Detail from the Penguin Modern Classics cover of As I Lay Dying.
“When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.”
– William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Usually, when I get sick, I wake up that way, as if legions of infectious bugs had secretly invaded my defenses at night. Not this time. This time I fell apart in the afternoon. All at once. While watching Wolf Blitzer. It hit me like an ambush. Suddenly, everything hurt: joints, neck, tongue, back, toenails, head. Even my eyeballs. Especially them.
My throat was raw, my lungs had filled with green gunk, and my ears were clogged so thick with oozing wax that I couldn’t hear myself scream at the screen, the way I normally do this time of day. The light of August grew dim, as my eyes crusted over. I had COVID for the second time. The FLiRT variant, which was supposed to be mild, flirtatious even, had knocked me on my ass.
I spent the next four days in bed, wheezing, hacking, and feeling like Aqualung on a bender. I was judiciously locked in a bedroom so as not to spread my contagion among the household. Food, pills and water were slipped into my cell twice a day. Other than the nightly monotony of the Democratic National Convention, my only distraction was a battered copy of As I Lay Dying that I hadn’t read in 45 years. Though a fan of Faulkner, I hadn’t much cared for this fractured southern gothic back in my 20s, when I presumed myself immune to such intimations of mortality. But now on the edge of the grim abyss, it called my name.
“It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.”
I remembered that a professor of mine had considered this slim novel Faulkner’s version of Joyce’s Ulysses, only shorter and not as dirty, though there’s plenty of dirt if you know where to look. So I dove in looking for the dirty parts and soon found myself caked in Mississippi mud, which was a relief given that my skin felt aflame.
Faulkner cribbed the title from a passage in the Odyssey when Odysseus entered the Underworld. I guess everyone should visit Hell at least once before they take up permanent residence, even if resembles a convention center in Chicago. Faulkner cribbed a lot, but broke it up and put it back together in ways most nobody recognized. Kind of like ChatGPT but in reverse.
As Odysseus is doing field recordings with some of the luminaries of Hades, who should show up but the rapist of Troy, Agamemnon himself, a new arrival to the Underworld, who was shivved shortly after coming home to Mycenea from his Middle East war. Agamemnon warns Odysseus against the evils of women, saying his own wife struck the fatal blow, as he lay dying from her lover’s sword, and then she even refused to close his eyes: “So true is it that there is nothing more dread or more shameless than a woman who puts into her heart such deeds, even as she too devised a monstrous thing, contriving death for her wedded husband. Verily I thought that I should come home welcome to my children and to my slaves; but she, with her heart set on utter wickedness, has shed shame on herself and on women yet to be, even upon her that doeth uprightly.” Which reads like a manifesto of the New Masculinity movement led by the likes of JD Vance, Andrew Tate and Matthew Walsh. Semper Fi, dudes.
Agamemnon didn’t mention what exactly set Clytemenstra off. What she’d been brooding about for more than ten years. Odysseus knew. He was there. He might even have been complicit. But he doesn’t say either. He doesn’t mention that Agamemnon had slit the throat of his own daughter to summon the winds that would blow him to Troy, where he could loot their gold and rape their women. Sometimes stories are told like that, leaving off the key parts, that you have to fill in for yourselves, if you can. That’s politics, even in the afterlife.
Of course, Faulkner doesn’t tell this story straight. He might not even tell it right. A lot of folks don’t seem to get it and I’m not sure I do, because my mind is befogged by Covid. But it seems to be about the dynamics of the American family under capitalism, a story that starts out as a tragic thing and becomes a comic thing, even though a lot of bad things happen to good people and good things to bad people along the way.
“It’s like a man that’s let everything slide all his life to get set on something that will make the most trouble for everybody he knows.”
Of course, if Faulkner had told this story straight what he called his “tour de force” would have been purged off the shelves in schools and libraries from Tallahassee to Tulsa. He understood that America holds itself in too high regard to talk straight about the things that matter most: the harm you suffer and the harm you cause, the deaths that afflict you and the deaths you inflict. This is even truer in politics than it is in literature.
Faulkner has 15 people tell how Addie Bundren died and her family tried for 9 days to find a place to bury her. Some of them might not tell it true, which can often be the truest way to tell a story, especially in America. One of the people ain’t even alive when she starts her telling, but since most of the story is about being dead or getting there, she speaks with more authority than many of the others, especially her husband Anse who can barely speak at all, intelligibly, anyhow, which is often the case with husbands.
“A man ain’t so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.”
As with the DNC, it’s sometimes hard to tell who to believe the most or disbelieve the least. The most rational storyteller in As I Lay Dying will prove to be insane. Or at least deemed as such by his own father, brother and sister and thrown into an asylum. There’s probably a difference. I don’t know whether he runs into Hannibal Lechter there or not. Typically, the reticent Faulkner doesn’t say.
“It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.”
Over the interminable sleepless nights, the speeches in Chicago and the run-on sentences of the novel seemed to blend together and it became increasingly difficult to tease out one from the other and which one was written by Faulkner or Jon Meachem, which is why I finally flicked the mute button on the DNC convention and watched it with the sound off, for the spectacle alone.
“How often have Ι lain beneath rain on a strange roof thinking of home.”
It’s July in Mississippi and it’s hot. Not as hot as it is now. But it’s getting there or starting to. Faulkner wrote this book in six weeks on an overturned wheelbarrow in the middle of the night at the power station on the campus of the University of Mississippi, where he worked shoveling coal into the furnace. So he helped, damn him.
There’s no air conditioning, as Addie sits by the window during her last night on earth, watching her firstborn son Cash build a coffin. Her coffin. Addie’s dying. We don’t know from what. Having so many children or being married to Anse or the unforgiving heat. She may be old for her age, but she’s still dying young, which was then and is now the American way of death, by which I mean premature. So premature in Addie’s case that she hasn’t performed her post-menopausal duty of caring for the grandchildren, because there ain’t any. Not yet anyway, though one may be coming, wanted or not.
“That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.”
Addie doesn’t speak until she’s dead. And then what she says doesn’t make much sense at the time she’s saying it but does later when some, but not all, of the blanks have been filled in. But what she says is that she doesn’t want to be buried here on Anse’s farm, in this patch of bad earth that like as not killed her, in spirit if not in body. In this book, as in history, the dead make more sense than the living. Addie wants to be buried with her kinfolk, even though we know she was abused by them, thirty miles away in Jefferson, which those of us in the know understand is actually Oxford.
“I learned that words were no good; that words don’t even fit what they’re trying to say at it.”
This is a story about poor people who become poorer when things they can’t control make them do things they can’t afford, like bury a wife and mother. It’s 30 miles to Jefferson but the Bundrens take 9 days to get there. They spend much of that time going back and forth over the same ground, reversing the progress they’d made the day before, a kind of incrementalism most Americans are familiar with in the time of neoliberalism. This morbid odyssey leads to all sorts of misery and mayhem: two drowned mules, a busted leg set in cement, a burned barn, a stolen horse, a lost fish who transforms into a corpse, a botched abortion and a question of paternity.
“It’s like it ain’t so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.”
Everything the Bundrens own is mortgaged, even the tools they use to pay back the banks and loan sharks. For them and most of the rest of us the promise of America is a promissory note. The family is so destitute that two of Addie’s sons, Darl and Jewel, take off to work on a neighbor’s farm while Cash saws and planes the boards for their mother’s coffin. They return with $3 between them for two day’s hard labor, which was considered an honest wage 100 years ago and slowly inflated to $7.50 an hour and remains so today.
“Those rich town ladies can change their minds. Poor folks can’t.”
The problem is that Addie died while they toiled and their wages can’t get them to Jefferson. Not after the heavens opened and a thousand-year flood that happens once a decade now came down to swell the rivers and wash away the bridges. It’s easy to die, but hard to be buried in an economic system where the only cash you have is a son who’s good with tools.
“Life wasn’t made to be easy on folks: they wouldn’t ever have any reason to be good and die.”
Jewell will nearly get stabbed outside Jefferson, after he called a white man he mistook for a black man a “son of a bitch.” Jewell said this after he had begun to “turn black” himself, charred by the barn fire his brother Darl had set. Cash was also turning black, after his father had insisted on setting his broken leg–fractured while trying took take the corpse-laden wagon across a flooded ford in the raging river–in concrete because he couldn’t afford a doctor. The makeshift cast cut off the flow of blood to his leg and foot. Nearly everybody in this book begins to turn black eventually. Just like Kamala in Donald Trump’s imagination.
“Once I waked with a black void rushing under me.”
I’m not sure how old Addie’s daughter Daisy Dell is. But she’s old enough to fool around or be fooled around with. So she’s probably at least 14. And she does so with predictable consequences that are just as predictable in at least 27 states today. Daisy Dell is pregnant and wants an abortion and can’t get one. This isn’t obvious in the beginning but becomes clearer as the funeral cortege makes its circuitous way to Jefferson.
“Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t.”
There’s another son named Vardaman, just a boy of five or six. Vardaman sees events metaphorically. He sees the meaning of things that others miss, because the roughness of the world has worn away that kind of insight. I begin to see the novel and the convention through Vardaman’s eyes. Vardaman doesn’t think his mother died. There was no reason for her to die. She was too young to die. So he drills holes into the coffin to let whatever’s in there breathe. Then everybody else begins to breathe the air of decay.
“Because a fellow can see every now and then that children have more sense than him. But he don’t like to admit it to them until they have beards.”
Vardaman thinks his mother is a fish and Jewell’s mother is a horse, even though they have the same mother, as far as we know, but not the same father, which we don’t know at the beginning but find out near the end. Like many American kids, Jewell’s father turns out to be the local preacher, Reverend Whitfield. Praise the lord.
“If there is a God what the hell is He for?”
Events get a little hazy in my mind now.
People take different turns sitting on the coffin. First, there was Cash with his broken leg, set in concrete and turning black. Then Miss Hillary, dressed in white, waving her arms like Bill’s pants were on fire. Again. Then the buzzards landed. Up in the rafters near the MSNBC booth. Nancy Pelosi didn’t sit on the coffin, even though she drew up some of the plans for it. They say Joe don’t cotton to her anymore. And a cat, but Vardaman chased it away, thinking it might eat the fish, which was his mother. Every party needs a cat and cat lady, I reckon. Then Obama sat on it for a while and preened. Obama thinks his mother is Ronald Reagan. Or Nancy. I can’t remember which. Then Michelle chased him off, saying his yacht was waiting on the Gold Coast of Lake Michigan, and he was late. Given her convention speech, AOC must think her mother is Hillary Clinton. Nobody inside seemed to mind the smell. Or even notice it. Not the smell of the casket or the smell outside, which nearly everyone else was gagging from.
“It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside.”
Kamala has a daddy who she doesn’t mention for reasons most everybody knows but can’t say. But her daddy is tonight Joe Biden, though it used to be Willie Brown. And her momma is Nancy Pelosi. And Biden and Pelosi fight. So they can’t be together in the same room. Kamala isn’t Daisy Dell. But she might have been once, no one’s quite sure. FoxNews is trying to find out. Now she’s nobody’s mother, which makes her suspect for many. An unproductive grifter, I guess, who won’t have any function at all in her post-menopausal years, which are fast approaching, if they haven’t yet arrived. Watch those nuclear codes.
“She has had a hard life, but so does every woman.”
Daisy Dell’s lover is Lafe (or Laugh). Lafe gives Daisy $10 to abort the fetus he has planted in her. He tells her she can get abortion pills at the pharmacy. Two months later pills. The first druggist she finds threatens to call the police. The next one swindles her. He gives her a glass of turpentine water and a box of talcum powder pills and then takes her down into the cellar and does something unspeakable to her, which JD Vance might call an “inconvenience.”
“I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he’s durn nigh hopeless.”
When the shattered Daisy finally emerges from the cellar, she encounters her father Anse, who swipes her $10 and buys himself a shiny white pair of dentures, because Medicare didn’t cover dental. Still don’t. And with those teeth, Anse got him a new wife, too. A new Mrs. Bundren or is it Harris? Cause a family without a wife, just ain’t a family. Is it JD?
“Why do you laugh? Is it because you hate the sound of laughing?”
That’s pretty much the end, though something is missing from this story. Something that’s there because it’s not. If you’ve read Faulkner you might know what it is. There are no Native Americans in As I Lay Dying, not even a mention of them in passing, I suspect because the culture in his mind has already been killed off and died out and even their ghosts, the ghosts of Sam Fathers and Ikkemotubbe, who in The Sound and the Fury Faulkner described as “a dispossessed American king,” have begun to fade. Their absence seems to pervade and haunt the story as the odyssey of the Bundrens and the casket and the body of Addie wander across the rivers and fields and woods of the Chickasaw and Choctaw. Death is in the air, even if no one wants to talk about it. The way another expanding absence, unmentioned by general agreement, envelops the United Center in Chicago, where anyone impolite enough to point it out is deemed crazy and hauled away to god knows where like brother Darl.
“The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now.”
We don’t know until the end, and even then it’s just a hint, which is, of course, the strongest kind of revelation, that Darl had been in the war and didn’t come back from France the same. Maybe that’s why he saw things clearer than the others and had to be locked away. Because whatever was in the casket that the Bundrens were trying to keep a lid on was more than just the decaying corpse of Addie Bundren, rotting in the July heat like the fish Vardaman is sure she’s been transformed into. It’s a burden of history, a burden of those lost in war, a burden of an economy that works for the owners and the confidence artists but works almost everybody else to an early grave, even if some of them can afford a scrap of earth to be planted in.
“Any old fool should be able to dig a hole.”
The question for America is: When do you stop digging? When have you dug yourself in so deep that you can’t dig yourself out?
The post As I Lay Coughing: Watching the DNC With Covid and Faulkner appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.
Jeffrey St. Clair | Radio Free (2024-08-23T06:00:58+00:00) As I Lay Coughing: Watching the DNC With Covid and Faulkner. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/23/as-i-lay-coughing-watching-the-dnc-with-covid-and-faulkner/
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