| Faulkner is not usually regarded as
a road novelist, yet he may well be the greatest. I'm thinking primarily of As I Lay
Dying, which depicts the Bundrens' funeral procession to bury the dead mother, a
grotesque pilgrims' progress. In Light in August, roads also take on central
importance. In the opening scene, Lena Grove walks along, pregnant, about to enter
Jefferson, thinking, "I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama
a-walking. A fur piece." At the end of the novel, less than two weeks later, she has
given birth to a baby and still has not found the father of her child as she sits on a
waggon leaving Jefferson and says, "My, my. A body does get round. Here we aint been
coming from Alabama but two months, and now it's already Tennessee." Lena Grove's
arrival and departure envelops the story of Joe Christmas, the orphan who is always on the
run, and that narrative is also full of road scenes, predominantly cruel and violent ones. |
