"Cliff Notes - As I Lay Dying" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Convinced that he would never make any money writing, he returned in his next book to a more conventional way of presenting material. He conceived of Sanctuary as a "potboiler"--a salable mix of sex and violence. When it was published in 1931, it became a best-seller.

Before Sanctuary came out, however, Faulkner wrote and published As I Lay Dying. Its plot is relatively straightforward, the story of a poor family's journey from the hills of Yoknapatawpha County to Jefferson to bury one of its members. But the story is told in a way that is anything but straightforward. Like The Sound and the Fury, the novel has no single narrator. Instead, it has 15 narrators--family members and outsiders--who piece together a funeral journey in 59 unnumbered sections. The result is a tour de force, a work of art that displays Faulkner's incredible technical skill as a writer. Even more incredible is the fact that he wrote the book in just 47 days!

That's a story in itself. In June 1929, he had married Estelle Oldham Franklin, a girlfriend who had turned her back on him 11 years earlier. He took a job as a supervisor at the University of Mississippi's power plant. It was night work and consisted of firing the boilers with coal until about 11 P.M., when the students went to bed. There was no more work to do until 4 A.M., so each night Faulkner wrote a chapter or more of As I Lay Dying on a wheelbarrow he had turned into a desk.

A quarter century later, Faulkner recalled the experience:

Sometimes technique charges in and takes command of the dream before the writer himself can get his hands on it. That is tour de force and the finished work is simply a matter of fitting bricks neatly together, since the writer knows probably every single word right to the end before he puts the first one down. This happened with As I Lay Dying. It was not easy. No honest work is. It was simple in that all the material was already at hand. It took me just about six weeks....

Faulkner took the novel's title from a line in Homer's Odyssey: "As I lay dying the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyelids for me as I descended into Hades." The line is spoken by the dead King Agamemnon. Odysseus meets him in the underworld and is moved by his story. The king had been killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus. As he died, Clytemnestra--"the woman with the dog's eyes"--demonstrated her heartlessness by refusing to close his eyes and so ease his descent into the underworld. With Faulkner, you can get into trouble trying to make literal sense of titles. Still, when you finish the novel, you may want to return to the title and try to make your own sense of it.

Once you get into the novel, you should have no trouble enjoying it. "Of all Faulkner's novels," the critic Irving Howe said, "As I Lay Dying is the warmest, the kindliest and most affectionate.... In no other work is he so receptive to people, so ready to take and love them, to hear them out and record their turns of idiom, their melodies of speech."

Faulkner had more than three decades of work ahead of him after he finished As I Lay Dying. In 1930, he began contributing short stories to national magazines. He published thirteen of them in book form in 1931, the year he gained some fame--or notoriety--with Sanctuary.

Unlike Sanctuary, As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury failed to reach wide audiences. When As I Lay Dying appeared in October 1930 reviewers generally praised it, even when annoyed. But readers found Faulkner's stream of consciousness techniques hard going and the world of Yoknapatawpha County as foreign as Mars.

In 1932, Faulkner couldn't sell the magazine rights to a more conventional novel, Light in August. So he took a job writing film scripts in Hollywood. He would write films, off and on, for the next 22 years. None of the films was especially memorable. Writing them kept him from his family for long stretches. Yet the movies helped him pay his bills.

He wrote a succession of fine novels after Light in August--Pylon (1935), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and The Unvanquished (1938) among them. During most of the 1940s, however, it was hard to find any of his novels in bookstores.

The Nobel Prize for Literature he won in 1950 changed all that. His publishers put his books back in print. And although his great creative period had ended in 1938, even the weaker novels he now wrote sold well.

Faulkner died of a heart attack in 1962, a little more than 32 years after he wrote As I Lay Dying. Some years before he died, he recalled the goal he had in mind when he wrote the novel: "I said, I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again."

As his reader, you are the final judge of his effort. Did he succeed in his aim of writing a book that his reputation could rest on?


^^^^^^^^^^AS I LAY DYING: THE PLOT

Addie, a schoolteacher, marries Anse Bundren, a tall man with a humped back who has a farm in the hills of Yoknapatawpha County. They have a child, Cash, who makes Addie feel less alone and whom she loves.

Her contentment with one child is shattered when she finds herself pregnant with her second child, Darl. She feels that Anse has tricked her with words of love, which she is sure he cannot feel. In revenge, she secures a promise she knows will be nearly impossible to keep. She makes Anse promise to bury her next to her relatives 40 miles away in Jefferson, the county seat, when she dies.

One summer, Addie has a brief, passionate affair with Whitfield, a preacher. They have a son, Jewel, whom Anse raises as his own. To make amends to Anse for her unfaithfulness, she has two other children, Dewey Dell and Vardaman.

When Vardaman is eight or nine, Addie lies dying on her corn-shuck mattress. Outside her window, Cash, now a 29-year-old carpenter, carefully fashions her coffin as a gesture of love. While the Tulls--neighbors--are visiting, Darl convinces jewel to take a trip with him to pick up a load of lumber. Darl knows that Jewel is Addie's favorite child. The trip for lumber is a contrivance--Darl's way of keeping Jewel from his mother's bedside when she dies.

Their absence with the family's wagon presents a problem. In the July heat, dead bodies decompose rapidly. A wheel breaks, and before Darl and jewel can replace it, bring the wagon home, and load Addie's body onto it for the trip to Jefferson, three days have passed.

By this time, heavy rains have flooded the Yoknapatawpha River and washed out all the bridges that cross it. The Bundrens travel past the Tulls' house to the Samsons', then back to the Tulls' again to ford the river at what had been a shallow place before the flood.

The river is vicious. The Bundrens' mules drown. The wagon tips over, dumping Cash and breaking his leg. Jewel, on horseback, manages to keep the wagon and its load from drifting downstream.

They stop at the Amstids' on the other side of the river. Anse trades Jewel's horse and Cash's eight dollars--he had been saving for a wind-up phonograph--for a new mule team.

To reach Jefferson, the Bundrens have to drive out of the county to Mottson. Addie's rotting body outrages the townspeople. The Bundrens buy a dime's worth of cement to make a cast for Cash's leg. Dewey Dell, who is pregnant, tries and fails to buy some abortion pills in the local drugstore.