ASSIGNMENT 23:
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (pt. 2)

Published in 1930, when literary success still eluded him, As I Lay Dying is William Faulkner's fifth novel. At the time it was written, Faulkner was employed at an electrical plant in Oxford, Mississippi. He'd just married, and would soon move his family into an expensive old mansion, "Rowan Oak," he intended to restore. The financial demands placed upon him by these moves were powerful. Needing a literary success, why did he risk publishing such an extraordinarily unconventional novel such as this one?

Faulkner's comments indicate that he wanted to write a book that derived from the region between conscious and unconscious experience, a book that would explore the obsessional side of Southern experience. Writing it, he was carried along by the desire to get under the surface of ordinary, gritty lives experienced in the depths of Southern rural poverty. He wanted his reader to enter their obsessional existences by means of interiorized monologue, a hidden and silent but also a spoken language--spoken within the mind, as verbalized thought. The obsessional qualities of this writing would also be evident, he thought, in the story's tendency to tell and re-tell the same events from different points of view: thus the novel's tendencies to repeat, circle back, and overlap. Faulkner also clearly sought to write a technical masterpiece. Later, he spoke of having written As I Lay Dying with exactly that aim in mind: "Before I began I said, I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again."

The very place in which Faulkner wrote the novel become important to our understanding of this book. He actually wrote it from the bowels of the Oxford power plant, during the night shift, the outside world virtually cut off by the whirring of the giant dynamos around him. In that setting, surrounded by the machinery that Henry Adams had regarded as the chief symbols of modernization, Faulkner imagined the lives of a poor farm family of the 1920s. They too seem utterly cut off from modern conveniences and developments. But in the course of their journey to Jefferson, they encounter the stuff of technological modernization; indeed, as you'll see, when they turn towards home at the novel's end, various of the characters will bring back some of these objects (a phonograph, for instance). In any case, Faulkner begins in an agrarian world that is anything but generative, much less an Eden. It is dominated by death; soon, in fact, by the degenerating, rotting corpse of Addie Bundren. The family's journey to bury her is, moreover, an ironic quest for Eden: note that they even pass through a place called "New Hope." Then they reach "Jefferson," after the Father of Democracy whose dream of an egalitarian society centered on small, agrarian villages; but this "Jefferson" is smokey with the exhaust of automobiles. Somehow, thought, the Bundrens collectively discover, in the course of that journey, the potential to pull together in adversity, to endure even though their own errors, and natural calamities, seem to make them destined for failure.

Placed just slightly off-center in the novel, Addie Bundren's monologue will loom as the centerpiece of your reading for this assignment. Given long after Addie has actually died and the Bundren's journey has begun, Addie's monologue (from the grave, apparently) would seem to at last give her a voice, thus a voice to the principal "subject" of this novel. If we think about it, though, this assumption becomes problematic. After all, death has already in effect silenced her; nothing she "says" here can produce any "results" in her family. For readers, though, the results of reading Addie's monologue are many: for example, key details about Addie and Anse's marriage are at last made available; and Addie's motives in actions only mentioned earlier, are at last clarified for us. Addie also has a great deal to say about words, and their meanings; and since her second child, Darl, seems to be descending into a form of insanity because of the way his own words are cut loose from determinate meanings, Addie's thoughts take on a broad thematic significance.

Note that Addie's thoughts are prefaced by Tull's description of the shape of Addie's coffin, and Cash's brief insistence that the coffin needed to ride "on balance," lest it fall (as indeed it did, into the rain-swollen river). Coming to Addie's monologue with Tull's visual image of the coffin, and Cash's concerns about balance, the reader can begin to glimpse Faulkner's larger artistic concerns in this novel. For example, these images ask readers to consider how the unthinkable (death) can become thinkable after all, by its containment within an orderly form (like a coffin, or a novel). And since Cash is the creator of that coffin, his stated concerns about exactness and balance begin to suggest how Art can begin to counteract the Chaos this novel both describes and embodies.

Reading Assignment

1. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (pp. 1563-1599).

Writing Assignment

1. Why is it essential that Addie be buried in Jefferson?
2. Jewell is criticized for his pride in owning a horse. Are there other examples of pride in the novel so far? What do they suggest about Faulkner's view of the characters?
3. Despite its serious themes, there are elements of comedy throughout As I Lay Dying. Focus on several examples, say how the comedy works, and summarize what these episodes teach us.
4. In the chapters we have read thus far, various of the characters are depicted falling down: Cash, for example, has previously fallen from a church roof. How does the motif of falling become symbolic in these chapters?
5. Is Darl different from the other characters with respect to the fear of falling? That is, against what, and how, does he struggle to stay upright? What forces would seem to bring him down?
6. In her monologue Addie says: "I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to another." How are these thoughts-about words and deeds ("doing"), and about the seeming impossibility of joining them in one person's being-expressed by other characters such as Cash or Darl? Write several paragraphs in response to this question.
7. What roles are played by sexual desire, including sexual infidelity and promiscuity, in the plot thus far? For example, how has sexuality determined the Bundren genealogy in various ways? How does sexual desire become a thematic counterpart to the theme of dying and degeneration symbolized by Addie's corpse. Discuss, in several well written paragraphs.

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