Tags
As I lay dying, Faulkner, Jefferson, Lafayette, MIssissipi, NAC, Ottawa, Oxford, Play, theatre
William Faulkner (1897-1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life.
Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, for which he became the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[2] In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is often included on similar lists.
The play we saw last night at the National Arts Centre is an adaptation of Faulkner’s novel As I lay dying. The play is called Take Me Back to Jefferson and is the story of the Bundren Family and of the death of Addie matriarch of the clan and how they must go back to Jefferson, a nine day journey to bury her with her kin despite foul weather, swollen rivers, broken bridges and bad roads.
I did not know what to expect of this play, at times I found it comical despite the tragic events, the Southern accents, actors bare foot and the convoluted logic and existential dialogue. In the end what you have are poor people trapped in their social setting by archaic conventions of the Old South. These poor white folk, dirt farmers perhaps were never rich, they may be intelligent but have little or no formal education, their world is small and centres around their county, the big town of Jefferson (a large village) and their State Mississipi. The play is set between 1890-1910 in Lafayette County, Mississipi, an area Faulkner knew well as he lived all his life in Oxford AKA Jefferson,MISS.
The plays ends not like I would have thought, a bit of a surprise, Anse Bundren, the father figure, is not as simple as he appears and his children find out, going back to Jefferson was not necessarily to bury Addie his wife, there was another reason, a set of new teeth and a new wife, some brothel floosie, he was having an affair with. The play is all about money, the politics of sex and family. The actors 4 sons and one daughter gave strong performances. Because of minimal sets, the actors during the play perform acrobatics to convey the dynamics of dealing with a coffin, a rotting corpse, buzzards, mules, a horse and a swollen river.
We had a great time and I will be looking out for more plays by the Smith-Gilmour Theatre.
The cousin I mentioned recently on my blog (on Selma, Alabama) is a Faulkner scholar, author of works on Faulkner, as well as Erskine Caldwell and Cormac McCarthy. I would tremble in his presence were he not such a nice guy. Faulkner is far too complex for this simple boy.
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After last night I do not know if I would say Faulkner is complex. He does present a piece of American Society, the Old South that no longer exist and is somewhat
comical, baroque and intriguing all the same, people trapped in their world. It would be nice to meet your cousin to enquire about their view on Faulkner and his world. I cannot imagine living in small town Mississipi.
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There are those, myself included (I was born here), who would contend that presenting the South as more of an absurdity and grotesquery than it is natively is almost impossible. Faulkner’s complexity, or lack thereof, is something I suppose we can agree to disagree upon.
On the other hand, YOU in a small Mississippi town? My dear, my very, very, dear! The mind positively reels.
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Dave in my defence I can say that prior to going to Sicily many years ago, I had no idea what the island was all about. What I knew came from those movies of Francis Ford Coppola. I know better now and I know that it nothing like in the movies. The same for the South, I have never been there, I do not suppose Florida counts. So the only image I have is that of the movies and images of the South prior to 1950. I will have to go one day to appraise the place myself and see what it is all about.
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See live theater is one of the great joys of life. I don’t go as often as I should. I’m glad you had a nice time.
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As I lay dying is presently sitting on my ‘read again’ shelf. It was a marvelous read.
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