WORLD SOUNDSCAPE PROJECT
SOUND REFERENCES IN LITERATURE


296.

She flings herself across Addie Bundren's knees, clutching her, shaking her with the furious strength of the young before sprawling suddenly across the handful of rotten bones that Addie Bundren left, jarring the whole bed into a chattering sibilance of mattress shucks, her arms outflung and the fan in one hand still beating with expiring breath into the quilt.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Vintage Books, Division of Random House, New York, p. 47 - 48.

PLACE: Mississipi, U.S.A.

TIME: 1930's.

 

297.

The women folks go on into the house. We can hear them, talking and fanning. The fans go whish, whish, whish and them talking, the talking sounding kind of like bees murmuring in a water bucket.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Vintage Books, Division of Random House, New York, p. 82.

PLACE: Mississipi, U.S.A.

TIME: 1930's.

 

298.

In the house the women begin to sing. We hear the first line commence, beginning to swell as they take hold, and we rise and move toward the door, ... The song ends; the voices quaver away with a rich and dying fall ... The women sing again. In the thick air it's like their voices come out of the air, flowing together and on in the sad, comforting tunes. When they cease it's like they hadn't gone away.

William Faulkner,As I Lay Dying, Vintage Books, Division of Random House, New York, p. 85 - 86.

PLACE: Mississipi, U.S.A.

TIME: 1930's

CIRCUMSTANCE: Describing a funeral service of a country-woman.

 

299.

It clucks and murmurs among the spokes and about the mules' knees, yellow, skummed with flotsam and with thick soiled gouts of foam.... Through the undergrowth it goes with a plaintive sound, a musing sound; in it the unwinded cane and saplings lean as before a little gale,... Above the ceaseless surface they stand - ... filled with the voice of the waste and mournful water.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Vintage Books, Division of Random House, New York, p. 134.

PLACE: Mississipi, U.S.A.

TIME: 1930's.

CIRCUMSTANCE: Describing a river swollen by rainstorms

 

300.

The breeze was setting up from the barn, so we put her under the apple tree upon the long slumbering flanks within which now and then she talks in little trickling bursts of secret and murmurous bubbling. I took Vardaman to listen.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Vintage Books, Division of Random House, New York, p. 202.

PLACE: Mississipi, U.S.A.

TIME: 1930's.

CIRCUMSTANCE: Describing the sounds of a decomposing corpse.


home