It seems to me that the Bundren family suffers from the same sort of affliction that plagued Quentin, although they seem considerably less aware of it, and considerably less able to clearly articulate it: They feel the urge to preserve what is already there, to hold on and to keep everything that is in their power inclusive to the family. This is evident from the very beginning, as we get a description of Jewel, with his “pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face (4)”, and we see Cash making his own mother’s coffin and, the wooden planks used are described by Darl as “yellow as gold (4)”. But the reader see’s later on from Peabody’s (an outsider) perspective that these planks appear the color of sulfur to him (43). Peabody also states that the light outside is sulfur colored, and refers once more before the end of his first chapter to the “sulfur colored light (46).” What Faulkner is trying to communicate, I believe, is that from the insider perspective it looks like gold but from the outside it is hellish (sulfur is also known as brimstone, and can be associated with hell).
It is from Peabody’s chapter that the reader can gain the most insight into the static nature of the Bundren’s, and Anse in particular, the patriarch who we can assume has  had considerable influence on the mindset of these Bundren children. When Peabody first sees Anse, standing behind a tree he remarks, “Too bad the Lord made the mistake of giving trees roots and the Anse Burdens He makes feet and legs (42).” He later remarks that “Anse has not been in town in twelve years (42).” His implications are that Anse is reluctant to move, or to make a change in anything. He is as static in his ways as a tree, which is obviously inanimate and can’t move at all. Peabody brings one last bit of insight at the end of his first chapter: “That’s the trouble with this country: everything…hangs on too long (45).” His comments serve to further this idea of being static during a period of clear change. And because this is Faulkner, this must be a metaphor for the antebellum South.
Anse also provides some insight into this, albeit in a way that is slightly difficult to understand. His first chapter he remembers complaining about the road (a constant source of pain for him) to Addie and she tells him “Get up and move then (35).” Obviously, he does not. He follows by saying, “…but when He aims for something to stay put He makes it up and down ways, like a tree or a man (36).” Again, there is this connection between man and tree, a completely static object in every way. Anse is bold in the face of progress, and would rather have his wife die on his family’s terms than call the doctor, an outsider in.
It is this contrast  of perspectives that shows the desire of the Bundrens, and Quentin, is ultimately futile. Change is inevitable, or so Faulkner would have you believe. The only options are to adapt or get left behind (mentally, economically, socially etc etc). Here again, I think the parallels with the antebellum South are unavoidable, but that would require significantly more time and space to complete a good analysis. Also, after seeing that trailer I’ve been picturing Danny McBride as Vernon Tull, and by Danny McBride I really mean Kenny Powers (protagonist of HBO show Eastbound and Down). So, yeah Kenny Powers is now just a character in As I Lay Dying for me. Way to go James Franco.

With many narrators, within the Bundren family or affiliated with them in some way, Faulkner develops multiple insights into the same event, the dying/death of Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying. We, as readers, are exposed to the multifarious mental handlings of death and the inconsistencies that arise from diverse perspectives. Faulkner uses a similar technique in TSAF to express the unreliability of any one character’s portrayal of a particular scene. Do we believe that Darl really cares the most about Addie, according to Cora? Is Cash really being inconsiderate to Addie for building her coffin just outside her room, according to Jewel? Although the first 52 pages is only scratching the surface, and there’s much to be desired, I believe the most transparent character so far is Anse Bundren, the father of the Bundren Family.

            One of the first impressions of Anse, besides the queer fact that he doesn’t sweat even under the sweltering July sun, is that he exhibits a quality of self-loathing. When he responds to Vernon about the likeliness of a storm disrupting their trip to Jefferson he says, “I am a luckless man. I have ever been” (18). This particular line reminds me of Caroline Compson of The Sound and the Fury and with that comparison in mind one may assume that Anse is a self-centered man. The last line on page 52, just after Addie dies, Anse further solidifies as a selfish character when he utters, “‘God’s will be done,’ he says. ‘Now I can get them teeth.’” Although he is willing to take Addie’s remains to Jefferson he may have an ulterior motive where he gains more than just fulfilling his dead wife’s final wish. Faulkner has Anse try and rub the wrinkles out of the quilt across Addie’s corpse and fail, which represents the failure of their marriage or at least the awkwardness of their relationship (52).

            Anse in a fit of self-absorbed thought blames the road that runs across the front of his house for the many misfortunes in his life. He vents that the road, built long-ways for constant moving and restless traveling, as the sole reason for the dynamic changes among his children. Of course he only raises this idea to show how it effects him: “Making me pay for Cash having to get them carpenter notions when if it hadn’t been no road come there, he wouldn’t a got them” (36). He hates that his house and his children are in contact with outsiders and would rather have them all be how He intended, “for them to stay put like a tree or a stand of corn”(36).  Anse uses God and “His aims” as a means to rant about the changes in his life that conflict with his own ideals.

            There is a passage in Anse’s chapter that I can’t fully comprehend and the more I linger over the words the less I understand so I can only speculate as to the story behind it. Anse refers to Darl: “it wasn’t till that ere road come and switched the land around longways and his eyes still full of the land, that they begun to threaten me out of him, trying to short-hand me with the law” (37). I understand that Darl is known to the town for being strange, always looking as though he is staring through things, but what does Anse mean by people threatening him out of Darl? How does the law play into that threat? Unless I missed something I’m sure this will become clear later on in the novel.

Belatedly, I find myself thinking about Luster. In the scope of The Sound and the Fury, he seems a liminal character, quite peripheral, as perhaps children are intrinsically. Yet his presence is also constant, absent only in Quentin’s chapter. Luster tends to Benjy and the fire, and is at the beck and call of Dilsey, though he often tries her patience by dodging obligation and her orders. But what, I wonder, is the value that Faulkner finds in him? Why Luster, and not some other?

Luster’s name naturally lends him a fleeting, even transcendent quality. He’s like one of Shakespeare’s mischievous woodland fairies, only carrying wood. The sentences in which he’s mentioned can’t help but rise to the level of aphorism or prophecy, as in “Luster was hunting in the grass” (both narration and sensation) or even, simply, “Luster went out” (275). Good puns galore: “‘I cold,’ Luster said.’”(275) That warms me. His pursuits are likewise lustrous, literally and figuratively speaking. Most obviously, he’s after a quarter when we meet him on page one. We learn the coin has fallen through a hole in his pocket (oh, the vagaries of fortune), and much later, we learn that he’d been given that day in order to go to the traveling show.

Of course, his name sounds also like lust-er, one who lusts. Faulkner, you punster. As we know, there’s a whole bunch of lust in the novel. Prof. Allred framed the male Quentin’s lust as “a desire for others not to desire.” Caddy and the female Quentin’s lust is presented by the narrating male characters as straightforwardly (defiantly) sexual, but the reader understands their desire for autonomy more generally. Jason’s lust for money and respect is transparent. What does Benjy want? I’d argue his lusts are elemental. He craves/remembers/receives bare sensation—the blanket-like comfort of Caddy’s arms around him as the first chapter closes—and shows us how sensation is always also emotional. The way Benjy reaches into the fire, burns himself, may be the embodiment of this elemental desire. He would hold fire, not out of pride (not in the way Quentin desires a pure flame for him and Caddy), but because he’s wired that way. All of the above “lusts” seem imbalanced, damaging to their characters.

What variety of lust does Luster bring to the table? One the one hand, perhaps he has some of the same debilitating lust in him. Consider this exchange between Luster and Dilsey after Jason discovers his window has been broken. Luster says:

“Dese funny folks. Glad I aint none of em.”

“Ain’t none of who?” Dilsey said. “Let me tell you somethin, nigger boy, you got jes es much Compson devilment in you es any of em. Is you right sho you never broke dat window?”

“Whut I want to break hit fur?”

“Whut you do any of yo devilment fur?” Dilsey said. “Watch him [Benjy] now, so he cant burn his hand again twell I get the table set.” (276)

Dilsey, who may know Luster best, asserts he has the same unreasonable vein in him as the other sinful Compsons. If we’re to believe her, on the one hand his lust is similarly debilitating and/or devilish. (Note, too, the juxtaposition of Benjy’s self-destructive fire-desire with this devilment discussion.) On the other hand, Luster’s desires are asexual, unlike Caddy’s or the Quentins’. He hunts inconsequential, ultimately ephemeral things or moments: Drinking sasparilla to achieve bodily levity, going to the show to forget himself in the entertainment, playing a saw in the dark of the cellar for the sound and experimentation. Of course, he is a child, so perhaps that’s consistent with “boyishness” more broadly: They eschew work in favor of small, lustrous activities.

But one senses he’s on the cusp of these two tendencies, heading toward adulthood. If I may speculate, in theory he could grow up in one of two images, assuming he’s able to partake in the upward mobility of his class and race: Luster could mature to hunt for quarters primarily, lots of them, like Jason; or he could pursue something closer to Benjy’s more elemental (transcendental?) luster, only with conscious direction, perhaps through the medium of the music he discovers at the show. Ultimately, he seems vulnerable, malleable, at a crossroads. What kind of Luster will he be?

I do not mean that his desire for sensation is morally superior to his incipient drive for capital (if we can read that much into his hunt for the quarter). That’s backwards. Some economic frame of mind is essential in “an ideal” person, but perhaps only if it’s kept in balance with that other kind of Luster. In the novel, Luster embodies that balance: He wants money and time only so he can spend it on experience, toward joy; that’s the opposite of miserable Jason, who thinks spending money on “a show” is a waste.

I’ll end by noting that “luster” comes from the Latin lustare, “to illuminate,” and I do find Luster to be a revealing character, maybe one of the most instructive. He seems the best of both lusts. I do wonder if we should see him as a kind of prototypical artist (was that also Prof. Allred’s suggestion?). He is willful, driven like Jason and Quentin (the way he returns to the cellar, even after admonished), but his end goal is an aesthetic or revelatory experience. He embodies that boyish curiosity that seems the drive, also, of a writer.

Shine on, readers. — Nick

A quick note to let you know some study questions are up on AILD for your reading pleasure.  And I would be remiss if I didn’t include the trailer for James Franco’s adaptation of AILD (below): it’s supposedly starting with a limited release on September 27th.  If there’s interest, I’ll try to organize a trip to see the film: there might even be some budget for tickets (or ticket subsidy), so I’ll look into that.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO68Kd2yQsE&w=560&h=315]

One of the first connections I noticed between As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury upon reading the first few chapters of the former is Faulkner’s interest in shifting perspectives, and how different people can view the same situations in such different ways. I find Vardaman’s perspective to be especially interesting (and similar to Benjy’s) in the way that he is trying to make sense of his complicated surroundings with a limited cognitive capacity. While Vardaman’s age is not stated explicitly (or if it is, I must have missed it), I would picture him to be somewhere in the 4-6-age range. Vardaman and Benjy’s narratives are similar in the way that both characters are trying to make sense of the world around them, but fail to accurately understand what is going on. Though in some ways, Benjy’s narrative offers us an unbiased look at the Compson family, it also shows Benjy’s constant confusion. His narrative jumps all over the place, one memory slipping seamlessly into another as words, places, or people remind him of other events. He becomes confused and upset as the golfers yell for their caddies, thinking they are calling out the name of his sister. Vardaman, in trying to make sense of his mother’s death, is also trying to connect different aspects of the world around him in a surreal cause-and-effect stream-of-consciousness. Unlike Benjy, however, Vardaman seems to have strong biases, such as accusing Dr. Peabody of killing his mother.

Much of Vardaman’s narrative finds him trying to make sense of his mother’s death. The way Faulkner writes these sections forces the reader to work from Vardaman’s limited cognitive ability and try to make sense of what he is thinking as he tries to make sense of his surroundings. A good example of this confusion can be found in Vardaman’s second section, when he seems to be trying to make causal connections between the death of his mother and the preparation/cooking of the fish that he caught earlier:

I chopped it up. It’s laying in the kitchen in the bleeding pan, waiting to be cooked and et. Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t. And tomorrow it will be cooked and et and she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there won’t be anything in the box and so she can breathe (66-7).

I’d be lying if I said I understand this passage, but I keep coming back and re-reading it in hopes of making sense of Vardaman’s thought process. The only conclusion I can take away is that Vardaman is trying to make sense of death. He seems traumatized by the remains of the fish after he chops it up and later he gets upset at Cora for cooking the fish. For some reason he begins to refer to his mother as a fish later in his narrative (84, 101). Perhaps, in trying to make sense of his mother’s death, Vardaman is tracing the timeline of events and making connections between the time of her death and the catching of the fish. Vardaman seems to believe that the woman who died in bed is not his mother and that his mother actually left days before. “It was not her. She went away when the other one laid down in her bed and drew the quilt up” (66). In his confusion, it seems that Vardaman believes that the fish he caught is his mother, and the violence involved in chopping up and cooking the fish is perhaps his way of trying to make sense of the trauma involved in losing one’s mother.

Vardaman’s narrative (like much of Faulkner’s writing) produces more questions than it answers. Why does Darl seem to encourage Vardaman’s thought process in their conversation right before the family leaves on the wagon? “But my mother is a fish,” Vardaman says. “Jewel’s mother is a horse,” Darl replies (101). In his conversation with Darl, Vardaman seems to be trying to make sense of his world by listing facts that he believes to be true and making connections based on those facts:

            But my mother is a fish. Vernon seen it. He was there.

            “Jewel’s mother is a horse,” Darl said.

            “Then mine can be a fish, cant it, Darl?” I said.

            Jewel is my bother.

            “Then mine will have to be a horse, too,” I said.

Part of the reason why Vardaman’s narrative is so confusing is because we are seeing into the thought process of a young boy who does not seem to get very much guidance from his older siblings or parents. He is forced to make sense on his own situation, and in doing so he makes jumbled, inaccurate connections and assumptions about the people and circumstances around him. 

Reading this chapter I found Jason’s sociopathic, dominating behavior very interesting. It all began with violence out of love. Infuriated upon finding out about you-know-who skipping school, he was livid, going as far as to threaten to whip her with a belt. You can see the concern, but like everything else he does, the ends do not justify the means. Finding out about Lorraine just proved his superiority complex more than any other. Jason sits there, almost expecting me to feel the pain of why all women are “bitches.” Then you tell me you associate with a woman that you know is with you for your money and calls you “daddy”. By the way you like to say money “has no value” (194) and isn’t important, but then black mail your sister for vast amounts of it. You say it’s to keep them in line but I don’t know where to think your motivations lie. Obviously you hate women more than the idea of money but its insanity. Most of his motivations seem to revolve around this theory that all women have something to prove to him. I don’t think there is any woman that can prove her worth enough. When Quentin grows up I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before she’s on the list. Look at poor Dilsey, this scene killed me, he convinced her she had leprosy. He knows that everyone in the house will catch on to why she can’t look them in the face, but he didn’t care. It’s all about now. Now in controlling you through the bible, now he’s controlling his sister for that money, now he’s telling this woman he will see her again.

Going back to the money “has no value” quote, I think money is more important to him than he cares to admit. Maybe it’s just Caddy’s money, but in his eyes, he is the breadwinner and gatekeeper of their home, and the gatekeeper for a child that isn’t even his. Maybe it’s the fact that he doesn’t know where all this money comes from, but it just seems likely he is forcing himself to be needed in the weirdest way possible. Manipulating people others is the only way he can seem to control his life. He knows he can manipulate Disley by her god-fearing attitude, he knows he can manipulate his mother by constantly convincing her of Caddy being evil, he can manipulate Caddy with her daughter, and he can certainly manipulate some idiot harlot with money. He learned to manipulate people when he had the means to. He always was the tattle-tale because that was his only means at power at the time. Now he’s an adult, the breadwinner, it’s either Jason or the poorhouse. It’s just sick, but I love him for it, what malicious behavior. Maybe it’s because I’m a psychology major, but I just love how he’s so quick to pick up subtle things and use it to his advantage.