William Faukner, As I Lay Dying Flashcards
“Jewel’s mother is a horse…”
“Jewel’s mother is a horse, Darl said… Then mine can be a fish, can’t it, Darl?
- language has no objective binary with truth
“Life wasn’t ever supposed to be easy folks…”
“Life wasn’t ever supposed to be easy folks: they wouldn’t ever have any reason to be good and die”
Barbers Johnson?
The text offers a series of possibilities rather than give a definitive answer - the text is a transparency to literature
- over the course of the module there seems to be a tension between language and textuality, as words oftentimes fail to represent worlds
What does Yoknapatawpha translate to?
Split country
“I saw Darl and he Knew…”
“I saw Darl and he Knew. He said he knew without the words like he told me that ma is going to die without the words”
Instability of language
- Dewey Dell
“If I had one, it was…”
“If I had one, it was. And if it was, it can’t be is, can it?”
Dewey Dell
How do post colonial scholars interpret nature writing?
They point out nature writing’s long tradition amongst colonial settlers of attempting to mythologise their relationship to place
What impact did the 19th century transatlantic romantic movement have on the US?
The romantic movement coincided with US independence, producing a nationalism whereby nature, understood as wilderness, came to underwrite a new national identity
What impact did the age of exploration have on nature?
Landscape became sexualised
Became envisioned as submissive and resourceful
“Ma is going to die…”
“Ma is going to die without words”
- Dewey Dell
“That’s the trouble with this country…”
“That’s the trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long”
- trauma of the past
- memory of slave trade reimpose itself on the land, which was the source of pain and degradation for black Americans
“Our rivers, our land…”
“Our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent”
Peabody, p38
“The yellow surface dimpled monstrously…”
Finish quote
Who’s monologue is this taken from?
“The yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface”
Darl
- consider repetition of surface, almost as if Faulkner is trying to puncture the surface of reality himself by repeating the word until it breaks
“Just beneath the surface…”
Finish quote
Who’s monologue is this taken from?
“Just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked”
Darl
“Above the ceaseless surface they stand…”
“Above the ceaseless surface they stand - trees, cane, vines - rootless, severed from the earth”
- referring to the modern age’s disconnection from the earth, nature, depth / meaning?
- link to ‘water should never be drank from a cup’
Focus on the connotations of violence associated with ‘severed’
