The Buzzard Reality of As I Lay Dying
Sandra K. Stanley
In a 1956 interview, Faulkner once quipped, “You know, if I were reincarnated, I’d want
to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never
bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.” Although Go Down, Moses may be the novel
that elegiacally foregrounds the nonhuman animal and natural world, as epitomized in “The
Bear,” against Ike McCaslin’s vision of the corruptible world of modernity, As I Lay Dying
confronts death itself through enigmatic references to animals, from Vardaman’s declaration
“My mother is a fish” to Darl’s assertion that “Jewel’s mother is a horse” to Faulkner’s authorial
buzzards ready to feed on Addie’s putrefying corpse. Although scientists and philosophers have
raised questions about mind theory as it pertains to nonhuman animals—examining whether or
not they are self-aware—Faulkner raises this question for all the living beings in this tale.
Faulkner critics have analyzed the use of nonhuman animals in As I Lay Dying in multiple ways:
as symbolic substitutions (Addie as a fish or horse; Dewey Dell as a cow); as psychological
projections (the children’s means of dealing with their mother’s death or even as part of their
maturation process in the repression or destruction of the maternal); or, in Christopher White’s
essay on Faulkner’s use of “zoosemiotics,” as part of Faulkner’s modernist resituation of human
language with the larger “continuum of communicative processes that are ahuman.”
I, however, am most interested in Faulkner’s use of nonhuman animals in the context of
what he has identified as the central villain of his novel: social conventions. As the human
characters are negotiating their way through the often paralyzing and destructive rituals of the
past and convention, the animal characters, although they may be unconcerned by these human
drives, are nonetheless caught within the net of human practices. On the one hand, in As I Lay
Dying, these corporeal animals are caught within the symbolic exchanges of modernity, cut off
from the Bear’s transcendent and mystical symbolic possibilities. The material finality of
Vardaman’s fish, which was killed to be “cooked and et,” is dislocated from the symbolic
representation of a transcendent Christ and communal redemption. Jewel’s ever-resistant horse,
fighting against tenuous human control, ultimately is bartered away and reduced to a domestic
economy not so different from Dewey Dell’s cow. Anse’s mules are sacrificed in their attempt to
cross the river. Yet, on the other hand, these animals, by their sheer animality, disrupt the
narrative and foreground the artificiality of human conventions. Scholars associated with Animal
Studies, such as Jonathan Burt, Nigel Rothfels, and Akira Lippit, have noted the ways that
animals have ruptured performative systems of representation, for there is always the possibility
of animals to disrupt literary and filmic narratives by asserting their specific realities as animals
upon the authorial plot and upon the audience’s preconceptions of animality. In the end,
Faulkner’s animals in this novel are consumable and usable—their symbolic possibilities
pointing not to a transcendent world, but a material world enmeshed in social conventions.
However, Faulkner reminds us, as the implacable buzzards hover around Addie’s body, of the
biological reality of all animals—nonhuman and human—and the fate we all share—death;
humans, after all, are also part of this exchange system of being “cooked and et.” Realizing the
limitations of the transcendent Word, the transparent logos, and the human subject, Faulkner, in
his Homeric allusion for his title ("As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close
my eyes as I descended into Hades”), not only recognizes the importance of the role of human
death, but also the importance of the “dog’s eye” that will not be appropriated by the human
world of social conventions, that is both human (belonging to the woman) and nonhuman, that
ultimately sees the world with a buzzard reality.