in a kind of demonic literal-minded inversion of honor), Anse does just as he promised, so that the two parents, in different ways, work together toward the destruction of their children. We can see here that, in a whole series of reversals and inversions of the mother-function (conceiving, bring into the world and life, loving, tending, nurturing, even educating for the future), Addie is deconceiving, de-generating, destroying (killing), hating, “starving,” immobilizing (Cash, for example), driving mad (Darl), and betraying her husband and children—the family—as she lies dying. All in the name of—through Anse—decorum, propriety, burial rites (and rights), and a return to one’s ancestors. In many ways, this is surely a novel about the past killing or maiming the future. Meditating inward toward the point where Addie’s monologue provides one explanation of the funeral journey, the imagination collapses in disbelief when it comes upon the stark, brutal, conception of the family and the future which is at the center of this fiction.
As she lies dying, Addie is taking her revenge against the living for the long ago violations of, or intrusions into her inner circle of selfhood by Anse and Darl. As Addie explains in the early part of her monologue, her terrible aloneness—her virgin state—and the turbulence and restlessness (the boiling blood) that went with it, is not brought to an end when she takes Anse (or earlier, when she punishes her students in an attempt to make some kind of “blood” contact with them.) It is only brought to an end when she has Cash and realizes that living is terrible and being a mother is the answer to it. With Cash, she discovers love and for the first time experiences the blood union she has been seeking. It is Cash, not Anse, who brings her virgin state to an end because of the intensity of the direct experience of motherhood. It is Cash who violates her aloneness and in so doing makes her whole again. For the first time, she experiences real “living” and begins to understand what her father meant when he told her that living was getting ready to stay dead a long time. What her father meant is that you only live once and, as Thoreau said, you don’t want to die and come to realize that you have never really lived. Addie’s torment at the beginning of her section is her aloneness, a condition which she thinks might be brought to an end by taking Anse. But Anse, she comes to realize, is only empty words, and only intense experience, for which no words are needed, can make her alive and end her aloneness. She has this with Cash. Anse is reduced to his empty words—Anse or love, what difference did it make—and, though he does not know it, is dead to Addie. He can never be inside her circle and never be part of what she means by living.
When she discovers that she is pregnant with Darl, she thinks that she will kill Anse because he has tricked her and because he, by way of Darl, will be responsible for intruding upon the perfect relationship she has with Cash, her first experience of love and her fulfillment of herself in motherhood. Addie says that she and Cash know what love is and do not need a word for it. She rejects Darl (he is never inside her circle of selfhood) and decides that she will not kill Anse, but will take her revenge against him in such a way that he does not know she is doing it. Her revenge—the direct cause of the funeral journey that brings so much pain and suffering to the family and is the primary subject of the novel—is to make Anse promise (give his word, he being the man of empty words, like an empty door frame) that he will take her to Jefferson when she dies and bury her with her family. It is here that we encounter one of the main ambiguities of this novel. Addie says that she is going to take her revenge against Anse, but in fact her revenge turns out to be against all of her children, including the two “value” children she allows inside her circle of selfhood, Cash and Jewel. Anse alone does not suffer or lose anything during the terrible funeral journey and in fact gets both a new set of teeth and a new wife. Though Anse has given his word to Addie that he will have her buried in Jefferson, and does keep his word, we know that his main reason for continuing the funeral journey against every obstacle and all sense of decency and humanity and consideration for his children, is because he wants new teeth.
The ambiguity lies in the fact that we do not ever know if Addie—like Darl—has foreknowledge and whether, in fact, this punishment of her children was part of her motive, or an ironic consequence of it. We cannot ever really know whether the pain and suffering inflicted upon the five children by the funeral journey was really part of her revenge; but we can say, with certainty, that she is indirectly—and may be directly—responsible for it and that the two parents do in fact collaborate in bringing about the awful things that happen to the children during the journey. This is the central concern of the novel. Addie, of course, punishes Anse long before the funeral journey. After Darl, Anse is dead to her and never able to intrude upon her circle of selfhood again. Worse, he does not even know that he is dead to her. Time, Anse, the word love (Anse’s word) are all outside of Addie’s circle. At this point, only Cash is inside the circle and the only real knowledge about living that Addie has comes intuitively from her intense direct experiences. It is after this that she has her passionate adulterous affair with Whitfield (the blood boiling along the dark land, voiceless speech) and learns from experience again what real passion is (something she never knew with Anse), what real living is, and, because it is adulterous, what sin is. She says again she does not need words to tell her what passion and sin are; she must learn what they are from the direct physical experience of them. Whitfield, then, is also inside her circle of selfhood, as is Jewel, their passion child. Everything else is outside her circle.
When the affair with Whitfield is over, Addie decides it is time to clean house, to put her affairs in order. She has learned what living is and is getting ready to stay dead a long time. She settles her account with Anse, by giving him Dewey Dell to negate Jewel and Vardaman to replace Cash. In this way, she says, Anse has three of the Children (Darl, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman) and she has two (Cash and Jewel). Her aloneness has been violated three times by Cash, Whitfield, and Jewel, and each time she has been made whole again by these intense experiences of motherhood and sexual passion. At the end of her section, Addie contrasts herself to Cora, whom she says is, like Anse, all empty words, and who, though she speaks constantly of sin and redemption, has no knowledge of them because she has never experienced either.
This account of Addie’s section may tell us a lot about Addie who, along with Darl, is the most interesting character in the novel and, ontologically, it may tell us a lot about the relationship between words and actions (the vertical and horizontal in Addie’s account), experience and knowledge, aloneness and wholeness through love and union (not necessarily sexual) with another, about what constitutes true being and what it means to really “live”, and about a mother’s relationship to her children (whether they are inside or outside her circle of selfhood and love). It may also help us toward a fuller understanding of the implications of the title. Though this section tells us why the funeral journey took place, it does not account for the journey itself and the terrible things that happened to the children during this journey; or, more accurately, to the Bundren family, since all members of the family are present during the journey. The funeral journey is initiated by the mother as her revenge against the father and the child he “planted” in her—Darl; it is carried out by the father, with the help of the children—mainly the two inside Addie’s circle: Cash, who makes the coffin, and Jewel, who saves Addie from the flood and the fire and is instrumental in other ways in making sure she gets to Jefferson and is buried there. Under normal circumstances, this would have been an easy journey and could hardly be construed or understood as a form of revenge. The journey is more than half over by the time we even learn that it was meant to be Addie’s revenge against Anse, and up to this point we simply assume that some combination of bad luck, sheer pig-headedness on Anse’s part and a kind of stupefying willingness to do what Anse says by his four adult children accounts for what happens. We recognize Anse’s hypocrisy (“I given my word,” he says, which is true, but what he really wants is new teeth); we know Dewey Dell’s real reason for wanting to get to Jefferson, but it is difficult to explain Cash and Darl’s, even Jewel’s willingness to go with the journey. And yet they all do, abiding by the mother’s injunction and the father’s promise, with a kind of mindless, emotionally charged, filial piety.
As a character (as a mother, that is, rather than as a matrix of terms which we might try to use to organize a reading of the fiction), Addie Bundren is full of death and drives her family on toward ruin and destruction even as she lies “dying”
