"too soon too soon too soon": Continuity, Blame, and the Limits of the Present in As I Lay Dying

Abstract

Abstract:Taking William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying as its central object of inquiry, this essay engages current debates about the narrative form and politics of the modern novel. Through an analysis of Faulkner's most putatively antirealist novel, this essay argues that modernism has a far more vexed relationship to plot and causality than scholarship has suggested. As Faulkner experiments with present tense narration, the characters clamor to deliver themselves from the modernist textuality that the embodied present unleashes. They reach for psychic structures such as blame—blame being a fundamentally causal structuring of events—to wrest narrative meaning from the temporal flux to which their author has subjected them. As I Lay Dying exemplifies what I argue is modernism's understudied preoccupation with the possibility that to abandon realist temporality may be to claim one's literary modernity, but it also amounts to a form of authorial cruelty.