Senior Project Presentation

As I Lay Dying and Cubism Themes and Motifs

by Michael Stultz

THESIS

“No man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was because the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman, and every moment. All of his and her ancestry, background, is all a part of himself and herself at any moment.”

William Faulkner (1897-1962) Greatest American Southern writer, won the

Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950 A master of modernist experimentation in the

novel, related to his obsession with time stream of consciousness, temporal shifts,

and multiple voices Some major novels: The Sound and the Fury

(1929) [4 narrators], As I Lay Dying (1930) [15 narrators], Absalom! Absalom! (1936)

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Born William Falkner, 25 Sept. 1897, New Albany, Mississippi

1918: joins Canadian Royal Air Force

1919-20 U of Mississippi

1921: U of Mississippi Post Office

Faulkner: Major Phase

1929: The Sound and the Fury [4 narrators]

1930 As I Lay Dying [15 narrators]

William Faulkner (1897-1962) His great theme is the influence of the past on the

present… Gavin Stevens in Requiem for a Nun (1951), says:

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, Oxford, Miss.

As I Lay Dying

By William Faulkner

1930

Faulkner’s House (1930)

Faulkner’s Mississippi

2,400 square miles;the population, 6,298 whites and 9,313 Negroes, for a total of 15,611

What is the American South?

“You're in the American South now, a proud region with a distinctive history and culture. A place that echoes with names like Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee, Scarlett O'Hara and Uncle Remus, Martin Luther King and William Faulkner, Billy Graham, Mahalia Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley. Home of the country blues and country music, bluegrass and Dixieland jazz, gospel music and rock and roll. Where menus offer both down-home biscuits and gravy and uptown shrimp and grits. Where churches preach against "cigarettes, whiskey, and wild, wild women" (all Southern products) and where American football is a religion.” - From John Shelton Reed's My Tears Spoiled My Aim

Modern Similarities

As I Lay Dying is like the TV show Desperate Housewives: told in voice-over by a woman who is already dead. Faulkner’s characters share inner thoughts through voiceovers.

Modern Similarities

As I Lay Dying is like the movie Pulp Fiction: told from multiple viewpoints and in a non-linear plot. Example: Vincent Vega gets shot and killed, but then he’s in the last scene (which begins the movie).

Major Motifs

Earth: Addie’s destination

Water: (flood) river crossing

Fire: barn-burning

Air: the smell of Addie’s

rotting corpse

Major Themes　 a. History and race　 b. Deterioration (of the family, the South, words)　 c. Conflicts between generations, classes, races, man and environment d. Horror, violence and the abnormal

Features of his works　 a. complex plot　 b. stream of consciousness　 c. characterization: the psychology of characters　 d. violation of chronology　 e. courtroom rhetoric: formal language　 f. multiple point of view, circular form

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The Mind vs. The Body

Critic Edmond Volpe says of Faulkner’s work:“Faulkner dramatizes the recognition that the human body

must exist in chronological time, the mind does not funtions within the boundries placed on the human body. The mind fuses past, present, and future. Because we think beyond clock measured time and because what we do today is shaped by what happened yesterday, ‘Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are IS: Indivisible. One.’”

　   Innner Narrators Anse Bundren: patriarch of the Bundren familyAddie: Anse’s dying (then dead) wifeCash: (30) the eldest son, the best carpenter in the areaDarl: (28) the second son, sensitive, cruel and intuitiveJewel (18) the third son, favoring actions over wordsDewey Dell (17): the only Bundren daughterVardaman (9): the youngest Bundren

exit

　   Outer Narrators

 Whitfield: the local preacherVernon Tull: Bundren’s neighborCora Tull: Vernon’s wife, nosy and piousLucius Peabody: the local doctorSamson: another neighbor who puts the Bundrens up for a night on their journeyHenry Armstid: another neighbor who hosts the Bundrens one unfortunate nightMoseley: druggist in Mottson, a town the Bundrens pass throughMacGowan: a drugstore clerk in Jefferson

exit

Faulkner’s Process

59 interior monologues where life and death are revealed through the characters

Our memory, the way we understand, is related to our physical perception

Monologues are very sensual perceptions of the real world

These intensify the character’s mental & emotional experiences for the reader

More Faulkner’s Process

Interior monologues Stream of consciousness First person narrator makes action immediate No omniscient narrator so no center 59 chapters apportioned among 15

characters 7 are concerned 8 are detached

cubism After 1909, Picasso and Braque began a more systematic study of

structure which we know as "Analytical Cubism". In this period, they removed bright colors from their compositions, favoring monochromatic earth tones so that they could focus primarily on the structure. The paintings of this period look as if they have deconstructed objects and rearranged them on the canvas. One goal of this is to depict different viewpoints simultaneously. Traditionally, an object is always viewed from one specific viewpoint and at one specific (stopped) moment in time. Picasso and Braque felt that this was too limiting, and desired to represent an object as if they are viewing it from several angles or at different moments in time. Innovative as this was, the danger was that many of the works of this period are completely incomprehensible to the viewer, as they start to lose all sense of form.~Eyeconart.com

Pablo Picasso, 1900

Picasso, Self-Portrait, 1900

Gris, Portrait of Picasso (1912)

Picasso, Self-Portrait, 1907

Picasso Cubed

Cubism ExampleFull-Face Portrait – Student work

Materials Mirrors – 12x 18 newsprint – Construction paper, scrap paper;

newspapers, wallpaper – and other papers.

Pencils, scissors, Seral transfer paper, glue, black permanent markers, paint markers 

Poster board for frame

The Mirror Effect

Most people look in a mirror this way: Full-front, Head-on

We see what we want to see…

We rarely…

Look at the sides…. ….and never behind.

…so we never really know how others see us.

Creative Component

The pencil drawing on the right was made in the author'sadult drawing class.  It is a practice observation drawingof two chickens in motion drawn with the instructions to keepdrawing in the same space while the chickens are moving.

WORKS CITED Adamowski, T.H. "'Meet Mrs. Bundren': As I Lay Dying -- Gentility, Tact, and Psychoanalysis." University of

Toronto Quarterly 49 (1980): 205-227. Alldredge, Betty. "Spatial Form in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying." Southern Literary Journal 11 (1978): 3-19. Bender, Eileen T. "Faulkner as Surrealist: The Persistence of Memory in Light in August." Southern Literary

Journal 18 (1985): 3-12. Bleikasten, Andre. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1973. Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1974. Branch, Watson G. "Darl Bundren's 'Cubistic' Vision." William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying: A Critical Casebook. Ed.

Dianne L. Cox. New York: Garland, 1985. Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1969.

Broughton, Panthea Reid. "Faulkner's Cubist Novels." "A Cosmos of My Own": Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1980. Eds. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1981.

Clarke, Deborah. Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Random House, 1990. --------. Mosquitoes. New York: Liveright, 1971. Mellard, James M. "Something New and Hard and Bright: Faulkner, Ideology, and the Construction of Modernism."

Mississippi Quarterly 48 (1995): 459-79 Morris, Wesley. "The Irrepressible Real: Jacques Lacan and Poststructuralism." American Criticism in the

Poststructuralist Age. Ed. Ira Konigsberg. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1981. Nielsen, Paul S. "What Does Addie Bundren Mean, and How Does she Mean It?" Southern Literary Journal 25

(1992): 33-9. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. Tytell, John. "Epiphany in Chaos: Fragmentation in Modernism." New York Literary Forum 8/9 (1981): 3-15. Vickery, Olga. The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation. Baton Rouge: U of Louisiana P, 1959. Woolf, Virginia. Walter Sickert: A Conversation. London: The Hogarth Press, 1934.