The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Faulkner · a novel in fifty-nine sections · Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1930 · scored on Faulkner’s English in the corrected text, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Funeral journey as a novel of many voices; family tragedy and rural farce in one book
Mythos
The descent to the dead and the dead who speak; a burial journey through ordeals by water and by fire; the son who is not his father’s; the seer punished for his sight; a mother become a fish, and a horse become a mother
Phase
About ten days, from Addie Bundren’s last hours to her burial in Jefferson, told in the order of the journey, with the dead woman’s one section set inside it
Presentation
Fiction; fifty-nine sections in the first person, each headed only by its speaker’s name; fifteen narrators and no narrator outside them; one section a numbered list
Register
From a child’s syntax and a carpenter’s plain reasons to Darl’s lyric and Addie’s furious abstraction; the comedy of grievance and borrowing beside terror at the ford
Scale
One family, a husband, five children and a dead mother; the neighbours, a doctor, a minister and the townsmen; one county over ten days
Governing Proposition
Addie Bundren dies, and her husband and five children carry her coffin by wagon to be buried in Jefferson, over about ten days, through a flooded river and a burning barn. The book is told in fifty-nine short sections by fifteen voices, the family’s, the neighbours’, a doctor’s, a minister’s and the townsmen’s, and once by the dead woman herself. The wager of the novel is that a shared duty can be the vehicle of each person’s private want, that a family can carry its dead together while every member travels alone, and that a book with no narrator can hold what none of its tellers holds.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file.” The speaker is Darl Bundren, and the sentence places two brothers in space before either of them is explained. Their mother, Addie, is dying. Their brother Cash is making her coffin. Their father, Anse, will carry her to Jefferson to be buried, as he has promised, and the family will go with her on the wagon: Cash, Darl, Jewel, their sister Dewey Dell and the youngest, Vardaman, a child. The journey takes about ten days, through a flood that has carried away the bridges.
Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith published the novel in New York on 6 October 1930, a year after The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner said he wrote it in about six weeks in the autumn of 1929, on the night shift at the University of Mississippi power plant. The title is from the eleventh book of the Odyssey, from Agamemnon’s speech in the underworld: the words of a dead man, spoken among the dead.
The book is in fifty-nine sections, each headed only by the name of its speaker, and there is no narrator outside them. Fifteen people speak. Darl has nineteen sections, nearly a third of the book; Vardaman ten; their neighbour Vernon Tull six; Cash five; Dewey Dell four; Anse three, and Tull’s wife Cora three; the doctor, Peabody, two; and Jewel, Addie, the minister Whitfield, Samson, Armstid, Moseley and MacGowan one each. The family speaks forty-three of the sections, the world around it sixteen. The reader assembles a family from these fragments with no guide, and comes to hold what no one in the family holds.
Movement II
Addie dies while Darl and Jewel are away, for three dollars’ worth of lumber. Darl tells her death all the same, from the road with Jewel, as if he were in the room: what he cannot witness he sees. It is the first sign of the sight that will cost him his place in the family, and the book lets it stand without explaining it.
Cash finishes the coffin. His section is a numbered list of reasons, beginning “I made it on the bevel.”: thirteen short lines on the carpentry of the box, which are the whole of a man who can say what he loves only in the terms of his trade. Vardaman, the child, joins his mother and a fish in a single thought, and gives it in five words: “My mother is a fish.” He bores holes through the lid of the coffin, into his mother’s face.
Each of them goes to Jefferson for a reason of his own. Anse wants new teeth. Dewey Dell is pregnant and wants an abortion from a druggist in town. Cash wants a gramophone, and Vardaman a toy train. Jewel has his horse, and Darl tells Vardaman that Jewel’s mother is a horse. Darl wants nothing, and sees everything: Dewey Dell’s pregnancy, and that Jewel is not Anse’s son. The burial is one duty, and it carries six private wants to town.
Movement III
The flood has taken the bridges, and the Bundrens try the ford. The crossing, told by Darl, is the height of the book: a log rises out of the flood, the mules go under and drown, Cash is on the coffin, and Jewel and his horse fight the current. Cash’s leg is broken. The coffin is saved, and the family goes on with the dead woman, an injured son, a pregnant girl and a child.
With the mules gone, Jewel’s horse is traded for a new team. Cash’s leg is set in cement, which hardens on it as the wagon goes on, and the comedy and the pain are the same fact. Overhead the buzzards follow the wagon. The book does not let the terror of the ford stand alone: Anse’s whine and his borrowing keep pulling the journey back to the grotesque, on purpose.
The voices outside the family carry the other half of the knowledge. Samson, Armstid and Moseley give the coffin as the world smells it after days on the road, which the family will not say, and their narrowness is the measure of the family’s, not a judgment above it. Cora Tull’s pieties about Addie run beside them, the comedy of the book and a false reading of the dead woman, which the dead woman will answer.
Movement IV
Addie speaks once, and only after she is dead. Her section stands inside the journey with no explanation, the one voice outside the family’s time, and it is an anger that becomes a theory of language and the body. She remembers her father’s saying, “the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time”, and the rest of her section argues with it.
Her conviction is that “words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at”. Love and duty are words other people use; what the body does is another thing. Her sin with the minister Whitfield is the deed under the words, and Jewel, the son Anse does not know is not his, is its issue. Her section answers what the book’s first third, and Cora’s pious reading of her, have been saying.
Whitfield has his one section too. It is satire, and it would compress. What stands is the gap Addie names: the word and the deed come apart, and the living use the word to cover what they do. The family carries her body to Jefferson under the word of a promise, and each of them under it carries a want.
Movement V
At Gillespie’s, Darl sets fire to the barn where the coffin lies. Jewel carries it out alone through the flames. It is the book’s second ordeal, and the second time the son who is not his father’s saves the dead woman from the elements. The book leaves open whether Darl is mad, or the one sane member of the family, and whether his sight is a gift or a symptom.
In Jefferson Addie is buried. Then Darl is sent away to the asylum at Jackson for the burning of a barn: sanity, in the end, is the community’s verdict on property. Cash, whose voice has grown as the journey went on, gives the verdict and its cost in one sentence: “This world is not his world; this life his life.” On the train to Jackson Darl speaks of himself in the third person. Dewey Dell, meanwhile, has been seduced in the drugstore by MacGowan.
Anse gets his teeth, and a new wife, and the last line of the book is his: “Meet Mrs Bundren”. The burial has become a wedding. The living have carried the dead to town for their own purposes, as Addie saw, and the book’s farce and its tragedy turn out to be one fact seen from two places. The family has carried its dead together, and every member has travelled alone.
Act III · The Twelve
Fifty-nine sections in about ten days, and the subtractive test finds almost nothing to take. Every section is a turn of the road or a turn of a mind. The outer voices are not decoration: Samson, Armstid and Moseley give the coffin as the world smells it, which the family cannot say, and the book needs their view to measure the family’s. Cora Tull’s pieties are the book’s comedy and also the false reading of Addie that Addie’s own section answers. Cash’s numbered reasons, beginning “I made it on the bevel.”, are thirteen short lines that are his whole character. The length is compelled: a journey in fifty-nine stations, none of which idles. What holds the axis a step from the top: Whitfield’s single section is satire the book could compress, and MacGowan’s seduction of Dewey Dell in the drugstore runs coarser and longer than the arc requires.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a shared duty can be the vehicle of each person’s private want, and a family can carry its dead together while every member travels alone. Anse wants his teeth, Dewey Dell her abortion, Cash his gramophone, Vardaman the toy train; Darl, who wants nothing, sees everything and is sent away. Addie states a second truth, that words and doing come apart: her father’s saying, that “the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time”, and her own conviction that “words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at”. A third is reached after Darl burns Gillespie’s barn: sanity is the community’s verdict on property. Held below the form because the book shows these truths more than it articulates the social condition behind them; the Bundrens’ poverty is ground, not disclosure.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Height is reached often, and mostly in Darl’s sections. The river crossing is the ceiling: the log rising out of the flood, the mules going under, Cash on the coffin, Jewel and his horse fighting the current. The barn fire is the second summit, Jewel carrying the coffin out alone through the flames. Addie’s section rises in another key, an anger that becomes a theory of language and the body. The dreadful heights are the buzzards over the wagon and Vardaman boring holes through the lid into his mother’s face; the plain ones are “My mother is a fish.” and Darl speaking of himself in the third person on the train to Jackson. Held below the top because the elevation is undercut on purpose: Anse’s whine, the cement on Cash’s leg and the drugstore comedy pull it back to the grotesque, so that the frequency is high and the sustained height less than in the greatest tragic novels.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The book is a funeral journey through ordeals by water and by fire, and the ordeals are the plot: at the flooded ford and in the burning barn the dead woman is nearly lost to the elements, and each time she is saved by the son who is not his father’s. The archetypes are made from the family’s own matter: Jewel and his horse, which Darl tells Vardaman is Jewel’s mother; Addie as a fish in a child’s mind; Darl as the seer whose sight is punished. The descent to the dead is the title, from Agamemnon’s speech in the underworld in the eleventh book of the Odyssey, and Addie speaks from the dead in the book’s own body. All of it stays particular: an adze, a mule team, a bag of bananas. Held a step off the top because the comic surface lets the myth be read as a joke, which the book intends, and which thins the load in the Jefferson sections.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the interior monologue as Joyce had made it, the impressionist narrators of Conrad and James, and the Southern novel of the rural poor, which had been local colour or sociology. The turn: fifteen voices and no narrator, a child’s and a dead woman’s among them; a novel in fifty-nine short stations; a carpenter’s section in numbered points; and a method built for the urban and the educated turned on tenant farmers and made to carry farce and tragedy at once. The stake was real: a writer whose last book had sold little wagered that readers would assemble a family from fragments with no guide. Held below the top because the greater break had been made a year before, in The Sound and the Fury, and this book refines the method that book opened rather than opening it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told by one narrator, this would be a grotesque tale of a funeral. Told in fifty-nine separate monologues, it knows that the Bundrens cannot reach one another, since the reader holds what no member of the family holds. The form gives Darl’s isolation its measure: he speaks nineteen of the sections, nearly a third, and knows what the others hide, Dewey Dell’s pregnancy and Jewel’s paternity, and the form’s own law makes that knowledge a danger to him. Addie’s single section, set after her death, makes the dead woman the one voice outside the family’s time, and it answers the book’s first third. Cash’s numbered list shows a mind by its shape. Held a step off the top by the strain of Darl’s clairvoyance: he tells his mother’s death while he is away on the road with Jewel, which tests the law of the monologue, and the book accepts it without quite earning it.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence, not promise: nine decades of criticism that have not settled the book. The questions are held open by the text. Is Darl mad, or the one sane member of the family, and is his sight a gift or a symptom? Is the journey an act of love, of pride, or of Anse’s appetite? Is the book tragedy or farce? What does Addie’s sin with Whitfield mean for her account of words? Is Cash’s growing voice in the last sections the book’s judgment, or one more partial view? The criticism has run from the book’s form to its readings of class and the body, and has not closed these. Formal depth yields too: the echoes between the water and the fire, and between the fish and the horse, are left for the reader to join. Held below the top because its open questions are fewer than those of Faulkner’s larger novels.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is the American novel of its century, and the modernist novel in English as it entered it. The intrinsic force: the book made the novel of many short first-person stations into a portable form, and showed that the methods of high modernism could carry poor rural people, and laughter, without condescension. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the descent claimed for it, the novel of a funeral or a wake told in many voices and the many-narrator family novel, is argued rather than settled, and the cases most often named are García Márquez’s first novel, La hojarasca (1955), and Graham Swift’s Last Orders (1996), whose debt was argued in public. Held below the top because much of Faulkner’s reach runs through the whole of his Yoknapatawpha work, and through The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, so that this book’s own share is real but not the largest.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is weighed over ninety-six years. Form: the text survives whole; the compositors’ errors of the first edition were mended in Noel Polk’s corrected text, a small charge that touches no part of the work. Presence: continuous since 1930, and wide. It is one of the most taught American novels in schools and universities, and it has been filmed, by James Franco in 2013. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the flood, the mules and the drugstore are period furniture, not the argument. Held where it stands, and not higher, because a good share of its presence is in the classroom, where it is often read as Faulkner’s accessible book rather than for itself, and a survival of a century does not stand with a survival of millennia.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Faulkner’s English, with no translation between. Fifteen voices in one book, each distinguishable on the page without its heading: Cash’s carpenter’s plainness, which loosens and grows as the journey goes on; Vardaman’s child syntax, in which the fish and the coffin and the holes blur; Anse’s self-pity; Cora’s piety in the language of the hymn book; Darl’s lyric, the book’s richest prose; Addie’s furious abstraction. The first sentence sets the method: “Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file.”, two brothers placed in space before either is explained. The last line is a whole ending in three words, “Meet Mrs Bundren”, which turns a burial into a wedding. Charged: Darl’s and Vardaman’s vocabulary run past what the boys could say, a convention the book uses without justifying, and the Jefferson sections are looser than the river and the fire.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Addie’s section on words and the body, and Anse’s new teeth and new wife on the last page. Or Vardaman’s fish and the cement setting on Cash’s leg. One law governs them: the living carry the dead for their own purposes, and the word for it, love or duty or a promise, is the cover for the deed. Addie saw it; Anse lives it; the book’s comedy and its tragedy are the same fact seen from two places. The range is wide and held: farce at the drugstore and in Anse’s borrowing, terror at the ford, grief in Vardaman, theology in Whitfield and Cora, madness in Darl. Charged a step: Darl’s clairvoyance, which lets him see what he cannot witness, sits at the edge of the realist physics the rest of the book keeps, and the reader must accept two laws of knowing to accept it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Many orders, held in one family over about ten days. Consciousness, in fifteen minds. The family, in a marriage, five children and a paternity the husband does not know. Labour, in the carpentry and the farm, and the three dollars’ worth of lumber for which Darl and Jewel are away when Addie dies. The neighbourhood, in the Tulls, Samson and Armstid. The sacred, in Whitfield, Cora and Addie’s sin. The body, in the corpse, the pregnancy and the broken leg. Commerce, in the town, the druggists, the horse traded for mules. The natural order, in the flood and the buzzards. The state, in the asylum at Jackson. They are integrated: every order is met on the road with the coffin. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: history and the state are present only at the edges, and the book’s world is one county over ten days; the larger history of that county Faulkner set elsewhere.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.3, then The Imperishable and The Made at 9.1. A form in which fifty-nine separate monologues are the knowledge that a family cannot reach one another, with the dead woman’s one section outside its time; a survival continuous and wide for ninety-six years; and fifteen voices each distinguishable on the page without its heading, from Vardaman’s child syntax to Addie’s furious abstraction.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.2: many orders met on the road with the coffin, but history and the state present only at the edges, and one county over ten days. Next above it, The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 8.7: heights undercut by the grotesque on purpose, and open questions fewer than those of Faulkner’s larger novels.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.3, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.8, The Swerve at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the last three by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 8.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, published by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, New York, on 6 October 1930. It is scored as the novel published in 1930, fifty-nine sections each headed by its speaker’s name, read in the corrected text established by Noel Polk, which mends the compositors’ errors of the first edition without changing the book. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. The count of sections and speakers was made from the list of sections. Every axis is judged on Faulkner’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the first sentence, Cash’s first reason, Vardaman’s five words, Addie’s two sentences, Cash’s sentence on Darl and the last line. The title is from the eleventh book of Homer’s Odyssey. García Márquez’s and Swift’s novels are named as the record of the book’s claimed descent and are not part of the work; the film of 2013 is named as the record of its presence. Facts that could not be verified, among them the edition and date of the corrected text, the word count, the place of Addie’s section in the count, the dates of the manuscript, the distance of the journey, the translation of the Odyssey Faulkner knew, the names and dates of the criticism, the early translations and stage adaptations, and the wider record of the book’s influence, are not given. Citations are by section, named by its speaker.