The Buzzard Reality of As I Lay Dying

The Buzzard Reality of As I Lay Dying

Sandra K. Stanley

In a 1956 interview, Faulkner once quipped, “You know, if I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.” Although Go Down, Moses may be the novel that elegiacally foregrounds the nonhuman animal and natural world, as epitomized in “The Bear,” against Ike McCaslin’s vision of the corruptible world of modernity,As I Lay Dying confronts death itself through enigmatic references to animals, from Vardaman’s declaration “My mother is a fish” to Darl’s assertion that “Jewel’s mother is a horse” to Faulkner’s authorial buzzards ready to feed on Addie’s putrefying corpse. Although scientists and philosophers have raised questions about mind theory as it pertains to nonhuman animals—examining whether or not they are self-aware—Faulkner raises this question for all the living beings in this tale. Faulkner critics have analyzed the use of nonhuman animals in As I Lay Dying in multiple ways: as symbolic substitutions (Addie as a fish or horse; Dewey Dell as a cow); as psychological projections (the children’s means of dealing with their mother’s death or even as part of their maturation process in the repression or destruction of the maternal); or, in Christopher White’s essay on Faulkner’s use of “zoosemiotics,” as part of Faulkner’s modernist resituation of human language with the larger “continuum of communicative processes that are ahuman.”

I, however, am most interested in Faulkner’s use of nonhuman animals in the context of what he has identified as the central villain of his novel: social conventions. As the human characters are negotiating their way through the often paralyzing and destructive rituals of the past and convention, the animal characters, although they may be unconcerned by these human drives, are nonetheless caught within the net of human practices.On the one hand, in As I Lay Dying, these corporeal animals are caught within the symbolic exchanges of modernity, cut off from the Bear’s transcendent and mysticalsymbolic possibilities. The material finality of Vardaman’s fish, which was killed to be “cooked and et,” is dislocated from the symbolic representation of a transcendent Christ and communal redemption. Jewel’s ever-resistant horse, fighting against tenuous human control, ultimately is bartered away and reduced to a domestic economy not so different from Dewey Dell’s cow. Anse’s mules are sacrificed in their attempt to cross the river. Yet, on the other hand, these animals, by their sheer animality, disrupt the narrative and foreground the artificiality of human conventions. Scholars associated with Animal Studies, such as Jonathan Burt, Nigel Rothfels, and Akira Lippit, have noted the ways that animals have ruptured performative systems of representation, for there is always the possibility of animals to disrupt literary and filmic narratives by asserting their specific realities as animals upon the authorial plot and upon the audience’s preconceptions of animality. In the end,Faulkner’s animals in this novel are consumable and usable—their symbolic possibilities pointing not to a transcendent world, but a material world enmeshed in social conventions. However, Faulkner reminds us, as the implacable buzzards hover around Addie’s body, of the biological reality of all animals—nonhuman and human—and the fate we all share—death; humans, after all, are also part of this exchange system of being “cooked and et.” Realizing the limitations of the transcendent Word, the transparent logos, and the human subject, Faulkner, in his Homeric allusion for his title ("As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades”), not only recognizes the importance of the role of human death, but also the importance of the “dog’s eye” that will not be appropriated by the human world of social conventions, that is both human (belonging to the woman) and nonhuman, that ultimately sees the world with a buzzard reality.