White Trash

            On Tuesday morning I memorized the the second chorus of "Arthur, où t'as mis le corps" (Arthur, Where'd You Put The Corpse?) by Boris Vian. Just six verses to go. 

            I finished working out the chords for “Belinda” by Serge Gainsbourg. I ran through it in French and English, made a chord adjustment, and then uploaded it to Christian's Translations.

            I weighed 88.2 kilos before breakfast. 

            I had time to eat two oranges and have a few sips of coffee before leaving for the US Lit lecture. I bundled up and wore two scarves as well as my winter gloves, though I don't know if I really needed them. 

            Lecture: 

            We are headed into the home stretch. Essay topics are up and she hopes some have started. It's due on November 26. Our exam is on December 15 from 19:00 to 21:00. Go to tutorials to prepare for the exam. Tutorials are a significant chunk of our marks. 

            William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying was published in 1930. It's good if it's difficult. He's a Modernist writer. It's an opportunity that it's difficult. We are taking a leap as the next cluster of texts is from the southern US. It's an aesthetic leap. 

            In Modernism, in the US context, Faulkner is juxtaposed with Hemingway as the other end of two poles. The opposition is that Hemingway is minimal with his tip of the iceberg effect while Faulkner is expansive and ornate. Modernism is closely linked but not necessarily sympathetic with modernization, cities, industry, secularism and mass production. Modernist texts tend to bear traces of these processes but are often critical of them. In terms of literary history and form, Modernism is a departure from Realism. It is associated with fragmented narratives, psychology, and internality over plot and events; stream of consciousness, and rhetorical complexity. Modernism is a more real realism that reminds us that realism is not reality. It is linked to the conventional passing of Realism. 

            Faulker was born in Mississippi. Connect this with Jesmyn Ward. He was the oldest of four. His family name was “Falkner” but he added a “U”. Hawthorne added a “w.” One can read endlessly about these changes. His sweetheart married someone else and he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force because he was underweight and under height for the US. He had to pretend that he was British to get in. He was discharged but wore his uniform back in Mississippi while telling fake war stories. He married the sweetheart who'd previously left him. 

            His first famous novel was The Sound and the Fury. He describes it as having been written without plan or design in a state of ecstasy. As I Lay Dying was written the same year while he was a nighttime supervisor at a U of Mississippi power plant. He wrote it in six weeks and sent it without change. He knew the last words before he started. It has a punch line. He is associated with telling tall tales. Is his account of how he wrote it accurate? His version is not entirely true but more than one expects. 

            He invented a fictional county to be the universe or world of his fiction. Yoknapatawpha County. 

            He also spent much of WWII in Hollywood working on classic films as a writer. His two most famous films are “The Big Sleep” and “Mildred Pierce.” The Coen brothers have a sketch of Faulker in “Barton Fink.” 

            His works went out of print but returned with the Portable Faulkner in 1946. He won the Nobel Prize in 1950. 

            There are snippets from the reviews of As I Lay Dying:

            “Faulkner and Formal Innovation. The method Mr. Faulkner used in his last novel, The Sound and The Fury, is here greatly modified, so that though something of that extraordinary madness hangs like a red mist over it, the lines of demarcation are mercifully clear. This is a great concession and a boon to people who are ready to weep with exhaustion from the effort to interpret and absorb what might be called a sort of photographic mysticism. But even so it cannot be said that for such readers As I Lay Dying will prove much of a picnic.” - Margaret Cheney Dawson 

            “Faulkner and class: The Sound and the Fury dealt with the tragedy of the disintegration of an aristocratic family. As I Lay Dying deals with the tragedy of death among white trash. The tragedy of character is deeper than the tragedy of death, for death is a commonplace, whether among white trash or cavaliers. It stands to reason that The Sound and The Fury with its strange reverberations of madness should be a more striking novel than As I Lay Dying in which the action is sordidly matter-of-fact. As I Lay Dying is a horrible book. It will scandalize the squeamish. But it is an admirable book, one to delight those who respect life well interpreted in fine fiction without attempting to dictate what subjects an author shall choose.” - Julia K. W. Baker 

            Unlike The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying is divided into short sections with characters' names as lines of demarcation that are helpful to the reader. But it doesn't always seem as if the section could be from the consciousness of that character. This is problematic for some readers. It gives a sense that it's strange and hard. Photographic mysticism. 

            Class specifics. A vocabulary such as a Bundren never dreamed of to render thought. Horrible but admirable. Some say the term “white trash” is not a good choice. They are low characters. There was a classroom agreement at a university for a class code that no one can refer to anyone as “trash.” Why is it important to say that? Who are the proper subjects of literature and how? People say Faulkner was morbid, cruel, and showed an affinity for defective mentality. There was a formal difficulty with Faulkner, his subjects, and his characters. But after Faulkner won the Nobel he was now representative of US literature.

            “Vardaman is a gibbering half-wit who believes that his mother is a fish.” -Clifton P. Fadiman

            “The Canonical Faulkner: Faulkner has daringly mingled the grotesque and the heroic, the comic and the pathetic, pity and terror, creating a complexity of tone that has proved difficult for some readers to cope with.” - Cleanth Brooks 

            In terms of genre, Faulkner is referred to as Southern Gothic. The gesture to Gothic is limited in use or coherence. Southern Gothic used to be derogatory. 

            “The Case Against Southern Gothic: The South has always been a section apart from the rest of the United States . . . Economically and in other ways it has been used as a sort of colony to the rest of the nation. The poverty is unlike anything known in other parts of this country. . . The South is the only part of the nation having a definite peasant class.” - Carson McCullers, “The Russian Realists and Southern Literature” (1941) 

            The Bundrens are a peasant class. Rural poverty in As I Lay Dying. They are farmers, maybe tenant farmers or maybe sharecroppers. How much do they own? Do they own land, property, or their mule? They are alienated from town life. Town is modern and seductive. We can read and think about race. The racial difference between this and his other novel is not obvious. White trash is necessarily racialized. The contrast with The Sound and the Fury, which has to do with a white family and their black servants. 

            The South is haunted by the Civil War. It has been left behind by modernity. African Americans are leaving in the great migration from southern rural to northern urban. There is a timelessness to the novel but it can't be separated from their being left out of history. One can read the novel closely and pick out historical references that situate it for you. When we see that Darl fought in WWI we see him closed in, limited, and set apart but now placed in history. 

            “Why drag about the monstrous corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then?” -Emerson, “Self-Reliance” 

            The Bundrens are dragging a corpse. It provides the plot. The symbol of the corpse. Does the personal history of characters represent the south? History? Emerson says don't think about the corpse. Faulkner says think about it. 

            Integrity vs. fragmentation, dissolution. What holds it together in terms of bodies, consciousness, and literary form? Mourning. Southern works are consumed by loss. Is that a distinct quality of southern literature or is all literature about loss and mourning? One hopes English studies include philosophy. Darl's passage is conscious being. Melancholy philosophy on the concept of mourning. He's conceptualizing absence and death and other things. There is a crucial opposition between Darl and Jewel. He imagines that Jewel has no consciousness. Jewel is not speculating so he can be. He later says Jewel is made of wood with no interior. 

            Relationship between object and shaping consciousness. Jewel, Addie and himself are configured. Think of the different characters in the novel on a journey in which we learn about them. Certain objects are important in the story. Who has an object and who doesn't substitute it for the body of the mother? We start out as an undifferent unity to become fragments but haunted by loss. Vardaman had a fish and wants a train. Dewey asks wouldn't you rather have bananas? What is Dewey's object? Jewel has a horse, Cash has his tools, Anse has teeth, and a new wife. Addie's object is Jewel. Darl has none but he has most of the language and thought. 

            We took a break. 

            I told the professor that Darl's thoughts about being sound like a Beat poem although it's way too early. Hipsters and jive talk are closer but still a few years away. 

            “The fact that in As I Lay Dying the characters think in words they cannot know shows that in “reality” they know things that they cannot say.” - Dorothy Hale

            Anse has an immediate comic presence and a comic distance. He has laziness. He has the desire to not be beholden to anyone while at the same time taking advantage of everyone. His relation to Addie is one of will and desire. He has a funny relationship with tense. After Addie is dead he speaks about what she wants in the present tense. It is clever of Faulkner and it says something about the ungraspable temper of death. He wants teeth. Part of the dark humour is that the other wife is the same as Addie. It ends with a joke. Observation on the relationship between patriarchy and language and loss. Mrs. Bundren represents Mrs. Bundren. 

            Cash is the oldest. He's a carpenter and makes his mother's coffin while she is alive, holding up the boards for her to see and approve. He has come from her womb and building her coffin is a fair exchange. His list makes no sense as a numbered list but it shows his mind and is important visually. It is the opposite of Vardaman's fish. Faulkner uses visual aspects of language to talk of consciousness. Cash is simple, careful, rule-bound, fair, not philosophical, stoic. He is comically in pain but it don't bother him. When you think of the characters think how they fit together as a family. The pieces fit and fall apart. Darl has the first section and Cash has the last. The family knows his tools are his object. He also articulates important things. She asked for our thoughts on why Cash defends Darl. 

            I say that for Cash everybody has been built just like he builds things. People are objects so they can't have insanity unless we put it into them. 

            Darl is a problem. He's able to gesture toward relationality. It's how we look at people. Cash questions philosophy and morality. He misses Darl. How much responsibility goes into characterization. The extent to which characters have been shaped by loss of mother or wife. Or if something else is going on. Dewey's pregnancy ties her to her mother. She is raped by a pharmacist. She modulates into poetic language not attributed to her. She has irregular diction and grammar. Speculations of character but also how consciousness works. Not just bad grammar. She and Darl have a wordless communication and he knows her secrets. Incestuous knowing. People are tubs of guts. She is from a name equated with nature and animals. This is problematic because it suggests men are less natural and subject to decay. Females take on the burden of death while men are conscious. 

            I said she stands apart from her mother in that she would choose to have an abortion. 

            She is thinking of the mysticism of pregnancy and how one is not oneself. The doctor has a fat belly. Why does he not have room for a baby? What does it mean to be an individual? Pregnancy is messed up for individuals. Dewey is like Macbeth after Lady Macbeth dies. 

            Jewel. How many sections do characters have? Jewel has one. He would save mom. They die together. He is pissed off at Cash. Jewel saves his mother's corpse twice from water and fire. Darl wants to destroy her corpse. Jewel gives up his horse. Compare Jewel and Pearl from The Scarlet Letter. They are not alike but of similar significance to their mothers, and illegitimate with a minister as the father. Addie's love for Jewel is different from what she has for others. 

            Q. Mr. Faulkner, in As I Lay Dying, did Jewel purchase the horse as a substitute for his mother?

            A. Well, now that’s something for the psychologist. He bought that horse because he wanted that horse. 

            Q. Did you consciously or unconsciously parallel As I Lay Dying with The Scarlet Letter?

            A. No, a writer don’t have to consciously parallel because he robs and steals from everything he ever wrote or read or saw. 

            Darl has 30% of the text. He is an author surrogate. He narrates events when he is not there. He knows secrets. He knows Jewel is illegitimate. He has an affinity with Vardaman. His special knowledge makes him quasi authorial. He is mad and in the third person he dissolves into the book. Vardaman has a distinct way of putting the world together. He has a fish he aims to show his dying ma as an offering. She will be impressed. His mom becomes confused with the fish. He substitutes her. After Addie is in the box Vardaman bores holes and damages her face. Addie is juxtaposed with the minister's section. This is a parallel to The Scarlet Letter. He wants to confess but relieved when he doesn't have to. 

           Addie is dead but speaks. She is missing and not missing, absent and present. Addie is similar to the sister in The Sound and the Fury. Addie's theory of language and love, about language and words. They are no good if the forms fail. Only language because of loss. Look at her account of language.

            “What the book poignantly exposes is the precarious nature of ritual expression, particularly that of funeral rituals, in which an absurd possibility—that the corpse of the person nonetheless is the person—is maintained not because anyone believes it but because no one can immediately, emotionally deny it. The trauma of grief, in which death most clearly is a function of other minds, makes the irrational conventional.” --------Eric Sundquist

            I told the professor that it seemed like a Dixie-centric course with most of the authors being from the southern US. I added that was ironic since the south isn't really part of the United States in a spiritual sense. She pointed out that we had a lot of authors from New England early on and I realized that was true. I said that still there sure have been a lot of great writers from the south. She agreed. I wondered if it had something to do with having an upper-class culture in poverty. We talked about regions that produce authors and she said the south is one of them. She couldn't think of much from the Midwest but I suggested Bob Dylan. I said the Canadian Prairies seem to have produced some good authors. She said her favourite Canadian writer is Alice Munro, who of course is from Ontario. I told her about my favourite quote from Alice Munro, which is that she never read a novel that couldn't have made a better short story. She said her later stories are as complex as novels. 

            I rode to Yonge and Bloor and then south to King and all the way to Dunn before going back up to Queen. King Street is pretty boring all the way and always has been.

            I weighed 86.9 kilos before lunch. 

            I weighed 87.3 kilos at 18:45. 

            I had a potato with the rest of my gravy and a chicken breast while watching an episode of Gomer Pyle. 

            In this story Gomer tells Sergeant Carter that he needs a week's leave to go back to Mayberry and buy a filling station with his cousin Goober. When Carter learns that Gomer plans on leaving the Marines if the deal goes through, he falls all over himself to help him. Gomer takes out all of his savings, which amount to $1600 and suddenly all of the other Marines are trying to get some of it. Carter sweeps in to protect his chance to be free of Gomer. At the bus station Carter has to steer Gomer clear of thieves and scam artists. Carter escorts Gomer onto the bus and tells him he can only trust the sweet little old lady and her son behind him, not knowing that she is a master pickpocket who has almost successfully lifted Gomer's money. Carter decides to travel with Gomer and takes his wallet to place the money under his protection. But the old lady effortlessly picks Carter's pocket. Gomer and Carter ride the bus to the next town where Gomer convinces Carter he'll be okay now. But Carter discovers Gomer's wallet missing. He realizes it was the old lady and they take a cab back to the previous stop. The cabbie is on his way to pick up an old lady and her son to take them to Las Vegas. Carter and Gomer catch them and call the cops. Carter sends Gomer onto the bus and thinks he'll be free of him soon, but Gomer returns to the base after realizing how well protected he is by Carter and so he decides to stay in the Marines. 

            After dinner I went to make coffee and saw a mouse on my stove. It ran to the counter and behind my granite cutting board that leans against the wall. I reacted instinctively and pushed the cutting board flat against the wall. When I pulled it away it looked like I had severely injured the mouse. I felt bad because I hadn't consciously intended to hurt it. I picked it up and put it outside. There are probably more living here although I've never seen two together. 

            It took me until 22:30 to edit my lecture notes.