North American Fiction and Film
Chapter 4: William Faulkner
Most of the novels considered so far can be said to present themselves as
(highly problematic) pieces of classic realism. With As I Lay Dying,
we come to a text that draws direct attention to its textuality through
its boldly headed series of soliloquies. You will find that many critics
locate these soliloquies in terms of a modernist exploration of consciousness.
There is, however, an alternative way of reading the novel-as a "proto"-postmodernist
text. This chapter will provide a reading of As I Lay Dying as a
mixture of both overt and covert metafiction which serves to interrogate
the sociocultural construction of the individual in terms of such notions
as the patriarchal order and Christianity.
Table of Contents
As I Lay Dying: Discussion
Soliloquies
As I Lay Dying consists of fifty-nine soliloquies shared among fifteen
different narrators. These narrators are made up largely of the Bundren
Family: Anse and Addie (the dying woman for whom the book is titled), Darl,
Cash, Jewel, Dewey Dell and Vardaman. The remaining narrators are Cora and
Tull (the neighbours of the Bundrens), Peabody (the local doctor), Samson
(a storekeeper on the route the Bundrens take with Addie's body), Whitfield
(the Bundren's Pastor), Armstid (a farmer whose mule team is of potential
use to the Bundrens in their cartage of Addie's corpse to her home town
for burial), Moseley (a druggist who refuses to help Dewey Dell secure an
abortion) and finally, MacGowan (the chemist who tricks Dewey Dell into
having sex with him under the pretence of helping her with an abortion).
Of these narrators Darl is predominant, "speaking" nineteen times.
Vardaman (the youngest of the Bundren family) is next in terms of narrative
dominance speaking ten times. "After" him, Tull speaks six times,
Cash five, Dewey Dell four, Cora and Anse three, Peabody twice and Jewel,
Samson, Addie, Whitfield, Armstid, Moseley and MacGowan once each.
These soliloquies are never situated within one "master" narrative;
they stand singly drawing attention to themselves by the bold type which
introduces them. Of course, the soliloquies are bound together by the mere
fact of their appearing collectively as As I Lay Dying. The obvious
question, then, is how do they operate?; that is, do they constitute some
"unified" "vision" or do they operate very differently
(that is, interrogatively)?
Orthodox criticism: Soliloquies as a "unified vision"
Orthodox criticism of As I Lay Dying clearly approaches the text
in terms of the possibility that the soliloquies constitute some sort of
"unified" vision. Such criticism, working from classic realist
assumptions, regards the fifteen speakers in the novel as "real people"
used by Faulkner to position the reader with respect to some truth/vision
anterior to the text. Since Darl plays such a major role in the "narrative,"
orthodox criticism sees him as carrying the "bulk" of Faulkner's
"message."
From this viewpoint, Darl-the sensitive, poetic, mentally retarded man sent
to the asylum for burning down a barn (and betrayed by Dewey Dell because
of his knowledge of her pregnancy)-becomes the tragic victim of a corrupt
family which has repressed its wife/mother (Addie) and which goes on to
repeat itself with Anse's re-marriage (at the end of the text) immediately
following Addie's burial. Within this reading, Addie becomes the brutally
repressed (though richly imaginative) wife and mother; Dewey Dell the young
girl forced through loveless circumstances into having to seek an abortion;
Cash the meticulous craftsman who falls victim to his family's ignorance
when his broken leg is encased in a cement cast; Vardaman the highly sensitive
and impressionable youngest son who thinks his mother has become a fish
and who bores holes through her coffin (and in so doing through her face)
to let her "breathe"; and so on. This reading sees the text's
black humour and absurdity as serving to intensify its unity-as a comedy
of modern American manners.
Overall, this reading operates to situate readers as superior and knowing
subjects whose moral principles are reinforced by being called upon to judge
the corrupt Bundren family, a calling which is revealed through their individual
consciousness. In short, from such a perspective, As I Lay Dying
is located as a classic modernist text where the external world is found
to be a place of social decay and fragmentation and where meaning is sought
at the deeper levels of the consciousness (particularly as represented by
the inner worlds of Darl, Dewey Dell, and Addie).
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A text which draws attention to its own textuality
While such a reading of As I Lay Dying is extremely plausible, it
can be argued that it ignores a number of the text's salient features/elements.
The most obvious of these is the way the text draws attention to its own
textuality through the use of the bold type headings to introduce each soliloquy.
Perhaps less obvious is the covert way that Faulkner might be claimed to
intrude on the text. Many of the soliloquies contain language that does
not seem "appropriate" to the speakers involved. Consider, for
instance, the following from Vardaman:
It is dark. I can hear wood, silence: I know them. But not living
sounds, not even him. It is as though the dark were resolving him out of
his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components-snuffings and
stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a coordinated
whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret
and familiar, an is different from my is. I see him dissolve-legs, a rolling
eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames-and float upon the dark in fading
solution; all one yet neither; all either yet none. I can see hearing coil
toward him, caressing, shaping his hard shape-fetlock, hips, shoulder, and
head; smell and sound. I am not afraid. (47-48)
The language and philosophical speculation on the nature of being here is
not only out of keeping with the rest of the soliloquy which it serves to
conclude, it is also out of keeping with what might reasonably be expected
to be the linguistic/ intellectual resources of a boy of Vardaman's age.
A "proto"-metafictional/"interrogative" text
Orthodox critics react to this charge with the claim that Faulkner is trying
to anticipate what someone Vardaman's age would say if he were capable of
giving shape to such "existential" thoughts. Such an argument
works on the now radically problematised assumption that thought can exist
prior to language. If the argument is disallowed, then, what we could be
said to have in As I Lay Dying is a text which (consciously or unconsciously
on Faulkner's part-it does not really matter which) reveals the ideological
construction of the "real." That is, As I Lay Dying may
be seen as a "proto"-metafictional/"interrogative" text
which (deliberately or not) "deconstructs" the "unified"
vision that traditional criticism argues it presents.
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Individuals caught within webs of conflicting
discourse
More specifically, As I Lay Dying can be read as showing individuals
as constructed/caught within webs of conflicting discourse(s). Cora, for
instance, works within an orthodox Christian framework. In her first soliloquy
she has this to say about Addie's remaining outside of God's saving grace:
Her face is wasted away so that the bones draw just under the
skin in white lines. Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter
down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks. But the eternal and the everlasting
salvation and grace is not upon her. (10)
Cora's husband Tull, on the other hand, is somewhat more "sceptical"
in his belief in Christianity:
I reckon it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard a fellow, though
sometimes I think that Cora's a mite over-cautious, like she was trying
to crowd the other folks away and get in closer than anybody else. But then,
when something like this happens, I reckon she is right and you got to keep
after it and I reckon I am blessed in having a wife that ever strives for
sanctity of well-doing like she says I am. (58)
At a still further "extreme," Anse Bundren uses God to justify
his own repression of his wife and family:
A-laying there, right up to my door, where every bad luck that
comes and goes is bound to find it. I told Addie it wasn't any luck living
on a road when it come by here, and she said, for the world like a woman,
"Get up and move, then." But I told her it wasn't no luck in it,
because the Lord put roads for travelling: why He laid them down flat on
the earth. When He aims for something to be always a-moving, He makes it
long ways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, but when He aims for something
to stay put, He makes it up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man. And so
He never aimed for folks to live on a road, because which gets there first,
I says, the road or the house? Did you ever know Him to set a road down
by a house? I says. No you never, I says, because it's always men can't
rest till they gets the house set where everybody that passes in a wagon
can spit in the doorway, keeping the folks restless and wanting to get up
and go somewhere else when He aimed for them to stay put like a tree or
a stand of corn. Because if He'd a aimed for man to be always a-moving and
going somewhere else, wouldn't He a put him longways on his belly, like
a snake? It stands to reason He would. (31)
This passage is a highly contradictory one which clearly shows Anse appealing
to God's authority to justify his own inertia.
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A different religious perspective: Vardaman's
"mysticism"
With Vardaman a somewhat different religious perspective is introduced to
the text. He believes that his mother has become a fish; that is, he appears
to present the idea of the transmigration of souls:
It was not her because it was lying right yonder in the dirt.
And now it's all chopped up. I chopped it up. It's laying in the kitchen
in the bleeding pan, waiting to be cooked and et. Then it wasn't and she
was, and now it is and she wasn't. And tomorrow it will be cooked and et
and 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. It was laying right yonder on the ground.
I can get Vernon. He was there and he seen it, and with both of us it will
be and then it will not be. (55)
Vernon Tull seems caught up in Vardaman's obsession with his mother's passing
into other bodies. When Vardaman turns up "like a drowned puppy"
( 57) at the Tull house, he insists to Vernon: "'you was there. You
seen it laying there. Cash is fixing to nail her up, and it was a-laying
right there on the ground. You seen it. You saw the mark in the dirt'."
Vernon comments: "'I be durn if it didn't give me the creeps, even
when I didn't know yet'" (57).
Darl and Dewey Dell also appear as "endorsing" Vardaman's "mysticism."
As the "funeral" approaches New Hope Church (perhaps the name
itself is symbolic), Darl sees Addie as embracing the whole landscape: "New
Hope Church. 3 mi. It wheels up like a motionless hand lifted above the
profound desolation of the ocean; beyond it the red road lies like a spoke
of which Addie Bundren is the rim" (83).
When Dewey Dell catches sight of the New Hope sign she thinks of Vardaman
and the fish and seems to recall herself as Addie dying:
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: I sit naked on the seat above the unhurrying mules, above the travail.
Suppose I tell him to turn. He will do what I say. Don't you know he will
do what I say? Once I waked with a black void rushing under me. I could
not see. I saw Vardaman rise and go to the window and strike the knife into
the fish, the blood gushing, hissing like a steam but I could not see. He'll
do as I say. He always does. I can persuade him to anything. You know I
can. Suppose I say turn here. That was when I died that time. Suppose I
do. We'll go to New Hope. We won't have to go to town. I rose and took the
knife from the streaming fish still hissing and I killed Darl. (93-94)
At one level this passage deals with Dewey Dell's desire to kill Darl because
he knows of her pregnancy (see 43). At another, however, it is clearly caught
up in that mysticism surrounding Addie seen already as felt by Vardaman,
Tull and Darl. When Addie finally speaks, what is more, she also appears
concerned with a vision of the world alternative to that offered by Christianity-a
vision strongly centred in woman and the earth. Addie reveals that she has
committed adultery with the Reverend Whitfield (138), Jewel being the outcome
(139).
As I Lay Dying presents Addie as exulting in her female transgression
of the patriarchal order:
Then it was over. Over in the sense that he was gone and I knew
that, see him again though I would, I would never again see him coming swift
and secret to me in the woods dressed in sin like a gallant garment already
blowing aside with the speed of this secret coming.
But for me it was not over. I mean, over in the sense of beginning and ending,
because to me there was no beginning nor ending to anything then. I even
held Anse refraining still, not that I was holding him recessional, but
as though nothing else had ever been. My children were of me alone, of the
wild blood boiling along the earth, of me and of all that lived; of none
and of all. Then I found that I had Jewel. When I waked to remember to discover
it, he was two months gone. (139) (my emphasis)
The "mysticism of the earth" expressed in the highlighted part
of the above passage is shared by many of the great modernist writers (for
example, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot) who sought to fight the dehumanisation
of their increasingly technological and commercial world by a retreat to
the agrarian values of the past. It is interesting to note that this retreat
effectively operated to keep in place a highly elitist class structure-one
in which the artist was privileged for "his" superior sensibility.
If this "vision" can be seen as the dominant one in As I Lay
Dying, then the novel can be located as a piece of high modernism [as
has/is so often (been) done in criticism] along with all the problems such
a location entails.
To reiterate my earlier statement, within such a location the novel becomes
a "tragedy" which at the same time celebrates those values so
"tragically" repressed. Whether unwillingly or not on Faulkner's
part, however, I would repeat that I see "the text" as questioning
this modernist position through its self-consciousness which points to the
constructedness of all positions and privileges no one position.
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Review questions
- What part does Peabody play in As I Lay Dying?
- What attitude(s) is /are revealed by Whitfield in his soliloquy?
- How do Moseley and MacGowan differ in their treatment of Dewey Dell?
- How do the grotesque and the blackly humorous figure in As I Lay Dying?
Work Cited
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
Last updated August 1996
Comments to Dr John Fitzsimmons:
Phone: (079) 309240; Email: j.fitzsimmons@cqu.edu.au
Humanities Department
Faculty of Arts
Central Queensland University
Rockhampton MC Queensland 4702
Australia