A close reading analysis phrased as an (only ostensibly) conclusive dialogue:

What does she mean, he died? Anse is not dead.

- What would be a contradiction in common use makes it clear that what she

means by dead is outside common use. What she means is dead to me, in

some sense necessarily unconscious. Perhaps she feels him as unreal. Or,

more likely, no longer feels him at all.

Well, granted Anses now not-being, what are we to make of this: Gods love and

His beauty and His sin. The last term is normally antithetical to the others,

something utterly unlike them. Why does she think sin part of God in the same

way as His love?

- Here, under the lands language, it presents as equivalent. God Himself, and

Beauty, and other Capital social constructs are presented in a sense

somehow objective, here. Somehow, in spite of all Addie has said regarding

the unreality of words, these most unreal and oft-abused of terms take on a

reality in the actions of wo/men, in the earth itself. They are the words that

are deeds, and so have an underlying reality beyond what people say about

them, beyond what those that are tricked by words consider bad or good.

Okay, so the words that are deeds are a part of the land itself, that Anse and Darl

both spend so much time staring into (in the one case w/o seeing anything, in the

second without being able to do anything with what he sees). Although Cora doesnt

know God, but that isnt because there isnt one but because He is a part of the

land, its laws and its forces, that she ignores in favor of words. But what of the

words that are not deeds? Of Anses and Coras so obviously unreal vocabularies.

Their words are just the gaps in [their] lacks], signifying nothing why doesnt

Addie just ignore them? What is the effect they have on her?
 - Even the words that are not deeds are described in real and living metaphor.

The cries of geese appear out of the wild darkness, as words spring

from the voiceless dark. Each seems as much an impossibility as the other,

utterly unknowable, passing overhead in the old terrible nights as we [lie]

in bed and cower. In the passage this last bit refers to, that the mention of

geese in metaphor calls strait away to memory (172), Addie says that in

early spring it was the worst, and that with the wild geese going north and

their honking coming faint and high and wild out of the wild darkness, she

thought she could not bear it. The possibility of wild, unreasoned life, in all

its quarrelsome and migratory loudness, is terrible to her.

Why is this so?

1. Epistemic uncertainty.
2. Since the words themselves spring out of the voiceless dark but bear no

intrinsic relation to it beyond that of being its progeny they are -

3. Groundless, improbable.
4. Like the geese out of the wild dark they have nothing to call their own but

their knowledge of their motion and their sound.

5. They have no more knowledge of their origins than the geese do.
6. That this is so we can see in the awkwardness of the relation of the words

that are not deeds to their progenitors.

7. They fumble at the deeds like orphans.
8. This implying epistemic uncertainty as the specific case, more broadly
9. Identity anxiety.
10.The words to whom are pointed out the world that gave rise to them are

pointed out in a crowd two faces.

11.They cannot differentiate these faces from the crowd, cannot make out their

supposed referents in the teeming mass; indeed, as orphans they have no

experience with referents.

12.Referent is as alien a concept to them as parent is to Darl (95, and this

actually the one section prior to his psychotic break in which he uses a
 personal pronoun to identify himself, going beyond the usual I said to I

cannot love my mother because I have no mother. One imagines the words

share this sentiment.)

13.And yet they are told: That is your father, your mother
14.That this is an alien metaphor, coming out of abstract terms into the

hopelessly concrete in what seems an arbitrary manner, increases the degree

of alienation it conveys.
15.They come into this world naked, as we do (Peabody, 46), and become alone

long before they have a prayer of coming aware. Their connection to the

world beyond them is as hazy and unknowable as the connection of the infant

to its mother is, when the child that comes out of it has grown beyond that

stage.
16.Their situation is that of all the Bundren children, Vardaman Jewel Dewey Dell

Cash Darl, that are groundless and alone, deep in their existence but with no

ability to explain it to themselves, imbedded as they are within the broader

world in which they cannot distinguish their mother from their life (Vardaman

& fish, Jewel & horse, Dewey Dell and The Problem, Cash & work, Darl and the

whole wordless world beyond him) and their father is completely alien.
17.This is the situation of all creatures on this earth, that to live on it they must

turn themselves towards an origin they cannot see but know must exist.
18.This condition predates hollow language, it is a fact of the world (suggested

by the worldly realness of the geese, the land, and the universal character of

orphans, and of sin).

19.So.
20.Life itself (beyond language) is terrible.
21.(Except maybe where one lives for progeny more the results of their deeds

than children and chooses ignorance. Cash perhaps succeeds at this. The

choice is not really made available to Darl or Dewey Dell.)

This minute section, with its one central protracted sentence and its split subject

and its ambiguities enacted in dazzling concreteness, contains the core of the whole

novel.

Various Errata (answers to the prompted questions not yet covered):

So what literally happened was that Addie said Anse died but that she didnt know

he was dead, so one presumes he was a corpse of some sort that presented to her

as alive, but to go beyond that in any way would be to invoke metaphor. Then she

says she would lie down in bed near him and hear the land talking of all the things

that Cora talks about all day, Gods love and beauty, and sin, but phrased as heresy

Addie ascribes sin to God, as if it could be His sin. One puzzles to think of what

she could literally mean by this, what with Gods being necessarily metaphysical

(and so, however really real s/he might be, only renderable in discourse through

metaphor). And to take literal meaning further would be absurd, the only subject of

this paragraph is exactly the way all reality is only describable in terms of metaphor.

Literal language misunderstands its own nature entirely. (It thinks it can point to

specific aspects of the world for its referent when there is only teeming mass. Not

that it did not come from somewhere specific, but that that somewhere is not

anywhere near where it thought it referred to.)

What really happens is that Addie, from somewhere beyond the grave or prior to it,

thinks. Perhaps this is the content of the corpse-bubbling speech Darl brings

Vardaman up to the coffin to hear (212).

And an extended investigation into an implication of the way world and word form
schizoid whole
It is easy to dismiss this book since, even as it deals extensively w/ political themes,
it is inherently apolitical, even anti-political. It turns away from the public sphere, in
which we manufacture meaning, not because the effect of such manufacture on the
individual is violent and terrible (although it is both of those things), but because it
is unreal. No revision of categories will accommodate the charge that Faulkner lays
at our feet. Though there are myriad social critiques imbedded in his work, the work
is not a critique, nor even social. It suggests that the damage we do to one
another is merely a function of the damage the world does to us. Of the damage we
do to ourselves.
- Our relation to the world is what determines the damage we sustain from it. A
creature like Anse could exist outside of language. His burdens (such as they
are) are pre-linguistic, non-linguistic. As are Addies, Darls, Dewey Dells. And
as are Cashs and Jewels and Coras (and Anses) willful strategies for avoiding
burden, keeping the self untainted from the majority of the world either through
a focus on the work of mans hands, the transactional ideal, or a particular and
all-excluding love (clearly on more shaky ground here), or a complete erasure of
the self in favor of the world as it presents itself through a supremely effective
filter. (Darls way of life, while similar in principle, cannot hold precisely because
it lacks this last ingredient.)