As I Lay Dying: Successive episodes in the death and burial of Addie Bundren are recounted by various members of the family circle, principally as they are carting their mother’s coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi, in order to bury her among her people. As the desires and fears and rivalries of the family are revealed in the vernacular speech of the South, the author builds up an impression as epic as the Old Testament, as earthy and comic as Chaucer, as American as Huckleberry Finn.
I’m almost considering launching yet another tirade on how my Australian high school education and limited experience of studying Literature at a tertiary level never introduced me to Faulkner. I don’t know why I place such emphasis on discovering these authors within an educational setting, maybe because it seems like that is where most people tend to come across them? Then I think that I probably would not have understood these authors when I was younger, and that I am discovering them now because I am at a level where I can appreciate and enjoy them without it feeling like laborious study.
So, William Faulkner. I’ve spent a while researching Southern – mainly Southern Gothic – literature, and everything I’ve read of the genre has completely floored me. Faulkner was the huge looming giant of the genre, intimidating me with his stature and supposed difficulty.
I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. (Addie)
William Faulkner
The death and subsequent burial rites of Addie Bundren are told through the voices of her children and husband, and local townsfolk, in a stream of consciousness style. It is richly layered and complex, it approaches issues of death and of the fragility of human identity. While the stream of consciousness narrative, shifting between fifteen different characters does take time to adjust to, it is also liberating – so much of the story is left to the imagination, so much is left unsaid and the reader has to interpret. It is challenging but in a satisfying way. The characters, at the beginning, seem to be indistinguishable from one another but gradually, through nuances of speech and thought patterns, they become clearer. They all deal with their grief over Addie Bundren’s death in their own way, no matter how far from usual conceptions of grief they may be. Their actions speak of their character more than their thoughts or speech does – I’m thinking mainly of Jewel here, who isn’t really given much of a voice, and his actions are read through the other characters. While Darl is the most eloquent of the family, some of his internal monologues are just breathtakingly gorgeous. The division between the inner thoughts and the conversations between the family establishes up how secretive and set apart all the characters are.
My mother is a fish. (Vardaman)
Most striking, and I’ve been thinking about it for days since, is Addie’s chapter told from her point of view after her death. (I think Faulkner says a lot about her position in the family by only allowing her voice to be heard beyond the grave.) She speaks of motherhood and childrearing in a completely unexpected non-romanticized way. It’s confronting in that it still seems to be largely believed that motherhood and the desire for children is a trait inherent in women. Addie speaks of how she hates her children, how motherhood is just a word and doesn’t mean a thing to her, it is just something she does.
He 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 any more than for pride or fear. (Addie)
An intense novel, thematically and stylistically, but the images of these characters have stuck with me for days. Their struggles, their secrets. I’m really looking forward to reading more Faulkner.