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The Modern Magnetic Animal: As I Lay Dying and the Uncanny Zoology of Modernism

2008; Indiana University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/jml.2008.31.3.81

1529-1464

Christopher T. White,

Travel Writing and Literature

The main characters in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying use animal metaphors throughout the novel to convey meanings and affects (my mother is a fish). At the same time, real animals (horses, cows, mules) are continually announcing their presence through groans, snuffings, lows and cries. In its treatment of the inarticulate animal cry, As I Lay Dying re-situates (human) language within a larger continuum of communicative processes that are ahuman; at the same time, through its pervasive and self-reflexive animal discourse, the novel exposes traces of animality within language itself. Broadly speaking, modernity finds the domain of animality (the body, the living) reconceived in terms of electro-magnetic forces in flux, of uncanny communication and transference. Read against this cultural-historical backdrop, the figure of the animal assumes a haunting presence in As I Lay Dying' s distinctly modernist strategies of representation, and in its reflections on language, communication, and the modern subject.