rebel rebel

In the beginning of Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying, it’s hard not to think of Grant as a sullen teenager. He avoids unpleasant conversations by retreating to his room or going on long walks; when he’s mad at his aunt, he saltily rebukes her by not eating the food she prepares for him. He is constantly frustrated and cynical about his job, his life, and the world as a whole. On some level, it’s understandable that this young, educated person working at a school with next to no resources could be, occasionally, frustrated and sullen. But the changing nature of Grant’s rebellion throughout the novel also gives important insight into his character.

At first, Grant is angry that his aunt got him involved in the situation at all. Tante Lou and Miss Emma love Jefferson, but to Grant, he is just another symbol of Grant’s failure to effect any real change in the community. Grant says, “The past twenty-one years, we’ve done all we could for Jefferson. He’s dead now. And I can’t raise the dead. All I can do is try to keep the others from ending up like this -- but he’s gone from us.” What Tante Lou and Miss Emma are asking him to do is too little, too late, and not only is it futile, but humiliating as well. When they meet with Henri Pichot to ask permission for Grant to meet with Jefferson in the jail, they have to use the servant's’ door in the back, instead of the front door as guests. Grant tells the story of how hard his aunt and Miss Emma had to work for the Pichots, to make enough money for Grant to go to college and “never go through that back door ever again.” Through the entire meeting with Pichot and, later, Grant’s meeting with him and the sheriff, the white men treat Grant as less than human and Grant is forced to go along with it to get them to allow him to see Jefferson. Grant resents Miss Emma and Tante Lou for forcing him to obey the commands of this white power structure, which he has tried so hard to escape and undermine, just to get a chance to attempt an impossible and useless task.

In Grant’s initial meetings with Jefferson, he views Jefferson in this same context, and rebels against him too. He goes through the motions to accomplish the task, but he has no idea what he’s really trying to do. Like everyone else, Grant wants to end the cycle of oppression -- but he thinks that Jefferson is past the point of no return, and by trying to “make him into a man,” he is just making a fool of himself and undermining all he hoped to achieve by getting an education. Jefferson, understandably, is even more cynical than Grant, and he seems to be aware of Grant’s attitude toward him. He eats like a hog, not because he really believes he’s a hog, but because he knows it will rattle Grant; he mocks Grant with his eyes, knowing that in him, Grant sees his own failures.

But as the novel continues, as Grant starts to understand what Tante Lou and Miss Emma  really want him to do to help Jefferson, the object of Grant’s rebellion begins to shift. Grant is frustrated because “making Jefferson into a man” will not accomplish anything concrete: Jefferson will still die, convicted and executed by an unjust legal system for a crime he didn’t commit. But Grant begins to understand why even accomplishments that seem useless have a great impact. He contemplates the great baseball player Jackie Robinson, and the wrestler Joe Louis, two iconic sports heroes. They both accomplished great feats, but their significance to the people in the quarter wasn’t really the concrete fact that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball; in all likelihood no one in that quarter was going to grow up and become a major league baseball player to benefit from that. The significance, instead, was symbolic. Jackie Robinson stoically absorbing insults all around him and gaining the moral high ground; Joe Louis coming back from a defeat to win against a Nazi. In terms of how much it will directly influence the life of people in the quarter, Jackie Robinson’s accomplishments and Jefferson’s behavior on the walk to the electric chair will be very similar: they’ll change almost nothing. But the people will be able “hold [their] heads higher than any people on earth had ever done for any reason.”

Grant says that when he was younger, he “began to listen, to listen closely to how they talked about their heroes, how they talked about their dead and how great the dead had once been.” As the novel continues, Grant begins to see that changing the image the white power structure wants to project into one that gives Tante Lou, Miss Emma, and the rest of the community a hero is its own form of subverting the regime, even if there is no tangible change in the actual system.

It is Jefferson himself who solidifies Grant’s new understanding of the value in being a hero. When Grant meets with Jefferson in the dayroom to give him the pencil and paper, Grant tries to explain to Jefferson why he should eat the food and make an effort to be strong for his godmother, but ends up explaining to himself why he must succeed in what Tante Lou and Miss Emma want him to do. He says to Jefferson, “The last thing they ever want is to see a black man stand, and think, and show that common humanity that is in us all. It would destroy their myth. [...] You have the chance of being bigger than anyone who has ever lived on that plantation or come from this little town.” As Grant understands the impact Jefferson has on the community, Grant is no longer as consumed by his self-imposed isolation and rebellion from his aunt and everyone else. Instead, the focus of his rebellion becomes the white power structure, and helping Jefferson defy it.

Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is an unconventional and on some level disturbing novel. For me, at least, every time I finished a reading I found myself in a really strange mood, and although I’m glad I did read it (eventually. RIP my quiz grades), I’m not so sure I’ll be reaching for this book as casual reading in the future. There are a lot of factors that contribute to this general sense of weirdness (beyond the fact that the plot centers on a dysfunctional family carting around their mother’s decomposing corpse) but I think one of the most disorienting parts of this book is the way it approaches heroism.

Anse, as himself, doesn’t seem like a hero: his defining trait is indecisiveness and the inability to do literally anything. His philosophy is that, because humans were built upright, God “aimed for them to stay put like a tree or a stand of corn.” Although he claims to always provide for his family, his survival is mostly thanks to everyone around him constantly bailing him out. Even his physical appearance is dreary and hopeless, always hunched and unsure of himself, and with a face sunken by his missing set of teeth. The setting, too, is mundane: they ride a rickety cart through the dusty, sparsely populated Yoknapatawpha County. The trip is a fiasco, and by the end, every Bundren but Anse has lost some defining element of their character: Cash can no longer be a good carpenter, Darl is in an asylum, Jewel lost his horse, Dewey Dell is trapped by an unwanted pregnancy and Vardaman is probably traumatized.

From a purely structural point of view, though, many of the elements of a hero’s journey fit into place. The way the novel begins is very similar to Campbell’s paradigm of a hero’s journey. The family is motivated to go to Jefferson by Addie’s dying wish to be buried with her family, which could be Campbell’s “Call to Adventure.” They have the choice to refuse the quest -- burying Addie at home would be much easier and safer than going to Jefferson -- but don’t, and when they eventually start off towards Jefferson, Anse’s narration makes it clear that what might be a simple road trip for someone else is for him “Entering the Unknown.” The “Supernatural Aid” is a little less obvious, but every Bundren seems to have their own talisman they carry with them to Jefferson, and also some quality that seems to be just slightly beyond the domain of an ordinary person. Cash, for instance, has his toolbox and unbreakable stoicism; Jewel has the horse that only he can ride. The “Supreme Ordeal” would of course be burying Addie, and for Anse, his reward is a new wife and the long-awaited set of teeth.

And the more you think about it, the more it seems like if we were given this novel in another light, the same traits that initially seemed fundamentally un-heroic could fit into this paradigm as well. If the hero is someone who doesn’t fit into the ordinary world, someone with a quality that sets them apart from everyone else, Anse could definitely fit the mold: perhaps his mysterious sweat allergy is actually a supernatural asset, and maybe his aversion to travel is what makes this long journey so heroic for him in the first place. Maybe the people who always had to help him out were no different than the helpers and gods Odysseus encountered; maybe the traumatized Bundren family doesn’t deserve our sympathy any more than Odysseus’s doomed crew did. And good old Yoknapatawpha county, too, needs only a little embellishment to paint it as a great land as mysterious as Ithaca, ruled by uncontrollable floods, capital-G God, and noble, unbreakable family vows.

This ambiguity is compounded by how the novel’s multiple narrators and their varying degrees of reliability force the reader to be constantly aware of how subjective any view of the situation really is. Some of the chapters are so abstract that it’s genuinely difficult to be sure of fairly concrete plot elements, and the one person who does seem to be a reliable narrator, Darl, is recounting events that he couldn’t logically have seen, and ends the novel laughing uncontrollably on the way to a mental institution. It makes the question of heroism much more complicated because the elements that make a hero do seem to be in the novel, but it’s hard to interpret what they all mean when you can’t tell if an idea is the truth or a narrator's opinion.