Faulker was just 33 years old in 1930 when he wrote As I Lay Dying while working nights at the University of Mississippi power plant. The Sound and the Fury had attracted some attention from the critics, but Faulkner was still largely unknown. He wrote As I Lay Dying in about six weeks, between October 29 and December 11, 1929. He felt he was at the height of his powers: “I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again.”
The book tells of a family—the Bundrens: mother Addie, father Anse, and five children ranging in age from about 28 to about 8. As the book opens, Addie Bundren is on her deathbed, and after she dies, about 40 pages in, the remainder of the story deals with the family’s attempt to transport her corpse and coffin to the town of Jefferson for burial. Anse has promised Addie he would bury her “with her people” in the Jefferson cemetary, but a series of obstacles, delays, and setbacks stand in the way, the greatest of which is that the countryside has been hit by torrential rains that have washed out all the bridges.
You think of Faulkner as a modernist and you think James Joyce, “stream of consciousness,” and all that. And while there is consciousness aplenty in As I Lay Dying, it is also a highly visual, immediate, and intense book, one that I imagine would be very tempting to filmmakers—a quick check of imdb.com reveals that actor James Franco is currently working on an adaption.
Different characters take turns narrating the book in short chapters. We hear their thoughts but we also see what they see—Faulkner deploys his narrators almost as a director might deploy his cameras. Sometimes as one narrator leaves off another takes up the action, possibly even recapitulating the last line of dialog. It’s all rather splicey. Perhaps Faulkner was deliberately mimicking the stylized visual transitions of the movies.
It would be interesting to know how Hollywood would sell this story. There’s the heroic angle: “He made a promise, and now he will move heaven and earth to fulfill it.” But there are other angles. Anse Burden is a craven, self-pitying and stubborn character who is idle and incompetent on the one hand and too proud on the other to spare his children all kinds of pain and humiliation by just burying the old lady at the local churchyard. So maybe the tag line could be “His wife was already dead. Who else would he kill to get his way?” It all gets quite lurid and fantastical in places. The youngest child drills holes in the top of his mother’s coffin because he is not quite sure she is really dead and accidentially drills down a little too far. An ever-growing flock of vultures follows the Bundren procession as it struggles along, lured by the aroma. You could pitch it as a midnight movie and maybe ask Quentin Tarantino to direct: “Grotesque horror, outlandish humor, riveting action.”
As I Lay Dying is all these things and many more—each character has a secret, a mission, or an obsession. I had to read the book twice to become completely familiar with all these crosscurrents. The first time through I often didn’t know what was going on. The reader is definitely expected to do some work. It mostly all comes into focus eventually, though I could read the following paragraph 100 times and never figure it out:
When I looked back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated outen it like it was the more the sweat, the broader the land; the more the sweat, the tighter the house because it would take a tight house for Cora, to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring; you’ve got to have a tight jar or you’ll need a powerful spring, so if you have a big spring, why then you have the incentive to have tight, wellmade jars, because it is your milk, sour or not, because you would rather have milk that will sour than to have milk that won’t, because you are a man.
I don’t think Bill was drinking milk when he wrote that.
The Library of America publishes Faulkners four to the volume, and I would gladly have plowed through Sanctuary, Light in August, and Pylon—except perhaps for the prospect of having to try to write something about them afterwards. I’ve noticed a spate of Faulker articles in recent weeks—John Jeremiah Sullivan (see the previous entry in this blog) wrote a piece about Absalom Absalom for the New York Times Magazine and the Daily Beast proclaimed Light in August “Faulkner’s Great American Novel”. There was an Oprah selection and there are rumors of an HBO miniseries. It’s reassuring that America has retained a taste for the ornery old cuss.
