As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner wrote his fifth novel, As I Lay Dying, in only six weeks in 1929. It was published after very little editing in 1930. The novel tells the story of the Bundren family traveling to bury their dead mother. The novel is famous for its experimental narrative technique, which Faulkner began in his earlier novel Sound and the Fury: fifteen characters take turns narrating the story in streams of consciousness over the course of fifty-nine, sometimes overlapping sections. At the time, Faulkner’s novel contributed substantially to the growing Modernist movement. He was no doubt influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, whose theories about the subconscious were made increasingly popular in the 1920s. Faulkner’s novel regards subconscious thought as more important than conscious action or speech; long passages of italicized text within the novel would seem to reflect these inner workings of the mind. Faulkner’s prolific career in writing is marked by his 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature and two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 1955 and the other in 1962.

Why Should I Care?

As I Lay Dying might be one of the most important works in American Literature, but it just sounds to us like the greatest of all childhood games: The Oregon Trail. But let us demonstrate:

• Rations are low.
• You have set your pace to grueling and your prose to convoluted.
• Someone has died (though not of dysentery).
• Ford the river, or caulk the wagon and float it?
• Bad choice. You lost 2 mules, a leg, clarity of plot, some farm tools, and all the optimism you had left.

Chuckle. We knew this book would be easy.

• Wait a minute.
• You are crazy, according to one member of your party.
• You are the most logical guy around, according to you.
• You’re a threat, according to another member of your party.
• Someone is pregnant (and unmarried).

Whoops! That reminds us to tell you that As I Lay Dying features no fewer than fifteen different narrators, which can complicate the heck out of any trail you’re traveling, Oregon or not. Even the most basic of stories – a journey from location A to location B – is actually a patchwork of perspectives, opinions, and points of view.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes is not the first fictional detective. C. Auguste Dupin, hero of a bunch of stories by American author Edgar Allan Poe, as well as a very few others detectives, came before. Poe invented the classic formula: the super-smart private detective and his less smart (but more literary) narrator buddy, amazing leaps of logic that prove to be right, and a bumbling cop who can never quite seem to get it right. So, props to Poe. Though Holmes may not be the first detective in fiction, but we kind of think he's the best. When you hear the word "detective," we're betting dollars to donuts that one of the first things that comes into your mind is the sharp-featured, pipe-smoking, deerstalker-hat-wearing Sherlock Holmes. He's like Frankenstein or Dracula – one of those characters who becomes so fundamental to his genre that, even if you've never read a single Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story, you probably still know who Sherlock Holmes is. (Though maybe you picture him as Robert Downey, Jr.) Holmes wasn't instantly popular by any means. Conan Doyle had some minor success with his first two Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet (1888) and The Sign of Four (1890), but it wasn't until Doyle started publishing Holmes-based short stories in a new fiction magazine, The Strand, that the character and his tales really started to take off. It was still pretty standard in the late nineteenth century for English novels to appear chapter by chapter in magazines before being collected into one published volume – that's how the first two Holmes novels appeared. Conan Doyle had the idea that this format would be perfect for a series of episodes from his detective's life. After all, sustaining a reader's interest in one detective plot across multiple chapters is kind of hard, and if you miss one issue, you're sunk. But if each story has its own self-contained plot arc, readers can get both the suspense and the resolution they want every month, while continuing to crave more Holmes-y goodness from one magazine issue to the next. So Conan Doyle basically invented the episodic drama. And as any viewer of House, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Ugly Betty can tell you, having a character-focused genre series is a great strategy for commercial success. Sherlock Holmes is no exception. Conan Doyle selected The Strand because it occurred to him that he could tie the success of this new magazine (which started in January 1891, six months before Conan Doyle started publishing his "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes") to his new series of short stories. And it worked: Conan Doyle's Holmes tales raised The Strand's circulation and established it as the popular fiction magazine of its day. Weirdly, despite the fact that he wound up writing dozens of short stories and five novels around this character, Conan Doyle was actually not that fond of his creation. A retired army surgeon and medical doctor (like a certain Dr. John Watson whom we know!), Conan Doyle had other, more serious ambitions. He wanted to be known for his historical novels and for his writings on the South African Boer War. He didn't mind the money that came with being a commercial writer, but he hated that public demand for Holmes totally overwhelmed anyone's interest in his more serious work. So Conan Doyle tried to kill off Holmes at the end of his second story collection, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1895). Public outcry was so strong, though, that he eventually brought Holmes back to life after a decade's hiatus (he did publish The Hound of the Baskervilles during this period, but it's set before Holmes's death). Luckily, if his creator couldn't love Sherlock Holmes as Holmes deserves, those of us here at Shmoop can totally fill in the gap. Why Should I Care? We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal – except for Sherlock Holmes, who is better than everybody. Seriously, this guy's a superhero: it's like asking why we should care about Batman (hint: because he's awesome). For one thing, Sherlock can look at people and see right into their minds (basically). We bet we can think of a million situations in which that ability might be useful, up to and including: (a) crime fighting, (b) bickering with our significant others, or (c) trying to convince our parents to loan us money. So Holmes is a guy who we either want to be, or who at least we want on our side. Speaking of having him on our side, Holmes totally uses his powers for good. Everyone in Victorian London, from the lowliest governess to the highest nobleman, eventually comes to see Holmes when they need help. He's like a super-genius, disguise-loving Victorian version of Dear Abby. And it's reassuring to read about a guy who just goes around making sure that life is fair for the little guy. Sure, Holmes may be in his business of private detective work mostly for the intellectual work rather than the moral judgment, but for us, reading Holmes is like reading Chicken Soup for the Nerdy Soul: he's so sure, and so good at getting things right, that reading his stories leave us with a comfortable glow. If that's somehow not enough to convince you that Holmes is worth caring about, let's just add that the bromance scale goes up to eleven in these stories. Holmes's relationship with Dr. John Watson is so emotionally satisfying that Watson's wife Mary eventually just dies so that the two guys can be roomies again. Holmes and Watson restore our faith in (Platonic) love – we hope we're as excited to spend time with our friends fifteen years down the line as Holmes and Watson seem to be during their later adventures. The guys may not be romantic partners in the least, but they are life partners. And we must admit, reading about their adventures leaves us a little choked up.

Literary Analysis: The Speckled people

A child-narrator who sees and hears begins to show us the world we, readers, are going into. In Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People this narrator exposes his secrets, conflicts, histories and beliefs, growing up in narrative and in the (re)construction of Hugo Hamilton’s memories, making of the book a memoir. The narrative unavoidably resembles Joyce’s The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and considering this, that is what this short text will talk about – language, constitution of subject and nationality. Firstly, we could ask ourselves how could be Hamilton’s and Joyce’s narratives related. The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is filled up with epiphanies and streams of consciousness, while there is an articulation of an Irish-Catholic experience, while a mythical dimension is also emphasized. In the final pages of Portrait, Stephen as a young man, finds his voice and the narrative has a dramatic shift, from the third-person narrator to Stephen himself, in a first person narrative.  Hamilton’s narrative also brings narration from a child-narrator who sees and hears, and while growing up, tries to make sense out of what is happening. However, differently from Joyce, the matter is no more centered on one’s nationality, the constitution of the subject in opposition to the other, but these issues are all mingled, we have the dissolution of one fixed identity, making Hamilton’s work a transcultural narrative. Language is the central issue in the constitution of an identity, of family and in the way the world is seen. My father says your language is your home and your country is your language and your language is your flag , points out the child-narrator. How can we constitute a single and regular home whereas in the middle of a different land, and different language, and in relation to the other, who speaks and sees the world differently? While in Joyce’s we see the struggle to the constitution of an identity, in Hamilton we see that identity in not one, but plural. The way he acts in Ireland and Germany, and the language change, showing the relation of the subject to the other, to the constitution of himself, of the otherness. If English is the language of imposition, of cultural domination, why haven’t Hamilton written in German? To put it crudely, the constitution of identity – as we could see in the constitution of a nation, what we think of it, an imagined nation – is plural : A lot more people would be homeless if you speak the killer language. He said Ireland has more than one story. We are the German-Irish story. We are the English-Irish story, too .

Literary Analysis: Tess of the D’Uberviless

The narrative is developed by acts that end up in a kind of catharsis, when Tess dies in the Stonehenge. The tragic aspect is built up by the religious beliefs of that society, while social class is directed related to fate. The fate of a social position – the result of the status quo – is reinforced by the protestant doctrine of election, in which the one’s beginning and future is determined by the Deity before one’s existence. This Calvinist thought has a strong effect over Tess. Although she is part of a peasant community and is in the middle of pagan-like acts, this predestination affects Tess, making her believe in her sinful existence.

  In Tess of the D’Uberviless, Hardy exposes structures of the woman’s role through the religious’ laws and beliefs of that period. Tess, raped and tainted by a sin she did not commit, has troubled relationships with Alec, who raped her, and Angel, who has doubts about religious doctrines.

Although Tess herself did not commit a sin in the beginning, being raped established the position she would have to take in society, both social and religious. Neither Alec nor Angel are judge by their communities, mainly because of a patriarchal aspect of protestant society; in which, according to Larson (2004) is part of a denial of Armenians and the defense of the idealistic men, the Manly Christian,  which includes the domination of women by men and their obedience. We see it clearer in some facts, i.e., Angel had had an affair with an older woman, but he is not judge by that, however, in Tess’s case, she is judge and even impure, which makes her to accept Angel’s rejection. Tess is not only part of rule in gender, but also part of a lower social class. Ingham (2003) argues that the gravity of female criminality was usually seen to involve what were called ‘crimes of morality’ and was measured by the failure of working-class women to live up to the middle-class model. In the rape, the entire fault relies upon Tess, who cannot be forgiven and need to accept her fate.

When Tess meets Alec again, the narrative exposes the injustice role of women, a gender that cannot be forgiven; the justice relies on a pragmatic scheme of purification, as Tess says, a scheme of religion. Alec is now a Methodist[1], receiving the fruits of the Spirit, which Tess finds a scheme of lies; while he is now a saint, she is still impure.

References

INGHAM, Patricia. The interlocked code of class and gender. In: ____. The language of gender and class: transformations in the Victorian novel. London: Routledge, 2003.

LARSON, Janet L. Skeptical Women v. Honest Men v. Good Old Boys: Gender  Conflict in the High Victorian Religion Wars. In: NIXON, Jude V. Victorian religious discourse. England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

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[1] Here there may be an opposition between Calvinist ethics against the new role of Armenian’s doctrine. Methodism’s doctrines denies predestination which make one’s free will possible, something that Tess denies and seems to be part of the tragic aspect of the novel. 

The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

Many critics have considered Portrait as the precursor of modernism and the beginning of Joyce’s new realism, which will be further developed in Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. Modernism, however, cannot be defined so easily. As Butler (2004) argues, there are many kinds of modernism, but what can be said about modernist artist is that they entered unprecedented freedom and confidence in stylistic experiment. According to Childs (2007), modernism in prose is associated with attempts to render human subjectivity, perception, emotion and meaning; it is to break up with the formal realism which is incapable of depicting reality. As Virginia Woolf says: what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?; this is an important question the modernist artists and it is strictly related to the new realism that Joyce was defending.

The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is considered to be a Künstlerroman, narrating the development of an artist. It exposes the wakening of Stephen Dedalus as he begins to rebel against the values and beliefs of his society. The novel starts[1] in the mind of a child; differently from what we see in formal realism with a direct discourse, here we start as if we were in a child perspective, and as Stephen grew up and developed, the world started being organized with new words and points of view.Filled up with epiphanies and streams of consciousness, the Portrait is an example of the new realism and the modernist purpose of a transvaluation of all values. In Portrait, there is an articulation of an Irish-Catholic experience, while a mythical dimension is also emphasized. In the final pages of Portrait, Stephen as a young man, finds his voice and the narrative has a dramatic shift, from the third-person narrator to Stephen himself, in a first person narrative. The consideration[2] of Stephen is an example of the new perspective of realism, in which past, present and future are not strictly separated, different from the Cartesian perspective of formal realism.The new realism in Portrait is also the element which builds up the rhetorical masks that deny authority and nationalism, not only the denial of nationalism and religious discourses, but it also makes up an ambiguity of Stephen Dedalus in the novel.

ReferencesATTRIDGE, Derek (ed.). The Cambridge companion to James Joyce.  Cambridge University Press, 2004.BULSON, Eric. The Cambridge introduction to James Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.CHILDS, Peter. Modernism. London: Routledge, 2007.

[1] ‘‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens  little boy named baby tuckoo ’’[2] “The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future”