...and that my revenge would be that he would never know I was taking revenge.
AS I LAY DYING
By William Faulkner
I picked this up on a whim because it was lying around the house and I wanted something I could squeeze in between chapters of my other current read. Another impulse that drove the selection was a desire to infuse more of The Classics into my reading habits, The Classics here being liberally defined.
My familiar with Faulkner extended only as far as those famous short stories of his we were required to read in high school. I noted then, in stark contrast to Hemingway another staple of high school English, his long and elegant and lush sentences, towards which my own writing habits and stylistic preferences prejudiced me.
But when I started reading As I Lay Dying, what I found both confounded and surpassed my expectations.
Once I fought through the novel's stylistic impenetrability and grew at ease with the stream-of-consciousness narratives, the dangling pronouns, the occasional bursts of philosophical pronouncement alongside emphatically "written-as-it-sounds" dialogue, I began to really, really enjoy this piece of work and expect to be picking it apart in my mind for a long time to come.
The novel follows the odyssey of the Bundren family as they traverse Mississippi country to bury the recently deceased matriarch. The novel is told from 15 different points of view and the 59 chapters are of varying lengths, but none more than about five or six pages long. Structurally, I found this execution incredibly satisfying as each point of view chapter often stood alone with an ample degree of circularity and thematic singularity while tying into the overarching narrative. The characters breathed incredible specificity and I find Faulkner here an incredible ventriloquist. The varying degrees of articulateness make each character immediately identifiable and the often simple language becomes an awesomely effective vehicle for the profound insights into life and the act if living it that each character possesses.
Often times though, I would find the characters outside of a particular chapter's narrator inscrutable and frustrating, Anse in particular. He seemed like a combination of Job and Odysseus, not necessarily courting disaster but doing absolutely nothing to dodge it when it announced itself on the horizon. His constant calamity seemed more an act of inertia than anything else. He'd set down a particular path because he believed it the thing to do and if that path was made rough for him, then he was meant to have a rough go of it.
Another example is Darl's burning of the barn later on in the book, something his older brother Cash attempts to explain in his own chapter. But it all gave me the impression that so very much existed outside of the words of the story. It's never really articulated, but I believe Darl suffered from mental illness, which would make the particularly articulate and insightful and objective nature of his chapters a principal irony. Additionally, there was so much commentary on the changing nature of Southern values, town life and country life as well as the place of Biblical inevitability and faith in the midst of it all that I'm only beginning to wrap my head around. The novel, while presenting itself as sparse and spare, is filled to the brim with all this material for thought.
And I suspect that was the book's chief impact on me. It was like a mule going the other way, and I was walking past, staring at it, wondering where it had been and where it was off too, what wagon it'd been hitched to and what had happened to it, all the details of its journey; and as I turn around to ignore it and continue on my own journey, it kicks me in the small of my back with all the force and anger and stubbornness its been bearing, invisible, on its back all this time. And I'm left wondering what powered that kick, what made the mule so angry to lash out like that with so powerful and lasting a force as that.
That said, I'm immensely glad, in the end, I picked this one up. I think I might try The Sound and The Fury later on down the road.
By William Faulkner
I picked this up on a whim because it was lying around the house and I wanted something I could squeeze in between chapters of my other current read. Another impulse that drove the selection was a desire to infuse more of The Classics into my reading habits, The Classics here being liberally defined.
My familiar with Faulkner extended only as far as those famous short stories of his we were required to read in high school. I noted then, in stark contrast to Hemingway another staple of high school English, his long and elegant and lush sentences, towards which my own writing habits and stylistic preferences prejudiced me.
But when I started reading As I Lay Dying, what I found both confounded and surpassed my expectations.
Once I fought through the novel's stylistic impenetrability and grew at ease with the stream-of-consciousness narratives, the dangling pronouns, the occasional bursts of philosophical pronouncement alongside emphatically "written-as-it-sounds" dialogue, I began to really, really enjoy this piece of work and expect to be picking it apart in my mind for a long time to come.
The novel follows the odyssey of the Bundren family as they traverse Mississippi country to bury the recently deceased matriarch. The novel is told from 15 different points of view and the 59 chapters are of varying lengths, but none more than about five or six pages long. Structurally, I found this execution incredibly satisfying as each point of view chapter often stood alone with an ample degree of circularity and thematic singularity while tying into the overarching narrative. The characters breathed incredible specificity and I find Faulkner here an incredible ventriloquist. The varying degrees of articulateness make each character immediately identifiable and the often simple language becomes an awesomely effective vehicle for the profound insights into life and the act if living it that each character possesses.
Often times though, I would find the characters outside of a particular chapter's narrator inscrutable and frustrating, Anse in particular. He seemed like a combination of Job and Odysseus, not necessarily courting disaster but doing absolutely nothing to dodge it when it announced itself on the horizon. His constant calamity seemed more an act of inertia than anything else. He'd set down a particular path because he believed it the thing to do and if that path was made rough for him, then he was meant to have a rough go of it.
Another example is Darl's burning of the barn later on in the book, something his older brother Cash attempts to explain in his own chapter. But it all gave me the impression that so very much existed outside of the words of the story. It's never really articulated, but I believe Darl suffered from mental illness, which would make the particularly articulate and insightful and objective nature of his chapters a principal irony. Additionally, there was so much commentary on the changing nature of Southern values, town life and country life as well as the place of Biblical inevitability and faith in the midst of it all that I'm only beginning to wrap my head around. The novel, while presenting itself as sparse and spare, is filled to the brim with all this material for thought.
And I suspect that was the book's chief impact on me. It was like a mule going the other way, and I was walking past, staring at it, wondering where it had been and where it was off too, what wagon it'd been hitched to and what had happened to it, all the details of its journey; and as I turn around to ignore it and continue on my own journey, it kicks me in the small of my back with all the force and anger and stubbornness its been bearing, invisible, on its back all this time. And I'm left wondering what powered that kick, what made the mule so angry to lash out like that with so powerful and lasting a force as that.
That said, I'm immensely glad, in the end, I picked this one up. I think I might try The Sound and The Fury later on down the road.