The Fall and Fall of the Bundren Family

This essay makes use of the linguistic categories of "causative" and "inchoative" to discuss the question of causality in "As I Lay Dying": who or what is responsible for the series of disasters that befall the Bundren family on their journey to bury Addie, culminating at the wagonhearse accident at the river. Faulkner's novel is obsessed with the four pairs of twin causatives and inchoatives in English (fall/fell, sit/set, rise/raise, lie/lay): confusions in the employment of each pair enable Faulkner to consider the relationship of what happens spontaneously to what happens intentionally. At stake metaphysically is whether any action is the entire result of accidents or is at least partly subject to human or divine control. At stake aesthetically is whether a modernist text can be brought into a determinate shape or should be allowed to fall into disunities of motive and form. Thus modernity (the increasing conceptual triumph of the accident over Providence, miracles, fate, substance, or will) ambiguously produces modernism (the reaction of form, successful or not, against chance).