"You Don't Knaow What Worry Is": Animal Apprehension in As I Lay Dying.

Abstract

Under the psychoanalytic gaze, interspecies affect is cast as a temporal distortion that renders people neurotic, belated, and even inhuman. In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner turns this clinical reasoning on its head as the hyper-vigilance of anxious characters constitutes an epistemic privilege that reorganizes the human sensorium and enables interspecies affiliation. Combining affect theory and equine behavior literature, I look at the influence of the novel's animal protagonist, Jewel's horse. Through him, Faulkner at once apprizes minority sensory experience and revises expectations of what being affected by animals can feel like.