Finitude, Death, and Play in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
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In his self-proclaimed tour de force, As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner reveals death to be a transformative force, one that, in its very opacity, constitutes a source of inconclusive and potentially endless mental play. Self-consciously aware that the human mind will never succeed in bridging the caesura between life and death, his novel nevertheless seeks to exhaust itself in attempting the venture. These confrontations between the human imagination and finitude rearticulate (the thinking of) living and dying as near-infinite play, while rendering death just as strange and remote as ever—and closure just as elusive. And forced to think using a language in which “words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at,” the irrepressible human desire for wholeness and self-knowledge, along with the attempt to recuperate loss, is perpetually frustrated. Ultimately, Faulkner’s play is reflective of, or analogous to, Derrida’s notion of it, but without the “joyous affirmation” the philosopher draws from it. This play promises, as long as there are words, to defer transcendence or an overcoming that would reveal the limits of our finite condition. In As I Lay Dying, then, Faulkner conveys the suspicion that what remains of our capacity to reinvent the world might very well be play; nevertheless, as his example testifies, the ever-failing search for truth, origin, and plenitude will continue, interminably.
Abstract
In his self-proclaimed tour de force, As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner reveals death to be a transformative force, one that, in its very opacity, constitutes a source of inconclusive and potentially endless mental play. Self-consciously aware that the human mind will never succeed in bridging the caesura between life and death, his novel nevertheless seeks to exhaust itself in attempting the venture. These confrontations between the human imagination and finitude rearticulate (the thinking of) living and dying as near-infinite play, while rendering death just as strange and remote as ever—and closure just as elusive. And forced to think using a language in which “words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at,” the irrepressible human desire for wholeness and self-knowledge, along with the attempt to recuperate loss, is perpetually frustrated. Ultimately, Faulkner’s play is reflective of, or analogous to, Derrida’s notion of it, but without the “joyous affirmation” the philosopher draws from it. This play promises, as long as there are words, to defer transcendence or an overcoming that would reveal the limits of our finite condition. In As I Lay Dying, then, Faulkner conveys the suspicion that what remains of our capacity to reinvent the world might very well be play; nevertheless, as his example testifies, the ever-failing search for truth, origin, and plenitude will continue, interminably.
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