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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hobbes Got Most of It Right,
By Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
This review is from: As I Lay Dying (Mass Market Paperback)
Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan of 1651: "No arts; no letters; no society; and what is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Well now, y'all, ain't that a summary of the life of rural Southerners through most of the century after the Civil War? And ain't it exactly what William Faulkner portrayed in this 'tour de force' novella, As I Lay Dying? Except Hobbes made no explicit inclusion of "women", whose lives as depicted by Faulkner were perhaps less brutish than those of their menfolk but equally nasty and poor. Hobbes also missed the mark with "short". Addie Bundren, her husband Anse, the "pussel-gutted" 70-year-old country doctor -- central characters in As I Lay Dying -- all have occasion to lament that they've lived too long, that death comes torturously slowly when one is ripe for it. The structure of this novella is its most remarkable quality. Addie Bundren lies dying in her mountain shack, while her son Cash meticulously builds a coffin for her outside the window. Her shiftless slovenly husband Anse has promised Addie that he will bury her with "her people" in Jefferson, several days' travel by buggy on dirt roads from the Bundren farm. Nature intervenes against the plan by flooding the land and destroying a key bridge. The story is told in chunks of reverie, inside the minds of Addie's sons and daughter, husband, neighbors, doctor, preacher, and Addie herself, whose 'thoughts' persist after she is dead and decaying in her coffin. The daughter has her own secret trouble, an unwed pregnancy. The sons are each and all "not quite right" in their heads, as there more functional neighbors perceive them. The family and the community seethes with bitter alienation from each other, living as Hobbes said, in continual fear of violence and Judgement, in despair and self-pity. The narrative structure is a marvel of psychological revelation and suspense. Each character exposes his/her existential solitude and anguish in graphic images. No question: As I Lay Dying is a glorious feat of imagination and word-craft. It's also a profoundly dishonest book. What I can't decide is whether Faulkner's dishonesty was conscious - literary snake-oil, pandering to the market for spiritualist sensationalism on a level with Dan Brown - or unconscious, ingrained, sincere, Faulkner's actual mentality. What's dishonest about it? Start with the various narrative "voices". Darl, the dark thoughtful probably psychotic son, is impossible to believe. He's too literately literary. His sensual perceptions are stuff from a van Gogh painting; his thoughts are right out of Kierkegaard. The same 'dissonance' crops up in the reveries of every character except the stolid plain-folk Tulls. Even the vocabulary placed in their reveries by their creator/author is false to their culture and education, or lack thereof. The melange of hill-country dialect and almost Shakespearian rhetoric is false to one side or the other. In other words, I don't believe these people could or would have these thoughts; either the characters are only antiphonal mouthpieces for the philosophical muddles of the author or else the author has deceived himself about humanity. If I understand Faulkner's method at all, he is seeking to portray the sorts of spiritual/mental epiphanies that come to certain people without words, but he of course is using words to do so. The words on the page are not 'really' the words of Darl or his kid brother Vardaman, but rather the unspoken and unspeakable "knowledge" they carry in their blood. "Wise Blood" is Flannery O'Connor's phrase, not Faulkner's, but the concept is fundamental to Faulkner's representation of humanity. Darl has "wise blood." But that's an odious concept! Should I call it mythologizing, evasiveness, or just plain hogwash? It's Faulkner's obdurate mythologizing of the Old South that always spoils my enjoyment of his literary craft. But then, I can put up with 'magic realism' and other gimcrack nonsense from lots of other brilliant poets and novelists, so I suppose it's the pernicious history of Southern racism, reactionary politics, and stubborn contempt for the rest of the nation, all of which Faulkner enshrines in his portrayal of Southern 'virtues', that I can't ignore or appreciate. Note please that I haven't denied Faulkner's genius as a wordsmith. I've given this book its five stars. But what I've tried to offer here is specifically an interpretation of the book's content, and of the cultural grid within which the content "makes sense." One of the embittered commenters on this review has declared that she "doesn't want an interpretation." But that's precisely what I find worth writing. I'm not an agent for the publisher. I don't choose to write a synopsis, or a paean to the author, or an endorsement. I'm interested in 'content' and context. If you want a differnt kind of review, look elsewhere!
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