In his essay, A Certain Slant of Light: Teaching Light in August Through Hightower’s Epiphany, Charles Baker makes a compelling case for reading Gail Hightower as a character who registers “Faulkner’s deep concern for the South and the collective suffering of its people” (CB). Baker presents this argument in order to supplement what he believes to be critics warranted, yet overdrawn fascination with Joe Christmas (“because he represents the problematic and touchy issue of racism”). This supplementation involves a reading of Hightower as “Faulkner’s own prescription for the woes of his region” (CB). While Baker makes a compelling case for casting light on Hightower as a figure of the unenlightened present, I think it is possible, and perhaps more interesting, to read Hightower’s unconscious present with the “touchy issue of racism” Joe Christmas figures in Light in August. 

While Hightower appears to register as the stranger figure upon his arrival in Jefferson, his manic glorification of the city’s past actually legitimizes his intimacy with both the place itself and its townspeople. Hightower’s obsession with his grandfather’s past as a Confederate cavalryman in Jefferson is ideologically quilted into the city’s present in such a way that it creates an ideological vacuum for the reproduction of violent racism.

It appears that Hightower’s unconventionality becomes the sticking point for the townspeople of Jefferson; both his relationship with his wife and his dogmatic approach to preaching operate antithetically to their oblique moral code. Yet even after he has been excommunicated and socially cast aside, the townspeople continue to use Hightower as a moral crutch in order to obfuscate the town’s racism. For example, their racial unconscious manifests in their obsession with the black female cook who continues to live with Hightower. Imagined rumors swirl about the “unnatural” relationship between Hightower and the cook, and she eventually quits after being violently threatened by the townspeople. Following her departure, Hightower hires a black male cook. Perhaps the thinking here being that a male cook won’t inspire the same rumors and response among the people of Jefferson. However, the K.K.K. smash a brick through Hightower’s window and beat the male cook unconscious.

While Hightower’s rhetoric functions as a manic deliverance or illumination of the past, the townspeople’s inability to hear this past simply makes him a repository for the racist moral agenda of the present. This resonates with Walter Benjamin’s idea that “for every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably (WB). In this sense, Hightower gestures the violent racism of the past that risks evaporating in the racial unconscious of Jefferson present.

Works Cited:

Charles Baker, A Certain Slant of Light: Teaching Light in August Through Hightower’s Epiphany

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History 

There is a series of occurrences early on in Faulkner’s Light in August where a character, or group of characters, share perceptions (and misperceptions) of other characters in telling ways. Sometimes these opinions are shared overtly between one another, and sometimes they are kept inside a character’s head; always, however, the perceptions are repeated, and offer insight into formations of character. The first notable instance is when Lena hitches a ride to Jefferson with the group of overall-ed men: they begin to talk amongst themselves and make asumptions about Lena and her situation. Faulkner writes, “The squatting men along the wall look at her still and placid face and they think as Armstid thought and as Varner thinks: that she is thinking of a scoundrel who deserted her in trouble and whom they believe that she will never see again… ‘Or maybe it’s about that Sloane’s or Bone’s Mill she is thinking,’ Varner thinks” (26). Here, we gain insight into Varner’s, and the other men’s, thoughts about Lena’s presumed upsettedness: they assume she is thinking ill of the father of her unborn child, of the locations in which he might be, and otherwise ruminating on her present circumstances. What is interesting to me in this moment is the pointed switch once we learn what Lena is actually thinking about, at this time. Faulkner clarifies that, rather, “She is not thinking about this at all. She is thinking about the coins knotted in the bundle beneath her hands. She is remembering breakfast, thinking how she can enter the store this moment and buy cheese and crackers and even sardines if she likes” (26). In this moment we gain great insight into Lena’s even-keeled character and strong will, as she is (surprisingly, to the men) not stressing about her impending future or even that she has been traveling alone for so long while being far along in her pregnancy. Instead, she seems to be deeply present and engaging in the tangibility of what is in her hands, what she recently ate, and what she might purchase soon, now that she has the means to do so thanks to Martha Armstid. Faulkner continues, clarifying: “So she seems to muse upon the mounting road while the slowspitting and squatting men watch her covertly, believing that she is thinking about the man and the approaching crisis, when in reality she is waging a mild battle with that providential caution of the old earth of and with and by which she lives” (26-27). I love the juxtaposition of what is assumed she would be feeling, and what her real feelings are. Her presence on this journey clearly inspires a multitude of opinions from those she encounters, ranging from shock, concern, disapproval, and surely many more, and I find that in these moments, Faulkner elucidates a lighthearted quality of Lena that challenges the misperceptions that people have of her and of her presumed struggles.

Another, quicker instance where Lena flips perceptions of her feelings is when she first meets Byron at the mill, and when he begins to describe a person who she is slowly realizing is potentially Lucas Burch, whom she seeks. Faulkner writes, “She continues to watch him with that expression not so much concerned for the future as suspicious of the now” (51). Like the previous passage, here we see a shift from the future to the present: Lena does not get caught up in the uncertainty and anxiety surrounding her future, but rather, stays extremely present. Lena cautiously considers the situation at hand with quiet care, interprets Byron’s words and descriptions, and tries to make meaning of what this means for her, moving forward. We learn that Lena prefers to stay practically rooted in the present moment instead of being consumed by worries of an uncertain future. 

Chapter five of the LIA provides the reader with the first moment of introspective access to Christmas, a character, up to this point, that has remained a prominent yet elusive agent in the narrative, occupying an ominous if romantic exterior role. The resulting scenes that unfold are rich in recurring images, tropes, and metaphors. Within in a few pages the character of Christmas is affiliated with so much associative imagery, that it almost feels like a literary bombardment: an explosion of linguistic possibility. It is perhaps no coincidence that such language erupts from Christmas directly following the moment the narrative disrupts his hereto before stable racial identity. Before Brown’s accusation (98) Christmas was not just passing within the fictionalized world on the pages, but he was also passing with the reader. There had been no overt evidence previous to suggest otherwise, and in an instant, a stable signifier is completely rendered unintelligible within the diametrically oppositional discursive codes Faulkner’s fictional world presents to us in the form of race.

“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” (114).

Faulkner’s choice of the telephone pole to symbolize alienation is striking here. The subtext describes a nonoperational message system, a device with the potential to transmit messages, but with no other equipment, or indeed civilization, to transmit or communicate. Once out of its appropriate context (a desert, not a society), the telephone pole becomes a pointless thing. It is like a “phantom, a spirit, strayed out of its own world, and lost,” something that has lapsed outside of its appropriate space or system (phantoms and spirits are by definition things that have strayed from their appropriate domain).

In this way, the question of Christmas’ race opens up not just a question of identity and its stability within social discourse, but also the very stability of language itself. The moment that Brown drunkenly stumbles into the cabin (102) and proclaims him a “damn niggerblood” (103), it is as if something is punctured, ruptured, and begins to erupt with a myriad of different codes. At this point, Christmas’ identity, his signifier, begins to disseminate. He immediately attempts to repress the rupture, the forceful gesture of silencing Brown with violence (most tellingly holding his hand over Brown’s mouth), but it is inevitably a feeble attempt. Shortly after, when quiet has resumed in the cabin, an entire array of discursive fields begin to emerge for Christmas that were before contained.

Then it seemed to him, sitting on the cot in the dark room, that he was hearing a myriad of sounds of no greater volume- voices, murmurs, whispers: of trees, darkness, earth; people: his own voice; other voices evocative of names and times and places- which he had been conscious of all his life without knowing it, which were his like, thinking “God perhaps and me not knowing that too” He could see it like a printed sentence, fullborn and already dead “God loves me too” like the faded and weather letters on a last year’s billboard “God loves me too” (105)

Sounds, voices, and murmurs, the initiators of discourse speak and unleash otherwise repressed discourses from within Christmas “which he had been conscious of all of his life without knowing it.” They originate from seemingly everywhere, “trees, darkness, earth; people: his own voice,” a “myriad” of signs transmitting an over-abundance of ambiguous meaning. Christmas reacts to this dissemination by attempting to reincorporate himself into the discursive system that was ruptured. He muses, “God loves me too,” projecting a possible space for himself, a potential candidate for God’s affirmation. However, the possibility of return is left hanging in ambiguity, like a “printed sentence, fullborn and already dead,” it seems as if he were to be re-inscribed into the previous discursive system, his existence would be zombified, something both dead and alive, but ultimately, an aberration capable only of passing and not belonging to a set code of direct meaning. Put more simply, he can be neither white for whites, nor black blacks; he cannot “fit” into the system.

This problem is further affiliated with language, as Christmas attempts to force a cohesive narrative in the process of his own reading.

He had previously read but one story; he began the second one, reading the magazine straight through as though it were a novel. (111)

Removed from the immediate chronological context of the narrative, the first part of the quotation can be read to connote that it’s not just “one story” in the magazine that Christmas has read, but that he also has only been reading one story of his life. Before this moment, he had perhaps only ascribed to one potential story (discourse) for himself. As he reads further, the text seems to suggest that he is attempting to combine an otherwise disparate array of discourses into a unitary whole, reading a magazine, which is a series of articles with no necessary direct relation, as “though it were a novel.”

Then he read again. He turned the pages in steady progression, though now and then he would seem to linger upon one page, one line, perhaps one word. He would not move, apparently arrested and held immobile by a single word which had perhaps not impacted, his whole being suspended by the single trivial combinations of letters (112).

Here, Christmas shuts down, and is immobilized by the inability to make the text before him mean something (signify) . He seems to reduce ad absurdum from container (magazine), to page, to line, to word, reducing the components of language to their most atomistic unit, attempting to render significance from words that no longer signify for him, “his whole being suspended by the single trivial combinations of letters.”

The overall picture Faulkner presents to the reader in this sequence of events is of a world of language gone awry. Words seem to have lost their meaning for Christmas. He can no longer fit himself back into the story he himself was telling. His own dilemma, points to a greater complexity intrinsic to language.  It cannot be ordered into a singular all encompassing code. There will always be a “dangling” signifier, a part that doesn’t fit into the system and therefore ruptures the imposed logic of that system. Hence the great irony of Christmas name, a day celebrating the birth of Christ, the word of god made real into flesh.

What struck me most while reading Light in August, was how different and more modern it was from the works we have read so far. While reading I saw that the relationships between characters were way more developed, and that the notion of sex was more explicit in this novel than the others. The novel starts off with Lena, a pregnant, unmarried girl, in search for the man who slept with her and then filled her head with lies and false promises. But Faulkner debunks the romantic, chaste idea of sex- making it the the cause of all the characters problems. The first and most obvious is Lena- her relationship with “Lucas Burch” has led her to be casted out of her home and of a future, Armstid noting “the woman had gone now, slowly, with her swelling and unmistakable burden”(9). The burden for Lena is not just the physical one, but the emotional and societal burden that she now has to deal with. This is seen again in Joe Christmas, who caught the dietician in his orphanage having sex in her office. I don’t want to get too Freudian about it, but this first introduction to sex shaped Joe, and could be the reason for his aggressive attitude towards sex later on. He feels the need to exert his power over women, in attempt to make up for the woman who ruined his life. Even his first actual sexual experience was aggressive and has a violent tone to it, “she let herself be half carried, half dragged among the growing plants, the furrows, and into the woods, the trees”(190). Joe’s first real “relationship” was actually a contrived situation, and a money making scheme for Bobbie. There was no love in it- and the romance and infatuation Joe had at the start was completely taken away. In his relationship with Bobbie, we got to see these intimate moments, instead of just being placed in the future wondering why these characters are the way they are. In The Sound and the Fury, Caddy who wasn’t given a narrative, and her relationship with a man was the foundation for the downfall of the family- yet the reader is never given a direct glimpse into how that relationship developed. The relationship and the way that sex is written about in this novel much more explicit that I thought I would see in a Faulkner work. Joe having a relationship with Miss Burden (ha. another burden), is clearly shown, and written in clarity, “the doors were never locked, and it used to be that at whatever hour between dusk and dawn that desire took him, he would enter the house and go to her bedroom and take his sure way through the darkness to her bed”(106). With all the mistaken identities and murder, the first 8 chapters of Light in August read more to me like a Shakespeare play than the Faulkner works we have read so far.