Toni Morrison’s Home versus William Faulkner’s As
I Lay Dying
What
being, with only one voice, has sometimes two feet, sometimes three, sometimes
four, and is weakest when it has the most?
Man,
Oedipus answered, because he crawls on all fours as an infant, stands firmly on
his two feet in his youth, and leans upon a staff in his old age.
Robert
Graves, The Greek Myths: 2 (Middlesex:
Penguin Books, 1955) 10.
 |
| Gustav Moreau |
In William Faulkner’s novel As I
Lay Dying, it is Addie Bundren who lies dying while her son Cash, a
carpenter, saws and smooths the boards that will make her casket. The whole
family (Addie’s husband Anse and the children Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell,
and Vardaman) is dying, each one in his or her own way. Standing—for the most
part a stagnant and static standing—is novel’s dominant metaphor.
In Toni Morrison’s novel Home,
it is Frank Money who lies immobilized by drugs and cuffs in the “crazy ward”
of a northwestern hospital while his sister Cee lies dying in Georgia: “’Come
fast. She be dead if you tarry.’” Frank thinks about a chair while plotting his
escape: “If hand-crafted, who was the carpenter and where did he get his lumber?”
Toni Morrison got the lumber for her novel from William
Faulkner’s novel. Instead of a coffin, instead of a coffin of a novel that depicts
an interminable and excruciating attempt to get Addie Bundren to where she will
be buried, Morrison builds a novel of achieved resurrection, of anastasis, of Auferstehung, of standing up.
“They rose up like men. We saw them. Like
men they stood.”
The opening lines and the dominant metaphor of Home are echoed at the novel’s end by words painted on a sanded
piece of wood Frank Money nails to a sweet bay tree: “Here Stands A Man” and
then by Frank’s thoughts:
I stood there a long while, staring at that tree.
It looked so strong
So beautiful.
Hurt right down the middle
But alive and well.
Cee touched my shoulder
Lightly.
Frank?
Yes?
Come on, brother. Let’s go home. 147
To get to this state, to
this home, Frank’s journey includes the following (italicized sections are
Frank’s own account, which sometimes contradicts the other narrator’s account):
We
shouldn’t have been anywhere near that place. . . . The reward was worth the
harm grass juice and clouds of gnats did to our eyes, because there right in
front of us, about fifty yards off, they stood like men. Their raised hooves
crashing and striking, their manes tossing back from wild white eyes. They bit
each other like dogs but when they stood, reared up on their hind legs, their
forelegs around the withers of the other, we held our breath in wonder. . . .
Then it stopped. The rust-colored one dropped his head and pawed the ground
while the winner loped off in an arc, nudging the mares before him.
. . .
we saw them pull a body from a wheelbarrow and throw it into a hole already
waiting. One foot stuck up over the edge and quivered, as though it could get
out, as though with a little effort it could break through the dirt being
shoveled in. We could not see the faces of the men doing the burying, only
their trousers; but we saw the edge of a spade drive the jerking foot down to
join the rest of itself. When she saw that black foot with its creamy pink and
mud-streaked sole being whacked into the grave, her whole body began to shake.
. . .
Since
you’re set on telling my story, whatever you think and whatever you write down,
know this: I really forgot about the burial. I only remembered the horses. They
were so beautiful. So brutal. And they stood like men. 3-5
In Faulkner’s novel animals stand like men as well, but
the comparison works backwards in most cases, with men and women standing
docilely like the animals (italicized passages are the thoughts of whichever
narrator is speaking at the time):
It
was Darl. He come to the door and stood there, looking at his dying mother. . .
. “What you want, Darl?” Dewey Dell said, not stopping the fan, speaking up
quick, keeping even him from her. He didn’t answer. He just stood and looked at
his dying mother, his heart too full for words. 15
Pa
stands beside the bed. . . . Then she raises herself, who has not moved in ten
days. . . . She lies back and turns her head without so much as glancing at pa.
. . . Cash comes to the door, carrying the saw. Pa stands beside the bed,
humped, his arms dangling. She will go
out where Peabody is, where she can stand in the twilight and look at his back
with such an expression. . . . Pa stands over the bed, dangle-armed,
humped, motionless. 30-33
The
cow is standing in the barn door, chewing. . . . I stoop my hand to the ground
and run at her. She jumps back and whirls away and stops, watching me. She
moans. She goes on to the path and standins there looking up the path. It is
dark in the barn, warm, smelling, silent. I can cry quietly, watching the top
of the hill. Cash comes to the hill, limping where he fell off of the church.
35-36
The
cow stands at the foot of the path, lowing. . . . his [pa’s] head bowed a
little, his awry hair standing into the lamplight. He looks like right after
the maul hits the steer and it no longer alive and dont yet know that it is
dead. . . . “Ay,” pa says. He rouses up, like a steer that’s been kneeling in a
pond and you run at it. “She would not begrudge me it. 38-39
.
. . and still see Cash going up and down with that saw, and Anse standing there
like a scarecrow, like he was a steer standing knee-deep in a pond and somebody
come by and set the pond up on edge and he aint missed it yet. 46-47
We
stand holding the rope. . . . He comes opposite us and stands there. . . . eye
to eye they stand in their close wet clothes. . . . they stand there, watching
Jewel’s still hands. . . . When we pass the wagon pa is standing beside it,
scrubbing at the two mud smears with a handful of leaves. . . . Cash has not
moved. We standin above him, holding the plane, the saw, the hammer, the
square, the rule, the chalk-line. . . . 108-109
.
. . fury in itself quiet with stagnation 110
Jewel
was stopped, halfway back, waiting to go on to the horse. “I give other
things,” Anse said. He begun to mumble his mouth again, standing there like he
was waiting for somebody to hit him and him with his mind already made up not
to do nothing about it. . . . Jewel had come back now, standing there. . . .
Anse stood there, mumbling his mouth. . . . Anse stands there, dangle-armed.
“For fifteen years I aint had a tooth in my head,” he says. . . . Jewel stands
with his hands on his hips, looking at Anse. 129
I
happened to look up, and saw her outside the window, looking in. Not close to
the glass, and not looking at anything in particular; just standing there with
her head turned this way and her eyes full on me and kind of blank too, like
she was waiting for a sign. . . . So I went around the counter. I saw that she
was barefooted, standing with her feet flat and easy on the floor, like she was
used to it. . . . She stood there, not looking at me. . . . But she just stood
there, not looking at me. 135-137
Faulkner’s characters stand like the dumb animals they are. Morrison’s
characters Frank and Cee come to stand like the magnificent horses that stand
fighting like men to determine which will protect and service the herd. But
before they can do that they have difficulties to overcome.
Frank, for instance, has been suffering from incapacitating, immobilizing
depression that keeps him from standing:
She had begun to feel annoyance rather
than alarm when she came home from work and saw him sitting on the sofa staring
at the floor. One sock on, the other in his hand. . . . She regretted the loss
of ecstasy but assumed its heights would at some point return. 75
The multiple times when she came home to
find him idle again, just sitting on the sofa staring at the rug, were
unnerving. 78
After leaving Lily, after a breakdown, Frank must break out of the
hospital and make his way without shoes (and then with torn galoshes and only
later with work shoes):
Still, before escape, he would have to get
shoes somehow, some way. Walking anywhere in winter without shoes would
guarantee his being arrested and back in the ward until he could be sentenced
for vagrancy. Interesting law, vagrancy, meaning standing outside or walking
without clear purpose anywhere. Carrying a book would help, but being barefoot
would contradict “purposefulness” and standing still could prompt a complaint
of “loitering.” . . . Twenty years ago, as a four-year-old, he had a pair,
though the sole of one flapped with every step.
Although shoes were vital for this escape,
the patient had none. . . . 10
Jean Locke returned with a basin of cold
water. “Put your feet in here, son. It’s cold but you don’t want them to heat
up too fast.” 14
“He
needs shoes too, John.” There were none to spare, so they put four pair of
socks and some ripped galoshes next to the sofa. 16
“Okay,”
said Billy. “Now for some grown man’s shoes. Thom McAn or do you want
Florsheim?” “Neither. I ain’t going to a dance. Work shoes.” 36
The
sole of my shoe flapped until Pap tied it up with his own shoelace. 40
Anse Bundren likewise has a shoe (and thus standing)
problem:
Pa’s
feet are badly splayed, his toes cramped and bent and warped, with no toenail
at all on his little toes, from working so hard in the wet in homemade shoes
when he was a boy. Beside his chair his brogans sit. They look as though they
had been hacked with a blunt axe out of pig-iron. 7
When
we go up the hall we can hear them clumping on the floor like they was iron
shoes. . . . He stands there, like he dont aim to move again nor nothing else.
21
And although it’s not exactly a shoe problem, Cash
Bundren limps from a broken leg and then, after the leg is rebroken, suffers a
crude attempt to immobilize it with cement:
“’And
dont tell me it aint going to bother you to have to limp around on one short
leg for the balance of your life—if you walk at all again. Concrete,’ I said.
‘God Amighty, why didn’t Anse carry you to the nearest sawmill and stick your
leg in the saw? That would have cured it. Then you all could have stuck his
head into the saw and cured a whole family. . . .’” 165
Like Frank in his early going, Cee too is troubled by bad
shoes:
The walk from the bus stop was a long one,
hampered by Cee’s new white high-heeled shoes. Without stockings, her feet were
chafing. . . . Thank you, ma’am. Can I take off these shoes first?” Sarah
chuckled. “Whoever invented high heels won’t be happy till they cripple us.” 59
Repeatedly, when Morrison’s characters threaten to fall
into the stasis of Faulkner’s Bundrens, they stand up and act. Cee, for
instance:
Cee stood up in the zinc tub and took a
few dripping steps to the sink. 43
She was all alone now, sitting in a zinc
tub on a Sunday defying the heat of Georgia’s version of spring with cool water
while Prince was cruising around with his thin-soled shoes pressing the gas
pedal in California or New York, for all she knew. . . . 50
Standing at the window, wrapped in the
scratchy towel, Cee felt her heart breaking. . . . Now she stood, alone. . . .
53
While Cee feels trapped, unable to travel like her
faithless lover, she stands up out of the tub and arranges to find a better
job. Anse Bundren, however, hates the idea of movement alltogether:
Durn
that road. And it fixing to rain, too. I can stand here and same as see it with
second-sight, a-shutting down behind them like a wall, shutting down betwixt
them and my given promise. . . . A-laying there, right up to my door, where
every bad luck that comes and goes is bound to find it. I told Addie it want
any luck living on a road when it come by here, and she said, for the world
like a woman, “get up and move, then.” But I told her it want no luck in it,
because the Lord puts roads for travelling: why He laid them down flat on the
earth. When He aims for something to be always a-moving, He makes it longways,
like a road or a horse or a wagon, but when He aims for something to stay put,
He makes up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man. . . . keeping the folks
restless and wanting to get up and go somewheres else when He aimed for them to
stay put like a tree or a stand of corn. Because if He’d a aimed for man to be
always a-moving and going somewheres else, wouldn’t He a put him longways on
his belly, like a snake? It stands to reason He would. . . . I says to them, he
was all right at first, with his eyes full of the land, because the land laid up-and-down
ways then; it wasn’t till that ere road come and switched the around longways
and his eyes still full of the land, that they begun to threaten me out of him,
trying to short-hand me with the law 22-23
Jewel Bundren (not his father’s child, but the offspring
of an affair his mother Addie had and for which she paid for the rest of her
life) is unlike the rest in many ways, including having the ability to take
actions like this one:
“Come
here, sir,” Jewel says. He moves. . . . Save for Jewel’s legs they are like two
figures carved for a tableau savage in the sun. When Jewel can almost touch
him, the horse stands on his hind legs and slashes down at Jewel. Then Jewel is
enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves as by an illusion of wings; among them,
beneath the upreared chest, he moves with the flashing limberness of a snake.
For an instant before the jerk comes onto his arms he sees his whole body
earth-free, horizontal, whipping snake-limber, until he finds the horse’s
nostrils and touches earth again. . . . They stand in rigid terrific hiatus,
the horse trembling and groaning. Then Jewel is on the horse’s back. . . . For
another moment the horse stands spraddled with lowered head, before it bursts
into motion. . . . The horse enters the stall, Jewel following. 7-8
Traveling east, after a young black couple riding in the same car had
been brutalized by a crowd in Elko, Nevada, Frank knocks down a pimp who has no
right to stand:
The young sun was blazing and there was
little standing to cast a shadow or provide shade, only the feed store, the
shop, and one shambling broke-down house across the road. A brand-new Caddilac,
gilded in sunlight, was parked in front. Frank crossed the road to admire the
car. . . . He walked down the side toward the squeals, expecting to see some
male aggressor showing off. But there on the ground were two women fighting.
Rolling around, punching, kicking the air, they beat each other in the dirt.
Their hair and clothes were in disarray. The surprise to Frank was a man standing
near them, picking his teeth and watching. He turned when Frank approached. He
was a big man with flat, bored eyes.
“What the fuck you looking’ at?” He didn’t
remove the toothpick.
Frank froze. The big man came right up to
him and shoved his chest. Twice. Frank dropped his Dr Pepper and swung hard at
the man, who, lacking agility like so many really big men, fell immediately.
Frank leaped on the prone body and began to punch his face, eager to ram that
toothpick into his throat. The thrill that came with each blow was wonderfully
familiar. Unable to stop and unwilling to, Frank kept going even though the big
man was unconscious. The women stopped clawing each other and pulled at Frank’s
collar. . . . Then she dropped to her knees and tried to revive her pimp. Her
blouse was torn down the back. It was a bright yellow.
Frank stood and, massaging his knuckles,
moved quickly, half running, half loping back to the train. . . . This violence
was personal in its delight. Good, he thought. He might need that thrill to
claim his sister. 100-102
Cee remembers a similar incident in which Frank protected
her from a man unworthy of standing by attacking a pervert’s legs:
Suddenly he was behind the tree she was
leaning against, swinging his bat twice into the legs of a man she had not even
noticed standing behind her. . . . Hours later, Frank explained. The man wasn’t
from Lotus, he told her, and had been hiding behind the tree, flashing her. 51
And Frank reflects on how
his protective relationship with his sister is a key to who he is:
She
was the first person I ever took responsibility for. Down deep inside her lived
my secret picture of myself—a strong good me tied to the memory of those horses
and burial of a stranger. Guarding her, finding a way through tall grass and
out of that place, not being afraid of anything—snakes or wild old men. I
wonder if succeeding at that was the buried seed of all the rest. In my
little-boy heart I felt heroic and I knew that if they found us or touched her
I would kill. 104
After a mugging in Atlanta that brings him low, Frank
finds his sister who is about to die of prolonged blood loss as a result of experiments
done on her by her employer, a eugenicist doctor trying to invent a new
speculum. As he carries her off the doctor screams for help but finds that his
other employee, Sarah (who had written Frank the letter telling him to come
quickly) is willing to stand up against him:
“Call the police, woman! Did you let him
in here?” Dr. Beau then ran down the hallway, to where another telephone sat on
a small table. Standing next to it was Sarah, her hand pressed firmly on the
cradle. There was no mistaking her purpose. . . . Sarah and the doctor stood
locked in an undecipherable stare. 111-112
Once Frank had fumbled and eased his way
through the front door and reached the sidewalk, he turned to glance back at
the house and saw Sarah standing in the door, shadowed by the dogwood blossoms.
She waved. Good-bye—to him and Cee or perhaps to her job. Sarah stood from a
moment watching the pair disappear down the walkway.” 112
Cee needs nursing, a course of healing undertaken by a
group of women in their hometown. And the final treatment that will stand Cee
back on her own feet requires that she lay down:
She was to be sun-smacked, which meant spending
at least one hour a day with her legs spread open to the blazing sun. . . .
What followed the final sun-smacking hour, when she was allowed to sit modestly
in a rocking chair, was the demanding love of Ethel Fordham, which soothed and
strengthened her the most. 124-125
The treatments work (in
the meantime Frank has dealt with his own troubled mind, admitting an atrocity
he committed in Korea, one which he has been denying and which has thus been
haunting him):
Weeks later Cee stood at the stove pressing
young cabbage leaves into a pot of simmering water seasoned with two ham hocks.
When Frank got off work and opened the door, he noticed again how healthy she
looked—glowing skin, back straight, not hunched in discomfort. 126
Together, Frank and Cee
dig up the bones of the man they saw buried while watching the standing,
fighting horses (the man was killed when forced to participate in the human
equivalent of a dogfight while a crowd bet on who would win), take him to a
place where they often found refuge as children, and rebury him in a quilt Cee
has made:
Quickly they found the sweet bay
tree—split down the middle, beheaded, undead—spreading its arms, one to the
right, one to the left. There at its base Frank placed the bone-filled quilt
that was first a shroud, now a coffin. Brother and sister slid the
crayon-colored coffin into the perpendicular grave. Once it was heaped over
with soil, Frank took two nails and the sanded piece of wood from his pocket.
With a rock he pounded it into the tree trunk. One nail bent uselessly, but the
other held well enough to expose the words he had painted on the wooden marker.
Here
Stands A Man.
Wishful thinking, perhaps,
but he could have sworn the sweet bay was pleased to agree. Its olive-green
leaves went wild in the glow of a fat cherry-red sun. 144-145
Where Morrison’s characters rise to this hopeful, if not
final stance, Faulkner’s are brought low by natural forces (in their
superstitious minds, unnatural forces):
Before
us the thick dark current runs. . . . Above the ceaseless surface they
stand—trees, cane, vines—rootless, severed from the earth, spectral above a
scene of immense yet circumscribed desolation filled with the voice of the
waste and mournful water. 95
I felt the current take us and I knew we were on the
ford by that reason, since it was only by means of that slipping contact that
we could tell that we were in motion at all. What had once been a flat surface
was now a succession of troughs and hillocks lifting and falling about us,
shoving at us, teasing at us with light lazy touches in the vain instants of
solidity underfoot. Cash looked back at me, and then I knew that we were gone.
But I did not realise the reason for the rope until I saw the log. It surged up
out of the water and stood for an instant upright upon that surging and heaving
desolation like Christ. Get out and let the current take you down to the bend,
Cash said. 97-98
I
see the bearded head of the rearing log strike up again, and beyond it Jewel
holding the horse upreared, its head wrenched around, hammering its head with
his fist. I jump from the wagon on the downstream side. Between two hills I see
the mules once more. They roll up out of the water in succession, turning
completely over, their legs stiffly extended as when they had lost contact with
the earth. 98-99
Morrison’s characters find themselves as a man and a
woman when they return home after having left home to escape its stultifying
influences. They find themselves by the grace of generous creators of
community. They find their place as standing human beings who have fought and
stood like the magnificent stallions they watched and not like the man brought
low and buried in the same field by vicious men.
Faulkner’s characters, with the partial exception of
Addie, continued to be bullied by their lazy and manipulative father who will
do anything (he turns his son Darl over to the police, he steals from Dewey
Dell, he trades Jewel’s horse) to get what he wants (teeth and a new Mrs.
Burden):
Then
we see it wasn’t the grip that made him look different; it was his face, and
Jewel says, “He got them teeth.” It was a fact. It made him look a foot taller,
kind of holding his head up, hangdog and proud too, and then we see her behind
him, carrying the other grip. . . . 181
In her turn as narrator,
Addie describes thinking about Anse and his empty, lifeless, incapable version
of standing:
Why
are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the
word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like
cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood
full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty
door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar. . .
. And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think
how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly
doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines
are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and
that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor
loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget
the words. Like Cora, who could never even cook. 116-117
Where mentally disturbed and mistreated Darl Bundren is
left to muse: “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking
of home” 52, Frank and Cee Money fight their ways home, family, brother and
sister.
