American Literature

In As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner is concerned with the distance between what is said and what actually is, what is true and what can be expressed in language.  He captures this distance through the juxtaposition of curt, grammatically incorrect dialogue with the characters rich and brilliant inner lives, showing that, while the characters appear to be uneducated, they are actually deeply educated as to the trials, paradoxes and truths of life, truths which go deeper than the language they speak on the surface.  Faulkner demonstrates the characters education in life, and the incapacity of language to capture its depth, through several thematic reversals.  In the novel, the creation and living of life are shown to be actual death, while death is a channel for the articulation of life.  Likewise, intimacy is shown to be violence, and words denote silence or emptiness while silence is a vehicle for speaking profound words.  Faulkner uses these three thematic reversalsbirthdeath, intimacyviolence and wordssilence to express the irreconcilably paradoxical character of life, which cannot be captured in direct language.

Life and death are reversed in several ways.  First, death is not just a physical event but a mental condition that takes place within life.  Second, childbearing is a kind of personal death and pregnancy provokes a hostile, even homicidal reaction.  Third, death is conceived as the reason for living and a release from the mental death that is life.  As he watches his mother dying, Darl contemplates the meaning and nature of death.

When we enter, she turns her head and looks at us. She has been dead these ten days.  I suppose its having been a part of Anse for so long that she cannot even make that change, if change it be. I can remember how when 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. The nihilists say it is the end the fundamentalists, the beginning when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town. (Faulkner 368)

While he is presumably uneducated in an official sense, Darl understands the array of religious and philosophical positions on death, and feels intellectually capable enough to casually reject them.  Death is neither a beginning nor an end, but is as banal as a change of location.  The simplicity of Darls declaration reveals that his education in life goes deeper than that of the nihilists or the fundamentalists.  He can easily see the paradoxical fact that his mother has not died, yet she has been dead these ten days he perceives her death by looking into her eyes.  The death described by Darl here has two aspects it is an occurrence within the mind of the bereaved, suggesting that the true difference between a persons life and her death exists primarily in the minds and souls of people who care for her and it is a state of living death.  His confrontation with these two types of mental death leads Darl to the profound philosophical question of whether death is actually a change from life at all.  This question is stimulated by Addies relationship with Anse, who embodies a state of mental death when Addie recounts Anses blind desire for more children, she comments, he did not know that he was dead, then (464).  The man from whom she created life upon life always seemed dead to her, and his death left her spiritually dead as well.

It is only in death that Addie finds the voice with which to articulate her life.  There is nothing warm or redemptive in the recovery of this voice, however she uses it to recount her own living death.  Childbearing is the main source of this death, even leading her to homicidal impulses.  Then I found that I had Darl.  At first I would not believe it. Then I believed that I would kill Anse (464).  Anse, tricking her into pregnancy with love, has actually brought her hate and death, just as, in the old words of the Fall, Eve was tricked into dying by the promise of life.  The connection Addie draws between her own life and the Fall shows that she is, at least, biblically educated.  She continues her narration by recounting the thoughts of death heralded by Darls birth when Darl was born I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew that father had been right (464).  What her father had been right about was that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead (461).  When she realizes that death via child-rearing is all that life has to offer, Addie hates her father for having ever planted me (461).  The creation of life makes her long for non-existence.

Addies daughter Dewey Dell also experiences the reversal of life and death through pregnancy, which kills her selfhood.  Her pregnancy is symbolized by dead walking in which she rushes upon the darkness, coming apart both physically and emotionally.  I feel my body, my bones and flesh beginning to part and open upon the alone, and the process of coming unalone is terrible (382).  Pregnancy, or the process of coming unalone, is like the process of dying.  Dewey Dell, like Addie, dies to herself when she finds that she is no longer an independent being.  She envisions the lives of people taking place within a womb of time (422), which dismembers them.  Here, Dewey Dell expands the deathlife reversal to include all of human existence to live is to be torn apart in a cruel womb.  Dewey Dell is portrayed throughout the novel, and especially here, as a kind of philosopher-poet, whose encounter with childbearing has given her privileged insight into the human condition.  While the words she speaks in dialogue reveal her lack of formal education, she, like Darl, understands lifes paradoxes.  Dewey Dells philosophical expansion of the lifedeath reversal is also evident in Darls living death.  What a shame Darl couldnt be to enjoy it too. But it is better so for him. This world is not his world this life his life (532).  Darls family experiences him as essentially dead, even though he is still alive.  His insanity means that he lives in a state of mental death, and so, ironically, his complex understanding of death as a function of the mind eventually comes to bear on his own existential crisis.

Just as death and life are reversed in As I Lay Dying, so are intimacy and violence, or love and hate.  Anses love for Addie leads her to hate him.  Moreover, it leads her to hate her children, which she expresses physically by beating them.  Her children are normally strangers to her, but when she beats them, she approaches intimacy with them.

I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch Now you are aware of me Now I am something in your secret and selfish life. (462)

Addies children are only hers when the violence she exercises against them causes my blood and their blood to flow as one stream (463).  When she beats them, there occurs a kind of transcendental identification wherein she feels what they are feeling and their blood becomes her blood.  Violence is a way for Addie to see her children as individuals and become an individual before them.  At the same time, it is the only way she can enact the fusion, the unaloneness, that she supposes ought to characterize the relationship between mother and child.  Addie is entirely aware of the complex dynamics of this situation, demonstrating that she, like her children, can describe and experience paradoxes with which a philosopher or academic might struggle.  Addie knows that, with her violence, she punishes her children for causing her loss of selfhood while simultaneously trying to achieve intimacy with them.  The tragedy of the novel is that she has this capacity for self-understanding, but cannot escape from her existential despair.

The only one of Addies children who seeks intimacy with her is Darl.  Cora suggests that, while Addie appeared to favor Jewel, it is really Darl who shares some degree of understanding with her.  It was Darl.  He come to the door and stood there, looking at his dying mother. I saw that with Jewel she had just been pretending, but that it was between her and Darl that the understanding and the true love was. He said nothing, just looking at her (354).  This is the only instance of true love in the novel, but even it is tempered by the living death brought on by Darls birth.  It is Darls silence that strikes Cora here.  The fact that he said nothing, just looking at her leads Cora to perceive the authenticity of his feelings.  He just stood and looked at his dying mother, his heart too full for words (355).  Here, the thematic reversal of intimacy and violence collapses intimacy becomes gentle, and Darls quiet, loving attitude stands in opposition to the violence of Addies death.  At the same time, in a general sense, the reversal is maintained, since throughout Darls childhood she met his attempts at intimacyfrom her misery at his presence in her womb to her pleasure in physically beating himwith violence and contempt.  Darls silent vigil shows that the deepest and truest things in life are beyond words, beyond education and philosophy the truth of his feelings, expressed in silence, is higher than any truth expressed in language.  In this scene, Faulkner suggests that the truest word that can be spoken is silence.  Moreover, it is here, as Darl silently reaches out to Addie, that the question of intimacy and violence converges with the reversal of silence and speech.

Words, according to Addie,
Dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at.  When Cash was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didnt care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear pride, who never had the pride. (463)

Words, with which education is primarily concerned, are poor and unstable representations of the deepest experiences in life. Addies experience reveals that motherhood is an irreconcilable paradox of intimacy and violence, of life and death, for which the term motherhood is, at best, an empty place-holder.  Words are necessary, she suggests, because the drive to express painful paradoxes is strong.  At the same time, people who believe that words actually represent reality are simply inexperienced, deluded.  For example, fear is a word the fear is an experience that words cannot capture.  It is the same with terms like sin and salvation. Cora prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too (468).  Here, the relationship between words and experiences is much like the relationship between religious rituals and true faith only those who lack the latter can be fulfilled by the former.  The only truly fulfilling word in the novel is silence.  It is in silence that a connection with truth, other people, and the universe at large can be achieved.  When the philosopher-poet Dewey Dell runs into the darkness to escape the agony of coming unalone (382), her pain is assuaged not by words, but by the silence that surrounds her.

The themes of life and death, intimacy and violence, and words and silence are all reversed in As I Lay Dying, and through this reversal Faulkner tries to express those painful existential truths for which mere, direct words are inadequate.  On a broader level, he reveals the inadequacy of education or of socio-economic standards to measure the truth and depth of a persons understanding.  By reversing life and death, he shows how death occurs within life, and how the articulation of life can sometimes occur only in death.  The reversal of intimacy and violence, in which Addie becomes connected to her children by beating them, reveals the paradox of motherhood in a way that direct description never could.  These paradoxes are facts of life about which the characters have had their own kind of education, and which they understand well enough to know that language cannot truly capture them.  Part of the strength of Faulkners method is its effect upon the reader watching Addie get close to her children by beating them forces us to face the horrific side of motherhood, which is rarely discussed by educated people precisely because it is too difficult, too painful, to be spoken.  The reversal of words and silence, then, comprehends the other two reversals and shows why they are necessary.