Epic Simile in As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Homeric simile is an elaborately sustained narrative that diverges from the main story into a relevant but unrelated poetic impression before merging again into the regular flow of the story. Because the Homeric simile is a cornerstone of the epic form, later writers Virgil, Dante Alighieri, Milton, and others have sought to imitate it to lend legitimacy and timeless to the epic nature of their work. Faulkner is no exception–he flavors certain narrative perspectives with a judicious sprinkling of the epic simile to draw out emotional points. As I Lay Dying is told by a dozen indifferent narrators whose lexicons are missing the basic terms needed to express their emotions. Thus, the place of the epic simile is to draw out meaty fragments of feeling from the dry bones of plot and idle conversation that are the driving force of the story. Because the form of the epic simile allows for a momentary diversion, the narrator can employ simile to inset a frame of reference more poetic and comfortable to reader, periodically shielding them from the typical harshness of the Bundren family’s internal affairs.
There’s a different between a regular simile, and an epic simile. When the Bundren crew have carried four-day-dead Addie to spend the night with Samson, he narrates, “It was a buzzard […] watching me first over one shoulder and then over the other, like a old baldheaded man” (119). First, there is actually a buzzard in his hallway, hankering after the sweet deathly smell of Addie’s rotting corpse, so the simile is not invoked to higher cause than to further describe bland reality. This simile does not attempt to treat an elevated topic, jibe at another character, or distinguish itself from a common well-placed adverb or adjective. Therefore, it cannot be part of an attempt to elevate the narrative from journey to epic. Second, the image is incomplete, brief, and obvious. The epic simile must draw two disparate scenes smoothly together. A buzzard actually looks like an old bald man, so even though the simile indicator “like” is used, it could easy be omitted and made into an in-place metaphor. As there’s no break in Samson’s narrative where we taste a richer viewpoint before returning to the tale at hand, we can mark this as a good example of figurative language and nothing more.
Darl gives us a true epic simile in his narrative, standing before the river, when he says “[the current] talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad” (141). He describes the river as a personified pantheon of water gods holding a “profoundly significant” secret they consent only to “murmur” among themselves (141). It is like, he says, “something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again” (141). Until this point, we’ve been presented with Cash’s analytical assessment of the river crossing, Vernon Tull’s refusal to allow his mule to cross, and Anse’s stone-dumb desire to just “drive right on across it” (124). Darl doesn’t see the river in the same rational light–he sees it in the voice of the epic narrator. And, he sees the truth of it: the hidden danger lurking, the complacent guardians of that tributary. Because it pierces through the Bundrens’ bleak perceptions and falls for a moment into another more truthful world, Darl’s simile is exceptional. It interrupts their journey with strong magic, a lucid moment of epic transcendence.
As I Lay Dying does not have a traditional narrator. Instead, it is told through the point of view of each of its characters in short bursts. These packets of thought are haphazardly arranged in a sort of chronological order that follows the flow of family emotions rather than events in time. In this way, it is appropriate the Darl is the source of most of the novel’s epic similes. Just as Darl, quite possibly a little insane, is the mouthpiece for vibrant imagery, so also does he add emotional context through the use of the epic simile. His main interests are brother Jewel and mother Addie. Between the three of them, they form a strange triangle of unloved son, favorite bastard, and cold mother. And through Darl’s peculiar relations with each of them, we see epic similes blossom as a parallel text to the starkly unemotional narrative of the novel.
Darl’s preoccupation with Jewel often takes the form of a horse. Watching from the shadows, he gives a twisted perspective which sometimes equates Jewel and his horse, and at other times examines his impression of the relationship between them. When Darl says, “Jewel’s mother is horse,” we suddenly see that what really interests him is the special relationship that Jewel has with his mother that Darl never had. Addie narrates, in media res, “Then I found that I had Darl. At first I would not believe it. Then I believed I would kill Anse. It was as though he had tricked me” (172). Clearly, Addie detests Darl with a passion born from the hatred of Anse’s “violation of her aloneness” (172). Darl is not her firstborn, not hated for taking her virginity or for being an unwelcome child, but simply hated with an undying and inexplicable passion that stems from Addie’s disgust of love and her husband. So, it is with sardonic eyes that Darl watches Jewel meld into his horse with Bundren violence:
When Jewel can almost touch him, the horse stands on his hind legs and slashes down at Jewel. […] For an instant before the jerk comes onto his arms he sees his whole body earth-free, horizontal, whipping snake-limber. […] They stand in rigid terrific hiatus, the horse trembling and groaning. Then Jewel […] flows upward in a stopping swirl like the lash of a whip, his body in midair shaped to the horse. (12)
If we interpret Darl’s imagery of Jewel as a narrative about their relationship with their mother, we cannot assume a neutral point of view. Looking for coloring in the way Darl describes Jewel mounting his horse as an allusion to an interaction with their mother, we find a strange violence. The horse, Darl notes, “slashes” at Jewel and they stare at other rigidly before he mounts, the horse “trembling.” Jewel is his mother’s favorite, and we have no indication that he resents his status as bastard son. Darl even notes that as Jewel gets on the horse, their bodies are shaped to each other, an indication that he and his mother have become intimate and close. So why does Darl infuse that relationship with violence and unspoken emotional tension? He must be projecting his own feelings about Addie into Jewel’s relationship with his horse. We catch a glimpse of Darl’s own desires when Jewel “strikes [the horse] across the face with his fist” and mounts it again (13). Perhaps he would like to strike his mother, but always holds back from it. Thus, he uses the epic simile that merges Jewel, his horse, whips, and flame as an imaginative outlet through which to savage Addie, his mother.
At other times, Darl uses the metaphor of the mother-as-horse tenderly. Bitter that Jewel “woodenly […] looks through [his hat] like through the visor of a helmet” towards his mother, the “invisible horse” in the barn, Darl complains “But it’s not your horse that’s dead” (94). Jewel is described in the stoic armored attire of a knight, sworn to cold justice and indifferent aspect. Like a knight looking through his helmet, Jewel’s gaze on his dead mother cannot stir his armored heart. In fact, she is invisible to him. However, Darl feels too many things for his mother. Biologically, he is Addie’s son. Emotionally, he “cannot love [his] mother because [he] has no mother” (95). These conflicting familial states produce in Darl an emotional tension that wavers between both sentimental extremes. Because he can curse Jewel for indifferently looking at his mother and deny her in the same passage, we can conclude that Darl here feels both tenderness and bitterness at the same time.
Paradox defines the emotions that Darl infuses into the story with simile:
[Jewel] climbs onto the manger and drags the hay down and leaves the stall and seeks and finds the curry-comb. Then he returns and slips quickly past the single crashing thump and up against the horse where it cannot overreach. He applies the curry-comb, holding himself within the horse’s striking radius with the agility of an acrobat, cursing the horse in a whisper of obscene caress. Its head flashes back, tooth-cropped; its eyes roll in the dusk like marbles on a gaudy velvet cloth as he strikes it upon the face with the back of the curry-comb. (183)
Jewel here begins to care for his horse, which we agree Darl interprets like it were his mother. He brings out fresh hay for it to munch and lie on. He “acrobatically” slips by its usual hoofed lash, and begins to carefully comb its hide. Then, suddenly, the caress turns “obscene” as the horse tosses its head back in terror and a curry-comb flies in its face. Imagine for a moment that Darl is engaged in thought about his dead mother, gradually growing more disgusted with her memory, until the dam of his emotions breaks and he wants to strike. So, he writes these emotions into the narrative as Jewel progressively abusing his horse. Darl’s revisionist narrative succeeds because is heavy-laden with simile. The horse is not a horse, it is a “gaudy lunging swirl” (182). Jewel is an “acrobat” as he skillfully brushes down the animal. And when he strikes it, he does it with the ignorant force of a child tossing marbles onto fine cloth. With just one word–”marbles”–the simile leaps back in time to when their mother was alive and could be beaten for her sins before she died. This kind of simile is Darl’s power.
I would like to talk a little about Darl’s authority as a narrator. Is he the most plausible narrator? Do his similes, imbued with hatred for his mother, twist and color the narrative unfairly? Vernon Tull notes that Darl always looks like “he had got into the inside of you somehow” (125). He continues:
He dont say nothing; just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes folks talk. […] Like somehow you was looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes. (125)
If we accept Darl as the mouthpiece for emotion in As I Lay Dying, Tull’s gut-level recoil when he comes into close contact with him makes good sense. Darl frightens him because he can inherently absorb hidden context from his surroundings. This would give him credence as a semi-omniscient narrator. Even if he doesn’t choose to tell us exactly what is going on, we can be sure he knows it. And, at least regarding Jewel, Darl has a personal vendetta of truth and exposure. When he finds Jewel missing from his bed, he writes for us:
But now it was like we had all–and by a kind of telepathic agreement of admitted fear–flung the whole thing back like covers on the bed and we all sitting bolt upright in our nakedness, starting at one another and saying “Now is the truth.” (134)
With satirical overtones, Darl gleefully notes that the whole ugly family is now all sitting naked in the same bed. The truth is out, and he revels in its revealing. Because he thinks the truth–that Jewel is rutting with a married woman (132)–is painful and embarrassing, he seems to enjoy recounting it even more. At the same time, Cash tells us that “it was either send him to Jackson or have Gillespie sue” because Darl had, in a fit of mad passion, set the barn alight (232). Cash decides that he is neither “pure crazy” or “pure sane” because sanity is only a democratic convention, writing off the episode to a sort of bad luck and misunderstanding. However, we as readers would be better cautioned to realize that Darl’s passionate narrative might be more of his own personal vendetta than a believable fixture of the rest of the characters. Also, because of Darl’s “spy glass he got in France at the war” we know he is a young, possibly traumatized, war veteran (254). But, with what better eyes than the dark embers of a once-flaming lantern to look out at the world and see its nakedness?
The other prominent use of epic simile in the narrative involves Addie Bundren, the third spoke of the Jewel-Darl-Addie triangle of passion. Images of fire and hell surround her, ultimately ironically leading up to the revelation that the Reverend Whitfield fathered Jewel. We see Addie, even before she dies, in flames:
Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks. But the eternal and the everlasting salvation and grace is not upon her. (8)
This brief simile brings into play all at once Catholicism, death, and the damnation that awaits her. Candles that gutter down into their sticks play an important role in the Catholic ceremonies of mass and other sacraments. Traditionally, a chapel cannot be found without candles forever keeping vigil. But, as the candle burns, so does Addie’s life until it quickly snuffs itself out. She is going to die soon in flame, and grace is not upon her. Addie relates her life to a nameless jar for her husband Anse to mindlessly fill:
Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty doorframe; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar. (173)
In this way, Addie is damned while she was still nominally alive. Her life is the cold, slow death of a nameless container to hold her already dead husband, like a living urn that holds cremated ashes. Darl presciently asks Jewel, “do know you that Addie Bundren is going to die,” prefacing his question in the narrative with a hellish depiction of the weather:
The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning. (40)
Sulphur is classically associated with hell in Christianity. The sun, like a bloody egg, mirrors the flames that await Addie Bundren. The light is even fire-colored, the shining red of copper metal. These portents lend an emotional, sinister overtone to Addie’s death, which otherwise would be the passing of a tired woman from this world. Indeed, in her own words, her sin is terrible. From Jewel we have stark bastardry, from Addie, emotion:
[God’s words] coming down like the cries of the geese of the wild darkness in the old terrible nights, fumbling at the deeds like orphans to whom are pointed out in a crowd two faces and told, That is your father, your mother. (174)
The language here employs the universally known sound of wild geese and associates it with the sin of fornication and the scream of her old pleasures in the night, which have led her to death. As her husband talks to her of God, she feels like an orphan in a crowd being pointed out her parents, feeling the weight of their old sin. Ironically, the simile includes geese, which monogamously take mates for life, and presumably bastard orphans, whose parents have dallied and strayed. So, this comparison brings an emotional aspect to Addie’s situation which we would not have seen otherwise.
It is through horses and whips, curry-combs and fire, that Faulkner injects little snippets of mysterious passion into the stark journey of a dysfunctional and emotionally vacant family to bury their mother. Because Darl’s world “is not this world” he is often the primary mouthpiece for the use of narrative simile. His perspective is so unique that it allows us to briefly cross over from Bundren to feel the raw hatred for his brother Jewel or to scoff and weep at his mother. Darl can take the world’s most innocuous activity–such as the eating of bananas–and turn it into a hysterically emotional affair of calculated, unsettling laughter. “Yes yes yes yes yes yes,” he ironically laughs (254). What do Bundrens deserve to eat bananas just after they bury their mother? There is no love in that family, Darl knows, so Faulkner uses him to tell it to us in the impassioned form of the epic simile.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2006 at 11:23 am and is tagged with homeric simile, epic simile, dante alighieri, momentary diversion, poetic impression, rotting corpse, william faulkner, dry bones, flavors, lexicons, narrators, hankering, addie, frame of reference, buzzard, harshness, internal affairs, sprinkling, inset, adverb. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
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