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As I Lay Dying ()


Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century (35)

The reasons for conservative denunciation of Freud, Darwin and Marx are pretty self evident, but why is Einstein so often pinned in this same crossfire?  It is not that the Theory of Relativity is, in itself, a social ill.  Rather, the source of the enmity is the misappropriation of a more generalized ethos of relativity by the nattering Left, which has served to undermine the belief that there is such a thing as truth and that it is discernible by us.  The strength of this insidious attack, of course, lies in it's being partly correct.  If you've ever seen Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, you know the power of the argument that learning the truth can depend on gaining the proper perspective.  But, this said, the danger lies in pushing the argument further and saying that we can never be certain of the truth because we can never be certain that we have achieved that proper perspective.

As I Lay Dying is an early experiment in just this kind of relativistic storytelling.  The story of a group of cracker trash on a six day trek to bury a dead woman is told in a series of 59 interior monologues by family, friends, neighbors and even the corpse.  Nearly seventy years on, this may seem like a pretty minor innovation.  It is not minor at all; the implication is that the traditional single narrator does not suffice.  More than that, it is an attempt to undermine the notion that one person can ever comprehend the (or any) whole story.  Of course, the interesting thing about this argument, as seen best in Rashomon, is that by presenting the story at all, the author (filmmaker) is implying that they are presenting the whole story, an irony that is surely lost on them.  The import of their attack on truth is obviously that, if everything is relative, if reality depends on where you view it from and if history depends on who you ask, then it is impossible to pronounce sets of moral standards for mankind.  Ultimately, God and morality and the viability of laws depend on our ability to say some things are simply true and to make judgments about what is good and what is evil.  Complete relativity precludes this capacity; one man's evil may be another man's good.  This is why Einstein gets tarred with the same brush as the true intellectual villains of the age.

So much for the malignant form of the novel, on to it's diabolical substance.  During her monologue, Addie, our corpse, repeats her Father's admonition that:  "the reason for living is to get ready to stay dead a long time."  This is the essence of Faulkner's existentialist mission here.  The absurdity of death, as symbolized by the rotting corpse, is supposed to demonstrate that life itself is meaningless.  Meanwhile, the eventual institutionalization of Darl, is intended to call into question the entire idea of sanity and insanity in an insane world.  But, once you've denied the possibility of truth, Faulkner is right, everything is absurd.  This is the danger in what he's trying to do.  What, after all, is the point of attacking the very basis of man's existence, unless you hate man and society and embrace nihilism?

This is an anti-human book; not merely bad, but evil.   Burn it.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (F)


Websites:

William Faulkner Links:

    -WIKIPEDIA: William Faulkner
    -FILMOGRAPHY: William Faulkner (IMDB)
    -ENTRY: William Failkner (Mississippi Writers Page)
    -William Faulkner (Poetry Foundation)
    -BIO: William Faulkner (Nobel Prize)
    -Faulkner at Virginia
    -Center for Faulkner Studies (Southeast Missouri State University)
    -TRIBUTE SITE: DIGITAL Yoknapatawpha
    -LECTURE: "I decline to accept the end of man." (William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech, Stockholm, Sweden, December 10, 1950)
    -INTERVIEW: William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12 (Interviewed by Jean Stein, SPRING 1956, Paris Review)
    -VIDEO: Writings of William Faulkner: From Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s home, the guests talked about his life and his writings, focusing on the Yoknapatawpha County novels (C-SPAN, MAY 5, 2002)
    -VIDEO: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury: The panel talked about the works of Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning Southern writer William Faulkner. (C-SPAN, DECEMBER 9, 2001)
    -VIDEO: Shelby Foote on Faulkner: Mr. Foote talked about the writings of William Faulkner and his view of the South (C-SPAN, MAY 2, 2002)
    -ESSAY: AN INNOCENT AT RINKSIDE: NOBEL PRIZE NOVELIST WILLIAM FAULKNER LAST WEEK SAW HIS FIRST HOCKEY GAME. HE WAS SI'S GUEST AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, WHERE MONTREAL PLAYED THE NEW YORK RANGERS. AFTERWARD FAULKNER RECORDED THESE VIVID IMPRESSIONS OF A SCENE HE FOUND "DISCORDED AND INCONSEQUENT...BIZARRE...ALMOST BEAUTIFUL" (WILLIAM FAULKNER, 1/24/1956, Sports Illustrated)
    -PODCAST: Short Fuse Podcast #67: Reflecting on William Faulkner (Elizabeth Howard, 5/14/24, ArtsFuse)
    -ESSAY: William Faulkner’s Last Words & the American Dilemma (M.E. Bradford, September 24th, 2023, Imaginative Conservative)
    -WIKIPEDIA: Absalom, Absalom!
    -ENTRY: William Faulkner American author (Michael Millgate, Encyclopaedia Britannica)
    -ENTRY: Absalom, Absalom! novel by Faulkner (Richard Godden, Encyclopaedia Britannica)
    -ENTRY: Absalom, Absalom! (Encyclopedia.com)
    -AUDIO BOOK: W. Kandinsky reads 'Absalom, Absalom!' (You Tube)
    -INTERACTIVE CHRONOLOGY: Absalom, Absalom! (STEPHEN RAILTON & WILL ROURK, UNIV OF VIRGINIA)
    -STUDY GUIDE: Absalom, Absalom! (Grade Saver)
    -STUDY GUIDE: Absalom, Absalom! (Study.com)
    -STUDY GUIDE: Absalom, Absalom! (Cliff Notes)
    -STUDY GUIDE: Absalom, Absalom! (Spark Notes)
    -ESSAY: How Much Did the History of American Chattel Slavery Shape William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!?: W. Ralph Eubanks on the Connection Between Faulkner’s Fiction, His Longtime Home, and the University of Mississippi (W. Ralph Eubanks, July 29, 2021, LitHub)
    -ESSAY: Imagining the Lives of the Aviators Who Inspired William Faulkner: Taylor Brown on Looking to the Past (Which Isn't Even Past) (Taylor Brown, April 21, 2022, LitHub)
    -ESSAY: William Faulkner’s Tragic Vision: In Yoknapatawpha County, the past never speaks with a single voice. (Jonathan Clarke, Winter 2022, City Journal)
    -ESSAY: Old Rowan Oak: William Faulkner’s Conservatism (Carl Rollyson|September 24th, 2021, Imaginative Conservative)
    -ESSAY: Faulkner as Futurist: The past is never dead because its meaning is forever changing. (Carl Rollyson, Hedgehog Review)
    -ESSAY: American myths: Demystifying William Faulkner Paul Giles, December 2020, Australian Book Review)
    -ESSAY: William Faulkner’s Demons: In his own life, the novelist failed to truly acknowledge the evils of slavery and segregation. But he did so with savage thoroughness in his fiction. (Casey Cep, November 23, 2020, The New Yorker)
    -ESSAY: Understanding William Faulkner (Mark Royden Winchell, September 24th, 2020, Imaginative Conservatism)
    -ESSAY: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner: American Ulysses: A perfect novel and distinctive, masterful version of the stream-of-consciousness style (Lucy Sweeney Byrne, 8/15/20, Irish Times)
    -ESSAY: The Many Guises of William Faulkner: As 'The Sound and the Fury' celebrates its 90th anniversary, read about two-time Fiction winner William Faulkner's varied career (Sean Murphy, The Pulitzer Prizes)
    -ESSAY: William Faulkner’s Hollywood Odyssey: The biggest name in Southern lit didn’t spend his whole life in Mississippi (JOHN MERONEY, April/May 2014, Garden & Gun)
    -REVIEW ESSAY: How William Faulkner Tackled Race — and Freed the South From Itself (John Jeremiah Sullivan, June 28, 2012, NY Times)
    -REVIEW ESSAY: What to Do About William Faulkner: A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it. (DREW GILPIN FAUST, SEPTEMBER 2020, The Atlantic)
Perhaps the most powerful of Faulkner’s tellings of the Civil War story is Absalom, Absalom! (1936), a novel structured around Quentin Compson’s own refusal to look away. Although Faulkner insisted that Quentin did not speak for him, Gorra has “never quite believed him.” Quentin’s search to understand why Charles Bon was murdered during the very last days of the war unfolds through his elaboration of successive narratives in a manner not unlike Faulkner’s own. Unsatisfied with each version of the story he uncovers, Quentin looks again, arriving through ever more disturbing revelations at the South’s original sin: the distorting and dehumanizing power of race. It is race that pulls the trigger. “So it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear,” Bon says just before Henry, at once his brother and his fiancée’s brother, shoots him.

    -ESSAY: Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" and the Mysterious Rosa Coldfield (Alicia D. Costello, 2010, Inquiries)
    -ESSAY: Absalom, Absalom! as a Hardboiled Detective Novel: Faulkner's Rereading of The Sound and the Fury (SUWABE Koichi, THE FAULKNER JOURNAL OF JAPAN)
    -ESSAY: From Genesis to Revelation: The Grand Design of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (Maxine Rose, Autumn 1980, Studies in American Fiction)
    -ESSAY: Poetic Justice in William Faulkner's "Absalom Absalom" (MANUELA GERTZ)
    -ESSAY: Reading Bon's Letter and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (David Krause, March 1984, PMLA)
    -ESSAY: Faulkner's Map of Yoknapatawpha: The End of Absalom, Absalom! (Robert Hamblin, Center for Faulkner Studies)
    -ESSAY: "ABSALOM, ABSALOM!" AND THE NEGRO QUESTION (JOHN V. HAGOPIAN, Summer 1973, Modern Fiction Studies)
    -ESSAY: The Biblical Background Of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (JOHN V. HAGOPIAN, January 1974, CEA Critic)
    -ESSAY: An Archetypal Study on William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (Haihui Chen, Theory and Practice in Language Studies)
    -ESSAY: Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Me (Ed Protzel, 6/27/2016)
    -ESSAY: Symposium on Absalom, Absalom! (Richard Ford, Spring 2013, Three Penny Review)
    -ESSAY: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!: A Narrative of Inexhaustible Word and Unfathomable Past (Djamila Houamdi, IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship)
    -THESIS: Impressions of morality in Absalom, Absalom! (Eric G. R. Stephenson, University of Colorado)
    -ESSAY: The Postmodernist Features In Absalom Absalom English Literature (UK Essays, 1st Jan 1970)
    -ESSAY: Absalom, Absalom!: Story-telling as a mode of transcendence (Richard Forrer, Fall 1976, The Southern Literary Journal)
    -ETEXT: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom: A Case book (Fred Hobson, editor)
    -ESSAY: Narrating the Indeterminate: Shreve McCannon in Absalom, Absalom! (Jo Alyson Parker)
    -ESSAY: Postmodern Truth in William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" (Nahid Sharifi, H. R. Rezayee and *Kh. Mohamadpour, Life Sciences Journal)
    -ESSAY: Narrative Voice in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom (Literature Essay Samples, March 1, 2019)
    -ESSAY: Reflection of History in Absalom, Absalom!
    -ESSAY: Faulkner's Stylistic Difficulty: A Formal Analysis of Absalom, Absalom! (Eric Sandarg, 12-14-2017, Georgia State University)
    -ESSAY: As I Lay Trying: How to read William Faulkner: Advice for reading William Faulkner (Christopher Rieger, 4/26/16, MPR)
    -ESSAY: Ragged, Unkempt, Strange: On William Faulkner: For all the ways it is rife with tenderness, fury and ugliness, William Faulkner’s fiction is stubbornly persistent in its artistry. (Joanna Scott, NOVEMBER 20, 2012, The Nation)
    -ESSAY: Sutpen's Delay in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (Robert Yarup, 07 Aug 2010, The Explicator)
    -ESSAY: Nic Pizzolatto on 'Absalom, Absalom!' (To the Best of Our Knowledge: Bookmarks)
    -ESSAY: James Joyce and His Influences: William Faulkner and Anthony Burgess (An abstract of a Dissertation by Maxine i!3urke, July, Ll.981, Drake University)
    -ESSAY: Joyce and Faulkner (Thomas E. Connolly, Summer, 1979, James Joyce Quarterly)
    -ESSAY: The Jim Crow South in Faulkner’s Fiction (Michael Gorra, NYRB)
    -ESSAY: Down Through the Faulkner Bloodline, Pride and Racial Guilt Commingled: Michael Gorra on William Faulkner's Great-Grandfather (Michael Gorra, August 24, 2020, LitHub)
    -ESSAY: You Need to Read Faulkner Right Now but You Might Need a Map: No white American author has ever written so well about the racial complexities of his country, but no author poses more challenges to unsuspecting readers. Here’s a guide (Michael Gorra, Sep. 13, 2020, daily Beast)
    -ARCHIVES: The Faulkner Journal of Japan
    -REVIEW: of Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (Dave Nash, Medium)
This novel requires time and attention, it’s not something to read in two minute intervals, it’s not for scanning or skimming, its paragraphs go for pages; its longest sentence is 1292 words. Faulkner’s flowing style, long sentences, stream of consciousness writing conveys all the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of a single moment. It enables Faulkner to throw everything he has into each page, put his heart in every paragraph, and make each sentence piece of his soul.

    -REVIEW: of Absalom, Absalom! (Arthur Hirsch, Baltimore Sun)
    -REVIEW: of Absalom, Absalom! (KC Public Library)
    -REVIEW: of Absalom, Absalom! (Rose Reads Novels)
    -REVIEW: of Absalom, Absalom! (J. A. Bryant, Jr., Twentieth-Century Southern Literature)
    -REVIEW: of Absalom, Absalom! (Michael A. Khan)
    -REVIEW: of Absalom, Absalom! (Literary Corner Cafe)
    -REVIEW: of As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (Orlo Williams, September 26, 1935, Times Literary Supplement)
    -REVIEW: Of As I Lay Dying (EL Doctorow)
    -
   
-REVIEW: of THE SADDEST WORDS: WILLIAM FAULKNER'S CIVIL WAR BY MICHAEL GORRA (Leo Robson, Bookforum)
    -REVIEW: of Forgotten Conservatives in American History by Brion McClanahan & Clyde Wilson (Stephen M. Klugewiz, American Conservative)

Book-related and General Links:
    -Yoknapatawpha County: William Faulkner on the Web
    -William Faulkner: Life and Works (includes synopsis of Light in August)
    William Faulkner on the Web
    -William Faulkner Centennial Celebration (Vintage Books)
    -THE WILLIAM FAULKNER FOUNDATION, FRANCE
    -The William Faulkner Society
    -Southeast Missouri State University's Center for Faulkner Studies
    -Faulkner's Page: Tour of Oxford
    -William Faulkner: The Myth Of The South (from Let's Find Out)
    -Faulkner and Racism (ARTHUR F. KINNEY, Connotations)
    -Frederick Crews: The Strange Fate of William Faulkner (NY Review of Books)
    -REVIEW: of WILLIAM FAULKNER: AMERICAN WRITER A Biography. By Frederick R. Karl (John W. Aldridge, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of William Faulkner: American Writer A Biography By Frederick R. Karl )(Michiko Kakutani, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of WILLIAM FAULKNER The Man and the Artist. By Stephen B. Oates (Louis D. Rubin Jr, NY Times Book Review)
     -REVIEW: of William Faulkner and the Tangible Past The Architecture of Yoknapatawpha. By Thomas S. Hines (Henry Taylor, NY Times Book Review)
    -William H. Gass: Mr. Blotner, Mr. Feaster, and Mr. Faulkner Faulkner: A Biography by Joseph Blotner (NY Review of Books)
    -Marvin Mudrick: The Over-Wrought Urn REVIEW of William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country by Cleanth Brooks (NY Review of Books)
   -Terry Southern: Just Folks  REVIEW: of Faulkner's People: A Complete Guide and Index to the Characters in Faulkner by Robert W. Kirk and Marvin Klotz (NY Review of Books)
    -Personal Best (JOAN SMITH, Salon)