Addie Bundren And The Spectral Voice Of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

Addie Bundren`s role within Faulkner`s As I Lay Dying is at its most basic level as a catalyst for the troublesome ventures of her family. And yet, whilst she is physically dead and voiceless in the immediate sense for the majority of the novel, her spectral form occupies the space between the text as well as shaping the unwitting intentions of the other characters. In this essay I look to shed light on the purgatorial essence of Addie and examine the relevance of questioning whether she is dead.

E.T Bartlett in his Essay "Difference between death and dying" marks a distinction between two definitions of death; One formal and universal and the other material and particular. The first is quite simply, irreversibility and is true purely as a matter of language; we say death and we mean no more. The latter is, whilst understood on a medical level, far more profound, particularly when lent to the literary perspective of Faulkner. Death is the `loss of the integrating function of the organism as a whole versus what is essentially significant to the life of a person.`(270, Bartlett) Bartlett suggests the importance of the latter definition to ask questions of societies perception of the comatose, the brain dead and those who seem to have lost the will to live. In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner employs Addie to similarly blur a line that is otherwise considered clear-cut in our general perception. The most forefront means of this blurring comes as Addie is offered a posthumous voice in an otherwise chronological narrative grounded in realism. The novel up until Addie`s section consist of forty first person accounts recounting, aside from the fifty or so pages in which Addie is still alive, the preparation of her burial; the order very much in sequence of time, despite small overlapping as we jump perspectives. We therefore must ask why this break from structure. One interpretation comes from William Handy`s essay "Faulkner`s Inner Reporter". Handy argues the section denoted to Addie`s conscience "has no location within the unfolding events of the story"(438, Handy) in a manner that echoes her role as the evasive catalyst within the text. She spurns the characters to action yet is absent, spoken of rarely by name but in the metaphorical, "my mother is a fish"(76, Faulkner), is physically incapacitated into immediacy and yet emotionally and spiritually absent. The incongruent placing of Addie`s voice is as such used to show the incongruent nature of Addie within the Bundren family and life:

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn`t need a word for that any more than for pride or fear. (160)

From these lines we learn at least two things. Primarily and obviously, she is miserable, cynical and bereft. Secondly, and more importantly, a new perspective concerning the value of words. If we adopt Addie`s contention that words are but "shapes" filling an absence, then the novel becomes a stream of mere place holders; signifiers that allude to an underlying meaning. This devaluation of words is very much in accordance with the slurring of reality necessary for a novel consisting of interior perspectives from multiple viewpoints. And yet, in recognising the subjective quality of events we recognise but part of the issue. As Handy suggests, "In moving from the consciousness of one character to that of another, Faulkner is concerned not so much with a pattern of events as he is with a pattern of individual existences."(447) This is tantamount to establishing Addie`s place within the novel. By investing in the novel we invest in a scenario requiring no small amount of willing suspension of disbelief. The Bundren`s are caricatures of Southern life, both in action(the dragging of a corpse half way across the absurdly hick titled Yoknapatawpha county by no means a realistic occurrence) and in speech: "Durn him. I showed him. Durn him.(51)" Whilst the reader accepts the muddling of vowels with little question, a small break from chronology seems offensively unrealistic. And yet it shouldn`t, for the book in its entirety is a patchwork of lent voices. Vardaman is no more than ten years old and yet speaks in a kind of poetic verse; "an unrelated scattering of component- snuffling and stampings"(55) and recorded speech is often rerecorded by other characters to contrasting effect; Anse drenched in colloquialisms in the first person, "hit was jest one thing and then another"(43) but formulaic and precise when quoted by Peabody "`She`s counted on it,` pa says. `She`ll want to start right away.`"(17) The result is to remove the voice from the characters, an effect appreciated in the text; "Whitfield begins. His voice is bigger than him. It`s like they are not the same. It`s like he is one, and his voice is one."(86) As such, the bodiless voice of Addie is less incongruent with this text of fragmentation than first imagined.

Faulkner moves further than just disconnecting the characters from their voices and at points lends the voices and interior perspectives of one character to another. Upon Anse asking Darl where Jewel is, he answers "down there fooling with that horse. He will go on through the barn into the pasture. The horse will not be in sight. The horse snorts, then Jewel sees him glinting for a gaudy instant among the blue shadows."(8) Handy interprets this phenomenon as the result of Darl centring "all of his feelings on his deep resentment of jewel- the objectification of his grief and incompleteness"(445); his conscience is focused so entirely on Jewel it begins to seep into Jewel`s interior. Elsewhere we see a similar if not so startling effect as a metaphor is shared between characters, sawing likened to snoring by Peabody, Darl, Cora and Vardaman. We must assume that Faulkner hasn`t just lost his thesaurus in this instance, and then ask why this metaphysical, verbal link.

One answer comes with what Alldredge calls Reflexive Reading. Reflexive Reading forces the reader to suspend juxtaposed images in the mind until the work is completed, finally allowing a total thematic image to immerge. One outcome of Reflexive Reading would be to gain a feel of the totality of the characters, regardless of their surface incongruities. Charles Aiken elucidates "with each of the other characters their existence as participants in a journey is generically different from their existence as living, experiencing beings."(437, Aiken) As such, if we view the text as a whole, we view the characters as wholes, not a mere collection of images; "As Darl describes the water in the cedar bucket we are not concerned the with sensation of water, but his inner sensibilities."(439, Handy) With this manner of perspective, Addie`s "place" in the novel becomes irrelevant in light of her simply being her.

From a slightly different angle, As I Lay Dying can be read as the product of Addie`s deathbed ladened mind. Whilst this may be considered one critical reading too far for some, it is a perspective that ties up many of the novels ambiguities. The interchangeable dialects of characters and the cerebral connection of Darl and Jewel for instance, are explainable as the outcome of a limited imagination. This idea is, if not congruent, a more hard-line version of the Bergsonian sense of time implied with the title`s "Dying". Rather than taking the title to mean the moments before Addie`s death, it can be read as the active function of being dead. In Addie`s words, "the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead a long time"; the act of being dead in this instance requiring effort. With this notion the reader can view Addie`s role not as the author, nor as a mere catalyst of events in the base sense, but as an active influence that exerts itself into every manner of the characters existence. Michael Millgate suggests that Addie, "the mother, as both their physical and symbolic core, embodies a principle of family unity that has long held the family together, and continues to hold it at least until her body has been buried. It is entirely natural that she should not only occupy the foreground of the text throughout, but bleed her essence into the very core of the novel."(107-108, Millgate)

Faulkner`s As I Lay Dying is an ambiguous novel, which disguises its inconsistent characters beneath the veneer of realism. Written wholly from the viewpoint of its characters and dotted with re-reported speech surrounded with quotation marks, a grammatical device used solely for citations until the 19th century, Faulkner not only switches perspectives with each new chapter, but morphs the character`s interiors throughout. This loosening of the objective nature of storytelling and chronology renders Addie`s voice less adrift from Faulkner`s perceived level of reality, whilst saving the reader from assuming she is a spectral voice in an otherwise "grounded" novel.

Works Cited William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Vintage Classics; New Ed edition, 1930 E.T Bartlett, Difference between death and dying, Cleveland State University, Ohio, 1995 William J. Handy, Faulkner's Inner Reporter, The Kenyon Review, Vol 21, 1959 Betty Alldredge, Spatial Form in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, The Southern Literary Journal, Vol 11, 1978 Charles S. Aiken, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha Country: Geographical Fact into Fiction, Geographical Review, 1977 Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner, New York, 1963