In his 2015 op-ed for the New York Times, “My Own Life”, renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks confronts his recent terminal diagnosis with typical grace, candor and an inspiring depth of perspective. He reckons with philosopher David Hume’s rumination on his own mortality – the piece a cheeky echo of the latter’s 1776 memoir – finding much to mine in the account of a clear-eyed but “speedy dissolution”, or “great decline of [a] person”, chafing, however, at the thinker’s professed “detachment from life” as he reaches that chapter’s conclusion. Sacks instead insists that he feels “intensely alive” and, in possession of “sudden clear focus and perspective”, wishes to dispense with “anything inessential” so as to “achieve new levels of understanding and insight.” He admits that he feels fear and allows that this will involve a sort of active detachment – he talks of giving up the News, not for lack of care but because of the finitude of time – describing his state of mind as an “increasing consciousness” as he confronts his mortality and looks forward to his end.
To anyone familiar with Sacks, his calm and clarity should be of little surprise. But upon revisiting the piece I was bowled over by its radical present tense. For a piece on death and dying if feels full of life. And indeed, what Sacks seems to be contending with is our problem in the West of giving dying its due. Rather than assent to the binary of Life and Death, with nothing in the middle, our Sacks, “sentient being…thinking animal”, plants his flag in the present moment and proclaims it to be something unique, active. He is dying and it is different than anything that came before.
Though he did not write As I Lay Dying in possession of the same first-hand experience as Sacks, I’d contend that Faulkner had a kindred perspective and as keen an interest in the in act of dying, and that a central interest in framing the novel around this liminal state, both universal and unique to every human, was to examine the ways we cast Death as the end of Life but often deny Dying its due. By employing a panoply of narrators Faulkner invites the reader to a sampler-platter of the ways in which the bereaved choose to engage or not engage with the death of a familiar (I hesitate to say ‘loved one’…).
As we toggle between the perspectives of the Bundren clan and their neighbors, in the hours before and immediately subsequent to Addie’s death, we bear witness to the ways in which mortality can drive us away from the present moment, further into ourselves. Cash, the eldest, fixates on the construction of the coffin, fulfilling Addie’s final wish and imagining her participation from her death-bed; Darl, evidently deteriorating and/or ascending to the astral plane, has taken to referring to his mother by her full name – “Addie Bundren will not be” (AILD, p.80) – and in between bouts of clairvoyant seeing, is tangled in the existential questions of tense, not sure if he ever was let alone is; Jewel, the bastard torch-bearer of his mother’s animal ire, alienated from his siblings by his inherent other-hood and his mother’s doting, can’t even bring himself to say ‘coffin’ as he and Darl miss the moment alltogether; Dewey Dell, though physically present at the moment of death, is elsewhere entirely, fixated on her problem and “process of coming unalone” (AILD, p.62); Vardaman, the youngest, in his state of un-tended-to trauma at bearing witness to his mother’s demise, denies that she is really gone — “It was not her. I was there, looking. I saw. I thought it was her, but it was not. It was not my mother. She went away when the other one laid down in her bed…she went away…” (AILD, p.66) – and proceeds to transmute her into the fish he has just gutted, which, despite being cut into pieces of “not-fish”, he seems to insist exists in a state of ‘not-death’; Anse, sits on the porch rather than with his dying wife – laying the grounds for all we come to learn about his sterling character – missing the active moment of her death and continues for the duration of the narrative to refer to her in the active voice (“her mind is set on it” he tells Samson once they’ve set out on the trek into town). Crucially—though the language and tense each character uses to refer to Addie and her death is different—none of narratives for the first third of novel afford Addie any real personhood in spite of her breathing. Tull, the neighbor, describes Addie as “…waiting to die and to do all over again” (AILD, p.137), allowing that she is technically still alive, but casting her state in terms of Life and Death (not to mention, a spiritual return to Life, and then Death, etc etc etc forever and ever amen). Even Peabody, the doctor, arriving too late to be of any real service, ruminates on the situation — “…I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.” (Peabody, AILD, p.43-44) – but does not functionally engage with the real person in front of him. He comes closest to recognizing that Addie is in a state separate from the forced binary of Life and Death, but he does little to engage with what that might mean for her, or for the rest of the family. For most of a novel centered around a dying woman, there is a profound lack of Addie.
Given Faulkner’s avowed interest in the temporal experience of consciousness, I find it fascinating that he chose to position the novel just prior to Addie’s death and to deprive us – until much later in the novel, and from a vantage removed from the active narrative – of Addie herself. While much is done to provide a panoramic view of people struggling to contend with Life and Death, they are all firmly rooted, one way or another, in that binary. Perhaps he intended for Addie’s narrative absence– much as he did with Caddie’s in TSAF – to shine a light on the our human insufficiencies, but I cannot help feeling – especially given that we’re already dipped into the supernatural or hyperreal with Darl’s clairvoyance – that giving Addie a narrative chapter from her deathbed would’ve elevated the text more. Even a character as a committed to practical misanthropy as she – stage-managing her own death, “[preparing] to stay dead a long time” – would not doubt have been activated by Sack’s notion of “increased consciousness”. I would have been fascinated to get a glimpse into her radical present.
