Faulkner: As I Lay Dying

Taking a break from Middle Eastern studies, I've book-traveled a bit closer to home - although Faulkner's mountain people of northeastern Mississippi are as foreign to me as anyone I've met through literature.

And I think they were a bit foreign to Faulkner, too, as lowlander that he was, he invites his readers to share his contempt for their uncivilized ways.

Their religion is hokum - i.e. the more they've got, the blinder they are. Like the pious Cora who is the quintessential unreliable narrator, or the bungling Anse who believes that God has chosen him, just like the Jews, in order to afflict him with bad luck or his ever-dying wife who was screwed by the pastor of New Hope church.

They don't care about their wives and children - except as work horses, to be replaced when broken or worn out.

And most importantly - for a Southern Gentleman like Faulkner - they have no honor. Both of the women in the piteous Bundren family have had sex outside of marriage with men who disrespected them.

So there they are - lazy dad, his pregnant daughter, and his crippled or crazy sons borrowing a cart to haul the stinking corpse of the dead mother, while the rivers rage, barns burn, and a flock of buzzards follows them from above.

"Who's your real father?" is a question all too familiar to such folk -- as well as -- "where can I get an abortion?"

Which makes this story a bit cartoonish -- as a darker version of "Snuffy Smith" or "Lil' Abner"

But the writing is often as delicious as Shakespeare, and the characters do tend to wax philosophical - often about issues of language - so this curious novel has entered the canon of great English literature.

And it's also a lot of fun to read --- if only to figure out what the hell is going on as the author has tried to disappear and let his crazy or inarticulate characters do all the talking.

It's hard to believe it ever got published in the first place -- back before Faulkner was Faulkner, and before one could surf the internet to find explanations written for the tortured school children who are required to read it.

Did Darl really suffer from PTSD as a result of combat in World War I? That would certainly explain a lot about him -- but nobody mentions that fact. (one more proof that mountain people lack honor. Townsfolk, like Faulkner himself, would let everyone know about their heroic wartime experiences, even if there weren't any)

The problem here is that the central character -- the mother who dies -- hates her own life, and therefore everyone else as well. Curiously, this has made her a proto-feminist heroine, especially as she rejects the language made by men to keep women down and deny her some kind of true companionship.

But this life-hater could never have been a true companion to anyone - even her bastard son, Jewel, who breaks her heart by showing enough independence to acquire a magnificent horse.

She reminds me of Eileen Chang's Yindi in Rouge of the North - as another woman with a very bad attitude, but one who hardly had been forced into a life of misery.

She chose it --- she got it --- she shared it.

But unlike Chang, Faulkner let's all his characters tell the story - so the tone of the book is not dark and depressing. Indeed -- it feels humorous, at least to me.

This is a book that demands multiple readings since each re-reading makes sense of yet another inscrutable passage - and there are always a few left that defy understanding.

But how much more attention does this miserable family deserve?

Thank God the library would not let me renew it for a third time - but now I am curious about how the author wrote about his own kind of people, so I may come back to him later.

BTW - I chose to read this book because my mother was reading it - and as it turns it out -- it was one of the last books she read before she lay dying herself.

But I'm not going to haul her coffin around!