February 2021. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
1930, Vintage, 290 pages. Written in English, read in English.
The first novel I’ve read by William Faulkner was “The Sound and the Fury”. As with several of his other books, it is set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha county in Mississippi. As with several of his other novels, it is told in various different voices, some of them undecipherable. It takes a lot of effort to get into this novel — it should not be read lightly. And when I finished it, I thought it was an anomaly, that Faulkner’s other books were more straightforward. And having “As I Lay Dying” in the list of David Bowie’s favourite books, I was looking forward to reading it, as I’ve read in several places it was considered to be Faulkner’s masterpiece.
I’ve learned very quickly that “The Sound and the Fury” was not an anomaly. At least as far as some of the other novels taking place in the Yoknapatawpha country were concerned. “As I Lay Dying”, then, is also told in various voices, and it is also far from being completely decipherable. But that is Faulkner’s beauty, I discovered. The story, as it is outlined in the synopsis — can be made as simple as it can be made complicated, and Faulkner takes it in all of these different directions at once. It is the story of a woman, a mother of five, Addie Bundren, who dies. And of her husband, Anse, who made her a promise to take her to be buried in her family’s plot in a different town called Jefferson. And of his five children who are drawn into the unfolding odyssey. None of the characters are happy, most are not going to be made any happier by the time their adventure is done. And within the myriad of voices telling the story — some in first person, some in third person, to make things a bit more complex — several stories emerge, the stories of a discontent family held down by the most oblivious character I have ever encountered in a novel — Anse Bundren. He is what I can only refer to, gingerly, as a simpleton. His world is comprised of a very limited terrain and anything that occurs beyond that terrain is incomprehensible to him, therefore he is the only character that comes out of this adventure with any kind of victory — because he doesn’t realize that it could have happened any other way.
The story unfolds over the simple errand of carrying Addie Bunden’s coffin to Jefferson, where her relatives are buried. But a fallen bridge, the stubborn decision of Anse to cross the ford anyway, the oldest son’s injury and another’s burns, and the natural progression of a coffin with a dead body in it, being carried on the road for eight days, contribute to making this simple errand a grand undertaking. And within it, several flashbacks reveal further stories, of incest, and attempted abortion, and rape, and two children who are remote from this world, each in his own way. And into all of this mess, Addie’s character must barge in as well for one chapter, to try and set some order. Obviously, she does not succeed.
Faulkner manages, however, to make this one of the funniest and saddest narratives I’ve ever read, one that you can appreciate, that you can fathom its narrative, only after it sets.
And by now, I’ve realized the truth about Faulkner — probably all of his novels are weird and undecipherable, but that means I will always be coming back.
The March 2021 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be Inferno by Dante Alighieri.
