1. Senior Project Presentation
As I Lay Dying
and Cubism
Themes and Motifs
by Mr. gasaway

2. “No man is himself, he is the sum of his past
“No man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was because the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman, and every moment. All of his and her ancestry, background, is all a part of himself and herself at any moment.”
Thesis

3. William Faulkner ( )
Greatest American Southern writer, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950
A master of modernist experimentation in the novel, related to his obsession with time
stream of consciousness and multiple voices

5. William Faulkner ( )
Born William Falkner, 25 Sept. 1897, New Albany, Mississippi
1918: joins Canadian Royal Air Force
U of Mississippi
1921: U of Mississippi Post Office

6. Faulkner: Major Phase 1929: The Sound and the Fury [4 narrators]
1930 As I Lay Dying
[15 narrators]

7. William Faulkner ( )
His great theme is the influence of the past on the present…
Gavin Stevens in Requiem for a Nun (1951), says: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

8. Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, Oxford, Miss.

9. As I Lay Dying
By William Faulkner
1930

10. Faulkner’s House (1930)

11. Faulkner’s Mississippi
2,400 square miles;
the population, 6,298 whites and 9,313 Negroes, for a total of 15,611

12. What is the American South?
“You're in the American South now, a proud region with a distinctive history and culture. A place that echoes with names like Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee, Scarlett O'Hara and Uncle Remus, Martin Luther King and William Faulkner, Billy Graham, Mahalia Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley. Home of the country blues and country music, bluegrass and Dixieland jazz, gospel music and rock and roll. Where menus offer both down-home biscuits and gravy and uptown shrimp and grits. Where churches preach against "cigarettes, whiskey, and wild, wild women" (all Southern products) and where American football is a religion.”
- From John Shelton Reed's My Tears Spoiled My Aim

13. Modern Similarities As I Lay Dying is like the TV show Desperate
Housewives: told in
voice-over by a woman
who is already dead.
Faulkner’s characters
share inner thoughts
through voiceovers.

14. Modern Similarities As I Lay Dying is like the movie Pulp Fiction:
told from multiple viewpoints
and in a non-linear plot.
Example: Vincent Vega gets
shot and killed, but then he’s
in the last scene (which
begins the movie).

15. Major Motifs
Earth: Addie’s destination Water: (flood) river crossing Fire: barn-burning Air: the smell of Addie’s rotting corpse

16. a. History and race Major Themes
b. Deterioration (of the family, the South, words)
　c. Conflicts between generations, classes, races,
man and environment
d. Horror, violence and the abnormal
Features of his works
　a. complex plot
　b. stream of consciousness
　c. characterization: the psychology of characters
　d. violation of chronology
　e. courtroom rhetoric: formal language
　f. multiple point of view, circular form
continue
exit

17. The Mind vs. The Body Critic Edmond Volpe says of Faulkner’s work:
“Faulkner dramatizes the recognition that the human body must exist in chronological time, the mind does not function within the boundaries placed on the human body. The mind fuses past, present, and future. Because we think beyond clock measured time and because what we do today is shaped by what happened yesterday, ‘Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are IS: Indivisible. One.’”

18. Anse Bundren: patriarch of the Bundren family
　 Innner Narrators
Anse Bundren: patriarch of the Bundren family
Addie: Anse’s dying (then dead) wife
Cash: (30) the eldest son, the best carpenter in the area
Darl: (28) the second son, sensitive, cruel and intuitive
Jewel: (18) the third son, favoring actions over words
Dewey Dell (17): the only Bundren daughter
Vardaman: (9): the youngest Bundren
exit

19. Whitfield: the local preacher Vernon Tull: Bundren’s neighbor
　 Outer Narrators
 Whitfield: the local preacher
Vernon Tull: Bundren’s neighbor
Cora Tull: Vernon’s wife, nosy and pious
Lucius Peabody: the local doctor
Samson: another neighbor who puts the Bundrens up for a night on their journey
Henry Armstid: another neighbor who hosts the Bundrens one unfortunate night
Moseley: druggist in Mottson, a town the Bundrens pass through
MacGowan: a drugstore clerk in Jefferson
exit

20. Faulkner’s Process
59 interior monologues where life and death are revealed through the characters
Our memory, the way we understand, is related to our physical perception.
Monologues are very sensual perceptions of the real world
These intensify the character’s mental & emotional experiences for the reader

21. More Faulkner’s Process
Interior monologues
Stream of consciousness
First person narrator makes action immediate
No omniscient narrator--so no center
59 chapters apportioned among 15 characters
7 are concerned
8 are detached

22. cubism
After 1909, Picasso and Braque began a more systematic study of structure which we know as "Analytical Cubism". In this period, they removed bright colors from their compositions, favoring monochromatic earth tones so that they could focus primarily on the structure. The paintings of this period look as if they have deconstructed objects and rearranged them on the canvas. One goal of this is to depict different viewpoints simultaneously.
Traditionally, an object is always viewed from one specific viewpoint and at one specific (stopped) moment in time. Picasso and Braque felt that this was too limiting, and desired to represent an object as if they are viewing it from several angles or at different moments in time. Innovative as this was, the danger was that many of the works of this period are completely incomprehensible to the viewer, as they start to lose all sense of form. ~Eyeconart.com

23. Pablo Picasso, 1900

24. Gris, Portrait of Picasso (1912)

25. Picasso, Self-Portrait, 1907

26. Cubism Example Full-Face Portrait – Student work

27. The Mirror Effect Most people look in a mirror this way:
Full-front, Head-on

28. We see what we want to see…

29. We rarely…
Look at the sides…. .
….and never behind

30. …so we never really know how others see us.

32. Your Artistic Assessment Project
While reading the story, take several notes in your journals on the characters and the perceptions you have of these character’s, as well as the perceptions they present of themselves.
You will need to draw a portrait of one of the characters using the ideas of cubism. The features should be constructed so that we, the viewer, perceive the character as you see the character
Represent the character “as if [you] are viewing him or her from several angles that are presented in the book
(Therefore, it may help to select a character beforehand to take detailed notes on throughout the piece)