I'm so happy to be reading this novel again. This is my third time through the novel, and new things are popping up everywhere. I found in Anse's first passage where he regrets letting Darl get drafted into the military. It seems that this read around Anse is a lot more emotional, especially about his children. I'm noticing how everyone paints Anse as a bad man, but really, Addie is a little more lunatic than everyone thinks. It's not just because she gets off on whipping the kids, but it's her ideas about how the world around her should function; for her; by her. Addie is the Hebrew god of this novel, and her family runs around the land like temple robbers, devout at that. I am really into Anse's point of view this time, and what people say about him, contrasted with what Addie says about her life, and their marriage.
I'm also interested in all the lines in this novel. The image of the cross, looking like this -- + -- is everywhere, beginning with the first paragraphs, where Darl describes walking on the path (the y plane) and compares his and Jewel's height (the x axis). Jewel is taller than he, so sits higher on the plane; Darl is sub-par; his mind is beneath the surface. This could be read as Jewel having a higher sense of awareness, but I see the line, as drawn by Faulkner, the y line at least, as sanity, and the Darl will prove, by deviating from the line as much as possible that he's not sane. Cash follows the line with a gripping obsessive finality that seems devoid of emotion. Our first introduction to Cash's mind is a series of lines that follow one another, logically, and with intense purpose. Anse is overwhelmed by the thought of living next to a government line, a road; Addie insisted on it. Dewey Dell has a definite agenda, and by getting from point a to point b she feels it will be accomplished (by following that line to town). Vardaman is also somewhat deranged, but his association of the fish with his mother is based on principles of time, and that time flows in one direction. I don't know enough about theories of time to expound on this more, but it's there, like furniture in a dark room -- I bump into these ideas, but I can't tell what they are in the dark.
I hope this paper comes out clearer and shinier and A minusier than the last. Also, I just love swimming in Falkner's words. I want to go back to his house. Yeah, it's getting creepy.
4 comments:
Vardaman is my favorite character. For such a young boy to have an existential crisis is pretty astounding (and to achieve some pretty sophisticated understanding as a result, well...), quite an achievement for a novelist to pull that one off. His discussion with his older brother of "was" and "is" is really the white trash version of Hamlet's "to be or not to be."
I enjoy rereading this book. The students, alas, did not seem to enjoy it particularly. They thought it was too "weird." Of course, they came to appreciate the technical achievement of the novel (if only a little bit), but I don't think anyone takes it to heart the way you do or that I do.
I still believe the advice that E.O. Hawkins gave me at Mississippi State University almost 20 years ago now. You have to read everything Faulkner wrote and then go back and start all over again. It makes much more sense that way. I reread "Spotted Horses" this time to recapture the story of the Snopes family's attempt to bring the wild ponies to Mississippi. It did make the sections about Jewell's horse richer, I think.
Enjoy. It's very rare that we get to revisit our favorite works of literature. I hope the people at CSUDH admire it more than my students did.
How can they not enjoy it? I'll admit it, there are sentences in this book that I still cannot even sort of grasp -- but not enjoy it? This book speaks! This book sits in my guts. This novel...this novel...I think that perhaps Sound is more of an achievement, but this novel really dunks me. For some reason I really associate reading Faulkner to being in water. I really don't know why the metaphor stands out for me, but I either feel like I'm underwater, or that I'm knee deep in water -- I think it could be the though of stepping off the earth and into a different, and potentially deadly, atmosphere. And there is something else -- something I think I've said before, felt before. This happened when I read Sanctuary and Light in August, and it happens in As I Lay Dying...you start out simple enough, just getting your feet wet. Then you step further in, slowly inching your way up to your waist. But once you're in that deep, he's ready and willing to pull the ground out from under you at any time, and you are submerged. And it is too late, because now you're in, and you've got to figure a way out. Meet Mrs. Bundren.
I was noticing today that when Addie dies, Anse is constantly thinking of the work that has to be done, and how he's going to get someone else to do it. It's so strange. And the whole thing about him not being able to work up a sweat? It's a wonder those kids were even conceived. I love how Faulkner really drives home that what we talk about is what we don't talk about it. I think my American Lit professor, that well of knowledge, called it "significant omission." He said that Hemingway coined the term for Gertrude Stein when she asked him to come up with a literary theory. He loved telling us that story. It almost made me like him enough to not want to cut his dirty ponytail off and throw it out the window.
Well, Phil said that when he taught it, his students simply refused to read it. When I taught it, I remember distinctly that every time, we would start giggling madly about the buzzards and the coffins and this family's bizarre journey and had LOADS of fun. But then I would always get so weepy when we get to Darl and his thinking and his fate.
Darl is NOT crazy. He has PTSD. He has a poetic thought process. He slips into "madness" because of the betrayal of all who he assumes love him, especially Cash, but perhaps most viciously, his sister. I keep thinking about Foucault and how he follows a sort of deconstructive process when talking about the artificial lines that divide the preferred term from the "bad" term, i.e. SANITY/MADNESS; BLACK/WHITE; MALE/FEMALE; RICH/POOR. etc. and how inevitably those put in the "bad" category (which is primarily an invention) inevitably serve, by their very existence, to reinforce the power of those who belong in the (again, artificial) "preferred" category. So Jewel, with his angry, confused, embittered, but selfish thinking, and Cash, with his mathematical, practical thought process, and even Ash with his OUT FOR #1 ideology, all survive. In fact, Foucault's idea is distinctly played out in this text; they DECIDE to have Darl declared "mad" in order to save their own skins (and what little money/property they have). His "madness" serves to excuse the family from responsibility for his actually quite SANE actions (getting rid of a rotting corpse) and let them continue on in their sanity.
Not Darl. He is too poetic and too fucked up from the war. A war fought by poor people in the interests of....who the hell knows about WWI. And he is TOO SANE in a world that cannot allow his sort of thinking.
Now I have ANOTHER thing I want to write about. Crap.
Remember in class how we talked about their different "thinking styles?" That was so much fun.
I love your attention to the lines and the pictures. So brilliant.
I'm not sure why, but this read I have a lot less sympathy for Darl. I hate how the family uses him. I hate this family! But I like their story. Darl is of course trying to do anything he can to be normal according to "town" standards, and his family does everything according to "back woods" standards. Dewey Dell cries, "Kill him!" becuase she has been furious that Darl would kill Lafe, or tell Anse and then Anse would get someone else to kill Lafe (becuase Anse can't lift a finger without screwing up), and she was probably a little bummed at having to drink Turpentine and have sex with the clerks. I can so see Lindsay Lohan in this role. I've been casting the movie in my head. I can't decide if I want Joan Allen to be Addie or Cora. It would be a fascintaing film. Well, could be anyway. And my instructor was saying that Verdaman is 10 yrs old? I always picture him closer to five ("fish almost as big as he is).
Darl has the mind of the townspeople, but the desire of a land-man. Anse keeps saying that Darl's eyes are or were "full of the land." Such strange expressions! He's the only one who never seems consumed by rage, but the rage of others turns on him. Classic line from the novel, the pharmacist asks Dewey Dell, "Don't you have a ma that can help you?" Dewey Dell -- "She's in the wagon."
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