Faulkner-As I lay dying

Stream of consciousness is a phrase used by psychologists. It was created by psychologist william james, the founder of American pragmatism philosophy in the19th century, and refers to the continuous flow of human consciousness. James believes that people's thinking activities are not composed of separated and isolated parts, but a continuous "flow" containing various complex feelings and thoughts. In 1884, "On Several Problems Neglected by Introspective Psychology", he thinks that people's thinking activities are an inseparable and uninterrupted "flowing water". He said: "Consciousness is not a connection of fragments, but a constant flow." It is most natural to use the metaphor of "river" or "flowing water" to express it. After that, when we talk about it again, let's call it stream of consciousness, stream of consciousness or stream of subjective life. "

The concept of "stream of consciousness" put forward by James emphasizes uninterrupted thinking, that is, there is no "blank" and it is always "flowing"; It also emphasizes its super-temporality and super-spatiality, that is, it is not bound by time and space, because consciousness is a purely subjective thing that is not restricted by objective reality, and it can make the present and the past inseparable. This concept and its connotation directly influenced writers, and were used for reference by them, thus entering the literary field and acting on writers' creation, which led to the emergence of "stream of consciousness" literature. In fact, James's psychological theory is not the only inducement for the emergence of stream-of-consciousness literature. Like other modernist literary schools, it is also a new literary territory excavated after people reoriented themselves in the new economic structure system with the high development of western capitalism in the 20th century.

In this social background, the popular western irrational philosophy and modern psychology provide a theoretical basis for the creation of stream-of-consciousness literature. The French philosopher Bergson (1859~ 194 1) emphasized that intuition is the only basis for understanding the world ontology. He believes that the noumenon of the world is "life impulse", that is, "the extension of consciousness". Only it is the only driving force for the operation of the universe, and objective things are nothing more than their external manifestations. Therefore, we can never grasp the nature of the world through rational analysis. Only through intuition can we acquire real knowledge, understand the world and solve all social problems. In his view, the subconscious should be the object of literature, and writers must go deep into people's inner world, even the subconscious field, and grasp what reason cannot provide; Break the traditional concept of time and work according to the structure of "psychological time". Another theorist who had a great influence on modernist literature, especially stream-of-consciousness literature, was the Austrian psychologist Freud (1856~ 1939). His full affirmation of subconsciousness and unconsciousness undoubtedly opened the horizon for stream-of-consciousness literature creation. The theory of subconsciousness and unconsciousness in his psychoanalysis aims at countering the traditional idea that "man is a rational animal". It is believed that subconscious and even unconscious are the basis of human vitality and conscious activity, and human behavior motivation comes from human instinctive impulse; People's instinctive impulse is often bound by social norms and rational conscience, which makes people full of contradictions. The writer's creative activity is a process of breaking through rationality, exerting instinctive impulse and releasing repressed instinct.

The term "stream of consciousness" is obviously extremely useful in describing the psychological process, because as a rhetorical term, it has a double metaphorical meaning, that is to say, the word "consciousness" and the word "stream" have metaphorical meanings. This idea provides a theoretical basis for novelists to show people's inner world by means of stream of consciousness and complete the narrative of novels by showing the conscious activities of characters. The stream of consciousness in novels refers to the imitation of the continuous flow of characters in the narrative process of novels. Specifically, around the seemingly randomly generated and loosely logical consciousness center of the characters, all the scenes of the characters' observation, memory and association are interwoven with the feelings, thoughts, emotions and wishes of the characters, and the flow process of the characters' consciousness is described truthfully and accurately. In the history of modern western novels, James Joyce, Adeline Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Kafka are all famous for their successful use of stream of consciousness.

At the beginning of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsey tells her son James that she will go to the lighthouse tomorrow. However, Ramsey came over and stood at the living room window and said, "It won't be sunny tomorrow." His words led to a famous stream-of-consciousness novel. The next paragraph of the novel can be said to be a model of stream-of-consciousness novels.

In this article, Woolf wrote about James's psychology. The boy may grow up to sit on the bench as his mother imagined, but now he is only 6 years old. The most important thing is to sail for a day to see the lighthouse. He had an extreme psychological reaction to his father's words:

First, he especially resents his father, which is written at the beginning of the last paragraph;

Second, I feel that my father is far behind my mother. This sentence is inserted in the first bracket.

His first psychological reaction comes from the second, or the second comes from the first. It doesn't make much difference The psychology of a 6-year-old child is sometimes like this.

This wonderful passage is more about Mr Ramsey's psychology.

One is a satire on his wife and son. He appreciates the disappointment and trouble he has brought to others. He is as thin as a knife, as thin as a blade, and he grins wickedly.

The second is to believe that what he said is true. He thinks he is always right, so he won't please anyone perfunctorily, but will ridicule him in a sharp tone. The word in the second bracket seems to be inserted into his action. In fact, what we see is his psychological and physical posture.

Third, he is determined, and it is especially necessary to maintain this feeling.

Fourthly, his heart is immersed in distant abstract things, which is also the philosophical atmosphere pursued by most stream-of-consciousness novels. For example, before and after the second bracket, our brightest hope will be extinguished, and our fragile boat will be submerged in the vast darkness. (At the end of this novel, Mrs. Ramsey also said that under our image is darkness, boundless and unfathomable; We only appear occasionally, that's why you know us. )

When it comes to stream-of-consciousness novels, we will notice one thing: the emergence of stream-of-consciousness masterpieces has a particularly concentrated period: the 7-volume "Remembering Things Past" by French writer Proust was published between 19 13- 1927. Ulysses by Irish writer Joyce was first published in 1922. British writer Woolf wrote it in 1927, and American writer Faulkner wrote it in 1929. These are all works from the first 20 years of the 20th century.

One more thing, we will also notice that the level of stream-of-consciousness masterpieces is quite high. Needless to say, The Sound and the Fury written by william faulkner in Nobel Prize in Literature and Proust's representative work Remembering the Past are considered to be one of the most important literary works in the 20th century, which are popular all over the world. Ulysses by Joyce is a masterpiece of stream-of-consciousness novels, which is considered as the greatest novel in the 20th century. Woolf's To the Lighthouse is the most perfect work in stream-of-consciousness novels.

There is a strange phenomenon in stream-of-consciousness novels. The authors of world famous works are generally gifted writers, and so are stream-of-consciousness novels. But only stream-of-consciousness novels need talented readers. In other words, talented readers share stream-of-consciousness novels, and other readers stop at their threshold.

We have no idea why. But as a result, we know that talented writers no longer write pure stream-of-consciousness novels with almost no main plot. In fact, after World War II, the rhythm of the times has changed, people's mood has changed, and there are no readers who sit at the window and chew novels over and over again. Not only stream-of-consciousness novels, but also many schools of modern novels are in a slump.

In fact, many techniques of stream-of-consciousness novels have become an integral part of literary tradition. You should know that before the emergence of stream-of-consciousness novels, people's consciousness was fluid. After the novels of stream of consciousness disappear, people's consciousness is still flowing. Human consciousness is like a river, not connected by fragments, but in a state of eternal flow.

If you want to describe the psychology of the characters in the novel, it is still a superior way to write with the stream of consciousness of the characters. For example, grasping the dynamics of stream of consciousness, taking into account both conscious and subconscious levels, and using inner monologue and free association. In addition, when you organize a chapter and a story, your narrative can be a classical way that is directly carried out in chronological order, or a modern way that follows conscious activities and freely associates.

For example, Mo Yan's novella Red Sorghum was influenced by Faulkner's novels. Mo Yan wrote an article about Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, in which he wrote, "I don't think the iron gate is cold at all, but I can still smell the dazzling cold smell." I closed the book when I saw it, as if the old man Faulkner patted me on the shoulder and said, well, stop reading and write!

As I Lay Dying is a novel with a unique style. In this book, Faulkner chooses not to use a single first person or third person to describe a rural family who embarked on a frustrating and difficult journey to bury their dead mother. Instead, 15 monologues are interwoven into 59 chapters of the book. It creates a scattered narrative. These characters are mainly family members, but there are also many other characters encountered on the way. It seems that in these interlaced monologues, readers not only feel how the shadow of the death of their loved ones haunts the hearts of various characters, but also have the experience of wandering and dying among various characters in such a narrative.

The scattered narrative style makes this novel difficult to read. It is easy for us to lose the plot of the story because of multiple perspectives. It becomes necessary to turn around, look at the personal relationship table and read different sentences repeatedly to organize the whole picture of things. From this perspective, As I Lay Dying is like a huge and complex bamboo forest, in which everyone describes what they have seen and what they think of others. Sometimes they overlap and echo each other, and sometimes they seem to be the divergence of the plot, so that readers can get a glimpse of the hidden details. Interestingly, although each chapter is a monologue of a character, this monologue, although a monologue, often seems to be talking about itself. In fact, the character does not describe his own psychology much, but always describes in detail the dialogue and behavior between the scenery he sees and others. At some incredible moments, people will speculate on other people's emotions and spirits, and even talk about the scenery and magical images that others see.

"Cash likes to saw the long, sad yellow days into pieces and then nail them into something ... (On the other hand) I don't think Dahl will find that sitting at the dining table, he sees all the land dug out of his skull and all the caves in the distance through food and desk lamps. 」

We don't want to ask, how on earth does a character know what comes to mind in others? And can describe it so vividly? In another chapter, Dahl, who delivered goods to the city, even described what happened in his country home at night. It seems that in this book, every character is like an author, who has an omniscient perspective beyond the text at some moment, and then, like the shadows of the narrowest buildings overlap, a new shadow is extended.

Another decentralized narrative effect is the stagnation of time sense in the novel. Because for readers, each event is very long and endless through the narration and description of each other by different characters. Wandering again, dying again ...

"We move on, with fantastic motivation, as if we can't infer the conclusion that we are moving forward, as if the shortening between us and our destination is not space but time. 」

Funeral is a kind of sport, but this kind of sport seems to resist itself through the process of movement. Although people are moving, because they are used to moving, they are in a trance, just like taking a slow train and dying in a place where they don't know where they are. Faulkner believes that this "place" where the spirit dies is not a space, but a time that makes people lost and lost.

"His head hung down and looked out through the dripping water, as if looking out through the blindfold of armor. His eyes crossed the whole village for a long time and reached the barn nestled on the edge of the cliff, as if knocking out an invisible horse from his eyes. 」

Faulkner captures all kinds of "dying" moments of the characters in this book through the eyes of each character, just like the "ecstasy" in quotations. At these moments, death becomes an understanding, a trance. I have a goal, but I seem to have lost my direction.

Attachment, like death, has a goal but loses its sense of direction. And let people wrap themselves in a sense of powerlessness. Trying to stay in a past or imagined time and space in this coating. And that kind of "powerlessness" is aimed at the fact that relatives have died first. Interestingly, Faulkner said this sentence:

"In the end, you will understand that death is just a spiritual effect. 」

The shadow of family death hangs over every character in the story. But Faulkner reminds us that death is not the same as death, and death is a state of losing life. But many things will make us feel dead, although they will not make us die. In the novel, the children's mother Eddie really died. But the feelings and memories of her remain in the hearts of the characters like the feeling of death. In addition, to the reader's sudden horror, in chapter 59, there is a passage from the dead love flute. It seems that although she is dead, she still lingers. It can be found that Eddie's married life is not happy. She felt that she had walked into a scam called "home". And what people say about love is just an empty shell word, let her fill the gaps in others' hearts.

In addition to death, the shadow suffered by her husband Ansel and their children at the funeral is another aspect, which is their debt to Eddie, and the bad influence brought by Eddie's anger and dissatisfaction with the obligation of "home" (unable to give love). Let everyone hope that Eddie can rest in peace through this funeral.

As Ji Shu Sishan once wrote in My Secret, "Death is just a fiction created by people to live." Rest in peace "is just a religious fiction. Eddie is really dead, but although everyone knows this fact, the painstaking preparation of the whole funeral implies that death is more than just death for people. Because maybe it's not the dead who don't need "rest in peace" at all, but the living. In this long funeral, the real funeral is not the love flute lying in the coffin, but the love flute still living in the hearts of family members.

Funeral will be a journey for people to die, be attached, experience death and sadness, and let them remember their mother in their own way. For Valdaman, the youngest son who doesn't know what death is, he doesn't believe that his mother is lying in a coffin. He thought that his mother must have turned into a fish and left this terrible home for her. As long as he keeps fishing every day, one day he will find his mother who wants to come back in the river. The third son, Pearl, loved by Eddie before his death, turned the grief of losing his mother to his favorite horse, as if his mother had become a horse to him, and he wanted to find his past attachment and admiration in the process of stroking and accompanying the horse. As the eldest son of a carpenter, Cash didn't have much imagination about death, but he worked very hard to build a coffin in memory of his mother. The second son, Dahl, and the eldest daughter, Dewey, have been indifferent to their mother's death. On the one hand, when Eddie gave birth to Dahl, he was desperate for life and never really loved Dahl. Zander even said, "I don't have a mother. On the other hand, Dewey was afraid to tell his mother because of the hidden knot on the fetal bead, so he was under the pressure of avoiding maternal love alone. And her husband, Anse, as Eddie confessed, is alive but actually dead. I just want to send my dead wife to her hometown: Jefferson City. Even if the bridge is broken in the storm, it will take many days to get there.

If you can be so immersed in your dying and attachment, this journey may be positive for each other. But God forbid it to happen. The characters in the story all ended up miserable. When crossing the river by force, the Bondren family had an accident, all the mules pulling the cart drowned, and Cash broke his leg. In order to continue his journey, Jules' favorite horse was sold by Anse without authorization. Dahl later went crazy, burned down a barn and was arrested. Dewey secretly wanted to buy medicine for abortion, but he was kidnapped. Valdaman also failed to get the little train he longed for. Although Anse finally showed his selfish purpose (remarriage), Faulkner's writing only made us feel that he was still a sad person.

First, the character is a metaphor for the fate of the family, and parents are the biggest tragedy of this family.

(1) Eddie's mother's ego and narrowness have created the children's tragic lives.

The author only gave her a monologue about her dead mother Eddie, but the concise description revealed a lot of information, which laid the foundation for Eddie's axis in this novel.

In the 40th section of the novel, it describes Eddie's monologue when he was teaching in a primary school:

I always expect those students to make mistakes, then I can whip them. Every time I whip, I think: now you know my strength! Now I have become a part of your secret and selfishness, and now my blood has left a mark on your blood forever and ever.

Eddie vented his hatred of his father on his students. This short period of her inner monologue before marriage seems casual, but in fact it shows the rebellious tendency brought by her family background. On this basis, we can understand some depressed emotions and behaviors of Eddie after marriage, and we will have a clearer context.

After marriage, Eddie regarded having children as "the retribution of marriage". After giving birth to the second child, he wanted to kill her husband. Even after he gave birth to five children, he never regarded them as his own flesh and blood. She rejected students, her husband, her children and life itself.

Life without love as the premise has created a tragedy for children. While they are chasing love, they refuse to give love to others. There is a demon in everyone's heart, either timid or selfish or cruel, or even crazy.

(2) Father Anse's selfishness and love for money are the great impetus of family tragedy.

After his wife died, Anse's longing for a new life far exceeded the grief of losing his wife. When he confirmed that his wife had died, he incredibly suppressed his ecstatic heart and shouted:

I can finally install a pair of false teeth!

In addition, when his wife is seriously ill, his only worry is that she will spend the money she has saved on installing false teeth. Even if she is ill and only has a withered body, he won't take out a penny.

The language describing Anse's love for money is full of tension, but also full of sadness that makes people cry. Unconsciously, he put himself in it and had a strong sense of substitution, thus feeling suffocation and despair.

He regards children as labor force, and the standard to measure whether children are more worthy of seeing is whether they can be more promising. In his inner monologue, the author describes his views on his second son, Dahl:

People always advise me not to let him appear in front of me ... those people just want me to be short-handed, saying that Dahl always keeps his head closed and always keeps his eyes on the land in front of him.

Wardman, the youngest son who has a natural problem with intelligence, is even more careless:

Wadman came from the corner, covered in blood, filthy below the knee, as dirty as a pig. He mostly chopped the fish with an axe or threw it on the ground for the dog to eat. ..... he won't be better than his brothers when he grows up.

As you can see, the author described Anser's monologue as innocent, as if you didn't hurt me and I didn't want to hurt you. In that way, his selfishness was more strongly exposed. I don't expect love, because I don't want to pay, but my wife and children are like enchanted demons, always making him pay labor and energy, but he regards it as a "price" that he has to pay.

So the unconscious self-protection of the two main characters created a family tragedy. The author used a lot of pen and ink to describe their inner powerlessness and struggle, aiming at revealing the powerlessness and self of the couple. The background of moral decay and human depravity in the family constitutes an impenetrable barrier, weaving a net for those five innocent children that they can't break free all their lives.

As we all know, monologue is the main form of stream-of-consciousness literature, and a work is like a complex map of characters. But if you follow the source, the reader will not feel complicated, but will suddenly be surprised.

Can be divided into three stages to interpret:

Eddie is dead.

The second son, Dahl, looked at every member of the family with the poet's melancholy before Eddie died, looking for unusual traces among them. However, the family is unusually calm, and everyone seems to be busy waiting for the moment of mother's death.

I saw my eldest brother Cash working hard all day to build a coffin for his mother, but he didn't even want to go near his bed. Dahl said gloatingly:

Eddie can't find a better carpenter. He can't lie in a more exquisite longevity material. She will trust and enjoy this coffin.

Everyone is doing his "duty", but it makes people look at a chill rising from the bottom of my heart. Echoing Eddie's own inner monologue.

The author evaluates Eddie's life without love in an ironic way, and the final value in the family is similar to a decoration, allowing each member to complete his own task.

(2) Send Eddie home for burial.

After Eddie's death, the Bundren family transported her back to her hometown more than 40 miles away for burial in order to fulfill her promise before her death. However, there was a flood on the way, which flooded the bridge and drowned two mules as important tools.

Eddie's husband, Anse, looked at two drowned mules and kept mumbling:

There is no such unlucky person in the world. This is punishment, but I don't blame her. No one can say that I blame her.

In fact, everyone can see the imbalance in Ansel's heart and pretend to be a very conscientious husband on the surface. The author gives each character the right to speak and the monologue of self-judgment. This is one of the highlights of stream-of-consciousness literature, for example, showing the personality of each character in an all-round way, not to mention good or bad, showing people side A first, then side B, and finally reminding you that there are side C and side D..

In the eyes of his second son, Dahl, Anse is like a vivid joke:

My father's figure floats on our heads, looking tall, like a portrait carved by a drunken satirist with miscellaneous wood, with rough workmanship.

The author describes the conflict between Dahl and his son as obscure, but it is very representative. It reflects the living conditions and moral dilemmas of poor white Americans at that time, and it is also a microcosm of the people at the bottom of southern society.

After Eddie was buried,

After going through thousands of difficulties and dangers, Eddie was finally buried in his hometown at the expense of two mules being killed and his eldest son Cash having a broken leg. Then a series of bizarre dramatic changes took place, which made people feel heavier.

Fearing that Dahl would reveal his unmarried pregnancy, her sister Wei Du turned him in, which made him want to set fire to his mother's coffin as crazy revenge.

When Dahl was arrested, he looked at his brothers, sisters and father and sat in the carriage happily enjoying his dream banana. He kept laughing. Next, Wei Du went to the drugstore to buy abortion medicine, but he was molested. My father, Anse, gained the most. He put on false teeth and brought back a new wife.

Putting death and rebirth in a balanced ecological chain embodies Faulkner's optimism, as he said in Nobel Prize in Literature's speech:

I don't want to accept the idea of the end of mankind ... man is immortal because his race will continue.

Objectively speaking, the main idea expressed by the author is that "life is worse than death". I would rather try my best to live than give up the freedom to live happily because of anyone.

Third, the behavior of the characters symbolizes the continuation of life and the diversity of human nature.

In addition to monologues, this novel also uses metaphors, symbols and other descriptive techniques to judge the source and rationality of characters' personalities. Among them, the behavior description of Dahl, Pearl and his father is the most classic:

Dahl's monologue is the most. He is the main narrator of this novel. Observing the behavior of his family and the words and deeds of others through his eyes, the main theme is the most prominent. He is the hub and promoter of the event.

He has a sentimental heart and has always longed for his mother's love, but her mother is only interested in her third son, Pearl, who is having an affair with the priest. He said:

Because I have no mother, I can't love my mother.

On the other hand, I am very nervous about my seriously ill mother and always look at her from a distance, for fear that she will disappear in the blink of an eye; On the one hand, it's ironic that Big Brother buried himself in building a coffin for his mother all day, and paid great attention to its progress and quality.

During the transportation, the time was delayed because the bridge was destroyed by the rainstorm. The mother's body smelled bad in the hot weather in July, but he set a fire in despair to end this meaningless and absurd "corpse transportation" operation as soon as possible.

Faulkner, a great American writer of stream of consciousness, showed people Dahl's entanglement, but also exposed his fragility and madness. Love and hate go hand in hand, and no one can judge right from it.

Pearl is undoubtedly a special existence at home. His mother Eddie is distressed by his thinness, so he becomes Dahl's biggest enemy. It should be said that he is the most qualified coquette in this family, but he secretly worked for others for several months because he got a horse.

After the mule carrying his mother's coffin died, under the cry of his father Anse, he took the initiative to exchange his beloved horse for two mules to continue transportation; When Dahl set fire to the coffin, he desperately tried to save his mother's coffin from the fire, but forgot to protect it.

But after Darfur was accused, he ruthlessly shouted:

Shoot this son of a bitch!

Is affection strong or weak, cruel or soft? Faulkner didn't make it clear in this multiple family tragedy. He just showed the true face of the characters in their behavior, leaving readers a long period of leisure time.

In addition, Father Anse's series of behaviors after Eddie's death also showed the diversity of human nature. After successfully burying her, he couldn't wait to put on his false teeth and bring back his new wife with his phonograph.

The arrival of the "new mother" and the unborn child in Wei Du's belly make the ending of the novel comic and symbolize the continuation of life, which seems to be a metaphor for the rebirth of a family.

Fourthly, the symbolic representative of the main characters, Faulkner's "poet madman" art

Dahl, the representative figure in the novel, is as talented as Faulkner himself. He invented a poetic language with crazy color for Dahl, which can present his sensitive heart as a poet in many places in the novel.

For example, describe the pleasure and scene of drinking water from a cedar barrel:

When I was a child, I began to understand that water was put in cedar barrels. Later, it tasted much better. It tastes cold and warm, with a faint fragrance, just like the hot air blowing from the cedar forest in July ... before I drink water, maybe I can see a star or two in the spoon.

He will also think about some philosophy about existence:

In a strange room, you have to think nothing to fall asleep. What are you before you do nothing? When you fall asleep without thinking about anything, you are nothing. When you fall asleep, you lose yourself and no longer exist.

Dahl has no education, but this kind of deep thinking and poetry is actually the endorsement of Faulkner, the author, and also the epitome of his truth. From this perspective, Dahl, as the protagonist of the novel, actually represents the author himself.

Some critics pointed out that Faulkner, like Dahl, was eccentric and wandered around all day in his youth, especially when he was demobilized during the First World War. Faulkner also often wrote poems during that time.

1929, and 30-year-old Fubaina is still a loser in life, and his life can only be barely supported by his family and friends. I finally got a job as a handyman in the boiler room of a power plant. I have to work hard every day 12 hours before I can write after work.

This classic, which spread all over the world, was the time he squeezed out of his 12-hour work, and it took only about six weeks to complete. At that time, the American economic crisis broke out, and the ensuing "Great Depression" swept across the lives of all classes in the United States. As a result, for decades, the seemingly calm "dispute between the North and the South" has once again clashed, pointing directly at the torn internal contradictions between the North and the South, and inspiring a new round of "shuffling".

In the words of critic Milgate:

"Faulkner's main purpose is more like forcing readers to read this novel from a higher and more universal perspective than the characters and behaviors in the book, so as to understand the Bendren family and their adventures ... It makes us gradually understand that, in a sense, this is an original fable about human endurance and a tragicomedy picture of the whole human experience."