As I Lay Dying

I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as when he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still look hard. He set there on the wagon hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn't act like he was proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself.

Apparently, Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying over six weeks, from midnight to four a.m., after working all day, and required very little editing after the fact. It must have rushed out of him like a fevered dream, like the dreams he should have been having, had he only gone to bed (perhaps, As I Lay Sleeping…). With fifteen points of view and great swaths of stream-of-consciousness, much repetition, and impenetrable philosophising, this is a Modernist-Southern-Gothic-white-trash-tragicomedy that lays bare all that is noble and all that is worthless in the hearts of men. More reader-friendly than Joyce's similar contemporaneous experiments, Faulkner sets the Bundren family on a farcical, near-Biblical, certainly epical, quest to return Addie Bundren's corpse to the town of her youth. In addition to the luckless trip that ensues, Faulkner maintains a strange tension by having characters brood over events that aren't revealed for a long time -- putting the cart before the sawdust-fed mules as it were -- and confusions are more piled on than cleared up. 

What an image to begin with: as Addie wastes away in her bed, her oldest son Cash is sawing and planing away at the boards for her coffin, holding each one up to her window for his mother's approval. Neighbours come to visit -- really to gawk -- and everyone has advice for Anse; the patriarch who is so lazy, he tells his family that for him to sweat would be a death sentence. The two other grown boys, Darl and Jewel, have decided to take the cart off to earn three dollars, and although Anse had promised Addie that he would start the trip to Jefferson the minute she started failing, that three dollars means him finally getting false teeth, and he knew his wife would not begrudge him that. Naturally, Addie dies while the boys are away, a storm comes up that washes away all the bridges for miles, and when the family finally begins their odyssey, it would seem that the judgement of God has already been passed upon them; the flood is not the last of the trials that He will send.

In their own ways, each of the Bundrens seems obsessive or mentally deficient, repeating phrases to themselves and others, acting and reacting in peculiar ways, and it's hard to tell whether they are simply unsophisticated and uneducated or actually brain damaged. These repetitions make for a strange yet compelling poetry:

Was there ere a such misfortunate man.
My mother is a fish.
He could do so much for me if he just would.
Jewel's mother is a horse.
He could do everything for me.

The youngest child, Vardaman, becomes a bit unhinged when his mother dies and keeps repeating (and believing), "My mother is a fish", but he is so young (perhaps as young as six?) that he may be traumatised. Darl, on the other hand, has always been "different", with people afraid of his strange ways and intuition, and his chapters have the most dense thoughts:

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

I don't know if any of this becomes clearer on rereading, or if the point is that these are the ravings of a madman, or if in the end, like Cash, we should believe that Darl is the sanest of them all:

Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

It is said many times that Addie is the luckiest of the Bundrens -- having 'scaped this vale of tears -- and it's tempting to feel sorry for this woman that even the doctor was reluctant to revive to thirty more years of hard use by her family, but the chapter that is in due course narrated by the dead woman puts her into a very different light. Having come out to the country as a teacher, Addie grew to hate the school children and their dirty snuffling noses, only pleased when applying the switch (Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own forever and ever.) Her eventual hatred of her husband and (most of her) children led to sinful ways and ultimately, the reader begins to wonder if the flood and the fire and the circling buzzards aren't just what her remains deserved -- and not least of all because it is her hatred of her family that prompts Addie to extract the promise from Anse to bury her far away in Jefferson. When the book ends and we learn that Anse had an ulterior motive of his own for the trip, the whole enterprise is thrown into yet another unflattering light. Perhaps, in the end, the meaning of life is as Addie says:

I could remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead for a long time.

Yes, much is confusing and peculiar in As I Lay Dying, but it endures as art. It has much to say about class and power in 1920s America (as pertinent as anything by Steinbeck) and through the characters of Addie and her daughter Dewey Dell, much to say about the (mis)treatment of women. The most Christian characters are the biggest hypocrites and the man with the most power (Anse) has done the least to earn it. I did love the speech patterns of all of the characters (even when they were talking nonsense) and when small mysteries were solved, the experience was gratifying. I could totally understand if someone thought this book wasn't worth the effort, but even where it is incomprehensible, As I Lay Dying has all the hallmarks of a masterpiece.