“The clotting which is you”: Adorno, Faulkner, and the Aesthetics of Negativity I n his 1979 analysis of the function ofform in Faulkner’s novels, Donald Kartiganer charts two interpretive trajectories that allow us to understand the status ofthe work ofart in AsILayDying: on the one hand is the meticulously constructed coffin that Cash labors so incessantlyto complete in time for Addie to be placed inside of it; on the other is Dari’s aesthetically charged attempt to put an end to the Bundren’s increasingly irrational journey to Jefferson by setting ablaze Gillespie’s barn. For Kartiganer, the aesthetic couple of Dari and Cash en capsulates “the central irony of As I Lay Dying, the gaping distance between vision without form and form without vision”: “Dari is the man who rejects the physical, rejects form, pursues a selfalready committed to absence. Cash is the most artful of all those Bundrens who, knowing little else, know themselves in the impoverished images they have created” (29). Though Dari exhibits penetrating and clairvoyant powers of poetic description and insight, his struggle to identify a personal inter est with the march to Jefferson explodes onto the narrative scene as a destructive assault on private property and labor, leaving the Bundrens with no choice but to send him away to the Jackson insane asylum. As Cash remarks, “there just aint nothing justifies the deliberate destruction of what a man has built with his own sweat and stored the fruit of his sweat into” (238). Because Dari has no personal investment in the successful completion of the journey, he is, as Kartiganer sug gests, incapable ofcontributing anything meaningful to the trip, such as the coffin, money, or a horse. Though Kartiganer is nevertheless sensitive to the structural and thematic ambiguity over Cash and Dari’s aesthetic contributions to the nar rative, he tends toward concluding that “much of the vitality and resilience that is part ofthe meaning ofAs ILayDyingis vested in the figure ofCash, Faulkner’s first and only artist to be convinced that ‘it’s better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy courthouse,”’ implicitly suggesting that insofar as we can attribute a work ofart to Dari, it will fall under the category of the “shoddy courthouse” (30). Kartiganer’s estimation of Dari’s exclusion from the narrative has found wel come reception in more recent Faulkner scholarship,1 according to which Dari’s ostracism to a mental institution is the necessary consequence of so radically ‘I have in mind, in particular, Ted Atkinson’s “The Ideology of Autonomy: Form and Function in As I Lay Dying' and Daniel Singal’s The Making ofa Modernist. We might also refer to Calvin Bedient’s contribu tion to Faulkner: New Perspectives, where he writes that “ifDari is our innate nakedness in extremis, impotent to defend itself, Cash exemplifies the pride that saves us and is itself the substance of identity” (147). 47 48 Christopher Langlois Adorno, Faulkner, and the Aesthetics ofNegativity insisting on the negative, or “nihilist,” capability of art.2 With the climactic scene of the burning of Gillespie’s barn, it appears as though Dari’s perceptive powers have attained such a pitch of aesthetic purity as to violently sever any link with the empirical world. With no firm grasp on the world he inhabits, Dari figures as the consequence ofwhat can occur when representation loses its grip on reality. Writing nearly twenty five years after Kartiganer, Homer Pettey continues the critical tradition of consigning Dari’s mode of artistic expression to a socially pernicious no man’s land of perception: “As much as Dari wishes to ground his existence upon his perceptions, invariably the disintegration of representation—the disparity between word and world—negates not Addie’s haunting presence, but his own being” (27). The negation of his being, the fact that Dari, like his mother Addie, is unable to identify a consistent network of correspondence between word and world, as Pettey puts it, reaches its apex in the burning of Gillespie’s barn, an event that signals Dari’s complete psycho logical deterioration. However, to uphold the continuing identification of Dari’s burning of the barn with an act of...