Normalizing Faulkner's Craziness

Most of the time, I think it’s considered normal to expect to relate to and like the characters in a book. I don’t go into a book expecting every single character to simply be a horrible person, or completely incomprehensible. Even depressing books generally have some form of character we’re supposed to like and understand, if only so the crushing misery of their inevitable fate hits us a little harder. So when we started As I Lay Dying, I had some preconceived notion in my head that the characters we would read about would be understandable. In one way or another, I would be able to comprehend their actions.
            This particular preconception of mine was only made apparent to me when Faulkner didnothing of the sort whatsoever,so this blog post is about to get real weird. I think the disconnect is that my worldview, my experiences, and my expectations from literature are not gelling with what Faulkner’s actually writing – he is, intellectually and artistically so far above me that I’m interpreting the story in a completely inaccurate way. I’m literally the Cora in this story – trying to develop a sense of the world from a one-dimensional and judgmental point of view, putting two and two together to get seven.
            This is clearest to me in the characterization of the Bundren kids and their relationships – and how I understood that. I began reading this book with the expectation that I would understand the characters’ motivations – while they might be convoluted, they would at least be recognizable. Therefore, reading the scenes between the kids, I interpreted them as normal sibling relationships, even while seeing how strange they were. I tried (very hard) to work those scenes into something that resembled two siblings talking. As I read this book, that belief that the kids had normal human emotions continued, even as more and more evidence piled up to the contrary. 
            Reading it from that over-simplifed and plain false perspective, many of the uncomfortable scenes in the Bundren household become minimized. Darl isn’t holding his knowledge of Dewey Dell’s pregnancy over her head, he’s trying to help her acknowledge what happened and plan for the future. He’s not mocking Vardaman, he’s trying to help Vardaman (and himself) make sense of what’s happened. Even his needling of Jewel can be seen as a familiar brotherly relationship, or genuinely trying to discuss the subject of Jewel’s father. And Jewel doesn’t reallyhate his half-siblings, he’s just brash. In truth, he’d always protect them. The kids are normal – they care about each other, they stick together.
That interpretation lends itself to a certain kind of ending. Anse dies a painful, stupid death, to commemorate his painful, stupid life. And the kids, who stuck together during his life, come together to take over the household. Dewey Dell will be protected by her brothers when her pregnancy is discovered. Jewel gets a new horse. Cash continues with carpentry, with both legs working, Jewel and Darl take over the farm, Vardaman learns to adjust in a suddenly far more normal environment. Things end well for everyone. Interpreting the Bundrens as a normal family makes you want a happy ending. And the fact that I was so determined to see the Bundrens through my “understandable” filter made me very convinced in that happy ending.
Obviously, that didn’t quite work out. Okay, it didn’t work out at all. And I think that my (very) skewed expectations of this novel appeared because I was looking at the book from the complete wrong perspective: I was trying to relate to the characters, and I was therefore basing my understanding of these characters off of my own life experience. But Faulkner was not writing these characters to be normal, or even weird but comprehendible. Dewey Dell and Jewel really are threatened by Darl’s knowledge. Vardaman really is psychotic and disconnected with the world. Darl really doesn’t belong in this world, and his siblings really did hate him. I’m projecting my own ways of comprehending people (normal people with normal thoughts and the basic education necessary to express those normal thoughts) onto people who were not written to be normal. It was like I was reading the book upside down the whole time, thinking I was watching a climb up to safety when they were in free fall the whole time.
            I really wish my happily ever after could happen instead.

Comments

  1. I also expected some kind of happy ending, but yeah a lot of things went wrong. I think Faulkner executes the taking away of a happy ending so perfectly. He takes the thing that each character holds to highest importance away. Cash is the handy man, but he loses his leg. Darl is the secret-knowing one, but he loses his family. Jewel is the horse guy, but he loses his horse. Dewy Dell is the hopeful one, but she loses that. And Varadaman is the innocent one, but he loses his mom. Everyone but loses their thing. Anse on the other hand actually benefits in the end? The whole time throughout the book we're supposed to pity him since he's doing the noble thing, but he just betrays everyone at the end. Anse's happy ending makes the ending even more frustrating.

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    1. Exactly! And Anse doesn't have even the slightest knowledge of each of the characters' arcs. If the story were written from Anse's perspective, it would lose all of its dimension and depth. There wouldn't be anything to talk about. It would just be "man on epic, perfect quest to honor his late wife combats forces of nature and subordination from his children to complete his journey. And finds someone at the end." But the introduction of narrative that comes from each character lets the reader know just how important each person's "thing" is, so we get more sadness/very extremely dark humor out of their slow descent.

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  2. I think that's one of the really great things about AILD- it challenges our notions of what, exactly, "normal" means. I agree that trying to project our own lives and experiences onto the Bundrens is probably a recipe for more confusion than not, but there's definitely still some very normal and very human traits present within them. Personally, I found things like Addie's despair at her lonely, domestic role and Dewey Dell's anguish at her unwanted pregnancy and Cash's wish to build Addie's coffin to be, if not exactly relatable, then definitely understandable within the framework of humanity and human emotions. Once I moved to trying to understand the characters on their own terms, though, I definitely got to know them a lot more easily.

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  3. I didn't really like the ending and I'm guessing it was partially because I was also hoping for something a little happier. Like, good for Anse that he finally got his teeth, but also I don't feel like he deserved it. The kids made more sacrifices than their father and yet he was the one who got something out of it? Also this family kind of gave off some not-family-like vibes. They all seem kind of disconnected from each other and more focused on their own interests and goals than working together which is not what someone would normally expect from a family-centered book.

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  4. I think this is something which I find so interesting about Faulkners writing. We go in expecting sympathetic characters and understandable narration, but he decides to flip it on its head in order to get at a deeper underlying point. The point that this preconception of likeable and predictable characters does not represent the human struggle. And he does so by putting us almost fully in the characters head, we see the selfishness, evil, and imperfections from inside their head, we witness first hand the unpredictability of humans, we dislike them just as we dislike our own flaws. And that I think is special.

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  5. I agree. I too expected the story to be about a family, not the amorphous blob of psychosis, trauma, and ego that it turned out to be. The slow deterioration of the Bundren family just as slowly reveals the truth of the book: perhaps that was Faulkner's true goal: not to write a Hero's Journey, but its dark mirror. Twisted and depraved, but still very recognizable as a Hero's Journey.

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