Matthew Little

It has been suggested that there is a "dual trend" in American humor, one strain evoking the "hearty guffaw" and the other evoking the "neurotic giggle."

Critics of American humor have been commenting for several generations on the decay of that full-blooded, masculine, vigorous streak that ran through nineteenth-century literature and reached its apotheosis in many ways in the character of Sut Lovingood. Generally, they have found the creation of the New Yorker in the 1920’s a convenient milestone to mark off the separation of "native" humor from what has been dubbed "dementia praecox" humor, urbane, sophisticated, witty, reflecting the tinge of insanity and despair of contemporary society.¹

Many aspects of William Faulkner’s novels and stories recall the humor of the old Southwest and other varieties of nineteenth-century American humor. Parallels between Faulkner’s work and dementia praecox humor are not as numerous or as obvious, but As I Lay Dying contains an unusual mixture of traditional native humor with elements of the relatively new type that rose to prominence at about the time Faulkner began to publish.

Faulkner’s personal acquaintances with Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, and other New Yorker humorists and members of the Algonquin Round Table were formed after the publication of As I Lay Dying,² but an early interest in sophisticated intellectual humor is evident in Faulkner’s first two novels: in Soldiers’ Pay (1926) the narrator’s clever, allusive irony is a major source of humor, and most of the humor in Mosquitoes (1927) is in the characters’ epigrammatic conversation and the narrator’s urbane satire of the ineffectual artists and intellectuals portrayed in the work. Faulkner’s association with the group that gathered at the Hotel Algonquin suggests that, whatever his dissatisfactions with his first two novels, Faulkner continued to appreciate sophisticated wit in conversation. Much of the humor in As I Lay Dying, like the humor of Benchley, Thurber, Perelman, and other writers of the dementia praecox school, has to do with psychological eccentricities, and in this work Faulkner offers some radical alternatives to patterns of psychological characterization common in American humor of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The thoughts and values of low-life characters in American humor are almost universally simple and basic. A certain psychological simplicity connected with practical shrewdness is the distinguishing trait of the

crackerbox philosopher. The Southwestern yarnspinner often displays imagination in his talk, but the chief interests of most frontier characters are pretty well summarized in this short speech by Sut Lovingood:

Men wer made a-purpus jis’ tu eat, drink, an’ fur stayin awake in the yearly part ove the nites; an’ wimen wer made tu cook the vittils, mix the sperits, an’ help the men du the stayin awake. That’s all, an’ nuthin more, onless hits fur the wimen to raise the devil atwix meals, an’ knit socks atwix drains, an’ the men to play short kerds, swap hosses wif fools, an’ fite fur exersise, at odd spells.³

Huck Finn, Sam Lawson, Uncle Remus, and many other characters of local-color fiction show a similar interest in a few basic comforts and a similar freedom from overly complicated habits of thought. In recent times the focus in most printed humor written for a relatively sophisticated audience has shifted away from common-sensible low-life characters, but these same types still thrive in the humor of popular media.⁴

The typical dementia praecox hero is in most ways the polar opposite of the characters who figure most prominently in native American humor of the nineteenth century: instead of being extroverted, common-sensible, and capable, he is introverted, neurotic, and incompetent; instead of being a rural low-life figure with little formal education, he is generally a city-dweller with a fair amount of education and culture. But for all the differences between the dementia praecox hero and the other character types mentioned above, this modern figure belongs to an old tradition in American humor. "That there is no necessary relationship between a man’s formal learning and his knowledge or even his wisdom" is "a conviction that Americans [have] long found hilarious,"⁵ and cultivated manners have traditionally been no surer evidence of practical wisdom than book learning has. The dementia praecox hero has prototypes in early American humor: the citified dandy whose education and good manners equip him poorly for frontier life is the ancestor of the Benchley character who finds it difficult to cope with the mysteries of a towel dispenser, and Ichabod Crane’s habit of poring over Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft until the real world takes on for him the fantastic qualities of what he has been reading prefigures Walter Mitty and the Perelman character whose mental world derives largely from the advertisements and magazine stories he reads. Similarly, the characters who have the most practical know-how in dementia praecox humor are often relatively ignorant women and common workingmen. Despite radical differences in tone and focus, one general pattern is discernible in both the older humor and the new: book learning, cultivated manners and tastes, and urban life

are often associated with overcomplicated thought and practical incompetence, while characters lacking formal education and good manners display admirable practical ability and common sense.

The characters in As I Lay Dying differ in this respect from typical dementia praecox heroes: neither the physical problems they face nor many of the more abstract problems they think about are trivial. Instead of fussing over broken shoelaces, they encounter fire and flood; instead of contemplating the social life of the newt, they think about time, language, human sexuality, death, and God. But the manner in which these characters confront their problems often reminds one of dementia praecox humor, and many unusual effects in As I Lay Dying and some of the book’s possibly unique humor are results of attributing sensibilities and habits of thought worthy of typical New Yorker heroes to illiterate hill farmers in a setting and situation that could have been taken out of Sut Lovingood.

There are passages in As I Lay Dying that employ devices common in American mock-oral humor such as exaggeration, comic similes involving animals, incongruous visual images, and anti-climax. But this conventional vernacular humor, besides being funny in itself, highlights incongruities between the characters’ complex, abstract musings and their primitive way of life and the psychological differences between these characters and their frontier ancestors. The spoken humor in As I Lay Dying is often nothing at all like the characters’ thoughts.

    "If you see a good-sized can, you might bring it," I say. . . .  How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures Wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-strings: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls. Cash broke his leg and now the sawdust is running out. He is bleeding to death is Cash.
    "I wouldn’t be beholden," pa says. "God knows."
   "Then make some water yourself," I say. "We can use Cash’s hat." (pp. l96–l97)⁶

The passage about the "dead gestures of dolls" is attributed to the same character who makes the scatological wisecrack.

The persistent habit of introverted meditation distinguishes characters in As I Lay Dying from most other low-life figures in American humor. Tall-tale fantasies often reflect the hardships of frontier life and may tell us something about the yarnspinners’ minds, but the telling of a tall tale is an intentionally humorous public performance that usually affirms the ability of frontiersmen to overcome the problems they face. Faulkner’s characters respond to many of their problems not by telling boisterous stories that make humor out of hardships but by contemplating their frustrations with despair and creating private fantasy worlds in the manner

of Walter Mitty. The thoughts and values presented in the interior monologues of As I Lay Dying are often neither simple nor commonsensible and rival the musings of New Yorker heroes in eccentricity: "It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end" (p. 38); "I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth" (p. 61); "My mother is a fish" (p. 79).

Like typical dementia praecox heroes, the Bundrens are pretty incompetent in practical matters. The funeral journey is accomplished at the cost of one horse, two mules, a broken leg, a barn full of hay, some hunger, the outrage of most of the neighbors, a lot of general suffering and anguish, and the loss of one able-bodied farmhand to the local madhouse. The Bundrens do get Addie buried as she wished and in the bargain get a set of store-bought teeth, a gramophone, a new Mrs. Bundren, and a sack of bananas, but the relationship of what is accomplished to the amount of effort and sacrifice involved must make the ending of As I Lay Dying one of the most jarring anticlimaxes in American literature.

The events of As I Lay Dying recall Sut Lovingood’s story, "Well! Dad’s Dead,"⁷ but the Bundrens’ practical incompetence, like that of many dementia praecox heroes, is connected with their constant involvement in private reveries rather than with occasional attacks of "durn’d fool." In the following passage Darl describes the family making a cement cast for Cash’s broken leg:

   "If it’ll just help you," pa says. "I asks your forgiveness. I never foreseen it no more than you.
   "It feels fine," Cash says.
   If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time.
   We replace the splints, the cords, drawing them tight, the cement in thick pale green slow surges among the cords. . . . (p. 198)

While Darl is thinking how nice it would be "if you could just ravel out into time," he and the rest of the family neglect to grease the leg before covering it with cement. The "cast" eventually has to be taken off with a hammer and chisel.

Corpses and funerals appear fairly often in Southwestern humor, but seldom as objects of reverence; they are more often the objects of practical jokes. The response most characters in As I Lay Dying make to death is solemn meditation, and the general scarcity of common sense in the book is especially evident in these responses.

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. (p. 42)

Many characters in As I Lay Dying treat death as "a function of the mind" in the sense that they try to confront it with metaphysical speculation or with fantasy that ignores the physical facts, in either case neglecting certain practical considerations like the advisability of getting Addie’s body buried before it starts to rot. Anse justifies the impractical funeral Journey on the grounds of Addie’s expectations, and long after Addie’s death members of her family talk as if she were alive and present (" ‘Where’s your ma?’ I said. ‘Haven’t you got one?’ ‘She’s out yonder in the wagon,’ she said" [p. 190]). Several of the Bundrens have very practical reasons for wanting a trip to town (such as Anse’s desire for a new set of teeth), but their private meditations on death still stand.

The idiosyncratic and sometimes enigmatic meanings that words associated with death take on in the interior monologues of As I Lay Dying reflect the degree to which the characters’ mental worlds sometimes become divorced from physical reality. Addie Bundren thinks a lot about death, and in contemplating her life with Anse she thinks, "He did not know that he was dead, then. . . . And then he died. He did not know he was dead" (165-166). In fact, if the chronological arrangement of the interior monologues is synchronized with the chronology of the plot, it is Addie herself who is dead when her monologue appears. Addie’s thoughts about Anse being "dead," Peabody’s thoughts about death as "a function of the mind," Dewey Dell’s "That was when I died that time" (115), and similar passages in other characters’ monologues involve uses of words associated with death that do not seem to have much literal relation to corpses like the one in the Bundrens’ wagon.

Mulling over words and phrases until they lose their usual meanings is a habit characters in As I Lay Dying share with characters in dementia praecox humor, and, whatever the interior monologues in Faulkner’s book owe to the writings of James Joyce, the stream-of-consciousness technique is a convenient vehicle for dramatizing this particular kind of mental befuddlement. As a prelude to an examination of dementia praecox humor Walter Blair discusses the humor of the "literary comedians" and compares Artemus Ward’s rambling, free-associative stage monologues to "the vague style of a stream-of-consciousness novel," quoting a writer for the London Spectator to the effect that

the whole trick of [Ward’s] humor was to give ". . . the impression . . . that his confusions of thought and speech are inevitable on his own part, that his mind drifts on hopelessly from one of those grotesque ideas or expressions to the next. . . ."⁸

Blair traces a similar mental helplessness and a tendency to be victimized by free association in the neurotic heroes of dementia praecox humor.

Robert Benchley himself warns, "One of the easiest methods of acquiring insanity is word-examining,"⁹ and in My Life and Hard Times James Thurber worries that he might be going crazy as he lies in bed trying to remember the name of a town in New Jersey:

I fell to repeating the word "Jersey" over and over again, until it became idiotic and meaningless. If you have ever lain awake at night and repeated one word over and over, thousands and millions and hundreds of thousands of millions of times, you know the disturbing mental state you can get into.¹⁰

Addie Bundren also lies awake at night pondering words, and in some ways her thoughts parallel Thurber’s.

Why Anse. 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 door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar. (p. 165)

One important difference between Addie and Thurber is that Thurber thinks his obsession is crazy, while Addie, instead of regarding a similar tendency as a "trivial mental tic," considers it a piece of evidence in the elaboration of her general theory that "words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at" (p. 163).

Parts of the interior monologues of As I Lay Dying look like nothing more than verbal buffoonery.

[Darl] went to Jackson. He went crazy and went to Jackson both. . . . He went to Jackson on the train. . . . He didn’t go on the train to go crazy. He went crazy in our wagon. . . . Jackson is further away than crazy. (pp. 241–242)

In this passage Vardaman Bundren is playing with a few verbal constructs that fascinate him, and the result is amusing nonsense. But there is no evidence that Vardaman does not take his ruminations seriously, and similar passages elsewhere in the book are not all such obvious nonsense.

I dont know what I am. I dont know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. (p. 76)

It is hard to be sure in reading such passages whether complex syllogisms are being worked out or a character has merely been hypnotized by the sounds of a few words.

The problem of how to know philosophy and poetry from nonsense has been a central one in critical discussion of As I Lay Dying: there is a good

deal of disagreement about what and how much in the work should be taken seriously and how its humor relates to non-humorous elements and to the work as a whole.¹¹ Walter J. Slatoff writes that "one is far from sure what the book is chiefly about, and above all one is uncertain to what extent one has been watching an epic or tragedy or farce."¹² Besides. "epic," "tragedy," and "farce," As I Lay Dying has been called "a kind of a tall story," a "philosophical novel," an "existentialist novel," "an ironic inversion of the quest romance," a "fable," and "a nonsense story,"¹³ and various combinations of these and other terms have been applied to the work. Part of the book’s complexity has to do with its unusual mixture of two very different modes of humor, and the diversity of critical response is possible largely because Faulkner’s combination of these two modes involves several departures from the traditional realism of American humor.

In prefaces and elsewhere many nineteenth-century American humorists state that the value of their work, apart from its value as humor, is in its accurate description of actual persons, places, events, dialects, social customs, and so forth; though many "original" characters appear in this literature, their "originality" often has to do with the talk and manners characteristic of a particular part of the country. The major eccentricities of the characters of As I Lay Dying are psychological and seem to have little to do with strictly "regional" considerations. The bizarre funeral journey can hardly be taken as a regional curiosity; it surprises and outrages many characters, and Cleanth Brooks states categorically that "Faulkner is not portraying a quaintly horrifying Southern folkway."¹⁴ Many of the verbal oddities in As I Lay Dying have nothing to do with dialect; in fact, the interior monologues contain words that illiterate hill farmers would be unlikely to know (stertorous, uninferant and scoriation, for example) and types of phrasing that such people would be unlikely to use. Contrasts between highfalutin language and the vernacular are common in American humor, but Faulkner assigns both "high" and "low" styles to single characters and offers no clear explanation of the matter. Even dementia praecox humor, for all its elements of fantasy, generally presents the neurotic reveries of its characters in language appropriate to their education and social circumstances.

If the subject matter of As I Lay Dying is often bizarre and apparently unrelated to any one particular region or group of people, the way this material is presented seems deliberately designed to create ambiguities and raise questions of credibility. As I Lay Dying lacks the epistemological realism that distinguishes fact from fantasy in more traditional works of American humor. Humorists who use the popular device of the framework narrative often use the voice of the narrator to provide realistic

descriptions that contrast with fantastic yarns told by characters. Though fact and fantasy often merge in oral stories, the representation of these stories as the talk of particular characters in particular situations gives the element of fantasy a solid grounding in reality; and a realistically described setting and an imaginative yarn may be mutually illuminating. The epistemological structure of As I Lay Dying is not clearly defined; if the interior monologues represent the characters’ thoughts, the reader is not told how the author knows these thoughts or on what basis he imagines them. The parts of the work that are represented as actual talk constitute a relatively small portion of the whole, and instead of providing a central narrative voice and a synthesizing consciousness Faulkner offers fragmentary accounts of persons, places, and events from fifteen highly subjective viewpoints. Instead of giving the impression that clear distinctions between fantasy and objective description are possible, this technique emphasizes subjectivity and creates the kind of uncertain and sometimes nightmarish atmosphere of irrationality that has been cited as characteristic of dementia praecox humor.¹⁵ Each reader has a good deal of freedom in choosing what to take as the portrayal of lifelike characters and the exploration of real problems and what to take as imaginative fancy, and the particular mixture of humor, horror, tragedy, and farce each reader sees in the work depends to an unusual degree on his own habits of thought.

As I Lay Dying is an innovative work in many respects and more complex than most works that belong to either the dementia praecox school or to older strains of American humor. But if the untraditional characteristics of As I Lay Dying get in the way of facile interpretation, these same characteristics are essential not only to the book’s humor but to some of the qualities that have led critics to call it "epic," "tragic," and so forth. The absence of traditional realism, particularly in matters of language and point of view, makes possible some unusual poetry. Faulkner’s disregard of the kinds of realism that link many works of American humor with particular regions and cultures may imply a broader significance in As I Lay Dying than is found in more conventionally realistic humor; and besides distributing neuroses in a new and humorous way, Faulkner gives his characters a complexity that is not exclusively humorous and sets them apart from stereotypical low-life characters. In the process of suggesting some interesting alternatives to traditional patterns of psychological characterization, Faulkner offers an unusual and very funny combination of elements of dementia praecox humor with "that full-blooded, masculine, vigorous streak that ran through nineteenth-century literature" and survives largely in the humor of media not aimed at sophisticated, well-read audiences. Richard Chase writes that

our best novelists have been, not middlebrows, but either highbrows like James, lowbrows like Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson, or combination highbrow-lowbrows like Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway.¹⁶

The combination of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" elements in Faulkner’s writing is especially conspicuous in the humor of As I Lay Dying. If this humor is sometimes perplexing, it is also provocative.

THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS—CHICAGO CIRCLE

NOTES

    ¹Hamlin Hill, "Modern American Humor: The Janus Laugh," College English, 25 (December 1963), 170.
    ²See Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 731, 732, 747, 820, 821, 901, 931, 932, and pages listed in the Index under "Algonquin, Hotel." See also Richard C. Tobias, The Art of James Thurber (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969), p. 4.
      ³George Washington Harris, Sut Lovingood’s Yarns, ed. M. Thomas Inge (New Haven: College and University Press, 1966), p. 77.
      ⁴Hill, "Modern American Humor." See also Walter Blair Native American Humor (Scranton: Chandler Publishing Co., 1960), pp. 162–168.
      ⁵Walter Blair, "‘A Man’s Voice, Speaking’: A Continuum in American Humor," Veins of Humor, ed. by Harry Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 192.
      ⁶Page numbers are those of the "corrected and reset" Random House edition.
      ⁷See M. Thomas Inge, "William Faulkner and George Washington Harris: In the Tradition of Southwestern Humor," Tennessee Studies in Literature, 7 (1962), 47–59.
      ⁸Walter Blair, Horse Sense in American Humor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), pp. 274–275.
      ⁹Robert Benchley, After 1903—What? (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938), p. 72.
    ¹⁰James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1933), pp. 72–73.
    ¹¹Most studies of As I Lay Dying at least mention its humor. John K. Simon offers a summary and attempted synthesis of several views in "What Are You Laughing At, Darl? Humor and Madness in As I Lay Dying," College English, 25 (November 1963), 104–110.
     ¹²Walter J. Slatoff, Quest for Failure: A Study of William Faulkner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960), p. 159.
     ¹³These terms are used in the following critical works: Otis B. Wheeler, "Some Uses of Folk Humor by Faulkner," Mississippi Quarterly, 17 (Spring 1964), 107–122; James M. Mellard, "Faulkner’s Philosophical Novel: Ontological Themes in As I Lay Dying," The Personalist, 3 (Autumn 1967), 509–523; Robert M. Slabey, "As I Lay Dying as an Existentialist Novel," Bucknell Review, 11 (December 1963), 12–32; Elizabeth M. Kerr, "As I Lay Dying as Ironic Quest," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 3 (Winter 1962), 5–19; Melvin Backman, Faulkner: The Major Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), pp. 50–66; Elmo Howell, "Faulkner’s Jumblies: The Nonsense World of As I Lay Dying," Arizona Quarterly, 16 (Spring 1960), 70–78.

    ¹⁴Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 142.
    ¹⁵Hill, "Modern American Humor."
    ¹⁶Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City: Doubleday and Co.; Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), p. 10.