Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying

Last year in school, I took a class that required me to read the book Absalom, Absalom!. I knew the author’s name and that he had written The Sound and the Fury, not to mention knowing the caricature that the Coen Brothers made of him in their film Barton Fink (the drunken writer W.P. Mayhew, portrayed hilariously and memorably by the underrated John Mahoney). Yet, I hadn’t read a word of his many books, figuring him to be kind of like Flannery O’Connor’s fatalistic and deeply violent work.

When I finally did sit down with the above mentioned book, it was like my experience trying to read Naked Lunch for the first time. I spent most of the time reading it slack-jawed or, with furrowed brow, flipping through the pages trying to make sense of his circuitous and exhausting prose. I can’t say that I really understood the book (hell, I did get a B- in the class) but I did know that the book had left an indelible fingerprint on my brain and I knew I wanted more.

This term, I found a class strictly devoted to the work of Faulkner and had to take the plunge. I have since been in a muddle trying to pull apart his mile-long sentences and figuring out how they work, not to mention being stuck with the chemical memory of his many unforgettable characters. The ones that have left the deepest impression on me were the Bundren family, introduced to me in the novel As I Lay Dying.

It may seem like an overused concept these days but I’m sure, in 1932, there weren’t many books available on the market where each chapter was devoted to the point of view and inner dialogue of a different character. We get the fairly simple plot (the matriarch of the family passes away and the family both has to deal with the loss and take her coffin 40 miles to bury it in the family plot) told in crystalline detail and gettin into the head of each major character in the book, even the mind of the dead mother. The effect is challenging, sometimes aggravating and oft times hard to deal with, but that is not too far afield from what it would be like to be an actual member of that clan.

What is especially striking about this book is its insight into the concept of a family and what that meant in the post-Civil War era in the American South. It seems to me that there aren’t many books or works of art being made today that deal with families like this one. The Bundren family, for all their faults and grievances, stayed together. It has the equally disturbing effect of making the bitterness and deceits that were enacted by various family members that much more distressing, yet it also makes palpable the necessity for seeing why the family, especially the headstrong father, want to get their mother to the family plot no matter what tries to stop them.

I didn’t realize the impact of this passage until I was watching the Carl Theodor Dreyer film Ordet and looked at the dynamic of a family living on a farm in Denmark. The father, his three sons, his daughter-in-law, and grandchildren were all still living together, scraping a living together off the land. This family, too, was riddled with difficulties, but to our modern ears and eyes, it seems like such a fascinating trifle of a bygone era. Most films and books that I have seen (especially those made by Americans) tend to lay to the party line that kids can’t wait to get themselves out from under the oppressive hands of their misunderstanding parents and authority figures.

Most of the younger readers in my class seemed too ready to dissect the book from a modern perspective, calling this family “dysfunctional” or thinking that (SPOILER ALERT) the father’s appearance with a new Mrs. Bundren at the end of the book was shocking. Considering the era Faulkner is writing about, using modern terminology doesn’t really work when talking about a novel like As I Lay Dying, and I think that quickly marrying someone new was probably not that out of the ordinary in Mississippi in that day and age.

I don’t know if I’m trying to espouse some traditional family values party line or not. My view of this novel is probably colored with the fact that I didn’t come from what we would view as a broken home and still hold fast to what the idea of family can mean. I am interested to know what others might think of this book whose ideas or memories of family aren’t that pleasant. But I think that if you are willing to put your modern conceits and biases aside for the duration of this book, you will understand why this family would risk their lives and (in one case) sanity to fulfill their mother’s dying wish.

Bob Ham has gotten rid of his record collection blog but you can track the progress of his life at http://vanpelt.blogspot.com

Posted on February 15, 2006 12:00 AM