Content area
Full text
The main characters in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying use animal metaphors throughout the novel to convey meanings and affects ("my mother is a fish"). At the same time, "real" animals (horses, cows, mules) are continually announcing their presence through groans, snuffings, lows and cries. In its treatment of the inarticulate animal cry, As I Lay Dying re-situates (human) language within a larger continuum of communicative processes that are ahuman; at the same time, through its pervasive and self-reflexive animal discourse, the novel exposes traces of animality within language itself. Broadly speaking, modernity finds the domain of animality (the body, the living) reconceived in terms of electro-magnetic forces in flux, of uncanny communication and transference. Read against this cultural-historical backdrop, the figure of the animal assumes a haunting presence in As I Lay Dying's distinctly modernist strategies of representation, and in its reflections on language, communication, and the modern subject.
Keywords: animal / language / modernity / subjectivity / magnetism
Logos is a zoon.
- JACQUES DERRIDA
6. Except
7. A body is not square like a crosstie
8. Animal Magnetism
- CASH BUNDREN
As I Lay Dying is a zoosemiotic tour de force.1 Throughout the novel, characters use animal signs - analogies, similes, metaphors - to convey meanings and affects: Peabody likens Anse to a "dipped rooster" (44), Darl declares Jewel's mother a horse (95). Typical of such analogies is Vardaman's extraordinary statement concerning his dead mother and the fish he has just caught: "And tomorrow it will be cooked and et and she will be him" (67). At the same time, "real" animals (horses, cows, geese, mules) are continually signaling their presence through a multitude of groans and snuffings, lows and cries, and moans "almost human" (149). In the fictional world of As I Lay Dying, animal signs and signals proliferate - and indeed, get crossed throughout - producing a vast network of animal currencies both natural and cultural, material and figurative.
Animals in As I Lay Dying expose the limitations of logos, and the insufficiency of a philosophical tradition, going back to Aristotle, that aims to secure the purity and privilege of the (human) subject. As I Lay Dying re-situates language within a continuum of signifying processes that are ahuman; through...