Critical Reviews of William Faulkner Light in August

Low-cal in August by William Faulkner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Light in Baronial, published in 1932, is Faulkner's seventh novel and generally considered 1 of the major works of his best period—roughly the 1930s—alongside The Sound and the Fury (1929), Equally I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Light in August is longer and looser than these, and more than conventionally told in third-person omniscient narration. Often said to be a adept place to start with Faulkner, it is less committed than the other novels I named to the modernist techniques of stream-of-consciousness narration and fragmentary construction.[ane] If Joyce and Conrad preside over the others, the master-spirit of Light in August is Dickens.

The flashback-driven narrative is not conveyed linearly, still; events are mentioned, and and then explained a hundred pages after. Each individual page is more linear than a page of, say, Quentin'south monologue in The Sound and the Fury, but the narrative overall, with its three braided stories, is elliptical and recursive.

It begins when Lena Grove, a pregnant young woman from Alabama, arrives in Jefferson, MS, looking for Lucas Burch, the father of her unborn child. There she finds non Burch but Byron Bunch, a lonely man in his 30s who works in a planing mill aslope 2 bootleggers named Joe Brown and Joe Christmas. Bunch falls in love with Lena at first sight and resolves to assistance her observe Burch, whom he quickly realizes is actually his co-worker, Brown.

Bunch discusses these sudden complications in his life with his friend, the former Reverend Gail Hightower, a minister disgraced and ostracized due to his married woman's adultery and eventual suicide. Hightower is furthermore disablingly obsessed with the exploits, heroic and anti-heroic, of his Confederate granddad.

On the day Lena Grove arrives in Jefferson, a adult female named Joanna Burden is murdered and her business firm burned down. It transpires that her killer is Agglomeration's other co-worker, Joe Christmas, who had been having a tortured matter with Joanna. Christmas, a foundling (and then named considering he was dropped at an orphanage on Christmas Eve), believes that he is half black, though he can pass for white and though he was raised by a white family headed by a religiously fanatical and sadistic male parent. Joanna, for her part, is the descendant of Northern abolitionists who came to Mississippi to uplift its blackness population during Reconstruction, for which her grandpa and brother were both assassinated; despite this, she remained a resident in the town, albeit near its black district, and from her "dark house" (the novel's get-go title) she writes to and maintains a network of colleges and other organizations for African-Americans.

Her affair with Christmas, and then, is a fatal entanglement complicated both by Joanna's racial fetishization and paternalism, which is due to her high-handed and Puritanical "sympathy for the Negro" equally well as her attraction to the racially and sexually forbidden, and past Christmas's masochism and misogyny, based on his racial self-hatred and his perceived emasculation past white women's clemency throughout his foundling's life. Once Joanna decides to stop sleeping with Christmas and start "saving" him, he murders her—though there is a hint that it may partially have been in self-defense, as she brandished a gun at him earlier in the story—and goes on the run.

How these three narratives conjoin, I will leave the reader to notice, except to say that Christmas—as his Christ-imitating and Christ-parodying proper name conspicuously foreshadows—is somewhen lynched by the community, led by the proto-fascist paramilitary racist Percy Grimm, who not only shoots Christmas just besides castrates him.

As full of characters and incidents as a nineteenth-century realist novel, though much more violent and sexually frank, Light in August is often said to be incoherent or disunified, with its stiff modernist central narrative of Joe Christmas's racial crisis weakened by its being conjoined to the country comedy of Lena and Byron and the Confederate nostalgia of Reverend Hightower's verbose reveries. But the novel does cohere: the stories of Hightower, Christmas, and Burden together form a devastating indictment of American Protestant Christianity, in both its Northern and Southern variants, as an oppressive, pain-worshipping, race-obsessed, and inherently violent creed that creates and destroys humans as outcasts; to this, the story of Lena and Byron serve as a comic-pastoral contrast, showing the gentle persistence of natural human desire that Christianity distorts or denies.

Hightower'due south reflections center on this theme every bit he comes to realize that his own Rebel-inflected Christian vision was destructive and responsible for the death of his wife (and, indirectly, the expiry of Christmas). Close to the novel'due south conclusion, he reflects:

…that which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who accept removed the bells from its steeples. He seems to see them, endless, without order, empty, symbolical, bleak, skypointed non with ecstasy or passion merely in adjuration, threat, and doom. He seems to run into the churches of the world like a rampart, like ane of those barricades of the middleages planted with expressionless and sharpened stakes, against truth and confronting that peace in which to sin and exist forgiven which is the life of man.

Even earlier than this, before the lynching of Joe Christmas, Hightower concludes that the white church crucifies itself as information technology projects its flaws onto the African-Americans it abjects and oppresses:

Yet fifty-fifty then the music has a even so quality stern and implacable, deliberate, without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for non dearest, not life, forbidding it to others, enervating in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music. […] Pleasance, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from information technology is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying; catastrophe also, the violence identical and evidently inescapableAnd so why should not their faith drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks. It seems to him that he can hear within the music the announcement and dedication of that which they know that on the morrow they will accept to do [i.e., lynch Christmas].

Just Faulkner does not leave it at that. In maybe his virtually startling passage, Joanna explains to Christmas her New England Puritan forebears' theology and theory of race, through which Faulkner shows that the Calvinist-descended progressive anti-racism of the Northern white is no less patronizing and dehumanizing than overt Southern racism. In the following passage, Joanna's father has just told her that the white race is cursed past God for having enslaved the black race, which is cursed in plow to be the scourge of the white race's inexpiable sin; there is much contemporary relevance, difficult to discuss, in this portrayal of the white supremacism and paternalism and, above all, Calvinist self-flagellation that persists beneath so many secular expressions and manifestations of what has been called "white guilt." Joanna tells Christmas:

"I had seen and known negroes since I could remember. I just looked at them as I did at pelting, or article of furniture, or food or sleep. But after that [i.e., her begetter's speech] I seemed to come across them for the first time not every bit people, merely as a thing, a shadow in which I lived, we lived, all white people, all other people. I thought of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white, with the black shadow falling upon them before they drew jiff. And I seemed to see the blackness shadow in the shape of a cantankerous. And it seemed like the white babies were struggling, even before they drew breath, to escape from the shadow that was not only upon them but was beneath them likewise, flung out like their arms were flung out, as if they were nailed to the cross."

Joe Christmas, anticipating Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas of Native Son, attempts to attain existential freedom by killing the well-intentioned white adult female who bears this constrictive racial ideology, just, like Thomas, he simply imprisons himself further in the racist script he wishes to evade past casting himself as killer (and this is not to mention the misogyny on which Faulkner'southward and Wright's narratives residuum, of which neither author seems quite sufficiently aware). Light in Baronial, though, is more than humanistic than Faulkner's previous novels, grim as it is; a scattering of references to "white claret" and "black blood" aside, information technology blames its tragic anti-hero's fate most entirely on his society, and not on whatever natural forces—which are themselves represented (no incertitude problematically from a feminist perspective) in the effigy of Lena equally female person fecundity, and therefore equally positive and life-affirming.

Faulkner'due south way in this novel is, as he might say, a myriad thing. Anticipating later trends in fictional prose, he narrates in the present tense; he also, though inconsistently, uses typographical devices to mark different levels of narrative discourse—double quotation marks for dialogue, unmarried quotation marks for conscious thought, italics for subconscious thought. There are passages of humorous vernacular dialogue, passages of Hemingway-articulate linear narrative with sentences every bit transparent equally this:

It is just dawn, daylight. He rises and descends to the bound and takes from his pocket the razor, the castor, the soap.

And then at that place are sentences similar these, describing the dour orphanage where Christmas grew upwardly, a torrent of language more sonorous than sensible, and wittingly or unwittingly defiant of traditional grammar:

Memory believes earlier knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled [sic—gabled?] cold echoing edifice of night carmine brick sootbleakened by more than chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten-foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the dour windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.

This novel's narrator, or, meliorate, its language, is a character in itself, a viscid medium that thins and thickens at volition, a haze of autumnal heaviness, a mood weary and somewhat erotically sickened with the violence it knows—but as well curiously hopeful. A modern editor or MFA workshop leader would find something to delete on every page, just for Faulkner, as for Blake, the path of backlog leads to the palace of wisdom.

About criticisms of this novel implicitly wish it to be something other than it is and are therefore unpersuasive. My i major criticism is that too much in Joanna'due south human relationship with Christmas is sketchily summed upwardly rather than dramatized, and Joanna herself is perhaps more than of an idea than a character. Discussions of "writing the other" then often center around obvious racial divides, but I observe that Faulkner's black characters are more substantial than this slightly shadowy Puritan Yankee.

I won't say Light in August never exasperated or fifty-fifty bored me, but it is a novel of undiminished relevance written in a style of intriguing still symphonic strangeness, the strangeness of the strangers the novel both evokes and elegizes.
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[ane] I don't concord with this advice, past the way. To start with Faulkner, drop yourself straight into the deep end with The Sound and the Fury, which contains pretty much everything Faulkner can practise in ane book, from the tour-de-force of the first chapter, narrated through the prismatic consciousness of a so-called "idiot," to the Ulysses-derived and febrile interior monologue of the disintegrating young intellectual in the second chapter, to the third chapter's vernacular clarity and bigotry and the concluding chapter's stately third-person rhetoric, both of which lead on to Calorie-free in Baronial's somewhat more traditionally realist aspirations.

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Source: https://johnpistelli.com/2016/08/14/william-faulkner-light-in-august/

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