Something of Faulkner’s own imaginary lodges in them all. The mind-damaged Benjy houses most radically his creator’s sense of home as doom. Incurably needy, abandoned by his mother and later by his sister, incapable of getting beyond the fence, Benjy radiates the pathos of disorientation, the punishment of being terminally misunderstood. He is Faulkner wordless, trapped, impotent, and alien. Quentin—narrated in a sort of infrared distress—suffers, no less than Benjy, from an inability to outlive childhood. His precocious brilliance serves him naught. Harvard operates as unavailing sanctuary for this eldest son who never left home emotionally, whose suicide was launched from the place of (apparent) departure. Both brothers negotiate their mother’s orphaning of them—”If I could say Mother,” Quentin murmurs—by way of an insupportable emotional investment in their sister, Caddy. As for Jason, he seems to embody Faulkner’s sardonic reflection on what might have transpired had he remained an obedient son—and become a version of his own father. Not for nothing did Maud Falkner recognize in Jason a portrait of her husband Murry: “his way of talking was just like Jason’s, same words and same style” (F 217). Murry Falkner: the embittered husband forever blaming others for his own failed life. Finally, Caddy and her daughter Quentin: eros gone off the rails, desire deformed by parentally instilled guilt and repression, and then turned self-destructive by the urge to hurt those who had hurt you. The portraits are indelible—unjudged yet unforgivable. It is as though once Faulkner managed to get all the way into these battered psyches—to grasp their trouble in its stubborn complexity—there was nothing to do but see.
But Faulkner’s personal investment may lodge most deeply in his style, not in characterological echoes. The gesture of The Sound and the Fury emerges in its use of interior monologue. Critics have noted that without the interior monologue in Ulysses six years earlier, Faulkner might never have deployed that technique in The Sound and the Fury. For his part, Faulkner always minimized indebtedness, even denying that he had read Ulysses.5 Yet Faulkner’s denial has its truth. Though Joyce helped him to interior monologue, Faulkner’s deployment was his own. A technique that in Ulysses renders the moment-by-moment cohesion of the mind delivers, in The Sound and the Fury, a traumatic uncohering—the unprepared psyche under assault. The inner wound Faulkner had repeatedly implied but never articulated—from The Marble Faun through Donald Mahon and Bayard Sartoris—was finally located. It lodged at home, and it could be made to speak.
Childhood was not Faulkner’s only locus for interior monologue. But it cannot be accidental that he moved to this locus and that technique at the same moment in his career. Faulkner used the technique to gather together, as though magnetically, troubles that had been accumulating over time—and to speak those troubles as they tumbled into each other in a moment of distress. The unpreparedness that marked childhood, children’s vulnerability to forces and facts they experienced (on their bodies as well as their minds) but did not comprehend: these realities now exploded onto the page. Refusing the decorum of fixed space and linear time, rejecting the propriety of classic syntax (no shaping subject/verb/predicate here), interior monologue gave Faulkner’s breakthrough novel its pathos and power. Articulating the naked moment of is, such monologue first spoke Faulkner’s supreme insight. We are not masters in the present moment, we do not see our way as we move through it. Mastery and insight come later, thanks to a retrospective take on experience: what we call wisdom. But in the assault of ongoing life itself we are often not ready, usually not wise. All the novels Faulkner had read proceeded otherwise, toward insight, recognition, resolution. They sought, and eventually reached, the calm that follows the storm. That seemed to be the unspoken mission of fiction itself, the core story it was devised to deliver. By contrast, his task, he seems to have recognized, was to find words to say the storm before the calm. This storm, which we use all our resources to see beyond, is life in the present moment whenever habit or expectation fails: sound and fury.
Pride and Nakedness: As I Lay Dying
As though riding an interior commotion he had just begun to tap, Faulkner moved in 1929 from summer’s immersion in the proofs of The Sound and the Fury to autumn’s immersion in As I Lay Dying. The darker Sanctuary, written in the prenuptial months of 1929, had been put on hold. His new bride, on reading it in typescript, had recoiled in disgust. “It’s horrible” (F 239), she told him—a response with which he concurred, thinking the novel might be profitable nonetheless. But Hal Smith of Cape and Smith—friend and partner in the new firm that would bring out The Sound and the Fury later that year—reacted no less vehemently. “Good God,” he told Faulkner, “I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail” (F 239). The deck was cleared for the book-in-progress, and As I Lay Dying proceeded with unprecedented swiftness.
Perhaps the new book’s effortless gestation made Faulkner a touch dismissive in his later remarks. In writing it he missed what The Sound and the Fury had given him: “that eager and joyous faith and anticipation of surprise which the unmarred sheets beneath my hand held inviolate and unfailing”—the exhilarating sense of not knowing what comes next, but trusting it will come right. With this follow-up book, however, “I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word, I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall” (NOR 226). He liked to say that it took only six weeks to compose this book from opening word to closing sentence, adding that he wrote it during the night shift he had taken at the Oxford power plant (using the hours from midnight until four in the morning, free from distracting noises). He was exaggerating only slightly; the book was completed in forty-seven days, and the revisions it underwent were minor. What had enabled its swift and painless birth?
One answer is that The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying are fused as a pair of gorgeous twins (both proceeding by way of interior monologues) that would have no equal among the other novels he would write. The sustained creative work and intricate revision that produced the older twin—this was no easy labor—made the delivery of the younger one more relaxed and predictable. The impetus behind them both was singular—one sperm fertilizing two eggs. They share an unwavering attention to devastating family dynamics. Both novels trace the helpless dependency of children on their parents and the frustration that occurs when that dependency is betrayed. As I Lay Dying turns the screw yet further, capturing the children’s anguish when the mother dies and their dependency is ruptured altogether. None of Faulkner’s other novels would mine interior monologue so extensively or brood on family tensions so provocatively. These are his two lyrical masterpieces, both of them staging the drama of orphaned children’s exposed hearts and minds.
The Sound and the Fury burrowed massively into the three Compson brothers’ minds; all of its chapters are over forty pages long. As I Lay Dying, by contrast, distills its portraiture into fifty-nine jagged monologues (running from a sentence to several pages). More, it narrates its materials by way of fifteen characters’ reflections. At the center are Anse and Addie Bundren and their five children. On the periphery stand the bemused or horrified neighbors and bystanders who, chorus-like, comment on their journey. The novel’s fictional time takes only a few days, as the family make their tragicomic trek to Jefferson, in order to bury their dead mother in her own family’s plot. Getting there proves to be an ordeal; they must pass through flood and fire. Further, a corpse exposed for several days in August to the Mississippi sun occasions not just an ordeal but a scandal. The deceased mother had exacted from her husband a promise to bury her in Jefferson. The living Bundrens carry out this pledge with their own mix of incompatible motives.
Faulkner gives Addie—about one hundred pages after her death—the most powerful monologue in the novel. Her haunting speech occurs in some nebulous space and time, as though it rose from the coffin itself. Or maybe not so nebulous, since the deeper move of the book is to show that Addie’s biological death hardly puts an end to her life. Deat
h is “only a state in which the others are left,” as Mr. Compson had mused in The Sound and the Fury (AILD 936–7). Its reality explodes only in the living. The book’s seemingly awkward title is unerringly exact: its 175 pages enact the entire family’s experience of one woman’s dying, through the distress of the others who are left. Addie’s dying releases in her offspring an anguish that each seeks to deflect in his own way. Jewel, the love child secretly fathered by the preacher Whitfield, cannot bear his carpenter brother Cash’s relentlessly crafting Addie’s coffin outside her window as she lies dying. “If you’d just let her along. Sawing and knocking, and keeping the air always moving so fast on her face that … you can’t breathe it, and that goddamn adze going One lick less. One lick less” (11). He fantasizes erasing his father and brothers from the scene: “It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the rocks down the hill at their faces, picking them up and throwing them down the hill faces and teeth and all by God until she was quiet and not that goddamn adze going One lick less” (11). Jewel’s other strategy (the term is too conscious) involves replacing Addie with a wild mustang whose untamable viciousness he passionately embraces, leading Darl (the all-seeing brother and hence the insane one) to muse: “Jewel’s mother is a horse” (61).
The youngest child, Vardaman, least able to manage the fact of his mother’s dying, attempts the most outrageous counter-strategy. First, he bores holes into the coffin Cash has prepared for her: “‘Are you going to nail her up in it, Cash? Cash? Cash?’ I got shut up in the crib the new door it was too heavy for me it went shut 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?’” (AILD 43). Vardaman next thinks his way clear by fantasizing her transformation into a rabbit; then, more satisfyingly, into the large fish that he has just caught, cut up, and prepared for dinner. His logic is impeccable: “Then it [the fish] 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 wont be anything in the box and so she can breathe” (44). Later, this primitive ritual of psychic displacements is complete, permitting Vardaman’s temporary evasion of his wound. In a one-sentence chapter, the shortest and strangest in the novel, he thinks, “My mother is a fish” (54).
Not that these children are sentimentally bonded with their mother, nor she with them. This lyrical novel is also Faulkner’s most severe, as it explores “that pride, that furious desire to hide that abject nakedness which we bring here with us … carry stubbornly with us into the earth again” (AILD 31). Pride and nakedness: As I Lay Dying probes the all but unrelinquishable barriers we require to conceal our psychic nakedness from others, the distress that occurs when those barriers are breached. Many of the book’s fifty-nine sections articulate the self’s inwardness—at once fiercely maintained yet imprisoning—even as this is silently experienced in the presence of vocal others. Addie Bundren had felt her imprisonment inside selfhood the most keenly. Her awareness (earlier, as a teacher) of her students “each with his and her secret and selfish thought” drove her wild. She would whip them with a switch, thinking with each blow, “Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever” (114). Mere words, Addie knew, were incapable of crossing this divide:
we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching, and that only through the blows of the switch could my blood and their blood flow as one stream … I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth. (115–7)
Words that swing and twist and never touch—reminiscent of Faulkner’s earlier poetry, that “cocktail of words” that substitutes for the real—are no good. They fail to penetrate the pride-installed boundaries that protect the self’s exposure, conceal its lifelong nakedness. What is needed are words that wound, words that break through the self’s defenses. Addie’s intact husband Anse will go to his grave unmarked and virginal (despite his having fathered four children), having remained cushioned throughout his life, thanks to the cottony insulation of the words he lives within and takes to be real. The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner’s first novel to hew its way into “wordless” territory. He twisted its syntax and procedures with such violence that the conventional word-parade ceased, and the released wordimage escaped its familiar boundaries. Released, it enacted, “terribly,” not a saying but a doing that “goes along the earth.” It sought not to entertain, not even to deliver truths, but to penetrate the reader’s heart.
Halfway through As I Lay Dying, an intimate moment occurs in which Cash and Darl reminisce over their brother Jewel’s earlier strange behavior. They believe that he has been spending his evenings “rutting” with someone else’s wife, and Cash muses: “A young boy. A fellow kind of hates to see … wallowing in somebody else’s mire.” Darl reflects,
That’s what he [Cash] was trying to say. When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again. (AILD 85–6)
The passage’s personal connection seems undeniable. Several months earlier, while writing Sanctuary, the recently wedded Faulkner had envisaged himself starting off from someone else’s scratch and scratching. Here he sees himself wallowing in a previous man’s mire.
More suggestively, Darl’s thoughts point to an artistic project that had long been Faulkner’s own. Only now, though, did Faulkner see what the project required of him; only thus did he fulfill it in these two lyrical novels. “You’ve got too much talent,” Anderson had warned. “If you’re not careful, you’ll never write anything.” Until he risked himself—found experimental techniques for breaking through his own defensive pride and articulating the formless nakedness within—his work would never penetrate anyone’s “damn head.” He might have gone on to write a dozen novels, yet (in Anderson’s sense) never have written anything, his words just “swinging and twisting and never touching.” Until The Sound and the Fury, he had not accessed what lay speechless inside. He had not pressured words so strenuously that they made that silence speak. The “doing” had been too easy. If he were candid, he could not have said about any of his earlier writing: “That was not done before and it cannot be done again.”
But what exactly had he done? What new territory had he found his way into in these two books? Perhaps it involved going not further on land but deeper into water, going underwater. The most hallucinatory sequence in As I Lay Dying narrates the family’s crossing of the flooded Yoknap-atawpha River. They do not manage this crossing intact, their pride and privacy safeguarded. The wagon bearing Addie’s corpse plunges into the swollen waters, and Cash breaks again a leg that had not healed from an earlier breaking. On the other side of the river, finally, Darl surveys the quietly treacherous water: “It looks peaceful, like machinery does after you have watched it and listened to it for a long time. As though the clotting which is you had dissolved into the myriad original motion” (AILD 110). Did Faulkner realize that in writing The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying he had submitted the nakedness of his inner being to something like “the myriad original motion”? That in seeking to word and thus expose to others the wordless psyche—by shedding the masks, attitudes, and judgments that protect the self and provide it sanctuary—he had run the risk of unclotting, of self-dissolving? The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying make their way beyond all masks and attitudes. They plunge deeper than judgment. “It’s like there was a fellow in every man,” Cash thinks at the end of the journey, “that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and t
he same astonishment” (161).
CHAPTER 2
UNTIMELY
Because the tragedy of life is, it must be premature, inconclusive and inconcludable, in order to be life; it must be before itself, in advance of itself, to have been at all.
—The Town
A FAILED ELOPEMENT
They both were desperate as 1918 arrived and the likelihood of Estelle’s marriage with Cornell Franklin loomed unavoidable. Neither wanted it to happen, but it seemed to approach with a logic and momentum they could not counter. To the outward eye, Franklin was as appealing a candidate for marriage as Faulkner was not. Handsome, ambitious, the son of an established Southern family, he had graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1913, covered with honors. President of his class, captain of the track team, he was the most notable of the suitors the precocious Estelle attracted. He took her to the glamorous college parties she was otherwise too young to attend, and he may have spoken of a future they might share. Since older boys had been buzzing around her and saying similar things for years now, she knew that such chatter went with the pleasures of the chase. It augured little. When her parents sent her off to Mary Baldwin College that same year—to get a proper “finishing” to her education—she hardly thought of Franklin as a future husband. Her bond with Faulkner was deeper—something she unthinkingly drew on as a talisman that would protect her from the consequences of her own flirtations. For his part, Franklin hardly knew that Faulkner existed. Finishing law school at the university in 1914, Franklin headed to Honolulu, where family connections had secured him the post of collector of the port. His career was all before him and already on the rise. He knew that when the time came, Estelle would be the right partner to share it with him.
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