AILD’s title is derived from Book XI of the Odyssey: “As I lay dying the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.” What aspects of the Homeric epic (as well as aspects of Vergil’s Aeneid) do we see in AILD—and how can we compare the journey to Jefferson to Odysseus’s (and/or Aeneas’s) journey? Additionally, how can Joseph Campbell’s outline of the monomyth (hero’s journey) be applied to the progression of the novel itself? Does the novel follow the template of the monomyth—can we deem it an epic? Who is the hero of the story, and what are the tribulations they face? Knowing that Faulkner took the title from the Odyssey, I’m interested in seeing if we can trace the scattered events of AILD to the often rigid narrative pattern of the hero’s journey laid out by Joseph Campbell.
The Modernist Novel
ENGL 387, Professor Allred, Spring 2021
I think the epic dimension of the novel is very interested. As with Joyce’s ULYSSES, here we get a strange mix of the tragic and comic, where we’re never sure if the point is that the epic is comically inappropriate to social modernity or whether the point is that modernist form modernizes the epic, in effect, given structure and meaning to a world that threatens to fragment itself and us. This latter is, famously, the position promoted by Eliot and Pound: you might check out Eliot’s laudatory essay on Joyce. I think it’s certain that Faulker’s AILD is his most “Joycean” novel. I think the Campbell/Jungian stuff on the hero is relevant, but I would avoid framing the essay in terms of the “monomyth” as ideal and asking whether the novel does or does not conform: too binaristic and limited. Better to work historically and note how FAulker’s novel meshes with a broader engagement with epic form in the modernist novel. So searches of “modernism” + “novel” + “epic” are a good starting place…