Cubism In Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
“The past is never dead. It's not even past” (Requiem 73). What Faulkner meant by this is that people are always living in the past. Old experiences shape one’s actions in the present and continuously impact one’s everyday life. This is true of Faulkner’s character from As I Lay Dying, Darl Bundren. An essential member of the Bundren family, Darl is the second oldest and narrates nineteen out of the fifty-nine fragmented chapters in the novel. His voice is critical in understanding and gaining insight into the characters’ lives. Besides having the most speaking parts in the novel, Darl proves different from the rest of his family in a variety of ways, including his sophisticated speech, his suspicious insight, and his apparent insanity. The
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Since Cubism “had been prevalent in Paris for a decade before American soldiers got there,” Darl would have been exposed to this style in France while serving in the war (Branch 42). Exposure to cubism provides Darl with a new means of conceiving reality. Cubism was an influential art style that emphasized two-dimensionality, fractured objects, geometric forms, and multiple vantage points. Essentially, it was a rejection against the more traditional techniques used during that time (Rewald 1). Through Darl’s narration, it is apparent that he utilizes cubist techniques in order to describe the world around him. A direct reference of this is when he perceptively views Addie’s coffin and the sawhorses and describes them as “a cubistic bug” (AILD 219). Another example is when he describes the woodchips laying on the earth as “smears of soft pale paint on a black canvas” (AILD 75). As Susan Scott Parrish noted in “As I Lay Dying and the Modern Aesthetics of Ecological Crisis,” “Darl turns his surroundings into startling art objects, like abstracted landscapes viewed simultaneously from multiple viewpoints, that seem to suggest a special kinship with Cubism” (79). The way he defines objects by describing them like cubist paintings adds a certain sophistication to his language: the same sophistication that Faulkner revealed was just an effect of Darl’s madness (Gwynn
Since Cubism “had been prevalent in Paris for a decade before American soldiers got there,” Darl would have been exposed to this style in France while serving in the war (Branch 42). Exposure to cubism provides Darl with a new means of conceiving reality. Cubism was an influential art style that emphasized two-dimensionality, fractured objects, geometric forms, and multiple vantage points. Essentially, it was a rejection against the more traditional techniques used during that time (Rewald 1). Through Darl’s narration, it is apparent that he utilizes cubist techniques in order to describe the world around him. A direct reference of this is when he perceptively views Addie’s coffin and the sawhorses and describes them as “a cubistic bug” (AILD 219). Another example is when he describes the woodchips laying on the earth as “smears of soft pale paint on a black canvas” (AILD 75). As Susan Scott Parrish noted in “As I Lay Dying and the Modern Aesthetics of Ecological Crisis,” “Darl turns his surroundings into startling art objects, like abstracted landscapes viewed simultaneously from multiple viewpoints, that seem to suggest a special kinship with Cubism” (79). The way he defines objects by describing them like cubist paintings adds a certain sophistication to his language: the same sophistication that Faulkner revealed was just an effect of Darl’s madness (Gwynn