**Note: The discussion/comment section of Sarah’s terrific post on “A Rose for Emily” will stay open! “A Rose for Emily” is available for download here; if you haven’t read it yet, or have and haven’t yet joined our conversation, know that we’ll remain eager to discuss it throughout the summer and beyond!**
The editors are so kind that they are no doubt right in thinking that nothing I have to say about the affairs of the universe would be interesting. But until they give me opportunity to write about matters that are not-me, the world must go on uninstructed and unreformed, and I can only do my best with the one small subject upon which I am allowed to discourse. (Helen Keller, The World I Live In, preface.)
As I begin As I Lay Dying, I notice the tense. Of course, everyone is tense because Addie Bundren is nearing her last breaths, and many of these characters are probably tense all the time, anyway. More so, though, I notice the present tense, in which so many of the voices are speaking to us. (To us? Is that preposition ‘to’ even relevant for the “speaking” they are doing?) I am only just beginning this absorbing story, but I already feel swept up by the tide of what’s happening. And I do feel it is happening. Cora, who doesn’t strike me as particularly insightful, does slip into an extended description in the past tense when describing “the sweetest thing I ever saw” (351*). Yet I wonder if she isn’t, in the present, romanticizing a just-past moment and already idealizing it from “that was sweet” to “that was the sweetest thing I ever saw.” And of course when Dewey Dell recalls “the first time me and Lafe picked on down the row,” she is, now, recollecting. But I’ll have to continue tracking the tense in which characters speak while the story progresses.
I will say, I feel swept up by it, and I feel that with each page we are moving forward, and time keeps on doing its thing, and as the moments pass we are getting insights into (what’s happening from) the minds of one character or another. If this is true, we can’t see the same moment from the perspectives of more than one character, at least not in the present tense. (Recollection is always possible down the line.)
Take the first section on/with/from Peabody, that interesting old man who made me think to begin this post with that insightful and biting remark from Helen Keller. Notice the way Anse speaks in Peabody’s section: “Hit was jest one thing and then another. [...] That ere corn me and the boys was aiming’ to git up with, and Dewey Dell a-takin’ good keer of her, and folks comin’ in, a-offerin’ to help and sich, till I jest thought…” (369). Earlier, when we hear [via] Tull, Anse sounds more like this: “No man mislikes it more than me. [...] She’ll want to get started right off. [...] It’s far enough to Jefferson at best. [...] She’s a-going. [...] Her mind is set on it” (357). I’ll say, though I am only just beginning this work, that I am already amazing by Faulkner’s ability to tell a story through such a fragmented narrative framework that nevertheless feels so immediately coherent and whole, and that sweeps one up so swiftly. Anse, for example, sounds totally different to Tull’s ears than he does to Peabody, and yet he is so clearly the same person in the same situation. How did Faulkner do that? Anyway, there’s a striking and essential insight here about identity and relationship, but I’d rather read on awhile than suppose just yet what that insight is and how it’s given voice…
Fellow readers, as we begin As I Lay Dying, how do its cadences sound to each of our ears? how do its characters and voices and themes begin to resonate in our respective minds? what translations and transformations and recreations are we each performing and becoming in the act of reading? In a while we’ll have a post in which we can discuss the work as a whole, and surely specific scenes and events and themes can be discussed at greater length and detail once we’ve all finished the novel. In the meantime, why don’t we discuss impressions, conjectures, and so on? Or–as ever–whatever else strikes your fancy and calls, in your view, for discussion. (Who’s read it before? Who’s loving it? Who’s hating it? Who’s confused? Etc., etc., etc….)
[*I am using the Modern Library edition of The Sound and the Fury & As I Lay Dying, hence the high page numbers.]
I can’t wait to read everyone’s first reactions to As I Lay Dying . This will be my fourth read of the novel, and unlike many other Faulkner books, I took to this one right away. I don’t want to give away anything for those just beginning but I will say, the journey (the nature of its intentions i hope to discuss later) this family takes rivals the Greek epics. The scale is a zoomed in stretch of perhaps less than 10 miles on a poor country road, but you’d swear there were sirens and monsters. Here be poverty.
I want to highlight one random bit from an early Vardaman section. I think it speaks to Faulkner’s unique insight into the nature of children and general human misconceptions. I will be slightly vague as to not spoil too much, but referring to Peabody the doctor who comes to check on Addie, the Vardaman narrator* says, “… I can feel the floor shake when he walks on it that came and did it. That came and did it when she was all right but he came and did it” (376). Vardaman here is convinced that Peabody killed his mother because Addie dies some time after Peabody goes into the room to check on her.
I was struck by this detail because of a personal family story. This sort of jump mis-association is something children do, as sometimes they do not understand injury or death. I suppose of I am an example of this. The story as told by my mother goes: When I was three my dad tore his Achilles tendon (ouch) playing basketball. He walked on crutches until we reached the hospital. Dad went into the doctor’s office. Some time later he came out with a big caste on his foot and leg. As the family walked away, I was heard muttering under my kiddie breath, “let’s go get that man that hurt daddy’s leg. let’s go get that man that hurt my daddy’s leg.”
Vardaman’s trauma will manifest itself in powerful ways and in some of the most memorable lines of this book.
I’m not yet done with this, my second time reading this gorgeous slice of a book (the first time’s a distant dream), but I just wanted to pick up on one thing James notes in his post. He writes that he is amazed by “Faulkner’s ability to tell a story through such a fragmented narrative framework that nevertheless feels so immediately coherent and whole, and that sweeps one up so swiftly.” I’ve been finding myself this time around struck by this, too: that despite (we’ll say “despite,” for now) the fragmented structure of the thing, there’s a palpable coherence or even wholeness to AILD. There’s little doubt that these are discrete voices speaking to us, in turn. And yet the book isn’t cacophonous or scattered. (This book’s so muted.) Part of this is surely that they’re speaking to each other, too; that they’re moving about in the same small space (and often, even at the same time, even if the book necessarily presents them in succession), and seeing the “same” objects. (I’m bracketing, Paul, the question of whether AILD’s people are seeing the “same” things or not.) And yet, take Kurosawa’s Rashomon. The multiple, inevitably differing accounts of the “same” story, there, teach you in the quietest most direct way the impossibility of any one account being the whole or correct or true one. It’s weird. Because in AILD, on the other hand, these multiple voices seeing the same thing—Addie dying, say—don’t seem to compete with one another. They don’t put each other into question, really. Nor do they put into question the truth of what’s really happening. They relate: they gently bump into each other, overlap, layer, suddenly violently tap each other, veer off, like life under a microscope, almost. Their movement, the overlapping circles, is what’s true.
I saw this opera by the American composer John Moran six years ago. I don’t know if anyone’s seen/heard a Moran piece before, but it’s actually him, and in particular, this opera, Zenith 5!, that AILD is most making me think of. There’re eight people on stage in this opera, I think. I remember a guy dressed up as an “Indian,” an old woman in a rocking chair, a woman in a tight business suit, a small woman on a column in a tutu. Each character had a thing they did: the “Indian,” for example, would step forward two steps, raise his hand, say two sentences (I forget them), retreat two steps; the old woman would rock forward (the chair would squeak), lean in, make a noise, lean back (ditto), rock back; the woman in the tight business suit would march forward three steps, make this terrified face, show something in her eyes, and back; the small woman on the tuto would lift, twirl, return, sigh, lift, twirl, return, sigh. Each character’s “thing” was a component of the opera. Sometimes they’d occur discretely, other times overlapping, other times in rapid succession, other times only once every 5 minutes; each character’s “thing” was, at varying speeds (it wouldn’t’ve worked without varying speeds), on a loop. (Think of Cash’s horrible repeating saw: it’s on a loop.) The characters didn’t complete each other or anything like that. They had literally almost nothing to do with each other (except for the fact that they were on the same stage). And yet … their repeated overlappings created this whole. And, yeah, it swept me up swiftly.
The other thing I wanted to say, in response to James’ noticing that, somehow, there’s a wholeness or a coherence to this series of fragments, is that I’ve sensed this time around something like a single persisting voice. Running just under the polyphony. What I mean is, a voice that is present (if in the wings, or only for a second) in each fragment we get, a voice continuous over the course of the fragments. Is this Faulkner’s voice? Is Faulkner a character in AILD? Is “Faulkner”? Does some one voice—one not living in Mississippi, I don’t think, but within the context of AILD—persist throughout and within the succession of fragments? I marked two places with pink post-its. Page 56: “It as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components—snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is. I see him dissolve—legs, a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames—and float upon the dark in fading solution; all one yet neither; all either yet none. I can see hearing coil toward him, caressing, shaping his hard shape—fetlock, hip, shoulder and head; smell and sound. I am not afraid.” Who creeps in here? Is it, he, she disembodied? Calmer? Purer? Integral? Sober? Long dead? What butts in, here? Who? This voices that emerges here—it’s not, I want to say, Vardaman’s. Has it been here all along? Can it not be eradicated? Just even more briefly on page 63: “The cow breathes upon my hips and back, her breath warm, sweet, stertorous, moaning.” Who creeps in here? Stertorous? What? I’m willing to say that Dewey Dell does not use this word. So who does? What are they doing here? Are they an anonymous member of the town? An angel? What links the voice that says “stertorous” to the one that wonders on types of “is”es? I’ve learned, or been told (it’s near orthodoxy), that the single strong untainted authorial voice dies around the time that Faulkner is writing—dies, that is, in favor of polyphony. Wholeness for fracture; wholeness being no longer believable, not today. An unflinching monoglossia surrendered to heteroglossia type of thing. These are the times. I feel like I’m reading wrongly when James and I sense something like wholeness. Everyone knows (“ “) unified coherent wholes became impossible with modernity. I feel like I’m reading wrongly, too, when I hear a single voice persisting. When I hear, at least, a voice that persists just beneath the surface, and occasionally, without the fanfare with which the repressed typically returns (really, this other underlying voice just sort of quietly takes over for a moment), surfaces. What am I hearing? What is this thread that runs throughout each fragment, linking each to each, like the single thread that Quakers speak of? The one they say runs through each person present at Meeting?