As we learn more about Christmas’s upbringing, Faulkner relates a somewhat disturbing scene from the McEachern era that I would like to examine more closely. The beginning of chapter 7 includes a key line, signaled by the use of italics: “On this day I became a man.” The episode subsequently related deals with McEachern demanding that Christmas memorize a piece of the Catechism and then brutally punishing him when he fails to do so. After several failed attempts, Faulkner describes McEachern’s voice: “His voice was not unkind. It was not human, personal, at all. It was just cold, implacable, like written or printed words” (149). These lines echo Addie Bundren, in some ways, with her skepticism of the value of words. It is also crucial that McEachern’s voice is compared to “written or printed words”–like the Catechism he is forcing Christmas to memorize.
For the 8-year-old Christmas, these words are dead on the page; he cannot relate to them or absorb their meaning. The question this raises for me is, does their “written-ness” cause this? Or does McEachern’s brutality create a kind of rift between the words of the Catechism and reality? We talked a lot about speech vs written text in terms of narration, but it seems relevant in this context as well.
A few pages later, this theme is explored in greater detail. “When McEachern approached he saw that the boy was not looking at the page at all, that his eyes were quite fixed and quite blank. When he put his hand on the book he found that the boy was clinging to it as if it were a rope or a post” (151). Here, we see that Christmas is not even processing the text before him. His eyes glaze over and the words become not only meaningless, but essentially nonexistent. At the same time, the second sentence suggests that Christmas is physically attached to the book in a very different way. This disconnect between the absence of meaning in the book and a desperate “clinging” to it is very intriguing. If the words do nothing for Christmas, why does he feel this attachment to the book itself? Again, how do we separate Christmas’s feelings about the text from his feelings about McEachern?
Shifting back to the conclusion of chapter 6, this line stands out: “The child was not listening. He was not bothered. He did not especially care, anymore than if the man had said the day was hot when it was not hot. He didn’t even both to say to himself My name ain’t McEachern. My name is Christmas There was no need to bother about that yet. There was plenty of time” (145). This last piece is essential, as it seems to set up the rebelliousness that will follow as Christmas gets older (and his “becoming a man” in chapter 7). The story of the Catechism is significant, then, as it signals an early demonstration of protest against McEachern. Christmas refuses food from Mrs McEachern, and passively accepts his beating without acquiescing to McEachern’s demands. Ironically, this image of an innocent child being whipped conjures up the idea of a Christ figure. For all of McEachern’s alleged piety, he overlooks the Christ-like actions of the child he is trying to punish. Given Faulkner’s depictions of Christians (here and elsewhere) this contradiction is not surprising.
