Tag Archives: AILD

thoughts on Franco’s film

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Thanks to all who showed up last night: despite the tech difficulties, it was a lot of fun.  But not too much time to chat afterwards, so here’s what I thought about last night as I was accidentally taking the M into deepest Williamsburg and walking 0.5 mi through the rain to find the G:

  • as Nick and I were saying after the screening, it was a remarkably unfunny AILD.  The novel is more funny strange than funny “ha-ha” (more komisch than lustig, for the Germanist cabal in the MA class), but it’s definitely funny.  Franco plays it very straight, putting the focus on the mourners and the loss and diverting our attention, for the most part, from the incongruities and absurdities that gin up the humor.  No “I am a wet seed in the hot wild earth”; no Anse on trees and roads; no Cora Tull at all.  When characters do voice moments that are funny in the novel, they’re often played for pure hypocrisy (e.g., Whitfield’s “bless this house”; Anse’s “meet Mrs. Bundren”; even the JV pharmacist’s taking advantage of DD) despite their being more two-sided in the novel.
  • Along similar lines, I thought Franco emphasized the “human condition” reading of the novel more than the reading of it as an examination of modernization in rural space (full disclosure: my reading, in case that’s not obvious).  So AILD is a timeless tale of the universal human drama of attachment and loss rather than a text that issues from and speaks to a particular moment in history where “modern” and “folk” are rubbing together in ways that are both tragic and comic (but mostly grotesquely comic).
  • For this reason, I thought the last 1/3 of the film sucked: Franco doesn’t really register the strangeness of the Bundrens to Mottstown and Jefferson as strongly as the novel does.  Most problematically, he doesn’t emphasize the way Cash, DD, and Vardaman are complicit in re-routing Addie’s request for their own ends, rather than just Anse.  So the film ends in melodrama (case in point: Cash’s leg has to be gratuitously amputated rather than just poorly reset) rather than irony.
  • And, oddly, given the fact that he’s the only bankable star, Franco’s performance was the weak point of the film for me.  If the scene when Darl is sent away is to work, we have to understand that Darl moves from pretty durned crazy to plumb crazy over the course of the novel. But Franco can’t help but play him as a handsome and charming, but misunderstood artist, who is wrongly betrayed by people who don’t appreciate his genius.  It’s like the Bundrens are the House Republicans and Darl is Franco, who’s NEA grant was withdrawn.  The novel, in contrast, makes clear that everyone sees Darl as unsettingly different (only Cora articulates it positively, but it’s as if he’s some kind of “holy fool” for her), with “eyes full of the land” and such.

Having said all that, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.  The split-screen was a game effort to try to import the novel’s theme of clairvoyance and perspectival shifts into the cinematic medium.  Anse was inspired in many respects: the teeth deserve an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Prosthesis.  I was impressed by how much of the novel’s text was crammed into the film, often quite organically and elegantly, and how much detail was smuggled in via images (Vardaman and the fish; Tull’s shine for Vardaman) thus obviating the need to have annoying voiceover.

Very curious to hear what y’all think, in comments or in separate posts.  Who’s on board for Franco’s TSAF, starring Jon Hamm as big Jason?

The Idolatry Of False Motherhood

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Mary Rubi

Darl doesn’t have a mother. Darl doesn’t have much of a sister either. Dewey Dell is the first one to restrain Darl when he’s taken away to the funny farm. The sibling animosity deepens and transforms as the novel progresses. She turns away when he looks upon her, he sees the sin and she can feel the sensation of knowledge. Dewey Dell knows that Darl knows her secret, Darl knows that Dewey Dell hates him for knowing. She imagines murdering him, buthering him with the knife that Vardaman uses to gut a fish. (121) She, who wishes to let her mother die, wishes to stab her brother. He, who claims not to have a mother, likes to speak about the animals that have replaced his mother. Clearly Vardaman does not have a fish for a mother, nor is Jewel the son of a horse. Their idols are their mothers. Vardaman has transformed his mother into a figment of an idea, a rotting wet corpse in a box. She is fish that needs to be gutted and eaten. Jewel would rather buy and ride his pony than be near his dead mother or his family. The bastard son may have been a diamond in the eyes of his mother, but he cares more for coal than love. Faulkner uses the biblical image of idolatry to depict the severity of the Bundren family and their neighbors. They, who claim to have a personal relationship with God are portrayed as the lowliest of idolaters. Anse repeatedly comments about his piety and good character, he’s done the best he can he says and the good Lord knows it. But he’d rather have a new set of teeth than have loved his wife. He would rather believe that he’s a good Christian man than a prideful fool that won’t seek shelter from the rain. Mrs. Tull is always a signing and praising God, but she makes an idol of her husband. The only character without an idol is Darl, Darl doesn’t have a mother. Death took his real mother, and that’s where his mother can stay. Death becomes a metaphor for a persistent condition that never comes and continues after death. Death is not as it seems, because many of the living are as dead as the decaying body. Addie Bundren might be dead, but her wishes continue to drive her family. Actual death becomes relative, and the death of the soul is the only tangible death. Darl is not mad, yes eccentric, but his eccentricity is wrongfully mistaken for malevolence. He has removed himself from his family, from idolatry, and lives not in the corporal world, but within the confines of his own self. The hushed whispers are not about Darl, but the secrets that he might know about his town. He sees the idolatry and the false mothers. The secrets must die with Darl, and therefore he must be removed.

Addie Bundren (Burden)

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Knowledge, and its precipitious effect on the individual stands as the major theme in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.  We as readers beckon for it, as Faulkner slowly gives us bits and pieces of the nature of the Bundren family. Upon the knowledge of their mother’s death, motives arise, and conflicts go unresolved in the novel.  Take the journey motif in stride, and one will find that truth is the greatest burden for the character and the reader.

Dewey Dell’s enlightenment along her journey reverses the reader’s idea of what life has to offer. The sign “new hope”  ignites Dewey’s meditation on her role as a woman in the deep South. Written in italics to showcase a new and important thought, Faulkner alludes to the cyclical, and pointless nature of life that Dewey Dell believes true, “Thats what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and the despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events”(121). This dense statement takes the reader into the bowels of Dewey Dell and the paradoxical truth of existence as an origin of entropy. The feminine words “womb” and “girdle” underscore Dewey’s helpless position as a single and pregnant woman in the deep south of the early 1900s. Girdle and womb are nouns that signify foundation, or support, yet the image that follows are purely of chaos.  This paradoxical language transforms the idea of life-giving  as deathbearing. This difficult truth upends the reader’s idea of Dewey Dell’s apparently simple character. Her conflict in god, hope, and life shows that truth and knowledge are not always absolute, especially for the limited reader. We find a similar realization with the first  monologue of her mother.

Rotting along the journey, Addie speaks to the reader in language that is purely entropic, yet, according to her logic, true. Through her meditation on life and her role as the giver of it, the reader gains insight into the absurdity of her duty and her meaning of life. She flips what the reader would perceive as the norm upside down. Sin is virtue. Virtue is sin. The only time Addie convinces herself good, or proud, is through the masochistic beatings of school children, the sinful birth of her bastard son Jewel, and her logic that proves words unstable. The idea of words merely as sounds with unstable meanings alludes fits her chaotic view on the world. For instance, she describes Anse and her first two children in a philosophical tone that conveys a sense of identity and therefore, pride, “[…] I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart[…] and that sin and love and fear are just sounds […]”(173). For Addie, the meaning of words, or anything that signifies truth is intangible and always changing. Just as her own death shifts the world about her, truth shifts as uneasily as a supposed finality–death. Addie’s proud tone in her description of the world conveys her own knowledge as disruptive and damaging not just for herself, but for those around her. Further, Addie’s mixed memories and desires in the middle of the book interrupts the orderly sequence of the novel. We are taken out of the  consistent temporal order of the novel, and therefore, are a step closer to the knowledge of Addie as the most disruptive force in the book.

Just as Addie and Dewey use knowledge to legitimate their experience, we as the readers use a similar logic to conclude a truth of the novel : Addie perpetuates chaos. All the Bundrens use their mother’s dying wish as a means to an end. And yes, one can say they are they are their greatest burden. Yet, it all originates from one source, Addie Bundren.

Bag of Winds

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For every step that the Bundren family takes, they seem to take two steps backwards. Their entire journey is marred by terrible fortune and every place that they end up the family seems to lose something, much like the travels of Odysseus who loses men, ships, and everything else as he bounces from island to island trying to get home. Also like Odysseus who suffers much at the incompetencies of his own men, the Bundren family seems to open up their own bag of winds that drive them backwards both physically and mentally. There is a sense of retrogradation that runs through As I Lay Dying. As the family progresses and obtains help from their neighbors, they consistently find themselves in situation worse than the one they were in before. 

The sense of backwards motion is established frequently in descriptions of the world around the Bundrens. Faulkner details the motions of the buzzards and the stars against the backdrop of the smoke of the burning barn as retrograde. Vardaman states that the smoke “makes the stars run backward without falling (225) and that the “stars moved backwards” (223). “Motionless, the tall buzzards hang in soaring circles, the clouds giving them an illusion of retrograde” says Darl describing the buzzards (95). These buzzards are a constant presence in the novel and makes this sense of retrogradation even stronger. The world around the Bundrens seems to be moving backwards even as they advance toward their destination, creating a sense that the environment is pulling elements of their story backwards. 

The Bundrens seem to be at the mercy of something in the world around them that, even if it is somewhat self inflicted, always makes their effort to bury Addie that much more difficult by reverting any process they have made or help that they have acquired to an earlier and inferior state. They manage to get some mules from Tull that allows them to cross the river, but the mules die in the process and they are again without a team. Gillespie allows them to stay in his barn but Darl burns it down. Dewey Dell makes it to a doctor, but he is not a real doctor and feeds her turpentine and talcum powder and takes advantage of her. Cash’s leg heals and not only is it broken again during the trip but it also needs to be amputated. Jewel, who rode in on his beloved horse, now has nothing on which to ride back. Excluding Anse, the family is, by the end of the journey, in a state worse than the one in which they began.  

The backwards motion is also present in the internal narratives of the family, especially visible in the Cash sections. In the beginning of the novel, Cash is almost a carpentry automaton, mourning his mother in a seemingly detached manner as he diligently constructs her coffin. As the novel and the journey of the Bundren family progresses, Cash becomes much more introspective and perceptive as he comes to terms with her death. Here, Faulkner characterizes Cash in both the present, what  is occurring in the novel at that time, and the past, before the death of Addie. His true character and thoughts are seen clearly when his narratorial voice is not as clouded by grief.

Humor and Narrative

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In some ways, the fractured and experimental narrative style of The Sound and the Fury helps Faulkner to avoid pitfalls of melodrama. Though the story is in many ways overwrought and sensational, it must be filtered through non conventional narrative techniques which inhibit the types of tropes and familiar cliches associated with the gothic form.

Similarly, the collective narration of As I Lay Dying moderates the dark burlesque humor of the novel. The humor ranges from Cora’s many mistakes in her early narrative section, to Vardaman boring holes into his mother’s face to let her corpse breathe inside her coffin, to the sick irony of Dewey Dell’s rape, culminating in the final image of Anse returning to the family with new teeth and a new wife. The humor is over the top, but because the plot itself is buried beneath the competing narrations, thre reader must take few extra steps before the humor becomes apparent.

This technique of buried irony contributes to several themes throughout the novel. The increasingly disastrous journey (the fire, the cemented leg, the lack of a shovel) generates a dramatic irony that implicates both an authorial presence, and associates this presence with both a malevolent God and the backlash of violated Nature. The nearly slapstick comedy of ill and breaking and rotting bodies reinforces the novels central concern with the paradox of the “being” and the physical object which contains that being. Formally, the humor complicates the intent of the novel, frustrating tragic proportions but never foreclosing to potential tragedy of the family. 

The final “gag” of Anse’s return is the most blatant and, in some ways, the least effective. But the build up of Anse’s repeated desire for new teeth, and his mysterious loyalty to his wife’s wishes despite general laziness, lends a sense of inevitability to the final joke. The reader simultaneously can’t believe Anse’s callousness, and cannot imagine any other outcome to the journey. Humor, as a a technique buried beneath broken narration and the readerly task of constructing a coherent narrative, ultimately structures the characteristics of the Bundren family and the pitfalls of their journey. The humor of the novel successfully assimilates complex themes within a sort of ironic authorial omniscience and undermines the concept of authorial mastery by undercutting the seriousness of the novel itself. 

Eating The Wooden Face of Death

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Mary Rubi

They have wooden faces to match their wooden hearts, to make their wooden coffins. It’s a real shame that Addie Budren has to be so far from her people. Insistent and wanton ‘till her death, Addie wants to be buried in her family plot in the Mississippi countryside and will drive her family to madness. There is a clear sense of separation and distance between Addie and her family, her assertion in having her way and being buried away from her present home is a sign that in life she has already removed herself. Calling upon her children from her deathbed, she demands and says nothing otherwise. Her death is just another job to be done. Like plowing the field or milking a cow, the death of the wife and mother is a part of the daily routine. There is more passion in Kate’s account of cake baking than the arrangements made for the funeral. Kate, very proudly, claims that she has saved up so many of her ingredients that her cake cost her nothing to make. The eggs were given to her. Kate depicts no trace of anger or resentment when her rich ‘ole customer refuses the cakes because the party had been canceled. With a shrug of her shoulders, she’s more content with losing the sale because she hasn’t lost any profit. Not losing money is as important as gaining wealth.

The Budren boys can’t eat their mother, so the loss of Addie is not as exciting as eating cake. Her children are more interested in referring to their loss of three dollars than comforting their dying mother. Losing money is worse than death. Clearly, their decisions as a family are not based on love, but on survival. Their possible loss of three dollars creates a division among the brothers. With silent resentment, they attempt to grant Addie’s command. Cash doesn’t build a coffin for the love of his mother; he builds because it is his obligation to carry out the wish of a dying woman. There is little love in the Budren household. Dewey Dell mistakes quiet observance for affection when she watches Darl see his mother in her deathbed. (24) He’s staring into oblivion, but she thinks he his gaze reflects tender thoughts. There are numerous descriptions of the characters staring ahead, as if dead themselves. Their woodiness, of mind and action, is a reflection of their wooden splintered souls.

Sundquist supplementary reading

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I’ve added several critical articles to the AILD subfolder within our shared Dropbox folder.  For BAs, all these are optional, depending on your time and interest.  For MAs, I’d like you to read the Sundquist essay for next time; the others are purely optional.  For those interested in the representations of rural space and poor whites in the novel, the Lester article might be especially interesting.

Alternative Motives within the Bundren Family

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The final moments of Addie Bundren seem to reflect the disharmony in the family and the separation they have from the outside world. Cash, who has only spoken once says “She’s gone” (48), brings about an eerie mood; he acts almost as a death reaper as he constructs a casket for Addie outside her bedroom. Cash may foreshadow the bad luck the family will carry once Addie is dead or Cash may be taking the bad luck, Addie Bundren, away from the family.  Cora and Jewel seem to be the most emotionally distant from Addie’s illness, as Cora wants acknowledgement and possibly be rewarded for staying by Addie’s side while Jewel doesn’t seem to be emotionally impacted. On page 19, Jewel mentions, “If everybody wasn’t burning hell to get her there… with Cash all day long right under the window, hammering and sawing at that”, her father responds by “You got no affection nor gentleness for her. You never had.” All the while, on page 22, Cora commends for watching over Addie as she hopes one day her family will do the same for her. From those two comments it would seem they would be unreliable narrators as they are biased and out for self-pity. Darl’s narrations are more evoked with imagery and sound and quite reminiscent of some of Benjy’s characteristics from TSAF. Darl is most in touch with Addie’s illness as he is able to sense the oncoming death (27, 40) and is the only person who is insistent on mentioning if Addie is going to die. Darl is very conscious and aware of his surroundings like Benjy to Caddy. However, on page 40, Darl’s conversation with Dewey Dell “You want her to die so you can get to town is that it?” transitions Addie’s death as a means of escape. Also, Anse’s constant mention of teeth “God’s will be done, now I can get them teeth” (52) may present Addie Bundren as a burden and possibly bad luck on the family.

The entropy that exists in this book lies from the Bundren family’s want to escape to the outside world, a world beyond their home on the hill. On pages 32 and 42, it mentions the fixation Anse has towards leaving his home, “Eyes look like pieces of burnt-out cinder” and “Anse has not been in town in twelve years.” The references of road and town once Addie has died lead me to believe she held the family together while Anse is the person tearing the family apart. Nonetheless, Addie’s burial ground will be in Jefferson in which during the journey will clarify how Addie Bundren contributed to her family, what each family member’s true motive for “escape” is,  and the definition of “bad luck” which has been repeated on numerous occasions.

Memento Mori

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    William Faulkner spends much of the first fifty-two pages of his As I Lay Dying foreshadowing the death of Addie Bundren. There is no description of Addie gradually becoming ill here. Faulkner begins the work with an Addie who is already sick and very near death while elements of both the natural world and the doings of the Bundren family function as a sort of clock ticking down the moments until she passes. Cash’s saw, Dewey Dell’s fan, the buzzards, and the approaching storm all add this foreboding and looming sense of imminency to Addie’s death and the difficulties faced by the Bundrens in an attempt to bury her.
    In the beginning of the novel, the voice of Cash is nowhere to be heard, but the noises of the “snore” of his saw and the “chuck” of his axe are constantly present as he constructs Addie’s casket right outside of her window. The monotonous and repetitious sound of the casket being put together fills the air with an audible reminder of Addie’s coming death for the Bundrens and for Addie herself. Jewel, unhappy with the proximity to the window and believing it to be creating a spectacle of her death, notes the persistence of the noise. He says that Cash is sawing and hammering “until a man cant sleep even” (15). These noises create an ever present and unpleasant audible atmosphere of gloom that suffocates the boundaries of the Bundren household. “I could hear Cash sawing a mile before I got there” says Peabody as he gives a range to the noise and reinforces the strength of this auditory manifestation of dread and anxiety (42). Dewey Dell’s fan serves a similar purpose. Just like the almost mechanized workings of Cash, Dewey Dell ceaselessly fans her dying mother. Cora notes that she “swaps the fan to the other hand without stopping it” (9). The routine nature of the carpentry tools and the fan not only add to this sense of an almost tangible gloom, but also are almost time-telling agents. Each gust of air and the approaching completion of the coffin serve as physical reminders that the regular passage of time is still occurring; every fan and every cut essentially count down Addie’s last moments.
    The weather in this opening section is also a foreboding presence. Almost all of the narrators comment on the ominous clouds and the difficulties they present to travelers. Given the origin of the novel’s title and the fact that the story details the strange odyssey of the Bundren family, I could not help but draw comparisons to the storms of epic poetry. A catastrophic storm is an epic convention that often scatters travelers and creates new challenges in their journey as seen in Virgil, Homer, and others. This “cyclone” certainly presages the death of Addie and the hardships that the Bundren family will face in an attempt to bury her (42). I saw another example of classical foreshadowing in the talk of the buzzards. In Homer, exposure of the unburied dead to the animals was seen as a polluting agent that would keep misfortune around, and the incompletion of Addie’s burial wishes is comparable to this; the family will face difficulties until Addie is buried in Jefferson.

Stasis and Dread

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For a novel about a journey, As I Lay Dying is surprisingly preoccupied with stasis. Despite the range of descriptive techniques that Faulkner employs throughout the narrative, many passages become obsessive reflections on the stillness and immobility of the landscape, of human kind, the permanence of action. Time seems to be stuck, and the action of the novel is operating in a landscape that has been paused.

Peabody offers the most succinct summary of the novels theme of stasis. He says:

“That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image. (45)”

This almost paradoxical understanding of the southern landscape as an ominous, brooding, static power stands in contrast to the pervasive sense of the landscape as fate, shaping the action and destinies of the family. In this way, Faulkner frames setting as monumental and godlike. Following our discussion of the conclusion on The Sound and the Fury , where Faulkner used a racially problematic symbol of Dilsey to express the persevering concept of monumental time, As I Lay Dying shifts this symbol to the landscape, which bears down ominously on the Bundrens.

Even in the scenes of action, a sense of stillness lends tension and dread. Darl narrates in the scene of the river crossing that:

“Pa and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice. (146)”

Darl’s quotation shows how the theme of stasis, which is certainly evocative of Faulkner’s ambiguous relationship towards the South, is also a structural strategy of suspense and tension. Just as the looming storm hovers over the narrative as a suspenseful possibility, the landscape that the characters move through hovers as a space of dread where time is both essential and nonexistent.