Somewhere, and for the life of me I cannot find the original source in my massive collection of Darden materials, Douglas Darden once said something to the effect of: I wish to be for architecture what Faulkner was for literature. Even if he never said anything remotely close to that, it feels like something that could be said about him: he was the William Faulkner of Architecture. Now, I am not specifically referring to Oxygen House, which is based largely on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, but just the entire essence of Faulkner's writings resonate deeply with Darden's approach to architecture, namely, the Underbelly.
If you are not familiar with Faulkner's work, I highly recommend it. Life is too short to read bullshit, and Darden lived a very short life, thus I doubt he wasted his time reading bullshit, much less designing buildings around shitty literature. The classic works of Faulkner are more than sufficient to understanding why Darden admired him, as well as sought to emulate his approach to literature — or rather the approach to the subject of his literature — in his architectural designs. It might take a week to read The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absolom! Absolom! to fully comprehend what Darden saw in Faulkner, but it will be a well-spent week.
Faulkner was the Underbelly of literature, and more particularly of the American South. When it comes to physical locations, we rarely use the term "underbelly" outside of cities — e.g. the seedy underbelly of Gotham, or New York's underbelly. We rarely, if ever speak of rural America as possessing any sort of underbelly. We think of rural life as charming, quiet, pious, hardworking, but also one of leisure and ease, where people take their time getting places, &c, all supposed core American values. Yet, films like Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks (television series and movie) by David Lynch illustrate the dark side of small towns. Or again, the recent surge in folk horror, such as the first season of True Detective, &c illustrate that we do in fact know that transgression and wickedness lies in the deep rural areas of this nation. We know incest is an issue on isolated homesteads. We know alcohol, drug abuse, and domestic violence is a massive problem in rural areas. We know the ideal of a quiet life on a farm is as much a wishful fabrication as the country bumpkin moving to the big city in hopes of making it big.
This is what Faulkner explores: the underbelly of the American South post-Civil War, what many literary critics and scholars call American Gothic, and that is certainly a great way of describing Faulkner's work. Most of his novels I believe could be classified as anti-Gone with the Wind. If Gone with the Wind is a banned book — which I personally find weird given how much it tries to whitewash slavery and the reasons for the War itself — then a work like The Sound and the Fury ought to be burned.
It has probably been a while since many of us have actually read Faulkner, or perhaps we were never properly introduced to Faulkner. So we should probably briefly graze over some of Faulkner's writings, especially those that pertain to Darden, Oxygen House, and the Underbelly. I believe the most influential Faulkner novels were As I Lay Dying (of course), The Hamlet, and The Sound and the Fury. I believe some other novels were influential in some ways, maybe to just personal development, but seem to have less direct impact on his work, or at least little to no direct manifestation in his work. Absolom! Absolom!, which might be in my opinion one of the few examples of what I would consider a perfect novel, likely had influence, especially given that the plan of Oxygen House is based on the map of Yoknapatawpha County as found in Absolom! Absolom! However, this really deserves its own separate post.
Let us start with As I Lay Dying, since that might be the work of Faulkner's that impacted Darden's work the most. The Bundren family appears to be a typical, small, simple family in rural Mississippi, yet they are quite dysfunctional and in many ways they are terrible people. The novel begins with Addie dying and then shortly thereafter she dies. While she was dying, her son Cash was building her coffin. She requested to be buried, not on the homestead, but in Jefferson where Addie is from. She wants to be buried with her family, not with her family, if you understand the nuance of what she believed was her family — the one she was born into, not the one she made and raised. Addie in many ways is a terrible woman. She is an adulterer, having had an affair with the local pastor, Whitfield. The pastor himself gets a narration, and in it explains away his own sin, that he is not guilty, but that Addie is still a sinner... in other words, he's a horrible Christian. One of Addie's children, Jewel, is the illegitimate child of Pastor Whitfield, and is Addie's most beloved child. Addie seems to hate, truly hate and despise most of her other children, except for perhaps Cash.
Anse Bundren, the patriarch, is not a great fella either. Their only daughter, Dewey Dell, was impregnated by Lafe, a nearby farmer; likely an older man, and Dewey Dell is about sixteen or seventeen years of age, so this was definitely an illicit affair. Lafe gives her $10 to get an abortion, which is why Dewey Dell agrees to go to Jefferson, as she could not get an abortion at the local pharmacy. However, when Anse finds out about the $10, he steals it, buys himself a set of dentures and gets himself a new young wife. Anse also takes Jewel's beloved horse and sells it. Jewel believes his family is dishonest and dysfunction and seeks to run away, especially since he no longer has his mother's love.
I mean, As I Lay Dying is a messed up story about a messed up family. This is not the quaint, charming country life we imagine. Far from it. And certainly if you have only ever heard of Faulkner, but never bothered to read him, you would not expect such a messed up family to exist. This is the foundation of Oxygen House. This really dysfunctional family and disgusting tale of familial betrayal and dishonor is the central piece to Oxygen House. It is so central that Darden repeatedly quotes portions of the first chapter of the novel in the letter to the architect from Burnden Abraham as published in Condemned Building.
Abraham is the name of the client of Oxygen House. This name comes from The Hamlet, a work I have not read, though I should, but even a Spark Notes briefing is sufficient to illustrate that other inspirations for Oxygen House are of a subversive and even criminal quality. The novel was originally an unfinished work called Father Abraham, though Faulkner would later use pieces of it to form The Hamlet. The novel takes place in Frenchman's Bend, the same site of Oxygen House. Frenchman's Bend was known for a haven of outlaws, lawlessness, and people of lesser socio-economic background. One of the main characters, Ab Snopes — presumably short for Abraham — it is learned, via gossip, to have been a barnburner. The Snopes family goes from being outcasts and disliked to being regarded as dangerous villains throughout the course of the novel. Thus, even the client of Oxygen House is based on a very unsavory scoundrel and the site of Oxygen House based on a den of lawlessness. Perfect Underbelly sort of stuff right there. As mentioned earlier, though cities tend to have underbellies, Frenchman's Bend is an underbelly unto itself.
The Sound and the Fury is not, per se, a direct inspiration on Darden, yet the novel has a few characteristics that resonate with Darden, namely overturning, upheaving, exposing the underbelly. The novel focuses on the Compson family, who were once a Southern aristocratic family in Antebellum Mississippi. Following the Civil War, they have lost everything. They live in a decaying homestead, a life of poverty, and trying desperately to hold on to the last vestiges of decency they once enjoyed. That which was once beautiful and stood proud is now overturned and downtrodden. There is transgression, or at least very questionable things. For one, the son Quentin has an unhealthy relationship with his sister Caddy. He believes he is being chivalrous in protecting her virginity, but when she gets impregnated by another boy, Quentin tries to protect her honor by telling his father that they had incestuous relations. He later commits suicide over the state of total disgrace his sister falls into. Caddy names the child after Quentin, though it is a girl, and they are kept out of sight in disgrace. Their brother Jason is a particular heinous individual, stealing Caddy's support money for the child; their mother Caroline is a hypochondriac... one of the children, Benjy, is mentally ill and attacks a little girl, so Jason has him castrated. (These are all greatly oversimplified for a very nuanced and complex book, but we're not examining the book, we are examining the Underbelly of the book). The entire narrative of The Sound and the Fury illustrates generations of decay within a noble Southern family, which in many ways is symbolic of generations of decay in the South itself. The old world has fallen and given birth to new and terrible things. It breeds generation after generation of rot and dilapidation.
Darden actually comments something to this effect concerning the film Blade Runner in the 1992 interview with Rob Miller, Looking After the Underbelly. He says: "the opening scene, once you pan through the industrial landscape that has been raised to a power of ten; it is the industrial landscape that has bred the industrial landscape so many generations that the thing is consummated as fire. It is the Promethean landscape. Prometheus, it is important to recognize, Prometheus is a god that carries with him the fundament anxiety that we have about change, which is that we are afraid of it."
This notion of an inbred industrial landscape is one of interest to Darden, as I have found references to the industrial landscape in course descriptions of classes he taught, though I am uncertain the full extent of the classes themselves. That said, when Darden looks at the industrial landscape, he sees the same degradation as Faulkner sees in the Post-War South: inbred degradation, a violation, a violence. The Underbelly here is not the incest taboo, which is a societal construct of the forbidden, but incest as a violation of the family unit.
And for Darden, the industrial landscape is this same Underbelly, this same violation of the urban fabric, the built environment, and the natural landscape. The industrial landscape is violence, violated, and degraded. And Oxygen House is this same violation. It is an industrial building. It looks like a silo, the very same silo in the image below.
Oxygen House is the exemplification of the inbred industrial landscape imposed onto rural Mississippi in a fictional place that was a lawless outpost, to house a man based on a scoundrel who is condemned to die there.
Darden emulated Faulkner by exploring the overturning of family, overturning place, overturning morality, overturning norms, overturning habitation, overturning built environment... Both men are exploring the underside of what we don't like to look at. When we think of the American South, we like to think of Gone with the Wind or Song of the South, &c, but Faulkner knows this is not real. He knows these are fictions, so his fiction is to overturn that pretty picture of quaint Southern life before the North came in and ruined it all, to flip over that stone and see the bugs wiggling underneath, expose it for what it is. Darden is doing the same thing with architecture, yet inspired by literature. Darden is looking under the pretty façade of Southern plantations to see the rot within the walls and mildew in the closets and the corpses buried in the cellar.
The pretty veneer of architecture is that "a house is for living," but for Darden, this is to be overturned to see the "house for dying."
There truly is no other author more informative on Darden, or more worthwhile to read than William Faulkner when exploring Darden. To read and sit with Faulkner is like being given one giant key to understand Darden's concept of the Underbelly. Faulkner's work is Underbelly.
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