attitude toward time—Dilsey’s, Father’s, Jason’s—has on our way of life. Here time stops, for Addie in one way, for the family in another, for the reader in still another; then begins again when Pa comes up to the wagon “kind of hangdog and proud too, with his teeth and all” and what is left of and added to the family goes back to take up the ordinary daily routine of the Bundrens, back to ordinary time. Addie Bundren is safely buried in Jefferson at last and Darl is on his way to Jackson, where his visions will result in no more barn-burnings. The Bundrens take up where they left off. As Faulkner has recently said of them,1 they cope with their fate pretty well.
Since Darl is the member of the family who “sees” the most, and sees most objectively, it is fitting that we get our introduction not only to the Bundrens but to the symbolic reverberations of their journey first through him. What Darl sees is true, and what he thinks always reveals more than his own idiosyncrasies. (What Cora Tull sees, on the other hand, sometimes didn’t happen, or didn’t happen that way; and what she thinks may or may not be revealing of objective reality.) Vernon Tull gives us a clue to Darl’s function in the story when he says of him, “I always say it aint never been what he done so much or said or anything so much as how he looks at you. It’s like he got into the inside of you, someway.”
Darl tells us in the first chapter that Cash is a good carpenter, and before long we have ample evidence that Darl is right. “Addie Bundren could not want a better one, a better box to lie in.” Darl’s opening chapter is factual, imagistic, objective. We learn immediately to trust him, whether he is noting the figure of Jewel striding just five feet in front of him or pondering the facts of birth and death: “It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.” His meditation on emptying yourself for sleep is one of the earliest pointers toward the central theme. Is there anything left after you have been divested of the items of consciousness that have made up your day?
In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not.
After they have crossed the river and while Jewel and Vernon are in the water trying to retrieve Cash’s tools, Darl watches the ludicrous, fantastic, and pitiful scene and formulates the judgment which his factual reporting of the situation has led the reader to accept:
From here they do not appear to violate the surface at all. . . . It looks peaceful, like machinery does after you have watched it and listened to it for a long time. As though the clotting which is you had dissolved into the myriad original motion, and seeing and hearing in themselves blind and deaf; fury in itself quiet with stagnation. Squatting, Dewey Dell’s wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which are the horizons and the valleys of the earth.
Darl is concerned to establish the line between being and not-being. When his mother died was there simply a dissolution of the clotting into the “myriad original motion,” or was there something else, something that could be described in Cora Tull’s religious language? Darl does not ask himself these questions formally because there is no need to: he ponders them so constantly that he is of little use to his family in their ordeal. If the scene beside the river suggests to him first the answer his mother would have given to his questions, it suggests also a very different answer, a Biblical answer. And his reply to Vardaman when asked “Why does she want to hide her away from the sight of man, Darl?” suggests, too, with its Scriptural echo, that he has weighed Cora Tull’s faith: “‘So she can lay down her life,’ Darl says.” Darl presents us with both the facts and the issues that spring from them. He arrives at no solution and is sent to Jackson.
Dewey Dell also leads us into the central theme, though unlike Darl she is only very dimly conscious, when she is conscious at all, of the implications of her own words and thoughts. Dewey Dell wants an abortion. Since she cannot get one at New Hope, she has her own reason for holding Anse to his promise to her mother that he would bury her in Jefferson. As they begin their journey and her new hope of freedom from the life growing within her is put to a severe trial by the slowness of their progress, she does not ponder the irony Darl knows: that only her mother’s death, making necessary a trip to Jefferson, could have given her this new hope. But what she experiences has more meaning for the reader than for Dewey Dell.
Anse’s people buried their dead at New Hope, only three miles away. If Anse had buried Addie there, there would have been no need to risk the perils of flood and fire. New Hope is the obvious place for Anse to bury his dead, as all the conventional, normal people believe, and several of them, notably Tull and Samson, tell him. But they pass the fork in the road with the sign first brought to our attention by Darl and later concentrated on obsessively by Dewey Dell: “a white signboard with faded lettering: New Hope Church. 3 mi.” The whole chapter assigned to Dewey Dell in the first day of the journey centers on this signboard and its implications. It begins with “The signboard comes in sight” and ends with Dewey Dell’s agonized prayer, “I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.” In between we have her thoughts as she ponders the sign (“it can wait”) and her own terrible need to hurry (“I wish I had time”). The sign saying New Hope seems to her “empty with waiting.” It seems to take forever to get to it but finally they are beyond it and the copula changes to past tense. For her there is no irony in her observations and thoughts:
It blows cool out of the pines, a sad steady sound. New Hope. Was 3 mi. Was 3 mi. I believe in God I believe in God.
In Vardaman’s chapters the religious theme is at once most precisely defined and most hidden from casual reading. Vardaman is first seen carrying a fish, immediately after Anse has said “The Lord giveth” and Tull has agreed with the implied interpretation of the significance of Addie’s death: “It’s true. Never a truer breath was ever breathed. ‘The Lord giveth,’ I say.” Vardaman’s first words in the book tell us the fish “was full of blood and guts as a hog.”
If this seems an unusual description of a fish, it is fitting for a fish so unusually large, both physically and metaphorically. The fish was a symbol of Christ to the early church, the church that centered its teaching in the new hope offered in the gospel, or good news, of Christ’s resurrection. Symbolically it is appropriate then that Vardaman in the first chapter assigned to him should be wholly preoccupied with the great fish he has caught. He can feel where it was in the dust. Jewel’s horse, both “an is different from my is” and somehow an illusion, seems to disappear in the darkness: “It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components”; but the image of the fish is strong and clear to Vardaman, no illusion. “I am not afraid.” Vardaman has a childlike faith in the efficacy of his fish. The chapter ends with “Cooked and et. Cooked and et.” When Cora Tull tries to question Vardaman about his mother’s state, she “can’t get nothing outen him except about a fish.”
Not to labor the point: the fish which Vardaman pictures “all chopped up . . . laying in the kitchen in the bleeding pan, waiting to be cooked and et” parallels Christ killed and ritualistically eaten and drunk to prevent the death of the believer. Vardaman does not accept his mother’s “change” as final; or does not mean the same by “dead” as the others do. She has somehow become the fish: when the fish is eaten she will live on hidden away “from the sight of man.” The thing they put in the box was not his mother: “I know. I was there. I saw it when it did not be her. I saw. They think it is and Cash is going to nail it up.” When the fish is eaten “she will be him and Pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there won’t be anything in the box and so she can breathe.” The Prayer of Humble Access in the Communion Service according to the Book of Common Prayer ends with the petition that we may “dwell in him, and he in us.” Vardaman’s chopping up of the fish is ritual magic to prevent his mother’s death. Believing it to have been effective, he opens the window by her bed and bores holes in the top of the coffin “so she can breathe.” We have been prepared for his next chapter, which consists simply of “My mother is a fish.” Vardaman is the true believer. He hovers in the shadows and watches Cash “going up and down . . . at the bleeding plank.” Worshipper, priest, altar, and the Last Supper are all suggested by Vardaman’s early chapters.
It is natural then that as they walk over the flooded river on the sunken bridge, in “a scene of immense yet circumscribed desolation filled with the voice of the waste and mournful water” it seems to Tull, who is more frightened than he has ever been, that without Vardaman he would never have done so foolhardy, so apparently impossible a thing:
It was that boy, I said “Here; you better take a holt of my hand,” and he waited and held to me. I be dum if it wasn’t like he come back and got me; like he was saying They won’t nothing hurt you. Like he was saying about a fine place he knowed where Christmas come twice with Thanksgiving and lasts through the winter and the spring and summer, and if I just stayed with him I’d be all right too.
Tull does not recall for us the Biblical parallel of this scene, in which, as St. John tells the story, “they see Jesus walking on the sea . . . and they were afraid. But he saith unto them, It is I; be not afraid.” But Darl is conscious of the parallel, and of the irony it contains, when he sees the wagon upset by the log (“‘Log, fiddlesticks,’ Cora said. ‘It was the hand of God.’”):
It surged up out of the water and stood for an instant upright upon that surging and heaving desolation like Christ.
Vardaman, like Dilsey, has what has sometimes been called “the perfect faith of the little child.” It enables him in this instance not to move mountains but to walk confidently where more circumspect adults like Vernon are afraid. Vardaman’s obsession with his fish is something more than a childish fantasy.
By the time we encounter, through Darl, the log “like Christ” we are prepared to realize the significance of earlier portents. Without being conscious of the echoes in his words, Tull has already reinforced Vardaman’s identification of his mother as a fish. Addie, he tells us, “laid there three days in that box” before the journey even began. “On the third day”—unless Vardaman’s fantasy may be trusted—“they got back and they loaded her into the wagon and started and it already too late”—too late to cross the river by the bridge and too late for proper burial: the corpse had already begun to smell in the summer heat. (But Vardaman: “My mother is not in the box. My mother does not smell like that. My mother is a fish.”) What we learn of Addie through the others reinforces the theme we have first seen through Darl.
When we come to Addie’s own chapter toward the end of the book we find another dimension added to the theme. Addie’s whole life, as she sees it, has been one long attempt to escape her aloneness by breaking through mere words to the reality of things. The result of our learning to know her from her own point of view, then, is to bring us to see the people around her in a new light. We see that they can be divided into those who, like Anse and Cora, live by, are taken in by, empty words, and those who, like Darl and Cash in their different ways, penetrate to the reality of things. With this distinction of Addie’s in mind, we are able to see another level of meaning in the Tulls’ sense of outrage at Anse’s refusal to break his promise and bury Addie at New Hope: the Tulls, led by Cora, have been taken in by words, the words of the “fairy tale” of traditional Christian faith.
But Addie had foreseen the reaction of those more conventional than she, with their faith in words. She would not be buried there, for she remembered all her life how her father “used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.” Unlike Cora, who confidently sings “I’m bounding toward my God and my reward,” Addie has no faith. Cora is probably right for once, at least from her own point of view, when she says that “the eternal and the everlasting salvation and grace is not upon her”: Addie is lonely, hard, loving only Jewel, embittered by having Anse for husband and Whitfield for lover, both of them men of words. Neither is any cure for her aloneness. In her despair she “learned that words are no good.” Anse had a word for what happened at night: “Love, he called it.” “And when Darl was born I asked Anse to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew that father had been right.”
And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words. Like Cora, who could never even cook.
The theme by this time could be suggested in a question: is Cora’s piety mere cant? Are we to believe, with Addie, that her father had said the final word on living? Addie’s father had taught her as Quentin’s father had taught him: that living has no final meaning or direction, that people are the mere momentary clottings of arrested motion that Darl sometimes saw them as being. What is man, and what is his destiny? These are the questions which form the central theme of As I Lay Dying.
If we read attentively we are never allowed to forget that these are the questions we want answered. Cora Tull’s piety, sincere but self-righteous, is a constant reminder whenever she is on the scene. As she falls into clichés that distort the reality (saying, for instance, of Darl, “His heart too full for words”) she prepares us to feel the full force of Addie’s distinction between words and things. Even when her words do not distort, they seem the result of a formula not very intelligently applied. “Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart”: this is not wholly inappropriate, but it serves to remind us that Cora cannot “see into the heart” at all, as Darl can, cannot truly discern the motive behind the deed. Her judgments are the conventional judgments of her time and place and faith: at their best they contain the kind of truth that inheres in her convention. All she discerns in Vardaman’s obsession with the fish is that “He’s outen his head with grief and worry”—which is true enough on one level, but insufficient. “It’s my Christian duty,” she says frequently, giving us each time both greater knowledge of her as a type of dogged and joyless and not very perceptive Christian and greater understanding of the theme.
Anse too supplies many casual running reminders of what is going on here below the surface. “The Lord giveth” is a kind of refrain on his lips, and his musing on his luck sometimes breaks into explicitly religious terms: “I am not religious, I reckon. But peace is [in] my heart.” Like Jewel (“because if there is a God what the hell is He for”), Anse thinks of God only when he pities himself, but that is often enough to keep us reminded how his misfortunes parallel and depart from those of the Vicar of Wakefield and Job, two other “misfortunate” men, who also had comforters like Cora Tull who did not comfort.
Tull’s characterization of Cora—perhaps she’s a little too religious, but still it’s better to be on the safe side—and Dr. Peabody’s meditations on death both serve the same purpose. Halfway through the novel the religious theme is fully established. Thereafter the number of explicit religious references diminishes as we go with the Bundrens on their archetypal journey.
THE THEME established by the religious symbols and echoes is strengthened and deepened by the pure imagery, by images that are not in themselves symbolic but take on depth and complexity of suggestiveness from their association with the more clearly symbolic images that make up their context. One image pattern in particular, in a work enormously rich in imagery, seems prominent and continuous enough to deserve to be called the stylistic key to the vision that shapes the novel.
In Darl’s second chapter, the third in the book, he watches Jewel and Jewel’s horse in a scene which impresses him as uniting somehow great violence with perfect stillness. As Jewel subdues his horse by cutting off his wind, the horse and Jewel suddenly, momentarily, become quiet:
Then they are rigid, motionless, terrific, the horse back-thrust on stiffened, quivering legs, with lowered head; Jewel with dug heels, shutting off the horse’s wind with one hand, with the other patting the horse’s neck in short strokes myriad and caressing, cursing the horse with obscene ferocity.
The violence of horse and man has been momentarily arrested and now Darl watches them as “they stand in rigid terrific hiatus.” The image is one of confused and contradictory movement arrested and defined.
“Rigid, motionless, terrific . . . rigid terrific hiatus.” The words are Darl’s, recording an observation seemingly free of interpretive bias; but they are also favorite words of Faulkner’s, idiosyncrasies of his style. And here they are functional keys to the whole book. As I Lay Dying stops time, creates a stillness full of arrested and incomplete motion, allows us to inspect the “myriad original motion” and try to discern its pattern. If this is what any work of art in some sense does, it is also the peculiar effect, the controlling metaphor, of this work.
It is not without significance that we get this image through Darl. Darl takes no sides on the issues he sees embodied in the events he records so accurately. He is detached, able to record objectively, very different from Jewel, Cash, and Vardaman. He can observe accurately because he is beyond caring. A less sympathetic character than Cash, he is, throughout most of the novel, more perceptive. He is pure mind, without will and without love or hate. (It is significant that he does not have the last word in the novel. That is given to Cash, who knows less but cares more.) Darl stands above the division of people suggested by Addie’s thoughts, into those who are taken in by words and those who are not. He listens to what Cora says as carefully and remembers her words as faithfully as he does those of Jewel and Dewey Dell. He is untouched by Dewey Dell’s emotional response to New Hope. He neither hopes nor fears: he observes, speculates, wonders.
Darl and Cash divide between them Faulkner’s conception of the artist in his multiple roles of seer, maker, and man. Darl is the seer, a Tiresias who foresuffers all. Cash is the artist as craftsman, maker, and as the committed man. Together Darl and Cash remind us once again how similar Faulkner’s initial idea of the artist is to Eliot’s. Cash comes closer, probably, to representing Faulkner’s conception of his own complex role, but Darl points to an aspect of Faulkner’s self-image never completely dropped even when he came, later, to emphasize more the moral function of art. Gavin Stevens surely speaks for an aspect of Faulkner when he pictures himself in The Town looking down at Jefferson “unanguished and immune.” When Darl sees Jewel and his horse in a “rigid terrific hiatus” he announces the dominant image pattern of the book.
The image is difficult to analyze. Out of context its union of opposites may seem merely confused or idiosyncratic. “Rigid” suggests that arresting of motion in time, that grasping of the event before it passes into oblivion, which was a part of Quentin’s effort in The Sound and the Fury. Quentin “succeeded” only in death, and “rigid” takes us back to the title and central situation here. In death the violence of motion and emotion is arrested and man may be studied, grasped, dissected. As Darl sees Jewel and the horse with perfect distinctness only by stopping time, so Addie’s meaning for the family becomes clear only at her death. When Addie dies the Bundrens experience, each according to his capacity and in his own way, a sudden halting of the flow of normal time as they have known it. Her death is an interruption, a stoppage, a cause and an opportunity for reflection, if only for Anse’s “The Lord giveth.”
But the motion begins again even before it has ceased, so that “rigid” alone, without the implications of motion in “terrific,” would be quite untrue to what really happens. The rigidity is “terrific” because of the violence which has preceded and will follow it. There is nothing of what we ordinarily mean by “quiet,” “peaceful” or “still” in the scene of Jewel’s subduing his horse which prompts Darl’s words, or in the story that unfolds before us in the novel. “Terrific” is one of Faulkner’s distinctive adjectives, revealing his sense of the “outrage” which is life. We find it frequently in all his stories: it is one of the threads of continuity uniting such different works as the Yoknapatawpha tales and Pylon. But no story ever more fully justified the sense of outrage than As I Lay Dying. For here the reassuring limitations, the comforting restrictions and blind spots of unimaginative “sanity,” of the polite, the conventional, the well-ordered “normal” world are wholly broken down, swept away by the flooding in of a larger, more ultimate perspective, by a direct confrontation with what we normally contrive to ignore. In Thomas Mann’s story “Railway Accident” it took only the slight jar of a minor accident to reveal to the narrator some realities he had been quite unaware of while he was comfortable and apparently secure. Here we endure with the Bundrens fire and flood and the stench of a rotting corpse. Darl’s word “terrific” for Jewel and his horse characterizes the larger action of the novel as well as the smaller one to which it directly applies. What Darl sees in the pasture is an epiphany of all that is about to occur.
Rigid and terrific at once: but not for long. Only for the timeless moment of the artist’s vision. Motion arrested is resumed: a “hiatus,” a pause, a gap, an interruption. Addie’s death makes a gap in the Bundren routine. Things do not go on quite normally between her death and the acquisition of her successor. The action of this interval is apocalyptic, for Darl and for the reader; it is shaped by the demands of the myth-making impulse. Normal action is interrupted by Addie’s death and is resumed (for the rest of her survivors though not for Darl) with the introduction of the new Mrs. Bundren. In the “hiatus” Darl sees that the log that kills the mules and breaks Cash’s leg is “like Christ.”
The implications of Darl’s image of Jewel and the horse are abundantly reinforced. Here is Darl observing the sunset the day his mother died:
The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads: the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.
“Like a bloody egg”: aesthetically this novel takes up where the last section of Sartoris left off. The suggestions conveyed by this image are the same as those of the passage in which young Bayard approaches the MacCallum place in a sunset like “thin congealed blood” and “a crimson egg broken on the ultimate hills,” though the writing now is more economical. The single image here conveys what the two images together convey in Sartoris, and conveys it without the need of the comment offered by “ultimate.” “Bloody” suggests death, life cut off: a bloody egg is one that was fertile, that gave promise of life, that would have hatched: the chicken within was living, developing. “Bloody” in Darl’s image compresses the meaning in the “thin congealed blood” image of Sartoris: congealed, dead. And a “bloody egg” is “crimson,” but in Darl’s image the color has taken on an added dimension.
Behind the images in both novels lie Eliot’s “Prufrock” with his picture of a sunset “like a patient etherized upon a table” and another poem of Eliot’s, “A Cooking Egg.” Darl’s vision, again, is the artist’s vision. The “bloody egg” superimposes life and death, wrenches them from their normal separation in time, stands them up together against the light to see what common pattern will fit them. The image reinforces that of the “rigid terrific hiatus,” points to a moment when time stands still, unites a beginning and an end. It precedes the Vardaman chapter in which Vardaman’s thoughts form an unconscious comment on the service of Holy Communion, which celebrates and re-enacts an end and a beginning. Much later in the novel we begin to realize that it makes a difference how we think of the implications of this image: beginning and end, or end and beginning. Both are contained in a bloody egg.
Darl’s thoughts supply many more reinforcements of his perception of the rigid terrific hiatus. Toward the end, when he no longer needs to be established as a “real” character and the language he uses can be even freer of the limitations of realism than it has been from the beginning, he thinks that “in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.” The implications of “rigid” are here expressed in “sunset,” “dead,” “dolls”; those of “terrific” in “furious”; those of “hiatus” in the undivided image. Or again, on the conditions of the journey: “we go on, with a motion so soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress, as though time and not space were decreasing between us and it.” On Jewel in the doorway of the burning barn: “like a flat figure cut cleanly from tin against an abrupt and soundless explosion.” On approaching Jefferson: “we can see the smoke low and flat, seemingly unmoving in the unwinded afternoon,” in which the prefixes deny and negate the roots so sharply in “unmoving” and “unwinded” that “still” and “quiet” could not be substituted as synonyms because they would convey only half the meaning.
The central effect of these images of Darl’s is to arrest motion: not to replace it with quiet or peace or stillness, but to see the motion and the stillness as somehow, in a way that cannot be translated into other, plainer language, one. Darl communicates this more adequately than the others; his mind is more sensitive, his language more expressive. But the others perceive in some degree what Darl perceives. Peabody, the most thoughtful “normal” character, comes closest to echoing Darl when, after his meditation on death, he characterizes the land: “opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.” The opposition between “slow” and “violent” and between “implacable” and “brooding” is noteworthy chiefly because it reinforces the tension in Darl’s “rigid terrific hiatus.”
Dewey Dell’s whole experience of the approach to and the passing of the sign saying New Hope has the same effect. This is also the dominant impression we get from the fording of the river, at least as we see that action through Darl. The wagon seems to take forever to tip over, seems to rest motionless and interminable half tipped over, with the log against it. The journey as a whole has this quality of arrested motion, as of “fury in itself quiet with stagnation,” somnambulist, dreamlike, yet still “terrific” in its rigidity; the quality of “terrific arrested plunge” and “baroque plunging stasis” assigned in Mosquitoes to the statue of Andrew Jackson and so, by implication, to the whole function and effect of art; the quality named in Sartoris as “a dynamic fixation” and “doomed immortality and immortal doom.” Darl sees well when he sees Jewel and the horse in “rigid terrific hiatus.”
ANALYSIS OF a work of art is always in danger of distorting the object it takes apart, destroying the uniqueness and self-existence of what it tries to understand. I have gone directly to what seems to me the center of As I Lay Dying because I believe that the act of critical understanding must in some sense grasp the whole before it can grasp the parts. But we are not likely to respond to the work in this way, in this order, when we first read it.
What strikes us first, so forcibly as to impress us immediately with the greatness of the novel, is a unitary experience of people in context. None of Faulkner’s novels, and perhaps no novel in modern literature, contains more vividly and fully created characters, wholly alive and distinct and unforgettable, engaged in actions that seem so inevitable that we accept (but do not forget) their grotesqueness, actions to which the characters give and from which they get their reality. Whatever else it may be, As I Lay Dying is a great novel in the Dickens genre.
Darl has the opening chapter, but we become aware in his early sections not so much of him as of the objects of his perception. In somewhat the same sense as Benjy’s, his mind is a transparent glass through which we approach the reality he passively watches. Darl is walking with Jewel, and the picture he gives us is distinct, exact, and moving in its suggestion of violence, but in it we see Jewel more as an object in the landscape than as a person. In the second chapter Cora leads us further into the situation and reveals, in the process, a good deal about herself, but still no person emerges full and complete from her rambling remarks. Anse is, I think, the first person in the book to emerge clearly, distinct and “understood,” and this despite the fact that the third chapter, Darl’s second, concentrates more on Jewel and his horse than on Pa. The portrait begins with the opening sentences of the chapter, “Pa and Vernon are sitting on the back porch. Pa is tilting snuff from the lid of his snuff-box into his lower lip . . .” and continues after an interruption, “Pa’s feet are badly splayed. . . .” We begin to see Pa, to feel that we know him, as we do not yet know—because we do not understand—Jewel.
Anse Bundren is one of the most perfectly realized characters in all fiction. He is at once ludicrous and pitiable, but we are never for a moment invited to exercise our sense of superiority toward him, to see him as outside the human context, our context, as simply an exhibit of the shiftless and wretched “poor white.” The difference between our apprehension of Pa and our apprehension of characters from the same class and section in the works of Erskine Caldwell written in the same period is distinct, and of the greatest importance. Caldwell’s people are dehumanized. The reaction they invite is either a mixed amused superiority and condescending pity or else political fury, a determination to “change the system” that produced them. They are the products of a predominantly political and abstract understanding, true caricatures, partial creatures, dependent on the author and his views, with their humanity left out despite the generalized pity that surrounds them.
Pa is highly grotesque but in no sense a caricature. He is utterly pitiable but we dare not condescend to him. He is the product at once of the clearest and sharpest awareness and of a love so complete that his absurdity is absorbed in his humanity. He is a person. He is one of us. He is both a type and an individual, as we all are. Shiftless, lazy, weak, well-meaning, self-pitying, stubborn, not very intelligent, he “can’t seem to get no heart” into anything he does except burying Ma and getting his store teeth.
Pa’s ludicrousness would be too much for us to credit if it were revealed by author’s comments instead of by his own actions and in his own words:
With that family burying-ground in Jefferson and them of her blood waiting for her there, she’ll be impatient. I promised my word me and the boys would get her there quick as mules could walk it, so she could rest quiet.
Since Addie is not yet dead, only gravely ill, Jewel’s reply seems appropriate: “‘If everybody wasn’t burning hell to get her there,’ Jewel says in that harsh, savage voice.” The situation has in it an elemental absurdity and an elemental naturalness, and both the absurdity and the naturalness unite in Pa. Only the greatest art could make us accept him. His emotional reaction to Ma’s death, for instance, his sincere if inadequate love for her, would seem to be in the sharpest contrast to his frequently expressed sense that her death is an opportunity—an opportunity to get new teeth. If the artistry were less perfect we should succumb to the temptation to interpret him as either genuinely bereaved or hypocritical in his clumsy expressions of sorrow and really glad of her death because of the chance to get to Jefferson it affords. But no: Pa is both sad and pleased, regretful and hopeful: he is human. Darl sees and presents the full humanity. Ma is dead:
Pa stands over the bed, dangle-armed, humped, motionless. He raises his hand to his head, scouring his hair, listening to the saw. He comes nearer and rubs his hand, palm and back, on his thigh and lays it on her face and then on the hump of quilt where her hands are. He touches the quilt as he saw Dewey Dell do, trying to smooth it up to the chin, but disarranging it instead. He tries to smooth it again, clumsily, his hand awkward as a claw, smoothing at the wrinkles which he made and which continue to emerge beneath his hand with perverse ubiquity, so that at last he desists, his hand falling to his side and stroking itself again, palm and back, on his thigh. The sound of the saw snores steadily into the room. Pa breathes with a quiet, rasping sound, mouthing the snuff against his gums. “God’s will be done,” he says. “Now I can get them teeth.”
The beauty, the power, the passion of the whole book is implicit in this one paragraph. The perfection of it can be seen as either moral or aesthetic, or, perhaps better, as both at once. Here is a compassion so complete that it does not sentimentalize and thus does not blur the sharpness with which Anse is seen, a compassion consistent with full awareness, a compassion which never asks us to deny what we know, to suppress our sense of the absurd, but which compels us to accept Anse as he is, and as we are. There is no suspension of irony here and no withholding of compassion for the sake of a “funny scene”: there is perfect vision, holding in suspension the contradictory reactions of humor and pity, irony and love, a sense of the absurd and a sense of the tragic.
Such passages prepare us to accept without any discounting Tull’s less sensitive, less shaded apprehension of Pa greeting the mourners as they come to the house:
Anse meets us at the door. He has shaved, but not good. There is a long cut on his jaw, and he is wearing his Sunday pants and a white shirt with the neckband buttoned. It is drawn smooth over his hump, making it look bigger than ever, like a white shirt will, and his face is different too. He looks folks in the eye now, dignified, his face tragic and composed, shaking us by the hand as we walk up on to the porch and scrape our shoes. . . .
We are ready to accept now the dignity, the composure, the awareness and expression of tragedy. Those who have interpreted As I Lay Dying as comedy are right, but only half right: it is also high tragedy. We accept Vernon’s perception of Pa without denying or discounting or even qualifying the Pa Darl has seen, the night before, as the rain began:
Pa lifts his face, slack-mouthed, the wet black rim of snuff plastered close along the base of his gums; from behind his slack-faced astonishment he muses as though from beyond time, upon the ultimate outrage.
Since Pa is at the center of the book, the novel could be wholly successful only if he were fully acceptable as a tragicomic figure at the center of a tragicomic action. The greatness of As I Lay Dying is revealed, not exhausted but revealed, in Anse Bundren.
Our interpretation of the central theme of the work is more dependent on what we think of Addie. She is a problem. There is an unresolved ambiguity in the portrait of her which would have to be counted a defect in the novel if it were not functionally related to the theme. Addie is the only character whom we do not see directly, except in fragmentary, undecisive glimpses as she lies dying. What her life has really been like, what she really is, we can know only as we apprehend it through a series of screens. Knowing her requires a more complicated and indirect act of judgment than knowing any of the others. She dominates the action at all times, living and dead, but we are never in a position to judge her directly, face to face, without intermediary, by her actions and her appearance and her words.
This is no less true in her own chapter than in the others. Her thoughts are obviously a rationalization, revealing a particular and peculiar perspective, natural, right, in character, and often shrewdly perceptive of objective facts. But these thoughts are as biased by personality as are all the other inward visions except that of Darl, who is beyond normal hope and fear and self-interest. Addie’s thoughts are marvelously revealing, of her and of the others, but she is not, I think, as she has sometimes been taken to be, an author’s spokesman, a convenient mouthpiece for the theme. Yet her central concerns, her search for a “violation” of her aloneness and her effort to know words from things, are connected with the central theme of the work, and we must make a decision about them before we can feel ready to say what that theme finally says to us. But if Vardaman is right in connecting her in his mind with a fish, we should not expect the most patient study of all that is revealed of her, by herself and by others, to resolve the ambiguity. The interpretation of Addie involves a doubtful and difficult act of decision.
Some critics have interpreted Addie as a wholly sympathetic character, the “heroine” of the work even in death; others emphasize her sadism, her misanthropy, and her bitter rejection of a life too hard for her to bear. The “traditionalist” interpretation points up an important aspect of the portrait when it emphasizes her effort to achieve a relation of love with others, to break through the barriers of separation. She is a redemptive character—Vardaman’s fish—because she recognizes both the difficulty and the necessity of love. But this reading of her neglects another aspect of her personality, an aspect very sharply at odds with this interpretation.
Cora Tull sees her as the victim of a pride that would never humble itself, her bitterness as the result of frustrated self-concern. We can say flatly that Cora is simply wrong only if for reasons of our own we have accepted Addie’s estimate of Cora and Addie’s own schematization of words and things. We know from Darl and in other ways that she has really loved only Jewel: Cora cannot be entirely wrong then in her statement that she has never been a “true mother” to the others. We know from Addie herself what her feelings were toward the children she taught in school before she married Anse: after school she would go “where I could be quiet and hate them. . . . I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them.” She rejected not only the children she taught and all but one of the children she bore, she rejected life itself: “I would hate my father for ever having planted me.” This side of her nature makes it difficult to interpret her as a wholly redemptive character.
Is Cora then right about Addie? It seems clear that Faulkner would not have us think so, yet the question cannot be wholly dismissed. Cora may be self-righteous and unintelligent, but there is too much evidence not of her own invention to support her judgment of Addie for it to be thought of as wholly beside the point. Even Addie’s effort to get beyond her aloneness can be interpreted as not Christian love so much as an attempt at self-assertion: “with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me!” The very expression of her search for community is ambiguous: “my aloneness had to be violated over and over.” Violated? If she is right, that “sin and love and fear are just sounds” so that the words of faith so continually on the lips of her antithesis, Cora Tull, are perfectly empty and meaningless sounds, then perhaps “violated” is the right word for what she sought. But if the outlook of historic Christianity, of which Cora’s inadequate pieties are a simple-minded fundamentalist expression, is taken as the standard, then Addie comes to seem a descendant of Ahab of Moby Dick. She responds to the presence of pain and suffering in the world not in resignation and humility and a desire to make of suffering accepted a precondition of grace, a necessary part of a desired “imitation of Christ,” but with bitter and violent rebellion and rejection not only of the world but of others and of love. Ahab’s rejection of the request of the captain of the Rachel and Addie’s rejection of her children come to seem parallel actions. Or, to turn back to a book equally relevant to Moby Dick and As I Lay Dying, Addie reminds us, as we think of her in the Biblical perspective, of a Job to whom the Lord never did speak, a Job left with only his sense of outrage and his false comforters.
Addie is presented with as much compassion and more sympathy than Anse. Where he is tragi-comic, she is tragic. If this were not so, the ambiguity in her portrait would be destroyed. Her sadism, her bitterness and coldness, are presented almost entirely in her own chapter, through her own words, as she reviews and justifies her life. To Vardaman she becomes a fish because to him her death is inconceivable. To herself she is a lonely and frustrated woman whose whole life has been a waiting for this death. To Jewel she is the only person he ever loved; to Jewel she is, Darl says, a horse.2 To Anse she is the faithful wife whose efficiency and dutifulness have compensated for his own complete ineffectualness. To Cora Tull she is a sinner. To us she is, and I think will remain, an enigma.
Just because of this, she tempts us to a kind of speculation more appropriate to allegory than to the kind of novel As I Lay Dying is. Is she the result of a breaking up of the role of Christ and a distribution of the disunited functions among several characters? Is she, in other words, whether willingly or not, while alive the sacrificial savior and when dead the body sacrificed? If we take her this way we get a certain insight into not only her role but the way in which the others are defined by their relation to her. Cash, the carpenter, loyal, patient, long-suffering, and forbearing, acts the human role of Christ; Jewel, who saves the body in the trials of fire and water, the role of “divine” champion; Vardaman, to whom she is “transubstantiated,” the role of devout believer.
But if this is the way we should take her as allegorical symbol, we are not, I think, forced by the nature of the work to reach any final decision on such matters as we read. As I Lay Dying is not an allegory, and any final decision we make about Addie will be in some sense beyond the book, on grounds that cannot be weighed in solely aesthetic terms, and this despite the fact that all the chief characters in the book may be seen as defined by their relation to her and to her demand for reality.3 The art by which Addie is created declares itself insufficient to define her character, and in that declaration lies its final perfection. Addie is, in a peculiar sense, the only character in the book who is not wholly self-sufficient and self-existing: she is the product of the imaginative apprehension of the others in her life, of the understanding contained in her own self-image, and of the imagination of the reader. She is the only character watched and remembered by Darl, the artist, whom he does not, in Tull’s words, take us “inside of.” She remains shadowy in all his reflections, ubiquitous and defining but undefined.
We are never for a moment asked to believe that Vardaman is literally correct in his idea that this mother has physically, or even in some transempirical sense, become a fish. It should be equally clear that we are not asked to accept either Cora’s judgment of Addie or Addie’s judgment of herself. All we know of Addie is insufficient to enable us to make positive final judgment, confident that we have overlooked none of the evidence and have properly assessed the significance of all of it.
It is not Addie but Cash who has the last word in the book, as Dilsey does in The Sound and the Fury. Unlike Darl and like Dilsey, he is an “engaged,” a “committed” character in the Existentialist sense; and he is also, for most readers I suspect, the most sympathetic character in the book. The role assigned him foreshadows Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech, with its conception of art’s moral and therapeutic justification. It is he who utters the words that come closest to stating the theme:
But I ain’t so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what ain’t. It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.
Cash is an artist in his carpentry, respecting his materials, working the wood according to the grain and turning out a good job not for any “practical” motive but simply because he cares about good workmanship. Cash is the artist seeing, caring, and taking pains, the artist as man and maker. “A fellow can’t get away from a shoddy job.” As a carpenter he foreshadows Isaac McCaslin, the redemptive character of “The Bear” and other later stories. If we take him as normative in the work and base our interpretation on him—on what he is and does as well as, or perhaps more than, what he says—we shall I think not go far astray. Like the Bundren family, we may depend upon Cash. What his approach to life would seem to imply is a sacramental view of nature—all nature—without a specific historical Incarnation: a religious view of life but not one that, in the historic sense of the word, can be called Christian. Divinity in Cash’s world is immanent but not transcendent. If this is a correct interpretation, it makes the novel, once again, foreshadow the later work, especially the nature mysticism of some of the stories in Go Down Moses. To say that As I Lay Dying asserts the emotional and imaginative, but not the logical, validity of Biblical and Christian symbolism is perhaps another way of saying much the same thing.
IN SOLDIER’S PAY and Mosquitoes Faulkner had found the words for his feelings and his vision, the words to suggest the quality of the world he experienced. He had written in Mosquitoes of “the equivocal derisive darkness of the world,” a world in which as the sculptor Gordon had said, “Only an idiot has no grief.” And in that novel of definition he had had Mr. Wiseman define the mark of the true artist as the capacity to know “that Passion Week of the heart . . . in which the hackneyed accidents which make up this world—love and life and death and sex and sorrow—brought together by chance in perfect proportions, take on a kind of splendid and timeless beauty.” In Soldier’s Pay he had apostrophized “Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world” and had foreshadowed Anse’s precipitous remarriage with “The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.”
But these are rhetorical statements of abstract “truths,” summaries of the experience of the young artist. In Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitoes he had not, except fragmentarily and imperfectly, found the images which would convey the quality of the experience itself. The words tell us about experience, but as we read we are aware of the gap between the thing in itself and the word for it. We know that we are being given an interpretation, plausible perhaps, appealing perhaps, but not inevitable. The words, as Addie said, go straight up, do not cling to earth with the doing.
Partially in Sartoris, especially in the last section, magnificently in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner learned how to make words cling to earth, to make them, in the seeming of art, disappear in the presence of the doing, become not simply translucent but transparent vehicles of the hackneyed accidents of sex and death in the equivocal derisive darkness of the world. In As I Lay Dying, as in The Sound and the Fury, he found the images that made the wise sayings of the young artist unnecessary.
“Equivocal”: two voices, the voice of Addie and the voice of Cora, speaking equivocally of the meaning of life and death. Addie’s death, Dewey Dell’s pregnancy and hope of abortion, the stench of the corpse and Anse’s new duck-shaped Mrs. Bundren—these are the substance of “sex and death.” The plot of the novel could be summarized as a journey that begins at the “back door” and moves to the “front door” of the world, progressing en route through a “Passion Week of the heart.”
The perfect craftsmanship of the novel may be seen in many ways. A purely structural analysis centering on the arrangement of the sections, with their contrapuntal balancing of perspectives, would highlight it. As in The Sound and the Fury, we begin with the facts themselves, seen in their purity by Benjy in the earlier novel and here by Darl, the uncommitted man. We end with the judgment of Cash, the committed man, as we did with Dilsey’s, after viewing the action from the varying perspectives of a series of other characters. The characters through whom we have our constantly shifting view of the events in As I Lay Dying exhibit several kinds of faith and unfaith and several degrees of closeness to the action. Their reactions range from the obsessive attachment of Jewel to the distant speculation of Dr. Peabody. Anticipating the more radical irony of Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying lets us overhear the voices of those variously involved without ever resolving the conflict in the impersonal tones of the author.
The beauty of the work is felt most immediately in the unforgettable solidity of the characters and the vividness of the incidents in which they reveal themselves: Darl drinking water out of a wooden bucket, Cash planing the boards for the coffin, Dewey Dell picking down the row with Lafe toward the secret woods—incidents clear, sharp, perfectly realized in all their qualitative richness, so that they become a part of our own memories along with those few incidents we really remember out of the many we forget.
But it seems to me that we may approach an understanding of the greatness of As I Lay Dying best at this point if we think of its vividness, its sheer immediacy, and at the same time try to hold in mind the lines of suggestion, of meaning, that radiate from it. In it we have a perfection of “realism” in the basic and non-historical sense of the word—not an effort at documentation, not a cataloguing of the details of surface perception on the assumption that only “physical facts” are real, but an illusion of experience acted and suffered. But in the seeming paradox of art’s achievement of the “concrete universal,” we also find symbolic meanings that are quite literally inexhaustible. Its forms are no less solid, its colors no less pure, because they are given added dimensions in their association with the basic Western myth. The novel not only re-enacts the Eucharist, it is incamational in its very form. In it the word becomes flesh, meaning is embodied, idea takes on substance and substance gets form and so meaning. In its perfection of embodiment lies the “splendid and timeless beauty” of the novel.