“No Such Thing as Was”: The Fetishized Corpse, Modernism, and As I Lay Dying

Abstract

“No SUCH THING AS WAS”: The Fetishized Corpse, Modernism, and As I Lay Dying T he literary corpse marks a key site of entry into a discussion of the shifting definitions of modernism. Certainly the piling-up of real bodies throughout the twentieth century impacted the form and content of fiction, and in many ways modern funeral and embalm­ ing practices both contain and reflect modernity as Americans begin to move toward “an increased concern for appearances in a consumer culture” after the Civil War (Farrell 7). Yet previous criticism has relied too heavily on literal readings of literary corpses, focusing almost exclusively on the ways in which bodies reflect how and why we deal with death in modernity.1 Corpses tell us more than this. Specifically, corpses that are overvalued, corpses that stand in symbolically or metonymically for other objects, other concepts, other nar­ ratives, other ideologies—fetishized corpses—force us to rethink notions of modernism and modernity because they reveal characteristics of regional modernism distinctly and explicitly at odds with old and new attempts at definition. It is the too-easy eliding of the avant-garde with conceptions of moder­ nity and the insistence upon “making it new” that still pervades even progres­ sive, interrogative definitions of modernism with which I wish to take issue.2 ‘See for example Alan Warren Friedman, who sees literary responses to death between the world wars as marked by artificiality and distance in the dying process after the turn of the century: “Whether hiding and forestalling death in hospitals or enacting it massively in wars, modern technology removed death from the home and rendered it artificial, arranged, civilization’s chief product” (23). The result of such technology is both “dehumanized subjects” and literary representations whereby, “repressed or inadequately repre­ sented, death leaks into language everywhere” (23, 19). See also Garrett Stewart, who argues that death scenes serve to articulate the crisis of subjectivity in modernism: “If the arrival of modernism serves in part to specify [the] intersection between identity and otherness through the magnifying lens of a more and more acute self-consciousness... then death remains foregrounded as the field of scientia which the self can never connect with in time—whether in the realm of lived time or in fiction’s temporal form” (50). Even Diana Fuss’s recent article, “Corpse Poem,” in which the author astutely notes the “curious para­ dox” of speaking corpses, limits its scope to readings of poems in which Fuss notes “the agency of voice” for both the poet and his (dead) subject, allowing the poet to “rehumanize the dead” (15). 2As early as 1989, Raymond Williams began to call the hegemony of modernism in the humanities “a problem,” describing it as “a now dominant and misleading ideology” (31) that “absurdly . . . stops history dead” (34-35): “Modernism, being the terminus,” he argues, “everything afterwards is counted out of develop­ ment. It is after, stuck in the post” (35). For Williams, our traditional definitions of modernism are the result of calculated market efforts to promote writers and works who perpetuated the (false) “avant-garde” notion of “radical estrangement” (35). 7 8 Tamara Slankard The Fetishized Corpse, Modernism, and As I Lay Dying Such discussions still privilege texts—modernist and postmodernist, ifwe may still use that descriptor—that “rebel” against “precursors,” and this limited description inherently still privileges the same bourgeois high modernist works and writers whose hegemony current critics claim to be dismantling. Regional modernist writers like William Faulkner—and later, Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison—reject such easy elision precisely through their relationships with literary and historical pasts. My purpose here is not to contribute to the established presupposition that Faulkner is an anomaly, a blip on the radar in Southern fiction and the one “true” American example of high modernism after Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Nor do I wish to add another voice to the already full choir of those celebrating later authors like McCarthy and Morrison for their “Faulknerian” styles. Rath­ er, I hope to reconceptualize readings of Faulkner’s fiction in light of chang­ ing ideas about modernism and, in a broader sense, to suggest that by tracing the treatment of the fetishized corpse...