As I Lay Dying (27 page)

9. This is a novel full of acts of love, not the least of which is the prolonged search in the river for Cash’s tools. Consider some of the other ways that love is expressed among the members of the family. What compels loyalty in this family? What are the ways in which that loyalty is betrayed? Which characters are most self-interested?

10. The saga of the Bundren family is participated in, and reflected upon, by many other characters. What does the involvement of Doctor Peabody, of Armstid, and of Cora and Vernon Tull say about the importance of community in country life? Are the characters in the town meant to provide a contrast with country people?

11. Does Faulkner deliberately make humor and the grotesque interdependent in this novel? What is the effect of such horrific details
as Vardaman’s accidental drilling of holes in his dead mother’s face? Of Darl and Vardaman listening to the decaying body of Addie “speaking”? Of Vardaman’s anxiety about the growing number of buzzards trying to get at the coffin? Of Cash’s bloody broken leg, set in concrete and suppurating in the heat? Of Jewel’s burnt flesh? Of the “cure” that Dewey Dell is tricked into?

12. In one of the novel’s central passages, Addie meditates upon the distance between words and actions: “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 the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words” [
see here
]. What light does this passage shed upon the meaning of the novel? Aren’t words necessary in order to give form to the story of the Bundrens? Or is Faulkner saying that words—his own chosen medium—are inadequate?

13. What does the novel reveal about the ways in which human beings deal with death, grieving, and letting go of our loved ones?

WILLIAM FAULKNER

(1897–1962)

W
illiam Cuthbert Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry and Maud Butler Falkner (he later added the “u” to the family name himself). In 1904 the family moved to the university town of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner was to spend most of his life. He was named for his greatgrandfather “The Old Colonel,” a Civil War veteran who built a railroad, wrote a bestselling romantic novel called
The White Rose of Memphis
, became a Mississippi state legislator, and was eventually killed in what may or may not have been a duel with a disgruntled business partner. Faulkner identified with this robust and energetic ancestor and often said that he inherited the “ink stain” from him.

Never fond of school, Faulkner left at the end of football season his senior year of high school, and began working at his grandfather’s bank. In 1918, after his plans to marry his sweetheart Estelle Oldham were squashed by their families, he tried to enlist as a pilot in the U.S. Army but was rejected because he did not meet the height and weight requirements. He went to Canada, where he pretended to be an Englishman and joined the RAF training program there. Although he did not complete his training until after the war ended and never saw combat, he returned to his hometown in uniform, boasting of war wounds. He briefly attended the University of Mississippi, where he began to publish his poetry.

After spending a short time living in New York, he again returned to Oxford, where he worked at the university post office. His first book, a collection of poetry,
The Marble Faun
, was published at Faulkner’s own expense in 1924. The writer Sherwood Anderson, whom he met in New Orleans in 1925, encouraged him to try writing fiction, and his first novel,
Soldier’s Pay
, was published in 1926. It was followed by
Mosquitoes
. His next novel, which he titled
Flags in the Dust
, was rejected by his publisher and twelve others to whom he submitted it. It was eventually published in drastically edited form as
Sartoris
(the original version was not issued until after his death). Meanwhile, he was writing
The Sound and the Fury
, which, after being rejected by one publisher, came out in 1929 and received many ecstatic reviews, although it sold poorly. Yet again, a new novel,
Sanctuary
, was initially rejected by his publisher, this time as “too shocking.” While working on the night shift at a power plant, Faulkner wrote what he was determined would be his masterpiece,
As I Lay Dying
. He finished it in about seven weeks, and it was published in 1930, again to generally good reviews and mediocre sales.

In 1929 Faulkner had finally married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle, after her divorce from her first husband. They had a premature daughter, Alabama, who died ten days after birth in 1931; a second daughter, Jill, was born in 1933.

With the eventual publication of his most sensational and violent (as well as, up till then, most successful) novel,
Sanctuary
(1931), Faulkner was invited to write scripts for MGM and Warner Brothers, where he was responsible for much of the dialogue in the film versions of Hemingway’s
To Have and Have Not
and Chandler’s
The Big Sleep
, and many other films. He continued to write novels and published many stories in the popular magazines.
Light in August
(1932) was his first attempt to address the racial issues of the South, an effort continued in
Absalom, Absalom!
(1936), and Go
Down, Moses
(1942). By 1946, most of Faulkner’s novels were out of print in the United States (although they remained well-regarded in Europe), and he was seen as a minor, regional writer. But then the influential editor and critic Malcolm Cowley, who had earlier championed Hemingway and Fitzgerald and others of their generation, put together the
Portable Faulkner
, and once again Faulkner’s genius was recognized, this time for good. He received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature as well as many other awards and accolades, including the National Book Award and the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and France’s Legion of Honor.

In addition to several collections of short fiction, his other novels include
Pylon
(1935),
The Unvanquished
(1938),
The Wild Palms
(1939),
The Hamlet
(1940),
Intruder in the Dust
(1948),
A Fable
(1954),
The Town
(1957),
The Mansion
(1959), and
The Reivers
(1962).

William Faulkner died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962, in Oxford, Mississippi, where he is buried.

“He is the greatest artist the South has produced.… Indeed, through his many novels and short stories, Faulkner fights out the moral problem which was repressed after the nineteenth century [yet] for all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics.”
—R
ALPH
E
LLISON

“Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well of human weakness. He knew
that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being.”
—J
OHN
S
TEINBECK

“For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner’s works] are without equal in our time and country.”
—R
OBERT
P
ENN
W
ARREN

“No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about that heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there.”
—E
UDORA
W
ELTY

APPROACHING WILLIAM FAULKNER

As with any great literature, there are probably as many ways to read William Faulkner’s writing as there are readers. There are hundreds of books devoted to interpretations of his novels, numerous biographies, and every year high school teachers and college professors guide their students through one or more of the novels. But after all is said and done, there are the books themselves, and the pleasure of reading them can be deep and lasting. The language Faulkner uses ranges from the poetically beautiful, nearly biblical to the coarse sounds of rough dialect. His characters linger in the mind, whether for their heroism or villainy, their stoicism or self-indulgence, their honesty or deceitfulness or self-deception, their wisdom or stupidity, their gentleness or cruelty. In short, like Shakespeare, William Faulkner understood what it means to be human.

Much of Faulkner’s fiction is set in the fictional Mississippi county Yoknapatawpha
(Yok’na pa taw pha)
and most of his characters are southerners who to one degree or another, are struggling with life in a country that has experienced defeat, resisting change, and dealing with a lingering nostalgia for a time that many of them never knew. Faulkner’s South is, of course, a segregated South, and most of his characters are white southerners, many of whom have not and will not accept the reality of racial equality. Faulkner himself became involved in the early Civil Rights struggle, but being a southerner who rarely left the small Mississippi college town where he grew up, he understood the difficulty of the racial divide, and in his writing we can find some of the most subtle explanations of the difficult relationship between blacks and white, as well as some of the most horrifying descriptions of the effects of racial hatred.

But if Faulkner were only concerned with the lives of southerners in the long period after the Civil War and into the first half of the twentieth century, his writing would not have the appeal it does (and he might not have received the Nobel Prize for Literature). Faulkner deals with universal themes, and his characters, speaking in their own, sometimes barely articulate, sometimes profoundly insightful voices, express the fears, joys, and confusion of struggling with life: the voices of the Bundren family and their neighbors and acquaintances alternating in
As I Lay Dying
lend the narrative much more power than a simple telling of the plot would. Allowing the “idiot” Benjy to narrate the first section of
The Sound and the Fury
, in which time is confused and details accumulate slowly, makes the reader consider how events are interpreted and what the mind makes of memories. In
Light in August
, Joe Christmas never knows his true origins, but his assumptions, and the beliefs of others, lead to a dramatic portrayal of the effects of prejudice.

Often tragic, sometimes absurdly comic, Faulkner’s plots are frequently driven by forces that cannot be controlled by his characters: the definition of classic tragedy. In
As I Lay Dying
, the family set off on a journey to fulfill the dying wish of Addie Bundren, only to be stymied by an almost biblical series of events: fire and flood among them. Benjy, Quentin, and Jason Compton in
The Sound and the Fury
are each affected by something that happened to their sister, which they could not or did not prevent, and perhaps by the effects of history itself. In
Light in August
, the lives of two characters who never meet, Lena Grove and Joe Christmas, lead to both horrifying tragedy and a small but significant ray of hope.