"No Such Thing as Was": TheFetishized C

orpse, Modernism, andas I Lay Dying

Slankard, Tamara, The Faulkner Journa

The literary corpse marks a key site of entry into a discussion of the shifting definitions ofmodernism.
Certainly the piling-
up of real bodies throughout the twentieth centuryimpacted the form and content of fiction, and in man
y ways modern funeral andembalming practices both contain and reflect modernity as Americans begi
n to movetoward "an increased concern for appearances in a consumer culture" after the Civil War(Far
rell 7). Yet previous criticism has relied too heavily on literal readings of literarycorpses, focusing alm
ost exclusively on the ways in which bodies reflect how and why wedeal with death in modernity.1 Co
rpses tell us more than this. Specifically, corpses that areovervalued, corpses that stand in symbolically
or metonymically for other objects, otherconcepts, other narratives, other ideologies -
fetishized corpses -
force us to rethink notionsof modernism and modernity because they reveal characteristics of regional
modernismdistinctly and explicitly at odds with old and new attempts at definition.
It is the too-easy eliding of the avant-
garde with conceptions of modernity and theinsistence upon "making it new" that still pervades even p
rogressive, interrogativedefinitions of modernism with which I wish to take issue.2 Such discussions st
ill privilegetexts - modernist and postmodernist, if we may still use that descriptor -
that "rebel"against "precursors," and this limited description inherently still privileges the samebourge
ois high modernist works and writers whose hegemony current critics claim to bedismantling. Regiona
l modernist writers like William Faulkner - and later, CormacMcCarthy and Toni Morrison -
reject such easy elision precisely through theirrelationships with literary and historical pasts.
My purpose here is not to contribute to the established presupposition that Faulkner is ananomaly, a bl
ip on the radar in Southern fiction and the one "true" American example ofhigh modernism after Hemi
ngway and Fitzgerald. Nor do I wish to add another voice tothe already full choir of those celebrating l
ater authors like McCarthy and Morrison fortheir "Faulknerian" styles. Rather, I hope to reconceptuali
ze readings of Faulkner's fictionin light of changing ideas about modernism and, in a broader sense, to
suggest that bytracing the treatment of the fetishized corpse in works by Faulkner, McCarthy, andMorr
ison -
works that span multiple temporalities as well as spatialities, even as they shareimportant modalities -
critics might continue to question the reliability of "definitions" ofmodernism that continue to insist o
n the a priori assumption of "making it new." Eachauthor's treatment of the literary corpse at least nece
ssitates a dismantling of (still) elitistprioritizing of high modernist works and at most insists upon a co
mplete reconfigurationof the relationship between literary modernism and history.
Southern literature in general and Faulkner's work in particular have had precarious -strained -
relationships to modernism. For at least the past two generations of literaryscholars, Faulkner's "mode
rnist" style has been understood as placing him squarely andunquestionably in the conversation alongs
ide Joyce, Eliot, and Pound. But that was notalways the case.3 Early critics often failed to see the valu
e in unpacking a complexnarrative structure that they believed represented only the particular experien
ce ofprovincial life; a common judgment lambasted Faulkner for what was perceived as hissimplistic f
ixation on violence and the grotesque.4 Faulkner's public image has often beenthat of an outsider to a l
iterary movement he helped to create: Hugh Kenner suggests that"no other major twentieth-
century writer was so isolated from his peers" (182), andJoseph Blotner's biography describes what is
perhaps the most symbolic image ofFaulkner's relationship to high modernism: Faulkner in the Left Ba
nk in 1925, sitting at acaf known to be frequented by James Joyce just so that he could get a look at t
he manwithout ever having to speak to him (159).5
Thus a curious paradox exists in any discussion of Faulkner and modernism. Certainly,Faulkner's expe
rimental form was no rejection of modernist aesthetics, even as the manhimself stood at a playful dista
nce from any official movement. Nor was Faulkner's life inany way a simple rejection of capitalism or
modernity, despite some of his contemporarycritics' seeming assertions that one could not be both Sou
thern and modern. Much ofRowan Oak was paid for, after all, by Faulkner's decision to "hack a little o
n the side" as aHollywood contract writer (Blotner 289). In his 1978 article, "Faulkner and the Avant-
Garde," Kenner declares: "we are preparing for a clarification of twentieth-
centurymodernism which in turn will help clarify Faulkner's relationship to it" (191-
92).6 The twohalves of Kenner's proclamation remain at disparate odds: scholars can now refer,unflinc
hingly, to Faulkner as a "traditionally canonized modernist," and yet even "new"conceptualizations of
modernism have not considered the ways in which Faulkner'swriting necessarily alters our perception
of it (Moglen 7).
Examination of fetishized corpses in works by Faulkner, McCarthy, and Morrison bringsto the forefro
nt not merely Faulkner's ghosts reimagined in the later works of"postmodernist" or "regional" writers
but also the necessity for a redefining of Americanregional modernism directly and distinctly at odds
with traditional - and current -
ideas ofmodernity and modernism. Through the fetishizing of corpses each author defiestraditional te
mporal, ideological, and aesthetic boundaries of modernism by illustrating aregional modernity identif
ied not as a radical break with the literary and historical past,but instead as a specific inability to break
with those pasts. Regional modernity carries thedecaying burden of its past forward on its back and is
marked by a fixation on the same.The implications of Faulkner's famous insistence that "there is no su
ch thing as was - onlyis" then takes on at least a two-
fold meaning (LG 255). First, overfixation on the corpsesignifies in each author's work an inability (or
perhaps an unwillingness) to break from aspecific past and a redefinition of historical and literary lega
cy as not merely the anxiety ofinfluence but also an intimate love/hate relationship -
much like Quentin Compson'sfamous last exclamation about the South in Absalom, Absalom!: "I dont
. I dont! I donthate it! I dont hate it!" -
in which specific narratives of progress like Reconstruction andthe Harlem Renaissance are interrogat
ed (378). Second, in the larger context of literaryhistory and criticism this fixation on decayed pasts be
comes a means by which scholarsmight map relationships between regional modernities. The corpse a
s fetish objectbecomes a site of negotiation of loss and a mode of discourse, not across cultures asorigi
nal anthropological definitions of the fetish would imply, but rather across culturalboundaries of the t
wentieth century.
"[M]y father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a longtime," Addie Bu
ndren says in a psychical monologue that haunts the narrative of As I LayDying nearly as much as the
postmortem matriarch herself does (169). As the maternalcorpse that refuses ever to die fully, Addie b
oth embodies and represents loss, a dying thatis an ongoing process because, in the specifically Southe
rn modernist context of Faulkner'swork, she represents the lingering melancholia of an idea of unifyin
g national andSouthern narratives that had never really existed except, to borrow Benedict Anderson's
phrase, as strictly "imagined communities." Writting in and of the post-Reconstruction,Depression-
era South, Faulkner posits the Bundrens as almost pathologically "other."Communicating only through
individual monologues, they are unable to fully articulateand differentiate self from other, and they ar
e able to negotiate through both the rural andurban terrains of the South only with the greatest of diffic
ulties. Strangely, through hernecrotic relationships with other characters - particularly with her sons -
Addie becomesthe unifying figure of the novel; but it is a progressively putrefying unification. Addie
becomes the ideal fetish object throughout As I Lay Dying because she represents not asimple elision
of common usages of the word "fetish," but an almost textbook example ofall three classic dfinitions
of the term.7 Through this fetishization she not only allows theother Bundrens to distinguish self from
other, but also, because she comes to stand in for(crumbling) domestic narratives of idealized Southern
womanhood and is seen alongsidefigures like Anse Bundren who represent a fallen and ostracized So
uthern masculinity, hercorpse becomes both the burden of history and, ultimately, the thing that allows
theBundrens to navigate and define the family's - and the New Souths -
place in the modernworld. Her lingering presence also allows us to see Faulkner's work and Southern
modernism outside of existing paradigms.
In Object Lessons, E. L. McCallum suggests that "fetishism . . . deconstructs the subject-
object distinction by positing a third kind of being, one which is neither fully autonomousand rationall
y thinking, nor completely inert, but is instead instrumental -
prosthetic andparasitic" (154). McCallum speaks here of the blurring lines between fetish subject andf
etish object, but the same could be said of Addie Bundren herself. The corpse escapesexact definition
because it is simultaneously person and object - both being and non-being-
and Addie Bundren's corpse furthers this resistance. Addie's body is, on at least two levels,the inverse
of Elisabeth Bronfen's idea of the beautiful corpse: Addie's continual decaymarks her as anything but a
n aesthetic object, and the physical power of her corpse, alongwith the continuing power of her wishes
to exert control over the family after her death,serve to mark her as something other than -
or at least more than - the victim of herhusband's incompetence and her own limited life choices.8
As both the title of the novel and the image of the speaking corpse that it invokes wouldindicate, dying
is a continual process in Faulkner's work. The author begins by portrayingAddie as the embodiment o
f loss through her ambiguous death and dying. It is unclearwhether Addie is alive or dead when Dr. Pe
abody finally arrives to see about her, followingAnse's belated fetching. "She has been dead these ten
days," the doctor surmises, but healso suggests the persistence of the corpse in Addie's inability (or per
haps refusal) toacknowledge her new position within the family structure: "I suppose it's having been a
part of Anse for so long that she cannot even make that change, if change it be," he thinks(AILD 43).
Though he declares her dead and her body beneath the bed coverings as "nomore than a bundle of rotte
n sticks," Dr. Peabody imagines Addie, motionless, watchinghim and her family with only the movem
ent of her eyes (44). It is as if, Dr. Peabodysuggests, at the precise moment of her death -
or rather, her decision to die -
Addie finallygains an identity beyond wife and mother and empty vessel, developing "that pride, thatf
urious desire to hide that abject nakedness which we bring here with us, carry with usinto operating ro
oms, carry stubbornly and furiously with us into the earth again" (46).
Yet it is also Addie's corpse that immediately marks the Bundrens as the extreme outcastsamong their
already outcast rural Southern neighbors. The presence of Addie's dying bodyin the familial home is in
dicative of the Souths remove from the rest of the nation. Duringthe years foUowing the Civil War and
particularly after the turn of the century, scientificprogressivism, as well as industrialist capitalism an
d the rise of the middle class, tookdeath and dying practices away from the home, out of the hands of f
amy andcommunity, and into the charge of a new professional industry. In Inventing theAmerican W
ay of Death, 1830-
1920, James J. Farrell suggests that while a burgeoningNorthern middle class invented a modern funer
al industry bent on controUing andmaking invisible the agrarian markers of death at odds with new ide
as of progress, both"Southerners and ethnic Americans have deviated from the pattern and chronology
of theAmerican way of death" (218). While FarreU expands very little on his specific readings of"ethn
ic American" practices, he suggests that "the American South . . . resisted industrialcapitalism based o
n free labor, preferring instead a famUial, agrarian, and slave-
labormode of production. The low level of Southern income and the slow growth of Southerncities hin
dered the concentration of moneyed markets for the products and servicesassociated with" the modern
death industry (218). In a more nuanced reading of Southerndeath practices, James K. Crissman notes
that although embalming began being used inthe South out of necessity during the Civil War and gaine
d popularity when Lincoln's bodywas toured through the country, in most rural areas the practice was
not used until atleast the 1930s (35-36).
Addie's death then serves to represent the Bundrens' status as members of the rural South,particularly
when Peabody, "a man seventy years old, weighing two hundred and oddpounds" is able to reach the d
eathbed only by "being hauled up and down a damnmountain on a rope," and the confusion surroundin
g the event reflects a Southern societyso at odds with modernity and so separated from the national im
agination that the linebetween life and death cannot clearly be drawn (AILD 43). It is in fact the Bundr
ensthemselves, not the presumably qualified professional Peabody, who proclaim Addie'sofficial death
once the flames in her eyes "go out as though someone had leaned down andblown upon them" (48):
Dewey Dell throws herself across her mother's body and begins toshake her, and Cash and Anse each
declare, respectively, "She's gone" and "She taken andleft us" (50). It was not unusual in the early deca
des of the twentieth century for ruralSoutherners to make death proclamations for their own family me
mbers and neighbors inthe absence of a doctor or coroner: after holding a "death watch" vigil over the
dyingindividual, groups of watchers would determine death by carefully monitoring breathingvisually
or by holding "a mirror to the face of the person believed to be deceased"(Crissman 16, 24).
In this way, the treatment of Addie's dying body and her ambiguous status as corpseharkens back to ni
neteenth-century rural traditions -
and certainly, though Anse's refusalto summon Peabody for his dying wife because "Hit was jest one t
hing and then another"and his lamenting, "now I got to pay for it," once the doctor finally does arrive r
eveal boththe family's economically downtrodden status as well as Anse's own particular brand ofsupp
ly-
side economics; it also reveals a mindset Farrell fails to consider fully: moderndeath practices represen
t, for the rural Southerner, yet another modern intrusion into theSouthern home and pocketbook (AILD
44, 37). Taken another way, Anse, Addie, and therest of the family must also "pay for" Peabody's arri
val because the presence and necessityof a modern medical practitioner could have only one possible
meaning: "She's goin, isshe?" Anse asks Peabody (45). Faced now with the inevitable, Anse subtly sug
gests that ithas been the doctor's absence alone that has kept Addie alive this long: "She'll know hit. Ik
nowed that when she see you she would know hit, same as writing" (45).9
But Addie's death is far from traditional in other, equally significant ways. Cora Tuliresents Dewey De
ll "always standing over Addie . . . like she was trying to keep anybodyfrom coming near her at all," ju
st as Jewel despises having "every bastard in the countycoming in to stare at her" (24, 15). Dewey Dell
has become Addie's only "watcher," thoughCora insists, "for the last three weeks I have been coming
over every time I could, comingsometimes when I shouldn't have, neglecting my own family and dutie
s so that somebodywould be with her in her last moments" (22). Even as she judges the Bundrens -
particularly Anse and Jewel -
for their backward ways, for their lack of civility andneighborliness, Cora simultaneously marks her o
wn place along a continuum of progressas she laments her own failure to be with the dying Addie -
"It's my duty," she tells Vernon(69) -
and to care for her body after her death, a role traditionally performed by women,especially in the cas
e of a female corpse (Crissman 31). Addie's (ambiguous, unembalmed)corpse then oscillates between
and reflects an uneasiness toward both old and newtraditions -
reflecting the precarious position of the New South in the decades followingReconstruction -
and also reveals anxieties surrounding gendered spheres and traditionalrepresentations of Southern wo
manhood.
The Bundrens' outcast status moves well beyond the economic position that leads Anse toa crossroads
between witnessing his wife's final breath and the trip to town that will bringthe three dollars needed t
o get her to "that family burying-
ground in Jefferson" (AiLD 19).Anse becomes the representative backwards figure whose mistrust of t
he modern worldexcludes the entire family from narratives of progress, and throughout the novel theB
undrens form the antiquated funeral bier upon which Addie's corpse stands as amonument to the past t
hat, ironically, ultimately forces the family into modernity. In thisway the fetishization of the maternal
corpse represents for the Bundrens a fixation on thepast and also becomes a vehicle through which the
y might move beyond that same past.
Anse becomes the pariah for his rural Southern neighbors because he comes to representall that is wro
ng with the Old South and its backwater ideology that continues to excludeeach of them from the natio
nal imagination.10 Though each stands in willful oppositionto modernity, Anse Bundren is the poor w
hite trash version of Emily Grierson -
the "fallenmonument" of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily." Whereas Emily is considered to have been"a
tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town," Anse issimply a burden (C
S 119). Vernon Tuli surmises that he has "never see him with a shirt onthat looked like it was his in all
my life" and as a result, "Like most folks around here, Idone holp him so much already I cant quit no
w" (AILD 3 1-
32, 33). Armstid wonders too,"be durn if there aint something about a durn fellow like Anse that seem
s to make a manhave to help him, even when he knows he'll be wanting to kick himself next minute"(1
92). Anse, the perpetual "luckless man," as Peabody also assents, then begins to stand infor the Old So
uth and its defeated position among the Northern middle- and upper-
classeswho view him as pathologically unwilling to change his ways and pull himself up by hisown pr
overbial bootstraps. And because Anse is also the patriarchal Bundren figure, herepresents a comprom
ised Southern masculinity willing to sacrifice both his children andthe dignity of the maternal body for
its remnants of stubborn pride.
Anse himself recognizes the family's position as distinctly at odds with and existing outsideof a moder
n world determined to break him:
It's a hard country on a man; it's hard. Eight miles of the sweat of his body washed upouten the Lord's
earth, where the Lord Himself told him to put it. Nowhere in this sinfulworld can a honest, hardworkin
g man profit. It takes them that runs the stores in thetowns, doing no sweating, living off of them that s
weats. It aint the hardworking man, thefarmer. Sometimes I wonder why we keep at it. It's because the
re is a reward for usabove, where they cant take their autos and such. Every man will be equal there an
d itwill be taken from them that have and give to them that have not by the Lord. (110)
Though Anse's seemingly slow-witted lack of preparation and slow-to-
action ways oftenappear simultaneously to arise from familial neglect tinged with cruelty and a "monst
rousburlesque of all bereavement" regarding Addie's death and his family's social andeconomic status,
in this rare instance of internal reflection Anse's action and inaction alsotake on the characteristics of b
lind Christian faith in eternal reward and a Heaven where"them that have" will no longer have the fleet
ing pleasures of "this sinful [modern] world"to prop them up, and Anse and his dying breed will finall
y be justified (78). Anse's LostCause belief in the "spiritual superiority" of poor Southerners11 makes
him ananachronistic lost cause to his family and neighbors, newly class-
conscious "commonwhites" who begin to see themselves as "increasingly despised" in the modern wor
ld (Cash282-83).12
Such country religion ideology does not keep Dewey Dell from surmising to herself, "Weare country p
eople, not as good as town people" (AILD 60), or Vardaman from lamentinghis position as "a country
boy" rather than one of the "boys in town": "Why do flour andsugar and coffee cost so much when he i
s a country boy. . . . 'Why aint I a town boy, pa?'I said. God made me. I did not said to God to made m
e in the country. If He can makethe train, why cant He make them all in the town because flour and su
gar and coffee"(66). Nor does Anse's faith stop him from cursing the modernity that always threatens t
oencroach upon the world and the old ways he is not willing to give up: "Durn that road,"he spits. "?-
laying there, right up to my door, where every bad luck that comes and goes isbound to find it" (35). F
or Anse, modernity and progress are evils that have blighted thefamily and killed Addie. It is the road t
hat is to blame for Cash's big world "carpenternotions" that lead directly to his broken leg and a loss of
labor and income for the family;the road is to blame for Darl's going off to war "just because he's got
his eyes full of theland all the time" (36); Addie was "well and hale as ere a woman ever were, except
forthat road" (37). If God had "aimed for a man to be always a-
moving and goingsomewheres else, wouldn't He a put him longways on his belly, like a snake?" Anse
philosophizes (36).
Addie then serves as the impetus for the family's reluctant and ramshackle entrance intomodernity.13
Before her death she tells Anse, "for the world like a woman," to simply "Getup and move, then" when
the road begins to reach too close to the Bundren doorstep (35).Though it has been a dozen years sinc
e Anse "has . . . been in town," it is Addie's corpsewhich the Bundrens both cling to as if they are unwi
lling to let go of something lost anddepend upon to move them forward (42). Though she is nearly (if
not already) dead at thebeginning of the novel, Anse fears that "if she dont last until [Darl and Jewel] g
et back . . .she will be disappointed" because Addie presumably wants to begin her own burialOdyssey
as soon as possible, her death being the single most important event of her life(17). "[W]ith the roads l
ike they are now, it wont take you no time to get her to town,"Vernon Tuli assures Anse, but Anse, no
w dependent upon that same cursed road, fearsthat "It's fixing up to rain" (18), and he "wouldn't upset
her for the living world" by notgetting Addie's body to Jefferson (19). Addie's death is, according to he
r husband, a directresult of her own will, and he and the rest of the family are powerless to deny her wi
sh tobe buried near the relatives she never cared to visit in life. The entire action of the primarynarrativ
e and the only movement forward undertaken by the Bundrens is a direct result ofAddie's demands and
the biological demands of her progressively decomposing corpse,which is continuously imbued with
more agency and autonomy than any of the othercharacters of Faulkner's work.14
While she simultaneously prods Anse and her children into action and into town, Addie'scorpse also b
ecomes the literal burden that her family must bear, making their journeyfrom rural to urban terrain -
from Old to New South and into modernity -
even morearduous than it otherwise would be. Though in life her body is only "pole-
thin," in deathAddie's corpse grows in stature: "I would not have believed that Addie Bundren wouldh
ave needed that much room to lie comfortable in," Darl declares when he sees her coffinat its vertical
height, turned on end (97, 222). As wife and mother, Addie Bundren'sphysical measure is just the "bun
dle of rotten sticks" Dr. Peabody describes, but as corpseAddie -
laid upside down in her coffin "so it wouldn't crush her [wedding] dress" that hasbeen chosen for her
burial -
becomes representative of the persistence of history and of theidea of domesticity that the Bundrens ar
e unable to leave behind (88). 15 Cashacknowledges as much, seemingly predicting the ensuing come
die disaster when hesurmises, "I made it to balance with her. I made it to her measure and weight" (90)
. ButAddie's corpse and container "wont balance. If [they] want it to tote and ride on a balance,they wi
ll have _____" (96). And here Cash's thought drops off in mid-
sentence, thereader left to finish his reasoning that for the coffin to "balance," Addie's corpse must bet
urned around and her wedding dress (and all its symbolism) either crushed or removedentirely. For Ca
sh, Addie's "measure and weight" exists outside of her dual position as wifeand mother -
perhaps because of his own oedipal desires -
but neither he nor the rest ofthe Bundrens are able to escape the precarious position of being both pull
ed forward andweighted down by the maternal corpse. "The river itself is not a hundred yards across,"
and it is as though the family "had reached the place where the motion of the wastedworld accelerates j
ust before the final precipice," a description suggesting how near theBundrens are to making the short
leap out of the rural South and into the modern world,yet how far (carrying the rotting burden of famil
y and Southern history along with themin a rickety cart) they are from reaching the other side, and ho
w ill-
equipped (with only arope and Cash's antiquated tools to help them carry it across) they are to make th
e leap(146).
Yet the Bundrens - and seemingly also Faulkner's novel itself -
are unable to escape theburden of Addie's corpse. They are unable to accept her death, even as they fi
xate on herdying body. "Ma aint that sick," Jewel insists (17), while Dewey Dell, caught up in her own
plans to obtain an abortion remedy once she reaches town, considers: "I heard that mymother is dead. I
wish I had time to let her die" (120). Darl attempts to come to termswith his own existence and its rela
tion to his mother's life or death, surmising, "I dontknow if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he
does not know that he does not knowwhether he is or not ___ Yet the wagon is, because when the wag
on is was, AddieBundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be" (8
0-
81). Vardaman adamantly refuses to relinquish the idea of Addie, determining, "Mymother is not in th
e box. My mother does not smell like that" (196).
It is precisely the smell of Addie's corpse that signifies, ironically, its persistence - herpersistence -
as the most powerful character throughout the narrative. It is as though,Schwab rightly suggests, "the l
onger she is dead, the more active her corpse becomes," asher husband and children imagine her corps
e as strengthened in its exertion of will andanimated within the coffin in order to survey their actions a
nd listen in on theirconversations (212). Darl envisions that with each stroke of the saw as Cash finishe
s hercoffin, "her face seems to wake a little into an expression of listening and of waiting, asthough sh
e were counting the strokes" before Dewey Dell has even lifted herself from hermother's just-
dead body (50). The coffin and the corpse within it are often spoken of as"Addie" or "her" interchange
ably, as when Vardaman describes the coffin and its contentsfalling into the river as if Addie were acti
vely trying to evade their rescue attempts: "Cashtried but she fell off and Darl jumped going under he
went under and Cash hollering tocatch her and I hollering running and hollering and Dewey Dell holle
ring at meVardaman you vardaman you vardaman and Vernon passed me because he was seeingher co
me up and she jumped into the water again and Darl hadn't caught her yet" (150).Addie's corpse literal
ly "becomes more active" through the ongoing process ofdecomposition that both mirrors the decay of
the Southern landscape and marks her asthe grotesque embodiment of loss. Darl and Jewel imagine Ad
die in her coffin, "withinwhich now and then she talks in little trickling bursts of secret and murmurou
s bubbling"as the putrefaction of her corpse continues (212). The main progression of the narrative -
the journey to bury Addie -
marks the age of her rapidly decomposing body amidstincreasing numbers of swarming buzzards until
there are "ten of them, tall in little tallblack circles on the sky" and until the stench of her corpse, eight
days dead, both loudlyannounces the Bundrens' arrival in town and maps the family's journey through
thenewly reached urban terrain, sending "the ladies all scattering up and down the street withhandkerc
hiefs to their noses" (197, 203).
The smell of rotting corpses is not unique to As I Lay Dying among Faulkner's works.Emily Grierson
holds her "high and mighty" head aloft as she "vanquish [es]" twogenerations of townsfolk who critici
ze "the smell" emanating from her house (CS 121) and"its stubborn and coquettish decay" (119): "Da
mmit, sir . . . will you accuse a lady to herface of smelling bad?" Judge Stevens asks of a young Alder
man (122). In The Sound andthe Fury, though Caddy Compson argues that death is something that onl
y happens todogs and "when Nancy [the horse] fell in the ditch and Roskus shot her and the buzzardsc
ame and undressed her," the simple-minded Benjy already knows what Frony insists -
"Your grandmammy dead as any nigger can get, I reckon" -
because he "could smell it":"A door opened and I could smell it more than ever. ... He shut the door, b
ut I could stillsmell it," Benjy thinks (22). In each text, "smell" serves to draw attention to and separate
the corpse from the society of the living, language being necessary only to articulate asensory percepti
on beyond the powers of the reader but available to all characters. In "ARose for Emily," the full signif
icance of the smell escaping from Emily Grierson's bedroomwill only become evident years later, after
her own death leads to the discovery of thefleshless lover still lying in Miss Emily's bed. But Addie's
corpse alone continually forcesthe reader's attention to both its presence and the biological reality of it
s demisethroughout the entire narrative, placing the reader in the role of fetishist right alongsidethe Bu
ndrens.
Addie's corpse becomes at least triply fetishized, particularly by her sons, throughout theoverlapping n
arratives of As I Lay Dying, signifying for the Bundrens an inability toseparate themselves from a dea
d past and for Faulkner a characteristic of Southernregional modernism that fixates upon, rather than s
evers, its relationship to history. Myreading of this multiple fetishizing relies on the three different mo
des of fetishism outlinedsuccinctly by Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen in Female Fetishism. Fir
st, theauthors utilize William Pietz's now widely-
cited series of articles, "The Problem of theFetish," in which Pietz traces the history of anthropological
fetishism - the first notion offetishism in the Western world - to the usage denoted by sixteenth-
and seventeenth-
century Portuguese imperialist encounters with Africa when traders attempted to describethe practices
of "primitive" cultures in denigrating terms and to describe the over-
valuation of inanimate objects, the "trinkets and trifles" Europeans traded to Africans inexchange for g
oods the Europeans considered to be "objects of real value" ("Problem, I" 9;Gamman and Makinen 16)
. Though its roots lie in the history of imperialism and anEnlightenment ideology that came to see the l
ack of recognition of the value of capital asequivalent to a lack of reason ("Problem, II" 36), Pietz is al
so careful to point out that thishistory of the fetish reveals the inherent problems of translation that exi
st both acrosscultural boundaries and in the borders between individuals and objects, for which thefetis
h might serve as a mode of discourse ("Problem, I" 7, 12). These boundary issues,which we now see a
s inherently germane to modernity, help explain why McCallumbegins her study by proclaiming succi
nctly, "Fetishism stands at the heart of modernity"(xi). They explain as well why the corpse, as both su
bject and object -
and particularly theliterary corpse, existing both within and beyond language and narrative -
serves as theperfect fetish object for modernism in general and in particular for the regional modernist
writer attempting to bridge temporal and spatial boundaries beyond the scope of highmodernist concer
ns.
When we apply it now, the term anthropological fetishism is used to describe behavior inwhich there i
s a seemingly "sacred relationship" between the individual and the objectfetishized, in which objects a
ppear to have deistic qualities for the fetishist. This behavior isoften, Gamman and Makinen explain, d
eveloped as a mode of dealing with loss, as whenthe personal effects of a deceased family member co
me to embody religious significance(27). This type of fetishism is most prominent in Faulkner's novel
when Vardaman insists,"My mother is a fish" (AILD 84). The fish is first meant to symbolize, for Var
daman, aninitiation into manhood as he "aimfs] to show it to ma," proud of his catch and "spit[ting]ov
er his shoulder like a man" to prove it (31, 30); yet as soon as he hears Cash sawingaway at their moth
er's coffin, he is immediately reminded of her imminent death and thefish comes to take the brunt of hi
s anger: he gouges its eye with his foot and cusses itwhen he imagines the fish, like his mother, "asha
med of being dead, like it was in a hurryto get back hid again" (31). Recognizing the totemistic power
of the fish, though not yet itsliteral association with his mother, Vardaman attempts to destroy it, chop
ping it to pieceswith an axe. He struggles to internalize his mother's death, to differentiate between fish
and "not-fish . . . not-
blood on my hands and overalls" and between his mother and thebody that has become "cooked and et
," and the fish comes to stand in as substitute for thematernal corpse in Vardaman's mind (53, 67). He i
magines the family consuming the fishand therefore rescuing his mother from the coffin Cash has bee
n preparing: "Then itwasn't and she was, and now it is and she wasn't. And tomorrow it will be cooked
and etand she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there wont be anything in thebox and
so she can breathe" (67). The cooking of the fish then becomes for Vardaman not,as Schwab has sugge
sted, the "totemistic meal" in which the power of the matriarchalfigure is "cut up and devoured" by the
family in order to distribute the power of her corpseamong the other members (223) or an attempt at "
freeing [Addie] from her bodilyexistence" (224); rather, it represents the symbolic death of his mother.
Once he comes toassociate Addie directly with the fish, all of Vardaman's longing for his mother istra
nsferred to the fish itself, and the ritualistic cooking then becomes not a way to save herfrom death, bu
t another death from which he must save her by "hollering, swarming andclawing at Cora when he fou
nd her cooking that fish" (AILD 86).
Jewel participates as well in a form of anthropological fetishism through the associationand substitutio
n of his horse for Addie's corpse. Despite criticism that he lacked thenecessary sympathy for his mothe
r, Jewel continuously wishes to slow her inevitabledeath. He seems to blame Cash for rushing her, insi
sting: "It's because he stays out there,right under the window, hammering and sawing on that goddamn
box. Where she's got tosee him. Where every breath she draws is full of his knocking and sawing whe
re she cansee him saying See ___ I said Good God do you want to see her in it" (14). ThoughMichael
Hardin reads Jewel's relationship to the horse as an oedipal attraction in whichriding the horse "replace
s the forbidden intercourse with his mother," I would argueinstead that the horse comes to signify the a
bsent mother for Jewel (100). The horse is asubstitute for Addie and the love that she withheld from hi
m, "hating herself for [the]deceit" that resulted in Jewel's birth and "hating Jewel because she had to lo
ve him so thatshe had to act the deceit" (130-
31). Addie herself nearly acknowledges as much when shebegins to cry after Jewel appears with the h
orse: "I'll give - I'll give - give - " shestammers, unable to say the word "love" (135).
It is in the initial comparison between these two brothers and their relationship to Addie'scorpse that w
e can see McCallum's distinction between the fetishist and the melancholicand a clear example of the f
unctionality of fetishism: "while the melancholic counters lossof an object with retreat from the object
to focus on the loss, the fetishist substitutes theloss with something that can provide satisfaction or res
olution, thus moving past the lostobject," she argues (118). While each condition functions as a way to
negotiate loss, thefetish object provides a "complicated satisfaction" that the melancholic lacks, thereb
yproviding a more productive coping mechanism (117). Jewel blames everyone else for"burning hell t
o get her there," but when the journey begins he is able to transfer hisfeelings for his mother fully onto
his horse, leaving Cash clinging to Addie's coffin -
whichhas become for Cash, not a substitute for the maternal corpse, but instead, through Cash'ssexual
fixation and the corpse's biological decomposition, a metonymical extension of thecorpse itself -
and unable to turn loose of his mother's corpse even at the cost of his ownbroken leg and near-
drowning (AILD 19). Ironically it is then Jewel who is able to "save"his mother's corpse from the wate
r because his fetishizing of the horse, as opposed toCash's lingering melancholia, provides him with th
e means to disassociate from the corpsein order to more aptly negotiate loss.16
Cash's fixation on his mother's corpse osciUates between such melancholic obsession andsexual fetishi
sm in which he displaces his oedipal desires onto Addie's coffin, eventuallyresulting in a symbolic inc
estuous act that continues for much of the narrative.17 Theearly pages of the novel are filled with the b
ackground noise of Cash's "goddamn adze," asJewel surmises, "going One lick less. One lick less. One
lick less until everybody that passesin the road wl have to stop and see it and say what a fine carpent
er he is" (15). Initiallythe act of Cash "bring[ing] each board up to the window for [Addie] to see it and
say it isall right" (43) appears either a bit morbid or simply an indication of the Bundrens'economic an
d antiquated status as Cash keeps within the family a service usuaUyprovided, particularly in urban are
as, by other artisans after the turn of the century(Crissman 44). However, the scene begins to take on a
sense of exhibitionism once theelement of overt sexuality is introduced into the dynamic.
Early in the narrative Darl performs an adolescent ritual of passive masturbation by lyingin his "shirt-
tail" and "feeling myself without touching myself, feeling the cool silenceblowing upon my parts," and
he wonders "if Cash was yonder in the darkness doing it too,had been doing it perhaps for the last two
years before I could have wanted to or couldhave" (AILD 11). Soon after, the famy finds Vardaman
"in his shirt tail, laying asleep onthe floor like a feUed steer, and the top of the [coffin] bored clean full
of holes and Cash'snew auger broke off in the last one" (73; emphasis mine). Though Vardaman is onl
y aprepubescent chUd, his "shirt tail" dress is clearly associated with his older brothers'masturbation ri
tuals; in this way, the holes "bored into" his mother's face then take on theimage of simulated sexual vi
olation (using "Cash's new auger" as a substitute) andVardaman's powerful sleep a symbolic postcoital
collapse. Hardin sees Cash asexceptionaUy drawn to Addie's corpse, particularly when Cash describe
s "the animalmagnetism of a dead body" as a necessary component in planning coffin construction(AI
LD 83), suggesting as weU the "hint of sexuality between Cash and the coffin," andnoting specificaUy
the scene in which "Cash drives the last nail and stands stiffly up andlooks down at the finished coffin
. . . slowly he strokes his hands on his raincoated thighs"(97; Hardin's emphasis). "When placed next t
o the scene in which Cash loses his tools andlies on the coffin," Hardin argues, "the sexual connotation
s cannot be dismissed" (97-
98). Iwould add as well the description of Cash "going up and down with that saw" as hefinishes the c
offin immediately before the description of Vardaman in his shirt tail asfurther indication of Cash's sy
mbolic sexual act with his mother's corpse and of the phallicsubstitution of Cash's tools when used by t
he adolescent Vardaman (72).
The toppling of Addie's coffin into the river leads both to a further damaging of the corpse,and therefo
re a further blurring of the symbolic association between both objects, and tothe loss of Cash's tools as
well as his broken leg -
actions that Hardin sees as dual symboliccastrations (98). 18 Given the sexual connotations associated
with Cash's building of thecoffin, I would agree with the first assertion that the loss of Cash's tools do
es in factrepresent the loss of objects "symbolic of male potency and the phallus" (98); it thennaturally
follows that Cash moves further in the direction of fetishist -
particularly giventhat Cash's actions as melancholic appear impotent compared to Jewel's functionalfe
tishistic association with his horse -
because he is forced to disavow, in classic Freudianterms, "the horror of castration" by constructing a
substitute via the coffin (154). Thisassociation lingers, even after the tools are retrieved one by one fro
m the river and placed"where [Cash] could reach his hand and touch them when he felt better" (AILD
186).
Yet again, for readers and particularly for Cash, the distinction between container andcontained is alw
ays slippery. Therefore, when Cash is laid upon the coffin (where he staysfor almost the entire remain
der of the novel), Darl describes how he and Vernon Tuli "laidCash on top of Addie" (180). This actio
n then has a two-
fold effect: first, the symbolicincest between Cash and Addie serves to replicate and stand in for the th
reat of incestbetween Darl and Dewey Dell, as when Dewey Dell imagines that Darl's eyes "begin at m
yfeet and rise along my body to my face, and then my dress is gone," and perhaps for theother taboo se
xualities in the novel as well: Dewey Dell's secret pregnancy with the absentLafe, Addie's affair, and J
ewel's quasi-
secret parentage with the Reverend Whitfield (121).And second, as the Bundrens wheel into town the
monstrosity of Cash's body riding atophis mother's rotting corpse, they announce far clearer than word
s their fixation upon, andsymbolically incestuous relationship with, history.
I would then disagree with Hardin's reading of Cash's broken leg as simply an"immobilization of the 't
hird leg'" (98). As soon as his leg is broken, Cash lies on theground looking "pole-
thin," just as Addie had when Peabody first arrived to examine her,and Cash comes to be directly asso
ciated with his mother's corpse (156). As seven buzzardscircle overhead, Vardaman exclaims that he "
wouldn't let him light on" Addie and he"wouldn't let him light on Cash, either," suggesting that Cash,
with his body pressedagainst the outside of the coffin while Addie's body -
inverted to make room for herwedding dress -
melds into the inside, is now inextricably linked with death as well (195).Cash is later described as "bl
eeding to death" -
also, not incidentally, because of Anse'sfailure to seek proper medical attention, choosing instead to se
t Cash's leg in cement (207).The leg and foot, which first begin to "look like they had been boiled" bef
ore they turnblack, serve to further tie Cash's body to Addie's corpse (213). After leaning his ear to the
coffin with Darl to hear Addie "talk," Vardaman then notes that in the darkness, "my legslook black. Y
our [Dewey Dell's] legs look black, too" (216). Such comparisons serve notonly to link the Bundrens t
o death and to Addie's corpse but also to link the symbolism ofdeath with a specific Southern history,
which the Bundrens can neither entirely accept norescape.
In this way, the sexual fetishizing of Addie's corpse goes beyond the treatment of HomerBarron -
Emily Grierson's Northern, "day laborer" lover ( CS 124). The "indentation" onthe pillow beside Hom
er's remains - along with, of course, the "long strand of iron-grayhair" -
suggest that Emily, at once the symbol of a historically fallen Southern aristocracyand sexually fallen
Southern femininity, was literally and figuratively in bed with andinextricably linked to the North. Yet
her suggested necrophilia is always tinged with asense of irony and revenge, as Homer is "cuckolded"
by death -
and perhaps by Emily'sarsenic (130). It is significant as well that Emily "died in one of the downstairs
rooms"while Homer lies in "one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in fortyyears"
( 129). Faulkner leaves it unclear then whether Emily's sleeping with her lover'scorpse is "purely" sex
ual and sentimental or a favorite pastime in which the murderessenjoys the fading vision of history and
of her crime.
When they deal with the issue at all, critics have often pointed to Cash's "black" leg andfoot and the B
undrens' subsequent encounter with three black men walking along thesame road the family is travelin
g as evidence of either the instability or the irreconcilabilityof race relations in the South.19 The other
characters too mistake Jewel's angry "Sons of abitches" spit toward the white man walking ahead of th
e other group: "It is as thoughJewel had gone blind for the moment," Darl reasons, "for it is the white
man towardwhom he whirls" (229). Yet it is clear that Jewel is not blind. His anger is succinctly andpu
rposefully directed toward the white man "because he's a goddamn town fellow" (230).This scene in p
articular does illustrate Faulkner's negotiation of the complex race relationspresent in the New South, a
nd it further illustrates the commingling of race andeconomics, marking everyone other than rich whit
e men as outside of the dominantnarrative. In this way, the novel illustrates not only the potential irrec
oncilability of Oldfrom New South, but also the extent to which economics has excluded the South fro
m thelarger national narrative and undermines the promise of national history.
Finally, Addie becomes a fetishized commodity when her corpse is figuratively exchangedfor objects t
hat the Bundrens could not otherwise obtain without the corpse's mystifiedvalue in tow. Taken from M
arx's, and later Lukacs's, theories regarding economicexchange and the blurring of distinction between
subjects and objects under capitalism,Gamman and Makinen explain that commodity fetishism occurs
when (using Marx'sterminology), an object comes to be valued for more than just its "use-
value," and insteadbecomes associated with "mystical qualities" (28). In a sense the entire journey to b
uryAddie is an economic one, first postponed so that Darl and Jewel can earn a much-
neededthree dollars, and incidentally leading to the acquisition of Anse's new teeth, the new Mrs.Bund
ren, and (nearly) Dewey Dell's abortion pill. Jewel's horse too is over-
valued not onlybecause it comes to stand in as a substitute for his mother and a lack of maternal love b
utalso because the horse was purchased with money earned outside of the Bundren familyeconomy. "I
dont reckon that horse cost anybody anything except Jewel," Cash surmises,though Anse disagrees (13
5). Just as Cash's leg, broken last summer when he fell off aroof, has cost the family in a loss of labor,
Jewel has essentially "taken the work from [his]flesh and blood and bought a horse with it." Yet Jewel
swears, "He wont never eat amouthful of yours. . . . I'll kill him first" (136). When Anse later exchange
s the horse -
inaddition to the "chattel mortgage on [his] cultivator and seeder" and the eight dollars hefound in Cas
h's pocket, meant to "buy that talking machine" -
for a team to haul Addie'scorpse to Jefferson, he robs each son (and later Dewey Dell when he uses he
r ten dollars inabortion money for the shave, haircut, and teeth necessary to gain the new Mrs. Bundre
n)of more than its "use-value" (190).
When Darl sets fire to Gillespie's barn, Jewel is once again able to save his mother's corpse,but withou
t the horse as fetish object, the coffin instead must become the horse. As it gainsmomentum after Jewe
l pushes the coffin out of the barn and down the hill, its descriptionis unmistakably equestrian: "Witho
ut stopping it overends and rears again, pauses, thencrashes slowly forward. . . . [T] his time Jewel is ri
ding upon it, clinging to it, until itcrashes down and flings him forward and clear" (222; emphasis min
e). Cash later notes -
after the family has essentially exchanged Darl in yet another economic transaction, as "itwas either se
nd him to Jackson, or have Gillespie sue us" -
that "it was Jewel's horse wastraded to get her that nigh to town, and in a sense it was the value of the
horse Darl triedto burn up" (232, 233). By destroying Addie's corpse Darl would have been nullifying
thedeal and retransferring the rightful ownership of her corpse - now symbolically apurchased object -
back to the family. He would also have accomplished what the rest ofthe Bundrens failed to do: "resp
ect" her by "get [ting] her into the ground as quick as youcan" (116).
But it is not for this convoluted economic logic nor for the attempted burial by fire thatDarl is sent to J
ackson; rather, insanity is figured here as the inability to recognize thevalue of commodities. Cash con
siders that Darl "almost . . . done right in a way" by tryingto "take her outen our hands and get shut of
her in some clean way" (233); however, hereasons, "I dont reckon nothing excuses setting fire to a ma
n's barn and endangering hisstock and destroying his property: That's how I reckon a man is crazy" (23
3-
34). WhenAddie's corpse is finally "exchanged" at the novel's end, when Anse returns to the familywit
h his new teeth and his new bride, it is not representative of "a familial economy, inwhich the women
are as exchangeable as the objects"; rather, the journey to bury Addiehas culminated in (most of) the fa
mily finally reaching the precipice of a bittersweetmodernity (Schwab 221). The new Mrs. Bundren's g
raphophone symbolizes a modernworld from which Darl, unable to participate in a capitalist economy,
is excluded:"everytime a new record would come from the mail order and us setting in the house inthe
winter, listening to it, I would think what a shame Darl couldn't be to enjoy it too. Butit is better so for
him. This world is not his world; this life his life," Cash concludes (AILD26 1).20
"A white signboard with faded lettering: New Hope Church. 3 mi." serves to establish justhow comple
tely the Bundrens - and the Old South -
have been left behind, left outside ofmodernity, outside of the promise of the New South (108). And
when a car is seen comingover the hill at the end of the family's arduous journey, the intrusion of mod
ernity is feltmost violently (228). Yet it is ultimately the (rotting, stinking) maternal corpse thatpropels
the Bundrens nearest to "this world" of modernity: "beyond [the signboard] the redroad lies like a spo
ke of which Addie Bundren is the rim," Darl surmises (108). In this wayAddie's corpse reflects the Bu
ndrens' precarious positioning between past and present,between Old and New South -
she is both impetus for change and, by her very existence, aconnection to the past the family is in no h
urry to sever. Addie too is caught betweenworlds -
between life and death, but also between embodying and undermining domesticnarratives of ideal Sou
thern womanhood, as when Cora Tuli surmises that Addie is "not atrue mother" or when Addie herself
laments, "motherhood was invented by someone whohad to have a word for it because the ones that h
ad the children didn't care whether therewas a word for it or not" (173, 171-
72). It is precisely these oscillations and the Bundrens'fetishizing of the maternal corpse that signify a f
ixation on - rather than a radical breakfrom -
the past and insist on an expanded definition of modernism in which we reconsidersubject/object relat
ions in regional modernity in order to more fully interrogate theperpetual role of history.21
A closer look at Faulkner's work reveals that even recent attempts at redefinition fall shortof encapsula
ting the complex relationship to history that regional modernist writersreflect. Far from insisting upon
a "radical break" from the past, such writers instead insistupon the necessity of a direct confrontation
with history in order to be, eventually, able tomove beyond that history: the Bundrens literally must "g
o to town" because the rapiddecomposition of the maternal corpse necessitates their projection out of t
he rural Southand into more urban (and modern) terrain. Faulkner's treatment of the literary corpseund
ermines the basic assumption that to be modern - literarily, culturally, intellectually,or otherwise -
one must break with the past. Clearly it is because "there is no such thing aswas -
only is," it is because the past is always present, that marginalized moderns are ableto finally move for
ward.
The State University of New York, Stony Brook
1 See for example Alan Warren Friedman, who sees literary responses to death betweenthe world wars
as marked by artificiality and distance in the dying process after the turn ofthe century: "Whether hidi
ng and forestalling death in hospitals or enacting it massively inwars, modern technology removed dea
th from the home and rendered it artificial,arranged, civilization's chief product" (23). The result of suc
h technology is both"dehumanized subjects" and literary representations whereby, "repressed or inade
quatelyrepresented, death leaks into language everywhere" (23, 19).
See also Garrett Stewart, who argues that death scenes serve to articulate the crisis ofsubjectivity in m
odernism: "If the arrival of modernism serves in part to specify [the]intersection between identity and
otherness through the magnifying lens of a more andmore acute self-
consciousness . . . then death remains foregrounded as the field of scientiawhich the self can never con
nect with in time - whether in the realm of lived time or infiction's temporal form" (50).
Even Diana Fuss's recent article, "Corpse Poem," in which the author astutely notes the"curious parado
x" of speaking corpses, limits its scope to readings of poems in which Fussnotes "the agency of voice"
for both the poet and his (dead) subject, allowing the poet to"rehumanize the dead" (15).
2 As early as 1989, Raymond Williams began to call the hegemony of modernism in thehumanities "a
problem," describing it as "a now dominant and misleading ideology" (31)that "absurdly . . . stops hist
ory dead" (34-
35): "Modernism, being the terminus," heargues, "everything afterwards is counted out of developmen
t. It is after, stuck in the post"(35). For Williams, our traditional definitions of modernism are the resul
t of calculatedmarket efforts to promote writers and works who perpetuated the (false) "avant-
garde"notion of "radical estrangement" (35).
Recent articles by Susan Stanford Friedman and Rita Felski continue Williams's initialattempts at rede
finition by calling into question notions of temporal, ideological, aesthetic,and disciplinary boundaries
of what we now call modernism. Yet each author is stillbound to limiting and traditional definitions, e
ven as she initiates interrogation into thosedefinitions. Felski in particular is still beholden to eliding th
e descriptor "avant-
garde" withthe (now) more nebulous "modernism" and limits the movement to a moving away from"th
e tyranny of the past, the forces of stagnation, the benighted ignorance of old ways ofthought" even as
she places the two "modernisms" of literary and cultural studies inconversation with one another (503)
. Friedman more thoroughly interrogates oftencontradictory conceptions of the tripartite "modern/mod
ernity/modernism," rightlysurmising that "modernity is a term at war with itself," yet even she falls ba
ck to oneabsolute definition (505): "modernity rebels against its parental precursors, only to berebelled
against by its inheritors: yet another form of the family romance" (504).
3 See, for example, James M. Mellard, who proclaims Faulkner "indisputably ... an icon"of modernist
literary aesthetics and ideology, but notes that critics have only been applyingthe "modernist" label to
Faulkner's works since the 1960s (459, 472).
4 Ellen Glasgow declared in 1935 that the "aimless violence" in "Southern Gothic" fiction(including "t
he fantastic nightmares of William Faulkner") indicated a failure on the partof Southern writers to artic
ulate a coherent relationship to modernity ("Heroes andMonsters" 3-4): "Has Southern Ufe -
or is it only Southern fiction -
become one vast,disordered sensibility?" she laments, calling "the current literary gospel of futility an
ddespair ... a single symptom of the neuroses inflicted on its slaves by the conqueringdynamo" (3). Onl
y a few years before, Glasgow had praised "a little band of [Southern]writers" (Faulkner was not amon
g them) who were "attempting a revaluation of both thepast and the present" ("Novel" 99), by breaking
with their own sentimental literarytraditions and by pushing "the artificial limitations of material and
method" -
praisedSouthern writers, in essence, for becoming modern while developing a unique regionalaestheti
c (96). Yet once that style had become more fully developed, Glasgow labeled it"incurably romantic"
and suggested that the Southern writer's inability to represent "plaintruth" would result in "the death of
a culture" ("Novel" 99; "Heroes and Monsters" 3, 4).
Leigh Anne Duck discusses how the concept of the Southern Gothic novel (a termGlasgow coined in 1
935) "provided U.S. intellectuals with a way to understand southernculture and to distance it, both spat
ially and temporally, from national culture" (147).Duck resists traditional gothic readings of Faulkner's
novels as "running away from thepast" (Glasgow, "Heroes and Monsters" 3) and instead asserts that F
aulkner's charactersrepresent a "destructive pathology"; they "damage themselves and others by avowi
ng anabsolute split in time and refusing to engage in more nuanced investigation of therelationship bet
ween past and present" (Duck 159).
For a thorough examination of Faulkner's early negative criticism, see Lawrence H.Schwartz. Schwart
z traces Faulkner's public image from the 1940s, when his works wereout of print and he was out of fa
vor, to his 1950 Nobel Prize and suggests that, in additionto the publication of Malcolm Cowley's The
Portable Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren'ssubsequent critical attention, Faulkner's works gained gre
ater public appeal as the result ofshifting political ideologies in postwar America.
5 In 1931, Faulkner would say publicly that he "had been having a good time with peoplewho accused
him of being influenced by [ames Joyce" (287). Faulkner "would always tellthem he hadn't read Joyce,
" and then proceed to recite a Joyce poem entirely frommemory (Blotner 287).
6 Kenner alludes to such a paradox when he suggests both that "Faulkner is clearly part ofsomething
modern" and that "avant-
garde is a metaphor of which we sense thewrongness as soon as we apply it" (182). The disparity betw
een Faulkner and themodernist movement, Kenner asserts, can be partially explained through Faulkner
'sdisinterest in " reforming] public taste" and in his complete lack of "pedagogical fervor"(185). Primar
ily, though, Kenner sees Faulkner's "temperamental aversion" to the avant-
garde "manifesto" as traced to both the oral structure of Faulkner's narratives and to hisresultant rejecti
on of the avant-
garde notion of atemporal, aspatial language (186, 185).Because Faulkner's reader is also "listener," he
"must pretend as listeners do that he doesnot confront anonymously the anonymity of print, that he is
acquainted with time andplace and genealogy" (187). Faulkner's reader becomes, then, part of "a com
munity whichincludes the storyteller and of which the bounds are indefinite" (187).
7 I depend throughout this essay on categories and definitions of the fetish outlined byLorraine Gamm
an and Merja Makinen in Female Fetishism, as well as on establishedideas in the works of Sigmund Fr
eud, Karl Marx, and William Pietz on which much ofGamman and Makinen's work is grounded.
8 Bronfen famously reads Gabriel von Max's nineteenth-
century painting of a physicianexamining a female corpse, Der Anatom, as an example of how, "becau
se the femininebody is culturally constructed as the superlative site of alterity, culture uses art to drea
mthe deaths of beautiful women" (xi).
9 Christopher Crocker writes that even in the modern South, '"going to the hospital' hasapparently com
e to signify dying for many middle and lower class Southerners" (116).
10For a recent discussion of "the trope of the backward South," see Duck (6). The 1930smarked a shift
in national discourse, she notes, as "southern backwardness, which hadlong been accepted as a funda
mental regional trait, was increasingly described as a threatto national politics, economics, and culture
" (52). For classic accounts, see both WJ. Cashand C. Vann Woodward. Writing of shifting attitudes at
the turn of the twentieth century,Cash insists that "there were still plenty of hate and spite toward the
South left in theNorth," but now "Yankee" writers and publications "were waxing almost maudlin in th
eirsympathy" (196-
97). Woodward suggests that the crisis for Southerners has been thattheir regional life experiences are
decidedly "un-
American" because poverty and defeat willnot allow for a belief in American mythologies of "econom
ic abundance" and "success andinvincibility" ( 17, 16, 18).
11See Charles Reagan Wilson's "The Burden of Southern Culture" and "The Religion of theLost Caus
e" for discussions of Lost Cause history and religious ideology.
12Barbara Ladd also reads Anse as "a burden more representative than incidental," but shesees him as
an unsympathetic, almost devouring paternal figure "for whom putting on hisshoes is a chore" (19). Fo
r Ladd, the foundation of Anse's worldview is not Lost Causereligion, but a broader, (masculine) Amer
ican "sense of entitlement," and so he speaks "adiscourse of right and privilege, of self-
justification," which results in the commodificationof his wife and children (19).
13Susan Willis likewise sees the narrative chronology of As / Lay Dying as a movementinto modernit
y; however, she reads the novel through the lens of contemporary consumerculture. Willis posits that t
he Bundrens represent "history's forgotten characters" whoactually play a pivotal role in the developm
ent of our modern relationship to commodities,and contribute to an understanding of the role of consu
mers in American capitalist society(43). Because, as sharecroppers, the Bundrens are first only "margi
nal" participants in aproduction economy, they are able to participate in "industrialized society . . . onl
ypartially" once they make it to town and encounter desirable products like bananas andgraphopones, s
he suggests (43). Whereas Willis sees the Bundrens as fetishizingcommodities and using desired objec
ts as "a means of replacing relationships betweenpeople," I see the maternal corpse as the fetishized ob
ject that eventually allows theBundrens to participate in a capitalist economy (46).
John T. Matthews reads Addie's death as exposing an already existing precariousrelationship between t
he Bundrens and capitalist modernity. I would argue, however, thatthe "dialectical relationship" Matth
ews outlines in the "economic contradictions" betweenthe Bundrens and modernity is not formed until
after Addie's death and that it is thematernal corpse that forces the family forward (74-77).
14Gabriele Schwab reads the Bundrens' burial journey as representing "an aggressivematernal power"
and the entire novel as a mode of "dealing culturally with the fears of thefemale body and with the thre
atening aspects of femininity" (214, 210). While I aminterested in Schwab's readings of the obsessive
nature of the sons' relationships to Addieand her corpse, and also in her readings of Addie's corpse as a
"grotesque representation ...of the dead maternal body" in opposition to the "exquisite cadaver" Bronf
en's work focusesupon two years later (210), I find her application of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque too
dismissive of Addie as "the negative, overpowering, and devouring mother" (214).
15In Absalom, Absalom! Jason Compson also tells Quentin the brief story of an aunt whofeared that s
he would not survive a dangerous surgery and whose "sole worry aboutdeparting this world was to get
rid of a certain brown dress which she owned," insistingthat she "see it burned with her own eyes, beca
use she was convinced that after she died[her female next of kin], the logical one to take charge, would
bury her in it" (156). Whenshe actually died years later she was "buried in her wedding gown" (156).
Crissman notesthat "in the years prior to embalming," Southerners in the remote Appalachians werety
pically buried in clothing considered to be their own "Sunday best" -
which occasionallyincluded a military uniform or a wedding dress -
but the inversion of Addie's body in hercoffin, along with the questioning of her roles as wife and mot
her throughout the novel,serve to undermine such domestic narratives, even if the mere presence of her
corpsedressed as if for the altar might not otherwise do so (33-34).
16 Seth Moglen and I disagree on this point. Moglen utilizes a psychological model tocriticize the "de
ep social melancholia" he sees as pervasive in modernist authors likeFaulkner -
authors whose works, he argues, are "structured by the presumption thatcollective resistance to the da
maging forces of modernization was impossible, evenunthinkable" (27, 7). Moglen rejects the notion o
f fetishization as a method for negotiatingloss and insists that substitution for a lost object leaves the s
ubject "mired in a form ofmelancholia" (22). My reading of the different responses to Addie's corpse i
nstead reflectsthe psychological utility of fetish objects.
17 Schwab notes that Cash has a "tendency of making a fetish of the coffin" and that "thecoffin [is] int
ermingled with the body of the mother," but she neither theorizes thisdescription nor specifically extra
polates as to how the coffin as fetish object influences herreading, other than to say that this is further
evidence of "Addie's dead body [being] turnedinto a symbol of the negative, overpowering, and devou
ring mother" (214).
18 While I am interested in Hardin's readings of the sons' sexual fascination with Addie'scorpse, I find
the scope of his argument, that "Faulkner provides a wonderful intersectionof the sex and death drives
in the lives of the Bundrens" and that the author "reveals thatthe way to survive, succeed, and prevail i
s only possible if one is focused on life and ongratification," fails to live up to many of the interesting r
eadings he constructs ofindividual scenes (102). Likewise, his assertion that "the fish is also a sexual s
ymbol" I findalmost entirely without evidence, and observations like these tend to undermine another
wise useful reading (102).
19 See for example Jessica Baldanzi and Kyle Schlabach, who convincingly argue thatAddie's corpse,
along with Jewel's questionable parentage, reference "the region's confusedracial heritage" and the "tra
veling display of decomposition blurs . . . supposedly puredistinctions between race, class, and family '
legitimacy'" (51).
20 Willis reads this scene as "the family made round and whole by the addition of thegraphophone" be
cause she sees Darl and Addie as "soothingly replaced"by the newlyacquired commodity (49). Darl "h
as no place" in the family or in the modern, consumerworld, she argues, because he is an "artist" and a
"visionary" (45). But Darl is sent toJackson immediately after setting fire to Gillespie's barn -
both to save the family fromfurther economic hardship, and because of his failure to see the heresy he
has committed.I disagree, too, with Willis's assertion that in the closing scene of As I Lay Dying Cashr
efers to Darl "with fondness," as his speech appears to be tinged with lament, even as heenjoys his ne
wfound position as consumer (49).
21 Ladd's reading of Addie as both subject and object, as both product and producer, isparticularly rele
vant to this discussion. Addie "speak[s] to the truth of modernity," Laddasserts, because she refigures t
he relationship between women and cultural products likechildren and texts; "with Addie, Faulkner est
ablishes a very different narrative of therelationship of the male author to women and a new narrative
of the relationship ofwomen to language, writing, and authorship" (51, 50).
[Reference]
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[Author Affiliation]
Tamara Slankard
A doctoral candidate in English at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, TamaraSlankard is
also an assistant professor of English at Suffolk County Community College.Her essay in this volume
draws from her dissertation, "Limber Corpses: The Remains ofHistory in Twentieth-
Century American Literature and Culture."
Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: "No Such Thing as Was": The Fetishized Corpse, Modernism, and as I Lay Dying. Contributors: Slankard,
Tamara - Author. Journal title: The Faulkner Journal. Volume: 24. Issue: 2 Publication date: Spring 2009. Page number: 7+. University of Central
Florida Spring 2008. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.