Sensational Modernism by Joseph B. Entin

Author:Joseph B. Entin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2007-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Shapes to Fill a Lack: Yonnondio and As I Lay Dying

A sense of social and aesthetic disintegration similar to the one that preoccupies Yonnondio also permeates William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which tells the story of the Bundren family’s nine-day journey to bury Addie, wife to Anse and mother to Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman. Told in fifty-nine discrete monologues, the novel is at once a tale of literal decomposition—as the Bundrens travel, Addie’s unembalmed corpse begins to decay—and a text that is itself structured by significant formal disintegration, held delicately together by the interplay of the characters’ voices, unframed by an omniscient narrator. Briefly, I want to explore some connections between Olsen’s and Faulkner’s novels, considering in particular how the texts’ common emphasis on disintegration may point to similar strategies for undoing prevailing conceptions of the Depression-era poor.

First, let me say a word about placing As I Lay Dying and Yonnondio side by side. On the face of it, Faulkner and Olsen make an unlikely pairing. The two are usually identified with opposing formal movements—Faulkner with high modernism and Olsen with proletarian realism—and contrasting political stances—in Faulkner’s case, a Jeffersonian liberalism, and in Olsen’s, a socialist feminism. Yet As I Lay Dying and Yonnondio possess some striking similarities.48 Both novels depict the desperate journeys of destitute working-class families, driven by catastrophe and plagued by economic need. In both narratives economic vulnerability is echoed by sexual vulnerability, as female characters confront unwanted pregnancies and sexual exploitation. Both novels foreground grotesque maternal bodies—Yonnondio, the ill and abused body of Anna Holbrook, and As I Lay Dying, the fetid corpse of Addie Bundren, which her husband and children travel to bury. Both novels emphasize the voices of children and, through them, the power of mass culture to shape desire. In addition, and for the purposes of this study most significant, both novels are radically decentered texts whose authors use multiple, heterogeneous perspectives and stream-of-consciousness narration to render the thoughts of impoverished characters in their own words, unmediated by an omniscient narrator. While Yonnondio includes sections of third-person narration of the kind that is notably absent from As I Lay Dying, and which serve to ground the characters’ stories and voices firmly within a realist matrix of social and political circumstances, in many of the novel’s most innovative segments Olsen uses streaming prose to portray the perceptual consciousness of the novel’s characters, much as Faulkner does. While I have no evidence that Olsen had read As I Lay Dying before starting Yonnondio in 1932, recognizing the formal resemblances between Olsen’s and Faulkner’s work helps us to see the fluidity of thirties literary culture, in which categories often taken to be discrete and distinct, such as “modernism” and “proletarianism,” were in fact quite porous, as ideas and techniques usually associated with one movement were taken up by writers usually affiliated with another. Looking briefly at As I Lay Dying in the context of Olsen’s novel allows us to grasp more clearly

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