As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

He did not know that he was dead, then. Sometimes I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the land that was now of my blood and flesh, and I would think: Anse. Why Anse. Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquify and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar.

I remember being totally bowled over by As I Lay Dying when I read it in high school. I had no idea literature could do the things this novel does. So when a few of my colleagues mentioned they were thinking of teaching it in their own classes, I was tempted. It would really be something, I think, to pass the experience of teaching this book onto a new set of kids. But I wonder, looking back, how other students reacted to the novel, which is so difficult and circuitous, and frankly, grim.

What are some ways you might teach As I Lay Dying? I think the book itself is metaphysical: its chief concerns are with dying and personhood, and the way the former threatens the latter. It's what Addie's thinking about when she reflects on the insufficiency of words in the night, and the way that the name "Anse" seems only like a vessel that, in some sense, obliterates the actual nature of her husband. In that same section, which she seems to be narrating from inside the coffin being carried to Jefferson, she contemplates the way that having children seemed to be a violation of her own personhood, the way they came from her, carrying part of her person with her. This is what frightens characters like Darl, who is so sensitive as to be nearly psychic, and who goes slowly insane over the course of the novel, and Vardaman, the young boy who associates his mother's death with the fish he's caught so strongly that he says, "My mother is a fish." They're confused, bewildered, but in their confusion, both Darl and Vardaman sense something essential and frightening about the slipperiness of the self, which can be parceled out, then obliterated by death.

I think one way I might teach it is by focusing on the stream-of-consciousness techniques. How do we think? In full sentences? Or in images, or feelings, or scraps of logic that are halted and interrupted? How does one imitate that kind of thinking on the page? This might be a way of mitigating what is hardest about As I Lay Dying, of encouraging students to think about its methods as trying diligently to capture the sense of interiority that gets flattened by more traditional narrative techniques.

I also think one way of bringing As I Lay Dying to a Gen Z audience is to focus on its more feminist elements. It might seem strange, but I think the novel is deeply interested in the experiences of women: first, there's Addie, whose experience of motherhood is what shapes her metaphysical understanding, even to the point of horror. Consider the way that Anse insists on carrying Addie's body to "her people" in the city of Jefferson, saying that this is what she had wanted, when really--as the novel's final scene, like a sour joke, shows--what he wants is to go to town to buy a set of new teeth. (Not only does he come back with a new set of teeth, but a new Mrs. Bundren!) Addie's loss of autonomy, bodily and otherwise, is echoed in the experiences of Dewey Dell, who needs an abortion she doesn't know how to ask for, and who finds herself exploited by the depredations of a sex pest pharmacist because of it. Now more than ever, those themes might seem to speak with a renewed voice to students.

But I don't know. It's awfully tricky, and though I think I can get students to reflect on the purpose of the novel's stranger narrative methods, I'm not sure I can get them to actually enjoy them, or tolerate them for four weeks. And I wonder, too, if the southern accents that made the characters' language recognizable, if strange, to me, might be further beyond my students' grasp. So we'll see.