Words and Images in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

Words and Images in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

Maybe I will end up in some kind of self-communion -- a silence -- faced with the certainty that I can no longer be understood. The artist must create his own language. This is not only his right but his duty. ----------- William Faulkner

Virginia Woolf observes that "painting and writing have much to tell each other; they have much in common. The novelist after all wants to make us to see" (22). Indeed, many movements in the visual arts during the first half of the twentieth century had a close relationship with literature. High Modernist writers, such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner, have been preoccupied with the visual arts. As John Tytell claims, in his "Epiphany in Chaos: Fragmentation in Modernism," one of the most prominent characteristics of modernism has been "the unusual reciprocity of artistic influence -- Apollinaire wrote the first intelligent book on cubism, Gertrude Stein wrote about cubist painters and collected their works" (8).

During the past three decades, several critics have recognized correspondences between Faulkner's writing and the visual arts. Ilse Dusoir Lind has examined the influence of painting on Faulkner's work. Such critics as Watson Branch and Panthea Reid Broughton have explored the influence of cubism on Faulkner. And more recently, Mary Rohrberger has noted the surrealistic qualities in Faulkner's text. But, what has not been considered is the intricate relationship between Faulkner's reliance on the visual and his skeptical view of language. Although some critics tend to emphasize Faulkner's early creativity in cartoons and illustrations, it does not seem to provide a satisfying explanation for the p...

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...acters rely heavily on vivid visual or pictorial images to express their complex inner logic and perceptions of reality. For example, as we can find in Vardaman's statement "My mother is a fish," Faulkner's verbal discourse often corresponds to the concrete, immediate visual image. In addition to his textual experiments with italics, punctuation, and capitalization, Faulkner's use of the coffin pictogram and the blank space are also indicative of his efforts to overcome the inadequacy of language. These visual signifiers attempt to express inexpressible ideas and experiences. Faulkner's extensive use of the visual as a privileged mode of expression is closely related to his recognition of the limitations of language. By employing various images and techniques borrowed from the visual arts, Faulkner attempts to fill the gaps between reality and verbal representation.