“A Conflicted, Imperfect Love.” Jesmyn Ward on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

I first read Faulkner in high school, when one of my classmates reported that he was his favorite writer. Every one of us had to do the same; I’d spent a year or so reading Gabriel García Márquez’s work, so I did my report on Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Curious about this serious, revered writer who wrote from our home state of Mississippi, I picked up The Sound and the Fury one day, opened it to a random page, and read, testing the book like one tests hot soup: for the temperature first, and not necessarily the taste.

“Does this suit?” I asked myself. “Can I sink into this world?”

I asked myself this because I knew that every book demands a certain amount of flexibility and willingness of the reader to follow the characters into the world of the book, to take in the words as they spool to story

“Yes,” I thought, “I can.”

I read a few more lines, but while the rhythm of the words lulled me in, the prose rebuffed me. I returned to the beginning of the paragraph, trying to orient myself as I savored the flavor of the story revealing itself, but I could not. Faulkner, it seemed, required a lot of work. I was not ready to parse each paragraph, each sentence, each line, to walk with these characters in their Mississippi. This continued with subsequent attempts. There was some sort of invisible wall between Faulkner’s work and me. After fighting through the bramble of his prose to his characters and place, I didn’t recognize his Mississippi, neither the people nor the place that made them.

*

When I was in my early twenties, living in New York City and working in book publishing, I tried again. Under the guidance of a better-read friend, I was attempting to read classics I’d missed in high school and college, all in an effort to commit to learning how to be a better writer. I dimly understood that one had to learn how to read as a writer, how to assess how an author is working, how they are constructing the story, and then imitate that in one’s own work in a kind of apprenticeship.

In this later reading of The Sound and the Fury, my comprehension bloomed. I could follow the various points of view. The prose no longer seemed to fight me as vigorously, and I could comprehend the basic action on the page. I felt a bit closer to the characters and their travails. I felt sympathy for Caddy, Quentin, and Benjy, all of them thwarted in their efforts to engage with and understand one another. But the depiction of the family servants, who are Black, kicked me out of the narrative again, and rebuked an emotional response to the text. I searched for echoes of the Black Mississippians I knew in Dilsey’s family, in their speech or their mannerisms or their emotional sensitivity, but I did not find them. I recognized the mastery in the rhythm of Faulkner’s paragraphs, his rendering of the Compsons’ rich inner emotional lives, his use of figurative language, but I didn’t love the book. At that moment in my life, the reading still failed to resonate.

After a few years of reading Dante and Morrison, Hemingway and Barnes, I wrote one passable short story, and I matriculated at the University of Michigan’s MFA program in Ann Arbor. While there, I decided to take an Imitations course with Nicholas Delbanco, wherein we read great writers like Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, and Ford Madox Ford, assessed their prose styles, and then attempted to write short fiction pieces that mimicked their prose methods. Faulkner was on the syllabus, with As I Lay Dying. I was in my mid-twenties then. I doubted I could write anything that successfully imitated Faulkner, because I knew how technically complicated and brilliant he was: I recalled that much from The Sound and the Fury. Still, I would try. And so I bought a paperback version of As I Lay Dying and began to read.

When Darl—the brilliant, perceptive, mad Darl—describes the dilapidated cottonhouse, when he says: “Square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch, it leans in empty and shimmering dilapidation in the sunlight, a single broad window in two opposite walls,” it was as if I were walking with him through that field, and he stopped and halted me with his arm, and bade me look. The moment felt intimate. At Darl’s invitation, I not only saw but recognized what I saw. I recognized that Mississippi, recognized the beauty of that place, which Darl renders again and again. Describing the approaching storm, he says: “The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.” This, too, was familiar. I’d grown up at the bottom end of the state, in a landscape riven by rivers and thickly forested, where my folks had scratched out a living for decades, planting and harvesting, losing everything every thirty years or so when monstrous hurricanes flattened us. I knew that Mississippi bestowed gifts in the harvest, but also damned like an old god with flood and rain and wind.

I recognized the heavy press of poverty, the relentless march of years spent on the lip of a deep ditch, seconds away from falling in and being washed seaward with the runoff. It breeds constant stress, wherein one is ever aware in one’s very body of money, or rather, the lack of it: one walks with a perennial tightness. Poverty bears fruit in Pa’s diseased gums, bare of teeth he can’t afford to keep in his mouth. It bears fruit in Addie, worn down from years of untreated illness and disease, inflammation and malnutrition run rampant until she can no longer rise from her bed. I felt Dewey Dell’s despair as she obsesses over the money she carries, the secret baby she does not want to bear that consigns her to a life of deeper poverty. She guards the money Lafe gave her for an abortion carefully, fiercely, only relinquishing it to her terrible father after a contentious fight. I’ve witnessed the paucity of money bearing fruit in my own life and in the lives of those I love: how it blooms in gout or diabetes or glaucoma or high blood pressure or high cholesterol or infant mortality. How it hurries us to infirmity, to the grave.

Darl may have been plumb insane, but his presence on the page spoke to me as a Mississippi-made aspiring artist. People often ask me why so many lauded, great writers come out of Mississippi, and I never have a satisfying answer for them. The most I can usually manage is a shrug and a smile, but returning to Darl and As I Lay Dying yields a half-formed, inarticulate answer. Perhaps so many great writers are born of this state because this place has endowed us with the particular temperament that demands we witness both the outrageous pain and the outrageous beauty of Mississippi. Perhaps we all share the same horror and awe at how the two are so closely intertwined here, how they seem to grow from the same root like a possum oak and a Spanish oak, one black-barked and prone to rot and breakage, the other feathered in small green ferns and a mosaic of moss.

In this later reading of As I Lay Dying, I recognized the urge to be still, to be aware, and to render art from the world around me as Darl does. Darl is an artist. Darl is a seer. Darl is a prophet. But are we not all seers here, as we wail and wrest art from the world around us, as we scream our stories skyward, inviting listeners to empathize, to embrace caution, to bear witness to the beautiful and the terrible at once?

Of course, my reading of Faulkner’s work wasn’t entirely smooth. When one of the characters described another’s gangrene-infected leg as looking like “a nigger’s foot,” it kicked me out of the narrative. I was reminded that the Bundrens would have interacted with people who looked like me and felt superior to us, even as they dragged their poor matriarch’s rotting corpse around a whole county. That even though their experience of the world was so rich and layered and not bound by their lack of education or how articulate they were in dialogue, that they were still blinded by the myth of their time, the myth of white supremacy. I was reminded that this myth would not have allowed them to feel any empathy for those like me, and that it was this very lack that must have dogged Faulkner in his attempts to render people of African descent whole on the page.

And yet I believe that As I Lay Dying, in many respects, was one of the foundational books in my life as a writer. It taught me to appreciate rhythm, fluidity, and defiance in prose. It taught me that characters didn’t need to be bound by point of view or by place: a person’s experience could be as deep, as inscrutable, as full of mystery, as a star-studded, brilliant night sky. It taught me that the first-person present point of view could be every bit as immersive and powerful and profound as its more popular cousin, the third-person. I took all these lessons with me along with a new love for Faulkner, a conflicted, imperfect love—but a love, nevertheless, for I realized he was kin in telling this complicated, complex story that is Mississippi.

__________________________________

From As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Introduction Copyright © 2024 by Jesmyn Ward. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.