as the ineffectual, essentially foolish , excessively self-pitying and self-deluding person that she is. Ben as the thirty-three year old idiot is given to us in a few terrible stark images. It is the first time we have ever seen him (rather than heard him). Dilsey is seen as a person who acts constructively, generatively in the face of all those Compson words, all that Compson rhetoric. She emerges as a kind of repository of basic, essential virtues. Faulkner, as narrator, comments on very little. He talks nothing away. He does not ride things away on stylistic hobby horses. It is all sort of photographic, black and white. It is about what there is left of the Compsons. Theft and counter-theft, self-delusion and flatulent rhetoric, self-pity, extreme dependence (on Dilsey and Luster, most obviously), futility (in Jason’s pursuit of Quentin II), taking to one’s camphor-filled room, the helplessness of having to be driven back home, bellowing and howling in the public square, and the awful shame of hearing one’s brother do this. And set against this the beautiful dignity, the routine humanity, the fundamental generosity, the basic faith of Dilsey.
I don’t want to write these superb scenes away, to transform them into hermeneutic mush. Just a few words more. The final section of the novel does not end with Dilsey. Faulkner, one of the great masters of endings, knew that would be untrue to the novel as a whole. Dilsey is bracketed between the discovery of Quentin’s theft and flight and Benjy’s bellowing in the square—between irony and anguish. The novel as a whole is enclosed by Benjy: it begins when he cries out for lost Caddy and it ends with his awful bellowing because he is going the wrong way around the square. These are essentializing actions for this novel because so much of the anguish experienced here is in the very genes, in the ground of human speech itself, and can never be fully articulated. Ben, whose being is all concentrated in this pre-verbal ground, this body of pain, anguish, loss and disorder, suffers before speech, without speech in the very ground of being. Nothing could be more fundamental. He is one of the first great figures to come to us from Faulkner’s imagination and an extraordinary triumph of the creative imagination. Faulkner’s first great novel begins and ends with him. Much of Faulkner’s subsequent work was to consist of efforts to transcend (without denying) Ben in order to arrive at a higher ground of being. It took a lot of words to write the anguish out of his own genes.
3 Destructive and Destroyed Being
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Faulkner conceived and wrote four terrifying fictions about destructive being and the ways in which being is destroyed. Three of these four fictions have been brought together here in a single long chapter so that the ways in which Faulkner imagined destruction can be studied and meditated upon in a concentrated and unrelieved way. The Sound and the Fury has been taken up separately, in part because, as the fiction which signaled Faulkner’s emergence into greatness, it has a special place and significance. Its absolutely dazzling technical brilliance tends to blind the mind’s eye to its ontological concerns and to the ways in which it, too, is a regular catalogue of destroyed being and destructive being.
The Coffin of Being
As I Lay Dying (1930)
Like The Sound and the Fury, the title, As I Lay Dying describes a basic, suffering human action. But it derives from no tragic literary context in a Shakespearean play and does not gather to its true force and greatness as a title until one applies it to the troubled fiction it so beautifully essentializes. Sartoris may take its title from the family, but As I Lay Dying is a much more profound and disturbing fiction about the family. Like Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, it has death in the title (other Faulkner works with death in their titles are Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun) and that is where one must begin.
Unspecified at first, one does not know who the “I” of the title is, only that there is a certain immobility about the situation and finality about the process (dying), that it happened in the past (lay, instead of lie) and that other things related to it occurred at the same time. The human, psycho/physical process is one of degeneration rather than regeneration. The title localizes the fiction that is to follow in relation (it seems) to a specific individual self—the first person of the title. But, entering the fiction, one discovers that it is narrated by a whole series (fifteen) of I/eyes, only one of whom is actually lying dying. Addie Bundren (the mother, in this family of unmarried children, three of them adult males), who has death in her first name, is the I who actually lies dying through the first part of the fiction; but she “dies” early on (ALD 48) and her death is reported by Darl, who is not even there: “Jewel, I say, she is dead, Jewel. Addie Bundren is dead” and spends all the rest of the fiction decomposing—putrefying in her coffin. She speaks—for the first and only time—from her coffin, after she has been saved from the river by Jewel—and so extends the title’s application to her funeral journey. Her monologue seems, also, to extend the title backwards to her whole life. Vardaman and Darl hear Addie talking to them from the coffin in the barn, which continues the application of the title to the whole funeral journey. Addie can be said to lie dying until she is, finally, buried with her ancestors and the flesh can rot in the earth in peace. The “I,” the conventional term for the personal individual living self, is gradually complicated in its meanings, diffused, generalized until one does not know whether the one “I” (Addie Bundren) or other “I’s” are meant. The title, in other words, is extended backwards and forwards in time, diffused through the whole life and being of the person, extended to apply in different places, and generalized to apply to many different persons. There is, finally, that troublesome past tense, as if the whole fiction were coming from a future time zone and some other place (not heaven; there is no heaven in Faulkner anywhere) or from Addie’s still residual “I,” unlocated, just out there somewhere.
It is one of Faulkner’s most troubling titles; one returns to it again and again, trying to penetrate its mysteries—of being, surely, located, as we are, in that title, at the going out point, where all is known, finally. Addie’s monologue and the fiction generally resonate with self-mysteries (of coming into as well as going out of being and, it seems, everything in between), with the deep truths arrived at by Faulkner’s imaginative penetration of so many fictional beings. It is an eschatological title and an ontological fiction, concerned, in its very form (like The Sound and the Fury) with the creation, imagination, exploration and deep penetration of the inwardness of different beings, mediating as a fiction between the self and others, in the disguises made possible by fictions.
The whole fiction is narrated from within, and has as its principal narrator Darl, who narrates nineteen times, with regular periodicity.6 He is one of Faulkner’s major fictional penetrators of other selves. Darl, like Quentin, is one of those characters who is cursed with extraordinary powers of perception and then is destroyed (put away, here) because of them. He is a perfect example of what Norman. O. Brown (in Love’s Body) means by schizophrenic. Darl is the double seeing self, the man who knows—without mediation—all the hidden, private truths about people. One is always tempted to see him as a figure for the writer. Of all the children in the fiction, he is in some ways the one most like his mother Addie (the other knower in the novel); and like Addie, is isolated by what he knows; ironically he is the one she most completely rejects. Darl is also the other character to whom the title most obviously and disturbingly applies: Addie is put into the ground, finally, and Darl is put in a cage, in Jackson, which Vardaman says, in the true symbolic language he always uses, is “farther away than crazy” (ALD 245). At the end of the journey, Addie is interred; Darl is incarcerated: they are only dead in different ways and Darl will go on dying for many more years. The title can apply to both equally; each has the ability to see through to and speak from other worlds.
One approach to this fiction is through Addie because the title leads one so directly to her and to the section she narrates from her coffin, after she is saved from the flood by her Jewel. She is lying dying and rotting in her coffin, taking we discover (in section 40) her revenge against the living: Anse and her children—even Cash and Jewel, her treasures. And she takes her revenge by means of the very thing that betrayed her (words), binding Anse, the man incapable of action (who never sweated in his whole life) to his literal word, making him promise (give his word) to take her (Addie)
