Exact Experience

Faulkner invents a new lexicon to great effect in As I Lay Dying. Specifically he uses rural dialects and close phonetic transcriptions to give true-to-life written forms of character’s speech. Faulkner creates a facsimile of his home state of Mississippi in Yoknapatawpha and copies the speech he hears there in his story. His characters, while not always mature beings, are fully fleshed out as characters. Each narrator/character has a unique style of recounting events as well as a distinct diction.
Interestingly, even the text of the more mature characters is encoded with the same dialectical grammar that they use to converse. That is to say that Faulkner’s statement about the mind speech connection is directly proportional. A person may only speak so well as their mind is able to fathom. This is true of all of his characters from the brilliantly philosophical Addie to the singleminded Dewey Dell.
The texture of the word choices and sentence structures are what Calvino describes as ‘exact’ use of language. Faulkner is able to systematically and exactly correlate language and style to form his characters. Even without the lexical clues such as mispronounced dialogue a reader would get a precise view of each character through his or her narration.

Light Experience

Calvino emphasizes that literature is able to recast a situation in new clothes; circumstances can be lightened. Thoughtfully written prose can freshen up a dark theme, elevate the mood in the direst situations, and generally uplift the reader when all signs point to immanent doom.
As I Lay Dying is not such a book. Analogized to weather, a ‘light’ experience is a sunshiny Florida day and As I Lay Dying is a typical Brittish Day. Drab, overcast and rainy with no respite in site, yet the hope remains that eventually a spot of light will appear. The book itself deals with the funeral procession of the matriarch of the Bundren family (Addie) and follows the dark conventions one would expect to sprout from such a plot line. While comical in a ‘this can’t possibly get worse’ kind of way, the comedy isn’t uplifting but more of a mechanism to cope with the copious amounts of dejected events.
The multi-narrator approach offers some relief from the otherwise heavy overall feeling of the novel however. One chapter, as told by Cash, is simply a train of thought process written in list form. This style of bulleted thought remains impartial even though the subject of the thought is directed towards creating the coffin for his own mother. While not directly uplifting it isn’t meaningfully heavy and thus the release of weight creates a pseudo-kinesthetic feeling of lightness.