Visible Emblem

For my emblem I created a drill that emerges from a three piece braid. The two pieces create a contrast between organic and mechanical but are resolved in the similarity of the weaving component of both. The drill bit was lifted directly from the tool belt of Cash, who is clearly defined by his own tools. The braid is referential to women’s hairstyles which can also ‘define’ who they are. There exists in these same images a conflict between masculinity and femininity which is resolved in the future generations which begin their own conflict.
The broken triangle represents superstition and then ending of the cycle of conflict then resolution. Addie speaks of how she poses the hatred of her father which she will inevitably pass on to her children. The broken drill bit shows how the children are able to escape that cycle but also have to break convention to do so.
The triangle I created points sideways so as to differentiate itself from the upwards (male) and downwards (female) facing triangles. It is also typographically a D which can stand for Dewey-Dell. Dewey-Dell is the most likely candidate for following her mother (she is the only girl, and she is pregnant) but she chooses to reject her mother’s decision to have children by attempting an abortion. She truly breaks the cycle.

Exact Experience

Faulkner invents a new lexicon to great effect in As I Lay Dying. Specifically he uses rural dialects and close phonetic transcriptions to give true-to-life written forms of character’s speech. Faulkner creates a facsimile of his home state of Mississippi in Yoknapatawpha and copies the speech he hears there in his story. His characters, while not always mature beings, are fully fleshed out as characters. Each narrator/character has a unique style of recounting events as well as a distinct diction.
Interestingly, even the text of the more mature characters is encoded with the same dialectical grammar that they use to converse. That is to say that Faulkner’s statement about the mind speech connection is directly proportional. A person may only speak so well as their mind is able to fathom. This is true of all of his characters from the brilliantly philosophical Addie to the singleminded Dewey Dell.
The texture of the word choices and sentence structures are what Calvino describes as ‘exact’ use of language. Faulkner is able to systematically and exactly correlate language and style to form his characters. Even without the lexical clues such as mispronounced dialogue a reader would get a precise view of each character through his or her narration.