An old teacher once offered an interesting insight about the difference between people and animals: where animals use signs to communicate, language frees human beings to communicate directly. And indeed, as I sit down to write this blog post my cat is clawing at a stack of books on the dresser, which is how he communicates to me that he’d like me to open the bedroom door so that he can go eat/use his box. The distinction we presume to exist between man and animal receives a thought-provoking interrogation in AILD, written at a moment when modernism, aided by Darwinism, was using language to reassert the animal origins of man. The result is a book that, in pursuit of a kind of animal truth, is told through signs and symbols and a cacophony of perspectives that together resemble an animal groan.

The animal-human connection is most apparent as humans are compared to animals, and vice-versa: Peabody says, memorably, that Pa — perhaps the most animal of our human characters — resembles a “dipped rooster”; earlier, Darl says Pa’s face “stubble gives his lower face that appearance that old dogs have.” (17) Christopher T. White points out, meanwhile, that animals are given human characteristics: a buzzard is an “old bald-headed man,” (119) and a horse later crossing the river moans and groans “like a natural man.” (155) All this leading up to the novel’s most famous line, narrated by Vardaman: “My mother is a fish.” (84)

But most interesting is what Faulkner’s recognition of the human-animal continuum means for the story more generally, and language in particular. Faulkner seems to be use the human-animal continuum to vent a frustration with language’s inability to fully describe human experience. As Edmund Burke writes in “The Cries of Animals”: “It might seem that these modulations of sound [i.e., animal noises] carry some connexion with the nature of the things they represent, and are not merely arbitrary; because the natural cries of all animals, even of those animals with whom we have not been acquainted, never fail to make themselves sufficiently understood; this cannot be said of language.” What Burke is saying, in effect, is that what distinguishes man from animal man’s ability to refer directly to that which he’s crying about — a faculty that Faulkner notably withholds from many of his characters (excluding the eloquent Darl and Peabody): indeed, Burke’s above quote resonated deeply with Darl’s description of Pa leaning “above the bed in the twilight, his humped silhouette partaking of that owl-like quality of awry-feathered, disgruntled outrage within which lurks a wisdom too profound or too inert for even thought.” (49)

Some of my classmates have noted that the story is being told primarily through images and metaphors — i.e., nothing happens in the chapter except two characters walk through a field, but the way it is told in such a way as to give it a symbolic resonance — which we might view as an attempt to transmogrify tragedy into symbol, and in doing so to express from a sense deeper than language the true scope of the tragedy. Faulkner’s use of symbol forces us to assume there is a natural wisdom to the world of this story that cannot directly be related using human language.

Which is not to say that he doesn’t try. The story’s 16 perspectives, which contain within them even more perspectives, create a cacophony that itself blends with a variety of animal noises (horses moaning like men, cows moaning to be milked, etc.) and natural noises (portentous wind or silence, or pounding rain), creating for the reader an experience of hearing a long and multi-layered groan more animal than human.