Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century
by
Annette Ferran
As I Lay Dying
To
me, one of the most satisfying novels on the Modern Library’s list and one my
favorites from its prolific author, William Faulkner, is As I Lay Dying (#35).
Its chief appeals are its black humor and modernist experimental style. “As
I lay dying,” you can hear the unfortunate Addie Bundren say, “Just look what
all these idiots around me were doing.”
In the seriousness of their endeavors, they succumb to ludicrous
situations. And in their ridiculousness they unveil a great world.
The story is told as first-person narrative from a rotating
cast of about 15 characters. Their
intellectual acumen is varied.
Some are very young. Some have a loose grip on sanity. Some are
obsessive. Some are fairly wise and grounded at moments. Some are selfish. Some
are always striving to do the right thing. Some have big secrets. Some have a
marvelous way with words. Many of
the characters we learn about through others before hearing from them directly.
The dying woman, though the story pivots around her, appears
in her own voice in only one passage more than halfway through the book. Her passage is, among other things, a
meditation on words. It is a
poetical articulation of what Faulkner does in this novel through strings of
words, dialect, punctuation and italics that add up to repeated immersions into
other people’s consciousnesses – like mind-melding sometimes, or like
half-drowning in psychology, and sometimes like sensory overload, or like
watching a high-rise being built or a sculpture emerge from a lump of clay. The
story builds persistently. Understanding grows and blossoms. It comes back around to that note of
black humor: after everything everyone has been through, the father shows up at
the end (I won’t say in what circumstance) and you want to say on their behalf,
“Are you kidding me?!”
The basic outline of the plot can be gathered only after a
full reading of the book. Addie
married Anse years ago and had several children. She lived with them away from
where she grew up, and they understand that she wants to be buried back where
she came from. So once she dies,
they undertake to transport her body in a casket one of the sons made, in a
wagon pulled by mules across some miles of landscape, including wild waters. They
make it after several days, with the decaying body still in the wagon in the
casket. What they’ve lost in the journey, and what they’ve contended with
during it and before it are the juicy meat of the story.
Faulkner was a virtuoso and became a cultural icon. As cultural icon, later in his life, he
was critiqued for not knowing personally enough of the actual people from whom
the Civil Rights movement grew and around whom it swung. His astoundingly profound understanding
of people, and his equally astounding ability to bring that understanding to
life through words earned him that stature and with it the unreasonable
expectations not bestowed on other writers. He wrote of the South; therefore, he should have been, in
his writing, a political activist – like Steinbeck, perhaps. He fell short, in some eyes, of the
obligation of a cultural contributor.
Faulkner as novelist is obliged only to know his own
characters. In this aspect of the
duties of novel-writing, Faulkner is the ultimate role-model. He has no peer in American literature
thus far. His novels are
fundamentally character studies, and this one is the prime example. The world is created by individual
people and their individual stories meshing together even where the characters
themselves pass each other by in communication and comprehension. It is, as an added bonus, funny and
poignant and stylistically magical.
It has a rhythm that rushes and slows and turns back on itself and
rushes again. Each word, and each
missing word, paints the landscape in which these people dwell. Each expression
serves to fill out their living portraits.
Faulkner wrote to write, and this novel should be read to be
read.
Annette
Ferran lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher. She is also the Associate Editor
for 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.
