‘Vomiting the crying’: A poetics of fluids in William Faulkner’s Light in August and As I Lay Dying

Abstract

The bodies of William Faulkner’s characters are porous; as the novels unravel, bodies seem to be deflating, in an effusion of blood, vomit, sweat, spit, milk and tears. ‘These oozings and flowings and outpourings’, to use André Bleikasten’s expression, highlight the malleability, or maybe the impossibility, of fixed bodies and fixed forms in Faulkner’s novels. Even more so, these horrific discharges of fluids articulate the interdependence of language and bodies. The debasing and involuntary outpourings of fluids dramatize the uncontrollable and irresistible urge, in Faulkner’s fiction, to simply say. Just like the recurring instances of vomiting, Faulknerian characters lose themselves in ‘word vomits’, where language does not seem to depend on human agency to get the words out. It appears that Faulkner’s writing greatly relies on the process of emptying: among his favourite words, ‘outrage’ or ‘abject’ both etymologically represent the desire to find a way out, to come out, to ex-press. Using As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932), two novels which address this topic through the use of a similar imagery, this article analyses the way bodily fluids and language interact in Faulkner’s fiction, in a dialectics of purity and impurity, debasement and elevation.