As I Lay Dying

Tonight is our Uncanny Voyages class, and our assignment was William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. We don't own the book and Phil Weinstein did not send us one digitally, so we were on our own. The quickest thing we could do was to take advantage of a free trial of Audible, an online Audio Book app. That's what we did. As I Lay Dying is written in stream-of-consciousness style from the standpoint of many characters - most of them members of one family, the Bundrens. So the Audiobook has many readers; maybe not a different one for each chaarcter, but it sounded that way. We managed to listen to the entire book - about 6 1/2 hours in all. That is different from reading it oneself, and I think we both would like to read it now ourselves. LATER We had the class, and it was great, as usual. It was interesting, though, that except for myself, all the classmembers asking questions were women. I don't know where the men were tonight. It's impossible to encapsulate the session here, but basically the book centers on the death of Addie Budren, and the reponse of her family - her husband and five children - to her death. The "plot," if you want to call it that, centers on a promise made by her husband to honor her wish to be buried not near her home, but in Jefferson, MS, about 25 miles away. Getting there entails first putting her into a coffin made by her oldest son, Cash (who is building it outside her window while she is still alive, but actively dying), and then carting that coffin, and the entire family, on that journey, during which every conceivable, and also inconceivable, bad thing happens to them. Buzzards follow them, they must cross a large river but the bridges wash out, and in their attempt to ford the river, they are hit by a log, the cart tips over, the mules pulling the cart drown, Cash breaks his leg, the coffin fills with water, Cash's precious tools are lost, etc. And that is just the beginning. The story is not narrated; we see it through the inner thoughts and dialogue of the various characters, each with a unique and often contradictory perspective. My question had to do with those soliloquies. They are beautifully written and often profound in their insight. How are we to square that with the fact that these are poor, unschooled, illiterate country people. Their soliloquies could hardly be how they would talk or even think. Phil Weinstein said, "Yes, that's true, but it's how they are. That raises a profound question. How can we manage to be something that we could never articulate, even to ourselves. Yet I suspect that we want to think that we are. Maybe we are like the "mystical experience of God," which is often said to be "ineffable." I.e., incapable of being put into words. Yet here, the novelist is putting these people into words - words they themselves would never use and not be able to understand. Pretty heavy !

Addie's husband, Anse, and two of the boys, at the Bundren cabin, from the 2013 film.