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Faulkner' Journal . Cheryl Lester As They Lay Dying: Rural Depopulation and Social Dislocation as a Structure of Feeling W hen Faulkner published As I Lay Dying in 1930, the moderniza tion of the South had already begun to propel a spatial and social dislocation that would amount by century’s end to the departure from the region of not only 29 million Southerners but that also involved, throughout the century, the massive comings and goings of erners who shifted places within the South or who left the South but then came back.1 After World War I, and even more so with the Great Depression and the transformative programs of the New Deal, millions of rural Southerners were faced with the struggle of maintaining a way of life that was rapidly becom ing extinct or of making the effort to adapt to new and unfamiliar environ ments, occupations, and social orders. As I Lay Dying allegorizes this collective upheaval of traditional rural life by setting the hapless Bundren family on a journey to town. As the family moves toward the unfamiliar landscape and community ofJefferson and toward new social identities, they are compelled to respond to pressures and limits that emerge in the context of new settings and social relations. At the same time, their movements are being closely monitored by others, who find the prospect of accommodating the influx of rural South erners like the Bundrens discomfiting. Despite its formal complexity, the underlying situation and narrative of As I Lay Dying are quite simple. Addie Bundren dies, leaving her husband and five children to fulfill her request that she be laid to rest forty miles away, in Jefferson, where her relatives are buried. Her request places a burden on her family, who subsist on limited means as small farmers and occasional wage laborers in rural Northern Mississippi in the late 1920s. After a delay of three days, the family sets out in the heat of July with Addie’s body in a mule-driven wagon, and, as delays extend the duration of the journey and Addie’s body de composes further, neighbors and onlookers become increasingly critical of the Bundrens. Not without suffering calamities, the Bundrens ultimately reach Jef ferson, unceremoniously bury Addie and, after committing the elder son Dari to an insane asylum and replacing Addie with a new wife and mother—two unexpected and preposterous twists of the plot—return to the country.* 'This article was written with the support of a sabbatical leave, for which I thank the University of Kansas and my colleagues in the English Department and the American Studies Program. 28 The FaulknerJournal Fall 2005/Spring 2005 29 In this essay, I suggest that the concept of hegemony, as developed by Ray mond Williams to refine and enlarge the concept of ideology, is descriptively and methodologically suited to the interpretation of Faulkner’s writings, with their effort to capture the lived experience ofmodernization in the South. I turn especially to Williams’ concept of the structure of feeling to situate thematic and formal elements of the novel in the larger context of historical transition and to capture Faulkner’s rendering ofthat transition as a structure offeeling. I focus, then, on a particular set of linkages in the text which have bearing on the lived experience of migration, social and spatial dislocation, and rural depopu lation, on one hand, and social identities, subjectivities, social relationships, and interdependency, on the other, and which demonstrate in the embryonic fashion of aesthetic forms the lived impact of historical transition on feelings and thoughts (that is, not feeling as opposed to thought, as Williams cautions us to remember, but feeling as thought and thought as felt), experiences, rela tionships, and practices. My particular interest in Faulkner’s response to the phenomenon of migration within and beyond the South and its impact on the formation and transformation of Southern identities is keenly examined in Marxist readings of As I Lay Dying by Kevin Railey, the editor of this volume, in his study NaturalAristocracy: History, Ideology, and the Production ofWilliam Faulkner and Julia Leyda in her article “Reading White Trash: Class, Race, and Mobility in Faulkner and Le Sueur.” Aptly developing...
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