Spatial Form in Faulkner's as I Lay Dying

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is a novel of human consciousness, a novel in which character presentation is the dominant structural element rather than traditional plot or narrative. It is an example of what Joseph Frank terms form as distinguished from the novel which proceeds in linear or chronological time and derives its unity from narrative plot. (1) We must recognize this spatial form and also that the novel requires reading to fully comprehend both the nontemporal focus of Addie Bundren as central to any reading of the novel and the ironic perspective Faulkner presents through multiple point of By reading, I mean that quality of reading which Frank discusses, one which forces the reader to hold images suspended in the mind until the total work has been read and then allows the emergence of a total thematic image. Frank suggests that reflexive reading provides a link connecting the aesthetic development of modern poetry with similar experiments in the modern novel, primarily in the work of such writers as Flaubert, Eliot, Pound, Proust, Barnes and Joyce. As he indicates in his important essay, Spatial Form in Modern Literature, if the poem is to be one vast image, whose individual components are to be apprehended as a unity, it is necessary to undermine the inherent consecutiveness of language, breaking the reader's normal expectancy pattern of a sequence and forcing him to perceive the elements of a poem juxtaposed in space rather than unrolling in As Frank says, the reader must reorient his attitude toward language: Aesthetic form in modern poetry, then, is based on the space-logic that demands a complete reorientation in the reader's attitude toward language. Since the primary reference of any word-group is to something inside the poem itself, language in modern poetry is really reflexive. The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word, groups that have no comprehensive relation to each other when read consecutively in time. Instead of the instinctive and immediate reference of words and word-groups to the objects or events they symbolize and the construction of meaning from the sequence of these references, modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity. (2) Reflexive reference, then, is the connecting link from modern poetry to the modern novel. In modern poetry the reader is almost forced to read reflexively to get any literal sense, while readers of a novel are led to expect narrative sequence by the deceptive normality of language within a of meaning. This is the point at which we have difficulty in making the transfer of the spatial concept to the novel. As Frank indicates, the novel with its larger unit of meaning (scene, episode) can preserve coherent sequence within a unit and break up only the time flow of the narrative. As Leon Edel stresses in his study of the Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury, a new way of reading is necessary for this kind of fiction. Edel's reply to those critics who attempted to convert Benjy's story to chronological narrative rather than experiencing his consciousness as presented, is applicable to those critics of As I Lay Dying who do not recognize the spatial form of the novel and attempt to convert it to linear narrative. Edel says: Indeed, when an author elects to tell us a story in this fashion, it would seem logical to follow him in his premises and not to construct new ones. In accepting the material in its scrambled state and seeking to understand it, we are invited by Faulkner to place ourselves within the angle of vision or perception of Benjy; we are involved with point of view. (3) In As I Lay Dying, we are placed within the perception of multiple narrators and are removed from linear or quantitative time. …