thepuncturedcoffin

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Afterword

The last sentence of As I Lay Dying may appear benign to an outside eye, but for the reader who has slogged through all of the Bundren's trials and tribulations for the last 261 pages, it is one of the most chilling final lines of the American Modern period:

"Meet Mrs Bundren," he says.

With that line, everything that the family has just accomplished at the sacrifice of their own physical, mental, and social health has been nullified. The great quest to bury the matriarch of the family has no closure, because there is another Mrs Bundren standing right in front of them. Anse reinitiates the purgatorial cycle that this family has fallen into. Mrs Bundren exists... Mrs Bundren does not exist... Mrs. Bundren exists... Mrs Bundren does not exist... Mrs Bundren exists...

Our tumblr, "The Punctured Coffin", allowed us to say everything we've said in the past several paragraphs in a single post, using no extra words at all. We simply posted the final sentence of the novel, and made it a hyperlink that brings the web user back to the frontpage of "The Punctured Coffin". Although disorienting at first, we hope a trick like that might inspire cyclical feelings of helplessness, inevitability, impotence--in a very different but parallel way from how Faulkner inspires those feelings in us with his final line.

This is why we have found tumblr, and the internet more generally, to be a fascinating medium for not only commenting on the text, but exploding it outward and inward in all sorts of ways. As I Lay Dying is no longer an intimidating standalone tome, a monument to modernism, imposing and impenetrable. Rather, we have split it up, fragmented it, spread it out so that it becomes porous, bite-sized, accessible in ways it has never been accessible before. Being able to watch James Franco's trailer for the book adaptation alongside high school students' book adaptations... mashing Addie together with Barthes and art... gauging reader reactions to the text alongside American Horror Story's remediation of the text, and a viewer's reaction to that remediation... bringing Faulkner back to Hemingway... these are all cultural mechanisms that could not have existed without Faulkner's opus as a jumping-off point. But we hope we have shown that the text is not only a jumping-off point: it is also a landing point. From a lowly youtube video with twenty-six views to a massively popular metal band, everything As I Lay Dying has brought into existence has also changed the way we read the original text.

Imagine, for example, being a thirteen-year-old fan of said metal band and realizing one day that they were named after a book. You enter the reading experience excited, expecting perhaps blood and gore, or a long-haired emo protagonist who is ill-understood by the world. Instead you find fractured narration. Constant sawing. A dead/not dead mother. A mother who is a fish. A mother who is a horse. A toothless father and a pregnant daughter. And none of it makes any sense to you. Can you imagine the way your set of expectations drastically altered your experience of the book? Experiences like these are what our tumblr experiment has allowed us to locate and explore.

We called our tumblr "The Punctured Coffin" for this reason. We wanted to show that Faulkner's modernist monument, much like the presumably watertight coffin in the book, is actually full of holes. Perhaps Cash is the author and Vardaman is the reader--it doesn't matter. What matters is that As I Lay Dying cannot be experienced in and of itself. New ideas and interpretations are constantly flowing in and out of the text, making it forever new--a cycle of birth and death and rebirth for as long as it exists in our social consciousness.

We wanted the word "coffin" in our title because so often in the book it is the word that goes unsaid. The noun is too terrible, so the speakers empty it out and replace it with a neutered pronoun: it. Our project has helped us find implicit, buried, hidden meanings or interpretations, and bring them to the forefront for our web users to discover. If they click a link, they might find the definition of the word they have clicked... or they might find a clip from The Big Lebowski about nihilists. Either way, they will think of that term differently in retrospect.

This project involved a lot of busywork, but it never stopped being fun. We may have made it for class, but we hope web users who are interested in the book, or perhaps doing their own class research, will stumble upon the tumblr and explore. Imagine a high school student researching for class, discovering our class project, and through that discovering yet another student's class project on Prezi. This sort of conversation is what the internet is best at, and what makes this project worthwhile. In the end, if we can make a web user experience an aspect of As I Lay Dying in a new way (with laughter, with sadness, with an enhanced understanding), we have done our job.

-KO and RR

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Cycle

"Meet Mrs Bundren," he says.

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Only Natural

Anse 

When he aims for something to be always a-moving, He makes it longways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, but when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man. 

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Gerhard Richter, paint on photo

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Wince and Wait

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot, blind earth. - Dewey Dell

"The wind it harped as twenty men. 

The wind it harped like hate. 

It whipped our light-eyed little girl,

It made her wince and wait."

-Gwendolyn Brooks, "The Womanhood"

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I Lay Me Down

CORA

"Well, folks are different," he said.

I should hope so. I have tried to live right in the sight of God and man, for the honor and comfort of my Christian husband and the love and respect of my Christian children. So that when I lay me down in the consciousness of my duty and reward I will be surrounded by loving faces, carrying the farewell kiss of each of my loved ones into my reward. Not like Addie Bundren dying alone, hiding her pride and her broken heart. Glad to go. Lying there with her head propped up so she could watch Cash building the coffin, having to watch him so he would not skimp on it, like as not, with those men not worrying about anything except if there was time to earn another three dollars before the rain come and the river got too high to get across it. Like as not, if they hadn't decided to make that last load, they would have loaded her into the wagon on a quilt and crossed the river first and then stopped and give her time to die what Christian death they would let her.

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Doctor's Order

PEABODY

The girl is standing by the bed, fanning her. When we enter she turns her head and looks at us. She has been dead these ten days. I suppose it's having been a part of Anse for so long that she cannot even make that change, if change it be. I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind--and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

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Speaking of Fiona! The reigning Supreme was enjoying an evening with her new beau, Danny "The Axeman" Huston. The Axeman brought her back to his apartment -- the previous owner of the apartment was decomposing slowly in the bath -- and began the sweet dance of seduction. Bourbon. A jazz record. Faulkner quotes. "The reason for livin' is to get ready to stay dead for a long time," he said, a line from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. (ASIDE: As we all know, Faulkner published Dying in 1930, 11 years after the Axeman was killed by Meryl Streep's Daughter and the Stabbin' Suffragettes. Maybe the Axeman passed the time by exploring Miss Robichaux's library. To hell with logic, now I'm just dreaming of an adaptation of As I Lay Dying directed by Ryan Murphy, ideally with a closing dance number where reanimated corpses in the Yoknapatawpha County cemetery sing a dance-pop version of "Don't Fear the Reaper" mashed with Ke$ha's "Die Young." END OF ASIDE.)

Entertainment Weekly, TV Recaps, American Horror Story, Episode 7

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Addie and Barthes

"I looked forward to the times when they flaunted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever." (170)

"My identification is imperfect: I am a Mother (the Other causes me concern), but an insufficient Mother; I bestir myself too much, in proportion to the profound reserve in which, actually, I remain...by being miserable by himself, the Other abandons me: if he suffers without my being the cause of his suffering, it is because I don't count for him: his suffering annuls me insofar as it constitutes him outside of myself." Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, "I have an Other-Ache"

"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack." (172)

"I-love-you has no usages...it is a socially irresponsible word...it does not transmit a meaning, but fastens onto a limit situation...It is a holophrase." Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, "I Love You"

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Addie Bundren could not want a better one, a better box to lie in. It will give her confidence and comfort.

(what sorts of boxes do students give this book to lie in?)

As I Lay Dying Quickly

As I Lay Dying Character Analysis Animations

As I Lay Dying Book Trailer

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R-E-S-P-E-C-T

"Because I got just as much respect for the dead as ere a man, but you've got to respect the dead themselves, and a woman that's been dead in a box four days, the best way to respect her is to get her in the ground as quick as you can." - Samson

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Chapter VII

"I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God." - Dewey Dell

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Addie and Saussure

"That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don't ever fit what they are trying to say at... One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too."  (171-176)

"...a word can be substituted for something dissimilar: an idea. At the same time, it can be compared to something of like nature: another word... The content of a word is determined in the final analysis not by what it contains but by what exists outside it." -Ferdinand Saussure, Course in General Linguistics

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"My mother is a fish."

"Chase worried that he would be remembered only as 'a painter of fish.'"

Iridescence is so difficult to capture. 

Addie as Fish. 

More pictures from the illustrator of the fish.