The Thirties

Abstract

As I Lay Dying (1930) continues the themes of The Sound and the Fury: the family, language, madness. Indeed in 1946 Random House published the two novels back to back. But in the new novel there is no fourth section to confirm our detached perspective on events and family members; paradoxically, the fragmented, multi-faceted form is more consistently enigmatic than the earlier novel: ‘It is the novel’s very control, its internal truth to itself, that has led to the huge collection of fragmentary and conflicting critical commentary.’¹⁰² It was written, according to Faulkner, around December 1929 in a space of 47 days while he was working nightshift as a stoker in the powerplant of the University of Mississippi. Even though there is evidence of some revision, the text in what one critic called its ‘nakedness of form’¹⁰³ certainly reads as Faulkner’s tour de force. Again Faulkner focuses on a single family, but taking the place of Caddy as focus for the children is the mother Addie Bundren, signifying the other of that pair of concepts in Faulkner’s world, sex and death. It is as if we learn here about those Compson children peering in the windows at Damuddy’s deathbed, rather than up at Caddy’s muddy drawers.