[lbo-talk] As I Lay Dying, was Re ...kulaks, Shanin's analysis

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Jan 12 11:52:21 PST 2005


andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> Mind you Faulkner's
> not sentimental bout the genuinely poor, like the
> Bundrens of As I Lay --

[It's been 55 years since I read _As I Lay Dying_ and I forget the details, but the general impression it left on me remains strong, and not accounted for by seing them as instances of poverty.]

Probably abstractly correct, in that the action is impossible except within the framework of their poverty. But the emphasis seemed to me to lie elsewhere: On the determination (weak word) with which they carry out a (perhaps falsely imagined) pledge to which they feel bound. My reading in 20th c. fiction in general is spotty, but among novels I've read the one which reminded me most of _As I Lay Dying_ was Barbara Pym's _Quartet in Autumn_, in which age replaces poverty as the general condition of the action.

Carrol



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