When the affair with Whitfield is over, Addie decides it is time to clean house, to put her affairs in order. She has learned what living is and is getting ready to stay dead a long time. She settles her account with Anse, by giving him Dewey Dell to negate Jewel and Vardaman to replace Cash. In this way, she says, Anse has three of the Children (Darl, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman) and she has two (Cash and Jewel). Her aloneness has been violated three times by Cash, Whitfield, and Jewel, and each time she has been made whole again by these intense experiences of motherhood and sexual passion. At the end of her section, Addie contrasts herself to Cora, whom she says is, like Anse, all empty words, and who, though she speaks constantly of sin and redemption, has no knowledge of them because she has never experienced either.
This account of Addie’s section may tell us a lot about Addie who, along with Darl, is the most interesting character in the novel and, ontologically, it may tell us a lot about the relationship between words and actions (the vertical and horizontal in Addie’s account), experience and knowledge, aloneness and wholeness through love and union (not necessarily sexual) with another, about what constitutes true being and what it means to really “live”, and about a mother’s relationship to her children (whether they are inside or outside her circle of selfhood and love). It may also help us toward a fuller understanding of the implications of the title. Though this section tells us why the funeral journey took place, it does not account for the journey itself and the terrible things that happened to the children during this journey; or, more accurately, to the Bundren family, since all members of the family are present during the journey. The funeral journey is initiated by the mother as her revenge against the father and the child he “planted” in her—Darl; it is carried out by the father, with the help of the children—mainly the two inside Addie’s circle: Cash, who makes the coffin, and Jewel, who saves Addie from the flood and the fire and is instrumental in other ways in making sure she gets to Jefferson and is buried there. Under normal circumstances, this would have been an easy journey and could hardly be construed or understood as a form of revenge. The journey is more than half over by the time we even learn that it was meant to be Addie’s revenge against Anse, and up to this point we simply assume that some combination of bad luck, sheer pig-headedness on Anse’s part and a kind of stupefying willingness to do what Anse says by his four adult children accounts for what happens. We recognize Anse’s hypocrisy (“I given my word,” he says, which is true, but what he really wants is new teeth); we know Dewey Dell’s real reason for wanting to get to Jefferson, but it is difficult to explain Cash and Darl’s, even Jewel’s willingness to go with the journey. And yet they all do, abiding by the mother’s injunction and the father’s promise, with a kind of mindless, emotionally charged, filial piety.
As a character (as a mother, that is, rather than as a matrix of terms which we might try to use to organize a reading of the fiction), Addie Bundren is full of death and drives her family on toward ruin and destruction even as she lies “dying” and rotting in her coffin and should be done with the living, should have relinquished her hold on the family so that they could get on with their lives without her. The whole fiction moves, with terrible inevitability, toward the terrifying dark spaces Faulkner gives us at the end: the grave (for Addie), the cage (for Darl) and the cellar (for Dewey Dell). Mother Addie has somehow (Faulkner never explains this, he just presents it as fictional fact) kept her three older sons from marrying. They are all blocked from growth and fulfillment in different ways. And terrible things happen to all of them as they carry out the senseless act of filial piety Addie—through Anse—has laid on them like a doom, a curse. Her rotting corpse in the coffin functions symbolically to tell us that being—the generative seed of selfhood—is rotting, putrefying in all the members of the Bundren family. Everything conspires against being and fulfillment in this fiction. The funeral journey is the coffin of being.
Darl (Faulkner’s darling, if not Addie’s) is the son with the greatest amount of vertical being. He is the knower, the self with the greatest verbal, symbolic perceptual powers, the person who is capable of pure unmediated vision. It is Darl, finally, who tries to save the family from any more grief and suffering by setting fire to the barn so the rotting, destroying Addie will burn up, and the family will be purified of her and free at last from the tyranny of her revenge. It is a great act of sanity. But, as usual, Addie’s Jewel—the man of spontaneous, unthinking actions—saves her and prolongs the journey, just as he did when he saved her from the flood. Because of the barn burning, and because he knows both of their secrets, Jewel and Dewey Dell attack and subdue Darl (their sibling, our brother) when he is betrayed and sacrificed by the whole family (including Cash, who rationalizes the action, and Vardaman, who saw Darl set the fire and reports it to Dewey Dell). It is this betrayal by the whole family which finally drives Darl on over into schizophrenia and so completes Addie’s revenge against him. Darl, one must remember, was violently rejected by mother Addie even before he was born and was the initial decisive cause of her revenge; at the end, Darl is rejected—cast out—by the whole family and removed from the ongoing life of the whole community. He might as well be dead.
Cash, who is the maker, the craftsman, is the son with a great deal of horizontal being. His skills are manual, physical and, unlike Darl’s, get translated into outward, practical physical actions. He makes things which have cash value. He makes boxes and houses and coffins—all enclosures. Addie’s revenge is indiscriminate and includes even those close and precious to her as Cash and Jewel were. Aside from Cash’s excruciating pain during the funeral trip, he will be crippled the rest of his life and never again be the carpenter he was. Addie—or the funeral trip—has deprived him of the true centrality of his being: the ability to use his own great talents as a master craftsman. So, just as Darl is destroyed at his greatest strength, at the true centrality of his being by being driven on over from sanity into madness and rendered dysfunctional (nobody pays much attention to what a man locked up in a cage in an insane asylum says), so too with Cash. A crippled carpenter is not going to build many barns. The dying-dead mother with the help of the father takes the centrality of being from each child.
Jewel is the son with the greatest horizontal being. He is almost the embodiment of pure, unthinking action. He is the opposite of Darl in every way. He narrates the least (once), he is the closest to Addie, he acts without knowing (Darl knows without acting; knows without doing, also). Darl is vision without power. When he does act from knowledge, he is destroyed and locked up because of his capacity for vision. Cash shapes things; Jewel acts upon them; Darl sees into them. Like the other older sons, Jewel is going to be affected at the center of his being and deprived of something essential to his selfhood. Dying, Addie is going to attack and kill her children’s powers of being, their ability to be in any generative way, and always by means of the dead, empty word. The Mother and Father are going to punish and destroy their own children, at least the three older ones—all sons. In one of his many gnomic copulas of being, Darl correctly identifies this centrality of being in Jewel: “Jewel’s mother is a horse,” Darl says, usually to taunt his half-brother. Jewel—the passion child—has the purest Oedipal relationship with his mother through the horse, and there is a certain cruel appropriateness about his having to give up his horse (to agree, again, to be governed by Anse’s word) to help pay for the mules necessary to haul the wagon to get Addie into her grave. Jewel’s double loss—of his mother and his horse—is a kind of Oedipal disaster, the consequences of which are not exactly clear. Jewel is a lot like young Bayard Sartoris, but one has no clear future for him (Darl is in his cage, Dewey Dell will have her baby, Cash will be crippled) and it is idle to speculate or invent one for him. Say, only, that he suffers a massive withdrawal of the sources and resources of his