the dreadful hollow
by Douglas Messerli
William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (New York: Vintage Books
[Vintage International], 1930)
But as I began teaching the book this time around, particularly during
the discussion of their tribulations, I was forced to admit that while in most
classical works these trials generally resulted in redemption and/or
transformation, in Faulkner’s novel only Anse, the father, receives any
benefit: a set of new teeth and a wife to replace the one whom he has just
buried. Cash nearly loses his leg, and, if the doctor is to be believed, will
be partially crippled for the rest of his life; Darl loses his mind and is
taken away to the Mississippi State Hospital in Jackson; Jewel loses his horse
and any possibility of mythic potentiality that lay in his centaur-like being
(early on, his body is described as “in midair shaped to the horse” [p. 13]);
Dewey Dell is stripped of the money Lafe has given her for an abortion (and
stripped of any remaining respectability by the salesman MacGowan), dooming her
to the kind of servitude to family-life that Addie has had to endure; and even
the young boy Vardaman loses, if nothing else, his innocence, perhaps even his
future sanity. In his desperation to get Addie to her own “flesh and blood” in
the Jefferson burial ground, Anse has sucked the very life out of his sons and
daughters, one by one, so that he might obtain the set of teeth and, almost
magically, be able to remarry.
And just as suddenly, it became clear to me that the family’s trip from
their mountain-top home (the location of which is made clear in Peabody’s visit
to the Bundrens, where he has to be towed up to the top by a rope) into
civilization is not only a trip to Hell, but a sort of metaphorical rendering
of what has already happened in Addie’s life. The Bundren shack lies at the
entrance of Hell, a place in which the light appears to be “the color of
sulphur matches,” “The boards look like strips of sulphur” (p. 43) and “The air
smells like sulphur” (p. 76), their hellish voyage presaged by Faulkner’s
title, a quote by Agamemnon in Homer’s Odyssey,
“As I lay dying, the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I
descended into Hades.” Even before
Addie’s death we begin to perceive that the family members she has borne are no
longer whole beings.
As Michael Neal Morris has noted in his internet essay, “Wood Imagery in
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying,” in many
ways the Bundrens are a people made of wood, “The Bundrens are rigid in that
they are hard, unbending people who stick to their principles, no matter how
absurd or impractical. Death in the novel is not only the physical death of the
matriarch, but also the spiritual death of those who retain their foolish
pride.”
Cash, quite obviously, is a carpenter
who spends most of the early part of the novel constructing the coffin of wood,
with adze and saw endlessly constructing a container of death, his saw like a
tongue lapping away at life, “one lick less, one lick less.” Cash’s major
statements in this book are numbered, as in a sort of maddened series of notes
on how to build a coffin. Jewel is described as having a face made of wood and
is represented in several places in the book as being “wooden-faced”: "He sits lightly, poised, upright,
wooden-faced in the saddle, the broken hat raked at a swaggering angle.”
Although Darl is not described as wooden, he is, as Cora and Tull make quite
clear, “queer,” with something wrong in his head. Dewey Dell is characterized
as having “a dazed way.”
Darl notes of his father: "He had that wooden look on his face
again; that bold, surly, high-colored rigid look like his face and eyes were
two colors of wood, the wrong one pale and the wrong one dark.” At several
points, moreover, Anse’s whole being is described as hollow, his arms dangling
from his shirts, his “chin collapsing slowly,” a man, “dangle-armed, humped,
motionless” (p. 51). The name Anse means, in French, a cove, defined in its
first meaning in Webster’s English dictionary as “a recessed place: concavity,” which, as we know is
something “hollow.”
In short, the Bundren family members are not just living at the lip of
Hell but are themselves already dead in Hell, hunkering, as Eliot describes it
in his poem “The Hollow Men,” at the “last of meeting places,” groping
together, avoiding speech, “gathered on [the] beach of the tumid river.”
In her horrible apologia spoken from the dead—Faulkner’s strange, almost
“postmodern” tour de force—Addie
expresses Anse’s condition quite clearly: “He did not know that he was dead.” She
means this, obviously, metaphorically, that he is one of the “living dead,” one
who, because has he no imagination nor vision, is, as Morris argues,
“spiritually dead.”
Yet I think, given the events of the novel, that we have to understand
this sentence also as being literal, that Anse is actually one of the living dead, a vampire if you will, a man who
early in the novel is described as never sweating, afraid that if he were to
sweat he would die (p. 17). Anse also admits that he has no heart: “…I just
cant seem to get no heart into anything,” “…I just cant seem to get no heart
into it" (p. 38). In the same chapter, Anse complains of being unable to
“eat God’s own victuals as a man should,” and throughout the book he refuses to
enter any other man’s house, insisting that he “wouldn’t crave nothing,” and
can subsist on what little food they have brought with them, despite the fact
that their voyage takes several days.
Once one begins down this path, it quickly becomes apparent that
Faulkner is interested in the vampire myth and even in the story of Dracula at a much deeper level than it
might first appear. If Anse is one of the living dead, a vampire who sucks the
blood from Addie and his children, we begin to comprehend many of the
mysterious aspects of the book. Jewel’s wasting away—which his brothers attribute
first to an affair with a married woman, only to later discover that he has
nightly been felling trees (another reference to the woodenness of this family)
to make enough money to buy a horse—can also be comprehended, metaphorically,
as a disease resulting from a loss of blood. The scenes describing his
condition (pp. 128-136), in fact, closely resemble Bram Stoker’s descriptions
of Lucy Westenra as she wastes away from the vampire’s bites.
Blood is mentioned throughout the book,
not only in Anse’s repeated creed of flesh and blood, but particularly in the
scene describing Vardaman being “bloody as a hog to his knees, (p. 38),”
ordered by Anse to clean and cut up the large fish he has caught, the fish
representing forces against which the Bundren's are allied, Christianity and
Christ.
While Dracula and his vampire family escape their mountain-topped
mansion as bats, the hollow men and women of the Bundren family leave their
home as buzzards. Early in the book, Jewel sees his family members sitting like
buzzards (p. 15), and soon thereafter buzzards begin to appear in the skies. By
the middle of their voyage Vardaman, the youngest, and, therefore, perhaps the
least dead of this vampire-like family, is kept busy chasing the seven buzzards
(the number of family members) away, wondering where they go at night.
We know that secret, and if we recognize Anse and the others as being
transformed into the buzzards that follow along with Addie’s stinking corpse—a
smell which horrifies everyone but the family itself—we can better understand,
moreover, Anse’s humped body and his propensity, described several times early
in the novel (see pp. 18, 19, 29 and 30, for example), to “rub his knees.” In
his one section, Samson clearly seems to link the buzzard he sees with the family:
I saw something. It kind
of hunkered up when I come in and I
thought at first it was
one of them [the Bundrens] got left, then
I saw what it was. It was
a buzzard. It looked around and saw me
and went on down the hall,
spraddle-legged, with its wings kind
of hunkered out, watching
me first over one shoulder and then
over the other, like an
old baldheaded man. When it got outdoors
it began to fly. It had to
fly a long time before it ever got up into the
air, with it thick and
heavy and full of rain like it was.
By novel’s end, accordingly, we
understand how Anse has “worn out” his wife, sucking the blood from her
body—just as he almost crucifies Cash upon the coffin of his own making by
embedding his leg in concrete; transforms Darl into a maddened Renfield-like
figure (and in this context we can also better understand Addie’s statement
that her family “uses one another by words like spiders dangling by their
mouths from a beam” [p. 172]); robs Jewel of any transformative potential by
selling his horse, the beast that is described almost as being part of Jewel’s
body; and dooms Dewey Dell to a life of patriarchal servitude. And Vardaman?
Perhaps he is destined to commit suicide, his blood already having been drained
by the suck of his own teeth:
From behind pa’s leg Vardaman
peers, his mouth open and all color
draining from his face into
his mouth, as though he has by some means
fleshed his own teeth in
himself, sucking. (p. 49)
At work’s end only Anse, the
original vampire, remains intact, with a new set of teeth and a new bride into
which he can sink them.
*
When I first read As I Lay Dying
as an M.A. student in Lewis Lawson’s 1973 Faulkner seminar at the University of
Maryland, a woman in the class suddenly burst into tears one day as we were
discussing this novel. “I’m sorry,” she whimpered, “but you are all speaking of
this work from an objective position which I simply cannot share, having just
gone through the death of my mother.” For years I have described this incident
as being one the earliest indicators to me that the New Critical perspective of
literature was about to crumble. The woman in our class, I now perceive, was
correct in her assessment; by enfolding the popular vampire myth within this
modernist masterpiece, perhaps Faulkner himself knew that he had created—as
Darl describes Anse’s face upon the death of Addie—“a monstrous burlesque of
all bereavement.”
As I began research on this short essay, I came upon a brief piece from
2006 in the Los Angeles Times
reporting that among the manuscripts found in Faulkner’s papers by his daughter
Jill was a full-length, unpublished screenplay about vampires titled,
unsurprisingly, Dreadful Hollow!
Los
Angeles, October 9, 2008
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (August 2009).
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