Faulkner's Intertextuality

In discussion over Faulkner's As I Lay Dying this week what I  found most interesting was intertextuality. The idea that a text gains meaning by allusion to another text was not entirely a new idea especially within an English classroom, but it had never been acknowledged directly by any professor I'd ever studied under. Every time you're asked to analyze a poem or any other literary work for that matter there is inevitably the question of what work the author alludes to within their own literature. For Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury it was brought up in our discussion over the complex of Caddy's relationship with Benji creating a monster that outgrew her and she could no longer control was a possible allusion to Frankenstein by Mary Shelly. Now in As I Lay Dying there are many indirect allusions to the bible. There is the reference to Cash as a Christ figure in his role as a "good carpenter." There is the possibility of Jewel or Darl serving as a Moses like figure from Exodus with the line "white hand spread over the ocean." There is the forty day journey which the family has to make which is a number that shows up allot in the Bible, the most significant right now of lent representing the forty days Jesus spent in the desert. The Bible is a very common literary allusion that many authors make and it can be inferred that other literary works whose allusions are indirect are making such allusions to Biblical happenings.  The fascination that the Modernist movement seems to have with the Greek fables of Odysseus and Ulysses can certainly be seen in Faulkner's work. As we discussed in class As I Lay Dying is a direct allusion to a line in book eleven of the Odyssey translation. I definitely think that this allusion and the knowledge of where it comes from adds to the intensity of Faulkner’s literature and the work as a whole.