I’ve posted some new study questions on LIA that cover the part of the text the BAs will be discussing tomorrow (chs. 6-8).

This is just a quick whatever blog post, in a world of more substantial ones. 

There is a lot of horror circulating around the female body in the Light in August, from Joe Christmas’ disgust for menstruation to the shameful physicality of Lena Grove’s pregnancy. In the novel, Faulkner represents the sexuality of women as a subject of repulsion within southern culture. Lena Grove’s pregnancy is repulsive because it is the result of a union of desire, rather than the social success of a married pregnancy. The ambivalence between desire for women and disgust with the actuality of their bodies and subjectivity is a central theme of the novel, and an important subtext of the larger theme of encroaching modernity. 

The fact of female sexuality is made explicit through the taboo of miscegenation. Through the logic of social structures, there can be no positive social or personal result from sexual contact between a white woman and a black man. The taboo of this coupling, a racist result originating in slavery, prohibits the generation of any “excuse” for the woman other than sexual desire. Subsequently, the subject of miscegenation is doubly invested with social horror–the racist context joined with a sort of proof of female desire. 

Joe Christmas is psychologically positioned within the conjunction of both of these socially repugnant transgressions. His very body represents a past of miscegenation, while his desire can only be realized in the act of miscegenation. Faulkner’s psychological representations of his violence towards women, and his disgust with the desire that they show for him indicts the paradox of a society that has set up, through slave history, both the reality of and the disgust for miscegenation.  

One of the most noticeable and intriguing motifs of Light In August is Faulkner’s usage of original compound words, beginning on pages 4 and 5 with bugswirled and stumppocked. Some of these inventions are lyrical but very specific one-and-dones (branchshadowed [189], pinewiney [8]) while others are perfect, endlessly useful articulations with no previous analogue (countryfaced [180], workhard [16], mansmelling [48]). With few exceptions, Faulkner’s new words elegantly complement the language (moreso, perhaps, than the Collins-recognized amazeballs?) and the English-speaking world would benefit from their wider adoption.

As someone who often feels hampered by the idiosyncratic restrictions of formal academic writing, I admire Faulkner’s boldness in the face of the rules, not only with such antiquated devices as comprehensible narrative, but also with the official lexicon and his subtle war on contractions. (Why not cant and dont? They’re better! I’m joining in on that one.) LIA proves that the contents of the dictionary are sometimes insufficient. And I’m not being sarcastic, by the way. And why cant a sentence begin with “and?”

Faulkner’s new compounds are all over the place (the novel is truly neologipocked). Here is a brief selection from the first half: creakwheeled, limpeared (7), slowspitting (26), manlooking (11), manhard (16), inwardlighted (18), fatherblood, motherblood (26), man-stale (42), manshaped (115), womansmelling (121), pinkwomansmelling (122), womansinning, womansuffering, woman filth (128-129, all coined by the oldtestament, misogynistic hospital janitor), womanshenegro (156, which Carolyn Porter calls “the novel’s most telling verbal invention”), overlarge, bigknuckled (179), greasecrusted, frictionsmooth, highboned (180), hardfeeling, hardsmelling, notseeing, hardknowing, deathcolored (189).

Faulkner places them inconsistently; we’ll see none for almost an entire chapter and then four within a single paragraph. The new compounds are most concentrated in passages that deal with gender, sex and race. When Joe meets with the white waitress for a sexual liaison on page 189, they suddenly come fast and furious. Faulkner has compounded words like this in previous works but not with such volume and significance. He leaves an impression of language echoing character, or more largely, theme, something like: people are compounds of various identities – a mashup of demographic overlaps and the sum of how others perceive them. The play with language metaphorically alludes to Joe Christmas’s identity above all. He is a whitehenegro, or perhaps an orphanwhitemannigger, which I humbly submit as an even more appropriate title for this remarkable book than Light In August or Dark House.

Faulkner places the Bundrens, the family of our focus in As I Lay Dying, within settings with specific topographical features that illustrate certain aspects of the family. The Bundrens’ house in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi sits upon a hill, at the base of which there appears to lay a field. Woods are also mentioned, presumably a little ways beyond the open field. It becomes clear that the voyage up the hillside appears to require a certain amount of effort in order to reach its summit. The heavyset doctor, Peabody,  reckons it would take fifteen minutes, “even with the horse… to ride up across the pasture to the top of the ride and reach the house,” adding that the path “looks like a crooked limb blown against the bluff” (42). The hill sets the family apart and the woods further remove them. Assembling them in such a landscape illustrates the family’s isolation and detachment – physically and psychologically – from any sense of community and simultaneously their detachment from one another. There is a road that passes close by (which one could argue clearly stands for the fast approaching modernity of early twentieth century America) though Anse Bundren, the somewhat pitiful patriarch, bemoans its very existence. “A-laying there, right up to my door, where every bad luck that comes and goes is bound to find it” (35), he gripes.  It should come as no surprise that Anse is not the sort of person who in keen on any sort of progression into the future. Jewel Bundren, on the other hand, imagines forcing all of his family members and neighbors to the bottom of the hill, keeping only his mother by his side at the peak, essentially because he’s sick and tired of everybody. “It would just be me and her on a high hill,” he thinks, bitterly, “and me rolling the rocks down the hill at their faces.” (15). Their journey to bury Addie therefore gives them a reason to abandon their solitude.

I was relieved to find that Faulkner chose to incorporate far more humor into As I Lay Dying than he did with The Sound and the Fury, which is something I really didn’t fully grasp the first time I read this book. Although, in all likelihood, after the complete lack of all comedy in The Sound and the Fury, I was probably just desperate for a laugh. Despite the dark, tragic, even grotesque, subject matter, there is a great deal of comic effect at play.

Anse is certainly something of a caricature. He reminds me of Ebenezer Scrooge, someone whose surly attitude is so absurd it’s silly. (Unfortunately, it seems there is little hope Anse is going to recover any unadulterated compassion for the world – probably because he had so had little to begin with). Backwards, lazy, and painfully unaware, Anse spends the days surrounding his wife’s death day dreaming about the teeth he’s going to pick up once they get to Jefferson to bury his deceased wife’s body. Few characters have good things to say about Anse. Actually, nobody ever says anything good about Anse. Even the doctor, Peabody, upon receiving word from to come visit with Addie, proclaims “‘He has wore her out at last.’ And I said a damn good thing, and at first I would not go because there might be something I could do and I would have to haul her back, by God” (41). (It also occurred to me while writing this post that by demanding to be buried in Jefferson and forcing her family to haul her dead body halfway across the state, Addie is essentially, finally, having the last laugh).

Though much of what he says is really quite poignant, the voice Faulkner employs to portray the youngest Bundren boy is simultaneously endearing and amusing which provides a thread of comic relief within his experience. Vardaman’s thoughts are often scattered, distracted, even somewhat fretful, as he deals with the trauma of his mother passing. “Dewey Dell said we will get some bananas,” Vardaman muses, “the train is behind the glass, red of the track. When it runs the track shines on and off. Pa said flour and sugar and coffee costs so much. Because I am a country boy because boys in town. Bicycles” (66). Vardaman comes to understand his mother’s death – and really the reality of death as a whole – in relation to the fish he caught and killed earlier on that day but, regardless, the idea of Addie lying in her coffin terrifies Vardaman. “I got shut up in the crib… I couldn’t breathe because the rat was breathing up all the air. I said ‘Are you going to nail it shut, Cash? Nail it? Nail it?'” (65). So, later that night, Vardaman drills a few holes through the top of the coffin and winds up putting a couple in Addie’s face in a well meant, but hilariously misguided and grotesque, attempt to allow his mother to breath. These idea’s which Vardaman pieces together to make sense of what he knows about life not only illuminates the genius of childhood logic but hints towards a deeper understanding we will see Vardaman come to hold later on in the novel.

Of course, we could not discuss the humor in this novel without mentioning Cora and Vernon Tull who provide a great deal of comic relief through their painfully off-mark and pious judgements. The quintessential nosy neighbors – although genuinely helpful – the Tulls certainly make it a point to be involved with their neighbor’s business. “For the last three weeks I have been coming over every time I could, coming sometimes when I shouldn’t have, neglecting my own family and duties so that somebody would be with her in her last moments,” (22), Cora muses to herself as she sits at the bedside of the dying Addie Bundren. Not that Cora minds terribly. She later insists on waking her husband and driving back over to the Bundren household in the middle of the night, in the rain, when she learns of Addie’s death because (as she declares to her husband), “it’s my Christian duty. Will you stand between me and my Christian duty?” (69). In an amusing testament to her faith and to her status as an upstanding citizen, Vernon later remarks, “I reckon if there’s ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter how He was running it” (73-74).

Just a note to inform you that I’ve made slight changes to the assignment due dates to both syllabi and included my office location (duh).  The most pressing change is that MAs have an extra week to post their second “medium” wiki entry.

In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner is able to create a multitude of characters worthy of heavy analysis, consideration and characterization. The book resists a distinction of having a “most important character”- a case could be made for most of the major characters in the book as being the most important, in terms of plot, or message, or underlying force. But I think it can be argued that this book falls on the shoulders of the patriarch of the Bundren family: Anse Bundren. He charges himself with the restoration of the Bundren family by way of setting his wife in the ground in Jefferson (while having ulterior motives). But while I consider this a story of restoration, so to speak, I think that ultimately Anse fails.

Anse is first presented to the reader as sort of an incompetent, impotent male figure on the Bundren property. Unwilling to move, unwilling to work and often with a look on his face that resembles a stunned animal, the novel reveals him to be a shrewd manipulator of sorts, one who can conserve and negotiate to attain things he may have no right to have in the first place. A description of him was thrown out in class as a “Machiavellian rube.” While I particularly like that characterization of him I think it’s only appropriate to modify it to read something more like a “rube with Machiavellian ambitions”, however less catch-phrasey that may be. Because I think that throughout the entire novel, Anse is operating at a loss. For all his engagement with modernity and the commodity exchange culture philosophy he embraces, he can never seem to get beyond his starting point, and while he gains things of symbolic value, the economic value of his decisions is questionable at best, and disastrous as worst. He is simply an unlucky man. He knows it as well, alluding to his luck by stating, “I am the chosen of the Lord, for who he loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if he dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like” (110) as well as previously alluding to the bad luck that is able to access their home due to the presence of the road (35). The reader sees the transitive philosophy of wealth and exchange that the Bundren family seems to hold in a description of why Jewel is so angry with Darl for burning down the barn, and this philosophy highlights exactly what Anse is: a rube.

Throughout the novel there are examples of objects and ideas standing in for each other (Vardaman’s mother is a fish, Darls mother is a horse, Cash’s identity is in his tools) and for some reason the Bundren’s (and Anse in particular) think that this “stand-in” philosophy can apply to their economic sensibilities. This is I think best exemplified by the gesture from Anse at the end of the novel, when he walks up with the graphophone, presumably to give it to Cash. Cash’s enjoyment of music is noted in an earlier passage as is his desire to at one point bargain with Surret to get a graphophone himself (“I believe I could have dickered Surret down to five dollars on that one of his. It’s a comfortable thing, music is. (236)) Of course, this is ruined by the injury to his leg and subsequent damage done by the cement. The reader is supposed to acknowledge Anse’s acquisition of the graphophone as part of his new wife’s dowry as a symbolic replacement for Cash’s leg. And while that’s all very nice (sort of), I think that the reader is supposed to look further and acknowledge that Anse’s engagements with modernity ultimately fail. He has the right idea for a person in his situation trying to get above the tide: to maximize utility and conserve and manipulate to his own ends. But when you see the outcome of his dealings/manipulations/conservations you (or at least I) wonder if it was worth it at all. The rationale behind using the ten cents worth of cement was that if it was bought it must be used. But when that use maims the only skilled worker in your family to the point where not only can he not perform the skilled work that he was doing prior but he can’t continue on to do the regular work required of him at the household as well as perform prior engagements (fixing Tull’s barn) to repay debt, was a graphophone really an appropriate recompense for all of that? And that’s not including the medical bills he will undoubtedly have to pay Peabody as well as any potential accommodations he may have to make for Cash should he lose his leg. He essentially added two mouths that won’t do any labor (Cash and the new Mrs. Bundren) and lost two (and possibly three) able bodied workers in Cash, Darl and possibly Dewey Dell (her eventual labor will prevent her from doing her household duties).  For every small gain Anse gets with his ability to deal, or manipulate, or whatever you want to call it, he is set back significantly in another way.

Darl’s departure is something that aids in this characterization. His laughter can indicate the ridiculous amount of trouble the family went through to get where they are at the point at which he leaves, and he acknowledges that they are way more screwed than he is at this point. He sees Anse’s attempts to employ modernistic practices as the futile efforts of the farmer engaging the modern world, much in the same sense that Jason views the farmer in relation to the NYSE.

The description of Anse in the beginning of the novel is particularly apt: “He looks like right after the maul hits the steer and it no longer alive and dont yet know that it is dead. (61)” Anse is that steer to the very end. While he may be doing his deals and maximizing the utility of what he has access to, he’s dead already and he just doesn’t know it yet. This recalls the passage from Addies chapter where she utters that exact sentiment. “He did not know that he was dead, then. (173)” So, in a broad sense to recap where Anse leads the family- he loses one wife and sets out to replace her (to bury her too, but we all know why he wants those teeth- and it’s not just for “victuals”). He lost two mules crossing the river, but traded Jewel’s horse to get two more mules. So they are down one horse. He gets some shelter and some food but ends up having to lose his son for it. So now he’s down one horse and one son and one wife. He gets some cement with good intentions, but due to his frugal nature he decides to use it in an ill-advised medical application and loses his son’s leg (or ability of a leg, and therefore a son as an able bodied and skilled worker). So by the end of the novel he has acquired a graphophone, some cement, teeth, a wife and a grandchild, while losing two sons physically (and potentially three considering Jewel most certainly blames him for the loss of his horse and would be prone to running away or sacrificing his nights again to work elsewhere), a horse, some cement and indebting himself to numerous other characters along the way. And that was just the way there- the journey back will most likely be as difficult and present many of the same problems, but with two less men to help. To me, that does not sound like the workings of someone who is particularly skilled at business (or manipulation).