A Lecture on William Faulkner S As I Lay Dying

A Lecture on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

Professor Robert Hamblin, Southeast Missouri State University

Part 1: Intro to Faulkner

Hello to all of you members of Oprah’s Book Club. I’m Robert Hamblin, Professor of English and Director of the Center of Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University. I first read William Faulkner almost 50 years ago. Interestingly, the first book I read was As I Lay Dying, which partly explains why it still is one of my favorite Faulkner books. All of that simply to say that I’ve been hanging out with this Faulkner fellow for quite a long time.

Even these many years later I distinctly remember my first impression of As I Lay Dying, and it had nothing at all to do with the story being told. I was simply amazed at the unusual way Faulkner chose to tell his story: all of those characters jumping around in time, each telling his or her own version of the events, sometimes supporting and sometimes contradicting each other. It was like Faulkner had scattered a deck of cards on the floor and left them for me to pick up and reassemble: 52-pickup, or, in this case 59-pickup. [Note: There are 59 chapters in As I Lay Dying.]

I found the technique daring, provocative, awesome. I was so taken with Faulkner’s technical virtuosity that it hardly mattered that I was having trouble putting the story together and arranging the cards into some kind of coherent and comprehensible order.

As I continued to read Faulkner I discovered that this shifting of narration from one character to another and these violent disruptions of standard chronology were hallmarks of his technique. Along with some of the most luxuriant prose I had ever read.

And I also soon discovered that he did indeed have a story to tell – dozens of them – involving all kinds of people: old and young; male and female; white, black, and red; good and evil; noble and ignoble; tragic and comic. In short, a variety and range of personalities that made his “little postage stamp of native soil” representative of the entire human race.

As I Lay Dying is a good place to begin reading Faulkner. Although the narrative technique and the characterization are quite complex, the storyline is actually quite simple and relatively easy to follow. The tone of the story is both tragic and comic. The characters are funny and pathetic. The language is fresh, lively, startling, and memorable. And the subjects treated are as huge as subjects could get: life and death; love and hate; success and failure; wealth and poverty; faith and doubt; sanity and madness; individual and family; family and community. Significant stuff.

So, let’s join the Bundrens on their journey to Jefferson. You may be surprised to learn, as I did years ago, that your journey with Mr. Bill won’t stop there.

Part 2: Point of View

The first thing that almost all readers notice about As I Lay Dying is that the narration of the story is tossed about like a football on a playground. First Darl speaks, then Cora, then Darl again, and then Jewel. Eventually we learn – if we bother to keep count – that there are 15 different narrators and 59 separate chapters in the novel.

Fortunately the storyline being presented is a fairly simple one about a rural Mississippi family, the Bundrens, who are taking the corpse of Addie, their mother, back to her hometown, Jefferson, to be buried with her family. So it’s not the plot but the way Faulkner chooses to unravel the plot that makes this a complicated novel.

And why would anyone choose to tell a story in this fashion? Faulkner prizes uniqueness, creativity and experimentation. He seldom told a story the same way twice. He once criticized Ernest Hemingway because he felt Hemingway had perfected a single style that he employed over and over again without splashing around, trying to experiment. Faulkner, by contrast, is one of the most experimental of all novelists, and As I Lay Dying is a tour de force of technique.

Scholars have pointed out that Faulkner may have been influenced by the Impressionist and Cubist painters – such as Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne – in his depiction of a truth that is very subjective and almost constantly evolving. Faulkner viewed and wrote home about the works of these artists on his visit to Paris in 1925.

Certainly one can easily see the similarity of As I Lay Dying to Monet’ series of paintings of the same object, for example, haystacks and “Stacks of Wheat” or “The Cathedral of Rouen.” In these paintings and Faulkner’s novel, truth is, to a great degree, personal, relative and ever changing.

The principal result of Faulkner’s shifting the storytelling from one character to another is fairly easy to identity and quite compelling. Anyone who has ever served on a jury knows how a parade of witnesses – some friendly, some hostile – present varying and often contradictory versions of the same event. And the juror must decide what actually happened, and who’s telling the truth and who isn’t. It’s the same with this novel with the reader playing the role of the juror.

Is Cora right about which of the sons is Addie’s favorite? What is Anse’s real reason for wanting to go to Jefferson? Why is Jewel so angry and spiteful? And what is Darl’s problem?

Answers to such questions depend of who’s talking. Clearly what Faulkner is conveying here is not absolute truth with a “capital-T,” but a “little-T” truth that depends in large measure on viewpoint.