DAVID HEINHood College

The Reverend Mr. Shegog's EasterSermon: Preaching as Communion inFaulkner's The Sound and the Fury"APRIL EIGHTH, 1928," THE FOURTH SECTION OF THE SOUND AND THE FURY,

begins with Easter Sunday's dawning "bleak and chill" (265). As DilseyGibson, the Gompson family servant, emerges from her cabin, the readersees her as if for the first time: a "big woman" once, now she is gaunt, herbody "consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising likea ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts" (266).At the heart of this chapter, Faulkner places his account of an Easterservice held at a worn-looking church at the end of a dirt road. Ofcourse, first impressions can mislead. Among the chief surprises is anAfrican American preacher from St. Louis: the Reverend Mr. Shegog.Through the author's portrayal of what takes place in this church, thereader learns something more important about Dilsey than her physicalappearance. In this service, on a day when the Compson family is flyingapart, she receives her orientation.

Over the last forty years, literary scholars have focused considerableattention on the final section of The Sound and the Fury and on theShegog sermon in particular. A number of studies provide carefulanalyses of the distinctive language of the sermon. Attentive to suchelements as meter, intonation, and repetition, Bruce A. Rosenberg, forinstance, examines Shegog's sermon as an effective literary presentationof an oral genre. Looking at influences on Faulkner's composition of thesermon, Robert E. Fleming notes parallels with James Weldon Johnson'sGod's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Victor Strandbergdraws attention to the author's use of the biblical technique of inversion,which offers readers the opposite of what they expect: a crucifiedmessiah, an undersized preacher who turns out to he a hrilhant orator("Faulkner's Poor Parson"). Joseph Urgo demonstrates how the structureof the sermon mirrors the structure and presentation of the novel.Analyzing Shegog's voice, Stephen M. Ross considers how this voice

'See also Matthews, /Vaj 108-10.

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operates as a powerful force in its own right, how Faulkner separatesvoice and speaker, and how sound and sight often contrast vi^th oneanother ("Rev. Shegog's Powerful Voice"). The point of the sermon, Rossfinds, is not the "communication" of a "message." Rather, the meaningof the sermon Hes in the "satisfaction and fulfillment" that the voicebrings about: the engendering of a communion beyond the need forwords (16). In his analysis of the language and function of the sermon,Andre Bleikasten also finds that what really matters is not the messagethat the sermon conveys but "the collective ceremony of its utterance"(The Ink of Melancholy 141).

In a discussion sensitive to the actualities of the African-Americanrehgious experience, Thadious M. Davis asserts that Faulkner's "crudeliterary representation of Negro dialect" lacks "the biblical grandeur"both of his own writing elsewhere and of black preaching; "it does notcreate the illusion of strong emotion as effectively as his descriptivepassages" that surround the sermon. As a result, Shegog's verbal effortmight confuse readers and cause them to "believe that the Compsons'alienation from the represented black world of faith is justified" (124).^Wilham Dahill-Baue examines the use of "Black English" in novels byFaulkner and Toni Morrison. He observes that by having Shegogabandon his more formal delivery in favor of black dialect, which "drawshis congregation into a communal space of identification where barriersbetween selves are broken down and all are bound together by theircommon voice and suffering," Faulkner is in fact "subverting the idiom(as well as the historical actions) of the master." The novel's author isrepresenting Shegog "as a Signifying Monkey," and so is using the blackdialect "not as burlesque but as a demonstration of the transformativepowers of language." In this depiction, then, Shegog becomes a"complex, reahstic" character who resists "stereotype and simphfication."Playing "with language's power to overturn expected meaning," Shegog"thereby overthrow[s] the binding shackles of social codes" (466, 467,469, 473).

Affirming the possibihty that Faulkner's approach to the fourthsection was informed by his reading of J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough,Philip D. Castille argues that Shegog awakens a "spiritual renewal" inDilsey—"a renovating vision of the power of life over death"—and thisspringtime rebirth enables her "to break free from the Compsons and to

See Kinney, "Faulkner and Racism" 265-66, and Cohen 116-17.

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renounce her years of resignation and denial" (423, 424). Alexander J.Marshall III, on the other hand, focuses on images of destruction andloss. Drawing on the work of Lacan, Derrida, and other literary theorists,he argues that the sermon's language effects a subversion of our usualunderstanding of Easter. Faulkner, he says, uses wasteland images topresent a sermon that moves toward silence and the death of the Word:"Reverend Shegog's sermon recapitulates in reverse the narrativestrategies of the novel itself, from the cold, rational 'white man'slanguage' of Jason to the irrational language of Quentin to themeaningless yet meaning-full moan of Benjy. The sermon is an eloquentexample of transcendent, nonverbal communication in a world of verbalimpotence" (187).

In this essay I attempt not so much to correct as to complement andto add to the extensive work that has already heen done on the Shegogsermon. Informed by historical and theological as well as byliterary-critical perspectives, the present study builds on an awarenessof the cultural-linguistic history of African-American preaching. Thecore of the interpretation that follows is grounded in the somewhatparadoxical claim that in the tradition of the church that Dilsey attendsa sermon is properly understood to be both word and sacrament—twofunctions of Christian worship that many would take to be distinct if notseparate. This interpretive approach works to understand such featuresof the sermon as its setting (use of sacred space), its relation to time (atime-binding event), its manner and content, its effect, and perhaps evenits role in the book. Witness to "the first and the last," Dilsey participatesin an event that may usefully be perceived as a sacrament. A liturgicalreading of these pages, therefore, should increase our appreciation of theriches of this section of Faulkner's novel.

In the congregation to which Dilsey and the rest of the Gibson familybelong—a church whose denomination is not specified but which allintemal and extemal evidence suggests is Baptist—the Lord's Supperwould be a rare event, celebrated at most on a quarterly basis andpossibly only biannually. Hers is not a sacerdotal church with an altar inthe most prominent position but a word-centered church, in which thepulpit is the main focus of everyone's attention and the preacher is anexalted figure. In 1928, on Easter Sunday, the vast majority of theworld's Christians—including Roman Catholics, Greek and RussianOrthodox, and Anglicans^would have celebrated the resurrection of

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Christ by participating in a service of Holy Communion. But in a Baptistchurch, like Dilsey's, worshipers would not remember Christ'sresurrection by holding a service of the Lord's Supper; rather, theywould proclaim their Easter faith through praise, prayer, and—most ofall—preaching.

To gain a better understanding of The Sound and the fury, however,we should be careful not to distinguish between these two ways ofcelebrating Easter so sharply as to mark them off completely one fromthe other. In Shegog's sermon, verbal witness and sacramental gracecoinhere. In Shegog's preaching, Christ is risen in the kerygmatic Word,alive within the body of believers through the ministrations of anotherwise unprepossessing black clergyman. In this moment ofkairoy—of time out of time—worshipers may experience the divinereality contemporaneously in meaning-filled past, ecstatic present, andblessed future. Much like a celebration ofthe Lord's Supper, Shegog'spreaching becomes a time-binding event. It not only re-presents thej'llud tempus when Christ taught and suffered and rose again—that is,the sacred time of Christian origins, which Christians understand to bethe hinge of history; it also offers a proleptic experience of eternity(Eliade ch. 2). Forming a close parallel to a celebration ofthe Eucharist,Shegog's sermon evokes dynamic remembrance ofthe crucified and risenChrist {anamnesis), even as it invokes love, hope, joy, and peace—whatone congregant calls "de comfort en de unburdenin" (292)-*giftstraditionally associated with the coming ofthe Holy Spirit {epiklesis).

The center of this Easter celebration, the mystical drama which is thesermon by the visiting clergyman, provides a ritual occasion forcommunion; communion of the worshipers with Christ and with oneanother. In his comments on this episode in the novel, John T. Matthewsnotes that "[bjands of Christian believers have regularly practiced theritual of the Eucharist, the sharing of bread and wine in symboliccelebration of Christ's broken body and shed blood. Though Dilsey'scongregation does not literally celebrate the Eucharist, or communion,during this service, its effect can be seen in the moment of fusion theyenjoy" (" The Sound and the Fury' 83).

^Although Bernhard Radloff's understanding of time in The Sound and the Furyisbased on a Heideggerian analysis of human temporality, in some important respects hisreading of the unity of past, present, and future in the Shegog sermon and in Dilsey'sresponse corresponds to my own (61-63, 66-67).

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A vehicle of grace, the sermon is thus powerfully sacramental; and soa reading of this sermon as a liturgical event would seem a natural moveto make. But first let's be clear about our authorization to proceed.Attempting to view this Easter service through the lens of liturgy is notan effort to impose a hegemonic Cathohc imagination on the text, tomake an "anonymous Cathohc" of Shegog or of Faulkner. That apreaching service should bear remarkable affinities with a Eucharist isno accident. What legitimates this interpretive move and keeps it fromheing an arbitrary imputation of foreign values is not only theconnotations and denotations of the text itself but also the fact that it isa reading-out that is firmly rooted in the Protestant understanding of theefficacy of the preached Word. Ostensibly "non-liturgical"churches—including those that incorporate the folk reHgion of ruralcommunities—can have a heavy investment in sacramentality and ritual.

The theologian who began the Reformation, Martin Luther, taughtProtestant Christians how they were to hear and receive the gospel—thegood news proclaimed in the words of Christ and in the words aboutChrist. They were to meditate upon and thereby to participate in thegospel in a sacramental way. Through the preached Word, the Reformersaid, God makes God's power and righteousness known as the savingword of forgiveness and new hfe. The words that Christians spirituallyingest are themselves sacramental signs: means of conveying to believersthe divine reality of Christ and his gifts (Stjema 43).

Especially in the antebellum slave community, the spoken words ofblack preaching carried special import. Because the slaves—and, fordecades after the Civil War, many of their descendants in the ruralSouth—were largely illiterate, "their world," a scholar ofAfrican-American culture has pointed out, "remained a world of soundin which words were actions." This context helped to make preachingan unusually powerful force: to speak of the heroes of the Bible "was togive them a substance, a reality, to make them literally come alive"(Levine 158). Consequently, in hlack preaching, as one student of thegenre has said, "[h]istory was brought forward, and the past wasreenacted as the people identified with persons and events in the biblicalnarratives" (Duke 82).

Within the Free Church tradition, in the first half of the twentiethcentury, a Scottish Congregational minister named P. T. Forsythdeveloped a theology of preaching that became particularly well known

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and influential. In his Beecher Lectures at Yale in 1907, Forsythexplicitly affirmed that "[t]he sacrament which gives value to all othersacraments is the Sacrament of the living Word" (7). While thepreacher's role is not "sacerdotal," he said, it is "sacramental." Thepreacher is "a living element in Christ's hands . . .for the distribution . . .of Grace" (80). More important than the words of the minister is thedivine action that takes place within the life of each believer: "In truepreaching, as in a true sacrament, more is done than said" (81). Throughthe work of the preacher, Forsyth believed, "a deed [is beingaccomplished] in which the Redeemer is the chief actor" (82). By meansof the mediating reahty of proclamation, the preacher "prolongs Christ'ssacramental work," and worshipers have an opportunity to participatein "the sacrament of the Cross" (82). Christ's saving work on the cross"re-enacts itself in us. God's living word reproduces itself as a living act.It is not inert truth, but quick power" (82). In this way, "[ejvery truesermon . . . is a sacramental time and act" (83). The "center of gravity" ofthis sacramental act, Forsyth said, Ues not in material elements such asbread and wine but rather in "the site of Christ's real presence," thecommunity of believers (83 84). Christ is truly present, then, in thesacrament of the Word, through which God acts anew to transformGod's people.

Faulkner did not need to read weighty theological treatises byProtestant Reformers or hooks on preaching by Nonconformisttheologians to have a strong sense of how Baptist preaching wassupposed to work. He knew well enough how participants in such aservice as Dilsey attends were to listen for the Holy Spirit to addressthem over the shoulder, as it were, of their own preacher. And certainlyin his own, analogous domain, the priestly realm of the literary artist, hewould have been thoroughly familiar with the ever-present, alwayselusive goal of expressing transcendent truth and beauty in earthlyforms.

Faulkner recognized the difficulty of articulating "the old verities . . .the old universal truths" through the recalcitrant medium of words("Address" 120). Human language, the mean instrument that the writeris "doomed" to use, is, he told a young English instructor in 1950, "aboutthe damndest clumsiest frailest awkwardest tool he could have beengiven" (qtd. in Blotner 1305). But alongside his awareness that languageis a frail and clumsy instrument, he maintained with Shegog a core behef

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in the sublimity of the word. Indeed, as Victor Strandberg observes ofFaulkner: "The artist, he thought, is (Uke the orthodox priest or prophet)a point of contact between the divine and the human" ("Faulkner's God"132). In attempting to make this contact, Faulkner and Shegog embrace,as it were, both the via positiva., which relies on words and images, andthe via negativa, which accepts the brokenness of all human discourse.

The deputy of God's power—the preacher who brings theWord—must often have seemed a weak vessel for bearing divine grace.Indeed he might be "undersized" and "insignificant looking": "'En deybrung dat all de way fiun Saint Looey,' Frony whispered." Dilseyobserves the same figure, but, possessing deeper faith and a widerhistorical perspective, she is prepared to be more patient than herdaughter: "I've knowed de Lawd to use cuiser tools dan dat," she assuresFrony (293).

What Dilsey indicates that she has experienced in her own life isconsonant with a core theme of Christian history. The apostle Paul,author ofthe earliest books in the New Testament, speaks ofthe way inwhich God uses what is foolish for God's wisdom and what is weak forGod's power, both on the cross and in the kerygma (1 Cor. 1-2).Preachers, Paul says, do in fact bring a "treasure," the grace contained inthe gospel of Christ, but they carry this gift in "earthen vessels," whichare the limitations of their own persons, including the manifoldimperfections of their preaching (2 Cor. 4:7). But God can use even theefforts of jackleg preachers to enable the words of human beings tobecome the Word of God (1 Thess. 2:13).^

The worship scene that Faulkner describes in the final section of TheSound and the Fury manifests the left wing Protestant juxtaposition ofsacrality and spareness. On the one hand, the church service takes placenot only in sacred time but also in an almost fantastic setting: in "a scene

•'"The apostle Paul was aware ofthe sacramental nature ofthe kerygma; that is. ofthesacramental relationship between his words as human elements on the one hand, andthe reality of Jesus Christ communicated through the kerygma, on the other hand"(Tarazi 36-37). Preaching, in other words, is sacramental because it involves atransformation through which Christians may partake ofthe mystery of Christ: divinegrace both enables the words of the gospel to become the Word of God and opens themind and heart ofthe Christian to receive the Word. In this way, hearing the words ofthe preacher (the material form) can become an authentic encounter with the Word ofChrist (the spiritual reality). What Henry Mitchell refers to as "Black folk-theology" hasalways held a similar view (196-97).

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like a painted backdrop." Tbe road beside which the small churchbuilding rests comes to an abrupt halt: "the road appeared to stop shortoff, Uke a cut ribbon." The entire scene resembles not an actual churchbuilding and its setting in a real, earthly place but rather "a paintedcardboard set upon the ultimate edge ofthe fiat earth, against the windysunlight of space and April and a midmoming filled with bells." It is ascene—this "weathered church lift[ing] its crazy steeple" into the sky(292)—which is fitting for the Uminal experience within the church ofthe vertical dimension of transcendence.

On the other hand, the interior of this church is an aestheticdisappointment: the beauty and holiness of worship are hardly suggestedby the "sparse fiowers" or by the "battered Christmas bell, the accordionsort that collapses," over the pulpit (292). The spareness of this settingneed not be wholly attributed to the poverty of the congregation,however. In this Protestant community, what's desired is not incense,beUs, statues, votive candles, and richly embroidered vestments; all ofthat would be seen not as aids to worship but as distracting bric-a-brac.Here what is sought is clean lines, simplicity, spiritualreaHzation. Andmaterial objects can get in the way of that.^

In a church such as Dilsey's, then, what makes the somewhat shabbysurroundings sacred is not matter and rite and furnishings but rather theamazing grace that quickens faith and love in this community offorgiven sinners. The holiness ofthe church resides not in the physical

The Baptist tradition, on the left wing of the Protestant Reformation, owes thisaesthetic impulse to the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli. Influenced by the ChristianizedNeoplatonism of such early theologians as Justin. Origen, and Augustine. Zwingli in tumpassed on to Protestantism a mistrust of the material realm, contrasting it with spiritualreality. Consequently, he bequeathed to many Protestants, including Baptists, a simpleform of worship, an approach to the divine that did not lead the believer to God throughan undue reliance on the physical senses. Zwingli was consistent: from him also comesan interpretation ofthe Eucharist according to which the material elements—^the breadand the wine—are merely signs or symbols of spiritual reality. He denied the Eucharisdcdoctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the bread and the wine. Christ, he said, isspiritually, not physically, present in the material elements. In Zwingli-influencedchurches, the principal work ofthe Christian minister is preaching, not presiding at theholy table. Hence the centrality of the pulpit rather than the altar: faith cometh byhearing, through the verbal sacrament ofthe preached word (Rom. 10:17). See Simmons155. For the overwhelming majority of black churches, a theologian of preaching haswritten, "the sermon is the focal point toward which ali else leads, and from which allelse follows" (Duke 81).

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building but in the spiritual quality ofthe body of Christians gathered inthis place, apart from the world, at the end of a road. This understandingreflects the Protestant emphasis on the church structure not as the holyhouse of God—the more Catholic view—but as the meetinghouse oftheholy people of God.

A "meagre figure," Shegog begins his sermon with his voice "level andcold" (293). As one literary scholar has noted, "We find this vocal tag,level and cold,' employed frequently in Faulkner as a mark upon thediscourse of any speaker not participating in a shared or shareable voice.To speak in a level and cold voice is to speak only for oneself, af but notwith others' (Ross, Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice Aff). An intelligent andpracticed preacher, Shegog may intentionally incorporate a distancingdevice in the first part of his delivery. His homiletical approach is notextraordinary for evangelical preachers, black or white, who werealways taught, as the popular injunction had it, to "start low, go slow,rise higher, catch fire, wax warm, quit strong," In the second and thirdparts of his sermon, the visitor pulls in his listeners—sparking theirinterest, then drawing them to the glowing hearth of his oratory.

In examining Shegog's pulpit message, we should not suppose thatFaulkner gives us the entire sermon verbatim. Indeed, this sermon, in itsreported form, seems disjointed. Shegog probably would have preachedfor at least forty-five minutes on this Easter Sunday, and Faulkner doesnot give us enough words for a sermon of that duration. Instead, heprovides the sermon's principal elements and, as elsewhere, allows hisreaders to fill in the scene and develop their own sense ofthe whole. Hesupplies the most complete transcript when the congregation itself startspaying close attention to what their preacher is saying (Ross and Polk182).

In addition, at least some ofthe seemingly disjointed quality may betaken to go back to Shegog's original version. Not only is the homileticalform that he employs thoroughly different from that of, say, the arid,essay-type sermons of eighteenth-century Britain; it is also a form thatanticipates the involvement of the congregation. Theirs would be anaudible and emotional response, to be sure, but an intellectualdovetailing with the work of the preacher, as well. When Shegog citescrucial episodes in salvation history or important texts from the life andteaching of Jesus or graphic images from the apocalyptic literature, he

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can appropriately expect his congregation to know what he's referringto.^

For his auditors this sermon is part inspiration and part moralencouragement, but it is primarily an identity avowal. Just as forChristians in liturgical churches who recite creeds that contain only theharest sketch of the lineaments of their faith, so for the members ofDilsey's church, the key phrases and allusions suffice. The scraps ofscripture are reminders—highlights in shorthand—of a completenarrative, which each hstener already knows.'' Within this larger storyeach Christian finds his or her identity. Shegog's purpose, then, is not toconvey new information but to reestablish his hearers in the faith byenthusiastically working with them to see their own mundanestories—their lives in ordinary time, in everyday places—in the light ofthis narrative of eternal salvation. He brings a word to fortify them ontheir individual journeys as they strive to continue on the Way.

Tramping "steadily back and forth beneath the twisted paper and theChristmas bell," Shegog declares his message: "I got the recollection andthe blood of the Lamb!" (294). He will repeat this statement severaltimes, interweaving it with snatches of biblical testimony. This theme of"recollection"—anamnesis—is central to Shegog's sermon and toChristianity. By remembering where they came from, Christians knowwho they are and where they are going. Through anamnesis, Christiansare able to experience the past in the present, partaking—whetherspiritually by means of the preached Word or physically by means ofsacramental wine—ofthe saving blood ofthe Lamb. Standing at the footof the cross, they enjoy here and now the benefits of Christ's passion.Shegog bids his hearers meditate upon—imaginatively to receivethrough recollection—the blood of Christ shed on Calvary. The "blood

*My imderstanding of Shegog's method and art puts me at odds, then, with NoelPolk's assertion that Shegog's "sermon is a hodgepodge of pseudo-eloquence and nonsequitur and nonsense theology" which gives the members of his congregation "no time,no reason . . . to think" (172,173).

'See Harned ch. 1. P. T. Forsyth comments on the similarity between sermons andcreeds: "Preaching... is the Church confessing its faith. And it is as surely a part of theservice as the reciting of a creed conld be. . . . It is less organized, but no less collectivethan the great creeds. And in the churches where there are no formal creeds it takestheir place. The place ofthe sermon in the more democratic and non-Catholic Churchesis due, in part, to the absence in their ritual of a recited creed. It is all that some of them, . . have for a creed" (100).

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of the Lamb" is a synecdoche for a larger reality and its meaning. Withthis divine economy of salvation Shegog's hearers would, of course, befamiliar: the once-for all sacrifice that atoned for sin, restored friendshipbetween God and human beings, and thereby opened up new life to thechildren of God, making authentic humanity and true virtue possible.

The preacher's dramatic declaration concerning "the blood of theLamb" is also a way of urging his listeners to keep in mind the Last Days.His words advert to the time when, according to the author ofthe bookof Revelation, the robes of the faithful will be made "white in the bloodof the Lamb." Shegog's use of this phrase points as well to the decisivemoment when the old serpent, Satan, will be "overc[o]me... by theblood ofthe Lamb" (Rev. 7:14; 12:11). As he goes on to develop thistheme of recollection, testing, and ultimate triumph, Shegog enables themembers of his congregation to stand apart from—to experienceeJc-stasis in relation to—their workaday lives, measured by chronos. Ifhis hearers respond to his words, then they can enjoy already, indramatic compresence, a taste ofthe messianic banquet ofthe Endtime.In this way his sermon offers them a deeper sense ofthe significance oftheir ordinary lives—of their self-descriptions, of their choices andactions—here and now.

Preaching to his listeners' hearts, not just their heads, Shegog hasmodulated his voice, so that it now has "a sad, timbrous quality like analto horn, sinking into their hearts and speaking there again when it hadceased in fading and cumulate echoes" (294). As he speaks, his beingundergoes something akin to transubstantiation, his inner essencetransmuted into a supernaturally charged voice while his physicalappearance remains the same humble exterior. In suggesting what thistransformation is like, Faulkner employs a simile borrowed not fromsacramental theology but from medieval demonology: "With his body heseemed to feed the voice that, succubus like, had fleshed its teeth in him"(294).

Through the instrumentality of his transformed self, Shegog becomesan agent of communion: "[T]he congregation seemed to watch with itsown eyes while the voice consumed him, until he was nothing and theywere nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their heartswere speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need forwords. . ." (294). This experience is reminiscent ofthe apophatic way ofthe mystics: the ladder of spiritual ascent rises beyond the realm where

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human language can avail. In Shegog's congregation a kind of mysticalunion takes place which necessarily transcends the limitations of finitewords. The sermon becomes a medium of communion; and it does so, asNoel Polk says, "when language breaks down completely, and [theassembled Christians] need not rely on it for the communication of theirdeepest beliefs: Jesus, in this frame, is in effect a signified which cannotAavea sufficient signifier" (173).** Shegog will go on preaching in words,for the viapositiva is also necessary for spiritual wisdom and progress,but in this ritual moment communion takes place along the via negativa.

Even the vehicle of communion becomes "nothing." Shegog'spreaching is the product of one who sees himself in Pauline terms: "I, yetnot I, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal. 2:20). Indeed, in the midst of thisverbal sacrament, the preacher appears to act almost in persona Christihis "whole attitude [became] that of a serene, tortured crucifix thattranscended its shabbiness and insignificance and made it of nomoment. . ." (294-95).^ As he preaches, "a long moaning expulsion ofbreath rose from [the congregation], and a woman's single soprano: 'Yes,Jesus!'" In terms signifying the sacrificial life, Faulkner depicts thethoroughgoing nature of Dilsey's participation in this event: "Dilsey satbolt upright, her hand on Ben's knee. Two tears slid down her fallencheeks, in and out of the myriad coruscations of immolation andabnegation and time" (295).

His voice becoming more Negroid, Shegog raises his hands andproclaims, "I got de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb!" The membersof his congregation "just sat swaying a little . . . as the voice took theminto itself " (295). In his preaching, phrases of biblical shorthand tumbleout in quick succession. Past, present, and future, abstraction andconcrete detail, historical scene and parabolic moral—aU cascade in close

^ e BedeU 247-48.

""Although Faulkner fuses Shegog with his sermon." Thadious Davis writes, "he doesnot transfigure the preacher into Christ," which might connect the preacher to the whiteworld of the Compsons; "instead, the closest he comes is to an image relating Shegog'sshape to the cross on which Christ dies" (125). In fact, however, the image is of acrucifix, not of an empty (post-Easter) cross; the "crucifix" is "tortured" hecause itcontains the figure of the crucified Jesus.

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proximity to one another down the torrent of Shegog's delivery.'" Therapid switching back and forth across time catches up the listener in acentripetal movement experienced as near contemporaneity." Thepreacher guides the flow of his oratory hy keeping his eye on a steadylight: the Word, present at Creation, incarnate in a man, coming againin glory to judge the quick and the dead.

Shegog's focus on the Word—"I sees de light en I sees de word"(295)—reminds us again of the sacramental quality of this preaching,through which a minister "in a shabby alpaca coat" (293) communicatesdivine things. The author ofthe Fourth Gospel, whom Shegog is quoting,draws upon the tradition ofthe biblical prophets when he speaks of "theWord [that] was vidth God" (John 1:1). The Incarnation of God is, in St.John'sphrase, "the Word . . . made flesh" (1:14). This incarnate life is theultimate revelation: the most complete means of communication possiblethis side of Paradise. In the Christian understanding, Jesus not onlybrings a word from God but is himself the Word that he brings: the lastand greatest ofthe prophets, the perfect realization ofthe work oftheHebrew prophets. Christ is the ideal for all Christian preachers. In theirpreaching, the apostles and their successors down the centuries witnessto this Word at the center of time. Their words participate in the Wordof Christ, interpreting this decisive revelation, incorporating Christianpeople into its life and meaning. That as a preacher Shegog should holdfast to this Word is therefore not surprising.

'"Shegog's rhetorical method parallels Faulkner's way of telling a tale. Using variousvoices and viewpoints, hringing to the fore episodes and images fT-om different timeperiods, and tying incidents and individuals together, both men spin out worlds ofdeepening meaning in which the significances reach beyond themselves. Both stylisticapproaches assume a familiarity that does not require the introduction of characters(Kenner 205-09). And both approaches to language and story require that "you havelearned to pay . . . the kind of attention by which you get the hang ofthe communityalmost like a native. . ." (209). Kenner is speaking only of Faulkner's method, but hisobservations apply equally well to Shegog's rhetorical way with his fellow Christians.

' 'This congregation probably includes many who are not regular, proficient readers;for them, the experience of contemporaneity would be heightened by their habitualdependence on the spoken word: "To leam of the past through the personally relatedspoken word was to give the past a contemporaneity and personal significance missingfirom the more highly segmented and compartmentalized sense of time characteristic ofliterate societies in which knowledge of the past is derived largely from the moreabstracted and detached printed page" (Levine 158).

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Then, referring both to the time when the Egyptians held theIsraehtes in bondage and to a popular Negro spiritual, the visitor says,"Dey passed away in Egypt, de swingin chariots" (295). Soon afterwardshe intensifies this tyranny-and-exodus theme by pointing to the terribleevent recounted in the Gospel of Matthew which became known as theslaughter of the holy innocents (2:13-18). In his telling, Shegog links thefirst-century tribulations of one mother, Mary, to the twentieth-centurytrials of ail the mothers in attendance:

Look at dem little chillen settin dar. lesus wus like dat once. He mammy suffered deglory en de pangs. Sometime maybe she helt him at de nightfall, whilst de angelssingin him to sleep; maybe she look out de do en see de Roman po-lice passin., . .I . . . sees Mary jump up, sees de sojer face: We gwine to kill! We gwine to kill! Wegwine to kill yo little Jesus! I hears de weepin en de lamentation [Matt. 2:18] of depo mammy widout de salvation en de word of God! (296)

I

In focusing attention on the subject of oppression/liberation, Shegogstands squarely within the long tradition of black preaching."Personalities such as Moses, Pharaoh, Mary, and Jesus," a scholar ofhomiletics has observed,"... were genuine persons" in the black churchsetting. A leitmotif of African-American preaching has been thepresence of suffering and redemption in the interlocking stories of theancient Hebrews, of Jesus, and of blacks themselves. "The sufferings ofIsrael and those of the black community were fused, so that both, as itwere, inhabited the same time and place" (Duke 82), On this EasterSunday, the visiting preacher works to make the exodus experience ofemancipation through Christ palpable to his fellow sojoumers, whoshare with him a burdened history.

To prepare his hearers for the future judgment, Shegog urges them toheed the lesson contained in the story of Dives and Lazarus: "Wus a richman: whar he now, O breddren? Wus a po man: whar he now, Osistuhn?" (295). Most in his congregation would remember how, duringhis hfe on earth. Dives, a rich man, had always ignored Lazarus, a poorman covered with sores. When both died. Dives was sent to torment inHades, and Lazarus was carried away by angels to be with Abraham(Luke 16:19-31).

By means of this story, the visiting preacher's sermon incorporates anemphasis on communion as mutual responsibility: participation in Christmeans communion with those who make up the Lord's body. Thisservice, like more formal hturgies, is an event which, in its dramatic

llie Reverend Mr. Sbegog's Easter Sermon 573

summary ofthe way ofthe Christ, displays not only a symbol of faith butalso a norm of conduct. Accepting an invitation to identify v^th Christentails a willingness to offer oneself—in unity with Christ^-on behalfof one's fellow creatures.

Every tired Christian, Shegog declares, will say at the end of his orher life, "Let me lay down wid de Lawd, lemme lay down my load"(295). But Shegog is aware of Jesus's admonition in Matt. 7:21, "Notevery one that saith unto me. Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdomof heaven; but he that doeth the wiU of my Father which is in heaven."Therefore the preacher inquires of those present, "Den whut Jesus gwinesay, O breddren? O sistuhn?" And he repeats the question that conveysthe urgent demand and holds the essential requirement for entering thekingdom: "Is you got de ricklickshun en de Blood of de Lamb?" (295).

Shegog's allusion to the story of Dives and Lazarus is a way ofaffirming that the true recollection of Christ's sacrifice requires aconsistent obedience to God's will, and obedience entails how one treats"de least of dese" (296; see Matt. 25:40). The Hvely reception ofthe Worddoes not mean simply feeling "spiritual" or momentarily uplifted. Hencethis Easter service becomes both an act of worship and a pattern for dailyexistence, the two sides held together through participation in andobedience to the way of Christ. Perhaps again having in mind theRevelation of St. John the Divine (7:4-8; 14:1-3), the visitor exhorts hisauditors to have faith and to practice charity by suggesting to them thatthe saints in heaven may be limited in number: "Case I aint gwine loaddown heaven!" (295).

Before Shegog speaks of resurrection and glory, he paints a scene ofsuffering and abandonment. Jesus is subjected to the mockery of thosewho call out, "Ef you be Jesus, lif up yo tree en walk!" (296). Does Shegog(or Faulkner) here confuse two quite different New Testament passages,one a taunt quoted in the Passion narrative and the other a commanduttered by Jesus during a healing miracle (Matthews, PJay 109; Ross andPolk 183)? In fact it seems more likely that the preacher is artfullycombining allusions to these two different situations as a way of dealingmore vividly with two references in Matt. 27, one to Jesus's savingsinners and the other to the Messiah's saving himself: "He saved others;himself he cannot save. If he be the King of Israel, let him now comedown from the cross, and we will believe him" (v. 42). In Shegog'sversion the jeer sounds even more derisive than in the original: "Ef you

574 David Hein

be Jesus, lif up yo tree en walk!" Moreover, in Matt. 9:5-6, just beforeJesus tells the healed man, "Arise, take up thy bed," he states that he willperform this miracle in order to demonstrate "that the Son of man hathpower on earth to forgive sins" (9:6). Shegog's homiletical emphasis is onthe cross of Christ and its power to forgive sins, heal transgressors, andfree captives. A quoted word of mockery—modified for extraspin—which deftly conflates allusions to taunting, to saving, and tohealing/forgiving could be rhetorically effective, especially given theadded irony of this gibe in relation to the events of Easter.

Sunday's exaltation is arrived at only through the ignominy of Fridayand after the emptiness of Saturday. Shegog recalls not only "de wailinof women" but also "de weepin en de cryin en de tumt-away face ofGod" (296). Calling to mind Christ's taking on human sin, hisestrangement from the Father, and his cry of dereliction from the cross(Matt. 27:46), Shegog links the forsakenness ofthe Son and the possibleabandonment of sinners: "I says to you, when de Lawd did turn Hismighty face, say, Aint gwine overload heaven! I can see de widowed GodshetHisdo.. . ." When the visiting preacher declares, "I sees de darknessen de death everlastin upon de generations" (296), his vision of Golgothais complete.

Finally, Shegog delivers a summar>^ burst of pulpit oratory: "I sees deresurrection en de light; sees de meek Jesus sayin Dey kilt me dat ye shalllive again. . . . Breddren, O breddren! I sees de doom crack en de goldenhorns shoutin down de glory, en de arisen dead whut got de blood en dericklickshun of de Lamb!" Repeating a phrase from an earlier description,Faulkner reveals Dilsey's response to what she has heard: "Dilsey sat boltupright. . . , crying rigidly and quietly in the annealment and the bloodofthe remembered Lamb" (297).

As she walks home, "through the bright noon," Dilsey tells Frony,"I've seed de first en de last" (297). With this assertion she is, first of all,simply describing her experience of participating in this Easter service,which climaxes in the dynamic recollection of the blood of the Lamb,made present in the preached Word. She has seen what the ReverendMr. Shegog has seen and evoked: "Alpha and Omega, the beginning andthe end, the first and the last" (Rev. 22:13). She too was there. Andseeing is believing: she will go on putting her trust in the meaningfulnessof this eternal narrative for her own Ufe.

The Reverend Mr. Shegog's ster Sermon 575

When Dilsey tells her daughter, "I seed de beginning, en now I seesde endin" (297), she is thinking, too, of the final disintegration of theCompsons; and she will continue to interpret her service to thisunappealing family within a larger frame of reference. "You's de Lawd'schile, anyway," she tells Ben. "En I be His'n too, fo long, praise Jesus"(317). Both Dives and Lazarus assume many forms.

Dilsey is, of course, a temporal creature, existing in time, but therhythms that most deeply influence her life are eternal currents.''^ Shedoes not need clocks to know what time it is. A part of God's creation,time is not an enemy to her, and she has no interest in trying to dragOmnipotence down (306). The sermon that she has heard, writesCleanth Brooks, "describes Mary's sorrow and the cruci&don of Jesus,but ends with the promise of resurrection and of ultimate glory"; thusthis Easter service offers Dilsey "a vision of eternity which gives meaningto time" (William Faulkner 345). After placing her mistress's unreadBible on her bed, she leaves Mrs. Compson's room and returns to thekitchen:

The stove was almost cold. WhUe she stood there the clock above the cupboardstruck ten times. "One oclock," she said aloud. "J^son aint comin home. Ise seed defirst en de last." she said, looking at the cold stove. "I seed de first en de last." She setout some cold food on a table. As she moved back and forth she sang, a hymn. Shesang the first two lines over and over to the complete tune. (301)

Faulkner's account of this service has given us a window onto Dilsey'sworld. We see how this event—surely a representative episode ratherthan a unique occurrence—has recharged her. Dilsey's faith is not theharsh, repressive religion of Southern Calvinism that Faulkner depictsin Light in August and elsewhere but a liberating, humanizingspirituality that revives the soul, enables perception, and supports virtue.Despite the bleakness of her environment, Dilsey rejects despair, leavingto others the view that human beings "are just accumulations" of"sawdust swept up from the trash heaps . . . the sawdust flowing fromwhat wound in what side that not for me died not" (175-76),

The notion, however, that this noble servant of the Compsonfamily—historically situated as she is in a time, a place, and therefore arole that deny her full justice—can be accepted as a moral exemplar, a

' See Anderson 311-24; Bleikasten, The Most Splendid Failure 192-94; and Hunt94-99.

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Christian saint, is debatable. As Irving Howe says, seeing Dilsey as theapotheosis of Christian virtue—particularly, given the often humiliatingconditions ofher life, the contextually ambiguous virtues of patience andfortitude—may be unwise. We would do well to remember that "theterms in which Dilsey is conceived are thoroughly historical, and bytheir nature become increasingly unavailable to us: a fact which if it doesnot lessen our admiration for her as a figure in a novel, does limit ourcapacity to regard her as a . . . model" (123).'"* Which is not to say thatthe virtues she embodies are themselves hopelessly time-bound and soirretrievable: that, it seems to me, remains in this exceedingly complexand mystifying novel an open question.

How, for example, does the author of this tale of tangled andcompeting loyalties regard the traditional theological virtue of faith,expressed in Dilsey's unwavering loyalty to the One beyond the many?Whether Shegog's and Dilsey's shared vision of transcendence affords anauthentic and rehable purchase on ultimate reality, Faulkner does notsay. In this novel he neither affirms nor denies the objective validity ofChristian truth-claims, and critics' efforts to demonstrate that he doesone or the other are doomed from the start.''*

Preached in a worn-looking church at the end of a road, Shegog'ssermon is an event full of meaning for those practiced in the ways of thisparticular Christian community. In the larger context of the novel and

•'Dilsey's status as an exemplar has itself become a site of critical contestation. OlgaW. Vickery says that "Dilsey is meant to represent the ethical norm" (47). And CleanthBrooks speaks of Dilsey's having "affinities with the Christian saint"; "she is thesustaining force—^the only possible sustaining force of a broken and corrupted family."Against her "integrity and wholeness . . . the alienated characters are judged. . . "CWiUiam Faulkner: Vision of Cood and Evil" 323). Considering her role in the Compsonfamily and in the novel, however, other readers see her as more to be sympathized withthan admired, and they view her experience at the Easter service as finally deficient inmeaning, in relevance, and hence in value. See, for example. Kinney, FauJkner'sNarrative Poetics 158-59; Kinney, "FauBcner and Racism" 266; Kartiganer 20-21; andSundquist 13. In his article on Dilsey's "conversion." Phihp D. Castile advances analternative to both the heroic and the non-heroic readings of Dilsey.

Brooks's succina and well-known comment still holds true: "Faulknermakes no claim for Dilsey's version of Christianity one way or the other" (WilliamFaulkner 348). See Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy 142-44; Gunn 53-54; andPalumbo 144. At the opposite end ofthe spectrum from the Christian readings ofthenovel (in decline since the 1960s) are views that may be equally rigid: cf, for example,that of John V. Hagopian. who sees "nihilism as the meaning ofthe whole" (46).

Tbe Reveread Mr. Shegog's Easter Sermon

for the individual reader, however, this episode yields up not ontologicalsolutions but practical questions. If not this ancient faith, then what? Inthis modem, death-dealing era, what alternative narratives exist to formcharacter and support life? Where, if anywhere, may be found the ritualsthat will inspire love, sustain hope, and give significance to time?Faulkner the Modemist uses this boundary experience at the blackchurch to interrogate modernity. He implicitly allows the peculiarity ofthis homiletical discourse, delivered via the otherness of a visitor fromSaint Looey, to confront both Jason's egocentrism and Quentin's despair.What is intriguing about this Easter sermon, then, is not the answer itprovides but rather the strange and haunting question mark that it placesagainst many ofthe assumptions of an age.'^

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Bleikasten. Andre. The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner's Novels from TheSound and the Fury to light in August. Bloomington: Indiana UP,1990.

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Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography, Vol. 2. New York: Random,1974.

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'^For their generous attention to various aspects of this inquiry. I am grateful toDavid Bartlett (Yale Divinity School), Charles Lippy (University of Tennessee atChattanooga), and Jack Matthews (Boston University). And for their valuable commentson earlier versions of this essay, 1 would like to thank Carol Kolmerten (Hood College),Stephen Ross (National Endowment for the Humanities), Nathan Scott (University ofVirginia), Joseph Urgo (University of Mississippi), and the anonymous readers for theMississippi Quarterly.

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