Beruflich Dokumente
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ELEMENTS OF MODERNISM
IN
"AS I LAY DYING"
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying 98
3.0. Preliminaries
As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930 has been acclaimed as
of his new style. Few novels in fact, penetrate into the depths of the
values of a family torn by the death of its matriarch, but it shows the
which there is one destination, but many different routes. Above all, this
tear it apart.
funeral journey that takes place in the novel; the Bundren family
3-1-l.Addie's Death
Anse Bundren and his five children disregard the advice of friends and
the front porch, Jewel and Darl confer with their father about taking a
job to make a bit of money. Anse reminds his sons of his promise to
their mother but agrees to let them go, even though he knows that Addie
Addie. Sure enough, she dies shortly after Peabody's arrival at the
Bundren farm. After sending Dewey Dell away to prepare supper, Anse
stands over his dead wife, listens to the sound of Cash's saw as he works
on the coffin, and says: "God's will be done. Now I can get them teeth."
Cash finishes the coffin later that night in the pouring rain. Addie is
kept in the coffin for three days before Darl and Jewel return home with
the wagon. On the first day, when the family wakes finds that Vardaman
has bored the top of the coffin fiill of holes — two of which bored
By the time the family finally gets the coffin on the wagon, the
bridge to town has been washed away by heavy rains, adding several
days to their journey. Jewel, refiising to travel with the family, follows
Just before sundown they complete the first eight miles of their
journey. They spend the night in a neighbor's bam and start off again
early the next morning, trying to find a bridge that has not been
and Vernon TuU will walk across the remains of the bridge and that
Cash and Darl will lead the wagon across the river at the ford. Jewel
crosses ahead of them on his horse. Halfway across the bridge, the
wagon is hit by a floating log and is dragged off by the current. The
wagon and Addie's coffin are recovered, but the mules drown and Cash
She describes her youth, her miserable life as a schoolteacher, and her
giving birth to her second son, Darl, she makes Anse promise to bury
her in Jefferson when she dies. Her revenge, she says, would be that
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying ^102
Anse would never know that she was taking revenge. Addie also reveals
After the disastrous river crossing, the Bundrens spend the night at
purchase a team of mules. During his absence, the heat intensifies the
horse for a team of mules. The family's journey resumes the next
town. She is pregnant and her boyfiriend, Lafe, has told her that she
When the procession passes through the town of Mottson, Dewey Dell
speaks to the druggist but is told that she will not get what she wants in
his store.
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying ^103
Anse, waiting outside in the wagon, is told by the town marshal that he
will have to leave town. After eight days in the stifling heat, Addie's
Cash's broken leg. Jewel, who disappeared after Anse traded his horse,
Mr. Gillespie. During the night, Darl sets fire to the bam and Jewel's
When Gillespie discovers that it was Darl who set the fire, he
Jackson. Cash thinks that Darl "done right in a way," trying to get Addie
"outen our hands," but decides that it does not excuse setting fire to a
As they arrive in Jefferson the next day, Anse finally concedes that
they will have to find a doctor for Cash's infected leg. But first, they
cemetery and — nine days after Addie's death — finally lays his wife to
rest in her family plot. As they leave the cemetery, Darl is jumped by
Dewey Dell and Jewel and handed over to the men waiting to take him
When Cash finally gets to the doctor, Peabody cannot believe that
Anse treated his son's broken leg with raw cement. Shocked at the
damage they have done to him, the doctor wonders why Anse simply
didn't bring Cash to the nearest sawmill and stick his leg in the saw.
seduce her. The next morning, Anse disappears only to reappear with a
new set of teeth and a new Mrs. Bundren — a local woman who loaned
but also makes factual observations about events, moving the story
We have no objective narrator who can reveal the truth .When the
them with objects: before we meet Tull, we encounter his wagon; before
we hear Cash speak, we hear the roar of his saw and, of course, before
we meet Addie, we see her coffin being assembled. These objects come
to stand for the individuals themselves, as symbols of, and clues to, their
primary role in the novel is played out in her death. We also learn fi-om
what the characters do not say. When Darl comes upon Cash, they
certainly not limited to Darl and Cash, demonstrates how thoroughly the
characters in As I Lay Dying are cut offfi"omeach other. Again, the use
characters so isolated from each other that even their thoughts cannot be
mixed.
appears sofi-equentlyas a narrator, and because his voice has the fewest
how Darl knows what is going on back at the house remains a mystery,
but his omniscience puts the role of narrator on his shoulders, at least
temporarily.
in either the present or the past tense. One of the frinctions of this
with their plight from the detachment that Cora and Tull experience as
While the Bundrens generally narrate in the present tense, Cora and
Vernon Tull usually give their monologues in the past tense. The past
tense gives Cora and Tull an air of careftil consideration, as if they have
had some time to consider and evaluate the entire story before telling it
puzzling, and, like Darl's strange ability early in the novel to know what
comic. Anse embodies the contrast between high seriousness and cheap
farce, and his status represents the contradictions that permeate the
last reminder that even the most cataclysmic events do not set off a
universal reaction, and that events are shaped entirely by the perspective
only to move the action of the novel forward but also participate as
characters in the main action of the novel that is the funeral journey of
the Bundren family. Each of the sections headed by the name of the
the novel. However the information provided is not enough and often
a clear picture of what is going on. The reader, for instance, is not able
to understand what should be considered the crucial part of the story and
the motivations behind. Addie's last wish of being buried in her native
relationship to her husband and children are not clear until her only
the stable social order and the strong doubts about an objective reality
round the actual journey from the Bundren farm to a town forty miles
difficulties are encountered. So, in one sense, the novel has a linear
traveling the forty miles from the Bundren farm to Jefferson. But the
novel is also structured in such a way that the author has virtually
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying ^111
removed himself from the story. He allows his characters to tell their
own story.
participate in the story. Since Faulkner has removed himself from the
aspects. Thus, we must enter more directly into the story and
the inner thoughts of all the characters. We see the mind of each
author, has not told us anything about the characters. He has simply
For example, when the coffin is lost in the river, we have several
narrations which allow us to see the same event from many different
vantage points. Darl gives his own narration of the loss of the coffin;
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying ^112
river; from Cash, we hear that the coffin was not on a balance; and
from Anse, we hear that this is just one more burden we must endure
event from many angles and observe what type of emphasis each
novel.
But Faulkner has also included some narrators who are not
typical people. For example, if the story were confined solely to the
Bundrens, we might not realize that this dead body stinks so badly
and that the Bundrens are violating all sense of decency by carrying
the body over the countryside. Thus, the outside narrators give us a
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying ^113
touch of the real world by which we can measure our reactions to the
Bundrens.
inside the mind of the characters. Since the ordinary person's mind
outer social reality to the innermost self In Woolf s The Waves, for
about the other five narrators. This is not the case with As I Lay Dying.
Here Faulkner is concerned not so much with exploring the inner reality
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying ^114
thoughts, he always looks out at the world around him. As a result, his
thoughts always sound objective, and even detached from his own mind.
possess their own distinct identities, each with his own self-centered
demands and obsessions. Although they are connected with each other
ritual, each often appears to be closed off in his or her own secret and
we have yet had. Even while using this technique, Faulkner varies it
through poetic imagery. From Darl we receive the views of the other
characters that penetrate into the heart of that character. And these
views are often expressed with a sensitive eye for detail. Thus Darl's
the reader that Vardaman was able to confuse his mother with a fish,
another. There are no difficult words because the mind of a boy like
simple. Since this mind does not function logically, Faulkner records
the mind's thinking in terms of basic images. For the most part, these
images involve the death of the fish, the death of his mother, being
associations are made into one image with the resultant statement by
illogical person but has still brought enough order to that mind so
because Addie is a person who has tried to solve some of the basic
problems of life and has failed. Therefore, she tends only to state her
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying ^117
and Comedy
much of the criticism of the novel. With some critics arguing that
this debate just shows how the novel has defied and resisted any attempt
The basic plot of the novel is, without question, tragic. A dying
mother, lying on her deathbed, watches her eldest son builds her coffin
just outside her bedroom window. After she dies, her husband and five
children load her corpse onto a mule-driven wagon. They travel in the
summer heat for nine days, hoping to bury her in her family's burial
ground. Along the way, the mules drown, one son breaks a leg, one goes
and the widowed husband, having stolen his children's money and
traded his son's horse , buys himself a new set of teeth, remarries, and
obtains a record player. Despite these tragic elements, the story exhibits
Robert Merrill (1994, 12). He states that "The comic moments in the
book are, genuinely amusing, but they almost always merge with events
novel as comedy that is the "inverse of tragedy: it affirms life in the face
of death."
overcome it."(Ibid) When the Bundrens begin their journey home, they
do so with a new team of mules, a new set of teeth for Anse, a new wife
and mother, and Dewey Dell's yet unborn child. Schroeder suggests.
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As ILay Dying ^120
that "even when confronted with the death of an individual, life will
prevail."
Indeed, many of the novel's fiinniest moments are found within the
admit: "It had been dead eight days," he says: "It must have been like a
Anse are equally amusing. Examining Cash's broken and badly infected
leg, he says: "/ be damned if the man that'd let Anse Bundren treat him
with raw cement ain't got more spare legs than I have." "God
sawmill and stick your leg in the saw? That would have cured it. Then
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying ^121
you all could have stuck his head into the saw and cured a whole
outrageous nature of the situation. Underlying this humor is the pain and
absurd ending: the brutal betrayal of Darl, news of Cash's serious injury,
The introduction of the new Mrs. Bundren provides one of the biggest
celebration of life's victory over death. Instead, this scene, like almost
novelist.
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying ^122
this trend which emphasized the self-imposed exile from one's native
soil Faulkner decided to turn back from the cosmopolitan and urban
cities like New Orleans to his own little land. As I Lay Dying is his
In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner dealt with the decadent
the social scale to the poor whites, stretching his fictional realm and
more deeply and open his eyes to the richness of its cultural capital,
the South's historical narratives about the lost past .What is interesting
but through it, and succeeds in forging his own version of a great
"local" art.
art.
text.
1925 and stayed near the Luxembourg museum. During the stay
facets, like a cubist painting, the design of this book. That is why it is so
plane. Cezanne's early cubist painting Still Life: Basket of Apples (1890)
cubist multiple points of view. We can find another instance in the very
first pages of the story. Although Jewel is behind him, Darl describes
Jewel and I come upfront the field, following the path in single file.
follow the path which circles the house. Jewel, fiifteen feet behind me,
looking straight ahead, steps in a single stride through the window. Still
staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face,
as "fading into the dusk like a piece of paper pasted on a failing wall"
(p. 162), and depicts Jewel's eyes as looking "like spots of white paper
section:
"The front, the conical facade with the square orifice of doorway
broken only by the square squat shape of the coffin on the sawhorses
of the facade with the coffin and sawhorses brought up to the plane of
well have been aware of the controversy surrounding the first American
famous painting" .
goal was to release the unconscious from the constraints and limitations
of previously neglected associations. It tends to ruin once and for all, all
other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all
desires. As some critics have noted, Addie Bundren is the emotional and
her children, and it is her ^eath which is the catalyst for the action of the
21). Jewel's strange relationship with his horse clearly shows that the
horse is the displaced object of his unconscious desire for his mother.
Darl sees Jewel "caressing, cursing the horse with obscene ferocity"
fixation on his horse is incestuous: He never leaves it, even sleeps with
it, and permits no one except himself to take care of it. Darl identifies
Jewel's love for his mother" (IJ)fd, 92-3). Jewel's unconscious desire for
Addie is made far more explicit in his Oedipal fantasy. His fantasy of
pictures:
It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the rocks
down the hill at their faces, picking them up and throwing them down
the hill faces and teeth and all by God until she was quiet and not that
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying ^130
goddamn adze going One lick less. One lick less and we could be quiet,
(p. 15)
autobiography, is written as if she was still alive, but placed after her
"Darl has gone to Jackson. They put him on the train, laughing,
down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls
the minds of other people. He knows that Jewel is not Anse's son and
that his sister Dewey Dell is pregnant. Vernon Tull says: "He [Darl] is
looking at me. . . . It's like he had got into the inside of you, someway.
Like somehow you was looking at yourself and your doing outen his
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying ^131
eyes" (125). Darl even describes events and scenes which he has not
place in his absence. Darl's language also has the dreamlike texture. In
the bam burning scene, he says that : ""Jewel and Gillespie are like two
figures '" '^ Greek frieze, isolated out of all reality by the red glare"
(p-221).
indistinct and shifting background with the strange clear-cut quality and
the text. The Bundrens, for instance, attempt to ease Cash's pain by
encasing his broken leg in cement. Later, Vardaman talks about Cash's
decaying leg: "Cash's leg and foot turned black. We held the lamp and
looked at Cash's foot and leg where it was black. 'Your foot looks like a
The Bimdrens are blind to the reality of the smelling, rotting corpse
scene occurs when Vardaman drills holes in his mother's coffin (and
inadvertently into her face), so that she might breathe. Like those of
We can also find in the text the surrealist or double images that
Darl and Vardaman express their inner realities through these vivid
disturbing world which blurs and breaks down the boundaries between
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying ^133
reality and dream, life and death, human and animal, comedy and
intricate relationship between his reliance on the visual and his skeptical
language.
Geneva between 1906 and 1911, is one of the most important texts
the verbal sound) ~ is, in principle, utterly arbitrary. For example, there
"natural," are always slipping away and can never be pinned down.
indictment of words:
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying ^135
And when I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible
and that this was the answer to it. That was when I learned words are
not good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at.
who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children
didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. (p. 171)
between signifiers and signifieds" (p.l 16). For Addie, language is only a
And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I
would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless,
and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after
a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle
from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds
Chapter Three: Elements of Modernism in As I Lay Dying ^136
that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they
never had and cannot have until they forget the words. (Ibid,pp;l 73-4)
following passage:
Addie realizes that 'words are not good'; Vardaman finds he 'couldn't
coffin; Whitfield 'fi-ames' rather than speaks his confession. In the case
of which the most obvious signs are irregularities in spelling ('darl' for
of words dash and crash into each other, disappear and appear;
sentences are started and lost, repeated and mixed up, unable to find
Bundren Mean, and How Does She Mean It?", Paul S. Nielsen (1992,_
34) notes that "the language of the novel in general and Addie's
borrowed from the visual arts, Faulkner attempts to fill the gaps
3.4. Conclusion
As I Lay Dying, often paired with The Somd and the Fury, has long
ground for placing Faulkner along with Eliot, Joyce, and Proust in the
1930's sought to do. Faulkner, in "As I Lay Dying" builds upon the
ideas of other High Modernist writers, such as James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf, making him one of the first great authors of modem literature.
The novel is full of cubist and surrealist visual images and scenes. His
Faulkner's use of the coffin pictogram and the blank space are also
in "As I Lay Dying", a world where objective truth does not exist, and