Visible Design

Three describes the process that Faulkner, Calvino, and Macnab undergo to bring their images to the reader. Faulkner starts with an idea and then develops it into a message which he then translates through his characters in the form of analogies or metaphor. Calvino begins with an image and lets the words describe the image until completion. Macnab extensively reworks her designs to fit her clients needs. Each of these artists employs the balancing nature of three to come to a resolution.
The Egyptian warning to not break a triangle lends itself to superstition. Faulkner’s novel is likewise filled with unlucky circumstances where the ‘triangle’ is broken. Metaphorically breaking the triangle is breaking from tradition, something the Bundren’s are good at. Rather than explicitly tell the reader that the Bundren’s are doing something taboo, Faulkner allows the images to speak for themselves. A dead body is generally buried to avoid the smell of the body rotting from causing nausea. In a complete breach of this practice the Bundren’s tote Addie’s body around until it begins to reek to high heavens.
The dead are also supposed to be given respect, but at one point in the novel Anse actually drills through Addie’s coffin to ‘give her a breeze’ and accidently drills through her flesh. Faulkner’s idea of taboo breaking manifests in the image of Tull describing the similar ‘bored clean’ holes in the coffin and Addie’s face.
ANALOGY

Visible Experience

“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.