Evaluación de Riesgos

My argument singles out the coffin in As I Lay Dying in order to examine it as an emblem of existentialist consciousness with a particular relationship to the notion of death. The metaphoric position of the coffin will be analysed in the context of Faulkner’s use of form, and more specifically through the fragmentation of form within the novel as a whole. In this context, the coffin will be analysed as fragmented both physically and ontologically through the metaphoric collision of being-for-itself and being-in-itself. The characters, Vardaman and Cash, exemplify in different ways a fragmented relation to the coffin, which will in turn situate the coffin as an existentialist object.

This existentialist duality of life and death is captured when Addie’s coffin is complete:

It is light, yet they move slowly; empty, yet they carry it carefully; lifeless, yet they move with hushed precautionary words to one another, speaking of it as though, complete, it now slumbered lightly alive, waiting to come awake. On the dark floor their feet clump awkwardly, as though for a long time they have not walked on floors. (my emphasis AS 73)

Faulkner juxtaposes life side by side with death or ‘lightly alive,’ a duality, which is a recurrent pattern throughout the novel. Here, life equals action, and the plot focuses on action and mobility in light of Addie’s death rather then passive immobility. Existential action is personified by the funeral 







156 _{Walter Redfern, ‘Praxis and Parapraxis: Sartre’s “Les Mur”’, in Harold Bloom (ed.),} Modern Critical Views: Jean –Paul Sartre (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001), pp.

149-159, p.151.

procession, the action of building Addie’s coffin, and the physical attempt to rescue the coffin from the river. Even the title of the novel indicates a continuous action according to Bruce F. Kawin:

“As” is process, a continuity of being and doing. “I” is the mind of the novel. “Lay” suggests that the novel’s consciousness-complex and its process are being viewed from some exterior perspective; […] “Dying” unites “as” and “lay” in perfect ambiguity, since it could refer to a finished or an unfinished process […], and links “I” to Addie, since she is the only character in the novel who dies. 158

The various perceptions of death and the notion of physical and emotional fragmentation are illustrated in the subjective relation of the characters to the physical coffin. Vardaman cannot accept or understand Addie’s death. The thought of Addie suffocating in the coffin alarms him: ‘[…] “ Are you going to nail her up in it, Cash? Cash? Cash? “ ‘ (AS 59). The thought of suffocation arises simultaneously with Vardaman’s memory of himself being trapped in a crib: ‘I got shut up in the crib the new door it was too heavy for me it went shut I couldn’t breathe because the rat was breathing up all the air.’ (AS 59) Vardaman also mixes his mother’s death with the death of a fish, which he had caught earlier: ‘ I can feel where the fish was in the dust. It is cut up into pieces of not-fish now, not-blood on my hands and overalls.’ (AS 48) Later on he expresses the underlying idea in a simple statement: ‘My mother is a fish’ (AS 76). The technique of the interior monologue exposes Vardaman’s disconnected thoughts and interior conflicts and projects them onto a visual image. Vardaman’s painful bereavement develops into a confusion between the dead fish, a feeling of suffocation and Addie’s death, all of which materialize into a disintegrated reality, as Tull narrates Vardaman’s action:

And the next morning they found him in his shirt-tail laying asleep on the floor like a felled steer, and the top of the box bored clean full of holes and Cash’s new auger broke off in the last one. When they taken the lid off they found that two of them had bored on into her face (AS 66)

Vardaman envisages that Addie is suffocating in her coffin, which drives him to bore holes in her coffin so she will be able to breath, but in the process he bores holes in her face. The breaking down of the object (coffin) as well as the damaged human form creates a collision of consciousness, as the object could be existentially viewed as a being–in-itself, a non-conscious being, which is 







defined and determined and as a result unable to change, ‘It is a plenitude, and strictly speaking we can say of it only that it is.’159 _{Thus it takes the being-}

for-itself, the human consciousness, to ‘activate’ so to speak, the in-itself and evoke illusion of transcendence between the two forms of being. In this respect, the coffin, which is constructed of wood, is defined as being-in-itself precisely because it is an object caught in a fixed and unchangeable mode, and it takes the form of being-for-itself (Vardaman) to create an interaction between the two states of being:

It was not her because it was laying right yonder in the dirt. And now it’s all chopped up. I chopped it up. It’s laying in the kitchen in the bleeding pan, waiting to be cooked and et. Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t. And to-morrow it will be cooked and et and she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there won’t be anything in the box and so she can breathe. (AS 60)

Vardaman represents here being-for-itself (consciousness), and since consciousness is always consciousness of something, (the coffin) he is able to reflect on Addie’s death by focusing on the object that is the coffin. This interaction between being-in-itself, and being-for-itself, is part of the invisible process of being. The fictional action of boring holes in the coffin symbolises the synthesis of both states of being, representing action by the for-itself, and the transformation of the in-itself (coffin), into a new transcended form of being.

The coffin has another symbolic function in that it represents a form of

contingency. The various relations of the characters to the coffin unravel

different levels of contingency. Defined by Sartre, ‘In the For-itself this equals facticity, the brute fact of being this For-itself in the world.’160 _{In other words,}

contingency in existential terms relates back to the idea of existence, because there is no clear reason for us to be in the world or pre –essence to our existence, we all live in a form of contingency. As Sartre illustrates in Nausea (which will be discussed at length in the next chapter) when an individual recognizes his own contingency, his own incidental reason to be in the world, that realization can produce nausea. Nausea can be defined as: ‘The “taste” of the facticity and contingency of existence; “A dull and inescapable nausea 







159 _{Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 650.} 160 _{Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p.651}

perpetually reveals my body to my consciousness.”161 _{Thus, the coffin evokes}

in Vardaman a recognition of his own contingency which produces a form of nausea. The analogy of the fish – so instrumental in As I Lay Dying - can be found in Sartre’s Nausea, as the character Roquentin, confuses his own hand with that of a fish:

My hand turns over, spreads itself out on its belly, and now it is showing me its back. A silvery, somewhat shiny back – you might think it was a fish, if it weren’t for the red hairs near the knuckles. I feel my hand.’ (Nausea 144)

Following on from Sartre’s example of the hand as an indirect projection of contingency, another key implication of contingency is the relationship between the body, Vardaman and the coffin. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre stresses the relationship of the ‘Other’s body’ as a form of physical projection of contingency:

The flesh is the pure contingency of presence. It is ordinarily hidden by clothes, make-up, the cut of the hair or beard, the expression, etc. But in the course of long acquaintance with a person there always comes an instant when all these disguises are thrown off and when I find myself in the presence of the pure contingency of his

presence. In this case I achieve in the face or the other parts of a body the pure

intuition of flesh. This intuition is not only knowledge; it is the affective apprehension of an absolute contingency, and this apprehension is a particular type of nausea.162

The reduction of the body into flesh creates a form of contingency as the fragility of existence is revealed. Vardaman manages to experience a similar contingency by the very physical act of boring holes in Addie’s face. Sartre’s contingency of the body could be compared to Vardaman’s physical experience of Addie’s fragmented body, where the body is reduced to flesh and blood. Furthermore, like Roquentin’s morphing process of body into fish, Faulkner enhances this process between Vardaman (being-for-itself), fish and Addie, through the use of fragmented narrative. The discontinuous narrative echoes the metaphysical transcendence of Vardaman’s point of view. The validation of Vardaman’s discontinuous mental encounter with the fish is backed up by Dewey’s narration as well:

I light the kitchen lamp. The fish, cut into jagged pieces, bleeds quietly in the pan. I put it into the cupboard quick, listening into the hall, hearing. It took her ten days to die; Maybe she won’t go until Cash. Or maybe until Jewel. I take the dish of 







161 _{Ibid. p.653.}

greens from the cupboard and the bread-pan from the cold stove, and I stop, watching the door. (AS 53)

Dewey’s narration objectifies Vardaman’s very subjective experience of himself, the coffin and Addie. The acknowledgement of the fish being cut is also associated with Addie’s death. This indicates that Vardaman’s conception of Addie’s death is not an imaginary act but based on reality. The actual confusion of all the elements indicates a specific form of contingency and subjective interpretation unique to Vardaman’s being-for-itself (human consciousness) experience.

Vardaman’s experience involves the metaphoric materialization of the coffin and the body. The coffin represents an exteriority of form in relation to death and the flesh and corpse of Addie accentuates the interiority of the coffin. André Bleikasten highlights the image of the corpse as the link between life and death:

It is precisely the corpse which offers us the most arresting image of the impossible separation of life and death. In the corpse, death becomes visible and reveals itself as the degradation of the human body into an inert object. A fascinating object, certainly, insofar as “the corpse is its own image,” linked with living flesh in a relationship of perfect resemblance and absolute difference; a disquieting and distressing object which materializes the unreal and gives absence a face; an incongruous object, too, as if come from elsewhere, and one which is de trop in our world.163

Bleikasten describes the corpse as an independent object set in between two worlds. At the same time, the independent image signifies a form of de trop. Bleikasten does not expand on the existential concept of de trop, however, it is important to broaden this crucial concept. Similar to the concept of

contingency, de trop, also signifies the notion of a contingent, gratuitous,

meaningless existence. De trop is also described by Sartre in relation to the body and flesh as something superfluous in Nausea:

Superfluous, my corpse, my blood on these pebbles, between these plants, in the depths of this charming park. And the decomposed flesh would have been superfluous in the earth which would have received it, and my bones, finally, cleaned, stripped, neat and clean as teeth, would also have been superfluous; I was superfluous for all time.’ (Nausea 184-5)

163 _{André Bleikasten, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, p. 116. Bleikasten quotes Maurice Blanchot in} L’Espace Littéraire (Gallimard, 1968) p.351.

The notion of a decomposition of the body exposes the idea of existence as contingent or as de trop. The process of decomposition is captured with the slow rotting process of Addie’s body. The rotting may indicate Faulkner’s attempt to delay death by prolonging the journey of the burial. Moreover, it may also symbolically expose Faulkner’s own attitude to death. Hamblin and Peek argue that ‘for Faulkner the ultimate meaning is to be found not in the fact of death but in the heroic resistance to that fate.’164 _{The grotesque element}

of the decomposed body, is highlighted by Bleikasten:

They [the Bundrens] are too absorbed by their immediate task to realize how shocking the unduly prolonged presence of a rotting corpse may be to others; they even forget its nauseating smell, which attracts buzzards and repels people. To this guileless scorn of decorum and convention, this obstinate failure of realization, this seemingly unruffled innocence in the face of death the story owes much of its baffling extravagance’. 165

Similarly, Eric Sundquist argues that the novel itself could be seen as a corpse: ‘The logic thus presents itself of speaking of the novel too as a corpse, as a narrative whose form is continually on the verge of decomposition and whose integrity is retained only by heroic imaginative effort.’166

In contrast to Vardaman’s emotional fragmentation, Cash’s relation to the coffin and Addie’s death is clinical and physical. His narrative concentrates on his choice of making the coffin. The following numerical passage reflects a very practical and systematic thought process, expressed here through the construction and deconstruction of the coffin, signifying yet another form of fragmentation. The form of description is presented in numbers from 1 to 13, which gives the text itself a vertical rather than horizontal shape:

I MADE it on the bevel.

1. There is more surface for the nails to grip. 2. There is twice the gripping-surface to each seam. 3. The water will have to seep into it on a slant.

Water moves easiest up and down or straight across. 4. In a house people are upright two-thirds

of the time. So the seams and joints are made up-and-down. Because the stress is up-and- down. (AS 75)

164 _{Robert W. Hamblin and Charles A. Peek (eds.), A William Faulkner Encyclopedia (Westport,}

CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), p.93.

165 _{Ibid. p.117.}

166 _{Eric Sundquist, ‘Death, Grief, Analogous Form: As I Lay Dying’, in Michael Gorra (ed.),} As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner, pp. 286 – 304, p. 288.

Cash’s descriptions are reduced to geometrical forms, ‘[…] water moves easiest up and down or straight across, ‘[…] the joints and seams are made sideways, because the stress is sideways’. , […] A body is not square like a cross-tie.’ (AS 75). The simultaneous interplay of various components gives each part particular importance and creates an overall image of the final object. The finished coffin, however, does not remain whole, but goes through physical and metaphorical fragmentations – almost burned in the barn fire, lost in the river, as well as carried in the long and difficult procession. The object is physically challenged, exposing the fragility of its own physical form as well as symbolizing the fragility of the characters’ emotions. This is shown when the coffin is almost lost in the river, and while Jewel frantically tries to save it, Cash’s own narration, on the other hand, concentrates on the position of the coffin on the wagon: ‘ “ It won’t balance. If you want it to tote and ride on a balance, we will have ---“’ (AS 87) Thus, Cash’s main concern is with the creation and maintenance of the coffin. The physical action or the process of building the coffin could be seen as existential. As Daniel J. Singal explains:

Cash invests so much of himself in his craft because it is his sole means for securing a viable identity, for "contesting the amorphousness, the appalling anonymity of existence itself." The coffin he lovingly constructs for Addie represents a perfect example of this sort of existential gesture of self-definition. Though Cash is well aware it will soon disintegrate into oblivion, he insists on taking extra time to bevel all the seams and joints, for that is the only way he knows how […]167

In complete contrast to Vardaman’s tendency to articulate through apparently un-associated elements, Cash’s main focus is on the coffin as a reconstructed object. The transformation from woodcuts to a recognized coffin shape symbolizes the need to put an order and meaning to Cash’s life. It is also emblematic of existentialist action as the choice to construct the coffin indirectly focuses on existence and therefore life. In this respect, the prospect of death only magnifies the need to make choices and to take direct action in life in order to live life to its full capacity:

Death is no longer the great unknowable which limits the human; it is the phenomenon of my personal life which makes of this life a unique life – that is, a life which does not begin again, a life in which one never recovers a stroke. Hence I become responsible for my death as for my life.’ 168

167 _{Daniel J. Singal, William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist ( Chapel Hill, NC. :}

University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p.151. Singal quotes Bedient in ‘Pride and Nakedness’, pp. 147-49.

Furthermore, the reconstruction of the coffin highlights the exterior texture and form of the wood itself. Wooden imagery is recurrent as seen in the description of Jewel: ‘[…] his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar-store Indian dressed in patched overalls […]’ (AS 1) Thus the reader becomes aware of the physicality of the coffin’s texture and its ongoing construction, and equally the reconstruction of the character’s point of views and its key place in the narrative. The exteriority of the wooden form is emphasized in the diagram of the coffin illustrated in the text:

They had laid her in it reversed. Cash made it clock-shape, like this with every joint and seam bevelled and scrubbed with the plane, tight as a drum and neat as a sewing basket, and they had laid her in it head to foot so it wouldn’t crush her dress. It was her wedding dress and it had a flare-out bottom, and they had laid her head to foot in it so the dress could spread out, and they had made her a veil out of a mosquito bar so the auger holes in her face wouldn’t show. (AS 80)

The diagram thus highlights the coffin as an essential entity, almost separate from the rest of the text, stressing its ontological and physical importance. In addition, Jewel’s view of the coffin intersects with Cash’s physical work: ‘It’s because he stays out there, right under the window, hammering and sawing on that goddamn box’ (AS 11). As Jewel sees it, the location of the coffin’s construction is important, because it takes place under Addie’s window. The coffin form is compared by Eric Sundquist to the form of the novel itself: