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| Leslie Shimotakahara |
Excerpts from The
Reading List.
Reprinted with the permission of Variety Crossing Press.
“Poplar or cherry?” Daddy
said. He slid a brochure across the
table.
I stared at the caskets, so solid and
heavy, and something about the ruffled satin lining in Pepto-Bismol pink made
me giggle. Is that the wall Granny would
want to stare at for all eternity?
Daddy had spent the past three days
meeting with funeral home directors, comparison shopping, planning ahead for
the inevitable. At least it gave him
something to do.
“It’s big business.” He flipped open his
laptop to show me a website.
What balls these people had. Who charges $39.95 to light a memorial
candle? The website was full of ways to
activate your PayPal account, buy services, and even avoid going to the funeral
altogether, while appeasing your guilt.
Daddy smiled grudgingly. “Absolutely recession-proof.”
“You should have gone into the funeral
business.”
“Oh, yeah. Can you see me with old ladies crying on my
shoulder?”
We continued joking, but something about
the whole thing really got to me.
Spending all this money and the person being honoured wasn’t even around
to enjoy it.
“I’d rather just go the way of Addie
Bundren,” I said.
Daddy looked at me blankly.
I explained that Addie Bundren is the
cranky old matriarch at the centre of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The novel
begins on the eve of her death, as her son, Cash, is making her casket, sawing
and sanding boards. All her kids – Cash,
Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell and Vardaman – are crowded around her bedside watching
her die, just like we were all hovering around Granny. After her death, they pack her into the
casket and load the whole thing into a horse-drawn buggy to make an epic
journey across the land to Jefferson, Mississippi, where Addie wishes to be
buried with her own people, rather than by her husband’s side.
“A homemade casket,” Daddy said, shaking
his head.
“You should read it.”
“Maybe I will.”
As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear
that much more is at stake than just an eccentric lady’s dying wish. Addie Bundren wants to be alone. Alone in death. To put the final nail in the coffin of a life
lived in solitude and despair.
An image of Granny being carted away by
horse and buggy popped into my head. She
was no less a strange, impenetrable woman.
A few days later, I was
revising the syllabus for my Modern American Literature course (just in case I
needed it for next year). Last year I’d
deluded myself that undergrads could handle Absalom!
Absalom! What had I been
thinking? Even Faulkner scholars are
baffled by what he was up to in telling the legendary story of Thomas Sutpen,
in flashbacks by multiple narrators whose accounts fail to match up. The reader is left guessing about who Thomas
Sutpen really was.
My course evaluations reflected just how
much the students loved the novel (I’d finally forced myself to read through
the pile). “What was Faulkner on when he
wrote that crap?” wrote one kid. “Half
the time I didn’t even know who’s speaking – everything blended together like a
bizarre dream.”
Since I would have to teach a Faulkner
novel (what’s an Am Lit class without Faulkner?), I figured As I Lay Dying was a better bet. Although the novel is told from fifteen
different perspectives, at least it’s always clear who’s speaking; each chapter
is titled with the name of the speaker.
And the plot is simple, deceptively simple. At first glance, you wonder why Faulkner is
spilling so much ink over an old lady’s death.
But Addie Bundren gradually draws you
in. She has shameful secrets at the core
of her being. As soon as she dies, the
neighbours are all gossiping about how quickly the Bundrens pack her up and
cart her off.
I wondered if Granny’s neighbours were
talking about Daddy. They must have seen
him packing boxes at her house.
Despite Daddy’s show of wanting to get
her death over with, however, I could tell that deep down he was astonished it
was happening at all. I could see it in
his childlike air, his petulant gaze, the way he stomped around the house. In a way, he reminded me of Vardaman, Addie’s
youngest son. After her death, Vardaman
bursts into the barn; the warm, rank smells envelop him and mix with the smell
of his own vomit and tears and everything seems very close and
suffocating. The little boy is so
overwhelmed that he wants to lash out at something, anything, “You kilt my
maw!” burning at the back of his throat.
Yet racing through the dust and striking
the horses can’t make it better, can’t bring his mother back.
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