ABSTRACT
One comes away from As I Lay Dying with a commingled sense of respect for the author and an intense annoyance-emotional rather than intellectual-with him for spending his rich inventive faculty on such a witch's brew of a family as Anse, Vardaman, Jewel, Cash, Dad, and the dying mother, Addie Bundren, constitute. One also feels that one must immediately sit down to write an essay on the province and limitations of fiction. The quality of Mr. Faulkner's own mind, even when it is latent, is of a high order; the quality of the minds of the people he chooses to set before you, in fluid Joycean terms, is, on the contrary, of a very low sort. The effect of the conjunction of the two qualities is to force the reader to call into question our prevalent assumption that the artist may never be quarreled with for his selection ofmaterial. We should be the last to deny the novelist the right to poke his nose into any human territory, but faced with As I Lay Dying, the critic can hardly be blamed if some categorical imperative which persists in the human being (even at this late date) compels him to put this book in a high place in an inferior category.
