The Balance of Us: On the Strange Therapeutic Power of Faulkner’s Prose

It’s disorienting to read Faulkner. That’s part of the point. It’s also what makes As I Lay Dying impossible for me to put down in this disorienting season of medication withdrawal. I began tapering off OCD medication several weeks ago and am keeping a log of my experience. The changes haven’t been all that significant except for at night. I wake up startled—not necessarily screaming but always startled—at least once a night. I dream of my beloved dachshund sinking into rabbit holes while we play fetch. I dream of golden horses drowning in the neighborhood pool.

The prose in As I Lay Dying simultaneously provides a mirror for and an escape from my experience. The alternating stream-of-consciousness perspectives create a sprawling, kaleidoscopic mural of place, personality and feeling—one I can’t make complete sense of or pull away from, one that perfectly complements my fragmented mindset and troublesome dreams.

The premise of the story is fairly straightforward. Anse Bundren, a farmer in rural Mississippi, has promised to bury his wife in Jefferson—about forty miles from their small family farm. Addie’s dying wish is to be buried among her ancestors, and Anse and his sons and daughter must make the trip whether circumstances cooperate or not. With this basic plot line firmly in mind, the collage of stream-of-consciousness perspectives becomes navigable. It becomes clear how each character’s inner turbulence mirrors the outer landscape; how the odyssey within parallels the one without.

Cash’s character provides us with a particularly striking example of how the internal and external landscapes converge. Cash is the eldest Bundren child, and a gifted carpenter with a mathematical mind. He begins construction of his mother’s coffin while she is still alive and watching. His brother, Darl, whose sections are poetic and musical by comparison, describes Cash’s labors as follows:

Cash labors about the trestles, moving back and forth, lifting and placing the planks with long, clattering reverberations in the dead air as though he were lifting and dropping them at the bottom of an invisible well, the sounds ceasing without departing, as if any movement might dislodge them from the immediate air in reverberant repetition.

These sparkling observations contrast starkly with Cash’s inner world, which Faulkner represents in list form, explaining the decision to craft the coffin on a bevel:

I made it on a bevel.

1. There is more surface for the nails to grip.
2. There is twice the gripping-surface to each seam.
3. The water will have to seep in on a slant. Water moves easiest up and down or straight across.

I think anyone who has experienced a profound loss or dealt with chaos can relate to Cash’s impulse to enter full-blown task mode in order to alchemize confusion and grief into something tangible, numerical. I think of my own journal notes as I undergo this medication transition, the usual meditations and musings replaced with bland dosage information, recipe conversions and grocery lists. I think of my husband in the wake of a recent family tragedy, meticulously replacing every ceiling vent in the house.

There are three main moments of crisis that drive the plot. The first is the actual death of Addie Bundren, the family matriarch. The second is the crew’s disastrous attempt to cross a river in the midst of a storm, in which they nearly lose the coffin to the current. Vardaman, the youngest son, reports on the scene in childlike, frantic run-on prose:

Cash tried but she fell off and Darl jumped going under he went under and Cash hollering to catch her and I hollering running and hollering and Dewey Dell hollering at me Vardaman you Vardaman you Vardaman and Vernon passed me because he was seeing her come up and she jumped into the water again and Darl hadn’t caught her yet.

In the process of trying to retrieve the family’s belongings from the raging water, Cash becomes seriously injured. He breaks his leg—the same leg he’d broken before—and is propped up to rest atop the coffin, of all things. At one point, they try to set the leg in a cement cast, but this only makes matters worse, and his skin turns black. Cash refuses help and heroically downplays the severity of the injury even while he vomits and fades in and out of consciousness. His internal monologue shifts from lists and instructions to feverish (but still strangely grounded) observations about human nature. After his brother Darl is committed to a mental asylum, Cash reflects:

Sometimes I aint so sho whose got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that a-way. It aint so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

If Cash is the figure of reason and pragmatism, his gruesome injury represents the fracturing of all semblance of normalcy and rationality for the Bundren family. If there was any ever established order in place on the journey, Cash’s injury marks a clear pivot to chaos.

The third crisis moment comes after their arrival in Jefferson, when Darl, in an attempt to end the insanity of the journey and incinerate the stench of decay following the family and drawing the neighbors’ attention, sets fire to the barn they are staying in, livestock and coffin and all. It’s not revealed until after the fire occurs that Darl is the arsonist. Rather, we view the scene in the midst of the confusion through the perspective of the other characters, with Vardaman hinting that he may have seen something suspicious: “and then I waited and then I went to find where they stay at night and I saw something that Dewey Dell told me not to tell nobody.”

Though I did panic and discontinue one of my drugs cold-turkey when I realized I’d gained thirty pounds on it, effectively setting my neat little tapering schedule on fire, my withdrawal process has been mercifully free of crisis moments. There have been no floods, broken legs, or buzzards flying forebodingly overhead. Where I anticipated a resurgence of panic attacks, I was met with a frustrating but manageable case of brain fog. Where I expected evil memories to torment me, I found the coping skills I learned in therapy still intact even in the absence of medication.

The only major speedbumps come at night. As Hamlet famously tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “I could be bound in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams.”

I dream I’m standing on a square island the size of a kitchen tile with massive tidal waves smothering me on all four sides. I dream of my dachshund’s tail getting crushed by a car and wake up screaming, “Oh my God, what happened?”

I experience a similar exclamation internally with each chapter I complete of As I Lay Dying. Between the unfamiliar farming terms, absence of traditional punctuation, and abstract stylistic choices, I inevitably find myself asking, “Oh my God, what happened?” from time to time. Whenever I do, I harken back to T.S. Eliot’s assurance that genuine poetry communicates before it is understood. This grounds me. It always has. No matter how confused I am intellectually, no matter the thickness of the fog or the wildness of the dreams, I still feel the overflowing river’s current pulling me under and along with the Bundren brothers. I smell the sawdust from Addie’s just-made coffin before the decay sets in.

Image Credit: Jacob van Ruisdael, “Landscape with a Village in the Distance” (1646)