Adrift with the Bundrens
“Pa
never does nothing, Sis will do anything for an abortion, my brothers are all deranged,
and my mother is a fish.” Sounds like a Jerry Springer episode, right?
The
fifth novel by William Faulkner, and the third set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha
County, Mississippi, As I Lay Dying
is famous for its subjective-perspective, stream-of-consciousness narration. It
might be just as notable for a unique set of low-life characters who dare you
to like any of them once you manage to work out what is happening. I still flail
futilely in both departments.
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.
The
narrator of this and many of the other 58 first-person sections that comprise As I Lay Dying is Darl Bundren, second-born
son of Addie and Anse. As in the section above, Darl spends much time going on
and on regarding what it’s all about. What As
I Lay Dying is about, put simply, is the Bundrens attempting to give Addie a
decent burial without killing everyone else in the family.
Critics
talk about As I Lay Dying representing
the flip side of Faulkner, a black existential comedy that follows the
metaphysical tragedy of hope that was his prior novel, The Sound And The Fury. The latter is one of my favorite novels of
all time; I’ve read As I Lay Dying
three different times in three different decades and never found much to like
about it.
Is
it the characters? I don’t know. I think I could enjoy them for their assortment
of miserable qualities the same way I can gutter-watch Springer clips on
YouTube. That’s how they were conceived and written, one-note performances all except
Darl who is so all over the place that [SPOILER ALERT] he gets committed before
the book’s end. Anse the father is a pious windbag, Dewey Dell the sister just
wants an abortion, Jewel the younger brother is horse-happy and rage-filled,
and so on. They aren’t vested with much in the way of personality or soul.
Maybe
that’s Faulkner’s point:
I can remember how
when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it
to be merely a function of the mind – and that of the minds of the ones who
suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the
beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving
out of a tenement or a town.
Death
is the preoccupation of As I Lay Dying;
it’s baked into the title and is the reason for everything that happens in it.
As a focal point, it grabs my interest. But beyond that, the Bundrens’ story
doesn’t move me at all.
The
approach of As I Lay Dying reminds me
of an observation that Charlie Chaplin is said to have made. Tragedy is when
you are walking down a street and fall into an open manhole; comedy is when it
happens to someone else. The comedy of As
I Lay Dying is entirely of the manhole variety, and it becomes wearying
fast.
The
first act ends with Addie dying in bed just after she looks out her window to
see her oldest son, Cash, building her coffin. The notion of a person being so
duty-filled that way is kind of funny:
It’s like when he
was a little boy and she says if she had some fertilizer she would try to raise
some flowers and he taken the bread pan and brought it back from the barn full
of dung.
That’s
how Jewel, son number three, puts in, in the one section of the entire book we
experience through him. Alone in the family, in this and other ways, Jewel can’t
understand why anyone would build a coffin in front of its future occupant like
that. Jewel’s attachment to Addie, we come to learn, runs deeper than the other
children, but he’s a bitter and violent fellow, so he’s not heard from much.
Then
just like that dog in “Mr. Bojangles,” Addie ups and dies, having given some
direction that she wants to be buried not in town but some distance away in
Jefferson, where her family is from. It’s here the story proper begins, with
the surviving Bundrens taking her body on a long trek after first waiting three
days for Jewel and Darl to return from an ill-timed delivery. In the interval,
heavy rains fall, swelling up the main river and causing the collapse of a
nearby bridge.
“I
mislike undecision as much as ere a man” is how father Anse explains his
strategy of following Addie’s direction regardless of consequences.
Though
his main function is to stand around and watch, Anse is the crux of the story
in many ways, personifying the human condition as represented by the Bundrens.
He’s so lazy and mule-headed he can’t be bothered to adjust the plan in order
to conform to reality. His motive, we learn before Addie’s body is even cold,
is not to honor his late wife but get into Jefferson so he can buy himself
some teeth.
“In
fifteen years I aint et the victuals He aimed for man to keep his strength up,”
he whines.
So
when they come to the sagging wreck of the bridge, they try to cross anyway, only
to lose their mules and nearly the coffin. Poor Cash even breaks a
previously-fractured leg, which he eventually allows his father to set with
concrete. It’s an unwise decision in a novel defined by same.
The
sad parade continues. Jewel vents; Darl daydreams; Cash lies stoically atop the
coffin containing his mother’s stinking corpse; and the youngest Bundren, Vardaman,
becomes more convinced than ever his mother is a fish since they just fished
her out of the river. In time, Vardaman becomes obsessed by the vultures
following them, attracted to the carrion they are transporting.
The
more the story goes on, the less sense it makes. This is in part because of the
absurdist situation Faulkner is consciously developing, and more because of how
the author presents it, via stream-of-conscience narration. The more the
narrative goes on, the more it seems to unravel, especially with Darl, whose
finely honed sensibilities render the story before us ever-more opaque:
It is as though
time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs
parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling
accretion of the thread and not the interval between. The mules stand, their
fore quarters already sloped a little, their rumps high. They too are breathing
now with a deep groaning sound; looking back once, their gaze sweeps across us
with in their eyes a wild, sad, profound and despairing quality as though they
had already seen in the thick water the shape of the disaster which they could
not speak and we could not see.
 |
| William Faulkner looking ever-natty in the classroom. His appearance personified Southern elegance, but his fiction has become the embodiment of Southern Gothic, for better or worse. Image from http://williamfaulkner.com/. |
Maybe
I’m just not smart enough for this sort of stuff. My own struggle with the
novel began my first year in college, when it was assigned reading for a gut
course, Literature Composition. Why the teaching assistant thought this was a
good one to give to a group of future accountants and business executives
remains a mystery to me. If you assign a novel to teach literature composition,
shouldn’t you choose one where you can appreciate how the pieces fall into
place?
I
don’t know how my classmates managed it; maybe a trip to the Co-op for some
Cliff Notes. Suffice to say, like Cash no one complained. I pored over it and
found myself frustrated to no end, both because I had no idea what was going on
reading it straight through, and because the TA kept noting things I not only
missed but couldn’t find even after being twigged onto them. So why does Darl set the barn afire?
Wait, you mean, he actually did that?
The
TA also kept talking about As I Lay Dying’s
dense gumbo of Freudian motifs and Greek mythos as a kind of value-add to the
overall reading experience, something we should all be appreciating and
enjoying. I didn’t, and eventually came to the grim realization that in my
quest to uncover the joys of American literature, Faulkner was my enemy.
A
few semesters later, I encountered him again in another class. This time the
novel was The Sound And The Fury.
This time my professor had hand-outs to help us weave our way through the
different narrative voices and run-on sentences. It took awhile, but then the
worm turned, the penny hit the bottom, and I felt like I had unlocked something
of the greatness of Faulkner. The Sound
And The Fury is a fun book, especially because of the elliptical way it is
written but also because the characters are so joyfully and poignantly alive.
More
than two decades later, I ventured back to As
I Lay Dying and found myself recapturing the agony of my second-semester
freshman year. It was like El Debarge was back on the radio and the girls were
all wearing big hair and Bananarama jumpers again.
Long
story short, I learned a hard lesson, something that came at me just as strong
when I tried this one on again this past week: Just because something is called
a “masterpiece” doesn’t mean it’s for everyone.
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