As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner supposedly said that the title to his 1930 novel comes from Book XI of Homer's Odyssey, when the spirit of Agamemnon, down in the underworld, tells Ulysses that, "As I lay dying the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes for me as I descended into Hades." In ancient Greece, this act of neglect was indicative of an improper burial, and according to ancient Greek belief, a spirit could not be at rest in the underworld until it had been properly buried.

Certainly improper burial is a constant running theme in Faulkner's novel--Addie Bundren has requested that she be buried in her place of birth. The Bundrens (their anagram for "Burden" is clear) are a poor white Southern family, for which to make this simple journey across Mississippi is almost too great a burden in and of itself--along the way they find 2 bridges washed out, when they try to ford a flooded river they lose all the mules, lose Cash's tools, and almost lose Addie's coffin in process.

Even before they family leaves, one son, Vardaman, drills 2 holes into the coffin that penetrate his mother's face. While she was still dying, 2 of her sons went off to make delivery. Never having been embalmed, her body starts to stink when the family passes through a town, garnering the attention of a local Marshall. En route, another son, Darl, burns down a barn for no discernable reason and has to be shipped off to Jackson before Addie can be buried. Cash breaks his leg en route, which is so improperly bound with raw cement that it draws a rebuke from the family doctor--this improper care is indicative of the improper care for the dead.

Addie is finally buried with borrowed shovels. While the dirt is still fresh on her grave, her widower Anse disappears to return the shovels, and when he finally reappears, he has a new set of false teeth bought with borrowed money guilted and extorted from his teenage daughter (and this after his incessant stinginess over the course of the funeral procession), and with a new wife in hand.

The burial of the poor family matriarch has been a travesty from beginning to end.

The novel is also narrated in brief chapters from the stream-of-conscious narrations of various people over the course of the journey--including at one point by Addie herself after her death, which is either an uncharacteristic flashback or Addie speaking a la Agamemnon from the depths of the underworld, an implicit condemnation of those who have failed to bury her properly--except that the implication is that it isn't her soul that will be forever disturbed by this neglect, but theirs.

But another thread running througout As I Lay Dying is the idea of property--Addie's dying wish is her property, her claim on her good-for-nothing Anse. Anse fulfills this claim only to fulfill the much more mundane claim he feels that he has--to buy a set of false teeth in the city, so that he can "partake of God's victuals as I was meant," a right he feels is as inalienable as Addie's request. Anse himself will constantly guilt his children with accusations that they are unable/unwilling to show due respect to their mother--this tactic is in part how he gets the ten dollars for his false teeth from Dewie, despite the fact that the money was borrowed, and that for an abortion. Cash condemns Darl's barn-burning specifically as an assault on a man's property, and Cash's very livelihood is threatened by the loss of his tools (his property) and his improperly-cared-for leg. Dewie herself attempts to trade 10 dollars for an abortion, exchanging money for a life, and finally she trades sexual favors for what turns out to be a fake abortion drug.

In short, all through out this novel, properties and claims are being violated, lost, swindled, dishonored, and broken. All throughout the text characters are constantly undermining the intrinsic connection between claims and properties.

Of course, the language of the novel itself fulfills this--each chapter seems to speak around what is actually going on, alluding to events but never actually touching them, just as claims never seem to actually touch "property." This linguistic-disconnect from reality makes the novel more difficult to read (though still not nearly as difficult as its immediate predecessor The Sound and the Fury), but this disconnect also means that the focus is on the language itself, not the actual action. The language, the story itself, is what remains independent of the misery around it. In such a patently irredeemable story of loss, the telling of it alone redeems. The language saves the novel; the language is the covering, the dirt by which the dead are finally properly buried.