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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
1 For further reference see Dillingham, William and Watkins, Floyd, “The Mind of Vardaman Bundren,” Philological Quarterly, 39 (1960), 247–51Google Scholar; as well as Rooks, George, “Vardaman's Journey in As I Lay Dying,” Arizona Quarterly, 35 (1979), 114–28.Google Scholar
2 Faulkner, William, As I Lay Dying (1930; rept. New York: Vintage, 1957), 63–64. Pagination for subsequent references to this novel appear parenthetically in the text.Google Scholar
3 Consider how the other members of the family are represented in terms of familiar elements of the natural world. Darl mentions that Cash's head is “like an owl's head, his face composed” (102), and after chopping up the fish, Vardaman comes into view “bloody as a hog to his knees” (37). Jewel is identified many times in the novel with the horse he worked at night to buy. The strange alloy of violence and affection that he lavishes on the horse stands as a hallmark of the contradiction in his personality, a contradiction that is further heightened by yet another animal analogy, Darl's observation that Jewel's face is greenish, “that smooth, thick, pale green of a cow's cud” (91). Of Addie, Darl declares “Jewel's mother is a horse” (88), and Samson is unable to distinguish a buzzard from a Bundren (112). In describing the other family members, Faulkner moves away from animal analogies to vegetative imagery. Although Edmond Volpe refers to Dewey Dells's “bovine submission” – see Volpe, 's A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1964), 128 — to the deceitful drug clerk, she (like her mother) is most often associated with plant life, with generative, sexual energy. Dewey Dell feels like a “wet seed wild in the hot blind earth” (61), and Addie sees herself as a seed planted by her father (162). Addie, in fact, seems to go through a complete cycle of vegetative growth and decay as she grows to a mature being with hands like roots (15), a bundle of rotten sticks (43), and finally the “it” (193) and the “this thing” (194) that Mosely the druggist refers to as being in the coffin. Likewise, from the beginning of the novel, the metaphorical representation of Darl with his “eyes full of the land” (35) continues this departure into the natural world. The representation of Bundrens seems to enter a new cycle as at the novel's end the new Mrs. Bundren is introduced as a “duck-shaped woman” (249).Google Scholar
4 See Seltzer, Leon F. and Viscomi, Jan, “Natural Rhythms and Rebellion: Anse's Role in As I Lay Dying,” Modern Fiction Studies, 24 (1978), 556–59. See p. 559.Google Scholar
5 Blotner, Joseph, Faulkner: A Biography, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1974), 1187. In many respects the traditional cultures of the Choctaws and Chickasaws are very similar. Many ethnologists believe they once were one group, and some versions of their origin myths account for the split.Google Scholar
6 While the Chickasaws had a clearly totemic structure of kinship and social organization with clans linked to various animals, the historical Choctaw clans may not have been as strictly totemic in nature. Jesse O. McKee and Jon A. Schlenker report that the Choctaws divided themselves into “matrilineal exogamous moieties” (28) “corresponding to the Chickasaw totemic clans and differentiated in some manner from the smaller geographical bands” (40). See their The Choctaws: Cultural Evolution of a Native American Tribe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1980). Because I evaluate totemism for its construction of extra-personal group affinity rather than its legendary or literary association with particular totem eponyms, I hope the distinction is not problematic. Since As I Lay Dying is structured so predominantly by the journey of the Bundrens, it is interesting to note, just by way of casual remark rather than developed argument, that like many North American tribal groups, both the Chickasaws and Choctaws of Mississippi have a migration myth at the center of their mythology. The Choctaw's legend, for example, describes how their ancient ancestors traveled from a land far to the west. Every evening their leaders would place a pole in the ground in the center of the camp, and the direction it pointed in the morning was the one in which they would travel. Finally one morning on the bank of the Yazoo River the pole remained straight up, and the travelers stayed, building an earthen mound Nanih Waiya (“leaning mound”). The Yazoo River flows through western Mississippi, entering the Mississippi River just west of Jackson.Google Scholar
7 Volpe, , 134.Google Scholar
8 Blotner, , 235.Google Scholar
9 Krefft, James, “The Yoknapatawpha Indians: Fact and Fiction,” Diss. Tulane University, 1976, 1.Google Scholar
10 Dabney, Lewis M., The Indians of Yoknapatawpha: A Study in Literature and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 97.Google Scholar
11 That is to say the following stories: “Lo!,” “A Courtship,” “A Justice,” and “Red Leaves.”
12 Moreover, in its own small way it moves in what I believe to be the productive direction pointed out by such Native American writers as Vine Deloria, Jr. and Dallas Chief Eagle (just to name two) who suggest the usefulness of adapting the Indian world view to European and Euro-American contexts and issues. See Deloria, 's The Metaphysics of Modern Existence and Custer Died for Your Sins and Chief Eagle's intriguing novel Winter Count.Google Scholar
13 For a useful overview of traditional Chickasaw culture and history see Gibson, Arrell M., The Chickasaws (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971).Google Scholar
14 Momaday, N. Scott, “The Man Made of Words,” in Chapman, Abraham (ed.), Literature of the American Indians: Views and Interpretations (New York: New American Library, 1975), 96–110. See page 103.Google Scholar
15 Ibid., 104.
16 Lincoln, Kenneth's valuable essay “Native American Literatures: ‘old like hills, like stars’,” appears in Baker, Houston A. Jr., (ed.), Three American Literatures: Essays in Chicano, Native American, and Asian-American Literature for Teachers of American Literature (New York: MLA, 1982), 80–167. See p. 92.Google Scholar
17 Hogan, Linda's “Leaving” originally appeared in her Calling Myself Home (1979)Google Scholar; I quote from its inclusion in Green, Rayna (ed.), That's What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 158–60.Google Scholar