Addie and Anse, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra

The story of Agamemnon, as we heard it in The Odyssey involves his family killing him, then not respecting his dead body, not burying him properly, dooming him to suffer eternally in the afterlife. He is betrayed by his wife twice, because she is now with another man. The story of Agamemnon adds an interesting dimension to As I Lay Dying, when you consider the implications of the allusion in the title. Who, if anybody is Agamemnon? Clytemnestra? Who does the killing and who is being killed, beyond the literal things, and whose fault is it that everybody in the Bundren family is kind of messed up?

In book 11, lines 424-29 of The Odyssey, Agamemnon narrates his own death like this:

    As I lay dying, struck through by the sword,

    I tried to lift my arms up from the ground.

    That she-dog turned away. I went to Hades.

    She did not even shut my eyes or close

    my mouth. There is no more disgusting act

    than when a wife betrays a man like that.

These lines are juicy for readers of As I Lay Dying, because Agamemnon basically lays out the uncomplicated dynamics at play between himself and Clytemnestra as he dies. Such simple betrayal would be foreign to the Bundrens. Our immediate thought is that Addie is the Agamemnon character, after all, she’s the one dying, and in her narration we get many clues that she feels betrayed/wronged, not necessarily by Anse, but by the circumstances that caused her to marry him, and especially the pressure on her to have children. Those pressures essentially “killed” Addie long before her actual death. On the other hand, the desire to respect Addie by burying her with her family is the thing that sets the Bundrens on their epic journey, one assumes that if Addie suffers eternally in the afterlife, it won’t be due to improper burial. She also dies of natural causes, not literal murder.

It’s also possible to think of Anse Bundren as the Agamemnon character, after all, his wife is unloyal to him, both literally cheating on him and emotionally hating him for much of their marriage. We can see that Addie basically cannot stand him throughout their entire marriage, and she only has kids with him out of a sense of duty (and then a sense of guilt). Addie sees him as “dead” for most of his life, when Anse says that they aren’t “nigh done chapping yet, with just two,” Addie tells the reader, “He did not know that he was dead, then”  (173). She also sees even her request to be buried with her family as almost a prank on Anse, a way to get revenge on him, and that journey does almost kill him and his family. Addie both betrays and “kills” Anse, and generally doesn’t treat him with much respect or dignity. But Anse doesn’t seem to care, or actually have any idea, what’s going on in Addie’s head. A huge part of Agamemnon’s story is that Clytemnestra turned away from him as he died, and killed him to his face, her betrayal of him is clear and public and a large part of the problem. Since Addie’s hatred of him doesn’t seem to have hurt him, or at least, he doesn't know that her betrayal hurt him, it’s hard to see him as a clear Agamemnon analogue.

Of course, Faulkner did not set out to write an uncomplicated book full of clear moral truths. Everyone in As I Lay Dying is kind of messed up, and the family as a whole is entirely dysfunctional. It’s hard to know what exactly is meant by the allusion in the title, and it’s hard to figure out what to do with the family’s betrayal of Darl (sending him to the mental institution), and of Cash (giving him the cement cast), and of Dewey Dell (Anse stealing her money), and all of the other hurts that the characters of As I Lay Dying do to one another. I think that Faulkner’s title is another example of the ironic approach to the conventions of literature-- the “allusion to works of historical importance” strategy is one employed by many other modernist authors (think The Sun Also Rises), and Faulkner’s title adds a complicated and interesting additional story to the novel.