twilighthush
04-22-2007, 01:24 AM
The rise of Modernism began somewhere in the late 19th/early 20th century. It is difficult to pinpoint an exact date when Modernism began, just as it is difficult to pinpoint where it ended -- especially with the amount of writers who crossed between two eras. Faulkner, in particular, is one of those writers. Some critics consider him to be one of the most Modern writers. Others consider him to fall somewhere in that limbo between Modernism and postmodernism. I happen to be a critic that falls into the latter of the two groupings.
The Modernist movement was one that was created by a very diverse set of thoughts and ideas. Modernist writers were often obsessed with historical development, industrialism, capitalism, social division, fragmentation, the breakdown of traditional forms of authority especially religious authority, and developing the sense of the Self. The Modernist movement was a literary and artistic movement in response to modernity and industrialism; it wanted to create an utter break with the past. As such, Modernist writers wanted to create new forms of writing, challenge traditional forms of authority including political and poetic forms of literature. They wanted to make their works “new”, avant-garde, and sui generis.
Written in 1930, As I Lay Dying was one of the most controversial works in America. It was not very popular, due to a plot that seemed very difficult to follow, free indirect discourse that switched perspective far too quickly, too many layers of subtext, language that was incredibly obscure at moments, and themes that simply were not easily accepted by a public still clinging to the fading past of the bourgeois Victorian Era's influence on American culture.
Faulkner wrote in a time when high Modernism had already experienced the likes of Earnest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, and were still shuddering from the aftermath of James Joyce's groundbreaking Ulysses. Influenced by those shockwaves, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying similarly took on the Joycean break with the traditional adherence to the parabolic plot, instead, employing a multitude of individual plots to represent the individualized thought, the individualized consciousness, the differentiated Self (or in this case, Selves) that make up the characters whose individual master narratives create some kind of a plot.
To most readers who manage to work their way through the text, it appears as though As I Lay Dying is about the death of Addie Bundren, and the way her family reacts as she dies. It also encapsulates the experience of the quest they embark on after her death to bury her. All of this is written from the perspectives of her husband (Anse), her sons (Jewel, Cash, Darl, and Vardaman), her daughter (Dewey Dell), and her friends (Peabody, Samson, Cora, Tull). Each perspective is written in first person, a dialectical free indirect discourse that allows a reader an almost voyeuristic, perverted sense of being able to "get into" a character's head and complex thought process.
But to simply summarize and say that this is all that the text is about is very incorrect. Writing in the South during the 1930s, Faulkner was very influenced by the Southern values that existed around him. This was a South still clinging desperately to religion, a South that also could not let go of its once-grandiose antebellum past, a defeated South marginalized by the Civil War, a region no longer powerful, now filled with tragedy -- not just because of the war, but also because of industrialism. Faulkner's South was a South that could not let go of the sense of glory and grandeur of the past, one that could not seem to face the impoverished conditions of the present, carrying the proverbial dead body of the "great South" into the Modern era, dragging it into the present and refusing to bury it. This was the South of Faulkner's time, and the South of As I Lay Dying. It is also a South that is very much represented in the very plot of the text.
The overarching plot is the last thing that As I Lay Dying is concerned with. Being that there isn't a unified master narrative, one can't even say that the text is about the master narrative; instead, it's about the subtext, and most importantly, the way language itself is used to not only construct the fictional "world" that the characters exist in, but the way it actually fails to capture their individualized experiences. Language, while being able to form the discursive realities in which a character lives, somehow seems to fail in its intersection between representation and what is represented.
This very postmodern notion of how language signifies a form of existence, while failing to represent what is actually being represented is precisely the dominant theme of the text that remains unresolved, and that pushes Faulkner into the gray area where Modernism and postmodernism intersect. While many of his themes are uniquely Modernist (the focus on the Self, the break with the traditional modes of narratives, the use of free indirect discourse, etc), this focus on language as a discursive power separates him from the rest of Modernist writers in that it allows him to show the problematic way that language itself works. In his attempt to capture the actual experience each individual character goes through discursively and provide it the representational means to exist, the bridge between the actual experience and the language that describes the experience falls apart.
Addie even says in the only part of the text when she has her own narrative (which appears long after she already passed away in the text), "Words are no good...words don't ever fit even what they are trying to say at". It is uncertain whether or not Faulkner agrees with her -- the ambiguity of where the author stands when it comes to this postmodern condition of language is yet another issue that remains as unresolved as many of the other issues that dominate this tragic comedy that is by far, one of the best works in the history of American Literature.
The Modernist movement was one that was created by a very diverse set of thoughts and ideas. Modernist writers were often obsessed with historical development, industrialism, capitalism, social division, fragmentation, the breakdown of traditional forms of authority especially religious authority, and developing the sense of the Self. The Modernist movement was a literary and artistic movement in response to modernity and industrialism; it wanted to create an utter break with the past. As such, Modernist writers wanted to create new forms of writing, challenge traditional forms of authority including political and poetic forms of literature. They wanted to make their works “new”, avant-garde, and sui generis.
Written in 1930, As I Lay Dying was one of the most controversial works in America. It was not very popular, due to a plot that seemed very difficult to follow, free indirect discourse that switched perspective far too quickly, too many layers of subtext, language that was incredibly obscure at moments, and themes that simply were not easily accepted by a public still clinging to the fading past of the bourgeois Victorian Era's influence on American culture.
Faulkner wrote in a time when high Modernism had already experienced the likes of Earnest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, and were still shuddering from the aftermath of James Joyce's groundbreaking Ulysses. Influenced by those shockwaves, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying similarly took on the Joycean break with the traditional adherence to the parabolic plot, instead, employing a multitude of individual plots to represent the individualized thought, the individualized consciousness, the differentiated Self (or in this case, Selves) that make up the characters whose individual master narratives create some kind of a plot.
To most readers who manage to work their way through the text, it appears as though As I Lay Dying is about the death of Addie Bundren, and the way her family reacts as she dies. It also encapsulates the experience of the quest they embark on after her death to bury her. All of this is written from the perspectives of her husband (Anse), her sons (Jewel, Cash, Darl, and Vardaman), her daughter (Dewey Dell), and her friends (Peabody, Samson, Cora, Tull). Each perspective is written in first person, a dialectical free indirect discourse that allows a reader an almost voyeuristic, perverted sense of being able to "get into" a character's head and complex thought process.
But to simply summarize and say that this is all that the text is about is very incorrect. Writing in the South during the 1930s, Faulkner was very influenced by the Southern values that existed around him. This was a South still clinging desperately to religion, a South that also could not let go of its once-grandiose antebellum past, a defeated South marginalized by the Civil War, a region no longer powerful, now filled with tragedy -- not just because of the war, but also because of industrialism. Faulkner's South was a South that could not let go of the sense of glory and grandeur of the past, one that could not seem to face the impoverished conditions of the present, carrying the proverbial dead body of the "great South" into the Modern era, dragging it into the present and refusing to bury it. This was the South of Faulkner's time, and the South of As I Lay Dying. It is also a South that is very much represented in the very plot of the text.
The overarching plot is the last thing that As I Lay Dying is concerned with. Being that there isn't a unified master narrative, one can't even say that the text is about the master narrative; instead, it's about the subtext, and most importantly, the way language itself is used to not only construct the fictional "world" that the characters exist in, but the way it actually fails to capture their individualized experiences. Language, while being able to form the discursive realities in which a character lives, somehow seems to fail in its intersection between representation and what is represented.
This very postmodern notion of how language signifies a form of existence, while failing to represent what is actually being represented is precisely the dominant theme of the text that remains unresolved, and that pushes Faulkner into the gray area where Modernism and postmodernism intersect. While many of his themes are uniquely Modernist (the focus on the Self, the break with the traditional modes of narratives, the use of free indirect discourse, etc), this focus on language as a discursive power separates him from the rest of Modernist writers in that it allows him to show the problematic way that language itself works. In his attempt to capture the actual experience each individual character goes through discursively and provide it the representational means to exist, the bridge between the actual experience and the language that describes the experience falls apart.
Addie even says in the only part of the text when she has her own narrative (which appears long after she already passed away in the text), "Words are no good...words don't ever fit even what they are trying to say at". It is uncertain whether or not Faulkner agrees with her -- the ambiguity of where the author stands when it comes to this postmodern condition of language is yet another issue that remains as unresolved as many of the other issues that dominate this tragic comedy that is by far, one of the best works in the history of American Literature.