Book Review

A Confederacy of Dunces

by John Kennedy Toole

     Anybody who says John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is a novel that is about nothing obviously hasn’t put much thought into what they were reading. Saying the opposite, that the book is about evrything, wouldn’t exactly be accurate either, but it would be closer to the truth. One thing that it is specifically about is dysfunctional American families.

A Confederacy of Dunces is a specific style of novel. It is written in the picaresque tradition that originated in Spain. You are in the right if you think this book reminds you of Don Quixote. Picaresque novels are essentially without centralized plots, detailing a string of adventures and misadventures experienced by the protagonist. This non-plot structure is thereby supported by subplots and side-plots of varying relevance. Picaresque novels also tell stories about lower-class characters. A Confederacy of Dunces not only meets all these criteria, but it also incorporates the themes of the 20^th century ant-hero, satire, and social commentary. It is modernist in the sense that it portrays an individual who is alienated from his host society. So of you think this is meant to be nothing more than a comedy, you don’t really understand the frameworks that are necessary to wholly comprehend what it entails.

Ignatius J. Reilly is the main character. He is condescending, egotistical, loud, rude, pretentious, histrionic, paranoid, suffering from delusions of grandeur, and mentally ill. (Does this sound like a description of Donald Trump?) He possibly has Asperger’s syndrome or some type of personality disorder. Obese and suffering from a serious lack of fashion sensibility, he bears a passing resemblance to Ron Jeremy from the waist up. He rampages like a hurricane through two jobs, one at the Levy Pants factory, the other as a hot dog vendor in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He is also an intellectual, having been a successful college student and short-term professor. Part of his literary output consists of letters to Myrna Minkoff, a Jewish hippie political activist in New York City who fell in love with him when they were together in university. She gives lectures on the socio-psychological need for free love and sexual liberation then complains because men keep hitting on her. The two of them correspond while she is away. His other literary output is his diary entries which he says he will someday publish as a world-changing work of major importance. Despite this particular delusion of grandeur, Ignatius’s writing is a stark contrast to his social behavior. It is calm, evenly measured, meditative, and reasonable. Even when he expresses bizarre ideas in his writings, they still come off sounding like passages from classic literature. This is a bit of realism since many of the great artists in history have been known for their boorishness, social awkwardness, and offensive, sometimes even baffling, behavior. Ignatius J. Reilly is held up as an example of how art is a product of a diseased mind, flowers that grow in piles of dung.

Aside from Myrna Minkoff, the other important woman in Ignatius’s life is his mother, Irene. Their ambiguous relationship is at the core of this novel’s meaning. After the two of them get drunk at a sleazy striptease bar called the Night of Joy in New Orleans’ French Quarter, she crashes into a house and the owner wants financial compensation for the damages. Thus, Ignatius has to find a job to help her pay for this but being the English major type that he is, he is allergic to work and prefers to stay in his room, reading, writing, and sometimes masturbating rather than digging ditches, wiping asses, or shoveling shit. Does this sound familiar to any of you bookworms? Come on, be honest.

Irene clings tightly to Ignatius because her husband, his father, died when the boy was young. She became an overbearing mother and the more she tries to dominate everything he does, the more infantile he becomes. She is also a depressive alcoholic, always at the end of her rope, and coming to the realization that she can’t live out the rest of her life in peace until Ignatius move out of the house. She is caught in her own trap where she dominates him but wants him to leave. She can’t find her way out of this impasse. This is the main subplot of this picaresque novel.

While Ignatius and Irene are the core family unit of the novel, there are other family units to be considered. In fact, the narrative revolves structurally around family units. The term “family unit” is here operationalized with the broadest possible meaning, incorporating not just traditional family structures but also surrogate families, substitute families, and alternative families.

For example, the family unit of Ignatius and Irene can be expanded into the family of Santa Battaglia, her son Mancuso, and Irene’s prospective husband Claude Robichaux. Santa Battaglia is the head of this group. She is a Sicilian immigrant who acts as a deus ex machina, making arrangements to set things right among her crowd. She attempts to bring Irene and Claude together while trying to convince Irene that she needs to liberate herself by getting Ignatius out of her house. The word “battaglia” is the Italian word for “battle” and in the Italian-American lexicon it carries the connotation of “badass”, “ass-kicker”, or “a person who can get things done” in its positive sense. In its pejorative sense it can connote “domineering”, “difficult to deal with”, “intimidating”, or “controlling”, kind of like the term “battle ax” when applied to a woman. The word “santa”, of course, is Italian for “saint”, a being who can offer assistance when approached in the right way. The meaning of Santa Battaglia’s name is wordplay and depends largely on the context of which character is talking about her. Santa Battaglia prays to the saint of television sets; only those of use with Italian relatives will truly understand how hilarious this is. We are also the ones who will know exactly what kind of person she is.

Another family unit is that of Gus Levy and his wife. Gus is the owner of Levy Pants, the factory where Ignatius goes to work and does nothing but make a mess out of everything. Gus is a middle-aged playboy, unhappy with the business he inherited from his father. Mrs. Levy is just as mentally deranged as Ignatius; she failed a mail-order course in psychology but insists on psychoanalyzing both her husband and Miss Trixie, a senile old lady employed in the Levy Pants management office. Mrs. Levy is also a domineering woman who tries to control her husband but he doesn’t buy into it. Instead they argue a lot . Mrs. Levy takes Miss Trixie into their home and tries to analyze her with the intention of bringing out her fullest potential as an employee. Mrs. Levy’s hidden agenda, however, is to passive-aggressively humiliate her husband. She makes no progress with Miss Trixie and at one point Gus makes the observation that Miss Trixie is just like Mrs. Levy’s mother. The ironic Freudian twists in these subplots are funny, poignant, and profound.

By extending the concept of the family unit, we next come to the employees of the Night of Joy which is also headed by a controlling and unsympathetic mother-figure, Lana Lee. She is the greedy and mean-spirited owner of this dive bar in the French Quarter where she pays attractive women to coax men into purchasing watered-down cocktails as the strippers disrobe on stage. One of these women is Darlene, a kind-hearted woman who has ambitions to bring her pet bird into a burlesque routine. She makes friends with Burma Jones, an African-American man who gets hired to sweep the floors at sub-minimum wage rates. Lana Lee exploits him while also verbally abusing him so he hatches a plan to sabotage her business and bring her down. Lana Lee has a side-hustle, posing for pornographic photos which are sold to high school students.

The final family unit of importance is the alternative family of New Orleans’ gay community. While dressed up as a pirate and pushing his hot dog cart, Ignatius J. Reilly encounters a young man named Dorian Greene. Yes, that is a reference to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian comes from a rich, conventional, and conservative family in Kansas who are embarrassed by his homosexuality. They pay him healthy sums of money to live far away in New Orleans where they don’t have to deal with him. The gay community becomes his surrogate family. At first, Ignatius and Dorian argue but after Dorian makes a joke about politicians and servicemen in the military being sodomites, pederasts, or closeted homosexuals, a cord is truck and the two of them connect. Ignatius suggests starting a new political party made up entirely of gay people with the utopian vision of an end to all wars, a simple nod to the anti-nuclear peace movement of the 1960s. Dorian loves the idea and decides to have a costume party to launch the new movement.

When Ignatius arrives at the party, decked out in his hot dog vendor’s pirate costume, he is welcomed with open arms, although the men there can’t tell if he is supposed to be dressed as a pirate or a Gypsy. This subtle ambiguity is significant because it demonstrates how people do not know exactly what to make of Ignatius. While the gay men are busy drinking, conversing, dancing, and engaging in some light bondage play, it becomes apparent that Ignatius is taking the sodomite political party game a little too seriously. The party-goers think of it as a joke but Ignatius is dead serious. He has failed to read the social situation and leaves out of frustration, heading off to the Night of Joy in a misguided search for a stripper he mistakes for being a highly-educated intellectual.

That is where everything blows up. Ignatius J. Reilly embodies the trickster archetype. His boorish behavior breaks every social taboo and mannerism of decency imaginable. It is by breaking these taboos that he reveals what those taboos are. He tears through every place he goes like the Tasmanian Devil and, in the aftermath, everything gets set to right. His whirlwind of stupidity reveals society’s truth to itself so that the god people move up in life while the bad people get punished, even though Ignatius, in the end, stays the same.

In regards to family units, the idea of matriarchy takes a battering in A Confederacy of Dunces. The mother figures in this novel, Irene, Mrs. Levy, Miss Trixie, and Lana Lee are almost entirely weak or unsympathetic. The exception would be Santa Battaglia who, despite being sympathetic to the audience, is not so much to Ignatius. The least dysfunctional family unit is Dorian Greene’s gay community who thrive with neither a mother figure or a father figure to guide them. The only females in that crowd are three violent, ill-mannered lesbians who spend the whole party segregated in the kitchen. The father figures in each unit are either weak like Gus Levy or non-existent. This should be no surprise because John Kennedy Toole’s father died when he was young, leaving him with an overbearing mother; the author had serious mommy issues. But with the character of Santa Battaglia, the possibility of effective motherhood is left open.

Another literary device of importance in this novel is that of the costume. It is an old adage that a costume reveals a person’s true character. In Ignatius’s case, the pirate get up he wears while vending hot dogs not only reveals something about his personality but also acts as a gateway into an alternate community. The pirate is a traditional symbol of outsider status and outlawry, men who were were forced into a life of crime because they were too clever to conform. In our times, the outlaw biker might signify a similar concept. Later at the party, people mistake Ignatius’s costume as that of a Gypsy, another symbol of outsider status and a community of marginalized people who live by their own rules. It is this pirate outfit that attracts the initial attention of Dorian Greene and other members of the gay scene in the French Quarter. So it functions as a juncture between Ignatius and Dorian’s party crowd, only the people at the party indulge in their masquerade as a means of escaping from themselves, having fun by becoming something else for one night. They liberate themselves by becoming something other than what they are. This is Nietzsche’s rites of Dionysus whereby humans renew themselves through carnavalesque orgies of inversion. Ignatius, on the other hand, takes his pirate-clad outlaw status literally; being unable to read the meaning of the costumes worn by the party-goers. He mistakes the situation as a serious attempt at launching a political movement. Ultimately, he fails in this endeavor, reaffirming his identity as a loner on the margin of society, not even capable of blending in with a crowd of outsiders who have formed their own community.

The other major costume wearer is Officer Mancuso, the mild-mannered but earnest son of Santa Battaglia who, incidentally, has a happy family of his own. Mancuso is bullied by his police sergeant who belittles him for being weak, making him wear ridiculous and transparent disguises for the sake of walking a beat in the French Quarter, looking to fulfill his quota by arresting lowlifes and degenerates. Little does he know that the gay people there secretly admire him even though he gets pushed around by the people he tries to arrest. While Mancuso’s undercover disguises are silly, fooling no one, note should be taken of how his costume becomes more respectable on the night he makes his big bust.

Other costumes of relevance are those of Lana Lee and Miss Trixie. Although Lana Lee poses nude for pornographic pictures, this is a type of costume because she does so in the role of a teacher, sitting next to a globe, in front of a chalkboard, and holding a book. This is subversive in an unsettling way because these photos are sold to boys in a high school. If her porn were being sold to adults, there might not be much to think about, but by posing naked as an authority figure for children, her malevolent attitude to social order is revealed. In another case, Miss Trixie does not choose her costume; rather Mrs. Levy dresses her up in an attempt to make her more attractive. She gives her a wig, a new set of clothes, and a bad makeup job. Gus Levy, when he sees Miss Trixie, remarks that she resembles Mrs. Levy’s mother. Rather than telling us a truth about Miss Trixie, this shows how Mrs. Levy’s poorly thought out psychoanalysis results from a failed attempt at confronting her own Freudian familial complexes.

A Confederacy of Dunces, in the end, reads like a humorous attempt by John Kennedy Toole to confront his own inner demons. Ignatius is a composite character of Toole and his best friend, a corpulent college professor who burped a lot while making self-abnegating jokes about being a fat slob who is lacking in social graces. The parallels between Toole’s and Ignatius’s family life and career trajectory are too precise to be ignored. Otherwise, the idea that this author committed suicide because he couldn’t get his novel published is possibly inaccurate. John Kennedy Toole was a paranoid schizophrenic who was losing control over his own mind and ended up being incapable of holding down a job. It is more likely that he killed himself out of despair over his mental illness.

So who is Ignatius J. Reilly? In one sense he is a hyperbole of the American intellectual who is unable to find his place in an overwhelmingly anti-intellectual society. In another sense, he is an exaggeration of the American rugged individualist. He insists on being who he is at any cost and damn the consequences. In yet another sense, he is camp in the way that Susan Sontag conceptualized that word. He is overblown to the point of self-parody so that no one can take him seriously, maybe a little bit like Divine’s characters in the films of John Waters.

In some ways, Ignatius J. Reilly is a distorted reflection of ourselves. That is possibly why there are two strongly polarized responses to A Confederacy of Dunces. Those who hate it are often people who see themselves in Ignatius, don’t like what tjey see, and react with histrionic declarations of disgust that sound as if they came straight from the mouth of Ignatius himself. Then again, some of the haters might simply be people are too shallow or intellectually dull to really see much in this novel. Those who love it tend to be people who see exaggerated parts of themselves in the character of Ignatius. They are able to feel his poignancy and laugh it away while being healthy enough to laugh at themselves too. But there are also those of us who love this book because we just want to tear the world to shreds and let the pieces fall where they may. In the end, Ignatius J. Reilly is a sad, clueless character; he is gross, offensive, and disgusting which is also true of a lot of other human beings. In the end, though, you don’t actually have to love Ignatius to love A Confederacy of Dunces. It is an examination of American families, marginalized communities, and isolated loners while being a love letter to New Orleans and all its odd characters, albeit one that is fraught with self-doubt and painful insecurities. It reveals the cracks and fissures in the foundation of American society, the family itself. It is also a work of comedic satirical genius, entirely one of a kind.

Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces. Grove Press, New York: 1987.

 

Book Review

3 by Flannery O'Connor

3 by Flannery O’Connor offers up the most renowned stories by this notorious Southern Gothic author. These stories are grotesque and well-calculated to unsettle the reader. O’Connor was a devout Catholic and most of what she wrote could be interpreted as a religious allegory of some sort or other. That does not mean you need to be religious to feel the horror of her works.

The first story in the book is Wise Blood, her classic novelette of dark humor. The symbolism and meaning of the story are opaque and difficult to interpret but keeping the concept of “eyesight” in mind will go a long way in breaking down what she intended to say. The central character is Haze Motes, a young man returning from the war with a mission to preach his new theology of The Church Without Christ. This bizarre individual talks at, around, through, and over people so that makes two-way conversations are an impossibility. He probably has Asperger’s Syndrome although he never has any trouble attracting attention from nubile women.

As the name “Haze Motes” suggests, he has trouble with his vision. The word “haze” means “blurry vision” and “Motes” refers to the New Testament passage that says “Do not criticize the speck in another’s eye if you have not removed the mote from your own.” At the start of the book, he returns to his dead mother’s abandoned house and takes her old glasses; later it is revealed that they make his bad vision worse. The next night he goes downtown and meets up with a blind street preacher named Asa Hawks and his teenage daughter who gets infatuated with Haze Motes. This encounter with Asa Hawks foreshadows what Haze does later in the story. As it turns out, the preacher is a conman who tried to blind himself with lime to prove his faith in God. To Haze, he and the other street preachers in the town are the epitome of everything fake and false about religion because all they do is lie and take people’s money. Haze Motes is right in calling out their insincerity. In life, he is after what is true and real.

Another character that Haze Motes meets on that night is Enoch Emery, a dull-witted teenager who tries to make friends with everybody but they all seem to hate him. He latches on to Haze and later they meet up again when Haze wants help in finding Asa Hawks and his daughter. While Haze represents nihilism, atheism, and the inability to believe in a god he cannot see, Enoch represents blind faith and faulty intuition. While not religious himself, he follows his gut feelings without questioning their validity, something that leads this dim character to do some strange things he himself can not comprehend. He steals a mummy from a museum and brings it to Haze and Asa Hawks’s daughter while they are in bed together. Then he beats up a guy and steals his gorilla suit. Enoch Emory has faith in his mission but he has no intellect and no common sense. And he despises animals, too.

While Haze Motes does not have faith in religion, he does have faith in one thing: his car. He buys a jalopy that barely runs in the belief that it is going to take him places, something that God is unable to do. But everything changes in one hilarious passage where a strange cop destroys the car. Everything he believes in is gone so he goes back to his boarding house and begins torturing himself.

His landlady at first is only after his money but she begins to have feelings for him when she wonders why he is such a masochist. She offers to marry Haze Motes and take care of him. If he can not believe in God he can have the next best thing which is unconditional love. But Haze has blinded himself to prove that he is true. He cannot believe in what he cannot see so in the end he can believe in nothing because he can see nothing. The nihilist Haze Motes can only self-destruct because he has nowhere else to go.

While Wise Blood is a darkly comic story that, in the end, makes you feel like you’ve been kicked in the stomach, The Violent Bear It Away takes on a more serious and even darker tone. The narrative of this novelette revolves around a teenage boy named Tarwater who had been kidnapped and raised by his lunatic great uncle, a religious fanatic obsessed with baptizing all the members of his family so they can become prophets when they get older. Tarwater is caught between this great uncle and his uncle Rayber who was also kidnapped, raised, and baptized by the great uncle. Only Rayber escaped, went to college, became a teacher, and decided to dedicate his life to undoing what he considers the family curse of religious fanaticism.

Tarwater lives with his great uncle on a farm and when the old man dies, a mysterious friend appears and begins giving him advice. Is this stranger Satan or is he merely the boy’s conscience? We never really find out but this stranger convinces Tarwater to burn down the great uncle’s shack and move to the city and follow out the orders the old man had given him. Uncle Rayber has a son who was born mentally disabled and Tarwater’s assigned task is to baptize the boy whose name is Bishop. When this is accomplished, the prophecy that Tarwater will become a prophet, seeking disciples in the town, will be fulfilled.

The story line is that Tarwater, single-mindedly, wants to baptize Bishop while Rayber tries to take him in and raise him as the son he never had a chance to have. Rayber is the most complex character in the story. Bishop is mentally stuck in infancy and the sullen Tarwater is stuck with the brainwashing he received at the hands of his great uncle. But Rayber is stuck at an intellectual impasse and fraught with moral dilemmas. He feels ashamed of Bishop’s mental deficiencies but is unable to persuade Tarwater to abandon his mental slavery to religion and become a part of the secular world. As Rayber’s thoughts progress, it becomes apparent that this do-gooder is motivated by deep feelings of insecurity and anger, a lot of which is rooted in the abusive treatment he got when the great uncle kidnapped him, baptized him, and tried to brainwash him into becoming a disciple and prophet. Rayber wants to redeem himself from the guilt he feels for going along with the religious game when he was young. Bishop is his greatest obstacle and Tarwater is his greatest chance for redemption. But in the end this is all about Rayber and not about anybody else. His motivation to do good is purely selfish.

In a private conversation, Rayber tells Tarwater that he wishes Bishop had died at birth. The meaning of this statement is ambiguous and Tarwater, at a crossroads himself, has to decide whether he should baptize or drown Bishop.

It is difficult to interpret what this story is actually about. Rayber’s psychology is secular, complex, frustrating, and full of irreconcilable contradictions. It would be easy to say O’Connor is simply trying to portray the shortcomings of a life without religion. But Rayber is not the main character and his confusion is a subplot to the story of Tarwater. The only sympathetic thing that can be said for Tarwater is that his great uncle’s religious indoctrination prevented him from becoming a part of the real world but his chance at redemption gets bypassed in favor of carrying out his great uncle’s evil plans. He could have redeemed himself by becoming R ayber’s adopted surrogate son but he chooses a darker path in the end. O’Connor seems to be saying that blind devotion to fundamentalist religion can only lead to disaster. On the other hand, the modern, secular life might be an appealing alternative on the surface but does not address morality at a deep enough level to reach full human potential. Neither option has a legitimate church to provide guidance to those who need it. O’Connor, the Catholic intellectual, appears to be advocating for a moderate middle road between the two extremes.

You do not have to be religious to get something out of this story. The events, plot twists, and interactions between the characters are distressing enough to make this a provocative piece of writing regardless of what you believe.

The third and final section is a collection of short stories called Everything That Rises Must Converge. The title is entirely appropriate because all the stories are about a social leveling off, the shifting of social positions, and the equalization, most often disastrous, of different classes of people coming to terms with each other be it by chance or force. Flannery O’Connor wrote these stories during the Civil Rights Movement and most, but not all of them, deal directly with racism.

Among the strongest stories is the first one with the same title as the collection. It tells the story of a white woman with an ugly green hat who encounters an African-American woman on a city bus. The white woman looks down on Black people but the African-American woman is wearing the same green hat which draws a common link between them. After a while on the bus, she speaks with condescension to the Black woman’s son who is with her. This leads to an ugly and aggressive confrontation between the two women and the white women is knocked off her high horse in the end.

Another strong story, “Revelation”, involves Mrs. Turpin, a farm owner who thinks she is superior to everybody else, especially African-American people. While she is sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, she gets into a conversation with another woman and freely expresses her feelings about everybody she perceives to be beneath her. Another patient gets angry and attacks her. The physical violence is inconsequential but is it her pride that is most wounded. After she returns home she sulks until she has a vision at sunset in which a line of people are ascending up to Heaven. She sees herself in the line and realizes that her place in the world is not where she thinks it is.

Still another strong story is “Parker’s Back”. It involves a poor man who is heavily tattooed; he marries a woman who is strict in her religion. She doesn’t like his tattoos and when she gets angry and locks him out of the house, he attempts to make amends by getting a crucified Jesus tattooed on his back. When he returns home and shows it to her, things do not go as planned.

The strongest, and most disturbing, story is “The Lame Shall Enter First”. It is similar in theme to The Violent Bear It Away since it tells the story of a secular do-gooder named Sheppard and his son Norton. The son is a normal child but Sheppard is chronically disappointed with him. The father is a social worker in a juvenile detention center and he decides to bring home a disadvantages boy named Rufus Johnson. This boy has a club foot, a high IQ, and a mean streak to rival the worst that humanity has to offer. Sheppard wants to save Rufus from himself but he also has the ulterior motive of turning him into the admirable son that he thinks Norton can never be. Rufus has other plans; he does everything he possibly can to ruin Sheppard’s life. His big conspiracy involves teaching Norton about Christianity and Heaven. The two boys spend their time together in the attic using a telescope to look at stars while Rufus explains that Norton’s dead mother is somewhere out there on one them and Norton will join her when he dies. The ending is one of the most emotionally brutal stories written by this author.

Flannery O’Connor has been criticized for portraying racism in her stories but this criticism is unfair. She portrays racism as ugly and the racist ideas come from the minds of ignorant people. Most of them get put in their place at the end and even, predictably, many of them die. She did not glorify racism. She knew that American society was changing in her day and she also was prescient enough to see that there were going to be some rough spots as it changed. Her intention was not to entertain people or celebrate what stupid white people were doing but rather to raise awareness of what they were doing wrong.

On the other hand, a lot of people have lionized Flannery O’Connor for her intricate and detailed writing style as if to say that the racism she depicts is justified because she was such a great artist. From my point of view, this is not such a great argument. Her writing tends to be labored and unnecessarily dense. Sometimes, like in The Violent Bear It Away, it is not always clear who the protagonist is meant to be. I’ve actually come to the conclusion that her writing style is less significant than the stomach-churning and ugly side of American society that she portrays. Her themes are hard pills to swallow but that swallowing needs to be done. Nobody ever said great art is meant to be fun.

Most of these stories are religious in nature but that should not put a secular reader off reading them. A lot of them are transgressive and could be considered borderline horror stories. Even if you don’t accept Flannery O’Connor’s religious beliefs, you can still get a lot out of her writing just by trying to interpret the difficult symbolism. If you have really understood them, you probably will never forget them even if you sincerely want to.

O'Connor, Flannery. 3 by Flannery O'Connor. Signet Books, New York: 1983.  

 

Book Review

Book Review

Daddy Was an Undertaker

by McDill McCown Gassman

     Those of you fortunate enough to be possessed by a sense of morbid curiosity, take note. Daddy Was an Undertaker by McDill McCown Gassman may be a book for you. This short and easy book has some dark themes which come across as even darker when keeping in mind that it was written for young adults or children.

     The story is autobiographical. Dill is a little girl whose father owns and operates a funeral parlor; the family lives in the apartment on the second floor. The secondary theme of this book is her love and admiration for her father, a Scotch-Irish immigrant who brought his family to Huntsville, Alabama where he set up his trade. Through a series of anecdotes, we learn how the family, and especially Dill, are outsiders in the community. Her father is well-respected but kept at an arm’s length by most people while Dill gets teased and bullied at school. The presence of death is felt in most of the stories. Many chapters have interesting themes; along the way, Dill gets to see a dead body leaking brains and blood after a car crash, the family goes on vacation in a horse-drawn hearse, a man commits suicide at his brother’s funeral, and Dill almost gets trampled to death by a bull. The simple writing style somehow illuminates these grim mini-narratives with the sunshiny joy and playfulness of childhood. The gloom of her neurosis gets balanced by her curiosity and wonder at the good-natured aspects of her life.

     To make it even more interesting, the narrator is a chronic vomiter. Ever time she gets excited about something, her stomach churns and she loses her lunch for all to see. Dill pukes at school, ralphs over the side of a horse-cart, and barfs while watching the fireworks explode during the the 4^th of July. I kept expecting her to upchuck at church or hurl during a funeral ceremony but those events never came to pass.

     The family’s relationship with the African-American community is interesting too. In one passage, Dill and her sister are preparing their ghost costumes for Halloween. They hear a car pull up outside and run out to see who it is. There are two African-American men outside who are immediately frightened and quickly drive away. Obviously, but without saying it directly, this is a reference to the Ku Klux Klan. You may think this scene is cruel at first but as the book goes on, it becomes obvious that the author had a great amount of respect for the African-American people. Her father defends them when people put them down, she writes with admiration about a 90 year old ex-slave who tells her stories and sings for her, and her father even helps a young Black man escape from a lynch mob. Some of this is patronizing to African-American people by today’s standards but this book mostly takes place in Alabama during the 1920s; this literature would have been both progressive and controversial in that decade so a little historical perspective can go a long way.

     Another interesting thing about this book is the artwork. Each chapter has an illustration with a caption taken from the narrative and written along the bottom. Some of the better one, especially when taken out of context, look similar to the art of Raymond Pettibon. One shows Dill hugging her father’s knees while he holds a pair of handcuffs and a pistol. The caption reads, “I flung myself at Daddy’s knees...’Don’t go,’ I implored, ‘Oh, Daddy – don’t go!’”

     Not all of the writing is great and the few passages that make no reference to death or anxiety are not especially interesting but Daddy Was an Undertaker is still worth being hunted down and read. It could even be interpreted as a young adult version of the Southern Gothic style even though that probably was not the author’s intention. McCown Gassman has written the kind of book that could inspire Tom Waits to write a song. It could inspire John Waters to make a movie. It is a weird book and that is why it should be read.

McCown Gassman, McDill. Daddy Was an Undertaker. Vantage Press Inc., New York: 1952.

Book Review

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

     Weird hicks. That is the subject of William Faulkner’s classic novel As I Lay Dying. This Southern Gothic novel provides shifting perspectives from all the members of the Bundren family, their neighbors, and a few other people along the way of this road trip story. While it is probably one of Faulkner’s best novels, and certainly one of his most accessible, it may not be one of the greatest books ever written as some critics and historians have overstated. Still, it is a high point in American writing.

     The Bundrens live on a cotton farm in an imaginary region of Mississippi. As the story opens, the son named Cash is building a coffin outside the window of Addie, the mother, who is dying in her bed. The toothless husband and father, Anse, is sitting on the porch, typically allergic to work and self-absorbed, contemplating how much better life would be with teeth. The other family members are gradually introduced as death creeps closer and closer to Addie. Darl is a thoughtful son who makes everyone uncomfortable. Jewel was born to Addie after she had an affair with another man. The youngest son, Vardaman, approaches the house with a big fish he caught; he proceeds to kill it with an ax so they can eat it for dinner. Dewey Dell is the mothering and responsible daughter who tries to care for the whole family as their matriarch dies. Predictably Addie does die and at the same time a severe rainstorm comes. The family embarks on a journey to bring the corpse to the family burial plot in a nearby town but first they have to cross a flooded river where all the bridges were destroyed during the storm.

     The narrative is linear but it is told from the shifting first-person perspectives of about twenty people involved in the story. The altering narratives give the whole book a cinematic feel; as a new person takes up the story in each chapter, the change functions like shot transition in cinematography. If such these are done effectively in a movie, the pacing of can take on different characteristics and the shifts in narrative function the same way as well in this novel. As I Lay Dying is a very visual novel as well. But what really enhances the flow of the story is the subjective thoughts that each narrator provides. The reader gets some philosophical ruminations from Darl and Varnaman who contemplate ontologically about the nature of being (their awkward logic reads like a hillbilly version of Heidegger and is even a whole lot easier to understand than that old German fool); Faulkner tries to show how uneducated people, while lacking the intellectual vocabulary of academics, struggle with the same philosophical issues that are discussed in the ivory towers of college campuses. We learn that Anse thinks little about anybody but himself. Cash comes across as a fatalist who just accepts whatever happens to him no matter how rotten it is and Dewey Dell constantly frets over how to take care of the whole family. Most importantly, we see the perspectives of the neighbors and a couple other people who think the Bundrens are a bunch of lunatics. By the end of the novel, you will probably agree.

     A large portion of the novel described the family’s disastrous crossing of the swollen river. Jewel ties his horse to the mule team that is pulling their decrepit wagon with the coffin in the back. A log flowing downstream overturns the wagon, the casket floats away, and the mules drown. Of course, the river is symbolic and shows not only the division between the Bundrens and the more modern people in the town but also the point where the family, at least almost, coalesces and coheres into a more integrated unit. They almost congeal since Jewel, the black sheep of the family, emerges as the most loyal and dedicated member while Darl, who always bickers with Jewel, makes his exit in the later passages of the book. Jewel stands out in this part, not only because he does the most to rescue Cash, his tool box, and the wagon but also because he sacrifices his beloved horse, a symbol of his distance from his family, by selling it so they can buy a new team of mules. After the crossing of the river, we also learn that most of the family members did not want to make this journey for the sake of burying their mother. They had ulterior motives and all pretended to be concerned about her so they could get the things they really wanted in the town.

     As I Lay Dying gets more hilarious as it goes along. The corpse inside the coffin begins to stink and attracts unwanted attention from the people they pass along the way. A flock of vultures continuously circle overhead, waiting for a chance to feast on the corpse. The family tries to heal Cash’s broken leg by pouring concrete over it. A sleazy pharmacist convinces Dewey Dell he can abort her unwanted fetus by having sex with her after giving her capsules filled with talcum powder for ten dollars. Faulkner wrote a novel nicely seasoned with gallows humor; if you do not laugh out loud at least a couple times while reading it, you probably did not really get the book in all its finer details.

     Overall, As I Lay Dying is a great little novel and deserves to be regarded as a classic. Whether it is one of the greatest books ever written might be a bit of an exaggeration. By the end, it seemed a little rudimentary. The story of the road trip takes place over eight days and thankfully Faulkner did not try to describe the entire time they were traveling but some of the time shifts are confusing and make it feel like something was left out. It is also one of those books that needs to be read at least twice in order to really get a good understanding of what everything means. But it is a quick read and by the end of the second time around, you will probably see what makes it great.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Vintage Books. New York, 1964.