"A Sack of Bananas":As I Lay Dying and Hemispheric Plantation Modernity David A. Davis (bio) When Anse arrives to introduce the new Mrs. Bundren to his children at the end of As I Lay Dying (1930), Cash describes the ridiculous scene of "Dewey Dell's and Vardaman's mouth half open and half-et bananas in their hands" as they stare in shock at the duck-shaped woman (260). The obvious surprise in this scene is that Anse has quickly procured a new wife, complete with a Graphophone, mere hours after burying the wife he and his family spent days carrying to Jefferson in a mock-epic journey. At face value, the bananas seem like a banal comic set piece reflecting the absurdity of the situation. They do not have the obvious symbolic portent of other food signifiers in the text, such as the fish that Vardaman confuses with his dead mother, which becomes a psychosexual signifier for maternity, death, and communion. Looking at the banana closely, however, reveals a profound set of connections between the text and colonialism, capitalism, and postcolonial literature. Far from banal, the banana is, in fact, one of the most politically and culturally important commodities of the twentieth century. The half-eaten banana situates As I Lay Dying within an elaborate transnational system of plantation labor exploitation, modernist infrastructural development, consumerist commodity consumption, and hemispheric protest literature.1 The banana's presence in Jefferson indicates a network of production and consumption routes connecting the United States with Latin American countries in a set of corporate and political entanglements that resulted in decades of puppet regimes, military incursions, and popular unrest in Latin America. In the novel, the banana also illustrates the Bundren family's role within a rapidly developing system of commodity colonialism based on modern infrastructure that made perishable consumable goods from the tropics available nationwide. Faulkner's [End Page 135] banana further resonates with the work of a generation of Latin American writers who used the banana to symbolize the corruption and oppression of El Pulpo—the United Fruit Company—an octopus of capitalist power emanating from the United States that subjugated entire nations in order to produce commodity fruit for global markets. Thinking about the banana as a material object within a network of exchange that spanned the hemisphere reveals the hidden nuances of the modern plantation system, and reading the banana as a cultural signifier places it in context with a much larger system of resistance through literature. Banana Plantation Modernity The banana's availability for purchase in Jefferson, Mississippi, is the result of a vast system of plantation modernity in the Americas. As an agricultural commodity, bananas combine New World colonialism with modernist modes of production and distribution. By the end of the nineteenth century, the pattern of New World colonial production was well established. Since the 1500s, Europeans claimed land in the Americas and either subjugated natives or imported slaves to produce agricultural commodities for transnational markets. This system undergirded the slave trade, the sugar trade, the cotton trade, and the tobacco trade, and it led to the European colonization of the globe, the industrial revolution, and the political development of North and South America. One might think that the system would have been played out by 1900, and to an extent, it was. Slavery had been abolished throughout North and South America, most of the New World states had achieved independence, and most international commodity markets had reached a stable equilibrium. But in the late nineteenth century, the United States emerged as an industrial power, and it joined the developed nations of Europe in the global grab for raw materials and exploitable labor. Concentrating on its own hemisphere, the United States began a campaign of invading, occupying, manipulating, influencing, and using the nations of Latin America as colonial territories, initiating a new era of hemispheric colonialism. Yet the United States did not expand its influence in the region intending to cultivate bananas. They were an unexpected product of American imperialism. Bananas were presented to the people of the United States at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, where they were exhibited alongside other harbingers of modernity...
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Jan 1, 2024
Sergei Vasilievich Eremin 
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