WARNING: Explicit academic and intellectualizing content. For folks that like that sort of thing: proceed. I do. However, all this fuss ain't necessary to fully enjoy, appreciate, or like Light In August. It's a very good story that stands on its own. So, if this isn't your thing, pick and choose from some of the essay, or ignore it. Do no let it stop you from reading the novel!
"Particles, Waves, and Points of Light in August "
Faulkner’s aesthetic genius in narrative is in the absence of advocacy masquerading as objective correlative, or otherwise often embedded in allegory. Faulkner chisels no didactic point per se; his point is to signify, to simply point and attend. He shows -- not tells. Light in August illuminates to the degree that it seemingly advocates nothing and strives to present the intractable “all,” a Sisyphean narrative attempt which Faulkner himself admits must fail. Faulkner’s Gail Hightower muses with monomaniacal obsession and imagines in order to “see,” we first “must hear, feel” (459). Faulkner’s voice provides a presence of our distinct, fleshy, and shared ontology. His sensorial text dances with aboriginal language rendering the reader to a prelinguistic state.
To properly respect aesthetic distance in Light in August is to tell, not so simply, what Faulkner shows, and point to the idiosyncratic tidal clash of titanic ideas within this pulsating textual artwork of swirled metaphor, allegory, and allusion. But allegory must be optional. According to Edgar Allan Poe, allegory functions best when “the suggested meaning runs through the obvious one in a very profound undercurrent, […] never interfer[ing] with the upper one without our own volition, so as never to show itself unless called upon” (Mandelbaum). Faulkner aligns with Dante, St. Augustine, and Poe crafting the surface clarity of story while simultaneously providing the textual means for a unified down going toward higher or parallel meaning that is sustainable. Accordingly, though Faulkner’s Light in August succeeds as a detective story, a virtual whodunit, it is awash with richly, and strangely, stratified allusive allegories.
Within Light in August lies the inescapable and shared fact that is the life we live. Employing Faulkner’s language here, our respective lives comprise the “purlieus” of our being, our private “penitentiary” or “cage” whereupon ashy facts of other lives fall. We see them, others, through metaphysical windows lining the walls of our own constrained being. If we hear and feel, as Faulkner insists, we see through yet other windows our own alienated and ever-present and never-past memories. We never quite transverse the sill of the first window but can the second, and so in doing traverse through and downward revealing something of the mysterious Lacanian “Other”, ourselves, and, inevitably, the intractable and unruly “all.”
We hear, feel, and inevitably see through textual windows in Light in August mnemonic vignettes outside and within ourselves marking, sometimes brutally, and reminding, sometimes painfully, our mutual affinity to a primal source. We sit alongside Hightower at his study window, a stage upon which his, and our, actors play, “at first dark […] disassociated from mechanical time” and unconsciously await the hearing of the music to begin (294). We wait with him for the “night and the galloping hooves” and feel the world as a “green […] light thru colored glass” (443).
The green cast light imagery may prefigure the eventually disembodied Ezekiel inspired apotheosis of Gail Hightower where Ezekiel envisions “the color of a beryl,” a green light at once opaque and transparent. The glowing glass of Hightower’s childhood is suspiciously akin to St. Augustine’s sense of the primordial and divine as, “even before the images of its sound are present in thought […] [we] see through the glass […] some likeness of that Word” (Voegelin). Something of Poe’s “very profound undercurrent” is sensed.
Faulkner begins to derail mechanical time and linearity of knowing with the koan, “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes […]” (111). As such, Light in August is an anamnetic text, the remembrance of things past and the recollection of the apriori and phenomenal known in the tradition of The Confessions of St. Augustine, Dante’s Vita Nuova.,and Plato. Augustinian, Dantean, and Platonic contemplation of memory is a divine reuniting; it is the educing of the godlike, godly, and for some, even god. The quest is intensely personal, particular, pointed, wavelike, and revelatory of the universal.
Faulkner knits and unfolds a textual tapestry of primordial memory with short interwoven strands at once implicating and explicating a universal mind, Jungian collective unconscious, and the Augustinian/Dantean/Platonic light, the light of divinity. But a Proustian sensibility and a sensorial synaethesia, the merging of senses, is vitally present insisting on the all too human. Subsequently, a “mouth think[s]“ (112), seeing of “stink” occurs (355); where sin and fear “astink” (364), we “see hear” and “hear see” (216); where “five senses [are] one organ” (275), and “goodness” has an “odor” and sin has a “smell” (282, 61).
It is tempting to railroad Faulkner’s characters, especially Joe Christmas and Gail Hightower, as an instances of literary technique alone (i.e. doppelganger), but misleading. Joe Christmas’ and Gail Hightower’s retrograde, willful, and revelatory anamnetic style searching deconstructs what Alfred Lord Tennyson calls “little systems” revealing the aftermath as “but broken lights of thee” (Voegelin). Both characters trudge opaquely (in Faulkner think, one can “trudge opaquely”) toward a prelinguistic, nearly precognitive state, deconstructing a consciousness riddled and broken with systems of culture, folkways, knowledge, belief, habituation, education, social constructs, and to an illumination rejoining (literally re-membering) a collective ‘soul.’ The process is intensely personal and congruent with Augustine’s trinity of a soul (mind) comprised of memory, understanding, and will (49). Faulkner’s koan, “Memory believes,” makes a claim to the Augustinian premise that within each of our memories the divine is nestled, retrievable in personal “recollection” and “remembering” to manifest a “knowing.”
Faulkner unpacks these relatively paltry disembodied systems of truth exposing their temporality, fragility, and insufficiency. His characters are steeped in suffocating foggy interiority gushing toward the imprimatur of an Augustinian glow. The textual flow of symbol, allegory, and metaphor of these insufficient and mistaken “little systems” merge as rivulets of insufficiency, awful consequence, and divisiveness. Faulkner weaves in a secular equivalent to an Augustinian/Dantean unity with the divine. To the extent there is advocacy in Light in August, he advances the Hellenist position that we are a parcel to a “directing mind,” a component of Reason, or a fragment of Logos. We are bound to one another or, as the character Tom Joad says in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, “maybe like Casy says, a fella’ ain’t got a soul of his own, but only a piece of a big one” (537). Faulkner’s position complements Diogenes the Cynic’s claim that we are “citizens of the universe”, yet not of the same blood but sharing of the same mind, the same portion of the divine” (Seneca; Epictetus).
Faulkner’s dogged juxtaposition of jagged physical place with esoteric epistemological and metaphysical space imbues the text with a mythopoeic sub-system of truth. Upon the death of her father and mother, Lena travels to Doane Mills, a “little-less-than-village like a forgotten bead from a broken string” (3). In the narrative present, to the extent there ever is a narrative present in Light in August, Lena espies a wagon off in the distance “like a shabby bead upon the red string of road” where the road seems an already “measured thread being wound into a spool” (6). Faulkner’s imagery of the red string resonates and is consonant with the Roman Three Fates, or Greek Moriae of Plato’s The Republic. The spinner, Clothos, spins out a white thread symbolic of birth and the past, the place that once was Doane Mills. The “drawer of lots,” Lachesis, measures and dispenses the red thread symbolic of the present and determining destiny, the place that is Doane Mills. Atropos cuts the thread to end life; the orphaned bead represents Doane Mills. Finally, the severed string symbolizes the “inflexible future result of past causes yet to be resolved” (Hergenhahn).
Faulkner may be toying with Clothos’ recoiling of the dispensed red thread of Lachesis revising the mythical sequence of a present ceased, a future severed, with a retracted past to be spun again, an odd deviation from the Moriae myth but consistent with Faulkner’s strangely stratified allusive allegories. But, Light in August is a regressive rewinding of past causes yet to be resolved culminating, perhaps, in the apotheosis of Hightower. The later reference to Gail Hightower Done Damned pulling “every string”—past, present, and future—“to get to Jefferson” is more than mere cliché in this context (55). Further plurisignation of this bit of “red string” is found in the Book of Ezekiel – figuring large in the apotheosis of Hightower – with a reference to an uncut “navel string” (certainly a red string) resonant with Hightower’s sense of ‘unbornness.’
Even Faulkner’s layered representation of the suspiciously forthright character Lena generates further obfuscation. “Lena” is a diminutive of “Helena” that is, in turn, a diminutive of Helen, the mythical daughter of Zeus. “Helen” is derived from the Greek “Helénē,” and linked by folk etymology to “helánē” with the meaning “torch,” and, more specifically, to fire –to St. Elmo’s fire. Saint Erasmus, better known as St. Elmo, was a Christian martyr during the Byzantine Empire when traditional Hellenistic philosophies ruled, a nod, perhaps, to yet another kind of light in August that Faulkner has suggested directly when asked to explain the title of Light In August. Alas, St. Elmo died with his “intestines slowly removed on a spindle,” a morbid mirroring of the symbolic “measured thread being wound into a spool” (6).
The plurisignified allegorical and strangely wrought subplot thickens. St. Elmo is the patron saint of stomach maladies and domestic animals, interesting in that the vignette with the “red string” includes mules and Lena with a “swelling and unmistakable burden […] swollen, slow, deliberate, unhurried, and tireless” presence, akin to the description of the mule themselves. Is Lena an ethical being at all? Later reference to Hightower’s “flabby and obese stomach like some monstrous pregnancy” (291) binds Lena to Hightower imagistically, and both, subtextually, to St. Elmo, and by extension: Fire.
Can any of this really be Faulkner’s authorial intent? As a Hemingway character once said, ‘it would be pretty to think so.’ Analytically unraveling the bit of red thread and tethering it to the Moriae, hard line Hellenists, Helen of Troy, slavery, and St. Elmo’s fire reeks of nearly conspiracy theory. But what matters in a Faulknerian sense, is the regressive dynamic, the history of each thing bound up with another, and their respective particulars inextricably intertwined with the universal.
Light in August tirelessly points to things more primal. Faulkner depicts a primordial collective soul, universal mind, and memory made manifest in philosophical, psychological, and mythological work, again in the spirit of Augustine’s Confessions and City of God, Dante’s Nuovo Vita, Plato’s The Republic, Greek mythology, and Carl Jung among others. Each system resists and reaffirms, simultaneously mutually inclusive and exclusive, yet sharing the common red thread of Lachesis that in the particular therein is the general.
Knowledge and knowing is a shadowy world of sense experience, falling short of enlightenment as Faulkner’s plentiful allusions to Plato’s Cave allegory suggests. Faulkner’s Platonic “shadow” is a kind of misty reality with “shadows” projected from multiple of points light. In the Platonic model, the light source is fire. We sit facing a wall in a cave, chained together, always looking forward never knowing our fellows, imprisoned in a cave privy only to the shadows on the wall. Thus, Joe Christmas experiences “something in his mind projected like a shadow on the wall” and “notseeing and hardknowing as though in a cave” (161,177); Hightower, too, considers marriage as “living like two shadows chained together with the shadow of a chain” (454). Thinking falls “quietly, not assertive, […] not particularly regretful” into shapes and shadows (461). The truth is shielded “with shapes and sounds” (453).
If we were to break free of the chains and face about to the fiery light source of our hitherto shadowy existence, the experience would be painful – possibly deadly. By adjusting our perceptions, we may escape the cave ascending to a world of more perfect knowledge. Descending again to share the knowledge of newly discovered Truth, we are likely to be killed by those who know nothing more than the shadows upon the cave wall. And so it goes for Johanna Burden who sees for the first time, upon being told the black race is “doomed and cursed” and forever a part of the “white race’s doom and curse,” the Lacanian other (blacks) as “a thing, a shadow in which […] we lived” (239). But, she is told, “in order to rise, you must raise the shadow with you,” the outcome of which can be Platonic suicide, an outcome supported by Faulkner’s killing off the last of the fiery Burden abolitionist males and, ultimately, Johanna Burden (240).
Faulkner’s metonymic and plurisignified shadow extends to the dying breath of Joe Christmas who was “empty of everything, save consciousness, and […] a shadow, about his mouth”(342), a shadow, at least partially, generated textually by the light of burning fire that is Johanna Burden’s house, the fire Faulkner dubs “an emotional barbecue” (273).
The controlling image of shadow has psychological import contrapuntal, and even contradictory, to suggestive import of both myth and allegory. In Jungian terms, “The Shadow” archetype is a pre-human ancestral inheritance that is immoral and aggressive, symbolized as devils, monsters, demons, and evil (Hergenhahn). Light in August is replete with this imagery. An Augustinian styled enlightenment may indeed not be possible while a monstrous evil may be some essential and inescapable Manichean element of nature. Thus, consonant with the working title for Light In August as "Dark House."
Faulkner insists on plurisignation of icon and symbol with an admixture of psychology, mythology, philosophy, and the dark brutish forces of nature lurking “behind the veil.” In a cave, Joe “sees suavely shaped urns in the moonlight.” Each urn is cracked and releasing a foul liquid; he vomits touching a tree (177-78). At once Jungian, Platonic, Augustinian, mythological, and Druidic, Joe experiences nausea from a shadowy and unrecognized anima-- and animus-- regarding the feminine aspect within Joe’s particular inheritance of a Jungian personal archetypal unconscious within the collective unconscious. He sees himself “doomed to be forever victim” of the woman; the “soft kindness […] he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men” (158). Then, mysteriously on cue, moonlight falls across his body symbolically invoking the feminine, the mythological huntress, perhaps Dianna or Artemis.
The house Joe lived in, as a recalcitrant McEachern, squats ”in the moonlight,” heeled by the feminine (160). When he leaves the dancehall with McEachern’s horse, he is haunted and hunted by a “moonblanched,” “moondappled,” and “moonshadowed” night (196-98). There is something in Joe’s nature, the percept of his own nature, or nature itself, from which he recoils. In contrast, embracing the huntress, Johanna Burden makes her hedonistic appeal to let her “be damned a little longer [while] the moon poured in through the window” (250).
Faulkner seems to summon Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. for a metonymic shadow as death. “Thine are these orbs of light and shade,” Tennyson writes in the poem’s opening lines, referring to Life and Death respectively. The shadow is death “feared of man” that “sits and waits” for me (Voegelin). A lurking doom and mortality that religion cannot stave off is evident in Hightower’s self perception within the church as “a shadowy figure amongst shadows (461) and the bedroom vignette between Johanna and Joe Christmas that ceases with, “the cocked shadow of the hammer flicked away” (267). The heavy hammer of death is frozen and poised to make its ever-present and ever-past claim.
Why is Johanna Burden’s house set ablaze in the novel since murder alone seems sufficient narrative pull? An allegorical affinity emerges between the character Johanna and Augustine’s work on memory and happiness. Augustine concludes we are unhappy because we attend to things outside ourselves possessed of more power to make us unhappy than the “power of [our] dim memory of truth to make [us] happy,” and ending with the faintly uplifting, “there is a faint glow of light in man” (Voegelin). Light in August does enlist the light of two looming “little systems” and tales of western truth: the Light of St. Augustine and Fire of Plato’s Cave. So, too, a Johannine light glows within a text bristling with Christian ministers. Johannitic light, literally the light of John in the New Testament, finds its nominal representative in Johanna. To this layered ideological canvas that is Light in August, a collage of burning afterimages emerges in Dante, St. Augustine, Plato, St. Elmo, Tennyson, and now, St. John. Faulkner’s universe is miasmatic, unbridled, and holographic.
Faulkner launches another epistemological sphere to collide, careen, and orbit about Light in August. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., “Nature” repels petty pledges of man by “red in tooth and claw/With ravine, shrieked against his creed “ (Voegelin). The imagery implicates a power independent of the nativist/rationalist model of Plato; it is a primal force, as fierce and unrelenting as it is inescapable. As Byron Bunch went to get Hightower and the doctor, he sensed “the clawed thing lurked” and “he knew […] what it was that seemed to lurk clawed and waiting until finally “the clawed thing overtook him from behind” (377, 379). Similarly, in Hightower’s imaginings even the trees are “uprearing against that red glare” and the horses toss their heads “in the abrupt red glare” (458-59). Fire!
We soon learn that, “Hightower read a great deal,” mostly books on religion, science, and history (67). Of the books lining Hightower’s study wall, he is fond of the dog-eared Tennyson he’s had “since the seminary” that is filled with “galloping language” (301). Is Hightower reading "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and the “wild” charge they made as evidenced in the references to “wild heads of horses,” “wild bugles, ”clashing sabers,” and the “dying thunder of hooves” (467)? The language conspires with his purpose in entering the seminary, that is, to return to Jefferson, the place where he was “shot from the saddle of a galloping horse in a Jefferson Street” (452). Likewise, the Tennyson book, insulated from “the actual earth” (56), did much the same, providing another read of the “light” in August as the “Light” Brigade.
Virginia Woolf invokes Tennyson’s brutish force in Mrs. Dalloway published approximately seven years prior to Light in August. She calls it the “brute” and identifies the sound of “hooves,” but the brute here is “human nature […] with blood red nostrils” (Woolf 12, 92). And “human nature” is Woolf’s Dr. Holmes, a representative of a psychoanalytical “little system” of truth. Faulkner, within his excruciating multiplex of meaning, shares Woolf’s sensibility too. And A.S. Byatt, too, in Morphia Eugenia, draws upon Tennyson’s “red in tooth and claw” nature of the this brute restating the modernist cant that human systems of truth such as religion, science, and culture are systems of hegemony, advocacy, dominance, and “the veil” of illusory constructs (Vogelin; Byatt).
Human hands morph in Light in August as a possible synecdoche of the brutish root of human nature. Hightower’s hands are “blackrimmed” (291), Bobby--the waitress-- has “big hands” (179), the “skeletal” and “dead” hands of Hightower’s mother (449); the “whimpering” and “beastlike” Mrs. Hines is “pawing lightly at the child” she has “snatched” from Lena (381); the hands of Joe Christmas “as he ate, like a savage, like a dog” and his “hands in the blood” after he shot the sheep (146, 174), “his hand not ceasing” moves up and down Bobby’s “flank” (184) though both are otherwise motionless. And Hightower’s hands transmute as he moves towards his apotheosis, his head becoming “suspended above his hands” (460) while his hands first lose weight and earthly contact (466) eventually dissolving into “twin blobs”(460, 467). He is free of the red in “tooth and claw” with the epiphany that he is not his grandfather and the latter died not shot from a galloping horse but with a “handful of feathers” (459).
The “twin blobs” of Hightower mark a loss of shape; and where shape wanes, a Faulknerian objective correlative for a truth gained waxes. Truth is ingeniously guarded against “with shapes and sounds” (453). Beyond the veil of Tennyson, and past the apriori truth of Kant, consciously perpetuated systems of false beliefs conceal “by not telling” (453). The false image of Hightower’s grandfather as “the crucified shape of pit and love” obscures the truth that he was really an “unchastened bravo killed with a shotgun in a peaceful henhouse” (462). Conversely, the ever atrophying body of Hightower— his “obese shapelessness”-- portends an incubating truth (342). Joe Christmas’ innocence is implied in Gavin Steven’s account to the professor, “whatever crimes molded and shaped him […] left him with the shape of an incipient executioner everywhere he looked” (424). He has been shaped and thereby symbolically made a constructed and false thing.
Faulkner answers Tennyson’s line, “What hope of answer, or redress?/ Behind the veil, behind the veil,” with an allusion to philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s “Will to survive.” The universal Will to self-preservation subordinates intellect and morality in its service; consequently, most human behavior is irrational. We become, at best, a reluctant servant of need, rising above it by immersion into poetry, music, and art (Hergenhahn). The implacable Schopenhauerian spirit of Will in Light in August is suggested in the music of Hightower’s church asking for “not love, not life, […] as though death were the boon”(347). In the same spirit, love is put into books as though it “could not exist anywhere else” because in books there is “no need to touch the actual earth” (456, 56).
Similarly, Hightower surmises what is “destroying the Church are, “[…] the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples” (461). The ministers to the individual Will of self-preservation-- McEachern, Hightower and his wife’s father, Hines, and Burden-- provide an escape from unbearable “ecstasy and pleasure” through violence in “drinking and fighting and praying; catastrophe too, the violence identical and apparently inescapable” (347). The Schopenhauer solution, the transcendence of need fulfillment, fails as religion sublimates music, art, and poetry to serve the universal will of self-preservation offering nothing in return save for prayer, a veiled progenitor of what the administers call evil.
Light In August is a terribly antsy text. It is “haste,” action and movement, that stems from the fleshy Tennyson red- clawed brute to defy and sublimate the Will to survive. Thus moves Hightower’s cavalry who “sweep past like a tide whose crest is jagged with the [….] brandished arms of men” (467) to kill another in the spirit of self-preservation risking death as a spit in the face of their own mortality. So, too, does Byron pass the birthing cabin at a “gallop” with the “need for haste” (379) and with a lurking something about to “spring full clawed upon him,” he finds “the need for haste” (374). And with “thought too swift for thinking” he knew what it was, “Yes, I did know,” he thinks shifting to the present tense, “I […] put on like a pair of hurried overalls, the need for haste” (377). Tennyson’s own line describes the condition as, “a weight of nerves without a mind […] haste[s] away” (Voegelin).
Do we act, that is, make haste in accord to what we believe, or believe in accord with our actions? Hightower thinks, “Too much happens […] man performs, engenders […] that’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything” (283). Hightower’s verdict nicely aligns with psychologist/philosopher William James’ counterintuitive theory in how we think we come to believe and feel. In the Jamesian view, we are sad because we cry, angry because we strike, and afraid because we tremble. James says, “Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth” (Allen).
Hightower’s psychological state throughout most of the text is reflected in, “I’m not in life anymore” and physical state as emphasizing “a “pale, bald skull” (284, 82). He does not move; he does not act. He prefers the life of an emotional “eunuch” and “the gutless swooning of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts” (301). Eventually, “he became utterly still in the act […],” 291). Subtle textual evidence reveals protracted and plentiful incidences of Hightower’s aposiopesis permeating the dialogue and reflecting his unwillingness to move or be moved even in language. For example, Hightower says, midsnore, “Yes, what--,”(372), “Who is--,” (342), “I have--,” (344), “I don’t see any connection between--,” (72), “Unless…,” For the…For--,” (292), “Miss Burden didn’t--,”(73), and “I just--,”(293).
For William James, it is the act –the making of haste-- that gives the belief substance, an emotional life, and power. Joe Christmas engenders outrage from the good people of Mottstown by doing nothing when captured. As to who he was, “He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted […] That was it. That was what made the folks mad” (331); for a moment, Joe Christmas is akin to Melville’s "Bartleby The Scrivener" who “prefers not.” Beliefs assume a life in proportion to actions, where the acts themselves create and sustain beliefs. Joe’s unwillingness and indifference enrages the townspeople because he does not conform to expectation and communal behavior. He is free at last -- and quite soon to be dead.
In Light In August, There are characters who cannot be made to believe and where their willful inaction reinforces a counter belief. For example, Joe abides when McEachern commands, “Kneel down.” Yet, in defiance he does not rise with McEachern, “he did not move at all” in contrast with McEachern’s command to his wife, “Kneel down. Kneel down. KNEEL DOWN, WOMAN” (143, 156). The stirrings of defiance emerges when Joe, “Knelt in corner as he had not knelt on the rug […] [and] ate, like a savage, like a dog” and when he shot the sheep “he knelt, his hands […] in warm blood” (146,174). Joe recoils from the “prints of knees […] as if death,” and denies her request to “kneel with me” (264). Johanna’s last request to “kneel with me” gives way to the pistol’s “cocked shadow of a hammer” (267). Curiously, eventually Joe does kneel in a mesmerizing pantheistic and transcendental narrative moment “in the act of drinking from a spring” (316). Accordingly, beliefs are reinforced and extinguished, as are counter-beliefs, with ritualistic compliance and defiance in haste and acts.
Faulkner reveals that tenuous systems of belief are “astink” of false concreteness in creeds, rituals, social constructs, and philosophical models. To act solely by systematic prescription is to be moved, and in the moving and the doing to become the believer. In this formulation we never come to know and believe, instead, we are made to know and believe thereby never admitting to consciousness the angst ridden Augustinian, Platonic, Dantean, and Jungian modality of enlightenment. Brown finds a curious peace where he moves ”without haste” as he is “moved here and there by an Opponent […] who created spontaneous rules which he and not the Opponent must follow.” He thinks of “the negro, the sheriff, the money” as pieces in a game, “all just shapes like chessmen” (414). “Shapes” appear once again indicating an imperfect shadowy foundation to this game in which the players are placed upon the surface of a board with a constructed checkered never- past and never-present.
Even Hightower realizes that he “was the one who failed” by not playing by the rules. He conflates “social sin,” failure to play by the rules, with “moral sin” (461). Morality does not rise above the playing plane of a game. Recognizing an insufficient morality, Hightower’s apotheosis includes the self-loathing thought that he played “his cards well” in executing the role of a “martyr” (463). Prior to his epiphany, he learns unrestrained dialogue on the contents of his own memory with his wife is against the “rule” (456). Similarly, Hightower’s father’s “sanctity” is muddled by his allegiance to games as if he were “two separate and complete people, one of whom dwelled by serene rules in a world where reality did not exist “(448). The reality from which Gail Hightower finds reprieve is the unrelenting catharsis of his consciousness and conscience.
Inherent in any game is a hermetic system of truth whereby adherence is rewarded, the terrible punishment to non-adherents notwithstanding. Percy Grimm is moved with an “objective […] served by certitude [...] in the rightness of his actions (434). Thus, Percy Grimm moves about with “no haste […] no fury, no outrage” (436). He moves effortlessly towards Joe Christmas by “the Player who moved him for a pawn” while admiring the moves and gamesmanship of Christmas saying “Good man” with the meaning of ‘good move’ (437). Percy Grimm’s perceptions are rule governed as he acts “upon what he believes would motivate him if he were […] to do what the other woman or man is doing “(43). He moves with “unfailing certitude” by the hand of the Player, shoots Joe, yet the game continues as “the Player was not done yet,” thereby exculpating Percy Grimm’s responsibility for his own action (439).
For Faulkner, we seem to live in the void, a ‘between-ness,’ biologically coaxed, and socially constructed capable of anything as the awful impress of “All of it! All. ALL!” drives human life into hermetic metaphysical and ontological alcoves (455). In Faulkner’s metaphorizing of liminality, we see Byron “must compass forever between two inescapable horizons of the implacable earth,” Joe Christmas is “between and among [states] suspended, swaying,” and the visiting congregation’s commentary on Hightower’s demeanor at the pulpit as “not looking at anything” (410, 321, 62).
Faulkner extends the notion of liminality to “between the between,” that is, a self separated from the cosmos and from itself. Hightower rejects his own memory, his “wild face frozen in the shape of the thundering and allegorical period which he had not completed” while his wife shrieks –Tennyson again -- in defiance from the “back of the church” in the “middle” of sermon (59). Another kind of liminality emerges, a “lonely suspension” and surrender as Joe Christmas thinks, “that was all I wanted […] for thirty years, that didn’t seem to be a whole lot to ask” (313). Similarly, when Joe sees the “Augusttremulous lights” surrounding Freedman Town he thinks again, “that was all I wanted […][don’t] seem to be a whole lot to ask” (313). The first instance is transcendental while the second incidence illustrates both a noumenal and phenomenal sense of liminality.
Yet another type of “between-ness” is exposed as Hightower’s photo is taken leaving the church depicting him in the “middle of a step,” teeth tight with the “face of Satan” (63). Hightower becomes this frozen sense of an instant to the community, an arrested present without a past or future, not unlike Hightower’s own obsession with the instant his grandfather was shot from the horse. In the same way, when Joe Christmas ducks McEachern’s blow in the dancehall, it is not the “child’s face” McEachern sees, but rather “it was the face of Satan”(191).
As in life, the characters cannot see in an object a quality that they do not have to project. Joe is demonized for the same reason Hightower is demonized: the observer projects the trait he dubs evil. The view is a static monomania and is the same discourse and dynamic of perception afoot in racism, hatred, envy, and separatism.
Liminality is also alluded to in, “The mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress” and [it] hang[s] suspended in the middle distance forever “(5). Hightower, too, is depicted as “in midstride, halfway home” and being filled with “baleful half-delights and half-terrors” (291, 300). An unreliable, projection laden, and static point impresses upon a ruling perception with which we assess whole lives, including our own. Life is often seen “between the ears of mule” (10), where the seer is something of a mule, a sterile hybrid cross between a donkey and a horse, a Frankenstein – a construct.
Faulkner’s language in Light in August is uncannily resonant with Joseph Conrad’s depiction of Africa as “the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention” (Kimbrough). Faulkner slathers a Conradian Heart of Darkness hue upon the narrative canvas of “blackness” with the keywords “inscrutable” and “implacacble,” seemingly lifted from Conrads’s pages. Both Faulkner and Conrad seem to metaphorize a Manichean conflict between light and dark, that matter is dark and evil in opposition to the light and good of the spirit. For example, when McEachern first tells Joe to kneel, Joe abides though his consternation is “calm, peaceful, quite inscrutable” (143). Later, Joe tries to breath into himself the “dark inscrutable thinking and being of negroes” (212). The intratextual implication is Joe’s “blackness” but also something beyond as the subsequent references to the word suggest.
Lucas Burch, alias Joe Brown, walks to the cabin of “old Negro woman” to enlist help in claiming the reward money for the capture of Joe Christmas. She sits on the porch, smoking, with an “inscrutable midnight face” that is further described as detached and godlike “but not at all benign” (411). The young boy to deliver Brown’s message has a face depicted as “black, still, also quite inscrutable” (412). Johanna’s note on Christmas’s cot is described as “lying square and white and so profoundly inscrutable against the dark blue blanket” (257).
Moreover, we do not know whether Joe has the inanely bantered about “black-blood” or even “white blood” referred to by Gavin Stevens (412). We do not know whether or not Joe’s father was Mexican from the traveling circus, though Ms. Hines refers to Joe as Joey, and “Joey” is curiously the trade name for a clown in a circus. The reader does not know; Joe does not know; no one knows anything except what they believe, and even that is inscrutable – even implacable.
Joe’s face is inscrutable to McEachern because he’s estranged by Faulkner’s “purlieus” of being as unique in its memory and experience as any one of us is to another. By extension, the “inscrutable” references may go to the spirit and mind of being, the Manichean good. The latter reference to the “old negress” and the young black boy superficially refer to the “material” sense of skin color, yet each description is embedded in language of cognitive states such as “calm, peaceful,” “still,” ”godlike,” and “detached.” The implication is the startling difference between race(s) is no more than the startling difference between culture and any individual life, a resolvable difference through the Augustinian styled inquisition of our respective memories, at the base of which we are one – and the same.
The “inscrutable” note “lying square and white” evokes the Manichean sense of the material and, consequently, evil. The note has an arresting whiteness, the smallness and concreteness of constrained space found in Faulkner’s memory analogies as a “penitentiary” and “cage”(111). The written word is symbolically “false” as the written word always is “when applied to life” (455). Faulkner places the note atop a blue blanket suggestively linking it with both the “uniform blue denim” of Joe’s orphanage and the “United States” blue patch on the confederate uniform of Hightower’s father, the patch that “stopped his very heart” as a boy (111, 444). With the flipping about of color, the white patch against the backdrop of blue, the arresting contrast toys with relativism, of war, black and white, partiality, and the element of falsity to both inspired and rational systems of truth while rejecting the existence of the any one overarching truth. Illustrative of the sort is Percy Grimm’s pursuit of Joe Christmas with “the implacable undeviation of […] Fate” (435).
Faulkner establishes an aesthetic of confined, frozen, and idiosyncratic “little systems,” large and small, as insufficient, dehumanizing, liminal, and terribly mistaken. We see without ever hearing and feeling the other, stranding life in an “inescapable middle distance at once static and fluid, quick, like mirages (24).
Light in August is illuminated with a pure aesthetic glow achievable by Faulkner’s dogged commitment to distance nearly void of advocacy, a pure artwork by an inspired craftsman that is exquisitely intimate in its distancing.
- Richard Guilfoyle -
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