"As I Lay Dying's" Heterogeneous Discourse
1989; Duke University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1345576
ISSN1945-8509
Autores Tópico(s)Translation Studies and Practices
ResumoWilliam Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930) no longer elicits the shock and outrage that accompanied its first publication.' We have grown accustomed to unconventional narration; experimental novels by now have a venerable tradition of their own, one that literary historians comfortably relate to the overall development of the form. Yet although the new novel is now old, and although we easily put Faulkner in the context of Joyce, Woolf, and RobbeGrillet, critical familiarity has not brought with it critical unanimity. The diverse and contradictory attempts to characterize Faulkner's narrative method in As I Lay Dying reflect the wide-spread confusion about that novel's conventions of representation, a confusion that centers upon a genuinely provocative issue: why does a that looks as if it should be read as a series of interior monologues frustrate our attempts to do so? This question inevitably engages a larger issue: if Faulkner seems to misuse a narrative convention that most writers employ for the sake of realism, then what kind of has he produced? Critics of As I Lay Dying tend to fall into two camps: those who regard Faulkner as a botched realist and those who cite his deviation from mimesis as the hallmark of an anti-representational language philosophy-in other words, of his deconstructionalism. Despite their radically different accounts of Faulkner's intentions, these positions share a similar notion of what an interior monologue should be. The definition of interior monologue assumed by Faulkner critics is best articulated in the work of narratologists such as Seymour Chatman and Dorrit Cohn. Cohn and Chatman both agree that the interior monologue pretends to be a direct thought quotation of a character's mind.2
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