The Man Who Suffers and the Mind Which Creates : Problems of Poetics in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
1987; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research
ResumoIn her study of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Olga Vickery says that Addie and Anse Bundren represent the two polar opposites of action and (53). Literally, of course, Anse acts and Addie talks, but effectively Anse is emotionally impotent and Addie mute. She will not reduce experience through the abstraction of words, and Anse acts not because of emotional involvement but for calculated self-aggrandizement. Numerous commentators (see, for example, Brooks, pp. 148-149, and Bleikasten, p. 136) agree with Vickery that the dramatic tension of the novel derives from the opposition of acts and words, a reading of the novel that makes Anse and Addie representatives of two elements of human communication--on Anse's side verbal ability, and on Addie's side the will to action necessary for using language. These critics also agree that the narrative shows the effect of this opposition on the children, especially Cash and Dark Vickery sees Cash ultimately achieving maturity and understanding by integrating these modes into one distinctively human response which fuses words and (51), and, similarly, Irving Howe says that at the end Cash is able to reach towards the between words and actions which none of the Bundrens, not even Addie, sees enough to desire (181). And perhaps Vickery on best represents how the second son is perceived: Darl ... encompasses all possible modes of response and awareness without being able to effect their integration (51). This reading, then, suggests that the novel portrays the elder sons' attempts to integrate those elements of human communication which they have received from their parents. The harmonious relation of these elements of emotional intensity and verbal facility produce what Kenneth Burke calls symbolic action, the most refined form of which is poetic language. In lengthy arguments through many books and years, Burke has developed a position on artistic expression which he first articulates extensively The Philosophy of Literary Form: Everyone suffers (as indeed the Bundrens suffer) and tries to alleviate the suffering. Poets attempt it through their art, turning [their] liabilities into assets, by using [their] burdens as a basis of insight (17). That is, poets, like others, are obsessed with their burdens, but their way of dealing with them includes an attempt to communicate the burdens and their attitudes to them. Burke describes the process and the work of art that comes of it in terms of a and a strategy for confronting or encompassing that situation (64); as poets work to overcome the recalcitrance that their personal burdens and interests would generate others--as they work to universalize them--they gain new perspectives on them and so create strategies by which they can understand and perhaps overcome the problems. If, as Vickery, Howe, and others say, As I Lay Dying tells about problems achieving the between words and acts, specifically as the problems concern the management of raw materials--experiences, reflections, one's personal history--then Burke's ideas suggest that these are problems of artistic expression. If Burke's arguments about the creation and effects of art are reasonable (and his case is elaborately developed), then Cash and Bundren possess the elements for using poetic action to resolve their problems. However, it seems that Darl, not Cash, is the Bundren who most nearly achieves the synthesis. Cash may be the stablest Bundren, the hardest-working, even the sanest, but he has maintained this position not through harnessing and combining words and acts but by keeping them separate. suffers more than the other Bundrens, because his mother has never loved him and he knows it. He knows other things, too. More than Anse, he can see the power of Addie's active and emotional plane, and more than Addie he knows that words have power, that they create their own experiences. …
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