Several years ago, when I first picked up Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, I wasn’t ready to really read Faulkner. I was intrigued by the title and the haunting picture on the cover of a coffin with a window carved into it, so you could see the withered woman inside, her head tilted to the left just slightly, mostly covered in shadow. As I began reading, I found myself drawn in, but horribly confused. I wasn’t ready for the shifting voices, the repeated but never completed phrases, or the temporal shift represented in Vardaman’s mantra: “My mother is a fish.”
Picking up the book again, years later, still drawn to that haunting cover, still intrigued by the eeriness of the title, I see the beauty, now, and the complexity of Faulkner’s work. The perspective of the novel changes every few pages, each chapter revealing the thoughts and emotions of a different member of the Bundren family as they each deal with the death of Addie, the wife and mother. What I find interests me now isn’t necessarily the psychological profiles Faulkner provides, showing us how differently and how deeply each of these individuals deals with death, though the “agony and despair” each feels, unaware that they all, in their own way, lay dying, is profoundly moving. As I think about the book now, it is the structure of the story itself that stands out.
The shifting voices that make up the novel’s structure are what help to make it so complex. As the narrative voice moves from character to character, shifting from family members to neighbors and back again, we see the death and burial of this one woman experienced in various ways through the eyes of each of these individuals. Each sees the death slightly differently; each experiences the loss alone. However, through all this individual suffering, the reader traverses a wide landscape of emotion and experience.
As we have been working on compiling issue number 4, I’ve been thinking about how the literary journal functions in a similar way to Faulkner’s novel. While our journal, along with many others, does not focus on a theme such as death, with each issue, we are pulling together a collection of voices, of perspectives on the world that we all live in. As writers, we are like Faulkner’s voices, each seeing the world slightly differently, each witnessing the world from our own unique vantage point. In this sense, all literary journals take on a theme. As editors, we compile a series of perspectives, a series of voices that show us how differently and deeply each individual writer deals with life.
As we do with the novel, when we sit down to read a literary journal, we traverse a wide landscape of emotion an experience. We get to see how life beyond ourselves is experienced by each of the shifting perspectives of the writers that fill the pages.
It is with this in mind that issue 4 of iddie comes to life. We hope you enjoy the new issue and all of the new voices it has to offer. As we continue to expand and grow, we would like to also welcome a new perspective to the iddie family, fiction editor Marsha Koretzky.
And as always, feel free to contact us at iddie.subscribe@gmail.com and let us know your thoughts on the issue. Thanks for reading and for your support.
