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what follows I intend to show that Faulkner’s generic, technical
and linguistic experimentation in As I Lay Dying stands in evidence
of his innate scepticism of all systems of signification, verbal
and non-verbal, and of what he perceived as a radical crisis of
communication. The modernist crisis of representation, although
all-pervasive in his work, acquires a distinct emplotment in this
novel. I contend that in the multiple instantiations of the category
of voice that it orchestrates, the novel foregrounds a radical epistemological
doubt, prefiguring in method some of the key tenets of deconstruction.
My reading of As I Lay Dying, although informed by Barthes’
proposition that the author is and must be dead to all critical/readerly
purposes, as well as by Derrida’s seminal discussions of logocentrism
and trace, is not a consistent ‘application’ of either.
Rather, in my analysis, the text both offers itself for deconstructive
reading and lays bare its own meaning-producing devices. Moreover,
whenever Faulkner as either a psycho-social subject or the writer
of the text is brought into discussion, my proceedings are not to
be regarded as a lapse into the intentional fallacy. Instead, I
submit that Faulkner’s biography and authorial statements
are to be read as one possible site of the reading of the novel.
Thus, by staging a dialogue between the several narrative intelligences
or centres of consciousness that the novel projects (i.e., Faulkner’s
dramatis personae and Faulkner’s authorial statements), I
propose in fact a reading of the text against itself. The main purport
of this analysis is to reveal the text at work, uncover its points
of rupture and place its concatenations under erasure.
I must specify from the outset that the same distrust of language
that I contend Faulkner’s auctorial protocol exhibits is shared
by the author of the present essay, as words demonstrate their fluctuating
referentiality at every step. Thus, I will refer to the ‘narrators’
of Faulkner’s story in the same loose sense in which they
are designated in the titles of the chapters, although my work is
premised on the assumption that these are not actual narrators in
any conventional sense of the word, in that they neither tell nor
write the story. Rather, their minds register it in the form of
perceptions, reactions, half-formed thoughts, which become the substance
of the text through an act of transcription whose agent(s)/originator(s)
remain(s) a provisional mystery. The text insists on presenting
the human mind in its immediacy and takes its cue from current theories
of the mind’s functioning. We will, therefore, provisionally
place signs such as ‘narrator,’ ‘writer,’
‘reality,’ ‘origin,’ ‘identity’
between inverted commas so as to suggest the tenuousness of their
connection to the signifieds conventionally assigned to them, but
will continue to use them in recognition of their methodological
value.
Secondly, since the word ‘deconstruction,’ according
to Derrida, cannot be allotted any of the usual equivalents (theory,
method, technique, criticism etc.), it follows that deconstruction
cannot in any common sense be ‘applied’ to a text. One
cannot ‘deconstruct’ a text, but merely show the way
in which the text deconstructs itself, expose the fact that it contains
the germs of its own ‘undoing’ (i.e., of its provisional
readings and interpretations). A text as tightly crafted as As I
Lay Dying, whose language and technique are so obviously foregrounded,
in conforming to the conventional requirements of narration, plot
and character, inevitably betrays the tensions inherent in its own
functioning.
The novel As I Lay Dying walks the tightrope between the comic and
the tragic modes, high above an undistinguished conglomeration of
literary genres that include the epic, the heroic, the mock-heroic,
the grotesque, the gothic, the picaresque, the romance, the farce,
parody and pastiche, yet preserves the precarious balance of its
own individuality and generic uniqueness. Such a novel invites a
deconstructive perspective as it begs the question of its strenuously
clung to originality. One of the most seminal deconstructive principles
is the distrust of hierarchies. The very act of naming is a hierarchizing
one, as it automatically assigns a position within an already existing
discursive system. Yet neither is resistance to names and categories
an entirely innocent, non-programmatic undertaking: the misfit has
his/her/its own (op)position within the same discourse, try as he/she/it
may to define him/her/itself as against or outside of it. Origins
and originality are such instances of resistance to names, and the
investigation below will suggest that they are a function of language
in ways that are not dissimilar to the biblical fiat.
Olga Vickery perceived as early as 1964 that As I Lay Dying takes
up as its main theme the divorce between words and deeds and sets
out to demonstrate the inadequacy of the former and the violent
marking power of the latter (50-66). As Faulkner well knew, such
an undertaking was fraught with perils, the most immediate of which
being the incomprehension with which the novel was met upon its
publication. Yet that bewilderment was precisely the needed verification
of the novelist’s scepticism regarding language. A different
understanding of Faulkner’s theme and narrative strategy,
however, was to come only in the early 1980s, when the European
awareness of the capriciousness and ambiguity of language was allowed
full play in American criticism. With the advent of deconstruction,
an enhanced comprehension of, and empathy with, Faulkner’s
anxious experimentalism was made possible, and a new light could
be shed on the working of style in As I Lay Dying.
Nor is this book a singular instance of Faulkner’s distrust
of representation. As Eric Sundquist points out, The Sound and the
Fury is not about the characters’ mind, nor about the South’s,
but about “the psychology of the novel as a form of containing
consciousness” (9). Absalom, Absalom!, too, is a novel whose
technique becomes its main theme. Faulkner seems to feel the compulsive
need to retell the same stories again and again in order not so
much to demonstrate their reliability as Southern historiography,
nor their relevance as mythic avatars of the South’s mentality
and psychology, but to test the validity and vitality of the medium
that conveys them from generation to generation, from the American
South to the world. His stories are not so much about people and
events as about the telling of stories: they are encrypted metatexts.
His despair with the representational valences of language has become
anecdotal (John Faulkner tells how his brother Bill wished he could
invent a new English dictionary, all the old ones having proved
inadequate), and his obsession with qualifiers is sufficient proof
of his striving to turn words into le mot juste almost against their
will, as it were, and definitely (we now know) against their nature.
Yet nowhere else does he dramatize language’s resistance to
meaning as pertinently and potently as in As I Lay Dying, nowhere
else is the inadequacy of its function as the vehicle of ideas,
feelings, relations, more vehemently and effectively exposed. At
the same time, nowhere else is the enterprise more impersonally
undertaken. Frederick R. Karl shows how Faulkner was sublimating
much of his private life, especially in the writing of this book,
which he undertook at a particularly traumatic time in his life.
Nonetheless, no autobiographical detail is in evidence in the finite
product: at the end of the day the book stands alone, offering itself
as a supreme instance of the death of the author, the text released
from the ties of personal involvement and opened up to the reader.
Faulkner’s authorial death is the more effective here for
his relegation of the narratorial function to the participants in
the plot – or rather to their consciousnesses. But as the
author covers the traces of his retreat, the multiplicity and instability
of the narrative perspectives demand that they be all traced back
to their orchestrator, the plot to the plotter. The reader’s
task is precisely to unravel the subtle threads that connect the
text to the meanings and origins it tantalizingly obscures.
Addie Bundren and her second son Darl are, by critical/readerly
consent, the two main catalysts of the novel: the former as the
prompter of the journey that constitutes the plot, the latter as
the most lucid and perceptive, as well as articulate – and
therefore privileged – narrative voice. Such designations,
while useful in a structuralist analysis of plot and characters
within the boundaries of socio-historical contextualization and
generic ascription, are both simplifying and irrelevant from the
point of view of language dynamics. The heteroglossia of the book
is remarkably limited in spite of the large number of narrators
and of their relatively varied social background (an ex-teacher,
a doctor, a minister, a store owner, pharmacists, peasants, an aesthete
etc.). All their respective social speech types are equated not
only in being contaminated with the bigoted rhetoric of white Protestant
supremacy, but especially in rendering the flow of thought rather
than the rhythms and structure of actual speech. Thus critics have
explained the vague echoes from Shakespeare that can be heard throughout
the book as remnants from the King James Bible and the peculiar
obsolescence of the Calvinist liturgical style that is typical of
the religion of the South and has infused its idiom. Hence the inescapable
sense of the discrepancy between people’s level of education
and intellectual sophistication, and the often pompous language
in which their thoughts are transcribed. Moreover, the interior
monologues do not purport to render speech: this is a novel in which
the first person narrative is never in the ‘actual’
voice of the narrator, but in the ‘voice’ of the mind,
which does not necessarily articulate all the perceptions and reactions
it registers, but reflects them in complex synaesthetic thought-contents,
although it preserves a certain degree of linguistic and intellectual
individuality for each character-narrator.
The result is the perplexing articulateness of all the ‘narrators,’
what Martin Green called Faulkner’s in vacuo rhetoric, which
points to the absent author who records them, while at the same
time creating so large a gap between language and writer as to leave
the latter ‘alienated’ from the former (cited in Sundquist
29). Yet it does so in no straightforward manner, as there can be
no question of an avatar of the traditional omniscient author who
has privileged access to the minds of his creations. Rather, as
Sundquist notes, it is precisely such notions of the “supposed
union between the author and his language” that “the
novel explicitly discards and disavows” (29). Language here
is “alien in the sense of being disembodied, traumatically
cut off from the conscious identity” of both character and
author. This rupture has “thematic significance insofar as
the book is obsessively concerned with problems of disembodiment,
with disjunctive relationships between character and narration or
between bodily self and conscious identity” (ibid.). The epitome
of this thematic-stylistic coincidence is the “intimate analogy
between the absence of the omniscient narrator, a controlling point
of view, and the central event of the book: the death of Addie Bundren,
with respect to which each character defines his own identity”
(ibid.).
A deconstructive approach will reveal the text’s enactment
of the death of the author, who is here twice removed: not only
does he purport to have relinquished control of the narrative and
to have granted freeplay to the minds of the characters, and thus
to be now as ‘dead’ as the titular character; but he
is also dead in Roland Barthes’ sense of the phrase, in that
his personal participation in the writing of the book has been critically
placed under erasure in favour of that of the reader. Yet at the
same time he is residually implicated, as writer, in the very existence
of the text, which could not have been written by any of its multiple
semi-literate narrators. Analogously, all the members of the cast
define themselves in relation to Addie and to her death. Indeed,
it might be said that they owe their coming into existence (as both
narrators and agents-spectators) to the event of her death which
triggers the story-telling. Thus, neither Addie nor Faulkner is
truly ‘dead.’
Faulkner relinquishes agency in the writing of his book much in
the same way as Vardaman denies his agency in crying: “I vomit
the crying. …and then I can cry, the crying can.… The
crying makes a lot of noise. I wish it would not make so much noise”
(36). Expulsion followed by objectification of and total disassociation
from his own product: the initial agent has become the mere vehicle
of his action’s agency. The next step is cessation of his
existence altogether: “I am not crying now. I am not anything”
(38). His very being is rendered impossible when the agency of crying
ceases to work through him in order to affirm the tremendous facts
of death, destitution and bereavement. The confused synaesthesia
of Vardaman’s childish perceptions, his sense that he “is
cried” rather than crying are indicative of the entire text’s
scepticism of agency and distinctions.
An extreme case of plurality and fragmentariness of being set against
normative individuality is Darl, Addie’s second son. Throughout
the book he is haunted by the sense that he is not is but are (65),
that he is inhabited by the others. Darl is de trop, a consciousness
in excess, not, as Calvin Bedient claims, because he is “pitilessly
empowered to trespass upon the privacy of the others” (in
Brodhead 143). On the contrary, as the same critic states earlier
on, Darl is de trop because he “is invaded by others as the
mystic is inundated by God and the novelist possessed by his characters”
(142). What Bedient intuits at first but then goes on to regard
as an inclusive consciousness, is a condition similar to the one
discussed above in connection with Vardaman: the protagonist experiences
not so much a split existence as the awareness of being acted through,
of being a vehicle, that is, a mere function or medium through which
language speaks. His incapacity to be one results in the erosion
of his sense of identity that culminates in his addressing himself
in the third person singular in his last soliloquy. However, it
is precisely in this chapter that he attains the coveted being:
when he is acted upon and assigned the identity of a madman, his
reality becomes undeniable even to himself, he is, and can now take
his place within the family: “Darl is our brother, our brother
Darl” (172), he keeps repeating. This affirmation of his belonging
to the family echoes one of his belabored syllogisms regarding his
own existence: “Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then
I must be” (52). In a typically cyclical thrust, being is
traced back to its originator, the mother: Darl’s strained
logic asserts the dialectical ontological confirmation of/by the
creation at the moment of the most traumatic doubt of its own integrity,
and of/by the creator as the only stable reference point.
We are thus back to the question of origins, originality, individuality,
and centres of consciousness with which we have started this interpretation
of Faulkner’s novel. Sundquist rightly insists that the central
theme of the book is disembodiment and disjunction; I would argue
that it is so to an even greater extent than he claims. Not only
is the text about dissociation and disintegration – insofar
as it is about Addie’s death, her physical (and moral) corruption,
and the dissolution of her family – but the characters constantly
define themselves and each other in similar terms. Thus, for instance,
dr. Peabody thinks about Addie as the subordinate fraction of a
marital continuum: “She has been dead these ten days. I suppose
it’s having been a part of Anse for so long that she cannot
even make the change, if change it be” (Faulkner 29). The
doctor horrifiedly imagines the stolid solidity of the husband as
having rubbed off on the wife and her incapacity of dying as an
instance of metonymic aphasia. Conversely, Addie resents her husband
Anse’s failure to become a part of her: “I would think
about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape,
a vessel… I would think: The shape of my body where I used
to be a virgin is in the shape of a and I couldn’t think Anse,
I couldn’t remember Anse” (116-17). She thus objectifies
Anse into a part of her that has become a lack, like the disappearance
of the hymen, but also into a shape that has the hollowness of a
name and cannot fill that lack in her where he should have impressed
himself on her body and mind. Her first two sons, on the other hand,
have all the solidity and concreteness of fragments of her being,
of her ontological integrity. Thus, as Judith Butler points out
in a different context, identity and origin are particularly tenuous
categories, in that they are always defined in terms of what is
derived from them. Individuality can only be defined against an
Other, but the Other was originally a part of the self that has
been abjected or torn away (the wife repudiating the husband whom
she belongs to in name only, the son born from the mother, the mother
taken away by death, etc.) (see “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”
722-6). According to Derrida, too, the fallacy of identity that
represents the foundation of the whole Western philosophical tradition
has been made possible through a sleight-of-hand that obscures the
initial expulsion of the Other from the One (see, for instance,
“Plato’s Pharmacy” 431-47).
More importantly, the text performs disintegration through its language
by constantly laying bare the contradictions and tensions that are
inherent in the very nature of language. As people define themselves
in relation to each other, so do words/texts. Olga Vickery pointed
out that As I Lay Dying is about the distinction between words and
deeds, and indeed there is much in the book that shows that the
latter are preferred. Addie explicitly repudiates words when she
comprehends their tendency to displace and replace reality: “When
he [her first-born son Cash] was born I knew that motherhood was
invented by someone 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. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had
never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride” (115).
Words are not only superfluous but also supplementary to reality
(whether it be called feelings, relationships, beliefs, presences):
meanings are superimposed on signs beyond the latter’s capacity
of signification. Moreover, signifiers have the tendency to replace
their referents, until both reality and the names given to it cease
to mean anything: “because people to whom sin is just a matter
of words, to them salvation is just words too” (119), and
Anse dies to all practical purposes when he ceases to be anything
else but a name/word to Addie:
And
then he died. He did not know he was dead. I would lie by him in
the dark, hearing the dark land talking of God’s love and
His beauty and His sin; hearing the dark voicelessness in which
the words are the deeds, and the other words that are not deeds,
that are just gaps in people’s lacks, coming down like the
cries of the geese out of the wild darkness in the old terrible
nights…” (117)
Against such a fate Addie rebels fiercely: “I would be I;
I would let him be the shape and echo of his word” (ibid.).
The entire book posits the moral split between the pragmatism and
hypocrisy represented by Anse and the dramatic rebelliousness against
all things practical or hypocritical that Addie strives for and
sets an example of.
Anse’s “death” as far as Addie was concerned,
while paralleling Addie’s death before she actually dies (see
dr. Peabody’s thoughts quoted above), places the whole matter
of words into a new perspective: if words have come to replace the
real, they have also acquired the power to displace it, to create
a parallel subjective ‘reality,’ a system of personal
beliefs that functions provisionally as 'convincingly' and 'effectively'
as any other system. This is the same life-death, being-non-being
dialectics that we have seen at work in Vardaman’s, Darl’s
and Faulkner’s rejection of agency, and which represents the
primum mobile of the entire text: Addie’s physical demise
is the stimulus of the journey; the death of the author is the life
of the text. Moreover, Addie’s decease is the beginning of
a new life and a new self-definition for the other characters; the
death of the author is the birth of the reader. And the function
of the reader is precisely to take the words of the ‘original’
text and to create with them an ‘other’ text with its
own provisional meaning, a new tissue around the old texture, waiting
for its turn to be unravelled.
WORKS CITED
Barthes,
Roland. "The Death of the Author" (1968). Image, Music,
Text. Trans. by S. Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 142-48.
Brodhead, Richard H. (ed.). Faulkner: New Perspectives. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall Inc., 1983.
Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”
(1991). Literary Theory: An Anthology. Rev.ed. Ed. by Julie Rivkin
and Michael Ryan. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Inc.,
1998. 722-730.
Derrida, Jacques. "Letter to a Japanese Friend" (1983).
A Derrida Reader. Ed. by P. Kamuf. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.
269-76.
---. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences" (1966; 1972). Contemporary Literary Criticism: Modernism
Through Post-Structuralism. Ed. by Robert Con Davis. New York and
London: Longman, 1986. 480-98.
---. “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1972). Literary Theory:
An Anthology. Rev.ed. Ed. by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden,
Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1998. 429-450.
Karl, Frederick R. William Faulkner: American Writer. New York:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989.
Faulkner, John. My Brother Bill: An Affectionate Reminiscence. Oxford,
Mississippi: The Yoknapatawpha Press, 1975.
Faulkner, William. Novels 1930-1935. New York: The Library of America,
1985.
Palliser, Charles. “Predestination and Freedom in As I Lay
Dying.” In American Literature, Vol. 58, No. 4, December 1986.
Sundquist, Eric J. Faulkner: The House Divided. Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins U.P., 1983.
Vickery, Olga. The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation.
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