ESSAY: THE IMPORTANCE OF SETTING IN AS I LAY DYING by WILLIAM FAULKNER

 

This is a Second Year essay that I wrote back in the day, when there were still days to be had. It has its flaws and the prof's comments and criticisms are in red. It got a fairly good "grade", but I wonder if it would it pass muster today? Well, enjoy it as best you can.

Cheers, Jake.

“…that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art…” (Virginia Woolf)

 

As I Lay Dying is an exploration of the fundamental isolation that exists at the heart of each person’s life. In the opening scene, Darl and Jewel walk along a path “worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July.” (3) For Darl, the path is followed until he reaches the spring. Jewel, however, with “pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face…endued with life from the hips down” (3-4) breaks stride and leaves the path, then later returns to it and continues on his way to the spring.

The path, the silent journey, the inward private world of Darl’s thoughts and observations set in place for us the shape and scope of Faulkner’s study of individual consciousness and its role in human relationships. Through Darl’s eyes we first see the field and path, Jewel, the cotton house, and the coffin. Through his ears we hear the sound of Cash’s adze blade. Then abruptly in the next chapter, we begin again, experiencing the world this time through the thoughts and observations of Cora. And so on through several more chapters, while each character introduces us to his or her private view of the world.

The setting in As I Lay Dying is important, both to facilitate the development and presentation of Faulkner’s major themes, and to provide a rich source for his imagery. In the rural landscape, the reader expects to be drawn to images of soil, growth and vegetation, to descriptions of the land, the sky and weather, to temperature, colour and smell. We expect to be presented with a rich portrait of natural imagery within which the characters of the novel exist. Thus, one of the striking elements of this work is the lack of this ‘objective landscape’, or perhaps to say it more clearly, with respect to the characters’ perceptions, there is a lack of a shared consensus as to the nature of the world. Because of the multiple points of view (the story is told through as many as fifteen perspectives), Faulkner paints with broad brush strokes only the most basic setting—a post-World War One July day in rural Mississippi; a poor family living on an isolated cotton farm, an approaching storm, and a journey of some distance to the town of Jefferson. He allows each character to present the world (their world, the world as they see it, with their own interpretations of time, event and motivation) that leaves us with a picture of people, not so much being on the land at a particular time and place, but rather being in the land, being at once a part of its character and at the same time shaping it with metaphor, “like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image…” (41)

 

Images of the land, the elements—earth, wind, fire and water—are presented to us, constituting not so much a particular landscape, but something closer to an interior landscape of each individual. Also interesting is to note that such imagery would be less available in an urban setting where nature is more controlled and muted, and where laws more efficiently regulate our social relations; where distances are shorter and where communication is much faster, making it more difficult to depict the intensely personalized isolation of someone like Addie or Darl or Dewey Dell. (Addie’s burial, for example, would have occurred more quickly and efficiently in the city.) As well, an urban setting would tend to foster the acceptance of a more commonly-held view of the world, disguising or perhaps entirely negating private visions of the world, the ones Faulkner wishes to explore. One compares his presentation, for example, of Macgowan’s limited, yet commonly held view of sexuality as a way to acquire social status, with the passionate, private vision of Addie’s: “I believed that I had found it. I believed that the reason was the duty to the alive, to the terrible blood, the red bitter flood boiling through the land.” (161) [You might include the Macgowan ref., even though you don’t quote it directly, just for the reader’s convenience.]

 
Additionally, the importance of setting as it relates to the imagery in the novel lies in the relative simplicity of the rural versus the urban landscape. Simple, in the sense that two people standing in a field experience approximately the same things, with perhaps vastly different interpretations. However, the same two people standing in a city street may experience vastly different things depending on how busy the street is, or where they are looking, or how long they remain there. The urban landscape is more highly concentrated and therefore is less apt to be commonly experienced by a broad range of people at any given moment. for example, in one scene, for Darl, the sun sets “like a bloody egg upon the crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.” (36) [Interesting idea] For Peabody, the same sun has simply, “gone down…like a load of cinders.” (37) Interesting here is a technique that Faulkner uses to create setting. He outlines in one chapter particular elements of the scene—the sky at sunset or, elsewhere, the river or the road—and in the following chapter he presents those same elements but from a different character’s perspective, creating continuity of setting but forcing the reader to examine one of his major themes, namely the uniqueness of individual perception.

 

Thematically, this rural setting provides Faulkner with the opportunity to present clearly such examples of individual human perceptions: two people see the same event—a sunset—but in dramatically different terms. Darl sees it in visionary, ominous terms, Peabody in perhaps more pedantic [load of cinders ref.?] terms. Here Darl also personifies nature; [Not quite—an egg, even a human one does not equal a person] in this case the sun is a bloody egg, a reference perhaps to Dewey Dell’s pregnancy. Vardaman also imbues natural events with human [again, not quite] qualities when he sees “the dark stand up and go whirling away” (59), or when the “top of the barn comes swooping up out of the twilight.” (49) Not only do natural events and settings take on human characteristics, but so too do human beings become, [or vice versa] at times, part of the setting. For example, Dewey Delly says, “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth” (58) There are numerous references to Jewel being wooden-like: “wooden-backed, wooden-faced” (193), his eyes like pale wooden eyes” (17). Addie’s hands are, “like two of them roots dug up.” (13) And there is the striking image of Darl’s eyes, “full of the land dug out of his skull and the holes filled with distance beyond the land.”(23)

With this imagery of eyes, we are aware of another technique Faulkner uses to create setting and establish mood and expectation. Throughout the novel, groups of images reoccur. There are references to eyes as “pieces of broken plate” (112), “eyes [that] were two colours of wood” (168) or like “pieces of burnt-out cinder” (28), or “eyes full of the land.” (32) Here we note eye imagery is most often associated with either land or wood, and we are drawn to make connections that we would not normally make between land, wood and the people—of Jewel, for  example, who is seen as rigid, implacable—like wood. 

Wood imagery, appropriate for story’s the rural setting, occurs throughout the novel in reference to Jewel, the coffin, buildings. Another recurring motif, rain, foreshadows the impending storm. Tull mentions it three times in as many pages. As well, the imagery of sounds is striking. Sound seem at times to exist independently, almost detached from their sources, as when Darl observes, “the sounds ceasing without departing, as if any movement might dislodge them” (67), or when Tull notes the sound of the women’s voices singing at Addie’s funeral: “It’s like they hadn’t gone away. It’s like they just disappeared into the air.” (82) And of course there is the sound of Cash’s saw, in the earlier sections, as a constant background.

Such imagery develops setting, creates atmosphere and allows Faulkner to explore thematically. Our vision of Addie, Darl and to a lesser extent Dewey Dell (and perhaps Vardaman) is of people who are aware of the profound isolation each of them lives with, and who are also aware of the need to act, with passion, to make those necessary connections which will bring them into the world—in the sense that they achieve both an experience and an understanding of their place there, one which has nothing to do with “words [that] go up in a thin line, quick and harmless.” (160)

 

Faulkner also draws our attention to parts of the body—Jewel's eyes, Darl’s hands “lying in quiet interstices” (236), Anse’s feet, Cash’s “one thigh and one pole-thin arm.” (68) Like sounds, these descriptions are detached, segregated from the whole. He draws our attention to particulars of the landscape that also seem detached from their surroundings. Wood chips are “random smears of soft pale paint” (67); for Dewey Dell the “crest, the trees, the roof of the house stand against the sky.” (58) At the river, “trees, cane, vines [are] rootless, severed from the earth, spectral.” (127) For Vardaman, Jewel’s horse is seen to “dissolve—legs, a rolling eye…and float upon the dark in fading solution…fetlock, hip, shoulder and head.” (52) As well, Faulkner’s use of short chapters and the disjointed narrative structure help create a persistent mood of disunity and disconnectedness. 

In discussing the importance of setting to the novel, we turn to the setting of the wagon where almost two-thirds of the story takes place—either on the wagon itself or during the trip to Jefferson. One of the most powerful images that remains with the reader is of the family, perched atop Addie’s coffin in the slowly moving wagon, each alone with their own private thoughts but all compelled to complete the macabre journey. For Darl, the wagon ride is “soporific, so dreamlike” (95), the road is like part of a wheel, “beyond it the road lies like a spoke of which Addie Bundren is the rim.” (95) This image, the setting, the archetypal metaphor of wheel, creates for us a powerful atmosphere of inertia. Everyone on the wagon, including the passionate Jewel, cannot act. Everyone is compelled to transport the rotting corpse of Addie to its final destination. No one can change this fate. No one can act, not even Darl, who knows, as the ghostly Addie does "how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it." (160) Nor can Dewey Dell, who suspects the truth of Addie’s words. Only Addie acts. And she acts in the most articulate and irrevocable manner of all. Her body, decomposing, is returning fully to the earth where she desires to be and where she belongs. For Faulkner, this image is in perfect harmony with the cyclical imperatives of rural life—planting and harvesting, birth and death, growth and decay.

 

For Darl, the journey may never end. He may never be able to leave the path, as we first saw him, to discover his passion. For Addie, her journey ended almost twenty years in the past when the “wild blood boiled away and the sound of it ceased” (61). We do not know if it is over for Dewey Dell. Will she discover her ability to act with knowledge and passion as Addie once did, but as Darl cannot? (It is this inability that destroys him in the end.) Or Jewel, who is able to act, but does not understand that he can. For Jewel, the journey, the cycle, continues but he, too, remains, like Darl and so many others, on the path. Only his passion exists for him (as only knowledge does for Darl). Jewel’s knowledge, his understanding of himself, remains dormant: “motionless, lean, wooden-backed, as though carved squatting out of the lean wood.” (214) For Anse, he has a new wife, “another one before cotton picking”. (29) The cycle continues and life goes on as usual for him, without knowledge or passion. For Cash, life goes on but with the addition of the new Mrs. Bundren’s gramophone and “us sitting in the house in the winter, listening to it.” (242) As for Vardaman—a child, questioning and alert—he may yet be able to leave the path.

Darl said it “takes two people to make you and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.” (35) For Addie and for Darl, that knowledge is not enough.

 

______________________________________

 

Works Cited

 

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Rev. ed. New York: Random House. 1987

 

Rev. of Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings by Virginia Woolf, New York Times Book Review, 14 Nov. 1975, n. page.

 

 

 

 

Grade = 86%

Well written and very interesting. The ending needs attention though. Youve been moving towards a broad interpretation of "setting", which is fine, but you should, I think, return specifically to the word near the end ["setting"] to make it clear that you haven't wandered off the topic.