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  • The Imagist and Symbolist Views of the Function of Language:Addie and Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying
  • William Rodney Allen (bio)
William Rodney Allen

William Rodney Allen teaches in the English Department at Duke University. This article is his first scholarly publication.

Notes

1. James M. Mellard sees Addie's and Darl's opposition as a philosophical one in "Faulkner's Philosophical Novel: Ontological Themes in As I Lay Dying," The Personalist, 48 (1967), 509-23. He views Addie as a nominalist and Darl as an idealist, placing Cash between the two as a philosophical realist. Analyses of Darl and his mother in psychological terms usually focus on the nature of Darl's madness. Two such studies are William J. Handy's "As I Lay Dying: Faulkner's Inner Reporter," Kenyon Review, 21 (1959), 437-51, and John K. Simon's "What Are You Laughing At, Darl?: Madness and Humor in As I Lay Dying," College English, 25 (1963), 104-10. A good study of Addie's psychic makeup is in Cleanth Brooks' William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 141-66, in which he defines her problem as her loss of a sense of community and subsequent feelings of isolation and emptiness. Pauline Degenfelder defines Addie's and Darl's opposition in terms of stylistics in "Yoknapatawpha Baroque," Style, 7 (1973), 121-56. In her analysis Darl's "baroque" style contrasts with Addie's straightforward, earthy style. Floyd C. Watkins approaches the problem in light of the relationship between language and reality held by Darl and Addie in The Flesh and the Word: Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 181-202, but he does not align them with the symbolist and imagist movements. The most comprehensive treatment of As I Lay Dying is Andre Bleikasten's fine work, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, trans. Roger Little (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973), but even Bleikasten does not deal with Addie and Darl in terms of symbolism and imagism in any comprehensive manner.

2. Mosquitoes (New York: Liveright, 1927), p. 186.

3. Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 101.

4. The Faulkner-Cowley File (New York: Viking Press, 1966), p. 67.

5. The Achievement of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 289.

6. Millgate, p. 7.

7. Millgate, p. 300.

8. Millgate, p. 6.

9. Mississippi Quarterly, 17 (1964), 129-35.

10. William Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1974), I, 164.

11. Blotner, I, 47n.

12. Blotner, I, 452.

13. "The Apprenticeship of William Faulkner," TSE, 12 (1962), 114.

14. As I Lay Dying (New York: The Modern Library, 1967), p. 68. All subsequent references to the novel refer to this edition and will be noted in the text hereafter by page number.

15. Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, Inc., 1971), p. 687.

16. "Mystery in Literature," in Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 693.

17. "Imagism," in The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 142.

18. Watkins, p. 182.

19. Brooks, p. 156.

20. "Poetry as Incantation," in The Modern Tradition, p. 112.

21. "Imagism," in The Modern Tradition, p. 142.

22. Degenfelder, p. 138.

23. "Imagism," in The Modern Tradition, p. 143.

24. "Imagism," in The Modern Tradition, p. 145.

25. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 119.

26. "The Evolution of Literature," in Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 690.

27. Frye, p. 119.

28. "Mystery in Literature," in Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 694.

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