Dead Gestures of Dolls

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

In this southern gothic from 1930, each chapter unspools a gossamer thread of story, from the points of view of different characters.  It’s our readerly duty and pleasure to identify how these strands are woven into what Thomas C. Foster calls “only one story,” i.e., all works of literature are part of the same enormous, universal narrative.

Here’s the quest: Five siblings must travel by wagon to a distant town in order to bury their mother. It’s a grueling journey, since in Mississippi in July the encoffined remains decompose like the bonds between the family members.

The siblings are sensible Cash, elusive Darl, outlaw Jewel, little bro Vardaman and the fragile Dewey Dell, the seventeen-year-old daughter. Their father Anse feels stolid and stubborn in the pursuit of his one great ambition in life, finding the money to buy false choppers and “get my mouth fixed where I could eat God’s own victuals as a man should.”

Harrying himself and others with shoulds and musts and oughtas, Anse is also resigned, stupid, feeble, greedy, passive mostly but hypocritically active in justifying the low things he does to get his way. None of these qualities detract from his authority because the dominant patriarchal values are, after all, those of a peasant culture.

I be durn, if a man can’t keep the upper hand of his sons, he ought to run them away from home, no matter how big they are. And if he can’t do that, I be durn if he oughtn’t to leave himself. I be durn if I wouldn’t.

Anse, acting all helpless in his flagrant hangdog sad-sackitude, exerts a malign influence over kin and neighbors alike. It compels them to take Anse at his own self- estimation – the poor luckless, misfortunate man – that needs kindly Christian help. And Anse gets help, probably out of sheer habit that the countrymen are too traditionalist to even think about breaking. “I be durn if Anse don’t conjure a man, some way,” says neighbor Amisted. “I be durn if he ain’t a sight.” Not that Anse is totally wrong about misfortune following him - omnipresent buzzards circle in the sky, hinting to the reader star-crossed Anse may be on to something.

The only other one than Cash who has a broader vision is Darl. And he’s one gone cat: "In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you." Seeing the eternal in the transient (hey, I am is, either), Darl tries to purify and resolve a grotesque situation with a grotesque solution. But he is spent, alone.

In this novel told not only from points of view of the family, we also get folksy voices like Dr. Peabody. Called by useless Anse to tend to his dying wife Addie, Peabody’s voice takes us back to the plainspoken codgers of yesteryear: Comic sarcastic fatalistic realism, the voice calls to mind the appalling stand-up of Jason Compson. And as for strangeness, Vardaman, surely the younger brother of Darl, realizes that his just died mother, like a big fish he caught earlier in the day, has gone to a another mode, another dimension of experience.

Faulkner's prose baffles me. “But it’s better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy court-house, and when they both build shoddy or build well, neither because it’s one or tother is going to make a man feel the better nor the worse.”

But his ability to create characters awes me.