Chance references often guide my reading, leading me meanderingly from one book to another. Discovering the influence of William Faulkner on Simone de Beauvoir was one such instance. Sartre remarked that de Beauvoir’s technique in Le Sang des Autres, cutting the chronological order of the story and replacing it with a more subtle sequence, half logical, half intuitive, was inspired by Faulkner.
Writing of As I Lay Dying, de Beauvoir admired Faulkner’s ability to harmonize multiple viewpoints: “Not only did he show great skill in deploying and harmonising multiple viewpoints, but he got inside each individual mind, setting forth its knowledge and ignorance, its moments of insincerity, its fantasies, the words it formed and the silences it kept. As a result the narrative was bathed in a chiaroscuro, which gave each event the greatest possible highlight and shadow.”
The contrasts in As I Lay Dying are striking, particularly the language: vernacular and poetic side by side. In the viewpoint of the confused child Vardaman, after a passage of rambling thought, the narrative offers a moment of dislocation: “It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components—snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is.”
It is difficult to attribute this passage fully to Vardaman’s consciousness. Faulkner seems instead to permit the unconscious a voice: the Id, that talks even when silent. Among the fifteen fragmentary viewpoints offered, even the departed mother speaks; it is not too great a stretch to allow the unconscious its moment.
Beauvoir found the dark comedy of As I Lay Dying unsettling but powerful. There is a surreal humour in the Bundren family’s desperate journey to bury the odorous corpse of the family matriarch. Set pieces, like the near-loss of the coffin on the river, are both predictable and agonizing. De Beauvoir observes: “If objects or habits were presented to the reader in a preposterous light, the reason was that misery and want not only change man’s attitude to things but transform the very appearance of things.”
In Faulkner’s chiaroscuro of speech, thought, and action, the visible and the invisible intertwine with a stubborn, unforgettable force.