they could get on with their lives without her. The whole fiction moves, with terrible inevitability, toward the terrifying dark spaces Faulkner gives us at the end: the grave (for Addie), the cage (for Darl) and the cellar (for Dewey Dell). Mother Addie has somehow (Faulkner never explains this, he just presents it as fictional fact) kept her three older sons from marrying. They are all blocked from growth and fulfillment in different ways. And terrible things happen to all of them as they carry out the senseless act of filial piety Addie—through Anse—has laid on them like a doom, a curse. Her rotting corpse in the coffin functions symbolically to tell us that being—the generative seed of selfhood—is rotting, putrefying in all the members of the Bundren family. Everything conspires against being and fulfillment in this fiction. The funeral journey is the coffin of being.
Darl (Faulkner’s darling, if not Addie’s) is the son with the greatest amount of vertical being. He is the knower, the self with the greatest verbal, symbolic perceptual powers, the person who is capable of pure unmediated vision. It is Darl, finally, who tries to save the family from any more grief and suffering by setting fire to the barn so the rotting, destroying Addie will burn up, and the family will be purified of her and free at last from the tyranny of her revenge. It is a great act of sanity. But, as usual, Addie’s Jewel—the man of spontaneous, unthinking actions—saves her and prolongs the journey, just as he did when he saved her from the flood. Because of the barn burning, and because he knows both of their secrets, Jewel and Dewey Dell attack and subdue Darl (their sibling, our brother) when he is betrayed and sacrificed by the whole family (including Cash, who rationalizes the action, and Vardaman, who saw Darl set the fire and reports it to Dewey Dell). It is this betrayal by the whole family which finally drives Darl on over into schizophrenia and so completes Addie’s revenge against him. Darl, one must remember, was violently rejected by mother Addie even before he was born and was the initial decisive cause of her revenge; at the end, Darl is rejected—cast out—by the whole family and removed from the ongoing life of the whole community. He might as well be dead.
Cash, who is the maker, the craftsman, is the son with a great deal of horizontal being. His skills are manual, physical and, unlike Darl’s, get translated into outward, practical physical actions. He makes things which have cash value. He makes boxes and houses and coffins—all enclosures. Addie’s revenge is indiscriminate and includes even those close and precious to her as Cash and Jewel were. Aside from Cash’s excruciating pain during the funeral trip, he will be crippled the rest of his life and never again be the carpenter he was. Addie—or the funeral trip—has deprived him of the true centrality of his being: the ability to use his own great talents as a master craftsman. So, just as Darl is destroyed at his greatest strength, at the true centrality of his being by being driven on over from sanity into madness and rendered dysfunctional (nobody pays much attention to what a man locked up in a cage in an insane asylum says), so too with Cash. A crippled carpenter is not going to build many barns. The dying-dead mother with the help of the father takes the centrality of being from each child.
Jewel is the son with the greatest horizontal being. He is almost the embodiment of pure, unthinking action. He is the opposite of Darl in every way. He narrates the least (once), he is the closest to Addie, he acts without knowing (Darl knows without acting; knows without doing, also). Darl is vision without power. When he does act from knowledge, he is destroyed and locked up because of his capacity for vision. Cash shapes things; Jewel acts upon them; Darl sees into them. Like the other older sons, Jewel is going to be affected at the center of his being and deprived of something essential to his selfhood. Dying, Addie is going to attack and kill her children’s powers of being, their ability to be in any generative way, and always by means of the dead, empty word. The Mother and Father are going to punish and destroy their own children, at least the three older ones—all sons. In one of his many gnomic copulas of being, Darl correctly identifies this centrality of being in Jewel: “Jewel’s mother is a horse,” Darl says, usually to taunt his half-brother. Jewel—the passion child—has the purest Oedipal relationship with his mother through the horse, and there is a certain cruel appropriateness about his having to give up his horse (to agree, again, to be governed by Anse’s word) to help pay for the mules necessary to haul the wagon to get Addie into her grave. Jewel’s double loss—of his mother and his horse—is a kind of Oedipal disaster, the consequences of which are not exactly clear. Jewel is a lot like young Bayard Sartoris, but one has no clear future for him (Darl is in his cage, Dewey Dell will have her baby, Cash will be crippled) and it is idle to speculate or invent one for him. Say, only, that he suffers a massive withdrawal of the sources and resources of his being and that the loss of the horse symbolizes the loss of his animal and physical potency and strength; that, like Bayard, he may lapse into a kind of violent apathy and eventually become pure violent action without purpose and perhaps even destroy himself.
The last time we see Jewel doing and saying anything, he is helping to capture Darl so they can take him off to the cage in Jackson. Jewel is holding his half-brother Darl down and saying: “Kill him. Kill the son of a bitch” (ALD 514). Both are actions which epitomize the now purely negative, destructive sources of his being. Jewel, more than any other person, embodies the end toward which Addie’s life and her long revenge have been moving. Addie’s Jewel, like Addie herself, is bent on killing, imprisonment, and destruction. With Jewel, we see how the four generative powers—intellectual power, manual skill, physical power, sexual-physiological power—which the self may have (together or separately) and which are represented here in the three older sons and the daughter, are all destroyed, impaired, or inverted by the end of the journey. The family is left to Anse, the stupidest, laziest, and weakest man in the whole book, who has neither knowledge nor skill nor generative power—only new teeth, power to devour, to eat others. He embodies the basic, demonic principles of the fiction: where something can go wrong, it will; where there is something precious, cherished, it will be taken away; whatever is valued will be lost; if something is good or pure, it will be polluted—I list only some of the inverting, demonic principles, none of which, of course, apply to Anse. One can make up a rule for Anse, which will also be perverse and demonic: those who take away shall receive?
Vardaman, who is not old enough to be so clearly defined in his being as Cash, Darl, and Jewel, is old enough to experience loss and to suffer. If he is anything, he is the sufferer: from the loss of his mother and the subsequent ontological chaos (“My mother is a fish,” he says; and he bores those holes in the coffin so she can breathe); from the cruel effects of the prolonged funeral journey (the buzzards and the smell remind us of this); from inadvertently betraying and then losing his brother Darl—the one who, naturally, understands him the best, ministers to his grief, and who, with Vardaman, give us the two most frequent narrators and the major voices of sorrow in the fiction. Vardaman’s double loss of his main identity figures (Addie and Darl) nearly destroys him and reduces him at the end toward Ben’s situation, where he becomes the voice of pure grief, not the explanation of, but the expression of loss, dislocation, and suffering. Cash tries to explain it; Vardaman only experiences, witnesses, and expresses it. This is beautifully shown by Faulkner in Vardaman’s last monologue, where he acts as witness for two of the violations which occur at the end, one internal to the family and one a classic example of external victimage of the ignorant country girl. The first is Darl’s departure for the insane asylum and the second is Dewey Dell’s “seduction” in the cellar. Re-experiencing the anguish of Darl’s loss, Vardaman expresses it in the broken copulas of being and familial relationships which characterize so many of his monologues: “My brother he went crazy and he went to Jackson too. Jackson is further away than crazy [. . .] He had to get on the train to go to Jackson. I have not been on the train, but Darl has been on the train. Darl. Darl is my brother. Darl. Darl.” His monologue ends. “Darl he went to Jackson my brother Darl.” Vardaman says near the beginning, “Darl went to Jackson. Lots of people didn’t go to Jackson. Darl is my brother. My brother is going to Jackson [. . .] Going on the train to Jackson. My brother,” he goes on and pretty soon one realizes that the monologue is in two type faces and that the Darl parts, all in italics, are set and broken up in such a way as to be continuous, even though passages in roman type describing what is happening outside Vardaman come between. He resumes, for instance, four lines down the page, thus: “Darl” and then six more lines down, “Darl is my brother,
