My Mother Is A Fucking Fish, For Chrissakes

I tried coming up with a 140-character-max hot take for William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and didn't get too far — it was something along the lines of "Multiple viewpoint modernism doubling down on dumb fucking Southerners" — it's one of those pieces of culture that at some point became unassailable, or at least hexproof to a point where only James Franco believes he can interpret the vastness to future audiences.

I was led to believe that Faulkner's whole deal is portraying the postbellum deep South as a bunch of tragic inbreds. As I Lay certainly succeeds in this: every goddamn person in the book can't do a goddamn thing right, from the patriarch who allows his wife's body to decompose to the point of nasty on an eight-day trip to the burying ground to the ignorant teenager who can't get get a proper back-alley abortion to the fool eldest son who allows a broken leg to be set with cement to the fool youngest son who thinks his mother is a fucking fish; this is a dumb fucking lot of fucking morons. You thought Martin McDonagh was over the top?

And really, in the end it's too much. We get it; the South has a lot to answer for. This just twists the knife. You're just like, "Let these fool motherfuckers twist in the wind, topple the coffin, I don't give a fuck, just make it end." And in the end, you're left with the cubistic, multi-angle storytelling, which is I guess what makes Lay Dying modern. It's obviously hard to sit here almost 100 years later and contextualize this approach, but if you're contemplating the craft, it seems a little lacking: it seems like notes a writer would take while constructing a third-person narrative. And Darl — the literate one — is a bit of a narrative deus ex machina, no? You just can't write a "book" without some smart piece of shit narrator serving as the divine intermediary to the creator's brilliance.

James Franco, I read — or thought I read — was cowed by the challenge of portraying I Lay cinematically; I don't know why because it actually seems really well suited for that. A film version takes a clunky first-person narrative — with like 15 different first-person perspectives — and seamlessly integrates them all in a (presumably) cohesive visual. I mean, right? Faulkner would have been a pretty rockin' auteur, right? Franco, man up.