he went to Jackson my brother Dar [. . .] He went to Jackson. He went crazy and went to Jackson both. Lots of people didn’t go crazy. Pa and Cash and Jewel and Dewey Dell and me didn’t go crazy. We didn’t go to Jackson either. Dar [. . .] My brother is Darl. He went to Jackson on the train. He didn’t go on the train to go crazy. He went crazy in our wagon. [. . .] Darl is my brother. My brother is Darl. (ALD 243-46)
Vardaman’s cri de coeur, somewhat more articulate than Ben’s roaring and bellowing and so further up the human scale, comes from the same matrix of helpless loss. Dying, Addie has set in motion an irreversible degenerative pattern which she is helpless to alter. Her revenge is this journey of disasters and only her burial will bring her specific revenge to an end, but the effects of it will go on for a long time. The helplessness—powerlessness—in the face of loss is most purely embodied in Vardaman because he has done nothing to deserve it and has no way to cope with it. He is one of Faulkner’s many figures for the self as innocent victim. Each of the children is victimized in some way by both parents, by circumstances and by others). Some—Dewey Dell and Jewel, especially—are also victimizers (of Darl) and perpetuate the victim–become-victimizer pattern that is so common in modern literature (all literature, all human life, really, as Kenneth Burke has made clear.)
Dewey Dell is the last of the victims and of all the children the least directly victimized by Addie. That is precisely the point about Dewey Dell, whose destiny is in her name. She repeats Addie’s pattern—as woman, as female, the dewey dell to be entered, violated, used: Lafe picks into her basket and fills it; MacGowan forces an entrance into this dewey dell; Darl enters her in symbolic incest again and again; the child growing in her is following its own pattern, which Dewey Dell is helpless to alter. She is tricked by Lafe’s money and words; by MacGowan’s words and promises. She is entering and beginning the pattern Addie is just completing. She is Addie, the female victim, all over again. Addie does not need to do anything to Dewey Dell: her destiny as sexual female, as a dewey dell, will do it all for her. Her own centrality of being—to be a dewey dell—is self-destructive because Faulkner has given her no way to protect herself, and like Addie, she will be victimized by the empty words and the “terrible blood” and in turn victimize the children who come, invariably, to violate her aloneness. The destructive future, the repeating pattern, is in her womb—the very ground of generation. She has already begun her revenge, her victimizing, turning on Darl because he has “entered” her without words, violated her aloneness, and knows her secret. Of all the children, Dewey Dell has the most completely predictable future. She goes back home already the victim of a biological pattern she cannot break, certain to be victimized again by the red blood “[. . .] the terrible blood, the red bitter blood boiling through the land” (ALD 166). And to take her revenge on her children.
There remains Anse, the only member of the family to gain anything on this funeral journey and a victimizer so stupid and inept as to fill the reader with helpless rage. Anse is the unmoved and unmoving mover in this fiction, almost a catalytic agent who, added to any human situation, will produce negative results, for everyone but himself. Addie could not have invented a more perfect agency for her revenge against the family. Anse, ironically, is beyond anyone’s revenge, which seems to be just the point: he is a kind of mindless, impervious negative force in the human universe. Anse is a completely non-productive self, without centrality of being: he has no intellectual power, no manual skill, and no physical power. He does not work at all and so denies one of the prime functions of the father, which is to provide. He does not sweat or suffer. Insofar as he is without generative being he is without life and is a negative force throughout. Anse is, as Addie says, faithful to the literal word, “a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame” (ALD 164). It is in the name of the literal word that the funeral journey is undertaken and continued, and always in the name of the empty word that Anse does everything: refuses intelligent help, refuses to turn back, takes Jewel’s horse and Dewey Dell’s money, and puts the family in debt to Flem Snopes for the next thousand years. Returning, Anse has new teeth (he is primarily a consumer) and a new wife to prepare food for him to consume. He has already partially consumed his children.
This fiction ends with a return to where it began after the long journey of disasters, deaths, losses, suffering, outrage, violations, indebtedness, betrayal, expulsion, imprisonment, putrefaction. The family returns but in some essential way the family is dead, its being having gone into the grave with Addie, into the cage with Darl, to Flem Snopes with the horse, down into the cellar with Dewey Dell’s last hope, out into the pain of Cash’s broken, cement encrusted leg, out into the broken syntax of Vardaman’s dislocation and suffering. The family can be no source of being here or seldom anywhere else in Faulkner. It is one of the terrible truths of his fictions. The “I” of As I Lay Dying can finally be understood as the collective “I” of the Bundrens; and the fiction can be read as a demonic chronicle of how these “I’s” individual being is lost, taken away, destroyed, frittered away by Anse and Addie—the two A’s, the double destructive beginning. It is truly a terrible fiction, almost without relief (save for the marvelous comic interlude about Jewel and his horse), thrusting, driving toward some zero point of absolute helplessness, victimage, outrage; some grammar of negative being. More dies and is buried than Addie Bundren in this novel.
Looking to the future, one knows that Anse was never a father anyway and that the new wife will be no mother. Looking at the present of the novel, one sees Darl gone, Cash crippled for life, Jewel without his horse, Dewey Dell about to begin repeating Addie’s destructive pattern, and Anse, the great parasite, carrying on as usual, exploiting the role and rhetoric of the father, victimizing family and friends alike, with the power that goes with the role. The cycle of this novel—that is, the projection of it into the future—does not bear thinking on. For this reason, it belongs with The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary rather than Light in August, which, through Lena Grove and Byron Bunch, does allow us to move beyond the agonies of Joe Christmas (who was in fact destroyed by his family in the person of his grandfather, old Doc Hines) and project a future in which a family (Lena, her baby, and Byron, who assumes the function of a father) is offered as a possible source of generative being.
A Grammar of Negative Being
Sanctuary (1931)
Faulkner arrives at an almost pure grammar of negative being in Sanctuary, his fiction with the most perfect title and the one which, when properly understood, tells us more about Faulkner’s early dark vision than any of the other titles. Faulkner’s own rather disconcerting remarks about this novel in the “Introduction” and the extreme purity (schematic, almost allegorical conception) of the work have misled many critics, causing them to under-read and to mistrust the authenticity of both the specific fiction and the vision. The French understood this fiction much earlier and better than American critics did because they have fewer biases against works as deliberately conceived and written as this one. I will follow their lead because it has always seemed to me that the most pure model of Faulkner’s negative vision can be found in this fiction.
One of the best ways to understand Sanctuary is to begin with the realization that the fiction is a black or inverted Romance and an almost absolute negation of the title—in all of its standard dictionary meanings as well as the many transferred symbolic meanings which are defined from within.7 The whole fiction flows counter to the title in a kind of perverse, demonic demonstration that there are no sanctuaries left, to be found, or to be created in this world, in this life. There is only one sanctuary and that is death, which is to be understood here, as it is almost everywhere in Faulkner, as a terminal (not a mediating) event, an absolute end to life. Almost the only relief Faulkner’s suffering characters get is from dying, often violently, and often in such a way as to render the motivation very ambiguous. The whole fiction consists of variations on the negation (inversion) of the title and the basic principle of the Romance, as defined by Northrop Frye and exemplified by Spenser’s Faerie Queene. That is the logic of the work, and Faulkner pursued it with brilliant, relentless imaginative fury. The end result is the grammar of negative being, a condition which may be defined as existence in a purely secular, human world where there are no sanctuaries. Otherwise put, there is a progressive constriction of
