“Her sudden and brief affair with Whitfield constitutes Addie’s attempt to explore this new relationship
between words and acts, for it encompasses even as it differentiates
between two quite distinct conceptions of sin. As a word, sin is the opposite
of virtue and leads inevitably to damnation. It is this aspect, which Addie
stresses when she thinks of sin as garments which she and Whitfield wear in the
face of the world and which they remove ‘in order to shape and coerce the
terrible blood to the forlorn echo of the dead word high in the air.’ (101) But
as an act sin may be a step toward salvation… The adultery thus becomes a moral
act, not, of course, in the sense of ‘good’ or ‘virtuous’ but in the sense that
it reestablishes the reality of moral conduct and of the relationship between
God and man. This reality is neither
linguistic nor factual in character; instead, it consists of the possible,
the hypothetical, the conceivable, all, in short, that follows from the
capacity for unrestricted choice. Significantly, Addie sees in Jewel, the child
of her sin, a sign of grace: ‘He is my cross and he will be my salvation. He
will save me from the water and from the fire.’ (97) Through sin Addie seeks to
find and enact her own humanity, and if her solution seems extreme, so is her
provocation. (239)
“The
Interplay of seriousness which reaches toward tragedy and of humor which is
practically farce is part of the complete success of As I Lay Dying. In a sense, it reinforces
the theme of the separation of words and acts by insisting on at least
these two modes of response to the same set of characters and events. At the
same time, it precludes any easy generalizations about the funeral journey
itself. Any event or series of events elicits various and, at times,
contradictory responses. The meaning of
an experience as distinct from a word exists in the consciousness of the individual
observer. Accordingly, it is only when one becomes conscious of the
mingling humor and pathos, of the relation of the Bundrens to Addie, and of the
observers to the action that the full complexity of As I Lay Dying is plumbed and Faulkner’s easy mastery of it
recognized.” (248) Formalism
Catherine
Belsey would claim that formalist critics limit themselves by deriving all
meaning in their critique from the text being read and not allowing themselves
the freedom to expand upon their interpretations using outside sources
including other critical analysis, historical references, intertextual comparisons,
and ideological interpretations. The result of formalism does however present
the reader of the analysis with insight into the opinions and perspectives of
the critic.
“Words
don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew
that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because
the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or
not.” (99)
“[Anse]
had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long
time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack;
that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than
for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would
say, ‘Let Anse use it, if he wants to.’ So that it was Anse or love; love or
Anse: it didn’t matter.” (99)
These
passages reflect the formalist perspective that meaning of a text be derived
only from the words presented by the text. These passages can also be
interpreted as structuralist because they suppose that the meaning of words is
derived historically.
The
limitation of formalism is that all meaning is derived from within the single
text in question. It is essentially a critic’s way of doing their own rereading
of the text without reflecting on any outside sources or opinions. This
limitation is also the source of formalisms importance to literary criticism
because every critic has their own life experiences that have shaped their
perspective and therefore critics will “see” different things in a work of
literature.
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