ABSTRACT
The note on the dust-cover ofAs I Lay Dyingsays that it 'has been long recognised in America as one of Mr. Faulkner's most powerful and remarkable works.' We may probably assume, therefore, that it is one of his earliest novels; and indeed it shows many signs of immaturity, as well as a simplicity, not achieved but unconscious, which tells us a great deal more about the fundamental elements of his work than his later novels do, with their smothering complication. The real subject ofthis story, simple to the point ofdesperation, is the corpse ofa woman in late middle age. A truer title would have been 'As I Lay Dead,' but even that would give the story credit for more complexity than it has, for it is concerned not with death, but merely with the chemical changes which happen in a body after life has forsaken it. The 'dying' is very quickly and perfunctorily got over, for what Mr. Faulkner-like the detective story-writer-is really after is the body, and the history he relates is the history of this body before it is finally shovelled underground and got out of the way. To have chosen such a curious theme, to have lingered over it with such professional solicitude, conscientiously and lovingly, must show the presence of a very deep-seated obsession. It may be objected that 'Webster was much possessed by death' and that Donne was such another; but death is a normal and indeed unavoidable subject of human thought, and, as Webster and Donne conceived it, was inseparable from life. To Mr. Faulkner, on the other hand, it is a sort of death absolute, or rather a sort of postmortem life, that has no connection with a human life at all. Weare told far more. about Addie Bundren's corpse, for instance, than about herself A vision of the horror of death such as Webster's depends for
its power on his sense of life. But it may be said of this story of Mr. Faulkner that the most interesting character, or at least the character in which he shows most interest, is the corpse, not in its former incarnation as a human being with feelings, affections and a soul, but simply in its dead, or rather gruesomely alive, state. What we are to deduce from such an obsession it is hard to say; for it is not a comprehensible obsession, like Webster's, but a blind one. The effect that this story produces is, in any case, one of self-indulgence, self-indulgence pushed to the point ofkeeping a corpse for nine days above ground on its journey to a distant town, saving it from a flood and then from a fire, and reducing the family it left behind it to such a state that they end by confusing it with fishes and horses. Yet the effect is not horror but merely disgust, a much more cold and impotent emotion.
