"Cliff Notes - As I Lay Dying" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)
WILLIAM FAULKNER'S
AS I LAY DYING
No one who knew William Faulkner in high school would have voted him "most likely to succeed." He dropped out in the eleventh grade. "I never did like school," he said, "and I stopped going as soon as I got big enough to play hooky and not be caught at it."
Failure seemed attached to him like a tin can. His girlfriend married a man whose prospects were better than Faulkner's. The U.S. Army Air Corps wouldn't take him during World War I--he was too short.
In his twenties, he seemed incapable of applying himself to anything. He went to the University of Mississippi, did miserably in English, and quit after a year. Though he managed to get a job running the university's post office, he was so incompetent he was forced to resign. He was even removed as the local scoutmaster because he drank too much. The litany of his shortcomings stretches on: his almost paralyzing shyness, his inability to write memorable poetry, his years as a problem drinker.
And yet, this "failure" produced 90 short stories, 19 novels, and a play that was performed on Broadway. In 1950 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the highest recognition any writer can get. Today, he is considered one of the greatest writers the United States has ever produced.
How did this happen? A complete answer would have to take into account Faulkner's special gifts as a writer, developed over a long period of apprenticeship. As I Lay Dying, his fifth published novel, will give you an excellent chance to appreciate those gifts and his unique view of the world. That view stems, partly, from what critics call the Southern Tradition--the myths about the South as a defeated nation that he shared with other Southerners of his time.
GROWING UP William Cuthbert Falkner (he added the u when he became a published writer) was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. For the first four years of his life, he lived in Ripley, a nearby town whose cemetery is dominated by a statue of Faulkner's great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner. Faulkner never knew his great-grandfather--he had died in 1889. But Old Colonel Falkner, as he was called, remained a legendary figure to his descendants.
After the Civil War, Colonel Falkner refused to lick his wounds. He built a railroad, became rich, and wrote several novels, one of them a best-seller. He was shot and killed in Ripley's town square by his former partner in the railroad venture.
The Old Colonel's son, John, was a lawyer and a banker. When John's son Murry and his wife moved to Oxford in northern Mississippi, they already had three sons: William, who was four; Murry, three; and John, just one. A fourth boy, Dean, would be born in 1907. Some readers think that Faulkner's growing up with three brothers may have helped him work out the intricate relationships of the four brothers in As I Lay Dying.
William and John were old enough to be dazzled by Oxford, a county seat of some 1800 people. The electric street lamps--the first they had ever seen--were especially marvelous. Toward the end of As I Lay Dying, the young boy Vardaman visits a town very much like Oxford, giving Faulkner the chance to re-create the sense of wonder the arc lamps gave him in his childhood.
Faulkner's mother, an amateur artist, tried to inspire in her sons a love of learning. There was, of course, no television or radio then, and silent movies became popular late in Faulkner's childhood. So, during the evenings, the family read a lot. Mrs. Falkner introduced her children to some of the great American and European writers.
Faulkner seemed to lose all interest in schooling when he got to high school. "He gazed out the windows and answered the simplest question with 'I don't know,'" a classmate remembered. He was an outsider, often lost in daydreams like Darl, the poetic, brooding brother in As I Lay Dying whose neighbors thought him odd.
He quit school in December, 1914, then returned the next fall to the eleventh grade (the last grade his school offered) so that he could play football. When the season ended, he quit school for good and went to work as a clerk in his grandfather's bank.
THE SOUTHERN TRADITION The South--as a region and a state of mind--plays a very important part in Faulkner's work. The South was defeated in the Civil War and occupied for twelve years afterward by Federal troops. Many of the white Southerners who had supported the Confederacy were unable to accept the harsh facts of defeat. Their children--and their children's children, people like Faulkner--were steeped in the myths of the Old South. They heard again and again of the chivalry, heroism, and honor of its defenders. Like the regional dialects that Faulkner uses in As I Lay Dying, the subject of a ravaged homeland was a part of the tradition that these writers inherited.
But the South was changing during Faulkner's youth. Its political leaders were changing, too. Descendants of the aristocratic families of the Old South were losing power. They were being replaced by men who drew their strength from the new class of businessmen or from poor white farmers who feared that they were being left behind.
Faulkner wasn't sure what to make of the upheaval going on around him. He tried to come to terms with it. Like Bayard Sartoris, the main character in Faulkner's third novel, Sartoris, he wasn't sure there was a place for him in this New South.
Faulkner would deal directly with these themes in several of his books. In As I Lay Dying, he approaches them indirectly, suggesting conflicts between the hill farmers--the "rednecks"--and the townspeople.
Here and there in As I Lay Dying, you'll see him betray a certain affection for the myths of the Old South. The character who comes closest to being a hero, Jewel, is a man of action, and he's often mounted on a horse like the South's gallant defenders during the Civil War. And the Bundrens, who hold center stage in As I Lay Dying, are a sort of proud guerrilla band fighting their own rear guard action against a powerful enemy.
LITERARY APPRENTICESHIP Faulkner wrote little more than poetry before leaving Oxford in 1918 to join the Royal Flying Corps in Canada. Most of that poetry, as Faulkner later acknowledged, wasn't very good. "I'm a failed poet," he once told an interviewer. "Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing."
Faulkner didn't take up novel writing until he went to New Orleans in 1925, after he was allowed to resign from his job as a postmaster near Oxford. In New Orleans he made friends with the novelist Sherwood Anderson, who encouraged him to write fiction.
Faulkner's first novel, Soldiers' Pay, was published in 1926. It is the story of an American soldier who returns home to Georgia to die of the wounds received in World War I. His second book, Mosquitoes, published in 1927, makes fun of the artistic and social circles he knew in New Orleans. Light on plot and heavy on hollow talk, the novel embodies a theme that Faulkner explores in As I Lay Dying: the uselessness of words when separated from action.
In 1928, Faulkner wrote Sartoris, which told of the decay of a proud Southern family much like his own. The book is set in Jefferson, a fictitious town in Mississippi that resembles Oxford. Jefferson is the Bundren family's destination in As I Lay Dying. In that novel, published in 1930, Faulkner for the first time gives a name--Yoknapatawpha--to the county of which Jefferson is the political center. (For the derivation of the name, see Note in section 45 of The Story section.)
While Sartoris was being readied for publication in January, 1929, Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury. Many readers think that this second novel in the Yoknapatawpha saga is Faulkner's masterpiece. It is a study of the collapse of another proud Southern family, the Compsons. A difficult book, it tells its story in three stream-of-consciousness styles Faulkner had learned from reading the Irish writer James Joyce. Faulkner told the story first through the eyes of an idiot, then through the eyes of two brothers.
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