Faulkner from Within. William H. Rueckert
he may lapse into a kind of violent apathy and eventually become pure violent action without purpose and perhaps even destroy himself.
The last time we see Jewel doing and saying anything, he is helping to capture Darl so they can take him off to the cage in Jackson. Jewel is holding his half-brother Darl down and saying: “Kill him. Kill the son of a bitch” (ALD 514). Both are actions which epitomize the now purely negative, destructive sources of his being. Jewel, more than any other person, embodies the end toward which Addie’s life and her long revenge have been moving. Addie’s Jewel, like Addie herself, is bent on killing, imprisonment, and destruction. With Jewel, we see how the four generative powers—intellectual power, manual skill, physical power, sexual-physiological power—which the self may have (together or separately) and which are represented here in the three older sons and the daughter, are all destroyed, impaired, or inverted by the end of the journey. The family is left to Anse, the stupidest, laziest, and weakest man in the whole book, who has neither knowledge nor skill nor generative power—only new teeth, power to devour, to eat others. He embodies the basic, demonic principles of the fiction: where something can go wrong, it will; where there is something precious, cherished, it will be taken away; whatever is valued will be lost; if something is good or pure, it will be polluted—I list only some of the inverting, demonic principles, none of which, of course, apply to Anse. One can make up a rule for Anse, which will also be perverse and demonic: those who take away shall receive?
Vardaman, who is not old enough to be so clearly defined in his being as Cash, Darl, and Jewel, is old enough to experience loss and to suffer. If he is anything, he is the sufferer: from the loss of his mother and the subsequent ontological chaos (“My mother is a fish,” he says; and he bores those holes in the coffin so she can breathe); from the cruel effects of the prolonged funeral journey (the buzzards and the smell remind us of this); from inadvertently betraying and then losing his brother Darl—the one who, naturally, understands him the best, ministers to his grief, and who, with Vardaman, give us the two most frequent narrators and the major voices of sorrow in the fiction. Vardaman’s double loss of his main identity figures (Addie and Darl) nearly destroys him and reduces him at the end toward Ben’s situation, where he becomes the voice of pure grief, not the explanation of, but the expression of loss, dislocation, and suffering. Cash tries to explain it; Vardaman only experiences, witnesses, and expresses it. This is beautifully shown by Faulkner in Vardaman’s last monologue, where he acts as witness for two of the violations which occur at the end, one internal to the family and one a classic example of external victimage of the ignorant country girl. The first is Darl’s departure for the insane asylum and the second is Dewey Dell’s “seduction” in the cellar. Re-experiencing the anguish of Darl’s loss, Vardaman expresses it in the broken copulas of being and familial relationships which characterize so many of his monologues: “My brother he went crazy and he went to Jackson too. Jackson is further away than crazy [. . .] He had to get on the train to go to Jackson. I have not been on the train, but Darl has been on the train. Darl. Darl is my brother. Darl. Darl.” His monologue ends. “Darl he went to Jackson my brother Darl.” Vardaman says near the beginning, “Darl went to Jackson. Lots of people didn’t go to Jackson. Darl is my brother. My brother is going to Jackson [. . .] Going on the train to Jackson. My brother,” he goes on and pretty soon one realizes that the monologue is in two type faces and that the Darl parts, all in italics, are set and broken up in such a way as to be continuous, even though passages in roman type describing what is happening outside Vardaman come between. He resumes, for instance, four lines down the page, thus: “Darl” and then six more lines down, “Darl is my brother, Darl went crazy” and later
Darl he went to Jackson my brother Dar [. . .] He went to Jackson. He went crazy and went to Jackson both. Lots of people didn’t go crazy. Pa and Cash and Jewel and Dewey Dell and me didn’t go crazy. We didn’t go to Jackson either. Dar [. . .] My brother is Darl. He went to Jackson on the train. He didn’t go on the train to go crazy. He went crazy in our wagon. [. . .] Darl is my brother. My brother is Darl. (ALD 243-46)
Vardaman’s cri de coeur, somewhat more articulate than Ben’s roaring and bellowing and so further up the human scale, comes from the same matrix of helpless loss. Dying, Addie has set in motion an irreversible degenerative pattern which she is helpless to alter. Her revenge is this journey of disasters and only her burial will bring her specific revenge to an end, but the effects of it will go on for a long time. The helplessness—powerlessness—in the face of loss is most purely embodied in Vardaman because he has done nothing to deserve it and has no way to cope with it. He is one of Faulkner’s many figures for the self as innocent victim. Each of the children is victimized in some way by both parents, by circumstances and by others). Some—Dewey Dell and Jewel, especially—are also victimizers (of Darl) and perpetuate the victim–become-victimizer pattern that is so common in modern literature (all literature, all human life, really, as Kenneth Burke has made clear.)
Dewey Dell is the last of the victims and of all the children the least directly victimized by Addie. That is precisely the point about Dewey Dell, whose destiny is in her name. She repeats Addie’s pattern—as woman, as female, the dewey dell to be entered, violated, used: Lafe picks into her basket and fills it; MacGowan forces an entrance into this dewey dell; Darl enters her in symbolic incest again and again; the child growing in her is following its own pattern, which Dewey Dell is helpless to alter. She is tricked by Lafe’s money and words; by MacGowan’s words and promises. She is entering and beginning the pattern Addie is just completing. She is Addie, the female victim, all over again. Addie does not need to do anything to Dewey Dell: her destiny as sexual female, as a dewey dell, will do it all for her. Her own centrality of being—to be a dewey dell—is self-destructive because Faulkner has given her no way to protect herself, and like Addie, she will be victimized by the empty words and the “terrible blood” and in turn victimize the children who come, invariably, to violate her aloneness. The destructive future, the repeating pattern, is in her womb—the very ground of generation. She has already begun her revenge, her victimizing, turning on Darl because he has “entered” her without words, violated her aloneness, and knows her secret. Of all the children, Dewey Dell has the most completely predictable future. She goes back home already the victim of a biological pattern she cannot break, certain to be victimized again by the red blood “[. . .] the terrible blood, the red bitter blood boiling through the land” (ALD 166). And to take her revenge on her children.
There remains Anse, the only member of the family to gain anything on this funeral journey and a victimizer so stupid and inept as to fill the reader with helpless rage. Anse is the unmoved and unmoving mover in this fiction, almost a catalytic agent who, added to any human situation, will produce negative results, for everyone but himself. Addie could not have invented a more perfect agency for her revenge against the family. Anse, ironically, is beyond anyone’s revenge, which seems to be just the point: he is a kind of mindless, impervious negative force in the human universe. Anse is a completely non-productive self, without centrality of being: he has no intellectual power, no manual skill, and no physical power. He does not work at all and so denies one of the prime functions of the father, which is to provide. He does not sweat or suffer. Insofar as he is without generative being he is without life and is a negative force throughout. Anse is, as Addie says, faithful to the literal word, “a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame” (ALD 164). It is in the name of the literal word that the funeral journey is undertaken and continued, and always in the name of the empty word that Anse does everything: refuses intelligent help, refuses to turn back, takes Jewel’s horse and Dewey Dell’s money, and puts the family in debt to Flem Snopes for the next thousand years. Returning, Anse has new teeth (he is primarily a consumer) and a new wife to prepare food for him to consume. He has already partially consumed his children.
This fiction ends with a return to where it began after the long journey of disasters, deaths, losses, suffering, outrage, violations, indebtedness, betrayal, expulsion, imprisonment, putrefaction. The family returns but in some essential way the family is dead, its being having gone into the grave with Addie, into the cage with Darl, to Flem Snopes with the horse, down into the cellar with Dewey Dell’s last hope, out into the pain of Cash’s broken, cement encrusted leg, out into the broken syntax of Vardaman’s dislocation and suffering. The family can be no source of being here or seldom anywhere else in Faulkner. It is one