As I Lay Dying (26 page)

So we set in the wagon, but the music wasn’t playing now. I reckon it’s a good thing we aint got ere a one of them. I reckon I wouldn’t never get no work done a-tall for listening to it. I dont know if a little music aint about the nicest thing a fellow can have. Seems like when he comes in tired of a night, it aint nothing could rest him like having a little music played and him resting. I have seen them that shuts up like a hand-grip, with a handle and all, so a fellow can carry it with him wherever he wants.

“What you reckon he’s doing?” Jewel says. “I could a toted them shovels back and forth ten times by now.”

“Let him take his time,” I said. “He aint as spry as you, remember.”

“Why didn’t he let me take them back, then? We got to get your leg fixed up so we can start home tomorrow.”

“We got plenty of time,” I said. “I wonder what them machines costs on the installment.”

“Installment of what?” Jewel said. “What you got to buy it with?”

“A fellow cant tell,” I said. “I could a bought that one from Suratt for five dollars, I believe.”

And so pa come back and we went to Peabody’s. While we was there pa said he was going to the barbershop and get a shave. And so that night he said he had some business to tend to, kind of looking away from us while he said it, with his hair combed wet and slick and smelling sweet with perfume, but I said leave him be; I wouldn’t mind hearing a little more of that music myself.

And so next morning he was gone again, then he come back and told us to get hitched up and ready to take out and he would meet us and when they was gone he said,

“I dont reckon you got no more money.”

“Peabody just give me enough to pay the hotel with,” I said. “We dont need nothing else, do we?”

“No,” pa said; “no. We dont need nothing.” He stood there, not looking at me.

“If it is something we got to have, I reckon maybe Peabody,” I said.

“No,” he said; “it aint nothing else. You all wait for me at the corner.”

So Jewel got the team and come for me and they fixed me a pallet in the wagon and we drove across the square to the corner where pa said, and we was waiting there in the wagon, with Dewey Dell and Vardaman eating bananas, when we see them coming up the street. Pa was coming along with that kind of daresome and hangdog look all at once like when he has been up to something he knows ma aint going to like, carrying a grip in his hand, and Jewel says,

“Who’s that?”

Then we see it wasn’t the grip that made him look different; it was his face, and Jewel says, “He got them teeth.”

It was a fact. It made him look a foot taller, kind of holding his head up, hangdog and proud too, and then we see her behind him, carrying the other grip—a kind of duck-shaped woman all dressed up, with them kind of hardlooking pop eyes like she was daring ere a man to say nothing. And there we set watching them, with Dewey Dell’s and Vardaman’s mouth half open and half-et bananas in their hands and
her coming around from behind pa, looking at us like she dared ere a man. And then I see that the grip she was carrying was one of them little graphophones. It was for a fact, all shut up as pretty as a picture, and everytime a new record would come from the mail order and us setting in the house in the winter, listening to it, I would think what a shame Darl couldn’t be to enjoy it too. But it is better so for him. This world is not his world; this life his life.

“It’s Cash and Jewel and Vardaman and Dewey Dell,” pa says, kind of hangdog and proud too, with his teeth and all, even if he wouldn’t look at us. “Meet Mrs Bundren,” he says.

EDITORS’ NOTE

This volume reproduces the text of
As I Lay Dying
that has been established by Noel Polk. The copy-text for this novel is William Faulkner’s own ribbon typescript setting copy, which has been emended to account for his revisions in proof, his indisputable typing errors, and certain other mistakes and inconsistencies that clearly demand correction. Faulkner typed and proofread this document himself, and it also bears alterations of varying degrees of seriousness by his editors.

According to Faulkner’s sarcastic testimony in his notorious introduction to the Modern Library
Sanctuary
in 1932, he wrote
As I Lay Dying
“in six weeks, without changing a word.” The manuscript and typescript reveal that he did not, of course, write it “without changing a word,” although the dates on the manuscript indicate that he did indeed complete the holograph version in about eight weeks, between October 25 and December 29, 1929. “I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force,” he claimed later. “Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first words, I knew what the last word would be.… Before I began 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.” He wrote
As I Lay Dying
at the University of Mississippi power plant, where he was employed as a fireman and night watchman, mostly in the early morning, after everybody had gone to bed and power needs had diminished. He finished the typing, according to the date on the carbon typescript, on January 12, 1930, and sent it to Harrison Smith, who published it with very few editorial changes on October 6, 1930.

Extant documents relevant to the editing of
As I Lay Dying
are the holograph manuscript and the carbon typescript, at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, and the ribbon typesetting copy, at the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas. No proof is known to survive;
this is unfortunate, since there are a number of differences between the typescript and the published book that must have occurred in proof.

American English continues to fluctuate; for example, a word may be spelled in more than one way, even in the same work. Commas are sometimes used expressively to suggest the movements of voice, and capitals are sometimes meant to give significances to a word beyond those it might have in its uncapitalized form. Since standardization would remove such effects, this volume preserves the spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and wording of the text established by Noel Polk, which strives to be as faithful to Faulkner’s usage as surviving evidence permits.

The following notes were prepared by Joseph Blotner and are reprinted with permission from
Novels 1930—1935,
one volume of the edition of Faulkner’s collected works published by The Library of America, 1985. For further information, consult Calvin S. Brown,
A Glossary of Faulkner’s South
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Jessie McGuire Coffee,
Faulkner’s Un-Christlike Christians: Biblical Allusions in the Novels
(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983); André Bleikasten,
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
(Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, rev. ed., 1973); and
William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,”
ed. by Dianne L. Cox (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984).

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group’s reading of three of William Faulkner’s greatest novels:
The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying,
and
Absalom, Absalom!
We hope that they will provide you with new ways of thinking and talking about three works that stand as major landmarks in the history of modern American literature, works that exemplify Faulkner’s bold stylistic and formal innovations, his creation of unforgettably powerful voices and characters, and his brilliant insight into the psychological, economic, and social realities of life in the South in the transition from the Civil War to the modern era. In their intellectual and aesthetic richness, these novels raise nearly endless possibilities for discussion. The questions below will necessarily be limited and are meant to open several, but certainly not all, areas of inquiry for your reading group.

READER’S GUIDE

1. Which are the most intelligent and sympathetic voices in the novel? With whom do you most and least identify? Is Faulkner controlling your closeness to some characters and not others? How is this done, given the seemingly equal mode of presentation for all voices?

2. Even the reader of such an unusual book may be surprised to come upon Addie Bundren’s narrative on
this page
, if only because Addie has been dead since
this page
. Why is Addie’s narrative placed where it is, and what is the effect of hearing Addie’s voice at this point in the book? Is this one of the ways in which Faulkner shows Addie’s continued “life” in the minds and hearts of her family? How do the issues raised by Addie here relate to the book as a whole?

3. Faulkner allows certain characters—especially Darl and Vardaman—to express themselves in language and imagery that would be impossible, given their lack of education and experience in the world. Why does he break with the realistic representation of character in this way?

4. What makes Darl different from the other characters? Why is he able to describe Addie’s death [
see here
] when he is not present? How is he able to intuit the fact of Dewey Dell’s pregnancy? What does this uncanny visionary power mean, particularly in the context of what happens to Darl at the end of the novel? Darl has fought in World War I; why do you think Faulkner has chosen to include this information about him? What are the sources and meaning of his madness?

5. Anse Bundren is surely one of the most feckless characters in literature, yet he alone thrives in the midst of disaster. How does he manage to command the obedience and cooperation of his children? Why are other people so generous with him? He gets his new teeth at the end of the novel and he also gets a new wife. What is the secret of Anse’s charm? How did he manage to make Addie marry him, when she is clearly more intelligent than he is?

6. Some critics have spoken of Cash as the novel’s most gentle character, while others have felt that he is too rigid, too narrow-minded, to be sympathetic. What does Cash’s list of the thirteen reasons for beveling the edges of the coffin tell us about him? What does it tell us about his feeling for his mother? Does Cash’s carefully reasoned response to Darl’s imprisonment seem fair to you, or is it a betrayal of his brother?

7. Jewel is the result of Addie’s affair with the evangelical preacher Whitfield (an aspect of the plot that bears comparison with Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
). When we read Whitfield’s section, we realize that Addie has again allied herself with a man who is not her equal. How would you characterize the preacher? What is the meaning of this passionate alliance, now repudiated by Whitfield? Does Jewel know who his father is?

8. What is your response to the section spoken by Vardaman, which states simply, “My mother is a fish”? What sort of psychological state or process does this declaration indicate? What are some of the ways in which Vardaman insists on keeping his mother alive, even as he struggles to understand that she is dead? In what other ways does the novel show characters wrestling with ideas of identity and embodiment?