My review of As I lay Dying on Goodreads
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
First published in 1930, As I lay Dying has all the hallmarks of modernist literature including interior monologue, multiple viewpoints and stream of consciousness. Faulkner uses all three techniques with great originality and to great effect as a means of highlighting the shocking nature of his theme.
Nevertheless at first sight the narrative is confusing with fifteen separate narrators all of them unreliable and 59 chapters of varying length. In this it’s similar way to The Sound and the Fury.
Yet if you let go of the obsessive need to understand exactly what is the reality of what is going on and simply allow the layers of narrative to carry you along, you become absorbed into Faulkner’s world completely. You enter it, breathe it, taste it. The experience is sensually overwhelming and in many ways Faulkner’s writing seems to me more akin to painting than anything else. If I was to think of an artist, it would be Van Gogh or Gauguin. It has that kind of shimmering sunlit brilliance about it.
Of course Modernism is all about the fact that we can’t know the truth. There is no one truth, only versions of events seen through the eyes of the protagonists.
Yet what Faulkner paints here is something truly horrific. This is the Southern Gothic version of Modernism and unlike anything else.
The Bundren family living in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional area of Mississippi, is a perfect symbol for the post Civil War American South. Corrupt, degenerate, inbred, mentally retarded, vicious yet soft, they are the inbred runts of a South on the point of decay, degenerate and capable of practically any form of inhumanity.
With an insensitivity that defies comprehension Cash, Addie’s carpenter son and Anse begin to construct Addie’s coffin in the yard while she, Addie Bundren, is still alive upstairs and can hear their discussion and the planing of the wood through the open window.
The image of this degenerate family then setting off on the journey carrying the corpse of the mother as it begins to fester and stink till they finally reach the appointed burial site in Jefferson is an abiding image. The decaying mother in the coffin sums up figuratively the overwhelming burden carried by the southern states in the period following the Civil War.
When Cash breaks his leg, his father Anse attempts to set it himself with concrete and finally Cash, now in agony at the pain inflicted on him by such crass stupidity, has to be carried on top of his mother’s coffin in an image of almost unthinkable degeneracy.
On reaching their destination after a long detour the family enter the town of Jefferson with the now stinking coffin and become figures of horror and disgust. But Anse without any sense of shame, quickly and without any qualms finds himself a new wife and marries her on the spot.
This is a novel full of haunting images and breathtaking language. The title comes from Homer’s Odyssey when Agamemnon says: “As I lay dying, the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.” Faulkner’s narrative is without doubt that, an image of a Hell without end told in the voices of the most degenerate of characters.
