William. Faulkner's "As I Die": Dying, in order to portray what was once

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"As I Die" is a novel in a unique style. In this book, Faulkner chooses not to use a single first-person or third-person account to describe a country family's frustration and arduous journey in order to mourn their dead mother. Instead, the monologues of 15 characters are interlaced into 59 chapters throughout the book. Creates a disjointed, decentralized narrative. These characters are mainly family members, but there are also other characters encountered along the way. It seems that in these intertwined monologues, readers not only feel how the shadow of the death of their relatives lingers and linger in the hearts of various characters, but also in such narratives, there is an experience of detachment that lingers and lingers among the various characters.

The decentralized narrative method makes this novel difficult to read. It's easy to get lost in the plot of a story because of multiple perspectives. It becomes necessary to go back and forth, look at the relationship chart, and read different statements over and over again to organize and organize the whole picture. From this perspective, "As I Lay Dying" is like a large and complex "In the Bamboo Forest", where each person describes what they see and what they think about others. Sometimes they overlap and echo each other, and sometimes they seem to diverge from the plot, allowing readers to glimpse hidden details. Interestingly, although each chapter is a monologue of a character, this monologue, although it is a monologue, often seems to be not talking about himself. In fact, there are not many descriptions of the character's own psychology, but he is always describing in detail and profoundly the dialogues and behaviors of the scenery he sees and other people. In some incredible moments, the characters contemplate other people's emotions, spirits, and even talk about the scenery and magical images seen in the eyes of others.

"Kash likes to saw long, sad yellow days into pieces of wood and nail them into something... (on the other hand) I don't think Dahl will notice that he's sitting at the dinner table, looking beyond him Food and table lamps, all he sees is the landscape of the ground dug out of his skull, and the far-flung caves beyond that land."

How on earth does a character know what is going on in another's mind, we don't want to ask? And can it be described so vividly? In another chapter, Dahl, who goes to the city to deliver goods, even recounts what happened that night at his country home. It seems that in this book, each character is like an author, having an omniscient view beyond the text for a few moments, and then the shadows overlap each other and stretch out new shadows.

Another effect of decentralized narrative is the stagnation of the novel’s sense of time. Because to the reader, each event seems to be very long and endless through such layers of narratives and descriptions of each other by different characters. Wandering and wandering, dying and dying...

"We move on, with an incomparably groggy, dreamlike dynamic, as if it were impossible to infer the conclusion of what was going on, as if it were not space but time that was shortening between us and our destination."

Funeral is a movement, but this movement seems to resist itself through the process of movement. Although people are moving, their minds fall into a trance because of their habit of moving, like riding a slow train, staying in a place where they don't know where they are. This "place" of spiritual death, Faulkner believes, is not a space, but a time of getting lost and "trapped".

"His head hangs down, looking out through the dripping water, as if looking out through the eye shields of his armour, that look that travels a long way across the village to the barn nestled on the edge of the cliff, as if looking through the eyes, Knock out an invisible horse."

Through the eyes of each character, Faulkner captures the characters' various "dead", "absent" moments in this book. In these moments, dying becomes a kind of insight, and also a kind of trance. There is a goal but the direction seems to be lost.

Nostalgia, like a kind of dying, has a goal but loses a sense of direction. And make people allow themselves to be enveloped in a powerlessness. Try to stay in a past or imagined time and space in this envelope. And that "powerlessness", first of all, is aimed at the fact that the relatives died. Interestingly, Faulkner said this:

"At the end of the day you'll understand--death is just a psychic effect."

The shadow of family death hangs over the hearts of every character in the story. But Faulkner reminds us that death is not the same as dying, that death is a state of loss of life. But there are many things that make us feel dead, even if they don't make us die. In the novel, Aidi, the mother of the children, is indeed dead. But the feelings and memories of her, like the feeling of death, still linger in the hearts of the characters. In addition, the reader is suddenly terrified that one of the 59 chapters is the words spoken by the dead Edi. As if she died, but the ghost still lingers. Among them, we can find that Aidi's married life is not happy, she thinks she has entered a scam called "home". And what people call love is just an empty word, so that she can fill the lack in others' hearts.

In addition to the shadows that her husband Ans and their children endured during the funeral process, in addition to death, another aspect is their debt to Aidi, as well as Aidi's anger and dissatisfaction with the obligation to "home" The inverse effect (inability to give love). Let everyone hope that through this funeral, Aidi can "rest in peace".

Just as Shuji Terayama once wrote in "My Mystery": "Death is just a fiction created by people to live." "Rest in peace" is also just a religious fiction. It is true that Eddie died, but despite the fact that everyone knew it, the whole preparation for the funeral implied that death was never more than just dying. Because perhaps it is not the dead who need "rest" at all, but those who are still alive. In this long funeral, what really needs to be mourned is not the love flute lying in the coffin, but the love flute still living in the hearts of the family.

Funeral is a journey that allows people to mourn, miss, experience the passing and grief, and let them cherish the mother in their hearts in their own ways. For Vadaman, the youngest son in the family who does not yet understand what death is, he does not believe that the mother lying in the coffin is the mother, and thinks that the mother must have turned into a fish and leave this home that is not good for her. As long as he continues to fish every day, one day he will find his mother willing to come back in the river. And the third son Zhuer, whom Aidi preferred during his lifetime, turned the grief of losing his mother to his favorite horse, as if his mother had become a horse for him, and he wanted to find the past in the care and company of the horse. Attachment, adoration. The eldest son of a carpenter, Cash didn't think much about death, but worked very hard to build a coffin in memory of his mother. The second son Dahl and the eldest daughter Du Wei maintained a certain indifference and detachment from their mother's death. On the one hand, Aidi was already despairing of life when she gave birth to Dahl and never really loved Dahl, so Dahl even said, "I don't have a mother. On the other hand, Du Wei did not dare to tell her mother because of her dark fetus, so she was under pressure to avoid her mother's care. And her husband Ans, just like Aidi's confession, although alive, is actually long dead. Despairingly, she just wants to send her dead wife to her hometown: Jefferson City, even if the bridge is broken in the way of the storm, it will take many days of hardship.

If they can be so immersed in their own dying and nostalgia, this journey may also be positive for each other. But God just wouldn't let that happen. The characters in the story all end up miserably. While forcibly crossing the river, the Bondren family had an accident, all the mules pulling the cart were drowned, and Kesh broke his leg. In order to continue the journey, Zhuer's favorite horse is sold by Ans without authorization. Dahl went mad and was arrested after burning a barn. Du Wei secretly wanted to buy medicine for an abortion, but was abducted. Vadaman also failed to get the little train he longed for. And although Ans finally showed his selfish purpose (remarrying), in Faulkner's writing, we only feel that he is still a sad person.

As I Lay Dying, the title of this novel comes from the Greek epic "Odyssey", in which Agamemnon recalls his desire to resist when he was assassinated by his wife when he was dying. From this point of view, as the translator mentioned in the translation preface, understanding the title of the book with the word "dying" is quite artistic, but it may ignore this sense of struggle at the moment of dying. Because if you think about it carefully, the kind of dying that Faulkner wants to describe is not only a kind of helpless nostalgia, but also expresses the realistic predicament faced by the characters in the book through the arduous process of funeral. This real dilemma is not only the disaster that people in the book encounter at home and on the road. If we go back to the historical context, it is related to the background of urban prosperity and rural decline in the 1920s and 1930s. And "As I Lay Dying" not only delved into the grief of the characters in the book who lost their relatives, but also described the incomparability (or even discrimination) of the urban people towards the rural people's situation through the road of funeral. And Aidi's troubles are, to a certain extent, the plight of a city man who is married to a village. On the other hand, when the Ans family dragged the already rotten coffin into the city streets and were criticized, the coffin seemed to symbolize not the death of a person, but the depression, dilapidation and embarrassment of the entire countryside.

All the dying, as well as the dying struggle, became more and more intense with the end of the funeral and the loss that everyone yearned for, and even made people feel cruel and indifferent. And at the last moment, with the scribbled, hasty, and almost no description of the burial, it directly returns to the reality that is ultimately futile, sad and irreversible. Faulkner's writing attempts to capture the dying, at this time, it is like a depiction of something that once existed, like a silent, unattended funeral, buried between life and death, existence and non-existence.

(The article is simultaneously published on the square grid blog: Literature Lab )

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