"No Such Thing As Was": The Fetishized Corpse, Modernism, And As I Lay Dying (Critical Essay‪)‬

The literary corpse marks a key site of entry into a discussion of the shifting definitions of modernism. Certainly the piling-up of real bodies throughout the twentieth century impacted the form and content of fiction, and in many ways modern funeral and embalming practices both contain and reflect modernity as Americans begin to move toward "an increased concern for appearances in a consumer culture" after the Civil War (Farrell 7). Yet previous criticism has relied too heavily on literal readings of literary corpses, focusing almost exclusively on the ways in which bodies reflect how and why we deal with death in modernity. (1) Corpses tell us more than this. Specifically, corpses that are overvalued, corpses that stand in symbolically or metonymically for other objects, other concepts, other narratives, other ideologies--fetishized corpses--force us to rethink notions of modernism and modernity because they reveal characteristics of regional modernism distinctly and explicitly at odds with old and new attempts at definition. It is the too-easy eliding of the avant-garde with conceptions of modernity and the insistence upon "making it new" that still pervades even progressive, interrogative definitions of modernism with which I wish to take issue. (2) Such discussions still privilege texts--modernist and postmodernist, if we may still use that descriptor--that "rebel" against "precursors," and this limited description inherently still privileges the same bourgeois high modernist works and writers whose hegemony current critics claim to be dismantling. Regional modernist writers like William Faulkner--and later, Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison--reject such easy elision precisely through their relationships with literary and historical pasts.