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“Perception increases by the number of viewpoints we can hold simultaneously” (171). Faulkner satiates each of the senses individually. He uses pastoral, religious, and lexical analogies to flesh out his novel.
Addie Bundren says “… people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just word’s too” (176) and that a word is “just a shape to fill a lack” (172). She speaks of words that are formed out of people’s inability to truly communicate, but ultimately end up betraying them. An arbitrary word is created by someone who doesn’t understand what it is to experience some other thing. How then can communication mean anything. We each pick and choose what we think a word means, and each word builds off of other words. In this way people go from what is real to what is universally false. Addie, and Faulkner by proxy, would argue, words are a subjective representation of that which is objective.
Addie employs the arbitrary words, built on tradition, but also creates a neologism (not-Anse; Anse’s abssence). Her ability to create a novum, a thing which is new and shocking to the point of demanding movement, is present in her son Darl who in dealing with death discuss her own death as no longer being is and now being was. Addie even discusses how she takes a word in her mind and thinks it until it is a shape. She thinks ‘Anse’ until his name is a shape, a vessel that ‘Anse’ occupies. This is much the same as Calvino moving from an idea to an image, and also mirrors Macnab’s process of allowing the client’s essence to guide her designs.
On a sensory level Faulkner uses kinesthetic tropes that relate the feeling of death to various mediums. Vardman feels the death of his mother as an analogy to the fish he kills. Both leave him with the feeling of loss. Again, Darl can only understand his mother’s death through the use of basic lexical twists (mother was not is). The smell of Cash’s rotting leg is analogous to his own mother’s decay.
Faulkner plays with the structure and form of this novel masterfully. The novel is encyclopedic in of itself which Calvino attributes to the multiple nature of novels. The novel could be told from any of the narrators perspectives individually but cumulatively each of the narrators adds depth to the novel. Faulkner creates a multiple 1st person omniscient point of view which jumps from one character to another without ever employing an unbiased narrator. Although the reader is privy to every thought of the narrators (indeed even partially constructed thoughts are exposed) they must take each thought with a grain of salt. Just as people are able to lie to themselves, so too are the characters able to have thoughts that hide their true intentions (Anse’s object for the funeral).
Faulkner immerses the reader in his network of connections. The town that he invents (Yoknapatawpha) is the backdrop to some of his other novels and gives the town more dimension than just the view of one novel. The novel approaches each scene from a different view, but never reexamines the same one providing a linear yet broken narrative. At time the narration delves into intricacies (such as many of Darl’s earlier chapters, and later Cash’s) while other times the prose is shallow (Cash’s initially).
There is a balance between the interior monologue (and inner dialogue between oneself in Darl’s case after he goes ‘crazy’) and the spoken dialogues which shows a depth of forms. Faulkner also utilizes multiple tenses. Certain sections of the work are italicized in order to indicate past events.Finally, at times the work deals with matters of deep importance (Addie’s philosophical debate on the meaning of words, Darl and Vardman’s conversation about what death means symbolically and lexically, Cash’s analysis of what it means to be ‘crazy’) while other times the novel remains blithe concerning itself with the price of cakes (Cora).
Nekromantix is a “Danish-American psychobily” band whose logo is a six sided coffin with their name inscribed inside. Faulkner’s most meticulous character Cash focuses his obsessively precise nature on the construction of his mother’s coffin, which is shown in a small picture to be six sided. There is an entire chapter dedicated to the painstaking thought process Cash undergoes to decide how to best create the coffin.
Coffin Logo for the band Nekromantics
The Nekromantix coffin becomes three dimensional through the use of six rectangular (four sided) panels. Four’s ability to create depth is obvious in this role. The name of the band is contained within the six sided top of the coffin which works to complement sixes ability to bring pieces together to work seamlessly. The name of the band is a portmanteau of two words “necromancy” (communicating with the dead) and “romantics.” These seemingly disparate words are graphically forced onto one another with the effect of creating a neologism, nekromantix.
A coffin then is both numerically symbolic of the number six, but as it is a skewed hexagon, the meaning behind six becomes slightly skewed. While still numerically the most ordered number, the coffin is symbolic of death and decomposition and contrasts with sixes connected nature. The coffin then is close to Faulkner’s own use of six. He employs the values of six to create a tightly knit experience that is actually an experience of decomposition (both of the family, and literally of the body of Addie).
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.
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