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Disembodied and re-embodied voices: The figure of Echo in American Gothic texts
Beutel, Katherine Piller, Ph.D.
The Ohio State University, 1993
Copyright ©199S by Beutel, Katherine Piller. All rights reserved.
UMI SOON. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106
DISEMBODIED AND RE-EMBODIED VOICES:
THE FIGURE OF ECHO IN AMERICAN GOTHIC TEXTS
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of The Ohio State University
By
Katherine Piller Beutel
*****
The Ohio State University
1993
Dissertation Committee: Approved by
K. Burkman j J [J A. Jaffe ^_ Adviser J. Prinz Department of English Copyright by Katherine Piller Beutel 1993 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Katherine Burkman for her help throughout the process of producing this dissertation. I also thank the other members of my committee, Audrey Jaffe and Jessica
Prinz, and my husband, Mike, for his encouragement and support.
11 VITA
October 13, 1966...... Born - Cincinnati, Ohio
1988 ...... B.A., The University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio
1989 ...... M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: English
Studies in: Twentieth-Century American and British Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Composition and Professional Writing
111 TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEGMENTS...... il
VITA...... ill
CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION...... 1
CHAPTER II: AS I LAY DYING: IMPOSSIBLE SILENCE...... 47
CHAPTER III: THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY: ECHOES AND PROPHETS...... 100
CHAPTER IV: BELOVED: HAUNTING AND HEALING ECHOES ...... 162
CONCLUSION ...... 209
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 226
IV CHAPTER I:
Introduction
She was under the apple tree and Dari and I
go across the moon and the cat jumps down and runs
and we can hear her inside the wood.
"Hear?" Dari says. "Put your ear close."
I put my ear close and I could hear her.
Only I cant tell what she is saying
"What is she saying, Dari?" I say. "Who is
she talking to?" (As I Lay Dying 204)
The scene, just before Dari burns the barn near the end of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, is in some ways one of the most horrible in a novel that gives us so many atrocities--by the time we reach this scene we have read of
Vardaman boring holes into the coffin and Addie’s face, the
family dragging Addie across country for selfish motives, buzzards circling overhead, and Cash with his leg encased in cement lying on the smelling coffin. But when Dari brings
Vardaman to listen to their mother’s body as it hisses and gurgles while decomposing ("talks in little trickling bursts of secret and murmurous bubbling"— 202), we are again made 2
painfully aware of the condition of Addie’s body within the
coffin (if the buzzards and disgusted townspeople were not
enough) while we also see Dari’s increasing disturbance and
Vardaman’s inability to comprehend death.
Vardaman’s questions here are on one level childishly
inappropriate; his mistaking the noises of putrefaction for
Addie speaking shows how far he is from understanding death
(although from his perspective he has every reason to
believe Dari’s contention that she is speaking). On another
level, however, Vardaman’s questions have deeper
significance--since Just a few sections earlier we have in
fact heard Addie speak, long after the novel presented her
death. We have just heard her life’s story in her own very
"real" voice. As we read the chapter attributed to Addie, we too could ask "What is she saying?" and "Who is she
talking to?" since her story in her own "voice" appears as
such a digression and is so packed with emotion and philosophical richness. Perhaps a more basic question that comes to us as we read Addie’s section, however, is simply
"Why is she talking?" She supplies us with a great deal of background information on the family that helps explain the relationships we see among them, but we still suddenly have
to deal with the fact that Faulkner has given us a voice
from a dead character.
Of course, Faulkner does not show the words of Addie’s chapter as coming directly from the coffin (like the 3 gurglings Vardaman hears); we have no reason to believe we should see a true ghost in this novel. But we do have a voice whose origin is quite questionable since we know the
"source" is dead. Even though none of the voices in this novel "speak"— since we just seem to be overhearing their consciousness— something different is going on with Addie, whose consciousness (or identity, self) has presumably ceased to exist. Addie’s voice is present only as echo— like the mythological figure of Echo who has voice after the
"death" or destruction of her body. Faulkner’s novel asks us just what it means to have a "dead" voice or a disembodied voice from some other realm "speaking."
When William Butler Yeats called for a "living voice" in literature early in this century, his notions of "voice" in texts were grounded in a tradition that, although challenged by theory, still is discussed today. Especially when we read narrative texts we expect to "hear" many voices— voices of the author, narrators, and the created characters, voices reflecting ideology and personality, voices we can label "ironic," "realistic," or "multi faceted." As Bette London reflects, voice is very much a
"subject of contested meaning; organic center of the text, agent of aesthetic unity, site of a personal presence, instrument of ideology, effect of mechanical reproduction, product of political technologies" (3). Voice as a critical concept is still very much alive, although we now may be 4 more likely to recognize the "dead letters" that make up any
relatively fixed and permanent written text. ^ "After structuralism, one might say, narratives no longer speak to us: they have become texts, grammatological systems of literary ’proauction’ within which an ’author function’ can be isolated. Like Prufrock before his mermaids, we can hear the ’voices’ of our literary canon ’singing, each to each,’ but we rarely say they sing to us" (Pecora 146).
Without endowing a book with life, we often do operate within an illusion of characters’ having voices that make
them seem "real" or "living"— especially in a modernist
tradition that values "characterization." As Michel
Beaujour explains, "representation (dramatic or otherwise) aunounts to a conferral of presence upon the dead letter of
the text, thus creating the illusion of an authorial voice or that of lifelike characters" (275). The voices that characters are given in texts contributes to what James
Phelan has called their "mimetic" quality. ^
But in As I Lay Dying. Faulkner presents us with a voice that subverts what otherwise seems to be a focus on characters’ consciousnesses as autonomous, a voice which, by
its presence when it should be absent, makes us question the connections between voice and identity (or the possibility of either) in the novel. This questioning of "presence" while still presenting the illusion of interior consciousness may be a particularly modernist characteristic.^ But it is also a problem that continues in more recent American texts, that "echo" Faulkner’s novel, in similar ways questioning connections between voice and presence.
Flannery O ’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away also includes a central voice that remains a presence although its source— the character Mason Tarwater— dies early in the narrative. This voice too is "disembodied," though in a different way from Addie’s (since it seems to live on in
Mason’s nephew), but O ’Connor’s text also gives us a "voice" that in odd ways comes to have a body (when the nephew’s own rebellious thoughts take on corporeality, for him at least).
Even more recently, Toni Morrison has given us a narrative that includes a "re-embodied" voice in the form of a corporeal ghost and some disembodied voices (attributable to the three main female characters and the "angry dead") that float outside of their house for others (their friend Stamp
Paid and the reader) to hear. In all three of these texts disembodied and re-embodied voices provide inherent questionings of consciousness and identity.
The echoes from Faulkner are understandable--although neither would like to admit influence, O ’Connor saw Faulkner as an imposing predecessor for any Southern writer, and
Morrison studied Faulkner closely as a graduate student. ^
Like Faulkner, both O ’Connor and Morrison employ characters from "low" social status, include events that shock and 6 dismay, and incorporate mythic symbols such as fire and water into a central journey (the family’s journey to
Jefferson in As I Lay Dying becomes a journey to civilization and back by young Francis Marian Tarwater or a journey from slavery for Morrison’s characters). And although the latter novels incorporate a more "traditional" narrative strategy than As I Lay Dying in general, they also show voices that live on past suppression as strong as death. Each of these novels opens with a body dying. As
Addie lies in bed in the Bundren house, O ’Connor’s Mason
Tarwater dies at the breakfast table as his nephew looks on, and Morrison describes Baby Suggs’ final days of lying in bed starved for color. And in all of the novels, the voices of these dying characters echo on throughout stories that also include other echoing--disembodied and re-embodied-- voices. The novels all challenge boundaries between past and present, show forces that refuse to be suppressed, and put traditional notions of autonomous identity into question by showing curious relationships between voice and body and by letting voices echo among characters, clouding boundaries.
The disembodied voices in these texts have much in common with the most famous disembodied voice in literary history— the voice of the mythological figure of Echo.
Echo’s is a voice that is unsuppressible, living on despite loss of body and repeating the words of living, or embodied 7 characters. As voice alone, she accomplishes the kinds of subversion that accompanies voices such as those of
Faulkner’s Addie, O ’Connor’s Mason, or the angry dead in
Morrison’s novel.
As Jonathan Goldberg explains, "Echo’s story is entwined with Philomel’s"— together they "offer an etiology of fiction . . . an etiology of the fiction that words have voice" (11-12). Philomel, deprived of speech, can still write (or weave) messages, and Echo’s story is also one of incomplete silencing. According to Ovid, the "voice-nymph"
Echo is "a chatterer, though her choice of words only others’ last words" (Ovid 57). Echo chattered to Juno to distract her from discovering Jove lying with the nymphs, and Juno realizes "’That tongue tricks me: if less power, less use’" (57). She punishes Echo by dooming her only to repeat the ends of words she hears. But Echo continues speaking, or singing in other versions of the myth, such as the one related by Longus. She is voice even after she loses body— either by pining away out of unrequited desire for Narcissus or by being torn limb from limb by shepherds.
The figure of Echo thus is an especially apt metaphor for the returning and reverberating voices in As I Lav
Dying. The Violent Bear it Away, and Beloved. Echo is a prime example of incomplete silencing, of voice that refuses to be suppressed by "death" or loss of body, and of voice 8 that can, as Hollander explains, "reveal the implicit" (27).
Echo’s voice is also closely tied with desire, with the unrequited love Echo feels for Narcissus that prompts her physical deterioration and also her continuing voice, and also with the self-love of Narcissus himself, since Echo is such a vocal "mirror" for him.
Echoing, disembodied voices are reminders of an irrational, unsuppressible "other side." They evoke creepy feelings of what Freud calls the "uncanny"— that which
"arouses dread and horror" (122). According to Freud’s essay on the phenomenon of the uncanny, we may think we are primarily unsettled by the strange and out of the ordinary, but what actually has the power to make us feel most afraid is really the disturbingly familiar which has been kept concealed, although not completely successfully (145). When a voice comes to us from "beyond" even in a literary text, it can disturb because it is irrational, but when we realize that the disembodied voice is also echo, necessarily something that is repeating a "real" voice (probably a suppressed voice), the effect can be especially spooky and unsettling.
The idea of voices living on and returning to echo among the living, and the relationships among voice, echo, identity, and death make a sort of ghost-story out of theory and criticism. But in fact, with their rotting corpses, devils, or ghosts, their characters engaged in labyrinthine 9 wanderings, their venturing into the taboo (with murdered innocents and shocking treatment of the dead), As I Lav
Dying. The Violent Bear it Away, and Beloved already fit into a larger Gothic tradition that provides a background
for the disturbing effects of their disembodied (and re embodied) voices. Much of what happens in these three texts reflects plots and themes of traditional Gothics. The de centering effect of the voices without presence echoes classic Gothics' subversive tendencies, and the ways in which traditional Gothics use voice give clues to what is happening with voice and echo in the twentieth-century texts.
Older examples of Gothic--works by Matthew Lewis,
Charles Maturin, Charles Brockden Brown, and even the
Victorian Bram Stoker, for instance--can give us insight into their twentieth-century counterparts. Classic Gothics have always been characterized as being "at odds with classical order and restraint" (Kiely 28). In dealing with paranoia, the barbaric, and the taboo. Gothics show the
"breaking out of those forces which still haunt the mind of the individual and the culture" (Punter 404-5, 149). ®
Since the age of "classic" Gothics by Radcliffe or Matthew
Lewis, however, the Gothic has taken an inward turn.
Creepy, labyrinthine corridors of the Gothic castle have given way to "dark, tortured windings in the mind"
(MacAndrew 48-49). ® 10
Certainly these modern texts are closely related to one
strain of American "Gothic" seen especially in the
nineteenth century--in works by Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe
especially. But according to Leslie Fiedler, Gothic has a
crucial position in the American literary tradition in general: "It is the gothic form that has been most fruitful
in the hands of our best writers: the gothic symbolically understood, its machinery and decor translated into metaphors for a terror psychological, social, and metaphysical" (28). ^
With Edgar Allan Poe’s stories’ emphasis on psychological terror, for example. Gothic’s turn inward becomes especially evident. His "voices" are often
representations of inner consciousness and thus draw a bridge between the older Gothic tradition and the twentieth- century texts by Faulkner, O ’Connor, and Morrison. In some of Poe’s short stories we can even see voices of the dead-- presented humorously as in "Some words with a Mummy" or with more creepiness as in "The Case of M. Valdemar."
Faulkner, of course, helped define the tradition of
"Southern Gothic" which owes much to Poe, with works such as
Absalom. Absalom! in which the "defeated" and insular region of the South is seen as haunted by its racial sins. But even in works drawing more on the grotesque strain of literary Gothic, Faulkner achieves similarly unsettling
Gothic effects, without the explicit overtones of communal 11 sin. Writers seen often as literary descendants of
Faulkner, such as Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and
Flannery O'Connor, also use the region of guilt, of decayed dynasties, and of shattered ways of life as a backdrop for literary hauntings and grotesqueries. Morrison, though from
Northern Ohio, seems to draw from this tradition of Southern
Gothic and grotesque as well. In Beloved. Southern slavery is ultimately the source of hauntings, and even in her other novels, Morrison shows characters encountering the supernatural (or more metaphorical ghosts of the past) in
Southern settings. ®
The Gothic tradition, which in America has flourished in the South, provides particularly fertile ground for disembodied voice. The Gothic use of voice and echo is especially suited for raising and exploring questions of life and death, authority and power, and identity. Voices, both of known and unknown origin, often are dangerous and threatening in classic Gothics, while those whose origin is suspect evoke even more terror. The necessarily disembodied words written in a Gothic text find parallels in the disembodied voices these texts often include. This loss of certain origin for voice in turn partly allows Gothic texts to explore the relationships between death and identity and to jeopardize ideas of outside authority, and their concentrations on physical bodies and on desire are facilitated by the connections of voice and death. Finally, 12
the Gothic use of voice (because of its particular qualities) questions identity by showing— through echoes, voice mergings, and the accompanying character doublings-- that "self" is not distinct, autonomous, or permanent.
The nature of voice in the physical world--as something that comes from within, is external but not visible, and
that "enters into" any hearers— can create connections among people that problematize notions of a separate individual consciousness and of a separation of inner and outer— leading to an emphasis on the vulnerability of that which is within a "self." Voice, as represented in a written literary text especially, also leads to questions of origin, since clear connections between words and sources— their speakers or writers--are broken when "voice" is put in written form. Voice in writing is already akin to "echo" since there is no visible bodily source to correspond with the words or "voice" we "hear." According to deconstructionist theory, "A truly living voice full of the presence of a subject (any subject, real, fictional, or formal), is a strict impossibility" (Carroll 86). ^
In Gothics in general, "hearing voices" is at least as common as seeing apparitions. Like ghosts that "come back" as usually visual manifestations of what they once were, voice also returns in echoes. It might seem there is little reason to fear echoes; after all, sound seems relatively harmless (except at extreme decibels). But actually. 13
returning voices can be terribly scary in these texts for a
number of reasons. Gothics show mysterious voices as
seductive, for instance, having the power also to enter into
hearers and to hurt them. Voices that are disembodied and
that lack clear sources can frighten for the same reason
ghosts often frighten--simply because they are irrational.
A voice with no logical origins puts all of rationality into
question.
That voices even from corporeal sources are dangerous
is demonstrated repeatedly in Gothic. If voice has the
power of penetrating inferiority and relieving isolation,
for instance, this quality can also highlight the
vulnerability one experiences in the presence of voice. As
Hartman considers, the ear cannot refuse entry to sounds,
and thus sounds have the power to hurt (or to heal) (122-
23). Voice has power "to hurt us, to echo internally, and
wound and even madden. The eyes are vulnerable enough, yet
ears are, if anything, chaster than eyes. Words penetrate
deeper into the labyrinth of the ear" (Hartman 44).
Echo’s story demonstrates the potentially dangerous and
seductive powers of voice. In Ovid’s tale. Echo’s voice is
seductive for Narcissus (especially before he physically meets her). While he spurns any young men or women who fall
in love with him, he is lured into the woods by Echo’s
voice, which seems to be seductive because it reminds him of
himself. The voice is far more dangerous to him because it 14 repeats what he says. He rejects Echo’s love and escapes her pull only when she physically puts her arms around him.
Examples of voice and spoken words as potentially dangerous abound in classic Gothics. The seductive voices of villains can penetrate and change their victims, often paralleling the more physical rapes that occur or are threatened throughout classic Gothics. In Matthew Lewis’
The Monk, which is often looked upon as a storehouse of classic examples of Gothic plot, the title character’s voice becomes a significant point of narration. Even before the beautiful and innocent Antonia is in any physical danger from the monk Ambrosio in Lewis’ novel, for instance, she is uncommonly attracted by his voice as he preaches. In
Charles Maturin’s Melmoth.the Wanderer (an English Gothic whose proliferation of plot yields examples that have come to epitomize our concept of Gothic), the undying Melmoth, who has bargained with the devil, tries to seduce despairing people mainly by using his voice, especially so in the story of Immalee that Moncada (our narrator for most of the novel) relates. Melmoth’s words delight Immalee when she first hears his voice (216), having been isolated on her island away from any human voice she could understand. But that voice changes her; Melmoth’s words, in fact, seem to constitute her fall from innocence. She is "overpowered by
[his] torrent of words" that resemble "fire-brands and arrows" even though their tone is sweet like David’s harp 15
(233). Not only does Melmoth literally introduce Immalee to
evil in the world, but his words also cause her own personal
destruction (though they do not win her soul).
In Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland. we also can see voices that have the power to enter and wound; characters
are so vulnerable to voices that the "biloquist" Carwin’s
projected voices and the mysterious voices that Wieland
hears while "insane" bring about the family tragedy that
leaves our narrator Clara alone. And Carwin’s voice is also
seductive for Clara— she speaks of the "magical" tones of
his voice (79). In exploring the irrational in a world
based on Enlightenment values, this novel gives us mysterious voices, some of which we can ultimately explain and some we cannot (since Carwin admits to creating all but
those telling Wieland to kill his wife and children),
Even when voices in Gothics are not openly seductive or wounding, they can still add to the terror of the novels by helping to subvert connections between voice and origin, and
thus striking us as uncanny. When the superior of Moncada’s monastery and his conspirators plot to drug him, the voice
from the old monk in the neighboring cell floats over to
them, warning that "God knoweth all things" (127). The words, apparently spoken at random by the senile old monk, appear to the others to have a relevant message, one they heed by deciding not to drug Moncada.The moans in the catacombs that so frighten the nuns hiding below their 16 convent in The Monk prove to issue from the imprisoned
Agnes, but this "natural" cause is no less horrible than the supernatural one they imagined. The "source" of the moans is a partially clad, starving nun who clutches her dead and decaying infant, but the origins of Agnes’s barely even articulate voice go far beyond this horrible physical spectacle. Ultimately, the source (or cause) of the moans involves her sexual transgression against her vows
(especially frightening for the nuns) and their superior’s incredible inhumanity (so frightening to the populous that they tear her apart, riot, kill, and burn).
Whenever voices are represented in a written text they acquire characteristics not necessarily present in audible voice. When "voice" appears as only words on a page, they are orphaned, having no clear connections with a source.
Garrett Stewart explains the influence of Derrida’s attack on Logos saying there is "No longer a metonymy of voice as origin, the idea of an ’embodied’ voice emerges as just the opposite: signaling the very destination of the text in the reading act, the medium of its silent voicing, sounding board rather than source" (3). In Charles Brockden Brown’s
Wieland. perhaps the best example of an American Gothic whose use of voice is instrumental in creating its terror, the ambiguous origins of the voices Wieland hears telling him to kill his family thus reflect a central quality of voice in any written text--its disconnection from its 17
In Gothic texts like Wieland featuring overtly disembodied voices, theories of voice in literature that stress the ambiguity of origin find expression on a
fictional level also. The questioning of absence and presence that follows from theoretical thought on written voice (especially in connection with voices that are explicitly disembodied on the fictional level) contributes to Gothic’s ability to challenge ideas of identity and death as well as the authority that can lie behind a voice.
Narrative distancing through letters, journals, and embedded tales, a structural technique common to many
Gothics, often reinforces the absence of a clear speaker.
Hawthorne’s characteristic technique of incorporating ambiguity into his "romances"--leaving readers several possibilities of interpretation by using hedging phrases-- seems related to the distancing possible with written accounts of voice. His narrator’s description of Miriam’s conversation with her mysterious "model" in The Marble Faun, for instance, shows how a written "romance" can avoid certainty: "Many words of deep significance, many entire sentences, and those possibly the most important ones, have flown too far on the winged breeze to be recovered" (114-
15).
In Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer tales become so piled up within others that the reader (and sometimes even the author it seems) forgets who is speaking. Tales 18 are filtered through many agents: within the story of
Immalee (Isabella), that Moncada has read in the hideout of the old Jewish doctor and now relates to young Melmoth, there are the tales of the Guzmans and of Elinor, which were told to Isabella’s father by a stranger and Melmoth himself.
The mere proliferation of story-tellers puts the status of the word in question.
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (a later Gothic that in many ways seems especially related to my American texts), likewise, many voices tell the story— in journals, diaries, and letters woven together mainly by Mina Barker. Although we could see Stoker as distancing himself from the text, it might appear that the voices we do hear in the "reprinted" diaries and journals are fairly direct. Yet Mina herself may get at a central difference between spoken and written voice (and the relative distancing or anonymity possible with both) when she speaks with Dr. Seward after transcribing his phonograph journal: "I have copied out the words on my typewriter, and none other need now hear your heart beat as I did" (242). Although the record of his voice is so essential to their detective work (in finding and killing Dracula), the record can be less full of the emotion Seward could not keep out of his audible voice.
Brown’s Wieland gives perhaps the most striking exploratior of "disembodied" voices that put origin (and thus identity) into question. When Wieland and then his 19 sister and Pleyal begin hearing voices, their rational sensibilities almost immediately face insurmountable obstacles. Wieland hears the voice of his wife outside, although she and Clara and Pleyal swear she has never left the room. Pleyal and Wieland hear a voice telling them that
Pleyal's Saxon love has died, while Clara hears voices from inside her closet plotting her murder and a voice warning her to stay away from the summer house. Carwin, a
"biloquist," claims responsibility for these voices finally in what seems a full confession, but he maintains he has had nothing to do with the voices Wieland has heard telling him to kill his family.
Carwin’s ventriloquy— his creation of disembodied echoes— subverts distinctions between presence and absence.
Catherine’s voice is there when she is not; Clara’s voice is there for Pleyal to hear in a lover’s conversation with
Carwin, but she remains innocently in her room. But the
"divine" voices Wieland hears are even more subversive; their origins are never really explained, except as being the product of Wieland’s diseased mind. Their effects, however, prove much more disastrous than the broken attachment of Pleyal and Clara that Carwin’s voice precipitates. Knowing the specific origins of the voices comes to be secondary to realizing their effects. But with the loss of clear ties to the source, voice without presence
(whether explained or unexplained) undoes the happy. 20 rationalist lives of the characters in Wieland.
One of the most significant aspects of Gothic, in its more traditional forms or in its more recent manifestations, is its ability to put rational notions of autonomous identity in jeopardy. Susan Aiken notes "insanity" and a
"disintegration of self" as subversive features of Gothic
(72). Especially for a "modern" text that probes consciousness and gives us the illusion of characters with true identity, the simultaneous Gothic questioning of self
(or identity) creates problems.
The cutting-off of voice from source has also been related to the death of that source. Derrida speaks of writing as "the common name for signs which function despite the total absence of the subject because of (beyond) his death" (93). Similarly, the capacity of a disembodied
"echo" to challenge identity is connected with death.
In Greek myth the nymph Echo, spurned by Narcissus gazing at himself, waists away bodily to remain only as a voice dwelling in underground caves; although her body is absent (dead), her voice can repeat what the living say to it. The figure of Echo thus can transcend both body and time; out of desire for Narcissus, her voice can live on after her body pines away:
she hides now in woods ; covers shamed face
in leaves ; lives alone, in solitary caves 21
but love stays: grows on rejection’s pain;
her body weakens: lack of sleep; skin dries;
all body fluid evaporates; only voice
and bones remain, then voice only; bones
turn stone; voice hides in woods; no mountain
sees her but heard by all: sound, alive
(Ovid 58)
In another version of the story. Echo is a virgin nymph taught by the Muses to sing and play. When Pan could not seduce her he made shepherds tear her apart in a mad frenzy, and mother Earth buried what remained of her body. The music given her by the Muses remained, however, thus inverting the Philamel myth in certain respects. Echo is murdered but not raped and instead of being left with body and no tongue (as Philamel is before being turned into the nightingale), she is left as "tongue" or voice without body, though her buried limbs continue to "mimic the tones of gods and men, of instruments and wild beasts, and even of Pan himself as he piped" (Longus 127). Silencing (and thus death) is impossible, and as Pan discovers, searching for the source of a bodiless voice— "scour[ing] in hot chase over hill and dale"--can be maddening. (Longus 127)
Whenever voice loses clear connections with origin and presence, its evocation of absence can lead to close associations with death. Death and dead bodies play a crucial role in the subversion of identity in Gothic texts. 22 since presence and absence become so confused when life leaves a body. Voice itself, however, can never truly be equivalent to the presence of a consciousness, and thus already can be associated with death. As David Carroll explains:
Death is never totally absent from the voice, for
the conscious, living presence of the subject
(its visible presence to itself and others) is
never the ultimate origin of the voice. The
’impersonal’ . . . has always already displaced
this source, complicated it, and rendered it
derivative rather than original. The impersonal
nature of the origin of the voice, evident in the
distance between the consciousness of the subject
and his or her voice, and the possibility, even
necessity, of the voice escaping the subject’s
control, are indications of the subject’s relation
to death, to his/her nonpresence (82).
But nevertheless, there are degrees of presence and absence highlighted by voices in a text. A character’s speech to another character, represented as a quotation, for instance, grants much more of an illusion of presence than do disembodied voices issuing from unknown or dead sources.
Death is the ultimate challenge to identity, and voice issuing from the dead or dying (or the "undead") emphasizes the Gothic’s undoing of the coherent, autonomous subject. 23
Death is normally equated with silence; if a physical body remains for a while after death, voice expires (or ought to) with life. Perhaps because the moment of death is such a significant change, as voice and breath leave the body for the last time, the voices of the dying seem to merit close description by most Gothic authors. Characters’ last words are occasions for great emotion, especially when a lady dies. In Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Matilda’s death speech addresses several characters in turn (forgiving her father, for example, and bolstering her mother) and continues for several pages. In The Monk Agnes’ voice, as she calls for help indicates her proximity to death; it is
"hollow, and rattled in her throat" (355).^* The "sweet accent" of Antonia’s voice grows faint and dies away as she perishes in Lorenzo’s arms (376).
The voices of the dead, however, as they are presented in classic Gothics, usually evoke not sentimentality but terror. If disembodied or apparently sourceless voices frighten, so much more do the voices of bodies that ought to be dead. In The Monk when Raymond accidentally "rescues" the ghostly bleeding nun instead of Agnes (who had planned to disguise herself as the nun), he cannot get rid of the
"visionary nun" who visits him every night, kissing him, and telling him in a "low sepulchral voice" that "Thou art mine"
(170-71). The vision would probably be terrifying enough, but her words and voice contribute to a scare from which he 24 nearly cannot recover.
Since death normally ought to be a silencing (as it is after the long and sentimental deaths of so many heroines even in these novels), the existence of voice (as well as active form) after death defies the laws of presence and absence. Ghosts like the bleeding nun and the "undead" characters like the vampires in Dracula or even Melmoth (who has never died and has the ability to appear wherever he wants) are present when they should be absent— dead and gone and silenced for good. Like Echo’s voice which is chilling and uncanny because it speaks without body or "life," the voices of the undead reflect a fear of immortality.
Immortal life in the physical world is something to be feared in these novels. The bleeding nun just wants her bones finally buried so she can rest, and achieves this goal through the help of the "Wandering Jew," another character doomed to perpetual life. The urgency of the various rescues in Dracula results from the characters’ fear of the life-in-death or death-in-life that awaits Dracula’s victims. When one becomes an "undead" in that novel, one continues to "be" but not to "be oneself." The undead assume new (or perhaps not so new but certainly no longer repressed) identities. Lucy, the perfect Victorian angel, with whom everyone seems to fall in love, turns into a
"voluptuous," seducing vampiress. Death, if it does not define, at least fixes identity; without it, one can 25
lose oneself.
Though Dracula’s voice is dangerous (he can use it, for
instance, to summon wolves to devour a young mother), the
voice of the undead Lucy frightens the men in the novel even
more. Van Helsing attempts to silence Lucy once before her
death, as he puts garlic around her room to keep out the
Count: "But hush! no telling to others who make so
inquisitive questions. We must obey, and silence is a part
of obedience, and obedience is to bring you strong and well
into loving arms that wait for you" (144). As he is not
successful in "saving" her, he is also not successful in
silencing her; she speaks after her "death." As she
attempts to seduce Arthur in the graveyard, Seward says
"there was something diabolically sweet in her tones--
something of the tingling of glass when struck--which rang
through the brains even of us who heard the words addressed
to another" (231). Lucy refuses to become Philamel; rather
she is like Echo, whose voice will not go away (although
unlike Echo, her body is very much present). The three vampiresses that Jonathan Barker meets in Dracula’s castle
and who appear again at the novel’s end also have these
"sweet tingling tones" (398). Melmoth’s and Ambrosio’s
seductive tones show this same mixing of desire with danger
or death. Close connections between sexual desire and death
in fact are quite characteristic of Gothic. Lewis’ monk
rapes and kills Antonia among the corpses, for instance, and 26 the description of the final killing of Lucy, with Arthur driving a stake into her, is overtly sexual.
If disembodied voices present challenges to distinctions between presence and absence and to notions of autonomous identity, the loss of clear origin in any echo can also be subversive because of the challenges it presents to any potential authority of a voice. As language is cut off from its source, it can lose its symbolic qualities-- becoming severed from the authority of the "father" and thus losing determined "meaning." Words can "mean" only in relation to other present or absent "signifiers," because without a "transcendental signified" (God/father) there is no direct connection of "meaning" between the word and that which it signifies. As the close connections between speaker and spoken are severed when voice becomes disembodied echo, the patriarchal aspects of voice are put into question, paralleling the questioning and decay of patriarchal orders that is often a characteristic of classic
Gothic t a l e s . Dracula himself is the last of his family of rulers; young Melmoth is the end of his line, as Clara is the last of the Wielands. Matthew Lewis’s monk Ambrosio turns out to be a lost son and brother (making his rape also the crime of incest and his murders the killing of family).
In these novels that deal so closely with the subversion of order, especially of the order of patriarchal lines--with families falling in fortune or dying out and 27
with mistaken and concealed identities--the subversion of
the origins of voices plays an important role. Characters
often face strong challenges to their belief in any
"transcendental signified," often teetering on the edges of
belief. In Melmoth. for example, Melmoth and the
institutionalized Church itself provide such strong
persuasion against faith that Moncada’s and Isadora’s
continued belief in a benevolent and all-powerful God seems
nearly absurd. Isadora (as Immallee is called in the
"Christian" land after she has left her island) has been
married secretly to the devil’s agent, is nearly to deliver
his child, and assumes she is facing death (in addition to
the marriage her father has planned), and yet in her
desperate plight she holds onto the faith she has only
recently learned (since her "rescue" from the island). When
she hears the nearby convent bells, she challenges Melmoth,
"Is there no truth in the voice that speaks to you in tones
like these?" She tells him to bring her unborn child to her
grave so it can listen to God and Nature; Melmoth must
remain silent so "The voice of God will speak to its heart"
(391).
Isadora’s belief, however, makes little sense in the
context of both her fate (dying in the Inquisition prison after her child dies) and the status of voice throughout the novel. In Melmoth as well as in most classic Gothic texts, disembodied voices of uncertain (though not necessarily 28 supernatural) origin make it difficult to attribute any voice (especially God’s) to definite sources. Moncada in his monastery, for instance, hears voices in the night tempting him with unrepeatable blasphemies (before he ever sees Melmoth), and does not know whether to attribute them to the other monks (who have done other terrible things to him) or to supernatural agency (120-21). Later when he is escaping through the underground passages with the parricide monk (whose crime Moncada regards as the ultimate transgression), they hear the "disembodied" voices of the monks at matins floating down to them in the tunnels.
Moncada’s description of the sounds as "the voice of heaven"
(150) resembles Isadora’s reaction to the convent bells, and is equally jarring. These are the monks, after all, whose mental and physical abuse of Moncada made him so desperate for escape. The beauty of the sounds (of monks singing or of convent bells chiming) is no indication of heavenly origin; equally beautiful music announces Melmoth’s presence to those he would seduce--his voice has "Melodious smoothness" (41).
Echo’s story also shows this potential to subvert the authority that can lie behind a voice. It might seem that
Echo is stripped of the power to communicate, since she is
"never around to speak first, never found not to reply"
(Ovid 57). And because she must repeat what she hears she would seem to be an accurate representation of the original 29 utterance— faithful to the source and not challenging its authority.
In Ovid’s story, however. Echo can in fact subvert the authority of an original voice; there is a revisionary potential even in her limited vocal powers. When Echo sees
Narcissus and falls in love, following him ever "closer, hotter," although she cannot approach him with "sweet talk and gentle pleas," she can be "ready for what’s allowed: to wait his words and return them" (58). This limited communication is enough to attract Narcissus’ attention; she can answer his question "Is someone here?" with "Here." She can repeat his "Come!" "Why hide?" and "Let’s get together."
Echo can also alter the sense of words she repeats, by truncating sounds. For instance. Narcissus’ "Hue coeamus"
("Here let us meet") becomes Echo’s "Coeamus" ("Let us make love") (Hollander 25).
Only Narcissus’ "hard pride" foils her attempts at love. When she throws her arms around his neck, he cries
"Hand’s off me! I’d die than give myself to you!" The words she repeats in this instance do not echo Narcissus’ sentiments but take on a significantly new meaning: "Give myself to you." Since Echo says this before retreating to the woods to hide her shame and pine away in caves, the words seem to express not only what she would have liked to have done (i.e. given herself to him) but also what she in essence does (although Narcissus pays no attention to the 30 sacrifice). Juno may have intended to deny Echo the power of self expression, but that silencing was ineffective. As
Hollander notes, there is a whole tradition of Echo poetry that builds upon this very power of communication in repetition or significantly truncated repetition.
Echo can be doubly subversive of authority. Her disembodied voice apparently lacks a source and thus challenges any attempts to locate a solid, knowable source in which to find authority. And even if we take another’s speech as the origin of Echo’s speech, her ability to alter meaning still makes it difficult to trust the connections between the source and the disembodied words.
Brown’s Wieland illustrates well the potential of disembodied voices--echoes— to challenge the authority one might normally expect from spoken voice. As Bernard
Rosenthal notes, by the end, Clara has "gone beyond concerns of whose voice belonged to whom" (120). As readers, we also lose (if not the concerns, at least) the ability to distinguish whose voice is whose. Even assuming that Carwin has produced all of the voices except those that come from inside Wieland’s mind, the sources of the various disembodied voices we have encountered throughout the text all still proceed from some underside— certainly they are beyond (or beneath) the rational (even Carwin has some strange, unexplainable compulsion to use his powers of voice). 31
When Carwin saves Clara by using ventriloquy one last time— convincing Wieland that he has been misguided--the final "disembodied" voice merely reinforces the lack of distinction between the explainable and unexplainable voices. As Clara waits for her brother to stab her, they hear a voice command him "to hold"--the same command Clara had heard near her closet. Then "new sounds were uttered from above;- ’Man of errors! cease to cherish thy delusion; not heaven or hell, but thy senses, have misled thee to commit these acts. Shake off thy frenzy, and ascend into rational and human. Be lunatic no longer’" (262).
Clara realizes the voice is Carwin’s, but Wieland does not— for him it merely comes from "above" and then near his shoulder. He trusts in its authority in the same way he trusted in the authority of the voices he thought came from
God (he even appears to believe it is the same voice, somehow). In essence, this disembodied voice tells Wieland he has been "hearing voices" and that he should now be rational. Wieland does regain enough grasp of "reality" to be unable to bear what he has done and turn the knife on himself. But there is an inherent contradiction in a voice with no source telling Wieland he was wrong to believe in voices with no sources— distinctions between "real" and
"unreal" voices are blurred.
The inherent contradiction of this scene is analogous to the sort of inherent contradiction we can see in novels 32 that seem to tell us that their voices are "real" (by creating an illusion of presence and consciousness through voice) while at the same time giving us what we can see as
"unreal" voices— voices whose only origin seems to be a dead body or an "invisible friend" or a ghost--or voices that clearly are not "spoken" by any character or even thought by any live character. These texts subvert the idea of
"living characters" or "living voice" by giving presence to voices of the dead or the unreal (the absent).
In addition to the echoes of voices that seem to float freely in these Gothic texts, returning from beyond, there are further echoes that contribute to their decentering effects— echoes that reverberate among characters. A prevalence of doubled identities in Gothic texts illustrates the blurring of distinctions among characters often emphasized by voice echoes among characters.
Disembodied, originless voices, voices specifically from the
"dead" or "undead," and desire (for death, connection, or sex) jeopardize identity by making possible mergings and doublings among characters. Often characters who seem very different are actually more closely attached than we may realize. The voices in Wieland. for exeimple, bring Clara to
"the brink of the abyss," showing a clear connection with her brother, although one is apparently "sane" and the other
"insane." The villainous Ambrosio, whose voice attracts 33
Antonia and sounds so familiar to Antonia and her mother, finds out after killing both women and ravishing Antonia that he is son and brother to them, in The Castle of
Otranto Manfred kills his daughter, Matilda, mistaking her for Isabella, whom he has desired and whose virtue he has threatened throughout the story— the young women (one of whom he threatens and one of whom is his child) are actually very much alike.
In Wieland. the final scene (between Clara and her brother) emphasizes doubling that has occurred to some degree throughout the novel. If Wieland has been driven insane by voices (or if those voices were symptoms of his insanity), Clara comes very close to "losing touch" also, even though she finds out eventually that the voices she heard had a logical explanation. The threat she has felt all along from Carwin’s tricks becomes a real threat from her insane brother, who wants to kill her to fulfill the task the voices gave him. The final confrontation between brother and sister, in which the knife continually changes hands, emphasizes their mutual threat and vulnerability.
Their close connection is characteristic of many Gothics, since the merging of characters is very often among family members who already could be expected to look or sound alike. In a later version of the Narcissus/Echo story, from
Pausanius, in fact. Narcissus falls in love with his image because he mistakes it for his dead twin sister. 34
The Narcissus myth shows that Echo plays a crucial role
in doubling. Narcissus laments that although he can see
returned smiles and tears in the beloved image, the words
that its mouth seems to say "never reach my ears" (Ovid 60).
In Ovid’s story of Echo and Narcissus, Echo’s self
destructive desire and her obligation to repeat tie her
story intimately to the story of the self-loving and also
self-destructive Narcissus. As John Brenkman notes, the
stories of Narcissus and Echo "are related to one another
through a displaced parallelism--a parallelism in that each
character is pushed toward death when desire is not
reciprocated by another, a displaced parallelism in that for
Echo the other is another like herself, while for Narcissus
the other is his mirror image" (297). The "object" of
Narcissus’ love— the image of himself reflected in the clear
pool— imitates him in much the same way Echo had, although visually instead of orally:
your face: friendly, encouraging: your arms
reach with mine; I smile, you smile;
I see your tears when you see mine;
head nods when I nod; sometimes
I think your handsome mouth speaks, but words
never reach my ears (Ovid 80)
The words that the image does not say, however, are
said by Echo, even as she hides in the woods and Narcissus
declines toward death. Each time he cries "Oh!" she repeats 35 him; and his "last words staring into water: ’In vain/was this boy loved!’ echoes back at him;/and to his own farewell, "Farewell" says Echo" (61). And so while on one hand Echo seems like the "healthy" love of the other that
Narcissus blindly spurns for his destructive self-love, on the other hand. Echo has much in common with that "self" if only because she repeats its voice and shares the consuming desire. As Jeffrey Berman explains, "The myth of Narcissus and Echo reveals a pathological union of two individuals who succeed in tormenting each other. The absence of boundaries in their relationship, the failure to distinguish between self and other, indicates two selves that have never come into independent existence" (8).
Similarly, during Immalee's seduction by Melmoth’s voice in Maturin’s Gothic tale, she tells about the only
"friend" she has had on the island— which she does not realize is her own reflection in a pool and which she laments cannot talk to her. If self-love is thus silent, as
Narcissus also discovers as he gazes into the water, echoes can repeat one’s own words. Though disembodied, Echo can and does repeat Narcissus’ words, his "Oh!" his "in vain was this boy loved," and his "Farewell" (Ovid 61). These words, however, issue from somewhere "underneath" (from rocky or woodland caves according to the myth). Thus in recognizing
"self" in the echo of one’s own voice, what one hears also
21 seems uncanny— strange or disturbingly familiar. 36
Similarly, Gothics show echoes of voice issuing from what is suppressed or buried by the rational ego--coming from the caves of unconsciousness or the realms of the dead.
Death, according to Otto Rank, is at the root of doubling. As Rank explains the development of the figure of the double: "Originally conceived of as a guardian angel, assuring immortal survival to the self, the double eventually appears as precisely the opposite, a reminder of the individual’s mortality, indeed, the announcer of death itself" (76). If seeing ourselves in another causes us to face our own mortality, hearing ourselves in another likewise connects us with death. When the disembodied voices in Gothics, seeming to issue from the realm of death, also echo voices of the living characters, those characters have reason to be doubly terrified. The uncanny cannot remain outside of the self, but rather hits close to home
(as Freud explains it does in his essay by that title).
Thus the voices pose a challenge to an autonomous "living" self.
In Gothics, merging or repeated identities are often emphasized by merging or repeated voices. As an intended representation of sound, voice in a text can show connections between what we might otherwise assume to be the autonomous individual consciousnesses of individual characters. Sharon Cameron explains:
the phenomenon of voice— that which exists but is 37
not visible--offers an exemplification of why the
self has trouble knowing the boundaries between
itself and the world. For since there are things
inside the body that the self fails to know in
palpable or bodily terms, why may there not be
things outside the body--someone else's voice, for
example--that could also belong to one’s own body,
while failing to be perceptible in palpable or
bodily terms? (8)
Voice as sound can surround us and enter us. As Walter
Ong notes in his Presence of the Word. "Sound unites groups of living beings as nothing else does" (122) because "to address or communicate with other persons is to participate in their inwardness as in our own . . . Sound binds interiors to one another" (125).
In Dracula we see many instances of merging identities, especially in the blood transfusions that connect nearly every male character to Lucy (all of whom love her and most of whom have proposed to her on the same day), and also between Dracula and the "mad" Renfield (who eats live animals to absorb their life into himself) and between Mina and Lucy (both Dracula’s victims). But because Dracula’s victims also become like him--even one with him--there are also doublings between victim and villain that seem the most crucial in subverting traditional concepts of identity.
Dracula’s image may not appear in any mirror, but his 38
victims certainly become images of him.
The best example of the role of voice (and echo) in
this villain/victim doubling is near the end of the novel,
as Mina (baptized in blood but not yet fully changed)
declines toward vampirism during the chase across Europe of
Dracula in his coffin (travelling on a boat). As Van
Helsing continually hypnotizes Mina at sunrise and sunset to
obtain information about the sleeping Count, Mina usually
speaks of hearing the sounds that Dracula would hear in his coffin on a ship; later she says she hears "confused sounds-
-as of me talking in strange tongues, fierce-falling water"
(376). When not hypnotized, and thus connected with the
Count, Mina becomes unusually silent on this trip, and
Seward assumes it is the vampire blood in her compelling her not to speak. He and Van Helsing decide (again) to keep her unaware of their planned strategy, since "The same power
that compels silence may compel her speech" (352-53).
If Mina can be the verbal echo of Dracula’s thoughts while hypnotized, she also resembles Philomel, effectively
"raped" by Dracula and now unable to speak. By the end her voice is "like a voice one hears in a dream, so low it was"
(398). As Van Helsing has tried to silence Lucy, Dracula has nearly silenced Mina. But in being an Echo to
Dracula, she more clearly merges with him, and distinctions between them become more cloudy. 39
In the more recent manifestations of Gothic, as in more traditional Gothics, echoes manifested in disembodied (and re-embodied) voices also allow a questioning of presence and absence, death, identity, and authority by emphasizing the unstable correspondence between origin (especially corporeal origin) and word, by involving death in that shaky relationship, and by allowing echoes among characters to confuse boundaries among them. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
O ’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away, and Morrison’s Beloved use these manifestations of voice in similar ways, and yet the novels are not simply repetitions of one another. As
O ’Connor’s and Morrison’s texts echo Faulkner’s, they also build upon its use of death and the (dead) body and the mergings possible among characters.
If Faulkner makes the decaying physical body of Addie a central focus, for instance, it is still cut off from the voice that spills over from "beyond." Language, despite
Addie’s philosophy of empty words, seems ultimately to dominate Faulkner’s novel. With O ’Connor’s and Morrison’s texts, however, we can see an increasing emphasis on corporeality, so that in addition to disembodied voices, we can see voices that are re-embodied. Physical aspects of identity have closer connections with the language that is voice.
Like As I Lav Dying. O ’Connor’s The Violent Bear it
Away contains a lasting voice from a character who dies 40 early in the narrative. Although young Tarwater thinks he has burned the uncle’s body, it actually lies buried with a cross over it, and his discovery of it at the novel’s end causes him finally to assume the old man’s prophetic voice, that he had been fighting throughout the narrative.
O ’Connor also provides us in this novel, however, with a voice that unlike Addie’s or Mason’s has a strong physical component. When Tarwater projects his own rebellious voice he creates a "stranger" who begins as only a voice but quickly assumes corporeality (for the boy at least).
Morrison’s use of the corporeal becomes even stronger.
Although she shows us some disembodied voices, which echo around the house near the end of the novel, she also provides a "ghost" that is much more than a voice. Beloved herself becomes so grossly physical that she saps all adjacent life and must be suppressed again.
Similarly, the two later novels may be more radical in the challenges they pose for characters’ having autonomous and distinct identity because in them we see more and more echoing among characters’ voices; boundaries among characters become more and more blurred as their voices repeat those that have come from beyond. In As I Lav Dying.
Dari’s voice, for instance, has many similarities with
Addie’s, and most of his siblings at some point seem to echo his distinctive voice (especially in their struggles for a sense of self). And the sense the novel gives us of 41 mergings with (and because of) the absent mother helps
Faulkner show connections among interiors. Yet As I Lay
Dying. all in all, shows less echoing than either of the later novels, and thus as their emphasis on the corporeal aspects of identity increases, so does their exploration of merging identities.
While The Violent Bear it Away gives us distinct characters, for example, there are so many reasons to see any of them as a double to any other character and so many echoes among their voices (especially between young Tarwater and the "voice" of the stranger) that the novel almost seems to present us with only one real character. Identities become much less distinct than they remain in Faulkner’s
Bundren family. Identities also become blurred in
Morrison’s novel, especially those of Sethe and her two daughters, whose voices become an echoing chorus near the end of the novel.
Because all three of these novels foreground questions of identity (with corporeality and death and with merging and echoes), we are forced to see (to varying degrees) that voices cannot be brought out and suppressed at will--because those voices refuse to die and are also somehow parts of the
"living" or "normal" voices of the novels. The emergence of the buried voice seems to speak of desire in the "living" characters, of social and psychological authority, or power and submission among voices, and of what parts of ourselves 42 we allow to speak. What is suppressed, destroyed, or chased off at the ends of these novels also says something about power of voice (word) and about power to establish an autonomous identity. The voices from beyond are buried finally in these novels, but the challenges they have presented to rational notions of death and self and the mergings we have seen between them and the "real" characters make that burying incomplete. Thus these novels are Gothic in their subversive abilities to challenge identity, outside authority, and the authority of "self"— showing through voice the power of that which resists being suppressed, especially the power of words (and sometimes of "The Word") to survive death and to transcend the individual— much as
Echo herself becomes just voice--a voice that speaks out of desire, transcends body and time (and even death), and has power even in its limited ability to "repeat" that which has been said before. 43
Endnotes
1. The notion of dead text is not new— Wordsworth, for example, in his Prelude uses the simile "Lifeless as a written book" (VIII.577).
2. Plato was perhaps the first to separate pure narrative (the poet’s own voice) from "mimesis" (the poet attempting to imitate another voice) (The Republic Bk. III). More recent rhetorical critics have distinguished between the voices of narrators and authors or "implied authors" (Wayne Booth, "Distance and Point of View) and have explored ways in which narrators present characters’ "speech." Genette, for example, claims there are degrees of diegesis (narration) from "narrated speech" through "indirect" styles to "reported speech" (the most mimetic) (Narrative Discourse 171-73). Ross argues with Genette, saying that even reported speech is reported by a character or narrator whose own discourse we see first and foremost ("Voice in Narrative Texts" 301). Critics following Bahktin apply the term "voice" to ideological as well as semantic traces in a novel’s discourse.
3. And certainly it is a central concern in Faulkner, who elsewhere gives us the voices of characters without self- knowledge (like Benjy, for instance)— or voices existing only in reports or imaginings (like those of the Sutpens in Absalom. Absalom!).
4. In "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction," O ’Connor explains, "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what a writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down" (Mystery and Manners 45). Gilbert Muller notes that As I Lav Dying was one of her favorite novels (21). Morrison, in a speech given at the Faulkner and Women, Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference, explains that she spent a lot of time reading and thinking about Faulkner while working on a graduate thesis.
5. Punter explains that "Gothic takes us on a tour through the labyrinthine corridors of repression, gives us glimpses of the skeletons of dead desires and makes them move again . . . Gothic writers work— consciously or unconsciously- -on the fringe of the acceptable, for it is on this borderland that fear resides" (409-10). Mary Jacobus describes the Gothic effect (of Villette) as "perpetual de-centering" (55), 44
6. Of course, we can still find newer examples of Gothic that follow the tradition of outward manifestations of uncanny forces, such as Stephen King’s The Shining. with its evil, haunted hotel or Shirley Jackson’s Haunting at Hill House with its heroine threatened and taken over by the haunted house.
7. And he extends the importance of Gothic in American literature: "Until the gothic has been discovered, the serious American novel could not begin; and as long as that novel lasts, the gothic cannot die" (Fiedler 143).
8. Milkman in Song of Solomon, for instance, returns to a more Gothic setting in Virginia, and Son’s home in Florida in Tar Baby is haunted for Jadine.
9. In modern texts in general, "it may be voice as the sign of human presence and identity--in narrative and in consciousness— that is being tested, strained, finally usurped by modern narrative. Instead of simply allowing the multiplication of voices to achieve a pluralistic consensus or dialogic freedom, such narrative also questions the efficacy, or what Jacque Derrida has called the hold, of voice as the sign of the unmediated, essential presence of consciousness to itself, its purest identity, uncontaminated by a conditioning reality" (Pecora 237).
10. Du Pont, in Radcliffe’s Udolpho consciously employs a similar warning, hoping his "disembodied" voice filtering up to the great halls from his dungeon will frighten Montoni out of harming Emily— he says he "repeated [Montoni’s] last words in a disguised and hollow voice" (254). The disembodied singing that people hear throughout the novel in the woods surrounding the Chateau-le-blanc prove to have come from the Signora Laurentini, whose guilt has caused her to become a nun in the nearby convent and to have become slightly insane. The other voices that haunt the Chateau-le-blanc and surrounding woods in this novel are explained away as belonging to the band of pirates and robbers who stored their booty in the walls of the chateau, wanting to frighten away anyone who might stray too close to their operation. But the adventure of the Count, his daughter Blanche and Saint Foix upon meeting with the robbers in the ruin in the woods (where they first hear their disembodied voices deep within the structure) shows clearly that haunting by real, live voices is just as dangerous as haunting by spirits.
11. Derrida notes in Speech and Phenomena the connection between death and "the sign": "This relationship with mv death (my disappearance in general) thus lurks in this determination of being as presence, ideality, the absolute possibility of repetition. The possibility of the sign is this relationship with death" (54). 45
12. Hartman notes that voice with presence is already speaking from realm of the dead (121).
13. This silence is frightening enough: when Moncada wakes up in the silence of the Inquisition’s prison, for instance, he is terrified and wonders if he is among the dead or in "some subterranean world of the mute and voiceless, where there was no air to convey sounds, and no echo to repeat them, and the famished ear waited in vain for its sweetest banquet— the voice of man" (168). Although Moncada finds that prisoners may whisper at least and that he is not among the dead literally, there certainly are enough other instances of characters being among the dead in Gothics. Waking up in tombs beneath a castle or convent is a classic Gothic occurrence, seen especially in Lewis’ The Monk where Agnes and Antonia both find themselves in the catacombs, among the decaying bodies. Agnes comes close to becoming one herself, while Antonia dies there after being raped by the monk Ambrosio.
14. Also in Dracula. Lucy’s mother’s death is described in terms of voice: "strange and horrible gurgling in her throat"(157).
15. In the tradition of Echo as a seductress and flatterer that Hollander explains has followed Ovid’s version of the story, we can see a context for this frightening feminine ghostly voice. Stoker’s Dracula likewise develops this feminine kind of frightening voice with his vampiresses and Lucy. When the tempting voice is masculine (as is Carwin’s or Melmoth’s or Dracula’s) there seems to be a twist on the tradition.
16. Lucy’s sleepwalking earlier in the novel had already associated her with death, putting her into a peculiar state of identity. Ambiguous states of "death" occur in other Gothics; Agnes in The Monk, for instance, is considered "dead" and yet she is not.
17. Punter maintains that Gothic is "erotic at root" (411).
18. Punter says that in portraying the barbaric Gothic shows a fear of the past and of racial degeneracy which brings us to the boundaries of the civilized. (405) Fiedler claims "the guilt which underlies the gothic and motivates its plots is the guilt of the revolutionary haunted by the (paternal) past which he has been striving to destroy" (129).
19. John Brenkman notes that Echo remains a real character in the myth precisely because Juno’s plans to deny her communication fail (300). Naomi Segal disagrees with him. 46 however, saying that "we are never unaware that the cleverness, assistance in her distress, belongs to the narrator" (7). But since the "narrator" reports the speech of Narcissus and Echo, attributing only her responses to the cleverness of the narrator begs many questions about the status of discourse in the myth.
20. MacAndrew emphasizes that questionable identity is at the root of doubling in traditional Gothics: "the figure of the double was thus born from the split and warring factions of the personality of the Gothic villain" (50).
21. Du Font’s echoing of Montoni’s words in Udolpho literally does issue from under him, in the cave-like hidden passages of the castle. When Emily asks Montoni if he has heard the "voice," he replies, with legitimacy, that he has only heard his own voice, and anything else must be a trick (210).
22. Often in various traditional Gothics, apparently isolated characters are able to achieve some kind of social connection through their voices. In Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, for instance, the princess Matilda and the imprisoned stranger Theodore (who fall into an ill-fated love) carry on a conversation out of their windows before ever seeing one another. In Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho. the heroine Emily hears the voice of the imprisoned Du Pont carried through the wind from the window below (although she is mistaken in the identity of this admirer). The physically imprisoned men and the socially entrapped women in the rooms above them can connect somewhat through the medium of voice-- voice that is, in effect at least, disembodied, since the speakers can only hear each other.
23. As grief silences Dr. Seward at one point: "I - I cannot go on - word - and - v - voice - f - fail m - me" (which looks ridiculous transcribed) (362).
24. Sharon Cameron, in The Corporeal Self, explains the importance of metaphors of the body in American fiction in general, claiming that the physical body emphasizes American fiction’s understandable concern with problems of self- identity (see p. 6-7). CHAPTER II:
As I Lay Dying: Impossible Silence
As Dari Bundren listens to his brother Cash clattering
the boards as he builds their mother’s coffin in William
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, he describes an uncanny characteristic of the sounds he hears. It seems to him as
if "the sounds [are] ceasing without departing, as if any movement might dislodge them from the immediate air in
reverberant repetition" (71-72). Faulkner’s novel presents us with many such sounds and voices that do become dislodged and echo on in reverberant repetition, but the most significant of these is the voice of Addie Bundren that seems dislodged long after Faulkner presents us with her death.
The question of what it means in a literary text to have a dead voice speaking or echoing apparently from
"beyond the grave" arises from Faulkner’s As I Lav Dying even before we read beyond the title page. Faulkner’s title
"As I Lay Dying" has sparked considerable critical
speculation since its tense and point of view do not seem to correspond to the events of the novel (e.g. Monaghan 213).
The title sparks questions about the meaning of "As"
47 48
(Sundquist 30), the identity of "I", and the verb tense of
"Lay" (which may conceivably be in present tense in a novel
employing so much colloquial speech). If Addie Bundren is
the "speaker" of the title words (as is generally assumed), we are faced with the discrepancy of her death so early in
the novel; most of the plot technically occurs after she lay
dying, not "as." And if the title is in standard
grammatical form (past tense), we seem to be dealing with
the words of a ghost, one who has already died.
Perhaps hoping that a "source" for the phrase may help
explain some of these questions, critics have cited
Faulkner’s claim that the title comes from the eleventh book
of Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus, looking for a safe passage home, trayels to Erebus to consult with the shades
of the dead (e.g. David Williams 100-101, Wadlington 107).
Agamemnon, in describing his murder to Odysseus, exclaims:
"while I, as I lay dying / upon the sword, raised up my hands to smite her [Clytemnestra]; And shamelessly she
turned away, and scorned / To draw my eyelids down or close my mouth,/ Though I was on the road to Hade’s house ..."
(Homer, quoted in Luce 1). There seem few connections between Agamemnon and Addie Bundren (unless we see Anse’s overworking her and failing to call the doctor in time as spousal murder, akin to Clytemnestra’s stabbing), and yet
the whole Erebus scene from Homer's epic and the Gothic
implications of dead shades speaking shed light on 49 disembodied voices in Faulkner’s novel. ^
In Homer’s epic, Odysseus must offer sacrifices before the shades appear to him, but only after he allows the spirits to drink the black sacrificial blood he has spilled into the earth are they able to speak to him. Clearly, the lifegiving powers of drinking blood, essential to Dracula and vampire legends in general, draw upon the same tradition. And Addie’s own obsession with the "terrible blood," "the wild blood boiling along the earth" (167) in the monologue she "speaks" after the novel has presented her physical death reflects the powers of life and death people have always associated with blood. And if the words "as I lay dying" belong to the shade of Agamemnon, there are still at least two other shades appearing to Odysseus in the same scene who carry implications for Faulkner’s text. In addition to an assortment of women and war heros, Odysseus speaks with the shade of Elpenor who, after falling off of
Circe’s roof and breaking his neck, has remained (like Addie for ten days) unburied, and with his mother who has died after he left for Troy. In As I Lav Dying the reader also hears the words of a dead mother— in the eight-page section two-thirds of the way through the novel entitled "Addie." A distinctly poignant and philosophical voice gives us a summary of its life history, a defense of its "sin," and a treatise on language, life, death, love, and motherhood. 50
Unlike the reader, however, the characters apparently do not hear this voice of the dead mother— at least not in the way Odysseus hears his dead mother. We can see evidence of communication between the living and the dead only in
Dari’s claim to hear Addie’s body in its coffin talk "in little trickling bursts of secret and murmurous bubbling"
(202), telling him that she wants God to hide her away from the sight of man "So she can lay down her life" (204-05). ^
For Dari, Addie "speaks" the desire for burial that is such a driving force of the whole novel.
We realize, however, by this point in the novel that
Dari’s clairvoyance--that allows him access to Dewey Dell’s thoughts. Jewel’s illegitimacy, and various events to which he is not direct witness and that would perhaps make him best suited for hearing a voice from beyond— is also closely tied to the "insanity" that his family sees in him. Dari is clearly a special character, and his capacities as omniscient narrator and mad poet make us see his access to the voice of the dead as somehow beyond the sort of supernatural occurrences we see in Dracula or The Monk in which ordinary people are visited by extraordinary visions and voices. And because of the distinction. As I Lav Dying seems essentially different from the traditional Gothic novel— there are no "real" ghosts or demons moving around and speaking within the realm of the story’s action. 51
In fact. As I Lav Dying normally receives labels such as "mock epic" or "mock heroic" (Monaghan 219), "tragi-comic quest," "morality tale of Southern life" (Hemenway 145), pathetic or tragic (Powers 70), or "grotesque realism." ^
In effect, however, the novel operates very much like a traditional Gothic, especially like the "new American literary Gothic" that Kerr describes, which includes surrealistic effects and reveals the "blackness in the depths of human nature" (18, 13). The inward turn evident in more recent manifestations of Gothic (beginning perhaps with Poe) lets us see a Gothic plot within characters’ minds— in, for example, Dari’s madness and hearing voices/*
The wanderings (and quests for identity) within Dari’s mind
(and others’ in the novel) parallel the physical wandering across the countryside to Addie’s grave in Jefferson. While we have no virgin trapped in dark and spooky catacombs, we do have the "dark, tortured wanderings in the mind"
(MacAndrew 48-49).
But this "inward" Gothic turn in the novel may be coupled with an outward turn also— since it is the reader who hears the "echo," the disembodied voice of the dead mother, even more than the character Dari does, we can see the reader as drawn directly into the Gothic effect. On this readerly level. As I Lav Dying does accomplish the same functions as traditional ghost-story Gothics; it decenters us by forcing us to think about the notion of identity and 52
how death affects it, makes us ponder "insanity" and what it means to hear dead voices, and unsettles us by subverting
order and presenting us directly with what is taboo,
perverse, and irrational. And the dominant Gothic device in
this novel (as in a novel like Weiland, only less overtly)
is the disembodied voice— specifically that of Addie
Bundren, returning after it should be dead and silenced.
Of course, to see Addie’s voice as particularly
"disembodied" is to raise questions first about the
narrative status of any "voice" in the novel and second
about Addie's body itself, which surely is as "present" as her voice. Commonly recognized "inconsistencies" in various voices (particularly the eloquence deemed beyond any of the
simple country folk, especially a character like the child
Vardaman) challenge the notion of any voice truly belonging
to the character with which a chapter is labelled. Faulkner also emphasizes early in the novel that voices sometimes can drift away from their sources; Dari, for instance, gives descriptions of voices that float like a breeze in the house and of voices that can linger in sulfur air. In a novel
laden with descriptions of voices floating around, viewing all of the voices as disembodied to some extent may have validity. Thus the nature of Addie’s voice’s disembodiment, while more extreme, fits into a context of disembodiment.
And Addie’s body, the most significant corporeal presence in the novel, highlights the paradox inherent also in hearing 53 her voice--that she is both present and absent, the dominant and unsettling corporeality and yet the absent center of all of the Bundrens’ lives.
Because the novel uses character narrators (fragmenting the story among fifteen speakers, expanding a technique
Faulkner uses also in The Sound and the Fury) we expect a certain mimetic reality. The various characters’ words, however, are not "directed narration," as Hugh Ruppersburg describes it; the characters "talk to no on in particular" and thus, "Their thoughts merely exist, on the page, in a kind of narratorial vacuum" (115 and 21). The characters
"merely speak, or think, in a disembodied voice not at all reflective of how they really talk" (Ruppersburg 20). ^ As
Dorothy Hale convincingly argues, Faulkner uses stylized language to represent a character’s inner thoughts to
"distinguish the private self from the criterion of plausible language use" (9). Without always being true to what a character might plausibly "say," the voices do seem true to what a particular consciousness might think or feel.
And usually they are consistent with the progression of the plot.
Addie’s, however, like a few other sections, is chronologically out of place. ® Her voice is not only out of place because it comes five days after her death; it also is more than any other we see a digression from the plot, a general summary of her life and philosophy rather than a 54 reaction to the events the other voices describe. Thus
Addie’s voice remains much more obviously disembodied than any other. In many ways, it seems cut-off and free- floating, as if it (and its framing sections of Cora and
Whitfield that provide ironic commentary on her words) might have landed anywhere amidst the other narration. As
Bleikasten notes, "Not only has her [Addie’s] monologue no immediate logical connection with the current action but also there is no locating it in space and time. The voice we hear in it is timeless and bodiless, conjured up by the author's necromancy" (54),
The novel gives us many analogous examples of voices and sound that, as Vernon Tull puts it (describing the voices of the women singing at Addie’s funeral), "come out of the air" (86) or are otherwise detached from their 7 sources, Dari’s early description of voices in the house sets the stage for voices floating around, making Echo a dominant trope in the novel’s Gothicism:
I enter the hall, hearing the voices before I
reach the door. Tilting a little down the hill,
as our house does, a breeze draws through the hall
all the time, upslanting, A feather dropped near
the front door will rise and brush along the
ceiling, slanting backward, until it reaches the
down-turning current at the back door: so with
voices. As you enter the hall, they sound as 55
though they were speaking out of the air about
your head (19).
Tull’s description of voices at the funeral also shows voice as something that lingers after it actually "exists":
In the thick air it’s like their voices come out
of the air, flowing together and on in the sad,
comforting tunes. When they cease it’s like they
hadn’t gone away. It’s like they had just
disappeared into the air and when we moved we
would loose them again out of the air around us,
sad and comforting. (86)
This description itself echoes Dari’s earlier description of sounds lingering, as he describes the sounds Cash makes while constructing the coffin as "ceasing without departing, as if any movement might dislodge them from the immediate air in reverberant repetition" (71-72). Dari then gives an eery description of the shadows of the men helping Cash in the sulphur air, relating the shadows to the lingering sound: "Their shadows form as upon a wall, as though like sound they had not gone very far away in falling but had merely congealed for a moment, immediate and musing" (72).
The threat that echoes (reverberant repetition) might at any time break out of the air (be dislodged by movement) after the sound has ceased, like ghostly sulfur shadows, sets up a frightening, Gothic context for the free-floating voices.
Even further examples of characters troubled by echoing 56 and disembodied sound heighten this Gothic effect. As the
Bundrens finally approach Jefferson and attract attention with the stench of their cargo, Dari says, "We hear sudden voices, ejaculant" (219)— voices that for him seem to come from nowhere, although we know they belong to offended townspeople. In his own bed after the night helping Cash finish the coffin earlier in the novel, Tull "listens" to the song his wife sang on their ride to the Bundren house earlier that night: "be durned if even then it wasn’t like I could still hear Cora singing" (69). Samson, in his bed later in the novel, while the Bundrens camp for the night in his yard, comments on his wife’s crying over the Bundren’s treatment of Addie’s body: "after a while it was like I could still hear her crying after she was asleep, and smelling it even when I knowed I couldn’t" (111-12). Rachel
Sampson’s pain (over the Bundrens’ treatment of Addie) is not silenced for her husband even after her crying has
0 stopped; it pervades like the smell of Addie’s body.
During the two major crises in the novel Dari again describes disembodied voices— voices that get away from their speakers. Both near the beginning of the journey when the Bundrens face the swollen river and washed out bridge
(nearly losing the coffin to the river’s current) and during the fire that Dari sets to Mr. Gillespie’s barn (to burn the coffin they have stored there for the night) we have descriptions of disconnected voices. Before crossing the 57 river, Dari says "our voices are quiet, detached" (135).
During the crossing, Tull’s voice is swallowed up by the noise of the river (138) and later as they look for Cash’s tools in the water, Tull’s voice moves away from him "full and clear along the water" (152). Jewel’s voice as he helps rescue Gillespie’s animals from the fire and braves the flames to rescue the coffin is "thin, high, faraway"-- "It is as though the sound had been swept from his lips and up and away, speaking back at us from an immense distance of exhaustion" (210). Dari can only "see his mouth shape as he calls my name” (211). Dewey Dell’s voice seems to Dari in this scene like the sounds that disperse into the air and then collect together again: "It seems to me that I now hear the accumulation of her voice through the last five minutes"
(211).
Tull’s narration of the pre-journey funeral includes one other example of detached voice that especially stresses the unstable relationship between body and voice, as he describes the Reverend Whitfield’s voice as separate from his body:
Whitfield begins. His voice is bigger than him.
It’s like they are not the same. It’s like he is
one and his voice is one, swimming on two horses
side by side across the ford and coming into the
house, the mud-splashed one and the one that never
even got wet, triumphant and sad" (86). 58
The Reverend Whitfield has ridden across the ford to get to the Bundrens’ house, and while outwardly sullied, we know from his monologue much later that his voice would have been
"triumphant" and clean, since he believes God has forgiven him for his adultery with Addie.
Tull’s words describing Whitfield also present, before the fact, a clear metaphor to describe Addie after the river crossing on the Bundrens’ journey. Emerging on the other side of the river, "rescued" by Jewel’s desperate actions, there are two separate Addies--the body in the coffin and the voice that speaks to us in her monologue almost immediately after this river scene. Addie’s body is more than mud-splashed; it has been decaying for five days, has had holes bored into it, and has been thoroughly soaked
(although the "wetting" does help stifle the smell temporarily). The voice we hear, however, (like
Whitfield’s) is clean and dry, perhaps not triumphant but at least not putrid or decayed--it is very much "alive."
Thus, like the voice of Echo, the voice of Addie that
Faulkner presents two-thirds of the way through a novel that began with her death challenges the idea that voice, like breath, ceases with the death of the body. According to
Ovid, Echo pines away in woodland caves and eventually turns to rocks--in a physical sense, she dies. In versions of the myth stressing Echo’s music (e.g. a third-century romance by
Longus), Echo, who has valued her virginity and refuses 59
Pan’s advances, is torn limb from limb by shepherds acting under Pan’s influence (Hollander 7-8). Addie’s physical body, one could argue, is killed and mistreated just as
Echo’s is in this version, although not with the same immediate violence. Although Addie’s illness is never specified, we tend to suspect she has been overworked to death, and Peabody implies by saying he has been called too late, that he might have been able to save Addie if he had been called in earlier. After her death, as the community reaction makes clear, Addie’s body is mistreated to even more horrifying extremes than if it had simply been torn apart.
In either version of the myth. Echo dies in one sense and continues to live in another, thus presenting us with a troublesome image of "death" as well as problems in fixing identity. Since Echo is robbed of much vocal ability in the beginning of Ovid’s story, voice does not seem to be the key to her identity (Narcissus only becomes fully aware of her as separate from himself when she flings her arms around him). But after her body ceases to be, her limited voice remains as the only evidence of her existence— of her identity. The presence of her voice is Echo. Similarly, in
Faulkner’s novel we have the continued presence of a female character who ought to be absent, since we have seen her die. And as with Echo, we are forced to ask what exactly death is and what exactly determines identity. 60
In significant contrast to the myth of Echo, however, it is the body at least as much as the voice that makes
Addie so much of a palpable presence throughout the novel.
Addie may be at the center of the novel,® but that grounding center is largely (for the characters who do not hear her at least) just a physical entity--the dead body.
Even technically before her death, early in the novel, Addie is mainly an inert body— a totally motionless rail-like
"hump" under the quilts (8). For Dr. Peabody, who is afraid he will have to "haul her back" to life (40), she is a
"bundle of rotten sticks" (43). And for Dari, her face is
"like a casting of fading bronze upon the pillow" (50); only her hands have any life left, but they are like roots (as
Jewel has described them earlier--15)— with a "curled, gnarled inertness" (50). Even before her actual death,
Addie seems as if she has, like Echo, turned to stone.
After her death then, it would seem natural for the
Bundrens to treat the body--once it is concealed within the coffin--as mere object, although an object deserving respect. Samson’s initial observation that "’They had something in the wagon’" (107) reveals one way of perceiving the dead body— as thing. When Samson learns what it is in the wagon, he no longer refers to it as a thing, and yet his attitude clearly shows the standard, "natural" reaction to a corpse. Realizing that this thing stinking up his yard is no longer Addie, he maintains that with a "woman that’s been 61 dead in a box four days, the best way to respect her is to get her into the ground as quick as you can" (110). The
"something," for him, however, has become a "woman.
The Bundrens consistently use this latter form of reference— speaking of Addie and the coffin not as something but as someone: "we put her under the apple tree" (202) or
"We hitched up and laid Cash on top of Addie" (172).
Vardaman says later that Dari is "out there under the apple tree with her, lying on her" (214). Or during the river scene, Dari says Cash had his "other hand reached back upon
Addie, holding her jammed over against the high side of the wagon" (141-41). Yet their reference to her/it goes beyond the social norms that make people at funeral homes murmur comments like "She looks so good." The Bundrens (especially
Dari) use "Addie" or "she" where we would expect them to refer to the coffin itself— Cash and Dari, after all, lie on the coffin, not directly on Addie, and Cash jams the coffin against the wagon.
In addition to the Bundren’s continuing to call the coffin and its contents "Addie" or "she," they display other behaviors that show them seeing Addie as a "presence" even after death. When the druggist Mosely asks Dewey Dell where her mother is, for instance, she replies "Out yonder in the wagon" (190) rather than telling him that she is dead. And even more strikingly, while Addie is decaying in the coffin, the Bundrens talk not only about her but also about her 62 wishes and "actions" in the present and future tenses.
Both Dari and Vardaman give descriptions of the coffin’s movements as Addie’s performing voluntary action.
As Dari describes loading the coffin onto the wagon, the impersonal "it resists" (91) turns to "she rushes suddenly after" (92), in Dari’s metaphor of a body resisting being stripped. Throughout Vardaman’s whole section describing the coffin lost in the river, he refers to the coffin as
"she" and sees its movements as voluntary: "she fell off . .
.she jumped in the water again . . . she could go faster in the water than a man" (143-44).
" ’Her mind is set on it’" (109) Anse tells Samson, explaining the trip to Jefferson. He repeats a few times that "She’ll want it so" (87), explaining the wait for Dari and Jewel to return with their own wagon. And continuing the strange verb tense. Anse tells Armstid as he accepts his food that " ’she will be grateful to ere a one of you’"
(174). Anse’s expressions of Addie’s desires could be viewed as a strategy for gaining pity and justification for his actions. But characters as diverse as Tull and Dari also ascribe feelings to the lifeless corpse. Both refer to
Addie as "waiting" to be buried: "She laid there three days in that box, waiting for Dari and Jewel ..." Tull complains (86), while Dari says, much later in Jefferson, urging that Cash be taken to the doctor first, " ’She’ll wait. She’s already waited nine days’" (224). 63
The desire for burial may be primarily in those who remain alive, yet they seem to express it as the dead body’s own wish. Continual exposure to the corpse seems to make the Bundrens unable to abandon the idea of Addie’s presence.
The body is impossible to ignore, and thus it is impossible for them to think of Addie as absent.Dari, for instance, says David Williams, is so concerned with Addie’s laying down her life because "even he is not completely free from a belief in her unremitting, vital presence" (113).
This presence, however, is primarily so disturbing because of the paradox inherent in a dead body— the paradox of an identity’s simultaneous absence and presence, the same paradox we have with disembodied voices such as Echo’s. As
Bleikasten explains, the corpse is a visible, material reminder of "the great void left by Addie’s death" (47); it
"gives absence a face" (116). If Addie is the center of the Bundrens’ lives, she is also "the center which no longer holds" (Sundquist 3 1 ) . This absent presence, the corpse, makes the notion of death itself questionable; "life and death seem to overlap" (Hemenway 138).
Throughout the novel, Faulkner’s characters reveal their own struggles with the Gothic sorts of questions brought about by this problem of death and what death does to an identity. Most characters seem to struggle with the challenge death presents to clear-cut notions of absence and presence— the challenge presented in traditional Gothics by 64 ghosts and undead characters. Doctor Peabody gives his own evaluation of death when he visits Addie as she lies dying, when it is too late to haul her back:
She has been dead these ten days. I suppose it's
having been a part of Anse for so long that she
cannot even make that change, if change it be. I
can remember how when I was young I believed death
to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to
be merely a function of the mind--and that of the
minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. (42)
Dewey Dell also questions whether death is merely an instantaneous change: "It took her ten days to die; maybe she dont know it is yet" (57). Her description of Anse's confusion right after Addie's death repeats this thinking:
"He looks like right after the maul hits the steer and it no longer alive and dont yet know that it is dead" (58).
Thus because Faulkner has made us see death as more than a physical phenomenon, we have some preparation before hearing the "dead" Addie "speak." Addie's own "dead" voice in fact also contributes to jeopardizing notions about death. Addie, who knows from her father that "the reason for living is to get ready to stay dead a long time" (161), says twice in her monologue that Anse is dead, that he died, although he "did not know that he was dead" (165-66). If death is the dominant state for Addie, and living is only preparation for it, then her own dying seems more like a 65 coining to be than a ceasing to be. It is significant that we hear her voice only after her death (even though we see her alive at the novel’s start she is silent then). And because her words seem to sum up the feelings and philosophies of a lifetime that were probably never uttered in that lifetime, we have some justification for seeing the
"real" Addie, her essence, as that which "comes back" after the death— the echo of her voice. But if this is so, we still must realize that the echo can only be of what was felt or experienced in the past, that what Addie is now is only a repetition of what she was.
Even more than the other characters, Dari and Vardaman both struggle with the problem of what existence might mean in the past tense and become caught up in questions of "is" and "was." Vardaman begins by thinking that bananas are eaten and then they are gone (like the burned barn he notes later "wasn’t a barn now"— 213). Vardaman works through the deaths of rabbits and possums he has seen and realizes that
"it is not her":
and Cash is going to nail it up. And so if she
lets him it is not her. I know. I was there. I
saw when it did not be her. I saw. They think it
is and Cash is going to nail it up. (63)
While for Vardaman, Addie becomes mixed up with the fish he has just killed (the "not-fish" since it has been cut into pieces— 52), lying "in the bleeding pan, waiting to 66 be cooked and et" (63), for Dari, in initial reflections,
Addie is now nothing, since she is in the past, has "passed away." Thus Vardaman’s "My mother is a fish" is for Dari "I have no mother" (89).
Thus the stage is set for the strange conversation
Vardaman relates later:
"Jewel’s mother is a horse," Dari said.
"Then mine can be a fish, cant it, Dari?" I
said.
"Why?" Dari said. "If pa is your pa, why
does your ma have to be a horse just because
Jewel’s is?"
"Why does it?" I said. "Why does it, Dari?"
Dari is my brother.
"Then what is your ma, Dari?" I said.
"I haven’t got ere one," Dari said. "Because
if I had one, it is was. And if it is was, it
cant be is. Can it?"
"No," I said.
"Then I am not," Dari said. "Am I?" (95)^’
Dari struggles directly with the challenges to identity imposed by death. But if Addie is only in the past tense, for Dari, existence itself seems to be threatened.
Because of her death, his mother "is" not, and since there cannot be a child without first a mother, the child cannot 67 exist without mother. Of course the logical answer to this reasoning is that the mother once "was"--that the child's existence does not continue to depend upon the existence of the mother, after it is created. But for Dari here, the death of the mother has jumbled notions of existence so much that his own identity is put in jeopardy. In an early monologue also, after he has narrated the death scene he has not really witnessed, Dari tries to "empty" himself for sleep in a strange room, thinking about "is" and "was." He concludes a long, jumbled passage on being and not being by saying :
Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is wa s .
Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel Is, so Addie
Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could
not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And
so if I am not emptied yet, I am is. (76)
Dari does not seem to be able to answer the questions of existence and thus is especially concerned with at least establishing the past tense of his mother as a certainty, which is so difficult because her body and her "voice" will not go away. Thus when Dari and Vardaman listen to the corpse under the apple tree, Dari hears Addie telling God that she wants to be hidden away "’from the sight of man . .
So that she can lay down her life’" (205). She clearly has not yet lain down her life (she still "lay dying") because she is still talking "in little trickling bursts of 68 secret and murmurous bubbling" (202). This "voice" clearly indicates a presence or at least the echo of a presence and thus perpetuates the crisis for Dari, mocking the inevitable absence that is also death.If Dari’s sense of self was challenged by losing to death the "mirror image" of his mother, the "echo" of his mother provides no substitute, because Dari realizes that she ought to be buried and silent. Echo subverts his ability to put his mother into a past tense.
Instead of being buried and silent, Addie has become to some extent like the "undead" characters of so many traditional Gothics--the vampires or "Wandering Jew" or
Melmoth figures doomed to never die. The driving force of the novel— to bury Addie’s body--echoes the goal of "ghosts" like the "Bleeding Nun" of The Monk or even of Homer’s
Elpenor. The threat of continual presence can be subverted a little perhaps if the body (or previous source) of that voice is buried. Significantly though. Echo’s story shows that burying may not accomplish the goal of silencing. Her voice, after all, does issue from buried places; her body ceases to exist (turns to rocks in most versions of the myth) while the voice still comes from caves.
Thus for the reader, the presence of Addie’s voice
(even more than the presence of her body) challenges the status of death. If silence does not actually equal non- being, as Vardaman in the barn seems to think ("I am not 69
anything. I am quiet" — 55), silence ought to follow from
non-being. Characters referring to speech as breath (for
example, Tull’s "Never truer breath was ever breathed"— 29)
emphasizes the inherent connection between life and voice,
and yet when Addie "speaks" in this novel, she is dead. For us, it is as if the jostling in the river has "loosed" her voice, and the disembodied echo comes out of the air as Dari
feared was possible in the sulfur shadows scene early in the
novel. And this echo for us creates the same effect the
corpse does for the Bundrens— a fundamental challenge to
death as an absence (or a silencing) of identity.
While we might, before hearing her voice in her monologue, have considered "Addie" only as a corpse and
laughed at or been disgusted with the Bundrens for
continuing to speak of her as a presence, her very "living" voice forces us to rethink her status in the novel. Hearing her voice also challenges us to give more credence to the alternate and "irrational" notions of death presented by other characters. Thus the most significant echo in this novel, Addie’s monologue, functions to give the text true
Gothic subversive tendencies, beyond its unsettling grotesque elements.
In addition to using death to show challenges to our concepts of self and being, by presenting absence and presence of voice and body, the novel also incorporates 70
death as something that challenges ideas of autonomous
identity— of the possibility of "self" as distinct from
others. Merging identities are brought out as characters
contemplate their relations to the dead, absent mother. And
the merging identities are highlighted by a different kind
of echo--not the disembodied, ghost-like reappearance of
voice but the reappearance of one character’s voice within
another character. Characters echo one another, just as
Echo in myth serves as a vocal "mirror" of Narcissus,
especially at his death. In this echoing the characters’
voices subvert distinctions between self and other.
Addie’s death causes characters to begin to see her
identity and their own as not completely separate, and thus
notions of autonomous identity in general become skewed. In
Dari’s conversation about "is" and "was" with Vardaman, for
instance, he comes to the conclusion that because Addie is
not "is," then "’I am not.’" Continuing the conversation he
responds to Vardaman’s logical "’But you are. Dari’" by
expanding his thinking to the whole family: "’Are is too many for one woman to foal’" (95). His own existence has a
precarious status because it is and is not a part of the
"are" of his siblings.^®
Even Dewey Dell, generally less prone to philosophical
speculation, takes existence beyond the individual when she
ponders what death is: "It took her ten days to die; maybe
she dont know it is yet. Maybe she wont go until Cash. Or 71 maybe until Jewel" (57). Although she does not complete the sentences (and we cannot be certain what she means Cash or
Jewel would have to do for Addie’s death to be complete), we get the sense that Dewey Dell feels that as long as these two, Addie’s favorite sons (in fact the only two children she feels are hers or part of her), are living, Addie also will continue to live. And Dewey Dell also seems to include herself in her mother’s living on; as she reflects on her inability to think beyond her pregnancy to realize her mother’s death, she says, "I wish I had time to let her die"
(114). Instead of wishing she had time to grieve, she implies that Addie will not really die until she accepts the idea. Thus she echoes Dr. Peabody’s notion that Addie might still live until the ones suffering the bereavement let her die. Vardaman also sees Addie living on in family members, but in his confused perspective, "she will be in him
[Peabody presumably] and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell" because they have "cooked and et" the fish which is Addie.
But in this notion of merged identities, we can see another challenge to traditional concepts of autonomous identity or voice. If the echoes— the disembodied voices that come out of the air in this novel, especially Addie’s-- subvert ideas about death, absence, and "self," so do those voices that we can see echoing among characters, living and dead. Although in a tradition of literary "realism" we can say that each of the Bundrens has a very specific and unique 72
personality and essence, Faulkner shows special
relationships among them that allow us to see many instances
of character doubling, and when voices of these doubled
characters repeat each other in style or subject, it becomes
much more difficult to draw boundary lines among them. In
one sense. Narcissus is not his image in the pool, nor is he
the echo of his voice that comes from Echo in her cave, and
yet in another sense, these repetitions are his identity.
Wagner’s argument that the emphasis in this novel is on
aural difference (74) neglects the significant voice echoes
we can hear among doubled characters--those who seem to copy
or mirror each other in significant ways— as well as among
relatively unconnected ones. Addie’s voice "lives on" not
only in the disembodied echo of her monologue (like the
ghosts or "voices" of traditional Gothics), but also in the
echoes of it we can hear in other characters (as Dracula,
for instance, lived in Mina). And by implication, all of
the other echoing, not directly involving Addie, contests
the very idea that any individual voice can be silenced or
suppressed, since echoes make it impossible to talk
legitimately about "individual" voices in the first place.
Between Dari and Addie, for instance, voice echoes
serve to relate two characters that we know had the least
close mother-child bond in the family. Addie had been so upset to find that she "had" Dari that she wanted to kill
Anse. And although Addie sees only Cash and Jewel as truly 73 hers, there at least seems to have been some degree of attachment between Dewey Dell and Vardaman and their mother.
Dewey Dell stands by Addie fanning her throughout her illness; Addie looks hard at Vardaman just before her death
(46). But Dari’s detachment from his mother, probably the natural result of the lack of love, is so complete that he refers to her as "Addie" or "Addie Bundren" more often than as "ma." His claim to have no mother seems to extend to the time before her death.
Strong parallels between Addie and Dari, however, make the relationship between them more complex than that of inadequate mother and spurned child. Both are, in different ways, at the center of the novel; although Addie speaks so little and Dari so much, both seem to dominate. Kinney even sees Addie as Dari’s "double," since his "dying" consciousness is reflected on a physical level by her death
(167-68).
And surely when Dari fails in his attempt to burn her decaying body with the barn it was in, we see his intimate connection with his mother: Vardaman finally answers the repeated question "Where is Dari?" by saying that "He is out there under the apple tree with her, lying on her" (214).
The child’s next words are among the most poignant in the novel :
The moonlight dappled on him too. On her it
was still, but on Dari it dappled up and down. 74
"You needn’t to cry," I said. "Jewel got her
out. You needn’t to cry, Dari." (215)
The Freudian implications are significant: the spurned son is "lying on" his mother (perhaps both "lay dying" in varying nuances of the words), apparently moving up and down with sobs at the failure of his desperate attempt to get rid of her. And these implications let us see just how much reason Dari does have to cry. He has lost the mother who was always on one level "absent" to him, and yet he cannot
"hide her away from the sight of man" so that she can "lay down her life" and "be quiet" (205).
If there was a lack of love in their relationship,
Addie and Dari still are bonded by their similarities. The
"spiritual isolation and estrangement" we see in Addie’s monologue, says Backman, parallels Dari’s state of mind throughout the novel (18). Both are "intellectuals"
(Adamoski 220) far more than any other characters, although what they say about language and being puts them in
"thematic opposition" (Allen 185). If Dari and Addie differ in what they say about language or words, however, the language of their voices is very similar in style. Both are abstract (although Addie generally uses more common diction), elusive (Addie never mentions Whitfield’s name;
Dari neglects key information about how the fire started), philosophical, somewhat disjointed, and very poetic (the qualities often ascribed to Faulkner’s style). Although 75 many characters occasionally veer into poetic description,
Addie and Dari’s voices are the most consistently literary, using more figurative language and also more sound devices.
Dari’s "The lantern sits on a stump. Rusted, grease-fouled, its cracked chimney smeared on one side with a soaring smudge of soot, it sheds a feeble and sultry glare upon the trestles and the boards and the adjacent earth" (71) sounds much like Addie’s "I would never again see him coming swift and secret to me in the woods dressed in sin like a gallant garment already blowing aside with the speed of his secret coming" (167). Both speak of Anse as a tall hunched bird
(154, 162). Dari’s speaking of the blood and "sawdust" running out of Cash (197) seems reminiscent of Addie’s talk of the wild blood boiling. When Dari speculates about how "our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily récapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string" (196), we are reminded of Addie’s decision to let Anse be "the shape and echo of his word" (166) and of her idea of the "forlorn echo of the dead word high in the air" (167),
Character and voice mirroring, however, is not limited to these two "central" characters. Dewey Dell, for instance, can be brought into this doubling and echoing between Addie and Dari, since she has close connections to both characters in situation and in voice. She is most like
Addie, of course, in being pregnant--soon to be mother also. 76
As Sundquist notes, "Pregnancy for Dewey Dell and Addie
involves a confusion of identity" (37). But she also acts
like the family’s mother already, cooking for everyone, for
instance, wiping vomit from Cash’s face, and worrying about
Jewel in the fire. Her words as she thinks about her pregnancy, however, draw even more explicit ties to Addie.
Her knowledge that she will soon be "not alone" (56) and her description of becoming "unalone" ("I feel my body, my bones and flesh beginning to part and open upon the alone, and the process of coming unalone is terrible"--59) echo the words
Addie uses to describe motherhood: "My aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the violation" (164).
Dewey Dell’s connecting herself to the "wild and outraged earth" (114) echoes Addie’s description of the "wild blood boiling along the earth" (167).
In several instances, we can even see Dewey Dell’s voice as a substitute or potential substitute for Addie’s voice. As Addie lies dying, Dewey Dell stands over her and speaks for her: "That near-naked girl always standing over
Addie with a fan so that every time a body tried to talk to her and cheer her up, would answer for her right quick"
(23). We see Dewey Dell telling Peabody later "’She [Addie] wants you to go out’" (44). Thus it becomes difficult to determine the referent--Addie or Dewey Dell— when Peabody
says, after speaking of Addie, "Cash’s saw snores steadily
into the board. A minute later she calls his name, her 77
voice harsh and strong" (45). While the call to Cash seems
like Addie’s "last" words, the connection with Dewey Dell
(who has been speaking for Addie) makes the origin of the
words less certain.
Samson's confusion over a similarly open pronoun later
on has significance beyond the semantic problem: Dewey Dell
has been forcefully reminding Anse of his promise to take
Addie's body to Jefferson, her eyes blazing like pistols,
according to Samson, when Samson attempts to reason with
Anse who responds,
"I give her my promise. Her mind is set on it."
"But seems to me she’d rather have her ma buried
close by, so she could— "
"It's Addie I give the promise to," he says. "Her
mind is set on it."
Samson's mistaking the "her" for Dewey Dell makes sense
logically, and is in fact more true than Anse's meaning:
Dewey Dell does have her mind set on getting to Jefferson and getting the abortion. And even according to her own
testimony, in the following section, Dewey Dell's will has virtually subsumed Addie's. As she sees the sign for New
Hope get closer and closer and realizes that Addie could be buried in New Hope as Samson has suggested, she also
realizes "He'll do as I say. He [Anse] always does. I can persuade him to anything" (115). Although Dewey Dell feels she could convince Anse to break his "word" to Addie, she 78 decides not to speak.
This same scene emphasizes connections between Dewey
Dell and her brother Dari. Dewey Dell has occasionally sounded like Dari (or Addie), employing similar eloquent language (for instance, she says in an early section, "The cow breathes upon my hips and back, her breath warm, sweet, stertorous, moaning"— 61), but in this scene we see her actually describing an identity crisis very similar to one
Dari describes when he is in the "strange room" on the trip with Jewel (76):
I had a nightmare once I thought I was awake but I
couldn't see and couldn’t feel I couldn’t feel the
bed under me and I couldn’t think what I was I
couldn’t think of my name I couldn’t even think I
am a girl I couldn’t even think I . . . (115)
Hemenway notes this as a "loss of a sense of human existence" similar to Dari’s (142). Dewey Dell concludes her memory of the dream of not being by telling of the wind blowing on her "like a piece of cool silk dragging across my naked legs" (116), which again reminds us of Dari, who in his second section has remembered lying with his shirttail up as a youth to feel the air blowing on his nakedness (11).
This scene also gives more evidence that the brother- sister relationship is antagonistic; Dewey Dell fantasizes, envisioning herself stabbing Dari with a knife that Vardaman had just used to stab a fish (her fantasy thus drawing in an 79 image that when associated with Vardaman stands for the mother). Later Dewey Dell’s violent feelings toward Dari are manifested by her telling Gillespie that Dari burned his barn and on a very physical level at the end of the novel when she is the first to attack Dari in the street. This antagonism clearly comes out of her fear that he knows of her pregnancy. Cash’s idea that "if I ’d a said it was ere a one of us she liked better than ere a other it was Dari" perhaps merely comes from his notion that they "kind of knowed things betwixt them" (227).
Irwin notes the incestual elements of the doubling between Dari and Dewey Dell, seeing Dari’s attachment to
Dewey Dell as a "displacement of his love for his mother
Addie" (53) and Dewey Dell’s resentment of Dari as coming from his putting himself between her and Lafe (53).
Dari’s "clairvoyance" (that allows him to narrate events he does not see) is clearly related to the intimate relationship he has with Dewey Dell. He knows she is pregnant in the same way he can speak to her and she to him
"without the words" (26). Narrating Addie’s death scene from a distance, Dari even knows what Dewey Dell wants to say to Peabody: "You could do so much for me if you just would ..." (50). Dewey Dell herself uses almost these same words just a few pages later: "He could do so much for me if he just would . . ."(56). Lockyer says this ability of Dari’s to know Dewey Dell’s exact words is an example of 80 language serving as a bridge, showing "how language connects these otherwise isolated narrators" in the novel (75, 79).
The clairvoyance, however, is not confined to Dari and
Dewey Dell; it also allows Dari to "speak" with Cash with no words. In the midst of a conversation about the height of the river and how to cross it, for instance, Dari watches
Jewel begin to cross the river on his horse and thinks of
Jewel as a baby on a pillow in Addie’s lap. Cash responds to the memory as if Dari had spoken it: "’That pillow was longer than him’" (137). According to Cash, the bond between them is "because me and him was born close together, and it nigh ten years before Jewel and Dewey Dell and
Vardaman begun to come along. I feel kin to them all right, but I dont know" (224). And Dari clearly perceives this bond also, feeling Cash’s failure to warn him of the plans to capture him as the ultimate betrayal: "’I thought you would have told me . . .1 never thought you wouldn’t have’"
(227). Cash even seems to assume Dari’s duties as primary narrator when Dari is taken away, ending the novel, for example, by speaking of "horror" and "astonishment"— clearly
Darl-like words.
But even beyond the close ties that result from Dari’s ability to get inside another family member, there are other instances of Bundrens mirroring one another. Jewel, for instance, is clearly the dark brother to Dari, who hates him so much that he continually taunts him by telling him Addie 81 is dead and asking him who his father is. (It is Dari, however, who stands up for Jewel in the near-fight in
Jefferson.)
Between Vardaman and Dari, both of whom are unacknowledged by Addie as her own and between whom there is so much collusion throughout the novel, there are also many voice echoes. Their crises over Addie’s death and reaction to it seem very parallel. They count buzzards together,
"talk" with Addie under the apple tree together, discuss the status of their mother (who hasn’t got one, whose is a horse or a fish), and try to rescue Addie— Vardaman by boring holes in the coffin for her to breathe through or escape from and Dari by burning the barn to hide her away from the face of man. Thus when Vardaman speaks like Dari, his sophisticated speech should not surprise us. When Vardaman describes the horse’s "smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a co-ordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my _is" (55), the problem is not only that the words do not "fit" Vardaman, but also that they would obviously "fit" Dari. We get the impression
Vardaman has assumed Dari’s voice, or that Dari’s voice is echoing in Vardaman. Vardaman’s "Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t" (63) even seems to prefigure the later speculations of Dari on is and was (95).
In Vardaman’s final section, his narration is interspersed 82
with italic lines repeating in a varying and sometimes
jumbled refrain what is most on his mind— that "Dari went to
Jackson . . . Dari went crazy . . . Dari is my brother"
(239-42). And immediately following this section, we have
Dari himself, speaking in the third person of himself,
repeating Vardaman’s refrain, "Dari had gone to Jackson"
(243), and beginning his final paragraph saying "Dari is our
brother" (244). The "sane" but puzzled and grieving little
boy seems to have the same voice as his schizophrenic older
brother, foaming in a cage in Jackson.
Besides those echoes specifically linkable to character who mirror one another, an undercurrent of echoes of metaphors extends throughout the book. Characters
consistently use the same figurative language in their monologues, echoing each other even when they have not heard
the other use a particular metaphor. Tull and Dari, for
instance, both speak of the river as "thick" and as somehow
alive (131, 134). Addie describes Anse’s name as like a jar
full of cold molasses (165), while for Tull, his house must
be tight "to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring"
(132). Ross points out that four different narrators (Cora,
Peabody, Dari, and Vardaman) use the same metaphor to
describe the sound of Cash’s sawing as snoring, "although
each couches the metaphor in a slightly different form"
(304). 83
The central contrast in Anse’s famous philosophy about roads being for moving and travelling because God "laid them down flat on the earth" while people should "stay put" because God made them "up-and-down ways, like a tree" (34-
35) is repeated both by Cash and Addie, although in varying philosophies. Cash, for instance, uses up-and-down versus sideways considerations to explain why he makes the coffin on the bevel:
4. In a house people are upright two thirds of the
time. So the seams and joints are made up-and
down. Because the stress is up-and-down.
5. In a bed where people lie down all the time,
the joints and seams are made sideways, because
the stress is sideways. (77)
Addie, on the other hand, thinks of "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" (165). The essentially different ways in which these characters use the vertical/horizontal contrast reveal essential differences in their personalities and philosophies. And yet, the echoing of the analogy reveals connections among them.
Because of all of these echoes, voices do, as Lecercle-
Sweet argues, seem to blur and drift with shifting frontiers between them (59-60). We cannot draw clear-cut 84 distinctions of identity among characters’ voices because they echo each other so much. And this problem of identity fits into the larger question of being that Addie’s death-- her dead body and the echo of a living voice— precipitate.
Critics are in general agreement that a primary theme of this novel, as in many Gothics, is that of "being"--of challenged identity and questionable existence. "It is clear enough," says Powers, "that one of the concerns of the novel is the problem of individual self-identification"
(57). 2?
With its challenging of "being," the novel brings us to the edges of non-being, or nothingness, and thus silence and silencing become crucial issues. As the novel seems to struggle toward silence, the figure of Philamel joins that of Echo in the novel’s Gothic subversiveness. The novel strives for a nothingness and a silence which it ultimately, however, cannot gain, because of its Gothic echoing.
Since sound or language can be powerful and threatening, silence is often presented in As I Lay Dying as an escape or an ideal condition, as Zender argues it is for
Faulkner in general (101). Silence is, in fact, a goal in many Gothics. A rational peace and quiet, usually restored at least temporarily at the ends of Gothics, is the ultimate goal for the wandering, speaking spirits (like the "Bleeding
Nun" or the "Wandering Jew") and those they haunt, such as
Clara and her brother Wieland who desire the sanity that can 85 only come when the "voices" cease. Only when the visions stop appearing and the voices stop speaking do rationality and normalcy prevail.
In As I Lav Dying's general struggle toward silence, we can first notice characters attempting to silence each other. Jewel tells Dari to "shut up" when Dari’s words seem to suggest that Addie will die soon (17); Anse and Cash both tell Jewel to "Shut up" when he insults their neighbors (17,
120). Dari repeats the message to Jewel when he nearly gets into a fight with some men in Jefferson (221). Jewel tells
Armstid to "Shut your goddamn mouth" when he thinks Armstid has suggested the wagon is sinking too much (178). Dari silences Anse’s "long tale" of their misadventures to the marshall in Mottson (194).
In the Reverend Whitfield’s one section, immediately following Addie’s, we see an ironic treatment of the possibility of silencing another. Whitfield sees his sin with Addie in terms of voice and language; God tells him to go to "’those people with whom you have outraged My Word; confess your sin aloud’" (169). Remembering that she had sworn never to tell of their sin and believing that Addie’s breaking that vow would be a sin on his soul, Whitfield goes to "stop her before she had spoken" (170). Finding that
Addie has already died, however, Whitfield decides God has forgiven him and that his confession is no longer necessary because God will "accept the will for the deed," since. 86 after all, "It was He in his infinite wisdom that restrained the tale from her dying lips as she lay surrounded by those who loved and trusted her" (171). Beyond the obvious hypocrisy in the messages Whitfield chooses to receive from
God, we can see a more basic irony in the fact that we have just heard the words of Addie’s "tale"— she has obviously not been silenced by Whitfield or by God, or even by death.
Within Addie’s "tale," however, we perceive perhaps the strongest desire for silence in the novel. Addie values actions and physical realities over the words that she feels fail to describe them, and even seems to fear words as inherently dangerous. Addie distrusts words because they are empty (she says "Love" is just like any word: "a shape to fill a lack"— 164), and because they do not allow for real connection ("we had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching"--164). She describes "words that are not deeds" as "gaps in people’s lacks" (166) and thinks of "when Cora talked to me, of how the high dead words in time seemed to lose even the significance of their dead sound" (167).
But as Allen notes, "The irony is that Addie must use words to defeat words, to argue that language is impotent"
(189). And these words that she uses are almost all that is left of her, beside the rotting body. "Speech betrays Addie
Bundren doubly," says Ross," and more than she could ever 87
know or say, by enshrining her subjective ’self’ in a mere
dead echo of a voice . . . By giving Addie speech Faulkner
at one and the same time creates her in voice and undercuts her voiced word" (FIV 129).
Other inconsistencies exist within what Addie says.
Addie may say that words go up in a straight line, "quick
and harmless," (165), but she also, paradoxically, describes words as having some power--being able to trick her, into
conceiving Dari, for instance:
Then I found that I had Dari. At first I would
not believe it. Then I believed that I would kill
Anse. It was as though he had tricked me, hidden
within a word like within a paper screen and
struck me in the back through it. But then I
realized that I had been tricked by words older
than Anse or love, and that the same word had
tricked Anse too, and that my revenge would be
that he would never know I was taking revenge.
(164)
Addie employs words, Anse’s "word," to get her
"revenge." If Addie’s and Dari’s voices warn against a
belief in the power of words (Lockyer 73), Addie also
reveals an awareness that since words mean something to
others (Anse, for instance) they also can be very
powerful. And other characters agree that words are
powerful. Dari speculates that if Dewey Dell admits her 88 pregnancy in words, saying it even to herself, she would have to believe it is true (38-39). Anse says that Addie would believe the doctor’s word: "If he was to come tomorrow and tell her the time was nigh, she wouldn’t wait. I know her" (18). Dewey Dell uses words to get rid of Dari, as
Cash figures it, by "telling on" him.
It is probably because words are powerful and dangerous that silence is presented as an ideal in As I Lay Dying.
Early in the novel. Jewel (certainly one of the most silent characters on the narrative level) ends the tirade against
Cash and the sound of his adze making the coffin, in his lone monologue, by imagining Addie and himself on the top of a hill alone together. He would throw rocks down at "their faces . . . until she was quiet and not that goddamn adze going One lick less. One lick less and we could be quiet"
(15). The relationship between Addie and her favorite son.
Jewel, seems to have been cased in silence from the beginning. In remembering Jewel as a baby on a pillow on
Addie’s lap, Dari recalls that "There would be no sound from them" (137). Addie remembers when she had Jewel: "the wild blood boiled away and the sound of it ceased. Then there was only the milk, warm and calm, and I lying calm in the slow silence" (168).
Silence is the promised final reward in a sense for both Addie and Dari. Anse, for instance, wants Addie to be able to "rest quiet" (18, 19). In her monologue, Addie does 89 seem to value the triumph of a kind of silence: the "dark voicelessness in which the words are the deeds, and the other words that are not deeds, that are just gaps in people’s lacks, coming down like the cries of geese" (166).
She wants to tune out the "high dead words" of Anse or Cora that form a "forlorn echo high in the air" and to listen to the "dark land talking the voiceless speech" (167). In being buried, she would in a sense become one with the "dark land" and thus also (unlike Echo) "voiceless."
Dari also seems to desire silence; he speaks of how
"our live ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound" (196)— relating silence with death. But he realizes that Addie has not achieved the peace of silence that death promises; after he and Vardaman listen to her body "talking" under the apple tree and Dari explains that she is saying she wants to be hidden away (204), Dari tells Vardaman, "We must let her be quiet" (205). His burning the barn results (at least partly) from his desire to give Addie the peace and especially the quiet that Anse, early on, said he wanted for her. And judging from Addie’s own words, we know that he is right in seeing her as discontent to be an echo that keeps
"talking" after death. What she has wanted all along is to be part of the voiceless earth, silent at last.
If the novel recounts Addie’s journey toward this quiet, it also records a final journey of sorts for Dari who ends up in a "cage" in Jackson, as Addie ends (offstage) in 90 her grave. Dari’s "end" also includes at least a promise of silence— when Dari asks if Cash wants him to go to the asylum. Cash tells him: "’It’ll be better for you . . . Down there it’ll be quiet, with none of the bothering and such.
It’ll be better for you, Dari’" (228). It will be better, according to Cash, because it will be quiet.
Of course, one normally does not associate insane asylums with peace and quiet. But Dari will be escaping lots of sound; Addie is replaced, after all, with a duck shaped woman who brings along a "talking machine." And surely the Bundrens are in for some "bothering," when Dewey
Dell can no longer hide her secret.
But in Dari’s being sent off to silence, seemingly with
Cash’s sympathy, there is still an element of the Bundrens’ attempting to silence him, to shut up the one character whose language (for them, like Addie’s voice for us) continually poses the most challenge to rationality. Dewey
Dell in her angry attack has the most obvious motives for wanting to keep Dari silent, since he knows her secret (and she has reason for wanting revenge, since if Dari had succeeded in burning the coffin, she never would have made it to Jefferson and the possible abortion). But all of the
Bundrens (except maybe Vardaman) conspire to have him shipped off— "buried" as effectively as they will finally bury Addie. Putting him far away in a cage promises that they will no longer have to hear his disturbed and 91 disturbing voice, either audibly or "without the words."
If the progress of the novel is thus toward this silence, however, the novel also subverts the very possibility of ever really reaching a final silence, since any silencings that we do have remain incomplete. Addie’s voice was not suppressed by death; it remained a presence as a disembodied echo. And if that Echo is finally buried in its underground cave, as Addie’s body is buried in a scene we do not see, we suspect that it will continue to echo in characters who are not dead or buried— in Dewey Dell who feels herself becoming "unalone," or in Dari, who has throughout the novel used language that reminds us of
Addie’s, or even in other characters whose voices so often merge with other voices.
If Dari can be buried alive, captured in the train and then within a "cage," the novel shows it is not so easy to suppress his voice, either. We still hear his final, poignant, third-person monologue (or dialogue with self).
We still hear him laughing and agonizing in his final monologue, after he has been separated from his family. And even in his cell in Jackson, he will still repeat one single word through the quiet spaces between the bars:
Dari is our brother, our brother Dari. Our
brother Dari in a cage in Jackson where, his
grimed hands lying light in the quiet interstices,
looking out he foams. 92
"Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes." (244)
If Dari’s "yes" continues to echo out of his cell,
Dari’s voice, we also suspect, will continue to echo in others. Perhaps it will echo in Cash, for instance, since he seems to assume Dari’s narrative role, suddenly at the end of the novel employing words such as "horror" and
"astonishment," and also willing at least to entertain the possibility that there are no clear-cut distinctions between madness and sanity ("Sometimes I aint so sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint.
Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that- a-way"— 223). And surely Dari’s voice will echo in
Vardaman, as we have seen it doing already. With little
Vardaman out in the square in Jefferson saying the very words Dari says on the train to the asylum ("Dari went to
Jackson . . . Dari is my brother"), the novel shows us the impossibility of truly silencing Dari or his "madness."
If As I Lay Dying moves toward a return to "normalcy" as the journey moves toward burying Addie, and thus suppressing the physical challenges to clear concepts of presence and absence and identity, echoing voices complicate this burying of the irrational. A body can be buried (as
Addie’s finally is) and an insane brother shipped away, but the novel shows that voices are not so easily suppressed.
Because of their ghostly capacity to echo on, to be 93
"dislodged" out of the air in "reverberant repetition" or to reverberate in other characters, voices in this novel are ultimately the most subversive Gothic feature. 94
Endnotes
1. Even critical commentary on the title’s relation to Homer reflects a Gothic turn: Williams notes, for instance, that "Faulkner uses the phrase to raise an old ghost, to evoke a power of awareness that reaches beyond life itself" (107).
2. Leclercle-Sweet notes that Dari uses the same terms as the novel’s title. The wish to be buried away from the sight of people— to lay down her life— parallels that of Elpenor, as well as that of the Bleeding Nun of The Monk.
3. Elizabeth Kerr admits Gothic elements in the novel, but concludes that it belongs "essentially to the romance tradition," following the "quest-romance pattern" (185). Hemenway notes the debate over whether the novel is a triumph of the human will or an absurd comedy showing farce and meaninglessness (145) Ude fits Faulkner within traditions of the romance novel and Magical Realism.
4. Ude notes that "Romance was able to recognize, and techniques learned from romance, the Gothic novel, and the folktale were able to present, the possibility that wilderness existed not only as an external set of conditions but within characters as well" (54-55).
5. Sundquist echoes this language describing Vardaman’s eloquent narration as "alienated language— alien in the sense of being disembodied, traumatically cut off from the conscious identity of character on the one hand and author on the other" (29). Sundquist argues that "Because they exist in the novel’s form as disembodied both from the bodies that utter them and from the one body that we must understand as having once produced them, the narrative episodes do indeed seem a collection of voices in the air" (39). Swiggart explains the "rhetorical flourishes" as authorial: "Faulkner combines his detached narration with a voice identical with that of the speaking character. The narrator perceives as Dewey Dell perceives, and thinks as she thinks; but the author uses his own language" (71). Powers explains that "each narrator thus exposes himself--his telling of the story becomes a kind of reflexive characterization" (50-51). Hemenway claims the use of multiple narrators casts doubt on events (151). For Lecercle-Sweet, "the enunciating subject . . . gives the impression less of speaking than of being spoken" so that the reader suspects "this superbly original enunciative architecture rests on quicksands" (49). 95
6. Franklin lists seven such "anachronistic" sections (concluding that Faulkner’s "narrative management [is] faulty"— 65), although in determining this, he privileges the narration of the Bundrens in determining when an event really occurs (61). Bleikasten also notes "inconsistencies and anachronisms" and "anticipations" (55).
7. Zender, in focusing on the power of sound in Faulkner, explains, "For Tull, as sooner or later for most of Faulkner’s characters, sound is a mysterious almost tangible force. It appears to be ubiquitous and sourceless even when its source is known"— much like the traditional notion of the muse, although more darkly invasive (89).
8. Crying is the first "voice" we have and perhaps the most expressive, as is Vardaman’s early in the novel: I enter the stall, trying to touch him, and then I can cry then I vomit the crying. As soon as he gets through kicking I can and then I can cry, the crying can. "He kilt her. He kilt her." The life in him runs under the skin, under my hand, running through the splotches, smelling up into my nose where the sickness in beginning to cry, vomiting the crying, and then I can breathe, vomiting it. It makes a lot of noise. (53)
9. Critics such as Kinney (162) and Pierce (295) make this point. O ’Donnell sees Addie as the center of the household, the creative principle that ties the family together (73).
10. Earlier in the novel, Tull has expressed similar sentiments regarding the fish Vardaman has caught: "It slides out of his hands, smearing wet dirt onto him, and flops down, dirtying itself again, gapmouthed, goggle-eyed, hiding in the dust like it was ashamed of being dead, like it was in a hurry to get back hid again" (30). The dead body, for Tull, ought not to remain a presence for too long.
11. For Wadlington, this is what mars the ritual of the burial rite for them— Addie has become a "flagrant corporeality" (109). Lecercle-Sweet also comments on the marred burial: "The result is that the dead woman never finishes dying— the full stop (the burial) being transformed into points of suspension" (47)
12. Bleikasten sees absence, lack, and nothingness as a major theme of the novel. (28) For O ’Donnell "the novel’ s many vessels and containers can stand for the idea of metaphor as a significant shape embodying meaning. However, the shapes, frames, and containers of As I Lav Dying seem to form 96 themselves around a lack, absence, nothingness (62).
13. Sundquist sees the text itself as analogously with an absent center, "on the verge of decomposition" --like Addie is and is not throughout the book (31).
14. Dorothy Hale explains that Addie’s voice can display "sophisticated vocabulary, complex metaphorical imagery, and moments of philosophical investigation" because Faulkner is attempting with her words to show a "private identity"— one that does not need to be true to what she might have actually said (11). Hale comments that "The diction and content of Addie’s monologue further suggest that if her voice does not literally come from the beyond, it is, in direct opposition to her husband's discourse, so far removed from the social norms of public expression as to be unsayable in her world" (14).
15. Commenting on this conversation, Hemenway notes that Dari’s choice of the impersonal pronoun is not accidental. Addie has become an 'it'— a body. That body does not exist as a mother; it can't be the is that Vardaman wants it to be, because it has become the was of memory" (141).
16. Hemenway notes that the "key" to the conversation between Vardaman and Dari is "Dari’s attempt to determine Addie's tense— the location of her humanity in relation to time" (141).
17. While Vardaman and Dari listen to Addie, Anse actually "talks" to her after she has been buried; upset that Dewey Dell has withheld money from him he says, "Lucky for you you died, Addie" (246). There is an echo in all of this talking with the dead, too, of Addie's recollection of the "courting" scene between her and Anse: Later he told me, "I ain't got no people. So that wont be no worry to you. I dont reckon you can say the same." "No. I have people. In Jefferson." His face fell a little. "Well, I got a little property. I'm forehanded; I got a good honest neime. I know how town folks are, but maybe when they talk to me . . ." "They might listen," I said. "But they'll be hard to talk to. " He was watching my face. "They’re in the cemetery." (163) On Addie’s journey to that cemetery, at least, she does not seem as "hard to talk to," but this very accessibility of her body and "voice" is more challenging than her simple absence would be. 97
18. Hemenway comments on Dari’s switching the focus to the number of the verb Vardaman uses--the "are” becomes plural, thus referring to the whole family.
19. For Bleikasten, this eating of the mother/fish is a "totemic meal" (97), while Lecercle-Sweet speculates that the "et" Vardaman uses to describe this "alimentary incest" coimotes the Latin word for "and"--thus stressing the merging of flesh (57). For Vardaman, however, the question of Addie’s existence is not so easily solved; if Addie is "in" those who ate the fish, she is also still in the coffin and is still some existing fish, perhaps the one he tries to catch when the Tulls see him fishing on their way home from the funeral (87).
20. Because of this relationship (or lack of) Dari’s reaction to the Bundrens’ treatment of Addie’s body is especially poignant. Though critics propose various motives for Dari’s burning the barn, I see him as truly trying to do for Addie what he thinks she wants, to hide her away from the sight of man. When Vardaman discovers him "under the apple tree with her, lying on her" (214) in the moonlight, we see him in a position of love that seemed more natural when it was the wounded Cash lying on "top of Addie" (172) on the wagon. We know Vardaman is wrong when he tells Dari, "You needn’t to cry . . . Jewel got her out" (215), not only because Dari did not want Addie to be rescued from the fire but also because perhaps his only expression of a love he knows was never returned has been foiled.
21. According to Allen, since both characters use such complex rhetoric and are so eloquent, they create between them an "internal debate on the proper function of language" (188). Lockyer also sees a dialogue on the question of language: "While Addie is the novel’s strongest proponent of the frailty of language, Dari Bundren embodies the conviction that the word can create reality and connect isolated consciousnesses" (73-74).
22. Allen notes this as a crucial distinction, since Addie distrusts abstractions (192) and sees the difference as part of the internal debate between symbolist and imagistic poetic principles operating in Dari’s and Addie’s voices (186).
23. Irwin summarizes the significance of doubling and incest in Faulkner’s work in general— both are "images of the self-enclosed--the inability of the ego to break out of the circle of the self and of the individual to break out of the ring of family--and as such, both appear in his novels as symbols of the state of the South after the Civil War, symbols of a region turned in upon itself" (59). 98
24. Bleikasten explains Dari’s clairvoyant ability to get inside others as based on his own identity crisis: "Dari can become anyone because he is nothing himself" (89).
25. But Jewel himself seems more antagonistic toward his oldest brother. Cash, which is understandable since they are both Addie’s favorite sons. In Jewel’s only monologue, his resentment of Cash and his "goddamn adze" and the "goddamn box" he makes right in front of Addie even brings up a memory of Cash as a boy, bringing fertilizer to Addie in the bread pan (14-15). Jewel merely wants to be alone with his mother on the top of a hill rolling down rocks on everyone else (15). In fact. Jewel and Addie are closely tied (although not perhaps to the extent Wagner sees them— as the focus of the whole novel); Addie whips her schoolchildren and "always whipped [Jewel] and petted him more" (17), while Jewel does the same to his horse, caressing and cursing it with a similar obsessive love. Even between Addie and Anse there are connections we might not expect after hearing Addie’s feelings toward him. Peabody’s observation that she has "been a part of Anse for so long" (42) is repeated by Anse at the end in what seems a rare moment of sincerity: " ’You all dont know . . . The somebody you was young with and you growed old in her and she growed old in you, seeing the old coming on and it was the only somebody you could hear say it dont matter and know it was the truth’" (224). As she dies, Addie even comes to have a hump— Anse’s most distinguishing feature (51).
26. This merging of voice would fit Bleikasten’s notion of flowing water as the dominant image of the novel (112) and his idea that "metamorphosis governs all" (105).
27. Powers also claims, however, that Dari’s sense of self-identity is the strongest in the family (64), which seems to ignore his crises. For O’Donnell, the novel is about the attempt of a language to define "being." O ’Donnell decides that "What signifies is motion" (77). Other critics focus on the problem of being from Addie’s or (more commonly) Dari’s perspectives. Of Addie, Pierce says, for instance: Addie is unable to find in life a state of Being, of wholeness, of stasis into which she can escape from the victimizing forces of nature, language, and consciousness and from the fragmented mosaic of selves that have resulted from her will’s repeatedly having gone up against these forces. In short, she comes to see that there is no place in life--indeed no ’self’ in life— where one can simply Be. (295) Williams speaks of Dari’s "psychic death": "it is this ’I’ of consciousness which, like his mother’s ’I,’ lies dying at the story’s end" (118). And Hemenway notes: 99
It becomes clear, however, that Dari's primary concern is the subsuming question of being: 'I am?’ or 'Am I?' He wants to know nothing less than what is existence? What is the nature of being? What is is? His words are not 'I don't know who I am,' but 'I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not." (134)
28. Bleikasten even argues that Addie becomes associated with masculine "law" by using Anse's "word" for revenge (81).
29. O'Donnell notes a similarly ideal, silent scene in Cash's construction of the coffin with Addie watching through the window; he marks the "total absence of sound or word" (74). In this scene, however, as narrated by Peabody and Dari, we hear what seem (despite the ambiguous pronoun "she" in both accounts) to be Addie's last words while alive: "A minute later she calls his name, her voice harsh and strong. 'Cash,' she says; 'you. Cash!'" (Peabody, 45), or "'You, Cash,' she shouts, her voice harsh, strong, and unimpaired. 'You, Cash !'" (Dari, 47).
30. Hale sees Addie as "not ever really satisfied with silence" because she has use for her own "personally defined" language (if obviously not for "socially constituted" language) (15). For Hale, Addie even "wills her own death" (16) because her desire for self-definition with her own language, that allows no connection with the public world. But if Addie desires this complete disconnection, she cannot really achieve it even in death— she still echoes on to tell her story, even if it is only "heard" by readers and to some extent by her son Dari. CHAPTER III:
The Violent Bear it Away: Echoes and Prophets
In an essay on "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,"
Flannery O'Connor speculates that one reason for the
Southern writer’s "tendency toward the grotesque" is "the
prevalence of good Southern writers" who challenge the
individual writer to see "beyond the surface." In
particular, she locates this particular kind of anxiety of
influence in the presence of Faulkner: "The presence alone
of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what a writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants
his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie
Limited is roaring down" (Mystery and Manners 45). In a
letter to her friend and correspondent "A" (written a couple of years prior to the essay) O ’Connor also expresses the
same sentiment; to A ’s inquiries about Light in August.
O ’Connor replies: "It’s a real sick-making book but I guess
a classic. I read it a long time ago and only once so I’m
in no position to say. I keep clear of Faulkner so my own
little boat won’t get swamped" (The Habit of Being 273).
In critical reaction at least, O ’Connor seems to have
forestalled having her boat sunk or her wagon smashed; few
100 101
critics explicitly compare the two authors in any detail or
consider O ’Connor as some sort of minor Faulkner. ^ Of
course, in canons of American literature, O ’Connor remains
somewhat in the giant shadow of Faulkner, and the hints of
anxiety and self-deprecation in her remarks are
understandable.
Despite her caution (or perhaps because of it) it is
possible to hear in O ’Connor’s texts echoes of certain
Faulkner texts, in the back-woods country characters, for
instance, the Southern settings or "grotesqueries." The
Snopeses would fit quite comfortably on O ’Connor’s pages,
and O ’Connor’s Mason Tarwater or Mr. Head might have stepped
out of Yoknapatawpha’s Frenchman’s Bend. But because of its
simultaneously comic and horrific events. As I Lay Dying is
the text most promising as the source of echoes in O ’Connor,
and in fact, according to Gilbert Muller, the novel was one
of O ’Connor’s favorites (21).
Specifically, O ’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away has marked echoes of Faulkner’s text. It too has a prominent
figure die in the early pages leaving a child to struggle with that absence; it has a central journey to the city; it
uses fire and water as primary symbols; and it concludes with a burial (or at least a discovered burial). More
importantly, O ’Connor’s novel echoes both the style ^ and
the themes of As I Lay Dying— themes such as threatened
identity, voices and authority, and family rivalries. 102
It is inviting to think of O ’Connor as a female Echo of
Faulkner, one who might revise Faulkner’s examinations of these themes with a decidedly female perspective; yet this portrait is difficult to support. Probably because there are so few "admirable" women in her corpus, critics are prone to ignore the question of O ’Connor as a female author.^ Certainly in The Violent Bear it Away O ’Connor gives us a novel that includes very few female characters.
The novel chronicles fourteen-year-old Francis Marian
Tarwater’s struggles to shake his great uncle Mason’s plans for him to be a prophet and to begin by baptizing his cousin
Bishop. Upon the death of Mason at the novel’s start,
Tarwater seeks out his rationalistic uncle Rayber who lives in the city with Bishop, his mentally retarded son. The narrative follows Tarwater’s struggle between rejecting and accepting his role as a prophet--following Mason’s plans or the rebellious perspective of the "friend" that only he can see and hear— leading to his act of simultaneous baptism and drowning of Bishop and his eventual acceptance (after being homosexually raped by a stranger who offers him a ride) of the prophetic role. This focus on male characters thus makes it difficult to see O ’Connor as female Echo (focusing on a feminine perspective) of Faulkner’s voice in As I Lay
Dying.
When Faulkner achieves a Gothic subversiveness through the primary echo of Addie Bundren’s voice, feminist 103
questions surrounding the mythological figure of Echo come
into focus: a female voice refuses suppression and
challenges readers and characters by continuing to speak,
although deprived of body. When Flannery O ’Connor includes
Echo-like uses of voice, however, there is a gender
inversion. Her Echoes are masculine figures, usually
representing or associated with a dominating male authority,
such as a father or father figure, a patriarchal Old
Testament God, or even the Devil.
If Echo is subversive and revisionary, foregrounding
the problematics of voice as it relates to authority,
desire, gender, and body, O ’Connor’s use of authoritative, masculine echoes seems on the surface to miss the potential
of this powerful use of voice: instead she gives us echoing voices that appear to reinforce the primacy of some patriarchal or religious power. The dominance of Mason
Tarwater’s voice in The Violent Bear it Away, for instance, creates a strong current of apparent didacticism in the novel— with the "lesson" being the inevitable victory of the powerful authority, even after a sustained attempt at
rebellion.
If the major theme of the novel is the conflict
inherent in responding to authority, that conflict can be seen carried out on the narrative level and also, by textual
implication, on an authorial level, wherein O ’Connor herself can be seen as Echo, not only of Southern grotesque writers 104 such as Faulkner, but also of the "voice" of religious authority that was central to her life. While the novel does indeed present a voice of authority that wins out in the end, the conflict that is presented along the way does more than simply provide the necessary opposing force for there to be any story at all. In dramatizing the response to authority in Gothic terms and with voices that play typical Gothic roles, O ’Connor creates a text that is much more subversive in overall effect than some take it to be.
If she is Echo, O ’Connor is not a simple repetition of the voice of religious authority. And while it is too reductionist simply to take the other extreme of the pole and say with John Hawkes that O ’Connor speaks with "the voice of the devil," the novel does show a very ambiguous response to the two opposing voices: the voice of authority and the voice of rebellion. The revisionary nature of Echo is in fact evident in the text, even more than the enduring nature is present in Faulkner’s text. And while Faulkner’s text uses echoes primarily to highlight questions of death and identity, O ’Connor’s Gothic use of echo foregrounds questions of authority (still as it relates to death and identity).
Focusing just on Mason’s insistent, echoing voice and its triumph can lead to a reading of the novel that places
O ’Connor in a prophetic role herself, a reading common to 105
O ’Connor criticism. Jill Baumgaertner, for instance, noting that "O’Connor frequently said that for the bard of hearing one must shout" (156), also describes what she calls
O ’Connor’s notion of "self-abandonment" in her writing:
the self became a vehicle for the Other. God used
her and her talents as an instrument. When this
occurred, she was so entirely immersed in the
creative process that she forgot completely about
her own physical situation. Only then could she
become a channel for God’s grace and the Holy
Spirit’s breath. (10)
Baumgaertner’s analysis clearly relates O ’Connor herself to the kind of prophet Mason perceives himself to be. And although O ’Connor, because of the grotesqueries in her work, usually is seen as a complicated prophet, even her own discussions of her work have led critics to see her as prophetic.
In replies to John Hawkes’ characterization of her authorial stance as "diabolic," for instance, Flannery
O ’Connor always maintained a crucial distinction between the objective Devil, the fallen angel Satan, and Hawkes’ subjective version of the term Devil. According to Hawkes’
1962 article on "Flannery O ’Connor’s Devil," the "creative perversity" her writing displays puts her "happily on the side of the devil" (99). For O ’Connor, who saw the Devil as very real, such claims seemed to contradict her Christian 106
beliefs.
The debate does seem to dissolve into a question of
terms— O ’Connor’s traditional Christian literal meaning of
Devil versus Hawkes’ Blakean emphasis on devil as
subversive, disturbing, gleefully perverse energy. But in
this debate there are the seeds for so many of the problems
in O ’Connor criticism. Since O ’Connor wrote and spoke so
often about her own fiction, emphasizing the importance of
her orthodox Catholic standpoint, most criticism follows
suit. O ’Connor strongly defended her agenda to shake people
up or to write truth as she saw it, whether or not audiences
accepted it ; ^
O ’Connor certainly does jar and challenge readers with
her fiction and clearly prided herself on affecting readers
strongly. ’ These tendencies, however, that she admits
seem "fiendish," are usually seen in light of her
"prophetic" stance. Her agenda seems to have a patriarchal
didacticism, since in her short stories and her two novels
critics see her as speaking with a voice of religious
orthodoxy, giving us allegories and morality tales to mold
us into better Christians.
In this view, O ’Connor emerges as a kind of Lucette
Carmody— the young girl who preaches forcefully about "the
Word" and clearly shakes up both young Tarwater and his
uncle Rayber. Lucette is one kind of Echo— a female child,
physically deformed ("frail" and with "thin legs twisted 107
from the knees"— 202), who repeats the words of Christian
belief with fierce, unrelenting precision and challenges
listeners by doing so. In much critical response, O ’Connor emerges likewise as an unrelenting spokesperson for God’s
authority— the strong voice coming from a woman whose body was made frail by a crippling disease. And this view of
Echo is in some senses very powerful; it shows a strong
feminine voice that can challenge listeners (or readers) and
that refuses suppression despite a weakness (or in Echo’s case an absence) of body. Yet it is still secondary; the
female voice does not originate the message, but "serves" by
repeating it.
Despite the similarities, however, O ’Connor is not best described as a Lucette; she is rather a much different sort of Echo. O ’Connor is not, after all, merely repeating some message of salvation. When O ’Connor herself uses the term
"prophetic" it is in terms of being able to see truth in the world: "In the novelist’s case, prophecy is a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up. The prophet is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that you find in
the best modern instances of the grotesque" (MM 44). Good stories, she says, include "revelation, not of what we ought
to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is, as a limited revelation but
revelation nevertheless," and thus "it requires considerable 108 courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller" (MM 34-35). However, O ’Connor specifically denies that fiction should be used to "prove the Truth of the Faith" (MM 145), claiming instead that an artist must first remain true to what can be seen in the world: "If the
Catholic writer hopes to reveal mysteries, he will have to do it by describing truthfully what he sees from where he is," and the "added dimension" of faith can be "judged in a work of fiction by the truthfulness and wholeness of the natural events presented" (MM 150). If O ’Connor intends to be "prophetic," she means to do so without sacrificing the demands of her "art," and yet, all of this emphasis on vision and revelation alone indicates a kind of concern with
"showing."
Moreover, in employing a Gothic form in this piece of fiction, she necessarily complicates any coherent "messages" about suitable responses to authority. Her play with identity, gender roles, silence, and voice and body all contribute to a Gothically subversive aspect of the text that challenges a view of O ’Connor as (simply) a "prophetic" writer, fulfilling a role as a vocal mirror for the dominant, and masculine, originator of voice. Her
"repetition" has more of the revisionary potential of Ovid’s
Echo’s (see Introduction, pp. 27-28)— she is a distorting and disturbing mirror, and she accomplishes that distortion through her Gothic style. Although the novel does not have 109 haunted castles or catacombs, wicked clergy, or damsels in distress, it does include many of the more characteristically modern Gothic features. Like As I Lay
Dying. it contains "dark, tortured wanderings" in the mind, a backwoods setting that if not Medieval is at least remote, dreadful events including rape and murder, and abundant crises of identity.
Claire Kahane has shown that the grotesque quality of
O ’Connor’s fiction results from "uncanny" imagery that evokes "fearful primitive fantasies" ("Rage of Vision" 24-
25). Kahane also looks at O ’Connor, specifically at her stories with female protagonists, in the context of modern
Gothic’s turn toward the seen (the grotesque) in place of the unseen. ("Gothic Mirror" 350) In fact, making the unseen seen by giving it strikingly visible and grotesque form emerges as one of O ’Connor’s most distinguishing characteristic, in critical reaction at least.
Ronald Schleifer, for instance, claims that O ’Connor’s work is "a literature of presence unmediated by the substitutions of language" (478) and that her "literary problem [is] to make the Sacred literal in a world in which it seems at best metaphorical, originating in a mode of perception rather than in the created world. Her problem, then, is the problem of the Gothic" (479). O ’Connor’s distortion of her characters— "wiring" the rationalistic
Rayber with his hearing aid into a near automaton. 110
intensifying Mason’s fanaticism with descriptions of his
pock-marked face and bulging fish-colored eyes, embodying
the Devil in a rapist with white lips, lavender eyes, and
hollows under his cheekbones— create a frightening world in which abstract concepts such as rationalism or evil take
amazingly physical form. For O ’Connor, "The grotesque has
the power of revelation; it manifests the irruption of the
demonic in man and brings to light the terrifying face of a world literally dis-fieured by evil" (Bleikasten 141). The
inescapable physically uncanny aspects of the novel thus are
the most obvious challenges to equating O ’Connor with
Lucette.
In fact, an analysis of the novel’s Gothic form shows an important revision from a feminine perspective. By using an adolescent boy as her main character, O ’Connor draws upon and inverts conventions of traditional Gothic novels whose protagonists are usually young, innocent women. Like the heroines of so many classic Gothic novels, for instance, young Tarwater is orphaned and at the mercy of questionable guardians. In fact, he is at least twice orphaned, once when he is born at the scene of a car accident that kills his mother and grandparents and prompts his father’s suicide, and again with the death of the only parent he has known--his great uncle Mason. This death leaves him wandering through the labyrinths of both the mind and the surrealistic city, like his female Gothic counterparts so I ll often left to wander labyrinthine corridors of castles or catacombs, searching for his identity and origins. On arriving in the city, he is put in a room with walls of
"insistent pink, the color chosen by Rayber’s wife" (185).
Tarwater also faces evil tempters and in fact has his own personal devil, the so-called friend or stranger with violet eyes and a panama hat who urges him to reject Mason’s plans for him. The threats to Tarwater eventually reach a culmination when he is raped near the novel’s end— suffering the fate that seems the ultimate threat to young women in many Gothics.
In feminizing her protagonist, O ’Connor leaves room in the novel, despite its predominantly male cast of characters, for a more radical reading of the role of Echo.
If on the one hand we have Lucette as a female voice echoing
Mason’s message with no rebellion at the role, we also have
Tarwater eventually echoing Mason, but only after a long attempt at rebellion that clearly illustrates how trapped he is by the authority of God and great uncle. Despite his insistence on his own active role, he ultimately appears in a passive one— doomed to be acted upon by the forces that insist he be prophet, a repetitive echo like Lucette. The rape is the physical culmination of what has been going on throughout the novel— something Tarwater does not want is being forced upon him. He can be read as more than simply a reluctant prophet who finally "comes around," since any 112
"decision" is finally forced upon him.
Although some critics take the traditional role of
Gothic heroines as an expression of their own liberating power, ^ Tarwater seems te fit more with the female Gothic characters who are clearly victims— Antonia, for instance, who is raped and killed by the Monk or Immalee who dies in the Inquisition prison after falling to Melmoth’s seduction.
Although O ’Connor apparently intended Tarwater to be a heroic figure in taking on Mason's role, he comes across as much more a victim than a hero (see note 5). Even O'Connor remarks, in a letter, that "The children of God I daresay will dispatch him pretty quick" (to "A" 7/25/59). His efforts to avoid the role planned for him, after all, are fruitless and lead only to destruction and violence.
Tarwater murders an innocent child. Although readers would be foolish to expect a "happy ending" for Tarwater, O ’Connor does give them lots of room to be disturbed by Tarwater’s fate— to feel the anger and resentment that he himself can find no outlet for besides murder. Reading Tarwater as a feminized victim, forced into violence and trapped by a patriarchal authority that forces him to adopt a role as vocal tool, one gets a far more radical interpretation of the text.
If O ’Connor is not a Lucette-like Echo then, she can thus be seen as a rebellious Echo— one who produces disturbing violence on her pages rather than allowing 113 herself to parrot any religious message. Below the surface of her text, one can see the resentment of the feminine voice that must take the secondary role— must repeat what originates elsewhere with the masculine authority. In
Hawkes’ terms, then, O ’Connor can be seen as a "Devil"--or more specifically as an angry feminine Echo lashing out at the role (as Tarwater lashes out with murder) with the violence and grotesqueries of her text. And this subversive voice reveals a much more revisionary type of
Echo than is immediately evident in O ’Connor’s works.
One must be careful in reading the undercurrent of rebellion as the final word on the text, however, since the subversive voices do not "win," and the authority of Mason so obviously triumphs. It really is not totally legitimate to see O ’Connor as being a female member of the Devil’s party without knowing it. Critics who take O ’Connor at her word about her own fiction and those like Hawkes who take an opposite viewpoint miss the ultimate effect the text achieves with its combination of a dominant authoritative voice and other, subversive Gothic features. O ’Connor is not a Lucette and she is not an angry feminine Devil. But in incorporating elements of both of these voices (the
"prophetic" and the rebellious), the novel illuminates an unresolved conflict between them, that in itself leads to the overall unsettling. Gothic effect. By exploring 114
O'Connor's use of silence and of voice— of echoes within the
text— one may examine this unresolved conflict.
While in As I Lav Dying echoes are primarily subversive because they foreground questions of identity and death (of
absence and presence), in The Violent Bear it Away echoes
become subversive because of the inherent challenges they
present to notions of knowable authority. The revisionary
potential of Echo becomes as important as her repetitive,
disembodied characteristics. O ’Connor presents us with echoes that do highlight the power of an authoritative voice by repeating it exactly, but she also includes echoes— both disembodied and embodied— that challenge that voice.
On the one hand, it is impossible to deny the novel’s emphasis on the power of traditional sources of authority, even when it uses echoes to achieve that emphasis. A primary echo, or disembodied voice, in O ’Connor’s novel is
the voice of Mason that refuses to be suppressed even with the death of the body. Much like Addie, Mason dies early in the novel— on the very first page in fact--but remains a striking presence throughout. His direct words come to us in more conventional narrative form than Addie’s truly disembodied monologue, since they occur in flashback scenes that ground them in a particular place and time, but the voice still remains a haunting kind of presence.^
When the old prophet Mason gives his own burial instructions to his great nephew Tarwater in an early 115 flashback scene in the novel, lying in a pine box he has made (with his stomach protruding over the top like a "loaf of bread"), O ’Connor describes his "gravel voice" as "hearty in the coffin" (131). The "gravel voice" emerging heartily
(if not literally) from the coffin comes to be a central metaphor for the novel as a whole. The authoritative, prophetic voice embodied in the father figure Mason (and tied so closely to the authoritative voice of an Old
Testament God) refuses to be suppressed by the death of that embodiment, lingering in various voices we hear throughout the novel and eventually taken over by Tarwater himself when he accepts his prophetic vocation at the novel’s end.
Tarwater is haunted by his old uncle’s voice throughout the novel; it echoes in him because it is part of him. Even when he had tried to tune out the old m a n ’s frenzied prophesying, it was practically the only voice Tarwater had heard. So of course the boy himself echoes his great uncle.
He echoes Mason’s terms for their relatives, calling Rayber
"the schoolteacher" and Rayber’s mentally handicapped son
Bishop "the dimwit." Mason’s insistent "It was me could act . . . not him" comparing himself to Rayber, becomes
Tarwater’s refrain, "I can act"— his idea that saying No is not enough, that one has to act "No" out. Tarwater’s generally antagonistic speech patterns continually remind the reader of Mason’s "absent voice"— that is actually present in the novel mainly through flashback scenes. 116
At Powderhead, living in isolation with Mason, Tarwater is indeed a "captive audience" to Mason’s prophesying, as the salesman Meeks comments, since as Tarwater explains,
"’Nobody else would listen to him and there wasn’t anybody else for me to listen to’" (170). While Mason once had prophesied in the city, on his sister’s doorstep, and on the ward at the asylum (for four years until he discovered he could get out by keeping quiet), since he kidnapped Tarwater he had preached only to the boy, in no subdued manner:
"While he was telling this to Tarwater, he would jump up and begin to shout and prophesy there in the clearing . . . With no one to hear but the boy, he would flail his arms and roar" (159).
Although Tarwater does not always listen actively, he cannot help falling under the influence of the prophet’s voice:
He [Mason] might have been shouting to the silent
woods that encircled them. While he was in his
frenzy, the boy would take up the shotgun and hold
it to his eye and sight along the barrel, but
sometimes as his uncle grew more and more wild, he
would lift his face from the gun for a moment with
a look of uneasy alertness, as if while he had
been inattentive, the old man’s words had been
dropping one by one into him and now, silent,
hidden in his bloodstream, were moving secretly 117
toward some goal of their own. (159)
Tarwater’s uneasiness takes on special significance
because, as we learn in the first chapter, the boy "was
secretly afraid" that the old man's "madness" or "hunger"
"might be passed down, might be hidden in the blood and
might strike some day in him" (135). And so, on the final
page of the novel, when Tarwater hears the Lord's command to
"GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF
MERCY," and "the words were as silent as seeds opening one
at a time in his blood" (267), we realize the return of a
voice that has never really left, that has been in Tarwater
throughout his struggles in the city. The analogy of words
as seeds planted and waiting in the bloodstream picks up the
biblical parable of the seeds that Mason and Tarwater cite
so often in the course of the novel (usually in reference to
Rayber) and also gives a strikingly physical representation
to a psychological and spiritual phenomenon.^ Tarwater assumes Mason’s voice. As Suzanne Morrow Paulson explains,
"the novel begins with the death of Mason Tarwater and ends with a grotesque kind of 'resurrection' as old Tarwater's will takes over the psyche of his young nephew" (100).
After death then. Mason can remain, like Addie Bundren, as
Echo.
It is no wonder that the presence of Mason haunts
Tarwater— that he imagines him standing behind a corner when he first enters Rayber's house, "so close that the boy 118
thought he could hear him laugh" (176)— or that Rayber would
see Tarwater as within "the old man’s ghostly grasp"
(188).If Mason’s voice has authority because he was the
boy’s only true father figure, it also has further ground
for Tarwater to respect it since it is tied so closely to
the Lord’s voice, which Tarwater has been taught to perceive
as the ultimate authority. Mason sees himself as a kind of
echo for the Lord, a vocal tool through which the Lord can
speak to people who cannot hear him as prophets can. Mason
claims, "’I take my directions from the Lord God’" (137).
He is certain the Lord called him to be a prophet, and thus
is horrified by the claims in Rayber’s article that he called himself. Beyond the original call, he continues to hear God’s voice. The "Lord had told the old man" to expect
the arrival of a truant officer (133), and Mason fully expects to "hear the summons" from the Lord when it is time
for him to die, thus giving him time to run downstairs close
to the door so that the boy need not carry the body too far
(131). For Mason, God’s voice comes through loud and clear,
represented in capital letters; when he sees the infant
Tarwater for the first time, for instance, "the voice of the
Lord had come to him and said: HERE IS THE PROPHET TO TAKE
YOUR PLACE. BAPTIZE HIM" (166).
The authority of Mason’s voice is emphasized as
Tarwater hears Mason’s words echoed by the child evangelist
Lucette, whom he sneaks out at night to hear. Both her 119 message and her specific words reflect Mason’s. She tells
the audience in particular that the "’Word of God is a burning Word to burn you clean*" (204), echoing Mason’s prophesy that Tarwater would be a prophet who burned eyes clean. Lucette’s sermon is the most explicit connection between God and voice or the Word. The world, she says,
"’wanted God’s own breath, it wanted His very Word and God said, "I’ll make my Word Jesus, I ’ll give them my Word for a
King, I ’ll give them my very breath for theirs"’"(202). If
God’s voice equals God, then Mason’s employing God’s voice gives him divine authority and makes him God-like.
As Mary Buzan notes, "The old man’s spiritual authority
is also borne out by the truth of his most important claims" such as his notion that Rayber once loved him and that
Tarwater will feel a pit opening inside him and that the devil will bother him (37-38). Mason warns Tarwater while giving him burial instructions to "’Go ahead and let him
[Rayber] burn me but watch out for the Lord’s lion set in the path of the false prophet!’" (137), and the words come back to haunt Tarwater as he and Rayber and Bishop walk into the city park and find the path suddenly widening to reveal a stone lion in a pool with water gushing from its mouth.^
The authority of Mason’s voice is accompanied by the authority of God’s voice, since Tarwater has just decided
(following the advice of his "friend") to take nothing short of water gushing from a rock as an unmistakable sign from 120
God (220).
Some of Mason’s words are driven into Tarwater quite literally by the homosexual rapist. Early in the novel, the old man tells Tarwater, "’You are the kind of boy . . . that the devil is always going to be offering to assist, to give you a smoke or a drink or a ride, and to ask you your bidnis. You had better mind how you take up with strangers’" (157-58). As Tarwater sits in the lavender car of the rapist, smoking his "special" cigarette, drinking his funny thick liquor, and answering all of his questions,
"there came into his head all his great-uncle’s warnings about poisonous liquor, all his idiotic restrictions about riding with strangers. The essence of the old man’s foolishness flooded his mind like a rising tide of irritation" (260). Tarwater’s rejection of his uncle’s words, however, results in his rape, a physical violation he cannot deny and one which forces the truth of his uncle’s words into him much more violently than the seeds dropping quietly into his blood.
In fact, all of Tarwater’s attempts to reject the words of Mason fail. His first attempt at subverting the voice of authority is his "burning" of the uncle’s body, in direct defiance of old Mason’s instructions to bury him ten feet deep with a cross over him. Much like Dari, in Faulkner’s barn-burning scene, though for different motives, Tarwater attempts to silence the voice (already absent on a physical 121 level) by annihilating the physical body that once housed the voice. Having thus subverted one injunction (so
Tarwater thinks at least), he is left with one primary command--one lingering set of words from Mason— the injunction to baptize his cousin. Bishop. And the only way
Tarwater can find to say "No" once and for all to the voice that commanded him (and continues to command him on a psychological level) is to get rid of the physical body of
Bishop, not by fire but by drowning. The physical means of obliterating the command is unsuccessful, however, since
Tarwater does obey his great uncle’s words in the end, baptizing the boy as he drowns him.
But Tarwater finds that even his first attempt at silencing the voice by disposing of a body has been equally unsuccessful. In the "final revelation" (262) Tarwater knows he must face after the rape, he discovers what the reader has known since the novel’s first paragraph— that the body of Mason has been there all along, buried under a cross, as instructed, by Buford Munson. It is as if Mason’s voice, just driven into Tarwater so forcefully by the rapist and beginning to open in his blood, has issued from the
"gravel voice" of the body within the grave. As with Addie in As I Lav Dying, the body has been buried, but the voice 17 echoes on.
In As I Lay Dying, the presence of this echoing voice is such a central threat because of the challenges it 122 presents to the novel’s (unobtainable) goal of silence. If silence is in many ways a central goal of As I Lay Dying, however, it is more of a continual problem in The Violent
Bear it Away, especially for Tarwater himself. Despite the many competing voices in O ’Connor’s novel, there is still often a "setting devoid of sound" (Paulson 104). This silence is both feared and desired, taking a much more complicated role than it plays in Faulkner’s text and emphasizing the novel’s concern with the proper response to authority. Initially, silence appears frightening because it is the absence of the voice of authority. Yet since silencing the nagging voice of authority is so important for
Tarwater, one might think that for him at least silence is an ultimate goal. Silence cannot be fully desired, however, even by a rebellious force, because the novel makes a strong association between silence and that very voice of authority— silence in fact is shown as necessary to Echo’s role as faithful repeater. Ultimately, silence is a powerful and frightening force from the beginning of the novel until the end.
After Mason’s death at the beginning of the tale,
Tarwater suddenly faces a silence that is strange and frightening to him. Part of this silence is his realization that "No voice will be uplifted" against him because he is now in charge at Powderhead (130, 248). The silence clearly results from the absence of Mason’s voice, a voice Tarwater 123 has heard (almost exclusively) his whole life. For
Tarwater, Andre Bleikasten argues. Mason’s death is the
"equivalent of the (provisional) death of God" (145). But
Tarwater also expected to hear something at the death of his great uncle; he thought the Lord would finally speak to him directly and give him the call he has expected all his life.
He waits, holding his breath "as if he were about to hear a voice from on high," but all he hears is a chicken scratching under the porch (130). As he digs the grave for
Mason, he realizes that the Lord "ain’t said anything. He ain’t even noticed me yet" (1 3 7 ).
O ’Connor shows silence as such a powerful force because she wants to associate it with Mason and with the prophetic life for which he had prepared Tarwater. As Paulson notes, because of their "uncanny" effects, "Silence and deafness signify the presence of Mason" (105). Throughout Tarwater’s sojourn in the city, his "mind had been engaged in a continual struggle with the silence that confronted him, that demanded he baptize the child and begin at once the life the old man had prepared him for" (218). The silence is threatening and dangerous:
It was a strange waiting silence. It seemed to
lie all around him like an invisible country whose
borders he was always on the edge on, always in
danger of crossing. From time to time as they
walked in the city, he had looked to the side and 124
seen his own form alongside him in a store window,
transparent as a snakeskin. It moved beside him
like some violent ghost who had already crossed
over and was reproaching him from the other side.
(218)
Tarwater often feels that the "silent country" is
"about to surround him and he was going to be lost in it forever" (218). Thus when Tarwater turns to his uncle
Rayber (in direct rebellion against what Mason would have wanted), he deliberately turns from silence. As Tarwater first approaches Rayber’s house in the middle of the night:
The quiet seemed palpable, waiting. It seemed
almost to be waiting patiently, biding its time
until it should reveal itself and demand to be
named. He turned back to the cold knocker and
grabbed it and shattered the silence as if it were
a personal enemy. The noise filled his head. He
was aware of nothing but the racket he was making
. . . The empty street echoed with his blows.
(174)
But while Tarwater can rebel against the silence, even at this early point in the story, it is evident that the silence is stronger than him. When he stops pounding on the door, "the implacable silence descended around him, immune to his fury" (174). 125
In a seeming paradox, Tarwater and Rayber reveal a strong desire for complete silence, although silence is presented as fearful. Tarwater wants to silence the continuing voice of Mason that plagues him and also hates to listen to Rayber. And although he cannot control his own deafness, Rayber can and does decide when to use his hearing aid and when to turn it off. Having been shot in the ear by
Mason (in an attempt to rescue the infant Tarwater), Rayber must wear the aid in order to hear. The "wedge-shaped gash"
(176) in Rayber's ear serves as a permanent reminder of his unsuccessful attempt to retrieve the baby Tarwater from
Powderhead, and the hearing aid that "wires" his head helps fit him into the role of calculating automaton that Tarwater and readers alike perceive. But perhaps even more significant than Rayber’s inability to hear (medically interesting since he was shot in only one ear) is the fact that he often chooses not to hear. He turns off his hearing aid when he pursues Tarwater on his after-dark walk to the evangelist's meeting (196), again to escape the words of the
"exploited" child preacher Lucette (205), to escape the
"racket" of the teenage dancers at the lodge’s nickelodeon
(235), and also when Tarwater and Bishop are out on the boat together and he lies on the cot (241).
The novel also makes it clear that one can choose not to listen even without mechanical switches to turn off.
Mason’s sister, for instance, when she was alive, "would not 126 listen to any word that had to do with her salvation" (158).
In the farcical scene in a lawyer’s office (as Mason tries to get Powderhead unentailed), no one listens to the boy’s news that he has lost his new hat out the window or that "a car is liable to have run over it by now" (140). The widespread tendency of all of the characters to preface comments to one another with "Listen" is understandable, since so often the characters simply do not pay attention to what others say.
Although characters often choose not to hear, O ’Connor reveals that a complete silence, though desired, is not possible for them. Even when Rayber has the hearing aid turned off, for instance, he still must hear. He lies at one point "as if listening to something he could hear only when his hearing aid was off" (241). The paradox of frightening and desired silence makes some sense if it is a total silence that is desired and a silence associated with
Mason’s voice— the voice of authority--that is feared.
Silence is an integral part of being a "faithful" echo;
Echo can be such a good mimic because her own voice has been silenced. Significantly, when Tarwater does have his vision of loaves and fishes and Mason at the novel’s end, his acceptance of the prophet’s role comes in terms of the silent country that had so frightened him:
He felt it rising in himself through time and
darkness, rising through the centuries, and he 127
knew that it rose in a line of men whose lives
were chosen to sustain it, who would wander in the
world, strangers from that violent country where
the silence is never broken except to shout the
truth. (266-67)
This breaking of the silence with shouted truth explains why the prophetic role is associated with powerful silence, since only in the absence of distracting voices can one clear voice be heard. Thus the dominance of silence, like the dominance of Mason’s voice, stresses authority in the text. Silence is necessary for the possibility it gives to be broken by the Lord’s word. Silence is presented as a prerequisite for shouted "Truth"— necessary before the voice of authority can come through to be repeated by the prophet acting as vocal tool. Ovid’s Echo is in fact doomed to silence unless another instigate speech, which she has no choice but to repeat. It is the absence of her own sound that makes it possible for her to reflect another’s. Thus her own silence makes her role of unwilling repetition— her
"prophetic" role as vocal tool— possible.^
A prophet’s anxiety must be in maintaining this necessary degree of silence of personal voice— thus being an accurate Echo. The last word of the novel seems to be that this kind of silence is possible, since Tarwater apparently becomes the kind of prophet who can keep quiet except only to shout Truth, but the novel as a whole does not support 128 this possibility as a final word. While the text is full of voice bursting out of silence, that voice is usually not a human repetition of some divine message; often it is only an expression of a very human anguish. So balancing the primary authoritative echo of Mason’s voice are echoes that fit more with a Gothic reading of the text, stressing the rebellious and angry voice.
When the silence is broken at crucial points throughout the novel, "truth" often comes out only as a wail or bellow, instead of a comprehensible Word of God. The silence following Mason’s death is broken by Lue11a Munson who comes with Buford to have a jug filled: "The woman lifted her head and let out a slow sustained wail, piercing and formal. She set her jug down on the ground and crossed her arms and then lifted them in the air and wailed again" (148). Tarwater is quick to tell Buford to "’Tell her to shut up that’" (148), clearly uncomfortable with the natural and uninhibited expression of grief at death.
Bishop’s "bellow" (the word reminiscent of Faulkner’s
Benjy Compson) upon his being drowned rises from and
"escape[s]" into silence. As Rayber stands in his room at the lodge, he turns his hearing aid on just in time to hear an "unmistakable bellow" that stops and starts again
"steadily, swelling." The sound "rose and fell, then it blared out one last time, rising out of its own momentum as if it were escaping finally, after centuries of waiting. 129 into silence" (242). Since Bishop cannot speak, the only communication he can "voice" throughout the story is a howl, cry, or bellow. But this final bellow seems to include more than the child’s momentary fear and anger, since for the listening Rayber, at least, it seems to encompass centuries of waiting— a kind of existential "Howl." For Rayber it must speak of the "fury" that had lain quiet in his "buried depths" since first discussing Bishop’s condition with a doctor who told him to try to be grateful at least for the boy’s health— since the doctor had seen much worse (206).
Rayber’s refusal to be grateful "’when one— just one— is born with a heart outside’"(206)— his fury— seems to call for the kind of bellow Bishop produces, as does Rayber’s
"hated love" (208) for the child, the all-encompassing love that rises despite his best efforts to suppress it. As his only child is killed, O ’Connor implies, Rayber ought to join
Bishop in a powerful howl, join in the sounds the hearing aid make "seem to come from inside him [Rayber] as if something inside him were tearing itself free" (242), but instead Rayber clenches his teeth and sets his jaw: "No cry must escape him. The one thing he knew, the one thing he was certain of was that no cry must escape him" (242).
Bishop’s bellow clearly emerges as the more natural and human response, and Rayber’s refusal to break the silence reflects his choosing to be more automaton than human. As
Rayber stands, in our final view of him, waiting for the 130
intolerable pain that does not come (243), we can see that he has somehow made himself inaccessible to that feeling,
partly by stifling his cry.
If Bishop howls at his impending death, Tarwater’s
reaction to his rape even more evokes images of Edvard
Munch’s famous painting of angst:
The boy’s mouth twisted open and to the side as if
it were going to displace itself permanently. In
a second it appeared to be only a gap that would
never be a mouth again. His eyes looked small and
seedlike as if while he was asleep, they had
lifted out, scorched, and dropped back into his
head. His expression seemed to contract until it
reached some point beyond rage or pain. Then a
loud dry cry tore out of him and his mouth fell
back in place. (261)
The mouth is momentarily useless, a horrified "gap"
from which voice cannot emerge, and only when the cry tears
from him, seemingly of its own volition, does he regain a mouth capable of speech. A scream, like Bishop’s bellow, is as close to "shouted Truth" as Tarwater can come. The cry spills out without conscious formulation, and thus seems one of the truest expressions of voice. Yet the cry itself has little to do with spreading the Word to the sleeping children of God, and everything to do with insuppressible human rage and pain. 131
If the refusal of Mason’s authoritative voice to be suppressed illustrates the power of a voice of Truth, these equally powerful bellows reveal a different kind of (nearly) disembodied and insuppressible voice— one that seems much more Gothic in its causes and effects, since it "speaks" of primal buried emotions (such as pain at death or violation) and disturbs and unsettles the reader. They do not seem to reflect a voice that originates elsewhere, but instead come from the depths of self. Those who utter these cries and bellows do not seem to be vocal tools for some outside authority, and thus these ruptures of silence reveal the more subversive voice of the text.
Even when the "Truth" that breaks the silence is a more direct echo of an authoritative voice, O ’Connor leaves some doubt about how we should take its supremacy. The best example of Tarwater as Echo despite his intentions is during his drowning of Bishop, when the words of baptism slip out of his mouth. As Tarwater is in the boat at night, drowning
Bishop, the words of baptism come out of him as his vomit had earlier in the day. And despite his claims that "’They were just some words that run out of my mouth and spilled into the water’" (248), they are obviously more important, and they even spill out of his mouth once again as the trucker sleeps beside him later that night: "Suddenly in a high raw voice the defeated boy cried out the words of baptism, shuddered, and opened his eyes" (252). The 132 words, like echo, are truly unsuppressible, and as
Baumgartner notes, accompany the act he had thought was all important: "For him, word and act are ultimately unified and simultaneous" (145).
In one respect, this incident in the boat does represent the triumph of Mason’s voice returned (or repeated). Tarwater tries to suppress not only the image of
Mason (since Bishop looks so much like him), but also that lingering command from him to baptize the boy. But in the very act of physically trying to silence that voice,
Tarwater becomes the echo of it, letting the words of baptism pass his lips. \vliile Tarwater can get rid of the visual reflection of Mason (and of himself as Mason’s double). Mason’s words— the words of baptism— remain. As the visual reflection of Narcissus fades, in Ovid’s tale when Narcissus pines away, a reflected voice does remain.
The words of baptism, like Echo’s lamentations, remain to give Mason presence, even when his physical reflection has been pushed below the surface of the water.
In another respect, though, readers cannot forget the fact that Tarwater commits murder at the same time. While the text implies that Tarwater is wrong to place total significance on the act, to the neglect of the word— since we see that the word _is important— the act does remain as a grotesque and profoundly disturbing manifestation of attempted rebellion. Mason’s voice may be supreme, but in 133
linking this proof of its supremacy with the violent murder of an innocent child, the text again subverts a "prophetic"
interpretation.
In addition, the very involuntary nature of the words points out the conflict between prophetic and devilish voices in the text. Since so often in the novel words
become detached from speakers, showing themselves nearly to have wills of their own either to remain lodged in a
speaker’s throat or to jump out involuntarily, the text
implicitly questions how much control anyone can have over voice. And in turn, the text, like other Gothics with disembodied voices, problematizes any possibility of certain voice origins.
Often characters suffer such a lack of control over
their own voices that they have a physical inability to speak— words are unable to get past some clog in the throat.
Characters open their mouths to speak and find no words coming out. Sometimes the words eventually do make it out:
Mason’s lips part slowly at one point "until" he says something (142); when he is angry with the lawyer he is
"barely able to force a thread of sound from his throat"
(140); and Rayber’s "mouth opened and closed" at another point until he can speak "in a dry voice" (223). But often emotion swallows the words completely. The woman at the
Cherokee Lodge finds her "mouth opening on a vanished sentence" (217). When Mason reaches the point in his story 134
that describes his sister’s "perfidy" (having him
committed), "His face would get redder and redder and his
voice thinner and sometimes it would give out completely and
he would sit there on the step, beating the porch floor with
his fist while he moved his lips and no sound came out"
(159). When he realizes Rayber’s article is about him, he
also cannot speak: "The old man’s tongue lay in his mouth
like a stone" (168). When Tarwater first sees Bishop after
Mason’s death and realizes "that he was expected to baptize
the child he saw and begin the life his great-uncle had
prepared him for" (177), "He tried to shout ’NO!’ but it was
like trying to shout in his sleep. The sound was saturated
in silence, lost" (178).
When Tarwater is in the truck after drowning Bishop,
he finds himself in similar circumstances: he "open[s] his mouth as if he expected words to come out of it but none
did" (247), and then "His lips worked a few seconds. They
stopped and then started again as if the force of a thought were behind them but no words. He shut his mouth, and then
tried again but no sound came" (248). When he dreams of the
drowning in the silence "corrugated with the snoring of the
driver," Tarwater also finds his mouth opening "to make way
for the cries that would not come" (252). And in the most
striking instance of the failure to produce sound, Tarwater wakes up in the woods and discovers he has been raped, and
for a time his mouth opens on a silent cry: "The boy’s mouth 135
twisted open and to the side as if it were going to displace
itself permanently. In a second it appeared to be only a
gap that would never be a mouth again" (261).
If in circumstances of extreme emotion, voice can
remain in the throat and characters cannot find their voices, words also have the power to break out of their own will, to spill over without a person’s conscious choice to utter them— they can jump out of a speaker without the
speaker’s will. Rayber, for instance, cannot restrain the words of his confession that he tried to drown Bishop (223), and the words "’I can read you like a book’" spill out of him, just before Tarwater’s vomit spills out of him when
they are on the boat together (226). When Tarwater tries to justify his actions to the woman at the country store with whom Mason had liked to "discourse," the words he wants will not come out, but others jump out of their own accord:
The boy pulled himself together to speak. He was
conscious that no sass would do, that he was
called upon by some force outside them both to
answer for his freedom and make bold his acts. A
tremor went through him. His soul plunged deep
within itself to hear the voice of his mentor [the
"friend" who has urged his rebellion] at its most
profound depths. He opened his mouth to overwhelm
the woman and to his horror what rushed from his
lips, like the shriek of a bat, was an obscenity 136
he had overheard once at a fair. (257)
In the same way As I Lay Dying prepares us for the primary echo of Addie’s voice with voices that seem to float around in "reverberant repetition," O ’Connor’s text also creates an atmosphere of repetition and echoing sound and voice with these words that often lose connection with their speakers, as when they burst out of throats of their own accord, or when they are "spit" (134), "hurled" (179), or flung (as Tarwater imagines himself flinging words at the
21 woman who owns the country store — 258). Rayber can speak in a "detached" voice, "as if he has no particular interest in the matter, and his were merely the voice of truth, as impersonal as air" (210). Tarwater’s first experience with a telephone, when the salesman Meeks calls his girlfriend, leaves him "awestruck" because he hears "an actual woman’s voice, like one coming from beyond the grave, say ’Why Sugar, is that reely you?’" (171).%% These kinds of free-floating and detached voices--these echoes-- problematize the notion that one can be sure where voices come from— if one has little control over one’s own voice and if words can float around in disembodied form, then origin remains suspect, and if origin is suspect, so is the authority that lies behind any voice.
The "origin" of voice is a central problem in any kind of echoing--"prophetic" or not. For this text, if only God and humans are in the equation, the problem is one of 137 autonomy or its lack--can Tarwater’s voice be his own or must it be a secondary echo of a voice from the outside?
But problematized voice origins become more potentially subversive if another voice is brought into the equation, and O ’Connor does this in the novel with the voice of the literal "Devil." O ’Connor balances the primary Echo of
Mason’s voice with an equally strong Echo— the voice that becomes the "stranger" or Tarwater’s "friend."
This character’s presence like Mason’s (and like Addie
Bundren’s) is almost entirely confined to voice. While obviously in opposition to the voice of authority, this stranger, who begins as merely a "voice," especially stresses that the origins of words are questionable, since it is never totally clear who this stranger is. The stranger is at first apparently Tarwater’s own rebellious voice that finds expression only upon Mason’s death.
Tarwater takes this rebellious voice and turns it into a
"friend" or "stranger" who offers him support, urges him to acts of rebellion, and is alternately passionate, rational, or obviously conniving, and whom critics (and O ’Connor) usually describe as the Devil himself.
This friend begins life as a true echo— a disembodied vocal reflection of Tarwater’s own words. Tarwater’s first rebellious sentiments, as he tells Mason’s body to "hold your horses. I already told you I would do it [the burial] right" are in a voice that sounds "like a stranger’s voice" 138
(129). The next words he says aloud, about moving a fence
on the property, are in a voice that sounds "loud and
disagreeable" and that continues inside his head as a sort
of conversation with himself (130). The "voice" turns
dominating while continuing to be unpleasant: "Bury first
and get it over with, the loud stranger’s disagreeable voice
said. He got up and went to look for the shovel" (130-31).
But several pages later this voice turns into a separate
entity: Tarwater speaks again in the "voice of the
stranger" and then again "softening the stranger’s voice so
that he can stand it" (137). Immediately after this
"softening," the stranger begins talking to Tarwater, and a
conversation of sorts ensues, with the stranger addressing
Tarwater as "you" (18).
Soon the stranger is digging along side of Tarwater
(143), watching him and jeering him from under the shade of
trees (145), asking him if he smokes (144), and throwing himself down beside Tarwater (149). There is even a physical description: "Tarwater didn’t search out the stranger’s face but he knew by now that it was sharp and
friendly and wise, shadowed under a stiff broad-brimmed panama hat that obscured the color of his eyes [which we
later find out are violet]" (144).
O ’Connor makes it clear that the stranger is part of
Tarwater: "Only every now and then it sounded like a stranger’s voice to him. He began to feel that he was just 139 now meeting himself, as if as long as his uncle had lived he had been deprived of his own acquaintance" (144). Much later, after Tarwater has drowned Bishop and is walking back to Powderhead in the sunrise, he thinks he has rejected his former self, the self that thought it was to be a prophet, but the description given to that former self reflects the stranger who has been with him since Mason’s death:
Beyond the glare he was aware of another figure, a
gaunt stranger, the ghost who had been born in the
wreck and who had fancied himself destined at that
moment to the torture of prophesy. I was apparent
to the boy that this person, who paid him no
attention, was mad. (255)
While no other characters can see this stranger, for
Tarwater, he is quite literally word become flesh— an embodied voice, recalling Lucette’s insistence upon God’s breath and word turned into the flesh of Jesus, and emphasizing the tendency in the novel as a whole to give voice and sound a physical description. While this tendency reflects her grotesque technique’s emphasis on the physical in general, it also points to an uneasiness created by shaky voice origins. A voice just coming out of the air is harder to place and account for than a voice coming from a gaunt figure in a panama hat, even if the physical manifestation is slightly more ambiguous than, for instance, a cloven-hoofed, red-clad figure might be. 140
If a prophet must silence his or her own voice in order
to be open to reflect another voice, it is dangerous to have
the Devil’s voice floating around, ready to be reflected unwittingly. So O ’Connor’s attempts to embody this voice—
in the stranger or the rapist— seem to be attempts to make
the voice less potentially subversive. With its emphasis on
corporeality, on supplying body to disembodied voice,
O ’Connor’s text, more so than Faulkner’s, reveals a
discomfort with all of the decentering effects of a truly
disembodied voice.
O ’Connor reveals a greater degree of corporeality in
her use of echo. Faulkner is able to emphasize the
problematics of absence and presence that his voices create
by keeping the physical body of Addie as a constant
challenge to distinctions between absence and presence. But
his echoes remain fundamentally disembodied— cut off from
that physical body. O ’Connor, on the other hand, endows what ought to be a disembodied voice--the echo of Tarwater
and the devil--with a corporeal presence. So in this
respect O ’Connor, by attempting to fix identity with
concrete form, does seem uncomfortable with all of the
subversive potential of disembodied voices. But this
discomfort with disembodied voices does not go so far as to
do away with all the Gothically subversive tendencies of
echoing voices, because although there may be an attempt to
ground voices in physical forms, the attempt is not 141 complete. Voice in this novel is not consistently and only physical. To the end, the stranger is "voice" as much as
body. After the rape and after Tarwater has burned the brush, he makes it to Powderhead and looks down on that
burnt ruin, and the stranger returns in the disembodied form he had originally:
He felt a breeze on his neck as light as a
breath and he half-turned, sensing that someone
stood behind him. A sibilant shifting of air
dropped like a sigh into his ear. The boy turned
white.
Go down and take it, his friend whispered.
It’s ours. We've won it. Ever since you first
begun to dig the grave. I ’ve stood by you, never
left your side, and now we can take it over
together, just you and me. You’re not ever going
to be alone again.
The boy shuddered convulsively. The presence
was as pervasive as an odor, a warm sweet body of
air encircling him, a violent shadow hanging over
his shoulders. (264)
If this description emphasizes the "friend" as word or
breath instead of body, Tarwater’s means of getting rid of
his "adversary" are still very physical: as he sets fire to
the surrounding bushes, "He glared through the flames and
his spirit rose as he saw that his adversary would soon be 142 consumed in a roaring blaze" (264). As Tarwater has burned the brush around the spot of his rape, he apparently burns the last vestiges of the friend/rapist. Because the stranger could appear as only voice— or as a "sibilant shifting of air"— even after he had disappeared, however, there is doubt about whether Tarwater can ever truly be free of him. O ’Connor leaves the potential for this voice to continue in its rebellion against Mason’s voice. And we are left with the original problem inherent in voices both divine and diabolic being detached from their sources— how to tell them apart. In order to give the text a "prophetic" reading, one would have to be able to locate the Devil’s voice as consistently "other" and evil, preferably located in a concrete form, but although the text at times seems to want to give this reading, it continually jeopardizes it.
In one seemingly incidental scene in the course of the novel, we can see the tension resulting from this incomplete attempt to "fix" the source of voice with physical form. In the eighth chapter, in which we hear the park scene narrated for the second time— this time from Tarwater's perspective— we meet a number of voices that follow a continuum of corporeality that emphasizes the curious relationship
O ’Connor creates between body and voice. Tarwater first
"hears" an echo of Mason’s and the Lord’s voices, since on walking through the park he suddenly is faced with Bishop running toward a pool at the center of which water gushes 143 from the stone lion (220), and he takes this as the sign he demanded from God and an echo of Mason’s injunction to
"remember the Lord’s lion set in the path of the false prophet" (137). And as Tarwater steps forward to the fountain, "He felt a distinct tension in the quiet. The old man might have been lurking near, holding his breath, waiting for the baptism. His friend was silent as if in the felt presence, he dared not raise his voice" (221). Two characters whose presence is on one hand limited to voice are present yet silent. (This silence is broken, however, by Bishop, who "split[s] the silence with his bellow" when
Rayber snatches him out of the water (221).) The silent old man, however, obviously has power over Tarwater, since as he sees the sunlight reflected on Bishop’s face, he obeys the voices commanding baptism in a kind of trance, exerting a force backwards yet continually moving forward to the pool, and even swinging his foot over the edge.
After Rayber has grabbed Bishop and the crisis has passed, Tarwater "hears" a voice that is only slightly more embodied. Tarwater sees his face in the pool "wavering" and finally becoming distinct and "cross-shaped" and sees the hungry (the inner silence) look in his own eyes, and he
"says" silently, "’I wasn’t going to baptize him . . . I’d drown him first’" (221). Tarwater throws out the words as a violent sort of challenge; he is described as "flinging the silent words at the silent face" (221). Significantly, 144
Tarwater directs his refusal of God’s and his uncle’s signs
to his own face in the water; the silent words he flings out
are directed to himself, a sort of self-denial (since it
seems very likely that he was in fact going to baptize
Bishop), but are also directed to the voices of authority which have become a part of him. Like Narcissus gazing at himself, Tarwater loses contact with any other participants
in his struggle--the focus is totally on self.
Interestingly, the silent face answers Tarwater’s silent words with more silent words: "Drown him then, the face appeared to say" (221).
Unlike Narcissus, Tarwater can walk away from his
reflection, primarily because it has challenged him
("Tarwater stepped back, shocked" after the face appeared to
tell him to drown Bishop.), but he cannot escape the vocal
reflection, the Echo that is his friend’s voice, who
trivializes the whole preceding scene and later also urges drowning. The friend chides him: "’Well, that’s your sign’
. . . ’the sun coming out from under a cloud and falling on the head of a dimwit. Something that could happen fifty
times a day without no one being the wiser. And it took the schoolteacher to save you and just in time’" (221). The
friend then hints that Tarwater should save himself from a lifetime of baptizing by doing something drastic, picking up
the advice later by reminding Tarwater that "water is made for more than one thing" (222). There is no qualifying 145
"appeared to say" for the friend’s voice, which the narrator
describes as simply saying these words (though they get no
quotation marks).
In the park scene, Tarwater has moved from the silent, wordless "voices" of authority that "tell" him to baptize
the child, through the soundless, apparent words of his
reflected face and then the "scarcely heard" words of his
friend, finally to hear the very "real" words of the
generally gray tramp on the park bench whose voice sounds
"familiar" as he tells Tarwater to "’Be like me, young
fellow’ . . . ’don’t let no jackasses tell you what to do’"
(222). And though the words of the gray tramp— this very
corporeal "stranger"— remain ambiguous (Tarwater has all
sorts of tangible and intangible "jackasses" telling him various things to do), the friend appropriates the gray man’s words: "an interesting coincident . . , that he [the
tramp] should say the same thing as I ’ve been saying"— that
is, to oppose his "calling" and the jackasses of authority
(222). Tarwater, of course, raised to appreciate biblical symbolism in which "signs" have definite meaning, has not been trained to interpret events as interesting coincidences
(this is more in line with Rayber’s rationalism), and the
"coincident" may help explain his haste in leaving the gray man (who— probably not coincidentally— is called "the
stranger"— the appellation often applied to the friend).
Although Tarwater seems to accept the friend and his words. 146 when similar words come from a familiar-sounding but unpleasant-looking man on a park bench whose eyes hold "a malevolent promise of unwanted friendship," Tarwater reacts with distaste. The tramp, old and ugly with a familiar voice, could perhaps be too similar to Mason for Tarwater, and the jackasses could thus refer to the friend and the
face in the water who are telling him to drown his cousin.
Though some of these voices have "bodies" and others do not,
Tarwater has trouble knowing which to follow, as well as the ultimate sources and meanings of the various messages he
"hears."
In addition to the friend, who is both echo and tempter, there are even further echoes in the novel--echoes that reverberate among characters clouding definite boundaries, as they do in As I Lay Dying. Vocal reflections in O ’Connor’s novel further counter the authoritative voice of Mason. Merging identities become much more prominent in O ’Connor’s text because the echoes among character voices are so strong.
Characters quite simply sound very much alike. Even if the Devil is not physically embodied, one might argue, it still might be possible to know him by the quality of the voice— he ought to sound very different from the voice of
"Truth." Such is not the case, however, in this novel. If
Tarwater hears Mason’s messages echoed in the child preacher
Lucette, he also can hear his great uncle in others, such as 147
Rayber or his friend, as he can see him in the "dim-wit"
Bishop and in Rayber. And these others are often on the
surface much less aligned in belief with Mason than Lucette
is.
Echoes among characters cloud distinctions among them.
Rayber, for instance, uses the old man’s language when he continually tells Tarwater that he needs to be "saved":
"’You need to be saved right here and now from the old man and everything he stands for,’" Rayber tells Tarwater (233),
realizing that "the boy’s salvation depended" on him (226).
And both Mason and Rayber speak of raising Tarwater to be
free: Mason tells Tarwater, "’I saved you to be free, your own self!’" (133), reminding him that he " ’sit[s] here in
freedom’" because Mason saved him. Rayber also, however, claims to want Tarwater to be "free" (165), telling him he cannot be free of the old man without his help (224).
Rayber even employs his uncle’s own words when he tells him he has to be "born again" to the "real world" (168).^®
The friend even sounds like Mason: though a devil
figure, he echoes the language if not the sentiment of old
Mason when he tells Tarwater, for instance: "That old man was a stone before your door and the Lord has rolled it away. He ain’t rolled it quite far enough, of course. You got to finish up yourself but H e ’s done the main part.
Praise Him" (150). When the friend urges Tarwater to give up the idea of baptizing Bishop he also sounds much like 148
Mason, again although the sentiment is counter to Mason’s
expressed wishes:
You have to take hold and put temptation behind
you. If you baptize once, you’ll be doing it the
rest of your life. If it’s an idiot this time,
the next time it’s liable to be a nigger. Save
yourself while the hour of salvation is at hand.
(221)
The friend uses Mason’s language and, like Rayber,
seems to be repeating sections of Mason’s messages. But
like Ovid’s Echo, who can alter meaning simply by truncating
sounds, these textual echoes of Mason can "sound like" him
while being fundamentally opposed to his beliefs. The
problem with this kind of echoing among characters is that
it makes distinctions so fuzzy— messages so opposed ought to
sound very different, and yet they do not.
These voice echoes among characters highlight shaky
boundaries and contribute to the sense one can get in this
novel of there being one single character, manifested in the various characters. The ambiguity surrounding these various
voices and the general merging of voices allow O ’Connor,
ultimately, to conflate the voices in Tarwater (while still maintaining their separateness by having them "speak").
Internalizing the tension of voices contributes to the
silence that so frightens Tarwater and also makes clear-cut
distinctions among other characters questionable. 149
The voice echoes among characters create a tremendous
sense of merging identity— to a greater degree than
Faulkner’s text creates. Faulkner’s echoing among characters emphasizes that one voice is not suppressible
because it can be revived in any other character, because boundaries among them are not as stable as it might seem.
But in their closed-in narcissistic world, O ’Connor’s characters have nearly no boundaries among them; they see
self everywhere they look. Tarwater, for instance, can see himself as a reflection of Mason: Rayber tells him he is just like the old man and has his future before him (227) and also as a reflection of Rayber: both were seduced and
baptized by Mason, rejected him at age fourteen and apparently look alike (184). But he also faces the problem of seemingly merging identities around him. This novel shows a "demented mirror world of doubles, where the self is always experienced as other, and the other apprehended as a reflection of self" (Bleikasten 151). There is indeed a
remarkably strong emphasis on reflections of all sorts in this novel— in physical characteristics as well as situation.
Like the original Narcissus, Tarwater continually sees himself reflected— in mirrors of glass or water. Walking
through the city, he sees "his own form alongside him in a
store window, transparent as a snakeskin" (218). In the park, he talks to his reflection in the fountain pool. As 150
Tarwater is making his way back to Powderhead, plagued by the persistent thirst, he drinks deeply at a well and then looks "down into a gray clear pool, down and down to where two silent serene eyes were gazing at him" (256), and it takes him "more than a mile to realize he had not seen" the vision (256). He again sees a "pale reflection of himself, eyeing him darkly" in the window of the rapist's car as they drive along.
The mirror images are not confined to literal reflection in glass or water. As O ’Connor describes
Bishop’s face in the park scene, as the sun shines brightly in the child’s, "His face might have been a mirror where the sun had stopped to watch its reflection" (221). Actually, the retarded child’s face is a mirror for those around him.
Most noticeably it is a mirror of Mason’s absent face;
O ’Connor emphasizes the physical similarity again and again.
Mason is even shocked when he first sees the "likeness and unlikeness" of himself in Bishop: "The little boy somewhat resembles old Tarwater except for his eyes, which were grey like the old man’s but clear, as if the other side of them went down and down into two pools of light" (136). The
"welfare woman," Rayber’s wife, cannot handle her
"exceptional child" mainly because he bears "the face of
’that horrible old man’" (230). As Rayber stares at the burnt out Powderhead, he envisions Mason’s face with an expression of misery, and when Bishops tugs at his hand, he 151
glances down "continuing to see the same expression and
barely noting that it was Bishop he was looking at now"
(233). And Tarwater notices, as he walks through the
streets between his own reflection in the storefronts and
the cousin he tries to avoid looking at, "the silent country appeared to be reflected again in the center of [Bishop’s]
eyes" (218)— eyes which are "fish-colored" like Mason’s
(251).
Tarwater and Bishop both have "old" looking faces
(151), and Rayber notices when they are leaving for the boat
together, that "the two figures, hatted and somehow ancient"
seem "bound together by some necessity of nerve that excluded him" (239). Tarwater has reasons beyond physical
appearance for seeing himself in Bishop; the first time he
sees the child (as he visits Rayber’s house with old Mason), he bursts out in anger at him: "’Before you was here, I was here’"— Bishop has taken over his place in Rayber’s house
(1 4 2 ).28 The effect of this profuse doubling is indeed
disturbing, since although the novel shows distinct choices
separating various characters, one can find little to
separate one "individual" from another.
As a Narcissus, continually seeing self reflected in
one form or another, Tarwater is necessarily disturbed by
echoes as well as reflections. Tarwater cannot distinguish
clear-cut oppositions among voices in general since he finds
the same voice— his own voice in fact--echoing in many 152
characters. Devil and prophet and ordinary human sound
alike. Thus it becomes impossible to label one voice as
authority and one voice as rebellion. Rather, there seems
to be one voice in constant tension within itself; it is
difficult to posit a speaking devil and a speaking God outside of Tarwater. The source of any voice remains unknowable. Mason thinks he is sure of the words that come directly from the Lord; the commandments he hears are
transcribed in capital letters, but Tarwater and reader cannot have the same certainty about voice origins. And
these are all especially crucial problems in a novel that
foregrounds the issue of responding to authority.
If the prophet Mason sees himself as a vocal tool for the Lord (as Tarwater also does at the novel’s end as he goes to shout the truth to the sleeping children of God),
O ’Connor’s use of echoing voices casts doubt upon the whole idea of simple repetition of The Word as well as upon our ability to know the source of the word. If Mason’s authoritative voice that refuses to die is a primary echo in the text, other uses of echo, such as the voices that seem to follow their own wills, the "stranger," and the echoing among characters, reveal more of the Gothic subversiveness of the text. When the friend speaks with Mason’s words, he resembles Ovid’s revisionary Echo, who has the ability to repeat while at the same time changing meaning. When Rayber and Mason both speak of making Tarwater "free" or of his 153 need for "salvation," they also can have totally different
ideas in mind.
The text ultimately serves as evidence of an unresolved conflict between acceptance and rebellion at the role of
Echo. In it we can see both character and author
struggling with a "prophetic" voice and a rebellious voice.
Like As I Lay Dying, this novel includes a subversive Gothic use of voice that shows how echoes can challenge and disturb any quest for absolute silence. With its greater emphasis on corporeality— embodying a voice that seemingly ought to be disembodied— O ’Connor’s novel reveals an incomplete attempt to fix voice origin that ultimately just extends the problem of knowing sources. The greater degree of character merging created by voice echoes among characters helps
internalize the unresolved tensions, thus further complicating the notion of outside, knowable sources and increasing the unsettling effect of the work.
Unlike Faulkner’s novel, O ’Connor’s text emphasizes a patriarchal authority with some of its echoes, and thus can appear to miss the revisionary potential of the feminine repetitive voice of Echo. At the same time, its "grotesque"
features (including murder and rape), its bellows rising up
from some human depth, and its emphasis on the uncertainty of voice origins and the resulting subversion of authority that lies behind voices all show O ’Connor including a
"diabolic" voice, if not assuming it herself. Though the 154 patriarchal voice seems to be the strongest, winning out on the final page of the novel, the conflict is so intense and balanced throughout that the novel as a whole seems to lack a resolution. In leaving the clash of authoritative and subversive echoes to dominate the novel, O ’Connor creates a disturbing text that remains ambiguous about the proper response to authority. 155
Endnotes
1. They are often listed together, of course, as examples of Southern Gothic or grotesque, and Joseph K. Davis has examined "Time and the Demonic in William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor." Martha Stephens does claim that O ’Connor’s early story "Wildcat" owes too much to Faulkner’s "That Evening Sun Go Down" (147).
2. Though The Violent Bear it Away has a third-person narrator, the narration throughout is colored by the character who is the focus of a particular section (Tarwater, Rayber, or Mason). The action unfolds in a similarly patchwork fashion, with frequent flashback and occasionally the same scene presented more than once, from different points of view. The comic/tragic tones are also similar. Martha Stephens notes (in a rare comparison of the texts) that the opening Powderhead section of O ’Connor’s novel creates a kind of "affectionate and amused tolerance" for the characters and that it "constantly teeters on the edge of outrageous comedy, that is of farce, but, much like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, never quite tips over into it" (114-15).
3. James Grimshaw, Jr., in his The Flannery O ’Connor Companion, explicitly rejects the notion that her position as a woman writer is worth discussion. O ’Connor also seems less interesting as a female writer perhaps since she seems to place herself in a predominantly masculine tradition of philosophy and literature— she admired and often referred to her readings of Catholic philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas or Teilhard de Chardin and put herself in the tradition of Hawthorne, for instance.
4. She had little patience with those who misunderstood her intentions. In a letter to her agent responding to an editor’s criticism of her first novel, for instance, she writes: "I presume he will not take the novel as it will be left to my fiendish care . . . . or that he would like to rescue it and train it into a conventional novel . . .The letter is addressed to a slightly dimwitted Campfire Girl, and I cannot look forward with composure to a lifetime of others like them" (quoted in Montgomery 16).
5.She writes to her friend, playwright Maryat Lee, for instance: The thing for you to do is write something with a delayed reaction like those capsules that take an 156
hour to melt in your stomach. In this way, it could be performed on Monday and not make them vomit until Wednesday, by which time they would not be sure who was to blame. This is the principle I operate under and I find it works very well. (HB 349)
6. Ronald Schleifer notes that characters in Gothic novels and in O'Connor's works are especially caught up in this search for their beginnings (477).
7. Leona Sherman, for instance, finds feminine power in Radcliff's women exploring castles (293) Kate Ellis discusses the "landscape" Gothics create "in which a heroine could take initiative in shaping her own history" (xii).
8. Andre Bleikasten, for instance, emphasizes the "sustained note of dry and bitter fury" (142) in O'Connor's voice: Yet with O'Connor laughter is never harmless, and her savage humor seldom provides comic release . . . Far from dissolving evil in farce, it emphasizes its demonic character and calls attention to its terrifying power of perversion and distortion (140) Bleikasten notes that since critics so often read non- Christian writers in a Christian light, it is fair to read O'Connor independently of her own expressed Christianity (147), and he concludes that "the Catholic orthodoxy of her work is at least debatable" (156).
9. Mason in many ways is similar to the deceased father in O'Connor's short story "The Comforts of Home," who comes back and speaks to his son, Thomas, urging him to "be a man" (393) and to show his mother (and the young woman she tries to help) "who's boss" (392). Thomas and Tarwater both must face the nagging and insistent voice of the father. O'Connor's emphasis on these masculine authoritative echoes reminds one of both her Catholic orthodoxy and the physical legacy she inherited from her own father— the Lupus that killed them both. In her own life, O'Connor had sufficient reason for being concerned with an inability to escape the Father, even a father who was not a physical presence.
10. John R. May develops the novel's use of the parable of the Sower in The Pruning Word, discussing the effects of the "seeds" on both Rayber and Tarwater.
11. Critics are is general agreement with the fact that, as Carol Wilson puts it, Tarwater "has grown into the old man's future" (84). Debate arises over how to take this fact. Mary Buzan sees it as a triumph, that "Tarwater is represented in the novel's concluding chapter as heroic, perhaps even 157 admirable, for having accepted the prophet's mantle" (34). For Bleikasten, it is a "surrender" (149), and for others such as Carol Schloss, Tarwater ends in madness, making the novel ultimately a failure.
12. When he is alive. Mason’s voice has other echo-like qualities. It is described as detached from his body when he expounds upon his escape from Rayber: "his voice would run away from him as if it were the freest part of his free self and were straining ahead of his heavy body to be off" (135). Mason’s tales of history, "beginning with Adam expelled from the Garden and going on down through the presidents through Herbert Hoover and on in speculation toward the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment" (125), and his tales of their own recent family history apparently are repeated to Tarwater throughout his boyhood at least once a week (157), so often that he knows which parts of the story to pay attention to, which parts bore him, and which parts best illustrate "his uncle’s craft" (160). Mason’s "story always had to be taken to completion. It was like a road that the boy had travelled on so often that half the time he didn’t look where they were going" (162). The story is so familiar to Tarwater that, like a child with a favorite bedtime story, he complains about missing parts: " ’You skipped all that part about how he [Rayber] came when he was fourteen to give you all that sass’ . . . ’Say the sass’" (163). At a climax of his story, when he relates how his nephew Rayber had described him in a "schoolteacher magazine," Mason becomes so upset that he can only echo himself, repeating the same words: "’Called myself!’ the old man would hiss, ’called myself!’ This so enraged him that half the time he could do nothing but repeat it. ’Called myself. I called myself. I, Mason Tarwater, Called myself! . . .’" (134). When Tarwater is riding toward the city with the salesman Meeks, the voice he hears most is not the one beside him but the voice of Mason narrating the family history Tarwater had heard so often. As Meeks rambles on about the value of work, Tarwater "was not listening to this advice" (156). O ’Connor comically intersperses a further relation of Mason’s central story with comments from Meeks which "The boy didn’t appear to hear" (158). Meeks elbows him to listen to his good advice about "Hard Lessons from Life," but Tarwater turns his head to the window and apparently listens instead to Mason’s story continue (158-59).
13. Mason has a similar effect on Rayber who says ironically at one point he is "Descending to speak with the shade of my dead uncle" (232) As Mason serves as a father figure, Rayber offers to take over from him, to be Tarwater’s father, but Tarwater rejects the offer (188). Bleikasten notes that in O ’Connor’s novels, rebellion 158
"ends each time in unconditional surrender to the parental powers which they attempted to escape" (143).
14. Paulson notes, in fact, that Mason perceives himself as a double for Jesus (101).
15. Richard Giannone draws even more biblical significance to this lion in "The Lion of Judah in the Thought and Design of The Violent Bear it Away."
16. As Jill Baumgartner notes, the rape is finally the "sign" that Tarwater had demanded from the Lord (146). O ’Connor explains in a reply to a letter from a teacher that the rape "was a very necessary action to the meaning of the book" because: The man who gives him the lift is the personification of the voice, the stranger who has been counseling him all along; in other words, he is the devil, and it takes this action of the devil’s to make Tarwater see for the first time what evil is. He accepts the devil’s liquor and he reaps what the devil has to give. Without this experience of evil, his acceptance of his vocation in the end would be merely a dishonest manipulation by me. Those who see and feel what the devil is turn to God. Tarwater learned the hard way but he has a hard head. (Cash 69)
17. Bleikasten relates the "humus" of the soil with the humility Tarwater acquires at the grave, smearing his face with the dirt (150). Buzan notes that "For Tarwater the old man’s grave is a sign of grace. It saves him from the responsibility of a broken covenant and establishes inescapably the old man’s truth and spiritual authority" (42).
18. And as the Lord continues to remain silent, silence becomes dominant also in relationships among characters. Tarwater himself in the days following Mason’s death often appears to others as the "silent boy" (153). Even immediately after the death, he treats the corpse with silence for a long time; he finishes his breakfast "in a kind of sullen embarrassment as if he were in the presence of a new personality and couldn’t think of anything to say," finally telling the body to "Hold [its] horses" (129). At other times Tarwater remains quiet around real strangers and his other uncle. He is "stupidly silent" on meeting Rayber for the first time (176). His silence annoys both the salesman Meeks, who drives Tarwater to the city, and the truckdriver, who drives him away from the Lodge late in the novel, who had picked him up only to be kept awake by the boy’s talking. Rayber, who thinks the boy’s rehabilitation can be accomplished through rational dialogue, often becomes 159 exasperated by Tarwater’s silence: "The ride up [to the Cherokee Lodge] had been oppressively silent, the boy sitting as usual on his side of the car like some foreign dignitary who would not admit speaking the language" (213). He hopes the beers he allows Tarwater to drink at the lodge will "loosen his tongue" (222) which earlier he had thought was "permanently slowed" by a shock received during his visit to the evangelist meeting (206).
19. As Tarwater often refuses to talk and apparently even to hear what he does not want to hear. Mason sometimes uses silence to his advantage. In his narratives, for example, he would sometimes pause "and let the weight of [the] mystery sink in on Tarwater" (128).
20. In Lucette’s sermon, we have a rationale for the disturbance caused by echoes of Truth that break through silence: "Jesus grew up and raised the dead," she cried, "and the world shouted, ’Leave the dead lie. The dead are dead and can stay that way. What do we want with the dead alive?’ Oh you people!" she shouted . . . (204) Lucette ascribes to the world the sentiment stated by O ’Connor’s famous Misfit in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" that Jesus "thrown everything off balance" by raising the dead (132). If bodies stayed buried and dead voices stayed silenced, there would be little to challenge us, and we would not have to worry about hearing the prophet’s disturbing "truth."
21. The plot itself also echoes as it develops in a "repetitive manner," as Zhong Ming notes (54). And as Michel Gesset points out, O’Connor uses the same motifs (birds, clothing, colors) over and over, "the motifs repeated like an echo that gathers volume ..." (102). Sometimes whole scenes are relayed twice, from different perspectives; the scene in the city park, for instance, comes first from Rayber’s point of view and then from Tarwater’s. Bleikasten notes that in this novel, as in Wise Blood. the end repeats the beginning:"The story comes full circle: otherness is resolved into sameness, difference into repetition" (150). Words sometimes echo on within characters’ minds: "The obscenity [that Tarwater involuntarily yelled at the store woman] echoed sullenly in his head" afterward (258). Rayber listens to an echo within his head also as he repeats "I must have infinite patience, I must have infinite patience" (207).
22. When Tarwater then uses the telephone to call Rayber, he is stunned as he listens to Bishop’s breathing— a "bubbling noise," O ’Connor describes it with foreshadowing of Bishop’s fate, "the kind of noise someone would make who was struggling 160
to breathe in water" (172).
23. Paulson calls the stranger Tarwater’s "doubled self" (108). The stranger sounds like Tarwater, as Mary Buzan points out: "Echoing the defiant cynicism that Tarwater has hurled at Mason before the old man’s death, this stranger persists in giving Tarwater bad advice, encouraging him, for example, to burn Mason rather than bury him and contributing to his getting drunk" (37).
24. All of the words that get stuck in throats or spill out of them. Mason’s words that are driven into Tarwater forcibly by the rapist, the words as seeds in Tarwater’s blood, and Tarwater’s physical pounding away at the silence surrounding Rayber’s closed door all express voice and sound as tangible substance. Even the words that Mason writes on the "schoolteacher magazine" when he cannot speak (THE PROPHET I RAISE UP OUT OF THIS BOY WILL BURN YOUR EYES CLEAN-168) or those Tarwater writes in the lodge registry (NOT HIS SON-217) give a physical form to voice. Rayber describes the command to baptize as a boulder blocking Tarwater’s path (237). Mary Strine notes this importance of the physical to O ’Connor’s project: Throughout the novel abstract truths and attitudes are expressed in terms of concrete physical sensations. Therefore, old Tarwater’s eccentric figure is firmly planted in sight before he is allowed to pass away . . .For dramatic balance, then, it would seem necessary to give his opposite, the devil, a physical reality also. Rather than create another character as physically prominent as old Tarwater, the author chooses to present him as an intimate, natural voice with unpronounced physical features and habits. He is thus able to slip unobtrusively in and out of any situation. (51)
25. The words are apparently audible for Tarwater, and yet we learn, after the near baptism, that he "scarcely heard the voice" of his friend, too shaken by his brush with accepting the role of prophet by baptizing Bishop. Since Tarwater is the only one who can "hear" this friend, it is very odd that he should "scarcely hear" him.
26. Rayber and Meeks (188) both ask Tarwater the same question: Suppose nothing happens?
27. Mary Buzan explains that Bishop’s spectacles and his eyes that resemble Mason’s "not only reinforce their physical, familial ties but also suggest an initially surprising spiritual kinship by specifically emphasizing their vision, the major prophetic faculty" (39). 161
28. Suzanne Morrow Paulson gives a detailed account of the profuse doubling in the novel, locating its roots in the narcissism of the major characters. In "Apocalypse of Self, Resurrection of the Double," Mary Buzan notes that "The physical resemblance that Tarwater and his would-be victimizers [Meeks, Rayber, the friend, the rapist] share— their sharp, narrow faces— points to Tarwater’s participation in his fate" (36). Bleikasten’s observation that the novel presents "a demented mirror world of doubles" (151) is certainly bourn out by the text, since every character is reflected in some way in every other character. When Rayber first sees Tarwater, for instance, he remains "for an instant frozen before what might have been a mirror thrust toward him in a nightmare. The face before him was his own, but the eyes were not his own" (184). He continues to see himself in the face (187) and the "thrust of jaw" (196), as well as in their similar situations, at the hands of Mason. CHAPTER IV:
Beloved : Haunting and Healing Echoes
Toni Morrison often describes her project as writing the books she feels were missing from her reading experience— those specifically that treated the lives and concerns of the African-American communities she knew.
Although she studied Faulkner’s work closely as a graduate student and readily admits to a "grotesque" quality to her fiction, the people and situations of her texts are in many ways original enough to argue against one’s treating her work as "echo" of previous Gothic or grotesque fiction, or of Faulkner or O ’Connor in particular. Beloved. for instance, has neither the backwoods Southern setting nor the concentrated time frame of As I Lav Dying or The Violent
Bear it Away. And although there is some humor in its pages,1 Beloved’s characters themselves seldom appear as comic, grotesque creations, in the manner of Anse Bundren or
Mason Tarwater. There is an essential dignity about
Morrison’s main characters that brings the often grotesque occurences of the novel to a level beyond the bemusement that is a possible response to events in Faulkner’s or
O ’Connor’s novels.
162 163
In other ways, however, Morrison’s novel does echo As I
Lav Dying and The Violent Bear it Away. It too contains a primary figure who has died and yet remains a controlling presence in the story— though in Beloved this figure is a more literal ghost than Addie or Mason are in the other novels. The story is also told in a repetitive, echo-like p fashion from the perspectives mainly of members of a central family of characters. Like the other two novels.
Beloved treats that family’s struggles with identity and with absence and death. Even the main images and motifs— of water, fire, and journeys— reflect those of the earlier texts. As Addie is taken over the river and rescued from it, for instance, and Bishop is drowned in the lake,
Morrison’s characters Sethe, Paul D, and Beloved all escape through or from water.^ Morrison’s Sixo is burned alive, as Tarwater burns the house and the stranger and Dari tries to burn Addie’s body. And almost every main character of
Beloved (again like the Bundrens and Tarwater) takes a life- altering journey (out of slavery literally and metaphorically).
While Morrison’s novel has features that could be termed "grotesque" such as the graphically described murder of a child, the "tree" of scars on Sethe’s back, and many other atrocities of slavery, the characters are in general more sympathetic than in O ’Connor’s novel, in which true identification with characters is very difficult and the 164
grotesque seems the most evident Gothic feature.* In
general, Morrison’s novel seems to rely less on the
grotesque element in its Gothicism. ’ If Faulkner’s novel
especially illustrates an "inward" turn in Gothic fiction,
with most of the "hauntings" and threats to identity,
rationality, and order operating on a psychic level,
Morrison’s employs more of the many traditional Gothic
features to show hauntings that are on the outside as well
as the inside. While much of the drama occurs within the
characters’ minds, there is also an "outward" turn to this
Gothic, where frightening forces take the classic forms of
ghosts and haunted houses. The themes of psychic
disintegration and the challenges of death, corporeality,
and merging identities still appear, but in Beloved they
take more overtly Gothic forms.®
Beloved opens upon a scene that plunges us into what we
might think is a typical ghost story— a former slave, Sethe,
and her daughter Denver live in a house haunted by a
spiteful, sad, or perhaps just lonely and rebuked ghost of a
baby girl, Sethe’s other daughter whom she killed eighteen
years earlier to save from a slavecatcher. The ghost, as we find in the opening pages of the story, leaves tiny hand
prints in cakes and soda crackers in lines on the floor, manifests itself in pulsing pools of red light, and has the
power literally to rock the house and everything in it.
Later in the novel, at the opening to its second main part. 165
Stamp Paid— the former underground railroad worker who now
claims the privilege of visiting any house in the community without knocking— is blocked from entering Sethe’s house by
haunting from yet different ghosts.
Within the house there is a young woman named Beloved whom the story presents as a re-embodiment of the baby ghost
grown to the age she would have been if she had lived. And around the house there are voices— the voices Stamp Paid can hear from the road as a "pack of haunts" (170), or "a conflagration" (172), and a "roaring" (181). They form a noose or wall around the house (183-84) that Stamp
identifies as the "mumbling of the black and angry dead"
(198), the indecipherable words of "the people of the broken necks, of fire cooked blood and black girls who had lost
their ribbons" (181). And mixed in with these voices, we
learn, are also the thoughts of the women of the house—
their "unspeakable thoughts unspoken" (199). All of these hauntings, by disembodied and reembodied ghosts or by voices, place the novel explicitly within a Gothic tradition. We have prising red light in a haunted house, heroines in peril (Sethe even making a desperate fleeing journey), taboo subject matter (such as rape and mothers killing children), and even the vampire-like sapping of life by the undead Beloved--all of which evoke thoughts of Ann
Radcliffe’s heroines fleeing through dangerous forests from haunted castles, of the incest and rape in Matthew Lewis’ 166
The Monk, or of Bram Stoker's beautiful, tempting
vampiresses who would suck the life's blood.
In addition to its spooky and unsettling subject
matter, Morrison’s novel reflects the Gothic tradition in
its central theme of things coming back— the return of the
unsuccessfully suppressed past. In this novel, memories,
stories, even dead babies return to reinforce Sethe's notion
that nothing ever dies, that after things happen they remain
as "thought pictures," not just in the "rememory" but "out
there, in the world" where you can literally bump into them
(36). The echoes of things live on— in infinite
reverberations.
The novel especially illustrates the "breaking out of
those forces which still haunt the mind of the individual
and the culture" (Punter 149). The characters live in a world in which "the day’s serious work" is "beating back the
past" (73).® The "ghosts" of the novel— "the dead Miami no
longer content to rest in the mounds that covered them"
(155), for example, or Beloved herself— bear out Ella's
claim that "people who die bad don't stay in the ground"
(189).
Morrison, like Faulkner and O'Connor, uses voices as
crucial elements in her novel's haunting. Like Ovid's Echo,
the echoes in Beloved are (mainly) feminine voices that
refuse the suppression of forces as powerful as death,
transcending (in limited ways) both body and time. In a 167 novel that shows us the tremendous power of words and voice, voices can echo well beyond their sources. Beloved’s own
"gravelly voice" (60), for instance, becomes more than the voice of the female baby who was "too little to talk much"
(4) when killed. Her voice apparently was acquired on "the other side." Other voices besides her own seem to issue
from the body of Beloved. As Denver tells Paul D at the novel’s end, she sometimes thinks Beloved was "more" than her sister (266). And Beloved’s own words— her memories— support this notion, since she apparently speaks of capture
in Africa, of experiences on a slave ship (210-13), and also perhaps of death, of the other side where there is no light and she lies in the fetal position (75). Other echoes in
this novel include the disembodied voices that surround the house in the middle section of the novel when "124 was loud"
(169). The conflagration of loud and hasty voices of the black and angry dead that Stamp Paid runs up against at the house, he believes, are what is left of the lynched men and women: "black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken" (180).
In As I Lay Dying, echoes achieve their most subversive effect by the challenges they present to autonomous identity and distinctions between life and death, while in The
Violent Bear it Away echoes are primarily challenging because they complicate any idea of a knowable authority 168
outside of the self. Toni Morrison’s Beloved combines and changes Faulkner’s and O ’Connor’s emphases on identity and
authority with echoes that are simultaneously subversive and potentially healing. The echoes speak despite attempts to
silence them; they triumph over death and certainly jeopardize any rationalistic conceptions that would separate past from present, life from death, or individual from
individual. They are "worrisome" (to use the term Sethe applies to ghosts— 13) to both character and reader.
Morrison also presents these echoing voices as voices that must be heard, since silence in this novel, though desired by characters at times, is not an ultimate goal but rather indicative of an unhealthy, solipsistic state.
Beloved emphasizes the power of words in general.
Denver, for instance, knows the world outside her house is a place "where words could be spoken that would close your ears shut" (243). A shout drives away the initial ghost
(37), and the words of Sethe’s story drive away Paul D
(187). Naming and defining characterize the power of those who control the words. Thus Stamp Paid can regain some sense of individual power when he changes his name from
Joshua (184), Baby Suggs elects to keep the names that connect her with a man she loved, and Sixo learns that
"definitions belonged to the definers— not the defined"
190). 169
Since word and voice are so powerful, echoes, although without clear sources, still have the potential to be powerful forces in the novel. In their capacity to survive death and suppression and to revise in repetition, they contribute to the novel’s disturbing nature. The loss of
"origin" for a voice that comes from "beyond" disturbs because it is irrational, but an echo can be even more subversive of authority (of forces that would like to silence certain voices), because it repeats a "real" voice, that has for some reason been suppressed. Echoes from the dead and echoes among living characters emphasize the past that will not remain suppressed and the threats to identity it still presents.
In its use of echoes. Beloved continues the tendency of
The Violent Bear it Away to show an increased emphasis on both corporeality and merging of voices. As part of this text’s movement away from the interior Gothicism of
Faulkner’s novel, the ideas of psychic disintegration and responding to authority are examined from a socially broader perspective; while one family still is central to the action as in the other novels. Beloved places that family in a historical context that extends the focus beyond the one family. Because the novel’s setting and central concern are slavery and its aftermath, it presupposes threats that are outside of oneself and very physically real. The questions the text must face about shaky identity and problematic 170
authority are determined by the context of slavery.
The corporeal, for instance, takes on special
significance because of this broader perspective- Because
the novel presents a world in which the primary threats to
an individual's sense of self come from their surrounding
society and in which there are so many physical scars that
remain to remind of what has passed, the corporeal must play
a prominent role. While Faulkner’s novel uses a dead body
to achieve its focus on presence and absence, the echo of
Addie’s voice, like other free floating voices mentioned in
the text, stays significantly disembodied. In contrast,
O ’Connor, who also presents the dead body of Mason and his voice living on beyond that body, endows a presence that
logically should be only "voice" with the body of a gaunt
"stranger." By embodying that voice, O ’Connor illustrates a desire to fix identity and voice origins that ultimately is unachievable. In Morrison’s novel, echoes also take a range of positions along a line of physicality, with some truly
disembodied voices, some that seem tied to a physical source
such as the house, and others that are apparently re
embodied— issuing from Beloved herself. In general, however, there is a greater emphasis on the physical in
Beloved than in the other novels. Although critical attention so often centers around the "speakerly" aspects of
this text, placing it in the oral tradition so important in Q African American literature, the "presence" that the "oral" 171 narrative characteristics give to the voices of the novel is also achieved through this emphasis on physical presence.
Sethe’s mother-in-law. Baby Suggs, illustrates this emphasis on physicality. Her death, like Addie’s and
Mason’s, is described in the first pages of the novel, but we learn in retrospect that she, like Mason and Lucette, was a preacher of "the Word" (177-78). What she preaches--her
"word"— is a celebration of physicality. She lets her
"great heart beat" in the presence of her congregation, rather than preaching a verbal sermon, and she urges the gathering in the clearing to love their hands, mouths, necks, inside parts, and especially their hearts. She preaches the body more than any traditional "word": "This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved"(88).
In some respects. Baby Suggs is an Echo like O ’Connor’s
Lucette; despite her own crippled body, she issues a powerful voice. Unlike Lucette, however, she does not repeat some standard message of Christian faith, but instead preaches love of the physical. Her occupation as shoemaker and her knowledge of healing bodies also ground her in a fleshly reality. She knows how to care for Sethe’s damaged body and recognizes at once in the shed which children can be saved.
Paradoxically, in this text, despite the close identification of Baby Suggs with the physical, the clearest 172 example of an echo that is voice without body is the voice of Baby Suggs heard by her granddaughter Denver. As Denver stands afraid to leave the yard to seek the help she knows she and her mother need, her dead grandmother’s voice comes to her: "Denver stood on theporch in the sun and wouldn’t leave it. Her throat itched; her heart kicked— and then
Baby Suggs laughed clear as anything" (244). Denver even holds a conversation with this echoing voice:
"You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina?
About your daddy? You don’t remember nothing
about how come I walk the way I do and about your
mother’s feet, not to speak of her back? I never
told you all that? Is that why you can’t walk
down the steps? My Jesus my."
But you said there was no defense.
"There ain’t."
Then what do I do?
"Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on." (244)
Denver does leave the yard and thereby saves herself by gradually becoming part of a living, healthy community. The ghostly, disembodied words of a dead grandmother, which ought to be frightening and, according to the logic of As I
Lay Dying, present clear challenges to Denver’s sense of self, is instead accepted as natural and helpful. Of course, Denver has grown up in the presence of a ghost and thus is used to contact with another realm, but 173 interestingly, Denver’s "sense of self" does not even develop until she follows the words of this disembodied voice— out into the world where Nelson Lord can tell her to take care of herself. It is outside the house that she can perceive this "new thought, having a self to look out for and preserve" (252).
The novel— and especially Baby Suggs herself-- make clear that the primary threats to identity are not uncanny disembodied voices or irrational, challenging notions of death, but very physical dangers from the outside. The primary threat to any character’s sense of self in the novel is slavery: the constant work, the lack of family ties, the invasions of body and soul perpetrated by whites all make self awareness nearly impossible. Baby Suggs, for instance, until she gains her freedom only has "the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home" because as a slave she "never had the map to discover what she was like"
(140). She is constantly worked and abused (before getting to Sweet Home), she does not remember a mother, and her children are taken from her. She only discovers her own heartbeat after getting freedom (141).
The other former slaves presented in the novel suffer similar challenges to identity because of very external causes. Sethe struggles with sense of self because of the system of slavery that did not allow her to know her mother, that allowed boys to violate her body, and that threatened 174
to break up her family. Paul D also is so impressed with whole families who know who belongs to whom because he has
been deprived of the defining extended family. In his own
search for self he wonders what it means to be a man.
Since slavery is so physical a form of oppression and
leaves such physical scars, it makes sense that so many of
the echoing voices that remind characters of it are tied to physical sources. Although Baby Suggs’ voice is obviously disembodied when she talks to Denver, returning from beyond,
far more often in the novel echoes are tied to very concrete
sources. The corporeal sources or sites of voices also give
them more "presence" than truly disembodied voices. The world of the novel is a world that is full of physical scars
and reminders of the past— Sethe has a tree on her back.
Baby Suggs has a crippled leg, family members are missing—
and so echoes of that past naturally fit with corporeal
reminders.
The emphasis on body in the novel centers around female
bodies specifically. The corporeal sources of echoes in
Beloved also are usually feminine. Claire Kahane,
links the maternal body and the Gothic castle and shows how
contemporary Gothics, in their move from the unseen to the
seen, dispense with the Gothic house altogether and make the
female body the site of hauntings ("The Gothic Mirror" 343).
Beloved gives us both a literal Gothic house and a "haunted"
(or haunting) female body. The echoes in the novel revolve 175 around the house— 124 Bluestone Road— and the body of
Beloved herself. The Gothic house and its corresponding image of the mysterious female body are very visual manifestations of the novel’s emphasis on things coming back, and the echoing voices that issue from or float around them show the strong connection of echoing voice with corporeality and especially with the female body.
The voices that Stamp Paid can hear around Sethe’s house, for example, are echoes of suppressed voices that revolve around a corporeal and feminine site. These voices he can hear even from the road, he thinks, are from all sorts of abused slaves and former slaves, but mainly they are the voices of "black girls who had lost their ribbons"
(181) since what had finally "worn out his marrow" beyond the stink of human blood cooked in lynch fires was the "red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp" (180) that he had found floating in the Licking River. These voices without body, like the voice of Echo in myth, float around the cave— the hidden depths of the Gothic space, the haunted house that is 124
Bluestone Road.
The house is important as a structural element in the novel and as a strong feminine space. 124 is the central setting for most of the novel’s action and also narratively unifies the novel since each of its three main sections begins with reference to the house: the opening line "124 176 was spiteful," is echoed at the beginning of Part 2— "124 was loud"— and of Part 3— "124 was quiet." The house shelters mainly female inhabitants (Sethe’s two boys ran away at young ages and Paul D— the last of the Sweet Home men, who has suddenly shown up on Sethe’s porch at the start of the novel— is driven gradually out of it). The house is also strongly associated with Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in- law and the only real mother figure she has had in her life, who lived and died there. It is clearly both sheltering and frightening. Although it is described as "peopled by the living activity of the dead," (29) the women realize its intimate connection to their lives and refuse to leave it.
Like the catacombs beneath the monasteries and dungeons beneath castles in traditional Gothics, usually associated with feminine depths, the house on Bluestone is much like a buried, secret place. It is like a cave in having only one entrance (the front door which is blocked in the beginning by a pulsing pool of blood-like light) and in having windows on the ceiling instead of in the walls. It is grey and white (on Blue-stone Road) and has many dark, hiding places, such as the storeroom and the cold-house or Denver’s grove of trees near the creek in its back yard. Even Mr. Bodwin, the abolitionist who lived there as a child, remembers only that women died there and that he hid and buried things there (259). 177
The house had once been a symbol of nurturing; the community remembers "the days when 124 was a way station, the place they assembled to catch news, taste oxtail soup, leave their children, cut out a skirt," or get tonics and stitch pillow slips (249). It was the site of the celebratory meal that fed hundreds with a banquet that started with a few berries (much like the Biblical loaves and fishes). In the present tense of the novel, however, it is "other" to those who once received its bounty— it is shunned. As such it could also be considered feminine; as
Kahane explains, "Because the mother-woman is experienced as part of Nature itself before we learn her boundaries, she traditionally embodied the mysterious not-me world with its unknown forces" (336). If the house is the feminine Other for the community, it is also associated with the mother for
Sethe who staunchly refuses to leave the house that she must associate with Baby Suggs and with the daughter she killed. For Denver too, the house is like a sheltering mother. For years she has refused to leave the house that she always regarded as "a person rather than a structure. A person that wept, sighed, trembled, and fell into fits"
(29).
Of course the voices that surround this feminine space are still disembodied to an extent, because a house or a cave cannot speak— the site of voice is not the source.
These voices are very much like Echo’s voice after she has 178 lost her body. Cut off from contact with another (because of her unrequited desire), she continues to speak from lonely, rocky woodland caves. Morrison has the voices of people spurned by a whole society and violently killed (as
Echo is in the Longus version of the myth^^), concentrated around a lonely, cave-like, mother-like structure.
Morrison shows that echoes have strong ties with specific places even when they are disembodied, and these ties add to the novel’s emphasis on the real and physically present scars of the past. And in a novel that focuses so much on motherhood^ and especially the perils of motherhood and of losing one’s mother^® there is special significance in the site of the echoing as an example of what Freud calls the "uncanny." His notion of the uncanny— the disturbingly familiar that has been kept concealed and which arouses dread and horror because it appears strange and unnatural— is closely associated with the maternal.
Echoes return to the cave or to the mother as Beloved returns to her mother, or as Sethe and Baby Suggs long for their own mothers.
The echoes that issue from the house’s physical counterpart, the body of Beloved, show an Echo who has in a sense been given back her body and again reveal the emphasis the novel places on the corporeal. As Rebecca Ferguson notes. Beloved is an all too corporeal reminder of the 179
"other side"— of the irrational and unsuppressible (113).
As Paul D puts it, "’She reminds me of something.
Something, look like. I’m supposed to remember’" (234). Not only does the baby ghost return as a beautiful, insatiable nineteen-year-old body, but it even saps life from Denver and especially Sethe, both of whom become thin as Beloved puts on flesh.
Beloved especially illustrates the connection between
the Gothic castle or haunted house and the female body that often seems to have replaced them as the central figure in modern Gothics. Beloved’s body conceals much; appearing simple on the outside (without even the intricacies of lines on her palms), it withholds identity and (like the house) has hidden depths— such as the "inside part" where she has
Paul D touch her and the womb that apparently by the end of the novel contains a baby about which there is surprisingly
little comment. Morrison gives us a very physical woman, whose presence we must account for, but the real identity-- who or what the woman is— remains a mystery, although her ghostly origins seem clear enough.
Elizabeth House, however, gives a well-supported argument that Beloved is really a psychologically damaged young woman who experienced the middle passage from Africa and was kept by a white man locked in a shed, and who is a ghost only in others’ perceptions of her. Morrison does seem to give us this "out," balancing the supernatural with 180 a logical explanation (a technique common to many Gothics).
But in essence the logical explanation is no less horrifying
(and perhaps more so) than the supernatural— much like in
Lewis’ The Monk for instance, when ghostly moans from beneath the convent turn out not to issue from a ghost at all but from a partially clad "fallen" nun, near death and clutching the decaying body of her infant to her chest.
Similarly, following House’s reading of Beloved, we are left with an extremely unsettling vision— if not of a ghost then of a woman who has suffered incomprehensible evils, alone and pregnant, wandering through the woods— much like the woman called Wild in Morrison’s next novel. Jazz.
But Beloved could also be more than Sethe’s murdered daughter or an unrelated young woman. Since she speaks of the Middle Passage, Beloved is also usually perceived also as "the haunting symbol of many Beloveds— generations of mothers and daughters— hunted down and stolen from Africa"
10 (Horvitz 157). Like the mythological Echo whose desire makes her speak after she has no body, the voices of the nameless "60 million and more" to whom the novel is dedicated echo in the words of one Beloved who has come back.
Beloved as echo shows the power of voice to triumph over suppression. As Sethe’s daughter, she acquires voice
(as well as body) after being, in her ghostly form, driven from the house by Paul D yelling, "God damn it! Hush up!" 181
(18). Her absence is described as "silence" that Denver wanders through (19), Despite the natural desire of most characters to silence her, however, she comes back to repeat her story. As an even broader echo, of all the voices that
seem to collect in her. Beloved illustrates the power of voice to continue beyond death and its normal silencing of
the individual.
The collective voice that Beloved expresses is also significantly feminine, recalling mainly female experiences and speaking with an intense desire— for the absent face of
the mother who "forgot to smile." She speaks of a place where it is dark and there is no room to move, where "a lot of people is down there. Some is dead" (75). She also speaks of a nameless "he" who "hurts where I sleep" and who
"puts his finger there" (212), articulating the experiences of millions of violated women as well as those who experienced the Middle Passage.
Although we have a single physical source for the voice of Beloved, we are still left with questions about its origin— about the true identity of Beloved. There are a number of possibilities: Is this a psychologically damaged young woman escaped from her captor? Is this Sethe’s dead daughter? Is this the embodiment of collective memories?
The novel suggests that Beloved, in fact, is all of these. 182
So despite its giving body to echoes, the novel still accomplishes some subversion of clear-cut notions of identity. But there is a difference between voices that truly have no knowable source and the many voices that seem to conflate into the single source of Beloved’s body, because the one physical "source" does help "fix" identity.
Like O ’Connor’s stranger, the body here lets character and reader interact more with what might otherwise be ambiguous, floating voices. But whereas O ’Connor seems to have endowed her devil with body in an attempt to limit possibilities, to make sure we recognize devil as devil, Morrison opens up possibilities with her embodied voice(s). We do not have a central tension between alternative choices (like O ’Connor’s of Mason/devil or acceptance/rebellion) because Beloved can be both individual and collective ghost and physical person without the voices coming into conflict, since the experiences of all the women in these possibilities are similar--they all speak out of a remembered suffering.
Besides concentrating voices around a single house,
Morrison, with the body of Beloved, gives corporeality back to those who had lost it. Doreatha Drummond Mbalia argues that this physical concentration of so many in the one body is necessary so that the community can drive off the past in a very concrete way (91). For Rushdy also. Beloved "must be reincarnated in order to be buried, properly" (571). 183
While it is true that having a visible form for the memories and fears of the past makes them easier to talk about and control, the body also allows Morrison to explore physical desires and fears from the perspective of those who lose and regain a body (ghosts or even slaves gaining the freedom to realize their bodies). If the novel suggests that voices such as those forming a noose around the house can still speak after apparent suppression, she goes one step further in letting an Echo have her say with the voices concentrated in the physical Beloved. Beloved’s desires, her insatiable hunger, and her appreciation of sweets, dancing, and color reflect the physical needs and appetites of the two-year-old she was, and they also reinforce the love of body that Baby Suggs preached. Beloved’s fear of falling apart and of not being able to "join" also reflect fundamental problems faced by humans because they are corporeal beings, and especially by mothers.
The emphasis on feminine corporeality in the echoes that return from the past allows Morrison to do more than simply present us with the existence of voices that refuse suppression. Instead, she can explore the theme of motherhood and emphasize the very physical nature of the scars of slavery with echoes that concentrate around physical sources. Any jeopardizing of notions of identity commonly accomplished in other Gothics through disembodied voices, can still occur although there are physical sites 184 and sources for the echoes— we cannot, for instance, know who Beloved is although we can perceive her as body. Echoes that return from the past in this novel are subversive despite their often "embodied" quality.
Like other Gothics, this novel presents not only voices that refuse suppression breaking out as echoes but also echoes among characters that cloud distinctions and blur boundaries. Although there are many echoes among characters in the other two novels, there is more merging in Beloved.
The echoes among characters that create merging voices in
Faulkner’s novel are subversive primarily because they show how difficult it is to shut up or bury any disturbing voice;
Addie, though buried, continues to speak through Dari, and
Dari, though locked up in Jackson, continues to speak through Vardaman, Cash, and Dewey Dell. In O ’Connor's novel, echoes among characters are disturbing because voices that ought to be in opposition become hard to tell apart.
The voices of authority and rebellion become conflated to form an internal tension. In Morrison’s novel, although voices often become hard to tell apart, there is no such internal tension, again because of the context of slavery-- authority, it is assumed, is primarily external and primarily evil. So instead of an echoing that subverts by repetition or one that subverts with an internal tension, we have echoes among characters that reflect a profound merging 185 that itself can be dangerous to a unified self. If echoes that live on from the past help subvert any definite idea about Beloved’s identity, reverberating echoes among characters especially highlight the problem of fragile identities.
The poetic sections of Part 2 that give us the
"unspeakable" thoughts of the women of 124— the voices that are mixed in with the voices of the angry dead— create a sort of merging among the three women since their voices become jumbled, echoing each other. Even before this section, the women have their own "code" from which Paul D feels excluded (132). But as they voice their "unspeakable thoughts," voice ties them to each other much more. As the sections of stream-of-consciousness memories begin, we hear echoes in what the three women say. Sethe’s "Beloved, she my daughter. She mine" (200) is echoed by Denver’s "Beloved is my sister" (205) and "She’s mine. Beloved. She’s mine"
(209) and then again by Beloved herself who says, ambiguously enough, "I am Beloved and she is mine" (210,
214). After each woman has her say, Morrison gives us a section of chorus-like, poetic blending of all three voices, in which it is barely possible to distinguish the speaker by what is said and not possible at all by the way it is said.
After Beloved repeats some of what she says in her monologue section and after a conversation of sorts between Sethe and
Beloved and one between Denver and Beloved, this section 186
ends, for example :
You are my face; I am you. Why did you leave me
who am you?
I will never leave you again
Don’t ever leave me again
You will never leave me again
You went in the water
I drank your blood
I brought your milk
You forgot to smile
I loved you
You hurt me
You came back to me
You left me
I waited for you
You are mine
You are mine
You are mine (217)
Clearly, identity becomes questionable, not only for
the reader trying to sort out the voices, but also for the characters who can say "me who am you." Each voice repeats what another has said, with some variation, and in this
2(1 echoing loses some of its autonomy. “ The mother’s
identity becomes mixed with the daughters’, and as Sethe’s monologue makes clear, both her mother and Baby Suggs are 187 also drawn into this merging of identities.The fears
Sethe expresses in her monologue— of being split in two between the child on her back and the one in her stomach and of eating herself up (202)— are echoes of Beloved’s fears of falling apart or being swallowed (133, 212-13). (Sethe also is "licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved’s eyes" 57.) So when it is finally, metaphorically at least. Beloved who eats up Sethe, we can see the true dangers of "the join.
Sethe, whose identity as loving mother is implicitly challenged by her act of killing her child, also suffers the threats to identity inherent in the shaky boundaries between self and other. As Paul D says, she "didn’t know where the world stopped and she began" (164) or as she tells Paul D,
"I was big . . . and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide" (162). She feels Beloved is her "best thing" and desires the kind of merging symbolized by the merging voices. She surrenders to Beloved as she wanted to when
Beloved was first buried: "I wanted to lay in there with you. . . I couldn’t lay down with you then. . . Now I can.
I can sleep like the drowned, have mercy" (204).
Sethe is left in an "insane" stage after the poetic climax of the novel, only able to echo on— continually to repeat the story of that act and the events leading up to it to an uninterested listener. Beloved: "and the more she
[Beloved] took, the more Sethe began to talk, explain. 188 describe how much she had suffered, been through, for her children . . . None of which made the impression it was supposed to" (241). After Beloved is driven away, Sethe is left echoing Baby Suggs' last days; Paul D discovers her lying in the same bed, having given up like Baby Suggs. And like Beloved’s constant refrain of "You left me," Sethe tells Paul D that "She left me," that her daughter, the part of her that was her "best thing" has gone. We are left speculating about whether or not Paul D will be able to convince her that her identity is not totally wrapped up in the absent Beloved, that Sethe herself is her "best thing. "^4
Obviously, too much merging can lead to a loss of identity that is very dangerous and to a repetition that is without hope. Sethe’s echoing becomes meaningless and unhealthy. While critics often praise the choric section of the novel as an example of the "semiotic"^^ and see the fluid boundaries among the three women as an ideal of womanhood, this stage of blending apparently cannot be sustained and leads only to destruction.
Beloved is such a threat in the novel not only because she represents vengeance from the past, but also because she represents an antithesis to community. Despite her desire to join with Sethe, she exhibits a fundamental narcissism in which anyone beside self and mother is almost beneath her notice. Although she accepts Denver’s constant attention. 189 she makes it clear that "She {Sethe} is the one. She is the one I need. You [Denver] can go but she is the one I have to have" (76).As Mathieson notes,"Beloved cannot imagine that she and Sethe are separate . . . death has locked her psyche into eternal infancy" (2). While she may seem also to want Paul D— she seduces him in the cold house-
-this too seems to result from Beloved’s great need for connection with the mother— Sethe. In this seduction, she most likely is either attempting to drive Paul D away from
Sethe or join in their relationship.
Beloved’s profound narcissism even takes a symbolic form in the many references to water and reflection. When
Beloved feels rebuffed by Sethe, as Sethe and Paul D make love under the stairs, for instance, she "ran through the woods to the stream. Standing close to the edge she watched her reflection there" (101). Beloved even claims to have been "in the water" (75), but mainly she recalls seeing the face in the water— the face of the woman who left her, whom she now equates with Sethe. She describes this face she wants to join repeatedly in her monologue in Part 2: "the woman is there with the face I want the face that is mine"
(211). Earlier, when she sees this face in the darkness of the shed, she also equates it with herself: "’Over there.
Her face,’" she tells Denver and when Denver asks whose face. Beloved replies "’Me. It’s me’" (124). Beloved sees the face in the water as her own— "She smiles at me and it 190 is my own face smiling" (214)— yet she is not able to join with it. When Beloved, like Narcissus, tries to embrace the watery image it breaks up: "I wanted to join. I tried to join, but she went up into the pieces of light at the top of the water" (214).
When Beloved recognizes the face as Sethe’s, she can get much closer to that joining. The face finally smiles back at her, gazes back at her, and gives her its undivided attention. One of the amusements of their crazy days
(between Sethe’s recognition of Beloved and Beloved’s expulsion) significantly involves the water of the stream again:
Anything she [Beloved] wanted she got, and when
Sethe ran out of things to give her. Beloved
invented desire. She wanted Sethe’s company for
hours to watch the layer of brown leaves waving at
them from the bottom of the creek, in the same
place where, as a little girl, Denver played in
the silence with her. Now the players were
altered. As soon as the thaw was complete Beloved
gazed at her gazing face, rippling, folding,
spreading, disappearing into the leaves below.
She flattened herself on the ground, dirtying her
bold stripes, and touched the rocking faces with
her own (240-41). 191
Through Beloved’s echoing of Sethe, they nearly become one: "She imitated Sethe, talked the v/ay she did, laughed her laugh and used her body the same way down to the walk, the way Sethe moved her hands, sighed through her nose, held her head" (241). Because Beloved talks the way Sethe talks, especially, their merging is so evident in the echoing poetic section. Their "conversation," though disjointed, can make some sense because they echo key terms used by each other. Sethe’s "Didn’t you come from the other side" is answered with Beloved’s "Yes. I was on the other side"
(215). Sethe’s "You rememory me?" is answered with
Beloved’s "Yes. I remember you" (215). Though we know they have slightly different meanings for what they say (Sethe’s other side means death; Beloved’s might mean Africa), because they echo each other, they can be brought closer by their voices. Thus Beloved’s use of the plural pronoun:
"Will we smile at me?" to refer to herself and Sethe is the culmination of the echoes between their voices.
Denver, though she participates in the echoing somewhat, is more independent than the other two, even in
the section of merging voices. Early in the novel especially, she is threatened by the kind of consuming merging Sethe and Beloved experience. She and Beloved stare at each other’s reflections in the stream (101) as Sethe and
Beloved do later, and Denver loves to be gazed upon by
Beloved: "Denver’s skin dissolved under that gaze and became 192 soft and bright" (118). But she does not succumb to total annihilation of a distinct self, and the degree of echoing between Denver’s and Beloved's voices reflects this lack of complete merging. Although in the final poetic section of the women’s "unspeakable thoughts" Denver echoes key phrases of the other two women, such as "You are mine" or "never leave me again," in the section in which Denver and Beloved speak to each other, the meanings are far more disjointed than they are when Sethe and Beloved speak to each other.
Often their comments are contradictory, and always they are unconnected. Speaking of herself and the ghost, Denver says
"In the quiet time, we played," and Beloved responds, "The clouds were noisy and in the way," referring to the clouds that separated her from the woman with flowers. "I could only hear breathing," Denver says referring to her deafness, and Beloved answers with an apparent reference to the man she has discussed earlier who died while lying on top of her in the ship’s hold: "The breathing is gone; only the teeth are left" (215-16). When Denver refers to Baby Suggs as
"She" in "She said you wouldn’t hurt me," Beloved responds with "She hurt me," implying not Baby Suggs but the woman . who left her. While certain catch words echo in these lines, it is not an echoing that leads to character merging, because each speaks according to her own aims and meanings-- there is a crucial detachment between the two.
Within her monologue, in the desire she expresses for 193 her father to come and take her and Beloved away, Denver reveals a need beyond Beloved’s need for "the join." She would not be content with the merging that satisfies Sethe and Beloved, because she still desires the masculine outsider. In the poetic combining of voices following the monologues, Denver’s is the voice that urges caution in the amount of joining: "Don’t love her too much . . . Don’t fall asleep when she braid your hair," she says, apparently to
Beloved, whom she still feels she must protect from Sethe.
Denver’s monologue, although spoken to no definite audience, is the least caught up in self or a narcissistic relationship; of the three, it is the one most able to accomplish communication with an outsider. Sethe’s becomes too insular with its use of the second person "you"— she speaks to Beloved and only Beloved. Beloved’s monologue is even more solipsistic; although it uses the third person, it employs a private language and private images that even careful readers of the novel must take pains to interpret.
Denver, on the other hand, consistently employs a third- person point of view, and although the stream of consciousness might be confusing had we not had previous insights into Denver’s life, she does provide new information ("My daddy do anything for runny fried eggs. . .
Grandma uses to tell me his things") and identify people and events she talks about. 194
Since Denver ultimately saves herself by establishing connections outside of the triangle of women in 124, her echoing voice can be seen as an ideal balance of individuality and communion. She experiences the pleasure of a degree of "joining" with the others, but she maintains the crucial autonomy and concern with something outside a narcissistic relationship. Though she echoes the others, she is not only an Echo figure doomed to an all consuming desire, and her voice thus contains that crucial distinction.
The novel makes clear that connection with the community is the one true source of survival and salvation; thus when Sethe locks the door of 124 "tight behind her"
(198) she sets up the insanity that befalls them. And though their private sojourn in the house begins with many voices, more often disconnection equates with silence, and connection is accomplished through voice and echo (although as we have seen this can be taken too far). Denver, for instance, the one character whose survival we are most assured of, moves from the silence of total disconnection to a real life in the community. If the echo of Baby Suggs’ voice starts her on the journey to connection, other voices complete it. Lady Jones’ sympathetic "Oh, baby" and the conversations with other women in the community help establish a bond, and the echoing voices of the women who 195 come to rescue Sethe actually do more to rescue Denver.
Silence, on the other hand, indicates a cutting off that is extremely dangerous to self and survival. Denver is most isolated when she becomes deaf for two years as a child when another child. Nelson Lord, questions her about the time she spent in jail with her mother. Her hearing is
"cut off" by Nelson’s question and "cut on again" by the sound of the ghost crawling up the stairs (103). The deafness that makes her walk "in a silence too solid for penetration" (103) takes her away from Lady Jones’ school and contact with other children. Her description of the silence and the only sounds she heard closely resembles
Sharon Cameron’s explanation of why voice can threaten identity (see Introduction, page 35-36). Denver explains:
All I could hear was me breathing but sometimes in
the day I couldn’t tell whether it was me
breathing or somebody next to me. I used to watch
Here Boy’s stomach going in and out, in and out,
to see if it matched mine, holding my breath to
get off his rhythm, releasing it to get on. Just
to see whose it was--that sound like when you blow
soft in a bottle only regular, regular. Am I
making that sound? Is Howard? Who is? That was
when everybody was quiet and I couldn’t hear
anything they said (207) 196
Denver suffers from this disconnection, and is not consoled even by the strong sense of sight she acquires to compensate. When she feels badly after arguing with Beloved over the apparent attempt to strangle Sethe in the clearing, she is not satisfied with the sight of Beloved, but instead longs for a word from her (105). For Denver, "Anything is better than the silence when she answered to hands gesturing and was indifferent to the movement of lips. When she saw every little thing and colors leaped soldering into view"
(121). The voice that connects people is more important and more healthy than the gaze that can be abused. Thus Baby
Suggs dwindles away when she gives up "The Word" for gazing at color.
Silence is associated with death as well as disconnection. When Paul D works sorting Confederate wounded from the dead, he does so by "listening in the dark for groans of life in the indifferent silence of the dead"
(268). Thus it is an "insult" to the community when Sethe
"competed" with the silence of the gravesite at Baby Suggs’ funeral, "as she stood there not joining in the hymns the others sang with all their hearts" (171)
Silence, then, is presented as unnatural and unhealthy;
Denver learns to associate it with weakness and hunger
(239). But echo can be a solution to lack of connection.
Too much echoing among voices, such as that created by unbounded narcissistic desire, leads to dangerous merging. 197
but a kind of echoing different from that which causes the
narcissistic "join" accomplished between Sethe and Beloved
creates a communal main character that has strength, and
does survive, even if Sethe does not. This communal voice
becomes evident when Sethe’s neighbors decide, after Denver
has made connections with them, that something has to be
done to drive away Beloved and save Sethe. Ella, who
"didn’t like the idea of past errors taking possession of
the present," realizes the need to "stomp out" the past if
it doesn’t stay behind. She will put up with ghosts, "But
if it took flesh and came in her world, well, the shoe was
on the other foot. She didn’t mind a little communication
between the two worlds, but this was an invasion" (256-57).
Thus she leads the women to Sethe’s house.
The voices that Sethe hears as the community women
approach her house to drive out the ghost come from a clear
source in the present, yet they are also echoes--both of the
past and among each other. They are the echoes of the voices from Baby Suggs’ religious gatherings in the
clearing, and as such they take on the power of the voices
from the past:
For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come
to her with all its heat and simmering leaves,
where the voices of women searched for the right
combination, the key, the code, the sound that
broke the back of words. Building voice upon 198
voice until they found it, and when they did it
was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep
water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It
broke over Sethe and she trembled like the
baptized in its wash. (261) 97 Although it may end up as sound more than voice, it is powerful because of the combination of "voice upon voice"— the voices of women with a common goal despite their variety of belief (some rely on Christian faith and others bring along talismen-257). As an example of merging, the voices show an echoing among the women that is far more productive than the echoing among the three women of 124.
Here, merging voices do show a different kind of blurring of boundaries between characters, but that blurring is not frightening because it is presented as a solution.^®
Significantly, it is "the earnest syllables of agreement" that Denver first hears when the women approach in prayer. She cannot hear the initial prayer, but she can hear the echoing "Yes, yes, yes, oh yes. Hear me. Hear me.
Do it. Maker, do it" (258). Because these are echoes of the sentiment of the prayer by so many voices, they seem more important that the initial words themselves. When the women let their voices echo among each other, they create a voice that is immensely strong and that can save.
This voice is finally the singing voice that Sethe was deprived of after killing her daughter and being led to 199 jail. The seemingly proud silence Sethe maintains on that occasion keeps the community from supporting her with sound:
Otherwise the singing would have begun at once,
the moment she appeared in the doorway of the
house on Bluestone Road. Some cape of sound would
have quickly been wrapped around her, like arms to
hold and steady her on her way. As it was, they
waited till the cart turned about, headed west to
town. And then no words. Humming. No words at
all. (152)
The words, as well as the sound, are important to the communal support that is absent in this case.
If in The Violent Bear it Away merging creates the sense of a single character that encompasses the tension of opposing voices, Morrison’s novel uses a different kind of voice merging to create the community as a character— many people acquire a single voice. And this communal voice appears to be the strongest in the novel. Although Sethe’s fate is left open ended, the novel makes it clear that the community will survive. Morrison says that the novel is
"the story of a people rather than a person" (Sitter 17), and the strong picture we get of the community supports the claim.
If silence in Faulkner’s text seems a desired, though unattainable goal and in O ’Connor’s text disturbing because both feared and desired, Morrison’s use of silence shows it 200 as something to be feared only. Since community is presented as the key to survival and silence equates with a
disconnection from community, as Denver discovers, there is
"nothing worse" than the silence that cuts one off. Echoes can be productive because they provide connection, but they can also do harm if they get out of control and contribute
to a narcissistic merging of identity that subsumes autonomy. Whether they are disembodied or embodied echoes
of the past or echoes among characters, however, they do break through the isolation of silence.
In many ways, the story itself is an echo that breaks an unnatural silence— a silence that indicates a disconnection from the past. The final section of the novel describes how Beloved is forgotten "like a bad dream" (274), and repeats the message that this is "not a story to pass 2Q on" (274-75). The story has been passed on, however, and even the final utterance of "Beloved" that concludes the novel shows that in the word at least she has not been completely forgotten.
In breaking through the silence of a forgotten past, as an echo, the story also both repeats and revises a particular story— the story of the escaped slave Margaret
Garner who became an Abolitionist heroine after killing a child to save her from slavery.^® As repetition and revision, it is also an example of what Gates terms a 201
"signifyin(g)" text since it builds on and reworks the original "story." Since she does not aim to write biography, Morrison’s project is necessarily "revisionary."
As Rushdy notes: "Keeping in touch with the ancestor, [for
Morrison] is the work of reconstructive memory" (567).
Morrison obviously builds on more than the one story of slavery and puts the "voices" of slaves and former slaves in the mouths of her characters. Thus in addition to the clear
"echoes" within the text, any character’s speech is echo like. The voices of the novel serve as echoes that make the past present.
The final pages of the novel, however, reveal a discomfort with the role of echo breaking the silence of the past. "This tension between needing to bury the past as well as needing to revive it, between a necessary remembering and an equally necessary forgetting, exists in both the author and her narrative" (Rushdy 569). An empty, continual echoing such as Sethe’s near the novel’s end, ceases to be productive. The hesitation about this story’s telling therefore follows what the text has shown about echoing— that while it can provide connection, any kind of connection can be taken to unhealthy extremes. Echoes are dangerous because they are so powerful and potentially subversive; we are right to be frightened by them, but it is also essential that we hear them. 202
Ultimately the Gothic vision of the novel has shown us that echoes present powerful and necessary challenges to rationalist notions that would separate past from present or parent from child or one person's "story" from another’s.
The echoes of the angry dead that float around the haunted house and the echoes of the sixty million housed in
Beloved’s own voice show the past that encroaches even when we do our best to forget it. The echoes among characters show the interrelatedness of characters, especially those in family and community, and the fragility of independent, autonomous identity. Gothic spaces and Gothic echoing voices help Morrison tell this story of slavery and its unsuppressible psychic effects, even though, as the echoing refrain of the final two pages tells us, it was not a story to pass on.
The corporeality attached to these feminine voices emphasizes the presence of the past in physical form and highlights the importance of motherhood in the text. It does not "fix" identity or voice origin, however, and so it does not negate the Gothic effect other writers also achieve through more straightforwardly disembodied voices. The character merging achieved through voices that echo among characters challenges like the merging in the other novels, but also shows two different views of connection— the dangerous, solipsistic kind in which two consciousnesses can merge and lose individuality and the healthy, productive 203 kind in which individual voices can come together to gain strength. 204
Endnotes
1. Paul D and Stamp Raid's laughter is contagious as they discuss Sethe's tendency to try murder every time a white man comes to the door (265), for instance, and the narrator often gives us brief comments that reveal a sense of humor even in describing tragic events : she mentions "The misery" as "Sethe's rough response to the Fugative Bill [i.e. her killing of the baby]" (171), notes that Sethe, Denver, and Beloved would have made good candidate for a lunatic asylum (250), and comments that Baby Suggs’ burial next to the dead child was a "neighboriness Stamp Paid wasn’t sure had Baby Suggs’ approval" (171).
2. Rodrigues notes that "Torn fragments of the past float out of [the characters] Sethe and Paul . . . Their voices join those of Baby Suggs . . . and of Denver" to tell the tale (154). Page notes that the novel is "built on repetition" (34).
3. Sethe escapes over the Ohio River (and gives birth in its water). Paul D escapes through the flood of the prison yard, and Beloved emerges from a creek, and remembers the water of the sea.
4. Audrey Vinson, commenting on Morrison’s work prior to Beloved, focuses on the "grotesque" quality of her novels, placing her in a tradition including Faulkner and O ’Connor and others (7). In a 1981 interview with Bessie Jones, Morrison explains this grotesque element: "because quiet as it’s kept much of our business, our existence here, has been grotesque" (141).
5. This perhaps marks a break with the "Southern grotesque" so often noted by critics.
6. Bernard Bell places Morrison’s fiction in categories of poetic realism ad Gothicism (8).
7. Duvall notes that like Absalom. Absalom! and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Beloved produces ghosts "as a response to patriarchal oppression" (84), another traditional Gothic element. The situation Morrison shows us, of Beloved sapping life from Sethe (and to a lesser extent from Sethe’s other daughter, Denver) implicitly calls to mind a vampire legend. By the end of the novel Sethe literally wastes away (in body 205 and mind) as Beloved puts on weight, demanding food and attention from Sethe with insatiable desire. Morrison never suggests that Beloved literally sucks Sethe’s blood, but she does give us a scene in Baby Suggs’ clearing in which Beloved kisses Sethe’s neck which had just been strangled by the invisible fingers that had been massaging it. There are overtones of menace and sexuality, as well as the implications of a nursing baby that seems to prompt Sethe’s response of "You’re too big for that." Denver, for instance, blames Beloved for the whole incident, thinking she was the one who had tried to choke Sethe (as Sethe herself thinks the fingers felt like the dead baby’s). Beloved thinks afterward as she is jealous of Sethe and Paul D making love (in one of the few sections of the novel from her perspective) that she had been "so close, then closer" to Sethe in the clearing. This kissing scene, while on many levels as ambiguous as most of the supernatural aspects of the novel, does prefigure the metaphorical vampirism the novel presents us with later. And Beloved does fit certain elements of vampire folklore; she is portrayed as coming back from the grave after dying a "bad death" so that she can "prey" on family members, all of which Montague Summers notes as characteristic of vampire legends of various cultures.
8. As Roger Sale puts it, "It is Toni Morrison’s éunbition to create a form, and a storytelling, that keeps alive the struggle to remember, the need to forget, and the inability to forget" (169).
9. Mobley notes that "the text illustrates the call and response pattern of the African-American oral tradition" (193). Harris puts Morrison in "the best tradition of oral performers" (172). Rushdy says "Beloved belongs to that class of novels Gates characterizes as ’speakerly texts’" (586). Sale gives an extended discussion of the novel as "oral text" (42).
10. Rubenstein believes that in Morrison’s work in general the "divisions and splits within individuals . . . mirror their cultural situation. Thus the constriction of the growth of the self is implicitly linked to restrictive or oppressive cultural circumstances" (126).
11. The Gothic itself is often associated with the maternal and the feminine. Norman Holland and Leona Sherman, for instance, see the Gothic castle as "a total environment in one-to-one relation with the victim, like the all-powerful mother of early childhood" (283).
12. Harris claims that Morrison "strips the word down to its original, creative essence; it can be made flesh, or it can destroy" (168). Rigney notes that body and word are 206
closely tied: when Sethe trades her body for the word etched on the tombstone, she is "almost literally translating her body into word" (26), and when Paul D wants to put his story next to Sethe’s, "The body and word become synonymous" (98) — Andrew Levy also mentions that Paul D equates "his corporeal body with his life story" (121). Lawrence also examines "word and flesh as intimate allies" in the novel (190).
13. Deborah Horvitz has linked Beloved with Sethe’s slave mother, saying she is both her dead daughter and her African mother (158).
14. In Daphnis and Chloe Longus includes the tale of Echo, whose music made Pan jealous. Pan caused shepherds to tear her limb from limb, although the pieces continued to sing.
15. Bell notes that the novel highlights a woman’s monthly menstrual cycle by having twenty-eight mini-sections and showing Sethe living happily for twenty-eight days (9-10).
16. Rebecca Ferguson notes that in probing the bonds of mothers and daughters, "Morrison is attempting to express the inexpressible, to speak the ’unspeakable’ partly by exploring domestic space and the space and language of the pre-Oedipal" (112).
17. Most critics, like most characters, accept without question her ghostly origins, following the sentiment of Margaret Atwood’s New York Times book review— that "In this book, the other world exists" (147).
18. Barbara Of fut Mathieson agrees that "Her dream-memory of death merges with a racial nightmare" (12). Rebecca Ferguson notes that "Since Beloved brings the whole traumatic experience of slavery with her, she not only knows more than she could otherwise have known in her previous life, but she also contains the effects that slavery had, its profound fragmentation of the self and of the connections the self might have with others" (114). Horvitz develops a thesis that Beloved herself is Sethe’s mother as well as her daughter (157-): "The author creates a fluidity of identity among Sethe’s mother, Sethe’s grandmother [the face Beloved longs for], and the murdered two-year-old, so that Beloved is both a individual and a collective being" (163).
19. Karen Carmean explains it well: Beloved is a fleshly ghost, she says, but is also "far too complex to be pinned down so directly, or to be pinned down at all in a final, materially defining sense. Like a true spirit, this character remains elusive, embodying certain ideas and functions, embodying not just herself literally but also metaphorically. 207 and always ambiguously" (85). Duvall agrees: Beloved "is simultaneously a material being and the spirit of Sethe’s dead child" (92-93).
20. Barbara Schapiro claims "the monologues reveal an utter breakdown of the borders between self and other" (202). But the monologues really are not identical; rather they echo the form and concern with connection of each other, but have very different content. Holloway calls this a "technique of repetition that functions as a recursive strategy" (519).
21. Sethe says that Beloved is a good daughter, as she herself would have been if given the opportunity, implicitly comparing herself to her own mother, whom she says would never have run away from her (203), and she also identifies with Baby Suggs’ need to ponder color (201).
22. Ferguson attributes this "profound fragmentation of self" to the effects of slavery (114).
23. Bjork notes that "through destabilization and desire. Beloved regains her story, her spirit and voice, but in order for her to perpetuate them, she must envelop the only one who can truly nourish and preserve her presence" (157).
24. Critics tend to believe "Paul D has the capacity to lead Sethe out of her narcissistic isolation" (Schapiro 204), but the text gives no assurances— only the comforting note that he will bother to try.
25. See Rigney (17, 74) for example. She notes that Beloved’s memories are "thought or spoken . . . in concert with Sethe, as their identities and their racial memories become one, in an elliptical, fragmented and purely poetic sequence of images" (74). For Ferguson, Beloved’s language itself is always like the "semiotic" since it reflects "the infant’s still fluid sense of ’identity,’ ’self,’ and ’body’" (117).
26. Schapiro comments that "The major characters in the novel are all working out of a deep loss to the self, a profound narcissistic wound that results from a breakdown and distortion of the earliest relations between self and other. In the case of Beloved, the intense desire for recognition evolved into enraged narcissistic omnipotence and a terrifying, tyrannical domination" (197).
27. Duvall notes, for instance, that the voices represent a "religious thinking. . . that affirms Baby Suggs’ religion of the body by looking beyond the patriarchal Word for origin" (95). 208
28. This echoing chorus is obviously feminine, as are most other echoes in the text. Yet Morrison makes it clear that men are important elements of the community also. Stamp Paid is the first to alert the community that something unnatural is going on at 124, and Nelson Lord and the "young man" who makes Denver’s face light up at the end of the novel obviously help in her assimilation into the community. But the voices that serve as bridges, among people or between past and present, are female voices.
29. Holloway comments: "Like the litany of repetition that is a consistent narrative device in black women’s literature, these closing phrases of the novel echo between the seeming contradictions of the ’it was/this was not. . and the final words ’pass on.’ The phrase becomes a directive" (517).
30. Duvall even sees ways in which "Beloved rewrites Uncle Tom’s Cabin" (83). CONCLUSION
The figure of Echo remains often in the shadow of her well known beloved— Narcissus. Perhaps because she appears to be such a victim in all versions of her tale— punished by
Juno, spurned by Narcissus, killed through Pan’s influence, deprived of body— her importance can be overlooked. But the phenomenon of voice alone, which is in fact her essence, can provide remarkable insights into fiction and especially into fiction such as the Gothic that includes disembodied echoes as crucial elements of its plotting.
Echo is important to fiction because voice in a text is so like her voice. It is disembodied— not clearly connected to a speaker— but it can continue "speaking" even after that detachment. It has a secondary capacity also; as Echo cannot speak unless repeating another, a text cannot speak unless actively engaged by a reader. Voice written in a piece of fiction also has some permanence; if Echo’s voice cannot die, a textual voice can often at least last long after the death of its source.
Echo is especially important to the Gothic because in their attempts to disturb and frighten. Gothics often employ voices that are more echo than even normal representations
209 210 of character speech or thought. When Gothics present the voice of a dead character (or a ghost) or show other disembodied voices breaking out of constraints of rationality, they emphasize Echo’s ability to be subversive.
Echo’s is a voice that is unsuppressible and that by its very nature strikes us as uncanny. It would seem to defy rules about presence and absence, bodies and life, and individuality. It is also a voice that can challenge authority by appearing only to repeat while actually altering meaning. In a genre that usually attempts these very subversions, then. Echo provides a key to why and how their haunting is effective.
Echo is also important as a female voice— a voice that expresses feminine desire and faces some of the silencing that has traditionally been the lot of women’s voices in the public sphere. In overcoming the silencing and speaking her desire, though in limited ways, she is a figure that can stand for the subversive voice that Gothic has provided for its women writers and readers for centuries. Usually characterized specifically as a feminine literary form, the
Gothic has provided an outlet for women to express fears and frustrations.1 As Kate Ellis has demonstrated, the Gothic voice let women explore the underside of the cult of domesticity and feminine innocence/ignorance (x-xii). In
Gothics women could actually give voice to fears about rape and violence, for instance; "The conventions of the Gothic 211
novel then, speak of what in the polite world of middle-
class culture cannot be spoken" (Ellis 7). Echo as
unsuppressible female voice thus becomes especially relevant
to a "female" genre.
Echo is of course also repetitive, and this repetition
can serve as a metaphor for voice reflections within and among texts. Within texts, echoes among voices can serve a variety of subversive roles— primarily in clouding boundaries between characters and again upsetting balances
between sources and their voices. Among texts, echoes can
lead to all sorts of questions about influence,
intentionality, and originality. Harold Bloom’s famous analysis of the "anxiety of influence" for instance rests on an assumption of ephebe poets echoing (often in revisionary ways) the father/master poet that precedes them. John
Hollander uses Echo explicitly to show how texts are interrelated by misremembered echoes: "The rebounds of intertextual echo generally, then, distort the original voice in order to interpret it" (111).
The Gothic itself, as a distinct genre, may be looked at as echoing, because while its boundaries are far from static or absolutely determined, certain features— the defining features of the form— do repeat from one Gothic example to the next. Thus we expect usually to find a heroine in peril, wandering through dungeons or forests, sexually and violently threatened by an evil villain of 212 questionable sanity. Or we expect a haunting and entrapping castle or house, with ghosts, dead bodies, and other grotesqueries. We expect certain echoing themes, such as the disintegration of patriarchal lines and the decay of traditional structures of authority (such as the Church) and the loss of clear cut identity, with doubling and concealed relationships.
Thus we can find such (in many ways) dissimilar texts as As I Lay Dying. The Violent Bear it Away, and Beloved to be connected by their echoes of traditional Gothics and their echoes of each other. While As I Lay Dying may seem very different from an Ann Radcliffe novel, for instance, primarily because its Gothicism takes an inward turn, there are still echoes that bind the two. There is still, for example, a perilous journey, a grotesque decaying body, taboo subject matter (Dari’s lying on Addie’s coffin, for example), and a blurring of boundaries between sanity and insanity. Similarly, The Violent Bear it Away includes a central (literal and figurative) journey frought with peril, grotesque characterizations, taboo events (such as the murder of a child and homosexual rape), doubling, madness, and challenged authority. Beloved echoes traditional
Gothics even more strongly with its haunted house and ghost, and also repeats the emphasis on journeys, grotesque characters and happenings, subversion of authority, and jeopardized sanity. It is not surprising therefore that 213 these three twentieth-century texts should also employ so many of the seime primary symbols and motifs, such as fire, water, and dirt/earth, nor that they should all open with a dying character or close with the burying, burning, or driving away of some disturbing force.
But each echo of the Gothic is also a revision— as
Echo’s voice is usually not exactly the same as the voice she repeats--and thus each individual Gothic builds the genre, changing and developing it. If Poe, for instance, can place Gothic haunting within a character’s mind,
Faulkner can build on that internalization and give us a physical journey to burial paralleled by a character’s journey to madness. Or O ’Connor can replace the traditional threatened heroine with a young male protagonist haunted by relatives and his own personal devil. Or Morrison can endow a ghost with a physical body and use slavery as a backdrop to Gothic hauntings.
If these Gothic texts repeat and revise each other by echoing, they also employ echoes as significant Gothic features within their stories, and in a sense echo each others’ uses of echo, each achieving a slightly different emphasis or effect with echoes that are disembodied voices breaking out of suppression or echoes that reverberate among characters. Since Echo can be such a powerful subversive force, different Gothic authors can alter the specific uses of echoes in the text without changing the underlying Gothic 214
effect of disembodied and reverberating voices.
Echoes in many traditional, older Gothics share some
particular features that allow them to produce fear and to
confound rationality. Disembodied voices confuse
distinctions between life and death, presence and absence,
and voice and authoritative source. Echoes also help
confuse boundaries among characters whose identities seem to
merge or repeat. Usually, at the ends of these Gothics, the
echoes are silenced and a sense of normalcy returns,
although the possibility of their breaking out again
remains a haunting reality.
Similarly, in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, echoes have a
haunting role. In this text that shows the impossibility of
achieving a final peace and silence, Addie’s returning voice
highlights the unsuppressible nature of Echo, as do the many
echoes of Dari’s voice that continue even after he is locked
away. Faulkner seems to recognize the subversive potential
of Echo’s voice, and explicitly uses disembodied and
reverberating voice to create an eery atmosphere in this overall unsettling novel. Faulkner shows voices as forever
likely to break out of the air like ghostly sulfur shadows, and thus he shows that Echo’s continuing speech has a power
simply in its persistence— it will not go away, even with death. In exploring a theme of "being," he can also employ
echoes to subvert the rationalistic separation of concepts
such as presence and absence or death and life or even the 215
notion of distinct individual identity. Dari’s and Addie’s
questions about what it means to "be"--what life and
identity are— can gain special prominence with his use of
disembodied voices that by their very nature also ask us to
ponder being and identity. Reverberating voices eunong
characters in the novel also beg questions about where one
character stops and another begins or how closely voice can
be tied to an individual being.
If Faulkner’s use of echoes emphasizes irrationality with the breaking out of subversive forces causing confusion
and fear, Flannery O ’Connor shifts the emphasis slightly.
Her use of echoes also blurs boundaries and elicits
confusion, but all with the effect of an unresolved conflict about outside authority— its existence and the proper
response to it. O ’Connor seems to pull back from or remain
less aware of the full subversive potential of echoes,
especially because it is Mason’s authoritative voice that apparently dominates the text, but ultimately her use of
echoes— both those that burst forth and those that
reverberate— also has a Gothically disturbing effect. Since words have a power of their own in this novel, independent of speakers, and since origin of voice is repeatedly made
suspect--especially by voices that ought to be in opposition
and yet sound alike--the text jeopardizes its own conclusion
that the voice of authority (Mason/God) will triumph. The
prophet who must repeat that authoritative voice, with a 216
parrot-like echoing, is still confounded by the revisionary
and resisting properties of Echo.
Morrison, on the other hand, seems well aware of the
subversive powers of Echo, and like Faulkner, explicitly
uses echoes that break free of forces (such as death, time,
or social norms) that would suppress them. As the character
Beloved comes back, so do the voices of the angry dead, and
these embodied and disembodied echoes have a haunting effect
on this novel that, like its Gothic predecessors, also
questions the nature of human existence and identity.
Echoes cimong characters, as in Faulkner and O ’Connor and more traditional Gothics, emphasize shaky boundaries between
individual identities and show characters as likely to merge
and become parts of each other. While all of this
confusion-causing echoing occurs both in Faulkner and
Morrison, Morrison creates a significant revision in her
echoing of Faulkner’s use of echoes; while Echo is still
subversive and frightening, she also becomes healing.
Morrison presents echoes as necessary and productive, as well as dangerous and fearful. Like Baby Suggs’ voice that
returns to save Denver, even the frightening echoes can save
those who hear them. Sethe needs to confront her past in
the echoes provided by Beloved, for instance, and passing
through the echoing stage of voice mergings in Part 2 helps
Denver then be able to enter the true community. 217
Thus as the two female authorial voices of O ’Connor and
Morrison echo Faulkner, they resee the figure of Echo; according to their own particular concerns and emphases, they revise how echoes function in a Gothic text. One such revision involves silence and Echo’s capacity to break silence. Already in the mythology. Echo has a curious relationship with silence; she is at once silenced and impelled to break that silence when another speaks first.
Her voice, in its repetitive quality, precludes any real, lasting silence. And it is this aspect of Echo that
Faulkner, following traditional Gothics, especially stresses. In his text, a complete silence becomes an unattainable ideal, desired yet impossible because one cannot shut up echoes— they keep reverberating. Echo is subversive precisely because she cannot be silenced, and this lack of silence is maddening and frightening.
O ’Connor’s text seems trapped somewhere between
Faulkner’s and Morrison’s in its views of silence and development of echoes. In her text, silence is both frightening and desired. It is associated with the prophet’s role, because of the necessity Tarwater discovers of maintaining silence except to shout the Truth, and it is also associated with the absence of Mason’s voice that haunts Tarwater. O ’Connor seems to be unwilling to go as far as Morrison in showing that disruptive echoes are necessary, positive, and healing, because the text itself 218
hesitates to present authority (and thus the silence imposed
by authority) as negative. But at the same time, O ’Connor
creates enough sympathy for-Tarwater as a reluctant and doomed prophet that the more subversive echoes of the text
often have our support and seem to represent a way out for
Tarwater. Of course because there is so much tension even among the echoes of the text, it is difficult to see a true
inversion of Gothic tendencies; there is instead a hesitant and incomplete move away from Faulkner’s emphasis (a
"traditional" emphasis) on silence as a desired end.
In Morrison’s use of echoes, we can see assumptions similar to Faulkner’s— that echoes cannot be silenced and
that hearing them can be terribly frightening, but the emphasis is quite different. For Morrison, silence is not a desired end, but a dangerous, solitary, and stifling condition. Silence disconnects one from the past, from community, and even from sanity. The irrational ("insane") echoes can save characters from disconnecting silence. Thus subversive echoes, although frightening, can also heal by providing connections.
In these varying perspectives on silence, one can find evidence of subtle differences in motivation for using the
Gothic form. All apparently use it to explore those uncanny forces that always lie below the surface of rationality, but
O ’Connor and Morrison also use it to grapple with questions specifically relevant to themselves as writers. O ’Connor, 219 whose own faith must have foregrounded questions of
authority for her, could use echoes to complicate any
"prophetic messages" that seem to lurk in the text. And
Morrison, who takes on a role of preserving the past in her
novel, can use the Gothic to achieve a social goal— of
breaking silence.
As female literary voices echoing past Gothics, and
even more specifically Faulkner’s grotesque Gothic As I Lay
Dying. O ’Connor and Morrison can revise the role played by
Echo. Echo thus can take a stronger role in a Gothic such
as Morrison’s in which she is asked to remind us of what
should not be forgotten— not just of what cannot be
forgotten. Morrison extends Faulkner’s emphasis on Echo’s unsuppressible nature; if the female voice that will not be
silenced is frightening for him, Morrison seems to be able
to use that frightening potential for deliberate aims, to stress the social importance of remembering, for instance.
Or, similarly, all of the turmoil Echo must face in being compelled to repeat outside voices can take center stage in a text such as O ’Connor’s that explicitly struggles with the
issue of prophecy and individual voice, since for a woman author, questions of "authority" can take special priority.
In addition to the revision evident in the varying uses of silence, these twentieth-century Gothic texts also re examine and revise Echo’s disembodied nature; corporeality
takes an increasingly dominant place in relation to voices 220 from beyond. If classically, and by definition, echo is disembodied voice, this very lack of body implicitly jeopardizes normal expectations about body and being— that the two are fundamentally linked. So the mere existence of a voice whose identity is only in that voice is inunediately subversive. But these Gothic authors, in employing echoes, have not been content to stop at that point. Instead, they have explored varying relationships between voice and body, all within the context of disembodiment.
Faulkner, for instance, sets up a sort of parallel between disembodied voice and the physical by including
Addie’s dead body as such a dominating presence throughout most of the text. The body highlights the same questions of absence and presence as do echoes; Addie Bundren is both there and not there, in body and in voice. Faulkner maintains a crucial distance between the voice and the body, however, so that the voice is unquestionably disembodied.
While echo also dominates O ’Connor’s text she is less concerned with maintaining the distance between body and voice. One of the most significant echoes in her text in fact takes on corporeality; the stranger/friend, although visible only to Tarwater, does receive a physical description. This gaunt, lavender-eyed stranger begins as voice and can become only voice--sibilant shifting of air— yet O ’Connor bothers nonetheless to also give him body.
While this embodiment seems in line with her grotesque 221
project, it also seems evidence of the hesitancy to push echoes to their most subversive extremes, since the stranger
seems slightly less frightening when one can "see" him as an entity separate from Tarwater and distinct from the other pole of authority— Mason, God, etc. Since his voice is so similar to Mason’s and essentially is Tarwater’s own projected voice, having him as a visible other offers some degree of protection from the haunting possibility that devil is not only within oneself but also indistinguishable
from God.
The questions Morrison develops with echoes and the corporeal move away from O ’Connor’s apparent concern with using physicality to fix identity. Even though she provides a body for the primary Echo in her text. Beloved herself, that clearly physical body does not definitively settle any questions about who Beloved is. Instead, for Morrison, the corporeal emphasizes the many physical scars from slavery that remain in her landscape and also helps her develop the theme of motherhood and the importance of the female body.
It is less important for Morrison to confound with disembodiment consistently; her truly disembodied echoes can mingle with more embodied echoes to show hauntings from a past that will not be silenced.
The increased emphasis on corporeality seems tied to a generally outward turn in Gothic features in these texts.
If most of Faulkner’s "hauntings" take place within the 222
minds of the characters, for instance, Morrison returns to
the outward manifestations of the irrational and fearful.
Part of this may be a function of the move away from
particularly "modernist" concerns with interior
consciousness. But in broader terms, a feminine concern with Echo’s body may reflect a discomfort with a total loss
of corporeality. There remains something essentially
disturbing about Echo as a female figure whose powers of
voice are so closely associated with her relinquishing
physicality, and thus any hope for satisfaction of her
desires. These writers seem to emphasize that body too is
important.
As they echo Faulkner’s uses of echo, the two women writers also incorporate more merging of voices. Faulkner presents voices that echo the voices of other characters within the text, with the primary effect of stressing the
fragility of autonomous identity. Boundaries among
characters become blurred as they repeat each other’s words and sentiments, so that in the end "burying" Addie or Dari and silencing their voices seems impossible because the other Bundren voices echo theirs so much. But in O ’Connor’s
and Morrison’s texts, this kind of echoing among characters occurs to even greater extents.
In creating characters who mirror each other to grotesque extremes. The Violent Bear it Away also emphasizes
that characters, even those in apparent philosophic 223
opposition, often sound exactly alike. Boundaries among
characters, and thus boundaries among beliefs, are cloudy
and disturbingly indistinct. This merging in O ’Connor’s
novel helps her to internalize central tensions within the
main character Tarwater and in general to augment the
effects of bodiless voice by complicating once again the
notion of knowable authority outside of self.
Morrison uses echoes among characters especially to
emphasize connection and to go beyond the unsettling effects
Faulkner and O ’Connor create with voice mergings. While
Echo herself cannot achieve the connection with Narcissus
that she craves, echoes within Morrison’s text do provide
connection, through voice mergings that help provide the
strength of community. While some voice mergings can become
so strong that they threaten identities and sanity, other
voice mergings illustrate the hope that lies in connection
with others in this novel. While disembodied and
reverberating voices can be spooky and unsettling,
emphasizing instabilities of origin and authority and
autonomous identity, they also can provide Gothic authors
such as Morrison with a means for showing the strength of voices that refuse suppression and the possibilities for
healing in those voices.
The figure of Narcissus may be especially emblematic
for the modern age and for the South as a "region turned in
upon itself" (Irwin 59), and thus may say much about the 224
essential questions of being and identity raised in texts
such as Faulkner’s and O ’Connor’s which rise out of a
Southern Gothic tradition. But Narcissus’s vocal
counterpart. Echo, reveals the role of voice in the writers’
explorations of those questions and provides a feminine
element that foregrounds issues of authority and Gothic
subversiveness. And in Beloved especially. Echo also shows
a breaking away from the insular, guilt-driven Narcissism
characteristic of the Southern Gothic’s particular form.
Morrison’s echoes show a possibility for connection (with
past and with others) that remains unfulfilled in the
original Narcissus myth.
Echo ultimately has many faces even in Gothic novels
with many similarities of plot, theme, and effect. As
Gothic texts echo each other, they can employ disembodied
and re-embodied echoes in various ways, emphasizing concerns
as diverse as identity, authority, or community. With these varying emphases, these three American Gothic texts ail
express the subversive power of voice that insists on
continuing to speak and echo. 225
Endnotes
1. Kahane feels that "Gothic literature has always seemed especially congenial to the female imagination" because of the maternal space always at its center (337). Leona Sherman explains the pleasure she gets from the Gothic as grounded in the power of the questing heroine or in her power of passive resistance (284). Aiken states that the rebellion of the female Gothic writer is more subversive than that usually found in the typical Romantic, Faustian story (75). Bibliography
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