As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Okay, so I predict that all of Faulkner's books will make an appearance on my reading list because he's one of my favorite writers of ALL TIME! Truly, he's one of a kind. If you haven't read any Faulkner, boy do I feel sorry for you! You see, reading Faulkner is the most visceral experience with literature you will ever have IN YOUR LIFE. His words are not just read, they are felt and experienced and LIVED.
I read As I Lay Dying as a junior in high school (St. Dominic Academy is the alma mater). The class, American Literature Accelerated (to all the haters out there, AP English was only offered in senior year. Yes, I took it and yes, I rocked the AP Exam), was one of the best classes I've ever had the pleasure of taking. From the opening words of the novel straight to the end, I was hooked, totally engrossed by the Bundren family's pilgrimage to bury their recently deceased matriach, Addie Bundren, in her hometown. Each brief chapter is told in the voice of a different character and the characters are brilliant!
There's Addie's bastard (okay, illegitimate...but oh, how I love saying "bastard"!) and volatile son, Jewel, who has always been his mother's favorite. Darl is the sensitive son, who eventually goes insane by the end of the novel. He is an aloof observor and the closest thing to a subjective narrator the novel offers. (Poor, poor, POOR) Cash, is Addie's eldest son. He is very analytical and clearly has issues expressing his grief. His way of dealing with his mother's death is by devoting himself to making her coffin (AS she lies dying!). You will become very familiar with the advantages of making a coffin on the bevel in Cash's chapters. Then there's Dewey Dell, who I always, perhaps unfairly, judged to be slutty because she's pregnant, and comes across as quite dumb. So, she's had sex with this guy Lafe in the cotton fields and is now pregnant and obsessed with getting to town where she will buy pills to abort the fetus. Finally, the youngest Bundren is little Vardaman, who is simply trying to make sense of his mother's death. He has one of the shortest, yet most thought-provoking and loaded chapters in literature: "My mother is a fish." Yep, folks, that's it! THAT'S the chapter! It's towards the front of the novel and I still remember becoming downright giddy when I came upon it as a teenager! Who knew one could do ALL of this craziness with literature! It was an ephiphany.
Anse is Addie's selfish, hunchbacked husband who wants nothing more than to get a set of false teeth from town (no wonder Addie had an affair). And then there's Addie. We hear from her even as she is carried from county to county, a smelly, rotting corpse. She's had a tough life. I mean her dad told her from as far back as she can remember that, basically, the point of living life is to get ready for death. Before marrying Anse, she's a schoolteacher who can only connect with her students (the only other people in her life, so it would seem) by beating them. Needless to say, she isn't the most loving, caring mother to the Bundren children.
So, those are the main characters of As I Lay Dying and they stay with you long after you're done with the novel. Sure, As I Lay Dying, along with The Sound and the Fury and Light in August--Oprah's summer book club selections--were what made Oprah decide to embrace living authors once again (her readers, apparently, didn't take to Faulkner very well, something that I'm still bitter about. I bet they were reading her on their bloody commutes---YOU CAN'T READ WILLIAM FAULKNER ON THE TRAIN. IT'S DAMN NEAR IMPOSSIBLE, SO DON'T TRY IT AND THEN DON'T COMPLAIN ABOUT NOT LIKING THE FREAKIN' BOOKS WHEN YOU DON'T GET ANYTHING OUT OF THEM ON YOUR RIDE HOME FROM WORK. Sheesh). But we must remember that Faulkner is not light reading. Read his work with a concordance in hand to fully understand and appreciate the complexities of his novels. Read him with additional outside material (perhaps Rich R., our former teacher extraordinaire and current English-grad-student-in-London can help us here! Babe, can you share your reading materials, notes, etc. etc. etc. with us (and when I say "us," I really mean "me," because I so want to reread As I Lay Dying again!)). Do it guys! You won't regret it! Once you go Faulkner, you don't go back!
3 comments:
In my Honors Modern Fiction class at Northern Highlands Regional High School (Allendale, NJ), we read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying in January. I liked to wait until everything was a little colder and more desperate before starting upon my favorite book in the course. My high school students, bright as they were, were, in general, either turned off by Faulkner’s polyphonic prose or forced to merely feign interest on account of my much-professed admiration for the work. There are few students who will defend Addie Bundren in discussion, most finding her selfish, manipulating, and, as one student wrote in a recent paper, “noxious.” Maybe the students who sympathize with her most are also those who understand her well enough to know that for Addie, who thought language was so inadequate, that Addie would not want some prolix declaration of support. So the closest I have come to “rescuing” Addie, during my three years teaching HMF, was a student’s journal entry admission that he cried after reading the last line of the book. And I cried a little too, at his words this time and not Faulkner’s. I tried to explain to my students Addie’s philosophy. “Isn’t it true,” I state, “that, what Addie says of love –– if love exists, then there is no reason for us to have a word for it: that the word love would just be ‘a shape to fill a lack’ as she declares? Wouldn’t it be the same for something like happiness -- that if we truly were happy we wouldn’t need to provide the term?” And now, as I reflect upon Addie and my students, I’m struck by the possibility that I am content nowhere in life because I am most content in literature and in language: I am more happy in the word happy than I should ever be in a state of happiness. And, here in London, I have only dear Sabila's name as metonymy for her actual person, which is sad, and I miss you terribly, love.
I miss you too Fork. I could use your company right about now. Everything seems to be weighing down heavily on my soul these days. :(
I'm about to approach the teaching of AILD again after a three-year hiatus. I encountered much the same reaction you record. I'm coming back to it partially because I (for inexplicable reasons) love it too, but partially because I've come to a different conclusion about who is getting revenge. Everything about the novel is perverse: the plot, the characters, the events, even the title--Addie only Lay Dying in the beginning of the novel--unless, as she remembers her father's dictum that life is about waiting to die, she lay dying throughout her life with Anse. I now think the whole journey is Anse's revenge. I think Anse knows Jewel is not his. And Anse is the only one who suffers little, and gains so much by 'keeping his promise': Cash us crippled, Darl goes mad, Jewel is unhorsed, Dewey Dell is duped, and Vardaman . . . who knows? They even burn down a neighbor's barn. By the time they get Addie's body to Jefferson, it is as stinking and rotten as she was--and Anse had no qualms about it. I think As I Lay Rotting is about Anse's revenge. I think Faulkner was presenting a picture of southern perversity.
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