Historical Context

Hello, my name is Scottie Parrish.

I'm a professor in the English department and the program in

the environment at the University of Michigan in Ann

Arbor, Michigan.

I'm really excited to be here with you today.

I first read Faulkner when I was about the age of your

students when I was a senior in high school,

and he's been the author that,

has been the most important to me throughout my career.

So I'm just so excited to help you

teach this teach As They Lay Dying

for your students.

Okay. So let's get started.

The first mini lecture is going to I want to get you situated

in the year nineteen twenty nine,

which was the year in which Faulkner wrote,

wrote As I Lay Dying,

and it was published in nineteen thirty.

So I'm just wanna start with historical context.

So first of all, when Faulkner wrote

his manuscript, he put a date on the very first page,

and that date was October twenty fifth nineteen twenty nine.

This was four days before what's come to be known as Black Tuesday,

when Wall Street investors traded sixteen million shares

on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day.

Billions of dollars were lost,

wiping out thousands of investors.

And it was this this was the inauguration or the beginning

of the global economic downturn of the Great Depression.

So

people have come to read As I Lay Dying as a depression novel

because it's so associated with the very beginning of of that decade.

And it is about a southern agricultural family who has,

you know, economic challenges.

And so it seemed to feed into that reading.

But Mississippi had been mired in financial

difficulties throughout the nineteen twenties,

because of fluctuations in the cotton market.

So it was in some ways, Faulkner was already familiar

with the crises that would become global after nineteen twenty nine.

So nineteen twenty nine, another way to think of it is

it was, after World War one,

which lasted from nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighteen.

So we're in the post World War one era.

And some scholars have read the novel,

as a war novel.

In particular, John Lyman,

calls it the muddiest book in all literature and he sees in

the mud that you'll you become familiar with as you're

reading, illusions constant allusions

to, trench warfare and the mud.

Faulkner did serve in the, RAF, the Royal Air Force in Canada.

He was denied

military service in the United States,

but he never left Canada and never saw combat.

He was a lifelong flyer.

Darrel, and you probably don't wanna let your students know this

until the very end,

but what you learn just a couple chapters from the end is

that he has been in France at the war.

So he is a veteran,

and he and you can tell as the novel advances that he is,

suffering from traumas,

mental traumas and begins to see the world quite differently

than everyone else around him.

We might call it post traumatic stress syndrome now.

So he is he is a veteran.

He is, as I'll talk about, our most frequent narrator.

And so in that sense, this is this is a post traumatic novel

in that in that way.

And you, you know,

you may have encountered the history of World War one in

some other classes or your students might have,

but World War one is known for taking,

the the industrials industrial scale machinery that had in

many ways helped humanity,

heretofore in production and and so forth

and turning it against human bodies in warfare.

So it was just a pulverizing event,

devastating a whole generation of young men,

signaling the end of various European empires.

The way John Dewey talks about life after World War one in a

book he wrote called The Public and Its Problems.

He wrote it in nineteen twenty seven.

He talked about how World War one changed the speed and the reach,

the quick the quick expansion of crises all around the world.

And he said the war showed how forces so vast, so remote

in initiation, so far reaching in scope,

and so complexly indirect in operation

are now felt and suffered, but not known.

So this new kind of mystery of of grand events initiated far

off that one is swept into but without really understanding.

So this is again kind of the the the era that we're in.

And the third thing I'll talk about is the great Mississippi

flood that happened in nineteen twenty seven,

so two years before Faulkner started writing this novel.

And the other two events, in some ways,

were a little bit distant, particularly the war.

The great Mississippi flood moved right by basically right by his door.

And so I'll talk about that at great length.

And then I wanna talk for a moment about

modernist visual aesthetics.

So what had been happening in the arts,

leading up to nineteen twenty nine that might have influenced

Faulkner.

So Darryl talks about or it is well,

he talks about a little spyglass he got in France at the war.

And so his having been at the war and his having learned to

see things differently are associated

so that he not only, you know,

learned to see the world differently through combat,

but also by being in some of the urban centers of Europe,

his his visuality, his way of seeing things changed.

So the character, Tull, talks about Darl's eyes at one

point, and he said, Darl is looking at me.

He don't say nothing.

Just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisen that makes folks talk.

It's like he had got into the inside of you some way.

Like somehow you was looking at yourself or your doings out of his eyes.

So it's remarked that he has these strange eyes,

these strange ways of seeing.

And I'll point out to you a couple of moments where Darryl

sees things in an unusual way and I would say in a painterly way.

And I think we can I wanna give you a little bit of a

background for this?

Like, what might he have seen while he was in France that makes him see this way?

So he's describing in one of the chapters,

the, you know, the nightscape outside the the Bundren's house.

And, his brother Cash, had been, using the the saw,

and he says,

rusted, grease fouled, it's cracked.

So there's a lantern, sits on a stump, rusted, grease fouled,

it's cracked chimney,

smeared on one side with a soaring smudge of soot.

It sheds a feeble and sultry glare upon the trestles and the

boards and the adjacent earth.

Upon the dark ground, chips look like random smears of soft

pale paint on a black canvas.

The boards look like long smooth tatters torn from the

flat darkness and turned backside out.

So he's clearly seen paintings,

and seen abstract paintings.

And then he sees something even stranger.

He's talking about,

someone sawing.

He saws again his elbow flashing slowly, a thin thread

of fire running along the edge of the saw,

lost and recovered at the top and bottom of each stroke in

unbroken elongation,

so that the saw appears to be six feet long into and out of

Pa's shabby and aimless silhouette.

So in that moment, his brother Cash is sawing,

but his father is sort of standing right in front of it.

So Daryl comes to see this in a

kind of surreal way, such that the saw is actually sawing his father.

So there's a kind of violence and violation and almost

absurdity to the way that Darryl sort of sees the world,

maybe flattens it and makes it more violent,

which which certainly comes out of war experience.

And then I wanted to read you one other moment of Darryl's seeing.

So he says he got a a little spyglass in France at the war.

In it, it had a woman and a pig with two backs and no face.

And I think what you're meant to think that literally that

this might be a piece of pornography that he got in

France at the war.

A a sort of strange, perverse pornography, with,

you know, a beast and a woman.

But so so something about that this experience in

the war and in France has made kind of a reasonable,

mind

see violence and perversity where wherever he looks.