When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there's nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, that was not done before and it cannot be done again.1

As I Lay Dying, often paired with The Sound and the Fury, has long been cited as an exemplary modernist text which provides a critical ground for placing Faulkner along with Eliot, Joyce, and Proust in the tradition of modernism. Certainly we see in it a variety of narrative experiments and innovations such as multiple voices and viewpoints, stream of consciousness, the disruptions of logical or temporal sequence, juxtapositions, repetitions, elaborate speculations on language, sophisticated rhetorical complexities-all easily found in the works of modernist writers. Perhaps the most audacious, and thus frequently noted as the most notably modernistic, among these technical innovations, is Faulkner's use of the multiplicity of voices. There are as many as fifteen different narrators who serve to orchestrate the fifty-nine divided sections into a workable pattern of meaning. These narrators work not only to move the action of the novel forward but also participate as characters in the main action of the novel, the funeral journey of the Bundren family, providing the novel with singular depth and intensity. Each of the sections headed by the name of the narrator alternates kaleidoscopically and reveals information about the characters, actions, and events of the novel. However the information provided is so scanty and often conflicting that the reader experiences extreme difficulty in obtaining a clear picture of what is going on. The reader, for instance, is not able to understand what should be considered the crucial part of the story-the motivations behind Addie's last wish of being buried in her kinfolk's graveyard at Jefferson forty miles away and much of her important relationship to her husband and children, let alone her character-until he comes to her only section, apparently narrated after her death, two-thirds of the way through the novel.
     Thus the way Faulkner's multipersonal narration works in As I Lay Dying, roughly outlined so far, indeed, seems to lend itself to the claim that it shares the modernist's metamorphic impetus, if in a more radical way. However, Faulkner's management of the polyphonic narrative strategies, on closer inspection, takes on a quite different aspect, which can hardly be explained through the prism of the European cosmopolitan paradigm of modernism. The technique of multipersonal presentation, as Erlich Auerbach explains in Mimesis, was originally devised as an attempt to approach (inner) reality "from many sides as closely as human possibilities of perception and expression can succeed in doing so"(Auerbach 536). The emergence of this narrative technique coincided with the pervading sense of the disintegration of the stable social order and the strong doubts about an objective reality after World War I. Its extensive use was directly linked to the consequent shift of the writer's concern from the meaningless outer social reality to what Virginia Woolf calls "the flickerings of [the] innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain" (Woolf 214). In Woolf's The Waves, for example, where the multiplicity of narrating voices is used as in As I Lay Dying, each monologue serves primarily to reveal the innermost self of the narrator which is complemented by the thoughts of each one about the other five narrators. This is not the case with As I Lay Dying. Here Faulkner is concerned not so much with exploring the full range of the inner reality of his characters as with capturing their intensely charged emotions or thoughts. Faulkner seldom goes down into his character's fluid unconscious mind as Woolf or Joyce does. Even Darl's monologues, which seem closest to stream of consciousness passages, seldom suggest the workings of the unconscious mind; when he is intensely preoccupied with his own thoughts, he always looks out at the world around him; as a result, his thoughts always sound objective, and even detached from his own mind. His narration sometimes ranges freely in time and space, but it is occasioned less by his introspection at the unconscious level than by his heightened consciousness.
     Of course it cannot be denied that the narrators of As I Lay Dying possess their own distinct identities, each with his own self-centered demands and obsessions. Although they are connected with each other as family members or neighbors participating in the communal funeral ritual, each often appears to be closed off in his or her own "secret and selfish thought" (155) and hardly able to communicate with the others. Bewildered by their mother's death, Darl, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman in particular within the Bundren family are so preoccupied with their own minds that their journey itself may be seen as a constant confrontation with their troubled consciousness. Nevertheless, they show the persistence of shared attitudes and similar mentalities. For example, the sound of Cash's sawing is likened to "snoring" by four different narrators. Cora and Peabody as well as Darl take note of Addie's eyes before her death, metaphorizing them into the "flames" momentarily flaring up before they are gone. As Stephen M. Ross asserts, the articulation of these common metaphors "does not individualize the speaker's consciousness so much as it individualizes a manner of talking" (Ross 126). Despite their distinctive individuality, these collective perceptions confirm that they belong to the same social group which shares a common set of values and beliefs. Perhaps the most comically conventional figure among the novel's characters, Cora Tull, habitually justifies her thought and behavior in the name of God. For Cora, religion means a spiritual investment for a rainy day here as well as after death. Jewel, apparently a stark foil to Cora, also appeals to God in a similar way when he secretly desires to monopolize her mother:

If it had just been me when Cash fell off of that church and if it had just been me when pa laid sick with that load of wood fell on him, it would not be happening what every bastard in the country coming in to stare at her because if there is a God what the hell is He for. (13-14)

     In his monologue Doc Peabody says: "That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long" (41). Here Peabody foretells not only the rainy weather but also the funeral journey which will be prolonged. Given that Addie remains a powerful presence, exerting a great impact on the lives of her family even after her death, Peabody's remark is equally true of her death. In this light, her posthumous speech, made after her physical death, which has frequently been singled out as another prominent modernist gesture swerving away from the convention of realism, is not so grotesque as it looks. On the one hand, it is not only an execution of the modernist impetus for dislocation of form but also its own parody, that is, a parody of the modernist technique of stream of consciousness in which a chance occasion in the present serves only to bring back the realities of the past from the reservoir of memories. In other words, Faulkner simultaneously asserts himself as a modernist by letting Addie speak after her death and negates it by parodying the modernist technique evoked by it, so that he seems to proclaim silently that his modernism is similar to European urban modernism only in appearance, but different in substance and motivation.
     From the perspective of Faulkner's thematics, on the other hand, Addie's posthumous reminiscence, which casts a shadow over the whole story, seems to symbolize the recalcitrant past, which won't disappear-the imperious past which makes Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom! feel "still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that" (AA 9). In Faulkner's world, as Gavin Stevens states it in Requiem for a Nun, "The past is never dead. It's not even past" (RN 80). Consider the irony that Jewel loses his precious horse, his mother-surrogate, to bury the dead mother. In the South as well as in Faulkner's fictional world, the past is not simply something alive in our memories, but the "burden" which overshadows, commands, controls, and informs the present, and so which people feel obliged to recapture and exorcise continually. In this sense, the prolonged funeral journey of the Bundrens is not only an act of burial, but actually a ritual of exorcising the overweening past. In short, Addie's speech beyond her physical death can be taken, and justified as well, as a Faulknerian mise en abyme of the spectral past pervading and informing every present moment.
     In discussing The Sound and the Fury, Sartre said, "the past takes on a sort of super-reality; its contours are hard and clear, unchangeable" (Sartre 89). This may be true of Quentin in that novel, but not of Faulkner (neither of the Quentin of Absalom, Absalom!). Although the past exerts a powerful force, it is not unchangeable. Faulkner is not concerned with the past in itself. His primary interest lies in the past reenacting in the present, not as a separate entity but as part of the continuum of time-the past which commands and informs the present, while itself being reexamined, reevaluated, and transformed each moment in this process. This is what Faulkner means by his famous remark, "There is no such thing as was--only is."4 Although the past dominates the present, there is no fixed, original version of it; only the past seen from the vantage point of the present, that is, the past recreated in its relationship to the present and future, exists. This kind of interaction between the past and the present constitutes a part of the psychology of the "Lost Cause," which has gripped the mind of the South since the Civil War. In fact, as historians have now admitted, the past cannot be captured intact in its full complexity; it can be only glimpsed or evoked momentarily, or imagined or constituted not as a whole but only partially. Faulkner's full awareness that the past cannot be recovered as a self-contained narrative sealed off from the present is directly linked to the characteristically fragmentary, discontinuous, and repetitious form of his novels. As such typical "Faulknerian" characters as Miss Jenny and Gail Hightower well exemplify, history comes as always partially or dramatically recollected, rather than actual, events to people in the South; for this reason, it cannot but be rendered in a series of segments and recounted again and again.
     In Faulkner's fictional world, the past comes alive into the present by way of memories, legends, and notably stories. An impressive number of characters in Faulkner's novels are storytellers: Miss Jenny, Mr. Compson, Rosa Coldfield, V. K. Ratliff, Sam Fathers, to name a few. They collect the "rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking" (AA 303) and tell and trade them, as people gathering at Will Varner's store in The Hamlet do, while, as David Minter puts it, shaping them "into new changing patterns that in turn trigger a new round of change and exchange" (Minter 29). Again, what must be emphasized is that stories, as they are told and retold from mouth to mouth, undergo changes and revisions, sometimes unpredictably, sometimes designedly, depending on the narrators and the narrated circumstances. Such a dialectic of repetitions and revisions not only commands Faulkner's narrative forms and styles but also animates the dynamic space between his texts, since he never stopped recycling characters, events, plots, and stories from novels to novels throughout his writing career. His writing is a succession of rewritings: As I Lay Dying rewrites The Sound and the Fury; Requiem for a Nun, Sanctuary; Go Down, Moses, Absalom, Absalom!; The Hamlet, Father Abraham, and so on. Richard Moreland argues that Faulkner's prolific rewritings both enact and criticize the act of retelling history to which the South has held on as one of its crucial cultural practices. According to Moreland, Faulkner's novels repeat "certain dominant structures of thought in the post-Civil War American South and the post-World War I United States and Europe, first to explore and understand their motivations and consequences, then critically to revise certain structural contradictions and impasses that were shared by both these postwar cultures" (Moreland 4).5 As I Lay Dying is a work in which Faulkner most seriously explores the ways of participating in such a project and comes to be assured of its potentialities and possibilities for his art of fiction.
     Like Cash's home-made coffin, As I Lay Dying has a primitive aura with which oral folktales are surrounded, as few other major modernist works do-an element which eventually contributes to mollifying the serious tone of this otherwise tragic story. Certainly the odd combination of the traditional oral storytelling and the radical experimentation of modernist techniques is what makes the experience of reading the novel so disturbing and so fascinating. As I Lay Dying suggests that Yoknapatawpha County is a society in which oral folk tales are widely entertained. One inevitably notes that town narrators like McGowan and Moseley begin their sections in oral narrative fashion, which means that they have already churned the grotesque funeral journey of the rustic Bundrens into a tickling story and circulated it. In addition, the novel's emphasis on community, choice of a public realm rather than a private mind as its setting for narration, its oral rhythms and rural dialect, the proximity of humor and horror, all these show its affinity with the tall tale tradition. Seen this way, the narrators of the novel resemble storytellers, who gather on the porch of a house or around a campfire and tell the stories alternately, and their sections are, so to speak, their own versions of retold tales.
     From this perspective, the controversial issue of the overblown rhetoric beyond the capacity of the characters, one especially found in the speeches of Vardaman and Darl, is now understandable. In the genre of oral tall tale, exaggeration is a key element of its conventions. In a tall tale, as Carolyn Brown explains, "inspired by real events and circumstances that are somehow odd, incongruous, or extreme, the narrator ... exaggerates the unexpected to make it humorous and even more outrageous," and its exaggeration "ranges over a broad continuum from the mildly improbable, through the physically impossible, to the mind-jarringly illogical " (Brown 23). Tull's remark on Whitfield's flourishing rhetoric makes it more evident that the breach of verisimilitude of narrating voice may be an adaptation of the tall tale convention:

His voice is bigger than him. It's likely they are not the same. It's like he is one, and his voice is one, swimming on two horses side by side across the ford and coming into the house, the mud-splashed one and the one that never even got wet, triumphant and sad. (81)