The Ideology of Autonomy: Form and Function in As I Lay Dying (Theorizing Practice) (Critical Essay‪)‬

In the early sections of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Cash Bundren remains in the background urgently working to construct his mother's coffin in time for her passing and, subsequently, for the family's burial march across Yoknapatawpha County. (1) Despite the imminent deadline--or perhaps because of it--the final product is a testament to the precise execution of design that Cash deeply values as a result of his strong work ethic and dedication to craftsmanship. But completion also brings a moment of truth for the carpenter: the time when production gives way to reception and the object enters into the traffic of the world. In this regard, Cash's project serves as a metaphor for the production of the novel itself, establishing Faulkner's concern with form and function as a means of exploring relations between art and social reality and, in turn, of laying bare the ideological dimensions of artistic autonomy--a fundamental principle of modernist aesthetics under considerable stress at the time of the novel's production. Significantly, Faulkner began work on As I Lay Dying against the backdrop of a national crisis--the stock market crash of 1929. Joseph Blotner highlights this contextual frame when describing the genesis of what would become Faulkner's fifth published novel: "On October 25, 1929, the day after panic broke out on Wall Street, [Faulkner] took one of these [onion] sheets, unscrewed the cap from his fountain pen, and wrote at the top in blue ink, 'As I Lay Dying.' Then he underlined it twice and wrote the date in the upper right-hand corner" (1: 633). Faulkner's composition process unfolded in the immediate aftermath of this signal event, providing now a precise historical and cultural frame of reference for examining how his treatment of autonomy responds ideologically to a severe blow delivered to the intertwined bodies of late capitalism and literary modernism.