Nudity

Nudity in Faulkner’s fiction is rather enigmatic; far from representing the erotic, or used as a purification symbol in a characters’ casting off of clothing, for example, nakedness becomes aligned with the morbidly grotesque, and is treated more as macabre than salubrious. The disgust of the human body turns into a leitmotif for Faulkner’s oeuvre, as characters express disdain for their, and others’, physiology. For example, in //As I Lay Dying// dwells upon the more disturbing and nihilistic notion that “everything in the world for [her] is inside a tub full of guts” (//AILD// 58). Likewise, she begins to see Dr. Peabody as a “big tub of guts,” and she a “little tub of guts,” as her introspection shifts to her pregnancy (her child also a “tub of guts”)—”if there is not any room for anything else important in a big tub of guts, how can it be room in a little tub of guts” (58). Nudity, or the unadulterated corporeal form, becomes a foil to the lucid and highly cerebral narrative Faulkner sets up in his novels.

The subversion of the human psyche in favor of the viscera, and its focus on the repulsing visuals of human bowels, marks a visceral, or animal-like consciousness within Faulkner’s characters. The explicit human body, whether the naked exterior, or entrails-filled interior, marks a loss of—or perhaps demarcates—the human consciousness from the animal consciousness. The concept and use of clothing is a distinctly human trait (unless you count the eccentric elderly women who dress their ‘fou fou’ dogs up in designer wear) and its loss seems to coincide with the bleak notion that humans, when stripped of this symbol of humanity, are nothing but a “tub of guts.” The shame of nudity, taken at its most parabolic allegory, alludes to the Christian concept of //Genesis//; in stepping away from a visceral conscious through the apple, humanity’s acquiring of ‘knowledge’ brought with it the accouterments of introspection, self-awareness, and, humility in exhibition. Faulkner’s literary catechism surely at the ready while writing, Milton’s epic, [|//Paradise Lost//], serves as apt evidence. Adam, after eating the fruit of knowledge, hides himself from God in shame: “I heard thee [God] in the Garden, and of thy voice / Affraid, being naked, [I] hid my self”(Milton X.116-7).

And thus we have, with the loss of clothing, the loss of immortality. Death being a major theme throughout Faulkner’s works, with the obviousness of the title //As I Lay Dying//, but also with //The Sound and the Fury//’s use of the tangible death—Damuddy’s funeral a temporal focal point for the Compson children; the deaths of Quentin and Jason Sr.—and the more metaphorical notion of ‘death’, as the destruction of the Compson and Bascomb family line, and the ‘Old South’ and its embodying ideologies. Within the concept of death, we have two opposing viewpoints: a more Christian doctrine of the infiniteness of time where death simply marks a stage in [|metempsychosis], and the more nihilistic vision of time as the ineluctable countdown to your own insignificance in passing. Yet, we have a third concept of death, one that Eric Sundquist theorizes, where “dying maintains a figurative power far succeeding the literal,” as the “I” of the dead “is self composed of others,” and “integrity depends upon being integrated and its identity…constituted by identification” (Sundquist 288-92). Death then becomes a much more relativistic and spiritual take on Keats’ concept of [|Negative Capability]: the loss of the self through the incursion of outside forces paradoxically creates a just-as-valid concept of the self within those same outside forces: apotheosis.

=**Nudity In //The Sound and the Fury//:**=

“White folks dies too. Your grandmammy dead as any nigger can get, I reckon,“ Frony sagaciously informs the Compson gang after Damuddy’s death. “Dogs are dead,” Caddy replies, “And when Nancy fell in the ditch and Roskus shot her and the buzzards came and //undressed// her (//TSATF// 33 Emphasis Added). The Compson children’s first experience with human mortality is relayed through Frony’s phlegmatic objectivity; all humans, regardless or race, must pass away. But it is in Caddy’s response, “the buzzards came and //undressed// her,” in regards to Nancy, where Faulkner’s thematic layering reveals itself. Faulkner‘s punning on the concept of “dressing,” both in the in the vestiary and culinary sense, turns the buzzards’ feast on carrion into a symbolic act. The buzzards ingesting Nancy’s innards literally //undresses// Nancy to a pile of bones, but it also conveys the metaphorical //stripping// of one’s vitality.

=**Nakedness In //As I Lay Dying//:**=

“Dewey Dell’s wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which are the horizons and the valleys of the earth” (//AILD// 164). Darl’s absolutely bizarre description of Dewey Dell’s breasts at the river’s edge after their failed crossing coincided with Faulkner’s unerotic grotesqueness with the naked body. Dewey Dell’s sexuality is trumped in favor of a pragmatic view of sex, yet also containing a metaphysical contemplation of the naked form as it appears “shape[d]” through her wet dress. The “dead eyes of three blind men” is also a bit problematic—who are the three blind men Darl is speaking of?—but returning to an earlier chapter, Dewey Dell’s fascination with both “darkness” and “death” can be found as she attends to the Cow after her mother’s death: “The dead air shapes the dead earth in the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes the dead earth. It lies dead and warm upon me, touching me naked through my clothes” (63-4).

If Darl is defined through his “queer” and uncanny visual precognitions, then Dewey Dell is defined through her lucid and macabre sensory perception—“It lies //dead// and warm upon me, touching me //naked// through my clothes.” In fact, Dewey Dell’s narratives often mention the sensation nudity or openness. Her preoccupation with death, and her ongoing sense of nakedness coalesce into an envisaged fratricide. Fearful of Darl’s preternatural vision, she “sit[s] //naked// on the seat above the unhurrying mules,” and imagines a scenario in which she pulls the knife from Vardaman’s fish, and stabs her brother (121). Though, her neurosis may not stem completely from Darl’s clairvoyance. Dewey Dell’s pilgrimage is not just to bury her mother, but to find the means of an abortion in town. The one character whose removal of clothes produces an erotic action, must also render that erotic action abortive through death.

–Michael Monahan

Works Cited

Milton, John. "Milton Reading Room." //Milton: Paradise Lost//. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Oct. 2013. Sundquist, Eric. “Death, Grief, Analogous Form: //As I Lay Dying//.” //As I Lay Dying//. Faulkner, William. New York: W.W Norton & Company Inc., 2010. 286-303. Print.