*As I Lay Dying* is the center of Faulkner’s achievement, a slowburning pyre of savage eloquence, a funeral expedition in the black of mourning. “I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again.” Working as a coal-shoveler at the local dynamo, Faulkner improvised a makeshift desk out of an upturned wheelbarrow, scribbling chapters in-between shifts. “As I lay dying the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyelids for me as I descended into Hades.” So spake Agamemnon’s shade in Book XI of *The Odyssey*.
But Addie’s pilgrimage to her gravesite is (entertainingly) besmirched by the black machinations of the Bundren clan, a tragic farce rolling in the squelch of the wagon-ruts – but without transcendance, without catharsis, almost without hope. Addie’s miserly lump of a husband, searching for new teeth and a new wife, Darl’s simmering schizophrenia, frittering away at the edge of disquiet, Cash’s halfway-demented stoicism, Jewel’s hellbent-for-leather mad-dog brutality. By the end of the novel, the Bundrens have spanned the (a)moral compass from qualified heroism to remarkable stupidity to outrageous cruelty and betrayal. But their experiences hardly ever avail them to Epiphany, except in flashes for Darl, whose incipient mental illness seems a sort of Demiurgic punishment for presuming to know as much as he does.
Faulkner’s language stutters, broods, crackles, plods, lashes, purls, trots, sashays, and burbles. His ekphrases are sopping wet, mud-splashed, paranoid, opaque, biting, feverish, and yes, even poetical at times. Take the murder ballads of Johnny Cash, darken them further with the withering mosquito-net confessions of Conrad’s stoic refugees, then spinal-tap this walking corpse with the elliptical viscerality of Joyce’s *Ulysses*, and you have something approaching the claw-hammer prose of Faulkner’s slow funeral.
The multiple 1st-person viewpoints make us sad that none of these tragicomic voices, each splintered from an inclusive 3rd-person GNOSIS, each trapped in their own cell of being, will ever be able to synthesize their travails into an intuitive, life-affirming perspective. Indeed, the reader, who has all the separate narratives at his disposal, is not necessarily in a better position. Faulkner, for all his elliptic poetry and stirring folkways, does not throw the buoy out to our drowning readerly hearts. Like the Compsens in *The Sound and the Fury*, the Bundrens (blind and battered) at journey’s end don’t find themselves standing at the threshold of change, of resurrection. This ain’t no Flannery O’Connor parable of anagogical rebirth and communion with Our Lord through violence and misadventure. What is remarkable, finally, is that this depraved clan of agrarian ne’er-do-wells can be capable of such feats of negative triumph and of triumphal negation, or as Faulkner scholar Jan Bakker put it, “Heroism is to be found in the most unlikely places, endurance in the most unlikely people, and both may be generated by the most unlikely circumstances. [But] while exerting himself in the most unlikely manner for the most unlikely causes, it is impossible for the individual to know the whole truth.”
*As I Lay Dying* reads like the episodic fever-dream of a long sickness. But our convalescence only cycles us back to a renewed emptiness, to the same heap of gristle and clutch of bones, to the same brooding necroticism. The reader may benefit from Faulkner’s moral enema but his characters, Darl, Vardaman, Dewey Dell, Cash, Jewel, Anse, and Addie, are doomed. In all, a masterpiece of literary pathogenesis and one of the ten most important novels of the preceding century.
