A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.
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"Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own. The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between green rows of laid-by cotton, to the cottonhouse in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the cottonhouse at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision."
-Darl (3)
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In my road trip to Oxford, Mississippi I will be analyzing the South through the writing of William Faulkner, more particularly the character Darl Bundren from the novel entitled As I Lay Dying. The ability of Darl to see the absurdity of his family's position, along with his psychological disintegration at the end of the novel, paints a picture of the South dealing with an unprompted transformation into what we now consider to be the modern day South. Darl however does not only represent modernity. Darl represents the crazy inside southern characters in much of the same way as The Misfit in A Good Man Is Hard To Find, or Emily in A Rose For Emily, and the duality that exists because of conflicting ideas of appearance versus reality, really says volumes as to the nature of the South. Darl is a Bundren, he embodies the South through and through, but he is quite different from the other Bundrens. He is articulate and smart, thoughtful and poetic, so while the South may appear to be concerned only with the "Dixie" way of life, the true picture is one of a group of people whose character mirrors the contrast we see in the character. Faulkner embodies this idea even if he really didn't mean to, the nobel prize winner basically placed the South on the literary map, we're lucky someone didn't see such insanely brilliant writing and throw him in the mental hospital in Jackson. The bipolar characteristics of Darl seems to say that in a way the South is bipolar, and the act of attempting to burn his mother's coffin while it was in the barn was obviously a manic episode in which the fate of the world for Darl in relation to his family's descent into madness rests on the partially irrational act, and Darl intends not not only to rid the South and his family of the dead body but do it in a way that symbolizes something larger, something divinely important in the mundane actions of man. The insanity of the South is what I am focusing on in my trip, and much like the irrational act of going to war with the North during the Civil War, the South was told to stay in line similar to Anse deciding that Darl will go to the crazy house in Jackson. By writing about a Bundren family who denounces their insanely brilliant brother as crazy, while at the same time being insane themselves, represents a group of people who do not truly know what drives their actions. The South, as it comes into modernity, rides on the waves of life, the force of the water being the emotional ebb and flow; a bipolar storyline for a group of people, an entire area instead of an isolated instance like Darl's. The insanity of Darl and the South has to do with the problems that arise as contrasting values and customs begin to occur during precocious transitions. This idea will be explored in Oxford, Mississippi by analyzing how the city embraces both the old and new at the same time, and how the image of mental health contributes to the psychoanalysis of Darl and the South as a whole.
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