Tag Archives: William Faulkner

Black Blood Annotated Bibliography

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Plenty has been written about Faulkner, race, how his characters are created, so it was not too difficult to find articles, mostly through CUNY+, Zotero [first time user!], Project Muse, Jstor, our Yonknapedia page for the sources used in the blood/miscegenation/racism entries, and google scholar. What was a bit difficult was finding [mostly] articles that were either specific to my topic or considering how its main points fit my central idea. I found it more challenging to find books that I could appropriately use as sources; I thought about considering some that focused on race, but I struggled to find a strong enough connection between my proposal and other Faulkner works such as Soldier’s Pay.  I wonder if I may have been too specific in my search. Overall, the process was not daunting and I’m grateful for the zotero site Prof. Allred built because it lead to some thought-provoking articles.

Works Cited:

  • Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage, 1936.
    An analysis of Henry’s anxiety with blackness and Sutpen’s seeming lack of anxiety and how both respond to Charles Bon’s lineage. I am fascinated with where and how this knowledge is revealed or hidden, and where it is used as a tool for power or destruction.
  • Entzminger, Betina. “Passing as Miscegenation: Whiteness and Homoeroticism in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!.” Faulkner Journal 22.1/2 (2007): 90.

In depth study of the Southern taboo of mixing blood [hemophobia] as well as the anxiety that it caused in society. This essay considers the parallels of “passing” [for white] with miscegenation and homoeroticism. Although my paper won’t focus on the homoeroticism of AA, it will focus on why Faulkner’s characters strived for clear and strict social and racial boundaries, as well as great anxiety blurring of these boundaries or lack of boundaries created within the characters.

 

  • Ladd, Barbara. “‘The Direction of the Howling’: Nationalism and the Color Line in Absalom, Absalom!” American Literature, vol. 66, no. 3, 1994, pp. 525–551., www.jstor.org/stable/2927603.

Ladd explores the octoroon identity as both a collage of others and an uncertainty of belonging. I want to use this article to explore how the structure of the  Yoknapatawpha cultural identity included race as well as how ‘the other’ [such as Black] was both embedded into it and threatened by it.

 

  • Masami Sugimori.“Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity in Absalom, Absalom!”  The Faulkner Journal. Mar. 1, 2008. P 3-22

This essay explores the correlation of Blackness and Whiteness and how they are perceived and why it matters in Yoknapatawpha County. The trouble with these perspectives is the ambiguity of Bon – where he fits in and how his mind is “limited and trapped by a body.”

 

  • Kartiganer, Donald. “The Blackness of Absalom, Absalom!” Faulkner and Mystery. Trefzer, Annette, and Ann J. Abadie, eds. JACKSON: U of Mississippi, 2014. 19-48. Web.

This article focuses on the language the four narrators use to describe, speak about, and grapple with Black. Based on their perspectives, we get subtle to very different responses and they all demonstrate some of that cultural anxiety of blurred boundaries, mixing labels, or a disregard for labels and borders.

  • Puxan-Oliva, Marta. “A Mysterious Heart: ‘Passing’ and the Narrative Enigma in Faulkner’s ‘Light in August’ and ‘Absalom, Absalom!”.” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 58, no. 1, 2013, pp. 51–78. www.jstor.org/stable/43485859.

This article focuses on a “narrative enigma of the characters who are able to pass for White, and because that narrative enigma is not resolved and it remains unclear if the characters passing, need to do so or if it is just paranoia.  Faulkner focuses more so on the fear that white Southerners have towards characters who can pass, than the actual passing.

 

  • Snead, James A. “Light in August and the Rhetorics of Racial Division.” Faulkner and Race: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha (1986): 152-169. Print.

This chapter focuses on the fracturing that a society imposes on itself because of the rigid divisions and racial rhetoric it creates and upholds. As stated, “The futility of applying these strictly binary categories to human affairs is the main lesson in Faulkner’s novels” is demonstrated with characters such as Charles Bon, Joe Christmas, and to an extent, Thomas Sutpen.

 

  • Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes.” “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Ed. Gates. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.1-20. Print.

This essay also focuses on author’s rhetoric on race and how it transforms characters and the world they inhabit. I am not entirely sure if I will use this source, however, I want to give myself a few more days to read it again and make a decision.

Hear, See, Speak No Evil [1st LIA post]

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Lena Grove does not want to hear no evil. After Lucas Burch, her mysterious lover, implies he must go away but he will send for her once he’s all settled down, she patiently and serenely waits, while her belly continues to swell. She does not hear the awful truth in his honey-covered lie; he will not send for her. He won’t make her a Burch. She will not see him again.

Lena relies on the kindness of her Southern strangers to help her meet her lover all the way in Mississippi. She does not hear the incredulity and  contempt and pity in their voices, when she tells them [often without being asked] of his promise, the time past, and her goal. Even among strangers who quietly listen to her tale, like the squatting, overalled men, she “tells her story again, with that patient and transparent recapitulation of a lying child” [25]. It is a summary she continues to tell, as though with each telling, it becomes more real to Lena. As I read her recapitulation again, I find myself feeling pity for Lena, as some of her audiences also demonstrate. But as I analyze the analogy of a lying child, my sentiments of pity heighten, because Lena is aware, though she would prefer not to be, that she is pursuing not a man waiting at the finish line, but one who will continue to run evermore. Her patient and serene profile is how she survives; it’s what allows her to put one barefoot in front of the other, all the way from Alabama.

While there is a lack of hearing on Lena Grove’s part, there is a lack of seeing Lena among the strangers she encounters. Mr. Armstid, who dropped Lena off at a crossroads that should have brought her closer to her lover thought, “she’s not listening…If she could hear words like that, she would not be getting down from this wagon…hunting for a man she aint going to ever see again and that she has already seen one time too many as it is…” [24]. It takes Armstid a good long while before he fully looks at her. In fact, he intentionally avoids fully looking at her and does not touch her to help her on and off the wagon he offers her a ride in. Even after she has slowly but finally climbed onto his wagon and they’ve spoken, “Armstid has never once looked full at her. Yet he has already seen that she wears no wedding ring” [12]. People look for markers – as well as the absence of particular markers – to tell them what is deemed important about a person. Lena’s swollen belly and empty finger ring of evil. To fully see her is to see sadness and sin.

Yet Byron hears the evil; “he listened quietly [to Jefferson], while thinking to himself how people everywhere are about the same, but at the same time [in a small town]…people can invent more of it in other people’s names” [71].  He tries not to speak the evil of hurtful gossip or to lie, not to Rev. Hightower and not to a very pregnant Lena, whom he has fallen in love with. Though he is able to see her fully, he cannot speak evil, he cannot lie. He unwillingly  and partially unwittingly reveals who Joe Brown is. He speaks a truth, yet he is filled with regret at the possibility of reuniting the woman he’s fallen in love with, with a horrible drunk.

Jefferson: a town of “gaunt” faces (Light in August Ch. 1 – 7)

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Gaunt – adjective

  1. (of a person) lean and haggard, especially because of suffering, hunger, or age.

In the first third of Light in August, readers are introduced to characters with faces that are insufferable, frozen, tight, grave, and perhaps the most recurring descriptor of them all, gaunt (32, 63, 69, 79, 89). Naturally, this leads me to raise a question with regard to the denizens of the novel’s hub: why the long faces?

As things would appear, there’s a lot more to Jefferson and its inhabitants than meets the untrained eye.

One of the most resonant themes in the novel presents itself in the Jeffersonian’s association of blackness with heathens. Indeed, the townsfolk cause a dramatic scene on minister Hightower’s premises on the notion “that he had that negro woman in the house alone with him all day” (71) blaming her for the suicide of his wife while the matron of the white orphanage expresses shocked disbelief at the knowledge that they’d been housing a black orphan and urgency to send him away. Even that very same orphan, Joseph Christmas, suggests the undoing of his foster father would be the knowledge that “he has nursed a nigger beneath his own roof” (169) and he is hunted after for the death of Mrs. Burden simply on the basis that “he’s got nigger blood in him” (98).

Black characters in the novel are persecuted when they are found out and as a result, bystanders are rendered sullen and droopy-faced as they are inevitably entangled in the society’s racist ideology just as German civilians during a Naziist regime.

Perhaps the most revealing character to examine for this phenomenon of widespread gauntness is Joseph Christmas. We are introduced to the character when he first steps on the scene in Jefferson’s mill community in raggedy clothes and upon closer examination, Byron describes that, “his face was gaunt, the flesh a level dead parchment color” (34).

When thinking about where Joseph’s gauntness comes from, it’s important to remember that the closest he had to any sort of tender loving figure was Alice who was torn away from him at a tender age of three. While Mrs. McEachern tries to take on that substitutive role as a nurturing foster mother, Joseph mentally and physically cannot bring himself to accept her caring even making a display of flipping her tray of food over and eating the scraps after she departs the room (155).

When I think of the type of gaunt face that Joseph bears, I think of a weathered face that has suffered lack of love and excessive physical labor, so much so that it even stands apart from the weathered faces of millworkers. Minister HIghtower is also described as having a long face and oddly enough “gaunt shoulders” (79) but when I think what weighs down his features, I think moreso about how he suffers the mental burden of painful knowledge such as that of his wife’s death or his dead grandfather. This sense of burden carries over when he begins thinking about how Lena, the one person who comes bursting on the scene without a trouble to boot, will fare amidst the troubled faces in the small world of Jefferson.

I do want to close on some questions that stood out to me. When the town (Jefferson) recounts the tale of Hightower refusing to evacuate town and the townsfolk lobbing accusations at him, the passage reads: “that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind” (71). What words came to your mind when you read that section? What sentiment do you think passes from person to person when a tragedy like the suicide of his wife occurs? Can you connect this moment to the one where Christmas is chased down for murdering Burden?

Thomas Sutpen: A Man’s Man

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Absalom, Absalom!, like Light in August before it, reflects a shift in Faulkner’s literary approach and subject matter from a focus on single families, as in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, to larger, though fragmented, communities. Thomas Sutpen, the central figure in Absalom, Absalom!, stands as the patriarchal locus of the townspeople of Jefferson that is so captivated, mesmerized and repulsed, by him. All of the novel’s narrators give voice to the obsessive nature with which the entire town observes and judges Sutpen. Albeit for different reasons (i.e. Rosa’s personal resentment, Shreve’s quest for knowledge of the South), they are each compelled to outline his mysterious and complicated influence on themselves, their families, and the town of Jefferson at large. In this light, Sutpen’s presence may be seen for the patriarchal notions he upholds.

Quentin’s narration, in particular, reflects the complex reverence, founded by fear and lack of understanding, that Sutpen’s contemporaries held towards him. Quentin, like the citizens of Jefferson, Sutpen’s neighbors, see him in light of the influence he carved out and collected for himself from that “best virgin bottom land in the country” (AA 26). More specifically, he and they, both, see this influence in light of its patriarchal domination, as is reflected by Quentin’s ponderings on the essence of fatherhood in a conversation he has with Shreve: “Yes. Maybe we are both Father . . . Yes, we are both Father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve, maybe it took Father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us,” (AA 210). In Quentin’s mind Sutpen is painted as an ultimate, capital “F”, Father figure, which harks back to Quentin’s own allusions to Sutpen, based on Rosa’s first descriptions of him, as embodying a Godlike essence: “Then in the long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch them . . . drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen’s Hundred, the Be Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be Light” (AA 4).

This latter association is particularly interesting, considering the perspective that created it (Quentin’s) versus the one that inspired its creation (Rosa’s). In other words, the question that begs to be answered is: “What meaning lies in the fact that Quentin likens Sutpen to God based on Rosa’s continuous and explicit reference to him as a ‘demon’ and ‘ogre’?” Firstly, I would point to the different social standing each character embodies. Rosa, who describes herself as “an orphan a woman and a pauper,” holds a much lower status in the social hierarchy of the time compared to Quentin (AA 12-13). Simply because of his maleness and the respectability, declining though it is, of the Compson name he bears, Quentin is able to neutralize Rosa’s acutely negative portrayal of Sutpen into one marked by first and foremost by awe, rather than disgust. Secondly, Quentin is the direct descendant, the grandson, of Sutpen’s first friend in Jefferson, General Compson. This highlights the patrilineal aspect of Quentin’s privilege that leads him to develop such a reverent conception of Sutpen.

Sutpen himself, too, reflects the novel’s patrilineal structure and focus. His ultimate goal in life, what motivates his every action, is revealed by the “design” he refers to in Chapter 7 (AA 212). This “design,” of course, is fundamentally entwined in patriarchy and patrilineality. As he supposedly explained to General Compson, “To accomplish it I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family—incidentally of course, a wife,” it becomes clear that Sutpen’s objective was about establishing a solid patriarchal footing in the place of Sutpen’s Hundred (AA 212). The money, the mansion, the slaves and plantation would serve to perpetuate power within the Sutpen lineage, or family. That Sutpen is concerned primarily with his theoretical male descendants, his patrilineage, is more than clear from his assessment of the role his theoretical wife will play into his scheme: necessary for biological reasons, but not symbolically integral to his plan, personally meaningful, or emotionally beneficial.

Women in Faulkner

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Absalom Absalom! begins differently, compared to his other three novels, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August, as the readers are quickly given a narration as to how the downfall of a family came to be.  Coldfield’s story of Sutpen, can easily be Ms. Burden, from LIA, or Hightower’s story, a story related to the Civil War that involves slavery and isolation. I found it quite interesting that Faulkner would situate a story prior to Quentin’s travel to Harvard and death. As told in The Sound in the Fury, the interpretation that Quentin’s death was primarily due to Caddy’s actions may be false. Absalom Absalom! Travels before the birth of Quentin, to a period that may explain why the once Aristocratic Compson family lost their wealth and reputation. The usage of “ghosts”, involvement of Mr. Compson, the non-present father figure in TSAF, and a female’s voice, may explain why Quentin was so heavily affected by Caddy’s actions and with his conversations with his father. Though Coldfield tells Quentin her stories due to his Ivy League education, “So maybe you will enter the literary profession as so many Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen too are doing now and maybe some day you will remember this and write about it…” My interpretation of Miss Rosa Coldfield’s reasoning as to why she chose Quentin to tell her story is similar to Ms. Burden’s forcefulness and want to control Christmas’s life and future in LIA. Miss Rosa Coldfield expects Quentin to join the literary profession, get married, own a house, and publish stories in magazines, yet she knows nothing about Quentin. Mr. Compson states, “Do you want to know the reason why she chose you… It’s because she will need someone to go with her- a man, a gentleman, yet one still young enough to do what she wants, do it the way she wants it done…” It seems Faulkner expresses each female in his novels as a demanding, emasculatory, and dominant figure in comparison to males that are easily manipulated and insecure with their own identity and inability to grasp control of their desires and futures.  Also, the analogy of ghosts to ladies “Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the war came and made the ladies into ghosts.”(AA!) , may implicitly tune into the ability of  women playing drastic roles in males without their presence being significant such as the lack of Addie’s presence in AILD, yet memories of her still allowed her to play a significant role in her son’s life through animal magnetism, a fish and a horse. However, due to Quentin’s naïveness, “Quentin thought, long ago when she was a girl—of young and indomitable unregret, of indictment of blind circumstance and savage event; but not now; only the lonely thwarted old female flesh embattled for forty-three years in the old insult; the old unforgiving outraged and betrayed by the final and complete affront which was sutpen’s death…”, in comparison to Mr. Compson’s belief of Miss Coldfield’s intentions, this leaves a question as to why did Faulkner decide Quentin be told this story instead of Quentin’s father or perhaps to another person who is more aware of Sutpen’s identity. By reading TSAF, LIA, and AILD, we are able to have a better grasp on how women, men, and the setting /town play a role into each person’s life through manipulation and interpretations.

Narrative Identity and its effect on the construction of memory; history

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The opening narration of Absalom, Absalom!, given by Rosa Coldfield, situates the reader amidst her spiraling account of a family’s fall to ruin. The narrative voice is primarily that of a daughter, as a result of what it is defending: a father, first, whose demise came at the hands of what Rosa claims to be his drastic moral opposite: Thomas Sutpen. Behind her It seems she needs, after forty-three years, the affirmation of a younger man from her society, one who may even go on to tell the old woman’s—the daughter’s—story, both of the grave injustice to her father and family, and subsequently, of the justification of her marriage to the man (the “demon”) who had caused it (5). Her search for an explanation, then, converges between a “fatality and curse on the South” (indeed, Miss Coldfield repeatedly alludes to the land itself as dangerous, no place for play) and “on [her] family,” because the latter, unfortunately had only “men with valor and strength but without pity or honor” to defend it (14, 13).

The primacy of patriarchal progenies in the novel’s beginning is common in Faulkner’s works. The dysfunction and ruination of such patrilineages, too, is a central theme in other novels, like The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August. This theme, backlighted with Faulkner’s obsession with time and moments of arrest, constructs the chief conflict Miss Coldfield passionately orates to Quentin. But as a financially dependent female, self-described as “born too late,” she has all the effective odds, besides race, against her (15). She uses her voice to express a personal struggle, but because of the patriarchal context, she may also serve as a vehicle to convey some important essences of masculinity in the South during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is important, then, to ask ourselves why Faulkner has chosen a female, in this instance, to give voice to her families’ woes. We have seen repeatedly in his works female characters that are not authorized to speak for themselves, let alone for others. So why now?

As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Rosa’s narrative is not the only one to speak to Sutpen’s influence in Jefferson. In fact, a number of characters cut in to give their own portrayals, and all of them male: Jason Compson, Quentin Compson and Shreve. As these men alternate in the task of filling out the reader’s understanding of the story of Sutpen’s Hundred, the narrative is complicated by contradicting interpretations. This notion highlights Faulkner’s primary purpose: to convey the strange nature of memory and its role in the construction of history.

No Need to Speak

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From the very start of As I Lay Dying, Darl is established not just as a primary narrator in the novel, but also as the most eccentric character. Often, narrations given by other characters are sandwiched between his own in a constant affirmation of his primacy. At the same time, though, his peculiar perspective only sets him farther apart from, rather than above, the rest of his family; indeed, it alienates him from them, as sometimes his singularity elicits an almost prophetic nature. I argue, however, that this capacity for clairvoyance runs through the Bundren family with more fluidity than readers, or the characters themselves, may naturally perceive. Granted, Darl often appears to be the common force bestowing this special ability upon the others; still, in different degrees they all reflect a common sensitivity.

Products of their parents, the Bundren children (excepting Jewel, on account of his only partial biological relation) all reflect the strange influence of Anse and Addie’s complicated union. In other words, the way the Bundren children relate to their world is inherently based on how they relate to their parents’ idiosyncrasies: their collective criticalness of Anse’s moral deficiencies, and simultaneously, their inheritance of his tendency towards metaphor; from Addie, they assume a drastic stoicism and a confused relationship with words, names and labels. Indeed, even Addie’s sole narration in the novel reveals, for example, a likely source of the similarly existential crisis Dewel Dell experiences in her own nightmare-state: “I couldn’t think what I was I couldn’t think of my name I couldn’t even think I am a girl I couldn’t even think I” (121). Similarly, Addie’s assessment of words combined with Anse’s metaphorical reasonings regarding the physical formations of all God’s creatures seems to similarly influence Vardaman’s conception of his mother as a fish, his brother Jewel, a horse.

Moreover on the discourse of words, Darl and Dewey Dell exhibit a relationship in which words are often unnecessary, if not outright irrelevant. They communicate, the both of them, and comprehend each other, “without words” (27). In fact, as Dewey Dell notes, the certainty of their mutual understanding would actually be compromised if the expressions were vocalized: “[I]f he had said he knew with the words I would not have believed that he had been there and saw us” (27). The notion that non-verbal expressions can manifest such power is further emphasized by Dewey Dell when she describes the immense capacity embodied in Darl’s eyes: “The land runs out of Darl’s eyes; they swim to pin points. They begin at my feet and rise along my body to my face, and then my dress is gone” (121). In this instance, Darl doesn’t just successfully express a simple sentiment to Dewey Dell; he penetrates her psyche, disarming her with one sweeping, yet incisive look.

Darl and his older brother Cash, too, reveal an ability to understand one another outside the realm of verbal communication. Before the catastrophe at the river, for example, Darl describes this nature: “[Cash] and I look at one another with long probing looks, looks that plunge unimpeded through one another’s eyes . . . When we speak our voices are quiet, detached” (142). Clearly, the brothers engage more naturally through facial expressions than verbal ones. Indeed, twice more in the same narration, Darl and Cash communicate without words. First, Darl describes a memory of Addie holding Jewel on a pillow longer than his infant body, but he doesn’t speak his remembering. So when Cash so casually responds as if, with ease, he could hear Darl’s thoughts aloud, readers may almost miss the unspoken transmission that has taken place between the brothers. And again, as they reach the place where they will attempt the river-crossing, Cash must merely look at Darl in order to ask if he join in the undertaking.

Dead Folks CreateThe Most Damage

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The town situated in Light in August is controlled/ran on purely through rumors and gossips. Similarly, to both As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, the people and the town, as a whole, are unable to move forward because everyone is fixated on past events, particularly on “the others”, Joe Christmas and Joe Brown, Joanna Burden, and Reverend Gail Hightower. On page 75, as Hightower questions Byron’s addiction to work at the mill, Byron answers, “I don’t know, I reckon that’s just my life… It is because a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he cant escape from.” This passage I believe perfectly deconstructs the town’s manipulation for control through its usage of rumors and its isolation of others they view unfitting. The town metaphorically is considered “dead” since the town is unable to accept new changes and cannot identify with foreign ideas/ behaviors. The town and its people are also unable to forego past events such as the death of Hightower’s wife and overlook/ reaccept Hightower back into its community. Without the construction of rumors the town cannot function, it does not survive through capital received by the mills, but by the town’s desire to apprehend everything about each person’s past. The town’s identity is to be omniscient while obscuring the “other’s” identities. The town’s particular isolation of Joanna Burden and Joe Christmas are due to their affectionate behavior towards black people and their desire to challenge the town’s policy. Mrs. Burden’s isolation occurred from her parent’s desire to aid the blacks, but by Mrs. Burden hiring black works, it led to rumors and then complete isolation (53). The idea of what a black person signifies to the town is captured by the marshal’s inability to depart from the idea of Christmas possibly being black. The marshal immediately concludes Christmas is the murderer once his ethnicity is exposed and relieves Brown of questioning, “A nigger, I always thought there was something funny about that fellow… Well, I believe you are telling the truth at last. You go on Buck, now, get a good sleep. I’ll attend to Christmas”(98-99). This further reveals the church and the dependency of capital by the mill does not dictate the town’s actions, but through the town’s narrow minded views on race, identity, and inability for change. Typically, churches are depicted as the omniscient marker in a town, but by Reverend Gail Hightower’s denouncement as a reverend and his isolation from the town due to gossips formulated about his wife on pages 62-65, this indicates as well, the superiority of gossip and inability to accept new ideas.

Furthermore, the rumors constructed by the town are false, unreliable, and biased which are revealed in the conversations between Byron and Hightower. One rumor that is constructed on page 59 states, “No one has entered Hightower’s house in twenty-five years”, we know is false because Byron visits daily to converse/gossip with him. Hightower’s role in the novel is as a spectator. Isolated from the community, he is unable to be manipulated, to believe the rumors by the town are true, and questions the gossip Byron tells him (59). As Byron gossips to Hightower, the reader is able to catch a glimpse of Byron’s ordeal with identity. He’s stuck between being part of the town, its love for rumors and gossip, and as an “outsider”, excluding himself from the rumors and gossip. Though Byron is able to comprehend the rumors and gossips constructed by the town are false, he is so keen in not being excluded by the town that he works six days a week at the mill (75), but occasionally visits Hightower. On pages 73and 74 are two moments when Byron reveals the falsity of the rumors and gives his own perspective. Byron’s perspective of the town as stated, “…the entire affair had been a lot of people performing a play and that now at last they played out the parts which been allotted them and now they could live quietly with one another” (73). Also, he mentions, “He believed that the town had had the habit of saying things about the disgraced minister which they did not believe themselves, for too long a time to break themselves of it. “Because always’, he think, ‘when anything get to be a habit, it also manages to get a right good distance from truth and fact’ (74). From those two passages, I believe Faulkner may incorporate the South’s inability for change and its refusal to accept the loss of the Civil War into the novel. The character’s labeled as “outsiders” may symbolize the change forced onto the town while the town is indicative of the South’s internment of denial and refusal for change thus the reason the town chooses to live in the past by gossiping. Which leads me to believe the two passages foreshadows either the downfall of the town or the “outsiders” who perceive the town as their home. Overall, I believe the subplots within the book will come together with Byron as the main character who pieces together the significance of each character, Lena Grove, Hightower, Christmas, Brown, and Joanna Burden to one another.

Eyes Like Candles, Drowning

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Within the very first pages of As I Lay Dying Cora provides readers with some initial foreshadowing of the novel’s exploration of liminality, which can be defined here as existing before or throughout a threshold or transitional stage. As she reflects on Addie’s laying, dying, liminal state Cora notes that despite her deteriorating physicality Addie’s capacity to communicate prevails: “If we were deaf we could almost watch her face and hear him, see him” (8). Thus, in keeping with the old proverb, “The eyes are the windows to the soul,” Cora’s observation reflects the profound duality between the death of a body and the death of a mind; Addie’s nearly lifeless body in contrast with her still expressive face combine to form a unique threshold being. And indeed, when Addie does choose to communicate verbally, even from her deathbed, her voice is described as “strong, and unimpaired” (48).

Eyes are consistently the most symbolic organ throughout the novel. Faulkner uses the word seventy-six times over the course of his two-hundred and sixty page novel, on average once every three pages. Faulkner is not only interested in the eyes of his characters’, but also those of his horses, fish, owls, and sun; pale ones like Jewel’s, and those black as Dewey Dell’s. As Cora narrows in on Addie’s “windows to the soul” she notes, “Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks” (8). By relating the drowning phenomenon of a candle on the verge of burning out to Addie’s own fast-approaching extinguishment, Cora once again highlights the unique state of liminality; the fitful flickering, likened to the body’s final instinctual yearnings to stay alive, becomes less and less potent with each flare; Addie’s last breaths, a candle’s. And at the actual moment Addie crosses the threshold between life and death, Darl makes a similar observation: “…[H]er eyes, the life in them, rushing suddenly upon them; the two flames glare up for a steady instant. Then they go out as if someone had leaned down and blown upon them” (48).

Cora and Darl’s descriptions hold additional symbolic significance in their foreshadowing of the trials Addie’s dead body will endure before finally being laid to rest–– trials reiterated by Cora when she quotes Addie’s blasphemy of worshiping Jewel in place of Christ: “‘He is my cross and he will be my salvation. He will save me from the water and from the fire’” (168). As previously mentioned, a guttering candle elicits the act of drowning; though already dead by the time her family attempts to cross the bridge, Jewel first saves Addie’s coffin from drowning in the river. And later, he saves it again from burning up in the fire Darl has set to it in the barn.

That Jewel feels compelled to continuously rescue Addie’s already dead body lends significance to the discussion of liminality in As I Lay Dying both because it reveals his dedication to fulfilling Addie’s transition from laying alive to laying dead, and also because it reflects the powerful force that can remain in a departed being. Returning to the distinction between death of the body versus death of the mind, then, we come across an interesting passage from Peabody when he first arrives at Addie’s deathbed: “…[W]hen I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind–and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement” (43-44). It is important that these words are delivered by a doctor, someone who, presumably, is more familiar with death, and has a stronger scientific background, than the average person in Yoknapatawpha Country because despite these details, Peabody still embodies a spiritual perspective on death. This is how he can suggest Addie has been dead ten days before he arrived; though a few more breaths of physical life remain in her, her will to live has passed, she has no more mind for life. Conversely, once she has both physically and spiritually passed on, Addie Bundren manages to live on in other people’s lives, strangers even: “…I imagined a lot of things coming up between us, but I be durn if I ever thought it would be a body four days dead and that a woman” (117-118).

Benjy

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In beginning The Sound and the Fury from Benjy’s perspective, Faulkner challenges his readers’ instinctual perceptions both of the story’s physical setting, but also regarding the atmosphere of the characters’ personal interactions. With this approach Faulkner prevents readers from projecting narrative conventions upon the story while also highlighting the subjectivism of experience, a valuable notion to keep in mind while engaging with such a socially stratified society. Indeed, if we are to gain anything from Benjy’s section, we must submit to his way of relating to his world. After all, Benjy’s way of understanding his surroundings is marked by an extremely unique hierarchy of senses. For example, most people deem their sense of sight as primary to their understanding of reality. For Benjy, neither reality nor sight are clear or trustworthy.

Benjy doesn’t associate so much with distinct images as he does with the relative brightness of an object, or the shadows they cast. He describes how shapes fall and spin, and start and stop moving (arbitrarily, as it would seem to Benjy). And yet, he is not at a total cognitive loss: “When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled” (41). Here, Benjy recognizes the dependent factors intrinsic to the glittering phenomenon that occurs when he changes his physical position in relation to the box of stars. Moreover, whether or not he reserves obedience for those he trusts, he does have a basic understanding of the concept: “Caddy turned around and said ‘Hush’ So I hushed” (19).

Benjy’s gravitation towards Caddy may be explained by her effort to accommodate his unique perspective. While most of the other characters mock or patronize him, Caddy truly attempts to construct a system of communication between them, even though verbally it remains one-sided. At the branch, on a day that it is frozen over, Benjy perceives Caddy to be breaking off a piece of the water. To his knowledge, perhaps, water is simply a clear substance. Caddy explains the difference: “Ice. That means how cold it is” (13). She also touches the piece of ice to Benjy’s face, so that he may feel, too, the difference.

Most of the other characters either mock or dismiss Benjy’s experience. His own mother, for example, denies his limited capacity to connect facts and make logical deductions. When Benjy becomes fixated on waiting by the gate after Caddy marries and moves away, T.P. explains to Benjy’s mother that “[he] think if he down to the gate, Miss Caddy come back” (51). His mother’s narrow-mindedness results in her denial of the situation altogether: “Nonsense,” she responds (51). She is right, it is non-sensical to believe that Caddy will come through the gate just because she has come through the gate in the past. But her denial of his experience is counter-productive and limiting to her own understanding.