Elegy, Effigy: Alchemy and the Displacement of Lament in As I Lay Dying

Abstract

.Libby Catchings Faulkner Journal Elegy, Effigy: Alchemy and the Displacement of Lament in As I Lay Dying Somebody in the house begins to cry. It sounds like her eyes and her voice were turned back inside her, listening; we move, shifting to the other leg, meeting one another’s eye and making like they hadn’t touched. Whitfield stops at last. The women sing again. In the thick air it’s like their voices come out of the air, flowing together and on in the sad, comforting tunes. When they cease it’s like they hadn’t gone away. —As I Lay Dying (91) T hese are the sounds of the women mourning the death of Addie Bundren . Warwick Wadlington frames this moment as a meditation on the relationship between the voice and death, in which the women’s singing enacts a “ritual crossing of mortal boundaries” that refuses physical dissolution in favor of a shared social recognition of human mortality (109-11). However, I would suggest that there is another ritual in Faulkner’s novel that prepares for death even as it refuses communal recognition—one that might be understood via Jonathan Sterne’s notion of sound reproduction technology as an embalming of the human voice. The primary agent of this ritual is Cash, who both mitigates bodily decay though careful construction of Addie’s coffin and seeks preservation of the voice through pursuit of Suratt ’s “talking machine” (AILD 190). Taken together, these two gestures con­ stitute an alchemy that supplants grief with effigy, endeavoring to immortalize Addie’s voice rather than transition to a life without her. By the novel’s end, Cash’s alchemy is complete; for, though her body is in the ground, the imprint of Addie’s maternal voice lingers in the records Cash now plays on the family graphophone. In this sense, Cash reverses the introjective process by which Addie has brought him into the speaking world, ultimately retreating into a domestic space where the maternal voice yields to the consumable object: bananas, false teeth, and mail-order records (260-61). So positioned, the “effiguration ” of Addie Bundren—her being made into an effigy—might also be understood as an auxiliary to the erosion of communal life Julian Murphet sees as Faulkner’s indictment of the modern media ecology (6). At the same time, the mirrored becoming and unbecoming of this modification resonates with Theodor Adorno’s conception of the graphophone as transmitting, in the 25 26 Libby Catchings Displacement ofLament in As I Lay Dying way that other sonic technologies of modernity do, a radiative, umbilical qual­ ity towards a “cosmic death drive” (Adorno qtd. in Zeitlin 122)1 —a distinctly (Freudian) maternal relation2 made all the more poignant by an Alexander Graham Bell recording from 1881: “I am a graphophone, and my mother was a phonograph” (qtd. in ‘“Hear My Voice”’).3 1. Technologies of Sonic Consolation According to John T. Matthews, the novel’s graphophone is a commodity ob­ ject that recalls the “illusorily prosthetic qualities of novels themselves” by “simulatjing] life and speech” to gratify the listener as he or she experiences life’s losses and disappointments (“Machine Age” 90). However, Sterne’s fram­ ing of phonography as “a modification of the relations between life and death” (293) urges us to consider the graphophone’s significance in the novel beyond the function of consolation, to where it might constitute an alteration of the characters’ engagement with the living, speaking world. Such an alteration serves to reinforce Matthews’s thinking that Faulkner was interested in “the way modern technology might create new structures of human feeling, new relations to one’s own body and place, and new possibilities for human imagi­ nation” (Seeing Through the South 62). It should be noted that the graphophone in Faulkner’s novel is a sound recording technology situated in a particular historical moment and identi­ fied by a distinct technique, whereas Sterne’s use of phonography is meant as an umbrella term for all sound reproduction.4 The phonograph, an inscription technology developed by Edison, featured a stylus which made indentations of sound on metal foil; due to the pliability of the material, however...