A farmer, I guess, who seeds his mind with much reading of
literature and modern science and harvests a complex, allusive poetry—in this
case informed by engineering, geometry, and paleobiology. The notion of an
“oxygenless first principle of liquid” clearly refers to the scientific account
of the origin of life, in which all was mineral, dead, and devoid of oxygen
until several billion years ago, when the first algae-like organisms commenced
photosynthesis, recombining carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates and
oxygen. Though the King James Bible gave Faulkner his title Absalom, Absalom!, he called on the
wonder of modern science to re-create the Bible’s sense of primeval magic.
For Faulkner, writing meant curiosity into human motives
(Inge ed., p. 166). That is, he made a scientific study of human beings. But
what is even more unique about Faulkner is that his poetical effects rely
surreptitiously on scientific methods and ideas. Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying while working nights as a
supervisor in the power plant of the University of Mississippi, the school
where he’d ten years earlier done a brief stint at college. He told a newspaper
in 1932, “I think the hum of the dynamo helped me.” (Inge ed., p. 28) Perhaps
it was that “sound of science” that compelled Faulkner’s thoughts in a
scientific direction.
Throughout As I Lay
Dying, Faulkner seems to scrutinize familiar phenomena so minutely that the
familiar becomes strange, as though he were looking into the familiar through a
quantum microscope at a weird physics that we’d intuited but never fully
understood. Inspired perhaps by modern physics, Faulkner re-sees reality and discovers
in it new relationships and underlying properties.
Often he describes relativistic perceptual phenomena wherein
motion imparts some new quality to a
thing, much as motion influences observations according to both Galilean and
Einsteinian relativity. Faulkner even words these descriptions a bit like a
physicist witnessing some previously unknown influence in the physical
universe.
Take this memorable example where Cash saws planks below his
mother’s bedroom window to make her coffin:
He saws again, his elbow flashing
slowly, a thin thread of fire running along the edge of the saw, lost and
recovered at the top and bottom of each stroke in unbroken elongation, so that
the saw appears to be six feet long…. As
I Lay Dying, pp. 75-76.
By superimposing the saw’s various positions into one image
irrespective of time, the saw elongates in the viewer’s imagination. If you’ve ever
done any sawing, you may recognize the weird visual distortion Faulkner
describes.
Later, Faulkner establishes the unsettling effect of
buzzards by charting the uncanny effect of Galilean relativity on the
perception of their motion:
Motionless, the tall buzzards hang
in soaring circles, the clouds giving them an illusion of retrograde. p. 95
From Galilean relativity, he proceeds to an observation of a
wagon’s motion that sounds blatantly Einsteinian in its linkage of time and
space:
We go on, with a motion so
soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress, as though time and not
space were decreasing between us and [Jewel’s horse]. pp. 107-108
The Bundrens’ wagon soon passes a turn-off and the slow movement
past the sign and the side road transfers motion to both:
a white signboard with faded
lettering: New Hope Church. 3 mi. It wheels up like a motionless hand lifted
above the profound desolation of the ocean; beyond it the red road lies like a
spoke of which Addie Bundren is the rim. It wheels past, empty, unscarred, the
white signboard turns away its fading and tranquil assertion. p. 108
All is still outside the wagon, yet through relativity the
moving wagon imparts motion to the motionless signboard so that it turns. The
wagon imparts motion to the road so that the road becomes a turning spoke in a
wheel and is said to wheel past. Faulkner’s like an experimental physicist
researching the relativity and associativity of perceptions.
He observes a similar perceptual relativity in the way that
objects derive their shape from their surroundings: “Beyond the unlamped wall,”
Darl says, “I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours….” (p. 80) Later,
Faulkner describes the shape of the wagon according to the air around it, and
suggests an influence that absent things exert over the place they previously
occupied, a poetic physics: “[I]t begins to rush away from me and slip down the
air like a sled upon invisible snow, smoothly evacuating atmosphere in which
the sense of it is still shaped.” (p. 98)
The two types of Faulknerian relativity—of motion and shape—appear
together when Darl and Cash and Jewel try to pilot the wagon across the river.
Darl looks at his father, sister, and little brother standing on the riverbank
and says:
[it is] as though we had reached
the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the
final precipice. Yet they appear dwarfed. It is as though the space between us
were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running
straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us…. [The
mules] too are breathing now with a deep groaning sound; looking back once,
their gaze sweeps across us with in their eyes a wild, sad, profound and
despairing quality as though they had already seen in the thick water the shape
of the disaster which they could not speak and we could not see. pp. 146-147
did the same and deduced that if the universe has expanded, it must once have been compact. The idea was not that the matter of the universe exploded like shrapnel from a bomb (one reason "Big Bang" is an imperfect name), but rather that the empty space of the universe itself was once compact and ever since has been stretching out like silly putty. 