“Nothing can look quite as lonely as a big man going along an empty street. Yet though he was not large, not tall, he contrived somehow to look more lonely than a lone telephone pole in the middle of a desert. In the wide, empty, shadowbrooded street he looked like a phantom, a spirit, strayed out of its own world, and lost.”
William Faulkner’s Light in August presents a relatively unstructured story, vaguely centered around several climactic events that happen at nearly the same time in nearly the same place. The narrative telescopes in and out of the immediate action, several times pulling way out to give detailed accounts of the origins of various characters—sometimes several chapters in length—before circling back to the main story. The book’s main concern is America’s legacy of slavery, but its unsettling mosaic of complex characters also brings to light Faulkner’s thoughts on religiosity, free will, and memory.
Joe Christmas lives and works in Jefferson—the county seat of Yoknapatawpha County—passing as a white man but concealing that he might have some black ancestry. The details of his birth are mostly unknown, and only retold vaguely by unreliable sources. He might be black; he might be Mexican; or maybe he is European. His indeterminate race is an unsettling mirror held up to a country which often superficially defines itself along racial lines. Though the narrative is told by a number of voices, its focus is the character of Joe Christmas. It is Christmas who is accused of murdering the reclusive Joanna Burden and setting her house ablaze, and it is Christmas whose childhood is recounted for us in great detail.
On Christmas day, the young boy is left on the doorstep of a children’s home. After mistakenly witnessing one of the nurses engaging in a sexual act—which he does not understand—the “discovery” of his mixed blood becomes public knowledge, and his young mind is conditioned to conflate the resulting social alienation with female sexuality and race. He is taken in by a strict Episcopalian couple, the McEacherns, who try to indoctrinate Christmas in their ways of self-denial and abasement. The young boy rejects the lessons of his foster parents, and suffers through a traumatic and physically abusive adolescence. In one of the novel’s many emotive scenes, Simon McEachern forces Joe to recite lines from his catechism book; lines which Joe has not memorized. For hours, McEachern sits with his watch while Joe stands with his pants around his ankles in a horse stable; McEachern repeatedly asks if the boy has learned his catechism, and whips him with a harness strap when he tells him he has not.
Then the boy stood, his trousers collapsed about his feet, his legs revealed beneath his brief shirt. He stood, slight and erect. When the strap fell he did not flinch, no quiver passed over his face. He was looking straight ahead, with a rapt, calm expression like a monk in a picture. McEachern began to strike methodically, with slow and deliberate force, still without heat or anger. It would have been hard to say which face was the more rapt, more calm, more convinced.
He struck ten times, then he stopped. “Take the book,” he said. “Leave your pants be.” He handed the boy the catechism. The boy took it. He stood so, erect, his face and pamphlet lifted, his attitude one of exaltation. Save for surplice he might have been a Catholic choir boy, with for nave the looming and shadowy crib, the rough planked wall beyond which in the ammoniac and dryscented obscurity beasts stirred now and then with snorts and indolent thuds. McEachern lowered himself stiffly to the top of a feed box, spreadkneed, one hand on his knee and the silver watch in the other palm, his clean bearded face as firm as carved stone, his eyes ruthless, cold, but not unkind.
As a young man, Christmas falls in love with a local prostitute, and his distrusting stepfather finds out and accuses him of whoring. Christmas murders McEachern and flees. His life is one characterized by discontent and self-hatred. He wanders the country, and even spends time in a black community where he becomes socially isolated because he appears to be white. Eventually, he ends up in Jefferson, shoveling sawdust at a planing mill; he has no friends, no dreams, and few positive personal qualities.
A few miles outside Jefferson lives a reclusive celibate woman named Joanna Burden. She is the last surviving member of her family of abolitionists that had been supportive of the black community. The whites hated them, and Colonel Sartoris (a character featured or mentioned in many other Faulkner works, including Flags in the Dust and The Unvanquished) shot down the Burden patriarch when he began arguing for voting rights for African-Americans. Christmas initially breaks into Joanna’s house to steal food, but the two eventually settle into an unromantic sexual relationship. He lives in a shack on her property, and enters the house only for sustenance and sex, ensuring his status never goes beyond that of merely a lover. But Christmas fumbles this seemingly last chance at love; warped by his upbringing and misfortune, he finds himself disdainful of Joanna’s religious ways.
Though Light in August is focused on the life of Joe Christmas, its story is told from several points of view, some of them belonging to people who are only tangentially involved with Christmas, and their connections revealed only as the novel unfolds. The story opens as Lena Grove arrives in Jefferson in search of the father of her unborn child, having traveled farther from her home in Alabama than she ever had before. Lucas Burch, the father of Lena’s child who split when he learned of her pregnancy, had moved into the shack with Christmas sometime prior as they began a profitable and illegal business partnership. When Christmas commits his crimes, Burch sells his partner out by telling law enforcement of his mixed ancestry.
Byron Bunch, meanwhile, is mistaken for Burch, and so ends up fighting an internal battle. He is caught between his desire to provide genuine help to Lena and his unreciprocated attraction to her. In his attempts to keep her safe in her pregnancy while simultaneously concealing the news of the murder from her, he seeks counsel with Reverend Gail Hightower. Hightower is a disgraced Presbyterian minister who had his heart set on Jefferson and stayed there even after his fall from good standing. His origin story could be its own fascinating short story, but he is an integral part of Joe Christmas’s and Lena’s trajectories as well. He has a checkered past and is now an aging man fighting his demons but still fundamentally good when the situation requires it.
He can remember how when he was young, after he first came to Jefferson from the seminary, how that fading copper light would seem almost audible, like a dying yellow fall of trumpets dying into an interval of silence and waiting, out of which they would presently come. Already, even before the falling horns had ceased, it would seem to him that he could hear the beginning thunder not yet louder than a whisper, a rumor, in the air.
Toward the end of The Portable Faulkner, we read of an ambitious, militaristic young man named Percy Grimm. The story told there is a latter section of Light in August, in which Percy dutifully tracks down Joe Christmas after the death of Joanna Burden, ultimately shooting and castrating him in brutal fashion. The novel is fascinating in the way that it presents a scenario (the murder of Joanna Burden and the pregnant Lena wandering around looking for the father of her unborn child), then gradually fills in the necessary characters one by one, fleshing out their lives so they can play a meaningful and believable part in the climax, in which the threads are woven together. It’s almost like deus ex machina, except each time a motive was required for an action, Faulkner developed an intricate backstory for the character that enriched the novel rather than cheapening it.
Hightower spends much of novel fixated on his grandfather’s Calvary unit, showing humanity’s tendency to allow the past to affect the present unnecessarily. He bears the stigma of his wife’s strange behavior and eventual suicide, but he refuses to be knocked down completely; his character arc describes his reclamation of dignity and self respect. As the moral, philosophical, and spiritual center of the novel, Hightower’s story climaxes in a mystical vision late in the story, allowing him to exorcise himself of the ghosts that haunt his mind.
In the lambent suspension of August into which night is about to fully come, it seems to engender and surround itself with a faint glow like a halo. The halo is full of faces. The faces are not shaped with suffering, not shaped with anything: not horror, pain, not even reproach. They are peaceful, as though they have escaped into apotheosis; his own is among them. In fact, they all look a little alike, composite of all the faces which he has ever seen.
While Hightower’s story was the most interesting to me, the whole novel is full of compelling characters affected by spiritual disquiet and social isolation. Faulkner’s writing laments the overwhelming heartbreak of the human condition. His prose is powerful and rich, relaying the story at the perfect distance from its characters; mellifluous polysyllabic and archaic words sometimes mask a tenderness toward the novel’s afflicted human subjects, but Faulkner’s consummate artistry is worth it. Gender, religion, and race are handled deftly as we are presented with an astounding view of the vulnerability inherent in every person. In its refusal to romanticize America’s past—like Faulkner’s other work—the novel serves to elucidate the unflattering history of division along the lines of race, gender, and class. Written in 1932 and set in that era, the unsentimental novel is a classic of the Southern gothic genre.
Just to give a sense of how poetic Faulkner’s natural speech was, when asked about the title—whether it referred to the house burning or perhaps referenced the term ‘light’ when speaking of a pregnant cow (and so of Lena)—Faulkner replied: “[…] in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and—from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone… the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.”
Sources:
Ruppersburg, Hugh. Reading Faulkner: Light in August. University Press of Mississippi. 1994.