Reading Faulkner: Light In August

My paperback from 1987.

About half way through William Faulkner's Light In August it suddenly felt a tad absurd that I was even reading it at all.  The story is nothing inspiring, with little redemption.  It is sad and harsh and brutal.  It is about cold-blooded topics like racism and the nature of human isolation.  It offers little emotion other than anger and frustration. It is reading a great Edward Hopper painting.  So frigid and objectified.  Why was I reading this while my life was turned upside-down?

And yet there is all that marvelous prose.  Faulkner was a master of poetic prose so all this bleakness is cast in a strangely enticing, figurative glow.  The novel is a poetic quest to tell a story that can be difficult to read.  Not difficult in the marvelous thickness of Faulkner's stream of consciousness prose but difficult in that there is no character's life worth rooting for to the degree that the narrative demands.  It demands you see the ugliness of the south.  There's nothing to root for.

Unless you root for the young woman who is pregnant, the first character you meet in the novel, and gives birth in the novel's third act.  Or you could root for a fallen reverend who, in fact, redeems himself in the end by assisting with the birth of the child.  Or you might have enough to root for in the wood mill boss, who takes this young woman under his wing and wants to help her.

But this young woman is looking for someone.  The father of the baby.  And the father of the baby, unbeknownst to anyone, including the reader, is living with the main character of the novel.  They share an small shack outside a larger home where a middle-aged woman lives who ends up having a sexual relationship with the main character.  This abruptly ends when she finds religion and tries to force our would-be protagonist to pray while holding a gun to his head.  For this he murders her and burns down her house.

Beyond all this, our would-be protagonist, Joe Christmas, does not know if he is white or black.  No one in the story particularly thinks he is a black man to look at him or interact with him but he believes he has some black (or hispanic) blood in him.  In his isolation (one of many in the novel) the ugliness of southern racism is fully exposed by Faulkner.  

Not only through the behavior of others toward him as the story unfolds but through his confusion and inner turmoil of not knowing whether or not he is really black.  And it is because he doesn't know whether or not he his black – as opposed to not knowing if he is white – that is the heart of matter for him.  But not knowing whether he is white is the primary driver for everyone else in the story toward him.  This is a brilliant examination of both sociological and psychological damage of racism.  Light In August exposes southern racism as a rot like dark mold in a cold and self-isolating (being ostracized by) society.

There's not enough to root for in the story to compensate for all this.  While the birth of the child is the ray of sunshine, it is but a single light among the gray and foreboding sky that Faulkner so masterfully creates.  Hightower's redemption is not nearly enough to make up for the rough-hewn brutality of the novel.

Faulkner's beautiful, evocative prose woven into a complex and often metaphorical tale make Light In August an astonishing read.  The nature and tone of this story should not hold my interest, especially right now in my life.  But the words of the page glue me to the book and make me want more.

The town of Jefferson is gritty and rugged and real.  Anyone who has stood in the southern heat and worked hard can relate to the atmosphere Faulkner creates.  Everything that happens happens within this carefully constructed atmosphere.  There is spitting, and toweling off sweat, and smoking.  The whole world of humanity and industry is smoking.  The smoke from the murdered woman's house burning alerts the townspeople to the murder site near the beginning of the novel. Daylight brings community (such as it is).  Existentially, night time brings isolation, which is as close to intimacy as Faulkner comes.  Though the novel has plenty of sex, it is far more passionate than loving.  I'm not sure there is speck of love in the narrative.  Maybe for the baby, which only decorates the main tale.

Most of the novel is about what Joe Christmas does.  It is often a mystery as to why he does what he does, except for, bizarrely, the fact he ate a lot of toothpaste as a child and was traumatized by hiding in a closet and watching adults have sex.  This seems of have left an imprint on him.  The taste of toothpaste makes him anxious and aggravated.  He is naturally a passionate, independent, confused and angry man.  But otherwise there are few clues as to what motivates him.

This is not a weakness, it is by intent.  Faulkner is exploring existential themes here, which are present in most of his great novels.  Joe Christmas affects other characters and he ultimately is affected by racism but the cause of his actions (or anyone else's) is generally opaque.  The racism in the novel is far more crystallized and transparent than the intimacy of any character.

It is initially thought by the townsfolk that Joe Christmas, this lone drifter, was “different” and when rumors spread that he's black they regard him in greater suspicion.  Faulkner makes this as ambiguous as possible but, importantly, no one thinks he is black until it is rumored so, a devastatingly accurate depiction of small town southern life.  When they find out he was having sex with a white woman, they want him dead.  This is perhaps the most powerful manifestation of the racism in the novel.

The N-word is used a lot.  Why do I even have to acknowledge that?  There is absolutely no way to seriously capture and detail southern racism without using the N-word rather frequently.  Otherwise, you partly sanitize everything and that was the last thing Faulkner wants to do in Light In August.  There is nothing wrong with his use of the N-word.  What's absurd is that I have to type “the N-word” (instead of quoting a passage as I would do with any other part of the book) to even explain this part of my review.

There is no “racial problem” with William Faulkner.  There is no issue with his objective relation of racism which seems slightly out of touch with our present enlightenment.  That enlightenment is false which does not see the past for what it was, on its own terms, which expects those before us to measure their world through our eyes.  Light In August is an often shocking exposé of racial southern society as it was in the early twentieth century.  It does not pull any punches in revealing its cancerous qualities for communities and for individuals.  

The best example I can give of Faulkner's magnificent, often philosophic prose is the beginning of Chapter VI.  The first sentence is something I have quoted from time to time throughout my adult life since I read the novel in my early 30's:  “Memory believes before knowing remembers.  Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.  Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick soothleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a 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 bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.”

Extraordinary prose, especially if you read it out loud and get the rhythm of its voice.

It pays to work that paragraph backwards.  A lot of chimneys emit soot into the bleak world.  This bleakness is constantly known to us even though our memory is like blue jeaned orphans.  “Sparrowlike childtrebline” is the sound of the orphans at play.  Wonderful inventive phasing.  I love an author you can just make up his own words, using English like it was German.  But this play is random, all or nothing, and is housed in a “grassless cinderstrewpacked compound.”  This place is engulfed (“soothleaked”) by the soot belching, bleak chimneys and is itself a chimney among them.  In this place there is a lengthy, echoing corridor which is a metaphor for what “Knows, remembers, believes...”  This is an excellent example of the smoky, atmospheric quality of the novel.

That part of the paragraph is a poetic exploration of the paragraph that starts in the third (and final) sentence.  The first words of the third and the first two sentences are separate from the metaphor, they are a philosophical proposition.  Still going backward Faulkner tells us that knowing can be a kind of memory about a belief.  Belief runs primitively within us prior to us knowing anything.  We can't even remember the wonder of knowledge.  But some memories are beliefs and, as memories, they are more fundamental than knowledge of them.  That is, they influence humanity more than knowledge (reason).

What we believe in our lives is instinctual, pre-rational.  Each generation lives out its remembered beliefs.  Memory believes before knowing remembers.

It is at this level that Faulkner works with his characters.  Men and women act far more instinctual than rational in Light In August.  That is what fuels the novels sexual energy, existential angst, and racial trauma.  There wouldn't be a novel at all if not for the sexual relationship of Joe Christmas with Joanna Burden, whose house he burned down near the beginning, her dead body almost decapitated by him, the inevitable result of the underlying tension of the novel.  The rest of the novel is incidental without this critical part.

Their passion affords another example of Faulkner's brilliant prose.  “Now and then she appointed trysts beneath certain shrubs about the grounds, where he would find her naked, or with her clothing half torn to ribbons upon her, in the wild throes of nymphomania, he body gleaming in the slow shifting from one to another of such formally erotic attitudes and gestures as Beardsley of the time of Petronius might have drawn.  She would be wild then, in the close, breathing halfdark without walls, with her wild hair, each strand of which would seem to come alive like octopus tentacles, and her wild hands and her breathing: “Negro!  Negro!  Negro!”

“Within six months she was completely corrupted.  It could not be said that he corrupted her.  His own life, for all its anonymous promiscuity, had been conventional enough, as a life of healthy and normal sin usually is.”  (Chapter XII)

This moment with Reverend Hightower demonstrates more of the author's mastery, this time exposing the interior of a minor character, moments such as all the novel's characters experience.  “...thinking 'God bless him.  God help him.' thinking To be young.  To be young.  There is nothing like it; there is nothing else in the world  He is thinking quietly: 'I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.'  Then he hears the feet no longer.  He hears now only myriad and interminable insects, leaning in the window, breathing the hot still rich maculate smell of the earth, thinking how when he was young, a youth, he had loved darkness, of walking or sitting alone among trees at night.  The the ground, the bark of trees, became actual, savage, filled with, evocative of, strange and baleful half delights and half terrors.  He was afraid of it.  He feared: he loved being afraid.” (Chapter XIII)

After she gets religion, Joanna wants to marry Joe.  So, they won't have sex out of wedlock,  In a manner of speaking, she proposes to him.  “He just thought quietly, 'So this is love,  I see,  I was wrong about it too', thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

“He changed completely.  They planned to be married.  He knew now he had seen all the while that desperate calculation in her eyes.  'Perhaps they were right putting love into books,' he thought quietly.  'Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.'” (Chapter XX)

Light In August is filled with such wonderful wordcraft and complex, bracing characters.  The story itself is uninspiring, almost hopeless, but the way it is told and the life breathed into these characters is extraordinary.  This is one of Faulkner's best novels.  I have not read it in 30 years but it is still a powerful and strangely seducing read reflecting the author's harsh and surgical genius.