Heidegger’s Idea of Dwelling: Narrative Style in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

Abstract

Heidegger’s Idea of Dwelling: Narrative Style in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying Colleen Shuching Wu William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is a novel that consists of several major characters’ monologues and narratives, each narrated in the first person. There is no grand narrator or authorial voice who acts as arbiter, telling the reader which character is more truthful or what to make of narrative discrepancies. Faulkner once stated that he was interested “in people, in man in conflict with himself, with his fellow man, or with his time and place, his environment” (Faulkner in the University 19). Nonetheless, for Faulkner, conflict might not occur in direct confrontation between the self and others or between the self and the environment. In fact, the characters in As I Lay Dying do not usually communicate what is on their minds in conversations. Instead, each of them forms a universe of their own while voicing their thoughts and contemplating what Addie’s death means in their own monologues. They might live close to each other but are distant in their minds while each narrates “the perpetual present of consciousness” as J. Hillis Miller notes (93). In “Ad Astra,” Faulkner wrote, “We are like men trying to move in water . . . watching one another’s terrific stasis without touch, without contact, robbed of all save the impotence and the need” (407). Faulkner is more interested in how one exists and dwells in the world while forming relations with others than in how one’s relations with others define one’s living and existence. Heidegger’s idea of dwelling and his definition of subiectum suggest a similar concern with the very condition of how one lives in the world. Heidegger’s major example of “things” where dwelling occurs is the bridge. As the bridge dwells and gathers things around it in its own way, it is no longer an object that passively receives meanings given by subjects. Heidegger’s discussion sheds light on how symbolism and [End Page 199] metaphor work in Faulkner’s fiction because Faulkner tends to show how a detail turns into a metaphor through contextual contingencies instead of making a fictional object representative of a specific symbolic meaning. Heidegger’s thinking of dwelling and being also further explains characterization and narrative construction in As I Lay Dying. The novel is composed of various characters’ perspectives, but each one does not carry the same weight. Instead, there is a narrative hierarchy. In The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard uses the terms “metadiscourse” (or “metanarrative”) and “grand narrative” when defining modern and postmodern as concepts. Metadiscourse or metanarrative represents “legitimate knowledge” and decides what grand narrative can stand for “truth.” Lyotard defines “postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv). In other words, in a postmodern culture, there is no metadiscourse to justify or legitimate a grand narrative as the truth. Lyotard’s idea of “incredulity toward metanarratives” is significant in the discussion of As I Lay Dying because the novel lacks a dominant metanarrative that grants legitimacy to a narrative and consequently resolves discrepancy among characters’ narratives. From this perspective, As I Lay Dying speaks to a conspicuous trait of the postmodern—a hierarchy of narratives where the supposed grand one is ready to fall and the one forthcoming probably cannot sustain itself as well. Faulkner’s presentation of the unstable narrative hierarchy does not offer a metadiscourse to justify a grand narrative and thus casts doubt on Heidegger’s “Being of beings.” Faulkner’s narrative style not only questions the positiveness of coexisting diverse perspectives and narratives but also challenges attempts to resolve their potential conflicts or their dialectical relations, such as Heidegger’s Being. Heidegger’s Idea of Dwelling For Heidegger, dwelling is being. Therefore, “I am” means that “I dwell.” As I will elaborate later, Heidegger defines “subject” to explain Being and introduces a thing, an object, a “bridge” to elucidate “dwelling.” He defines the concept of subject exactly the same way he presents “the bridge” to explain “dwelling”—i.e., gathering things around. In “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Heidegger suggests that the three are essentially the same. Dwelling presides over buildings, and “to...