Here’s the prompt: How does the long backstory of Charles Etienne St. Valery Bon engage central themes of LIA from a new angle? How does it diverge from this narrative? How does the demise of CESB continue the theme of the ‘tragic mulatto’ in Faulkner’s work, and how does it revise this narrative?

According to my extensive research (i.e. Wikipedia) the “tragic mulatto” is a stereotypical mixed-race character who is doomed to unhappiness because they are rejected from both the white and the black world. Apparently this type of character appeared often in abolitionist literature, in order to depict the evils of racism, but with a white-appearing character who would be easier for white readers to identify with. The characters of Joe Christmas from LIA and Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon of AA! fit this stereotype to a certain extent, although Faulkner diverges from it in certain ways, and the two characters differ from each other in key ways as well.

While portrait of Joe Christmas as a tragic mulatto is complicated by his lack of knowledge about his racial heritage, there is less epistemic uncertainty about CES-VB’s parentage. His father is Charles Bon, and his mother is an unnamed octoroon women who was married (sort of) to Charles Bon in New Orleans, and this is common knowledge for the characters in the novel. Both characters have tragic lives that seem to result from their mixed-race ancestry, and yet it can’t be said to derive exclusively from their ability (or lack thereof) to fit in with white society, as in the classic “tragic mulatto” scenario. Joe, at least as an adult, is assumed to be white. The courtroom officials that deal with CES-VB after he attacks the participants of a “negro ball” assume he is white until they are informed otherwise by Quentin’s grandfather (168). And yet neither character takes the option of passing.

While Joe seems to vaccinates between living among whites and living among blacks, CES-VB seems to eventually settle on living his life as a black man. He marries a black women, and when Judith even offers to sell some land and give the proceeds going to CES-VB, allowing him to leave the area to a place where no one would be aware of his ancestry, CES-VB refuses. He settles in a cabin (formerly a slave cabin) on the Sutpen land with his pregnant wife until both he and Judith die of yellow fever–a “colored” disease, a detail subtle enough to miss but somewhat heavy-handed once it is seen. After his death, CES-VB’s son, known as Jim Bond, fulfills CES-VB’s wish, insofar as he (Jim Bond) is unquestionably black, at least in his own viewpoint and that of the town, and is blissfully unaware of his troubled ancestry. Though grim, this is an optimistic outcome compared to Joe Christmas’s end, a sort of suicide-by-vigilante culminating in his castration, his bloodline ending with a full stop.

What is it specifically about passing as white that CES-VB violently rejects? Could it be that he’s absorbed society’s view of mulattos, specifically the “one-drop rule,” to the extent that he cannot question it and regards himself as black? Or perhaps it’s an act of solidarity in some sense: he could be so disgusted with the racism of whites toward blacks and mulattos like himself that he cannot bear to “impersonate” a white person for the rest of his life? But this are just speculations. The text does not give us an answer to this question. More broadly, however, we can say that Faulkner portrays racism as inflicting so deep a psychic wound on CES-VB (and on Joe Christmas) that they cannot escape it, even though their outward appearance may seem to allow them the option.

My essay will attempt to understand Joe’s puzzling behavior regarding his possible mixed-race ancestry. For a sketch of my main argument, see my now-infamous blog post “Notes toward a Kleinian Reading of Light in August.” I will supplement that reading by situating it in the context of other psychoanalytic approaches to Joe Christmas.

Stringer, D. “Memory as Fetish: Light in August.” Misrecognition, Race and the Real in Faulkner’s Fiction, edited by M. Zeitlin, A. Bleikasten, and N. Moulinoux. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004, pp. 113-126.

The evasively named D. Stringer argues that, even though Joe Christmas’s racial background is never unambiguously described, it is in some sense determined by the description of his blood as “black” in the scene of his murder, and also by a fetishization of racial difference on the part of Faulkner or the text or the reader–or something like that. I don’t completely understand this essay, and I’ll have to reread it a couple more times before I figure out exactly what the author is tring to say, and how I will engage with it.

Bleikasten, André. The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner’s Novels from The Sound and the Fury to Light in August. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.

Though Bleikasten, in this book-length study–originally published in 1990–devotes nearly ninety pages to a psychoanalytic reading of LIA, he barely touches what I regard as the central mystery of Joe’s psyche. On the topic he merely posits that Joe has internalized the views of his society toward race and miscegenation. I will argue this is not an adequate explanation of Joe’s behavior.

Polk, Noel. Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.

Without going into much detail, Polk likens Joe Christmas’s toothpaste-vomiting primal scene to a similar event in the life of Wolf Man, the subject of one of Freud’s major case studies. I haven’t yet had time to investigate thoroughly, but I will, with the aid of:

Muriel Gardiner, ed. The Wolf Man and Sigmund Freud. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1973.

This comprehensive Wolf Man smorgasbord contains Freud’s case study of the Wolf Man, a second case study from a later analysis, Wolf Man’s own memoirs, and a biographical sketch of Wolf Man’s later life by the editor, who knew Wolf Man and corresponded with him up until his death.

Schreiber, Evelyn. “‘Memory Believes Before Knowing Remembers’: The Insistence of the Past and Lacan’s Unconscious Desire in ‘Light in August.'” The Faulkner Journal 20.1/2 (2004): 71-84.

Schreiber ascribes Joe’s behavior regarding his unknown racial background in terms of Freud’s idea of repetition compulsion. I believe this approach is completely misguided. There are two ways of understanding the repetition compulsion: in Freud’s original formulation, the drive to repeat tramatic events cannot be explained by any conscious or unconscious benefit or “pleasure” to the subject, and understanding it requires positing a seperate instinct, the death drive, which is “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” It is also possible to see the compulsion to repeat tramatic events as serving some sort of unconscious function, which might be different in different instances. For example, take a child that repeatedly throws away and retrieves a doll symbolizing a parent. Rather than seeing the child as reliving a perceived traumatic abandonment by the parent for no reason beyond the death instinct, one might see the child as attempting to develop a sense of object permanence, which would enable it to enduring the absence of the parent without being tramatized. Schreiber seems to be adopting the instinctual view in their essay; at the very least they do provide offer an unconscious benefit in the essay. I find the reduction of Joe’s puzzling behavior regarding his racial background to instinct to be deeply unsatisfying, and am not alone in finding Freud’s idea of instinctual repetition compulsion to be flawed in its conception, to wit:

Otto Fenichel. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946).

In this major reference work by a second-generation psychoanalyst, the repetition compulsion is conceived of without resort to Freud’s death instinct, and in my paper I will cite this work as emblematic of the approach of most post-Freudian clinical psychoanalysts toward this concept.

Irwin, John T. Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

Schreiber is not alone in his overreliance on Freud’s instinctual repetition. In this highly influential book, Irwin make frequent use of the concept, especially as applied to TSAF and AA! In his introduction, he describes his approach to Freud’s work as treating it like a philosophical text. In taking issue with Schrieber I also take issue with this general approach to psychoanalytic criticism. In ignoring the ignoring nearly all of the clinically-relevant post-Freudian advances made in psychoanalytic thinking (note that I do not include Lacan in this category) and treating Freud’s work as merely a text, rather than a partially successful attempt to understand and explain deep truths about the human psyche, aren’t Irwin and his followers practicing a kind of cultural or historical criticism, rather than a genuinely psychoanalytic criticism? Anyway, two thumbs down for Irwin.

Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude & Other Works, 1946-1963. New York: Delacorte Press/S. Lawrence, 1975.

Segal, Hanna. Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. London: Hogarth Press [for] the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1973.

Hinshelwood, Robert et al. Introducing Melanie Klein. London: Icon Books Ltd. 1997.

In my own reading of LIA, I will be relying the work of Melanie Klein, in particular her book Envy and Gratitude. I may use the Segal text for clarification and to furnish examples. Also, while I do not believe it would be appropriate to cite this book in an academic paper, I have over the past week read and enjoyed “Introducing Melanie Klein,” a breezy summary of Klein’s life and work in comic book format:

I had read the Melanie Klein prior to picking the topic, and have the book of her essays in my personal collection. Got Irwin from the Queens Library a couple weeks ago, since I had read somewhere that it was a classic of psychoanalytic Faulkner criticism. My psychoanalyst recommended Segal. I found the rest of the articles and book chapters from Hunter OneSearch and the MLA thing that the librarian showed us. Searched for “Faulkner” and/or “Light in August” in the subject field, combined with “Christmas,” “Psych*,” or “Freud,” and probably some others that I can’t remember. This list will certainly be culled before the annotated version is due.

Faulkner, William. Novels, 1930-1935. New York, NY: Literary Classics of the United States, 1985.

Irwin, John T. Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude & Other Works, 1946-1963. New York: Delacorte Press/S. Lawrence, 1975.

McDowell, Deborah E. “‘Must Have Been Love’: Sexualities’ Attachments in Faulkner.” Faulkner’s Sexualities, edited by Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 2010, pp. 94-114.

Schreiber, Evelyn. “‘Memory Believes Before Knowing Remembers’: The Insistence of the Past and Lacan’s Unconscious Desire in ‘Light in August.'” The Faulkner Journal 20.1/2 (2004): 71-84.

Segal, Hanna. Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. London: Hogarth Press [for] the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1973.

Stringer, D. “Memory as Fetish: Light in August.” Misrecognition, Race and the Real in Faulkner’s Fiction, edited by M. Zeitlin, A. Bleikasten, and N. Moulinoux. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004, pp. 113-126.

Toomey, David. “A Jungian Reading of Light in August’s ‘Christmas Sections.'” The Southern Quarterly 28.2 (1990): 43-57.

Watkins, Ralph. ” ‘It Was Like I Was the Woman and She Was the Man’: Boundaries, Portals, and Pollution in ‘Light in August.’ ” The Southern Literary Journal 26.2 (1994): 11-24.

I sketched out the argument of my final paper in my most recent blog post, “Notes Toward a Kleinian Reading of Light in August.” So far I know that I will be using the article “Envy and Gratitude” by Melanie Klein, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein by Hanna Segal, and of course Light in August itself. There are two areas that I’d like to explore with further research:

1) How was miscegenation con in the deep south in the 1930s? Joe Christmas seems to have internalized the view that miscegenation is undesirable, but getting more specifics on this will help me get at Joe’s internal state.

2) What other psychoanalytic approaches have been taken toward Joe Christmas by literary critics? This will help inform my argument, and if my paper is too short I can pad the length by placing my own argument in the context of others.

First, the facts. No one who sees Joe Christmas as an adult thinks he might anything but white. His only evidence for believing his is part black seems to be that the other children at the orphanage, and the dietician call him the n-word. We know that he does not know from his conversation with Joanna Burden. He tells her one of his parents was part black, and when she asks how he knows, he tells her he does not: “He didn’t answer for some time. Then he said: ‘I dont know it.’ Again his voice ceased; by its sound she knew that he was looking away, toward the door. His face was sullen, quite still. Then he spoke again, moving; his voice now had an overtone, unmirthful yet quizzical, at once humorless and sardonic: “If I’m not, damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time.’ ” (586)

Near the end of the novel, we find that his mother was Milly Hines and father was a traveling circus worker. His father may actually have been part black, according to Milly’s mother Mrs Hines, who reports in a conversation with Byron and Rev. Hightower that the circus owner told her as much (678). Though we might doubt the veracity of this report, as Mrs. Hines does herself, the matter is largely irrelevant inasmuch as Christmas does not have access to this information until possibly the last few days of his life.

So why doesn’t Joe attempt to pass as white? More curiously, why does he hang on to his possible mixed-race heritage as though it were a certain fact? From his conversation with Joanna, he is intellectually aware of the possibility he may be all white, but he quickly dismisses the idea and it never comes up again. This seems to be to be the deepest mystery of the novel. I would propose that if Joe clings to the supposition that he is of mixed-race heritage, despite lack of tangible evidence and at considerable cost to himself, he must be getting some kind of benefit, consciously or unconsciously, from the supposition.

How would this work? Well, I’m still trying to figure that out, and I’m planning to explore my ideas more fully in the final paper, but here’s a quick sketch of my current theory.

As a young child, Joe interrupts the dietician in flagrante delicto, and when he is discovered, she calls him “you little n***** bastard!” The dietician is as much of a mother-figure as Joe has in his life, and her rejection of him is now linked explicitly to his ambiguous ethnic heritage. According to psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, in her seminal essay “Envy and Gratitude,” when a young child feels rejected rejected by the good object (i.e. the mother), the child fantasizes about spoiling the object, attacking it and ruining it for everyone else. This is Klein’s definition of envy, which goes beyond our usual use of the term. In Joe’s case, the scope of his envy seems to encompass all aspects of femininity, external and internal. Instances of Joe’s animus toward the feminine are too numerous to count. His method of spoilage is (the possibility of) his mixed-race heritage–the perfect weapon, since it was implicated in his initial rejection, and then reinforced with his experiences with Bobbie. Nearly everyone Joe tells about his heritage (as though it were a fact) is a woman with whom he’s had sex. In many instances he does so explicitly to get a negative reaction. And in order to make this fantasy of pollution as realistic as possible, he has to believe it himself. A consequence of Kleinian envy is guilt, and even before he murders Joanna Burden we can extrapolate through the life that he lives that Joe has little regard for himself. The certainty of mixed-race heritage then serves a dual purpose, as a way of punishing himself as well.

With Joanna Burden, he finds a woman that accepts him, and especially accepts his desire to spoil her, since she seems to share the same fantasy, crying out “negro” when they have sex. This alleviates Joe’s guilt somewhat, and gives him a safe space to begin to process his feeling about himself and race, at one point ruminating uncharacteristically, ” ‘Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?’ ” (589) When Joanna’s sexual desire for him flags, however, the hatred returns, both inwardly and outwardly directed, with disastrous consequences.

Jewel’s mind, as we find his only section, is intently focused on his mother, even as his actions are often focused on and through his horse. The horse functions as a substitute mother for Jewel, upon which he can act out fantasies of physical closeness as well as violence: “Jewel kicks him in the stomach; the horse arches his neck back, croptoothed; Jewel strikes him across the face with his fist and slides on to the trough and mounts upon it,” (13) He calls the horse “pussel-gutted,” (13) as in large-bellied, like a pregnant woman. Furthermore, the deceit he practices to get the horse mirrors the deceit Addie practices to conceive Jewel–a link that is made explicit by Darl.

Throughout the novel Darl is intensely focused on Jewel. Darl’s chapter on p. 180-183 illustrate the depth of Darl’s focus on Jewel typographically: most of the chapter is in normal type, but the sentences and clauses referring to Jewel (not referred to by name in the section) are italicized, indicating perhaps an unconscious resonance that separates Jewel from all others. But it is only Darl’s longest section, at the exact center of the novel, in which Darl recounts the story of how Jewel got his horse, that we understand why.

In that section, we learn that Jewel for month sneaks away to work at night, to raise money for his horse. At first the only evidence noticed by the family is his extreme tiredness. Later Cash spies on him, but he and Darl conclude that he is in a sexual relationship. Darl, who in the present time of the novel can often see through deception, has surprisingly little insight into Jewel’s behavior, and is apparently as clueless as the rest of the family about the real reason for Jewel’s nighttime excursions. He begins to make an important connection, however, when he notices Addie, concerned for Jewel’s health, sneaking him extra food. Darl is struck by the hypocrisy of her deception: “I first found it out, that Addie Bundren should be hiding anything she did, who had tried to teach us that deceit was such that, in a world where it was, nothing else could be very bad or very important,” (130). The evening when Jewel’s deceit is fully revealed, Darl has his epiphany:

“That night I found ma sitting beside the bed where he was sleeping, in the dark. She cried hard, maybe because she had to cry so quiet; maybe because she felt the same way about tears she did about deceit, hating herself for doing it, hating him because she had to. And then I knew that I knew. I knew that as plain on that day as I knew about Dewey Dell on that day.” (136)

As we later learn, Addie had many years ago betrayed her family, sneaking away for her assignations with Whitield, her “secret . . . in the woods,” (175) resulting in her pregnancy with Jewel–just as Jewel sneaks away, betraying his family by forcing them to do his chores and feed him extra food, and gets not a baby but a horse. Darl makes the connection. This recapitulation of the primal scene unlocks something in Darl’s mind, and seems to be the origin of his uncanny penetrating insight. When Darl says “I knew that I knew,”, that is, that Jewel is illegitimate, he links that moment to his unexplained knowledge of Dewey Dell’s affair. It also appears to be the origin of Darl’s intense focus on Jewel.

As the betraying figure in the horse affair, Jewel now acts as a lightning rod for Darl’s resentment toward his unloving philandering mother. Jewel has so totally taken over this role in Darl’s mind, that Darl no longer views Addie as his mother, and refers to her as “Addie Bundren” rather than “Ma” or “Mother.” Darl’s displaced resentment suffuses the novel and drives much of its action. His constant taunts are the just most obvious manifestation. Why does Darl insist on taking Jewel on an excursion to earn $3 just as Addie is about to die? Not for the money–unlike every other family member, he’s not planning on buying something in town. Rather, he pulls Jewel away from his dying mother as an act of revenge against both of them. Without this delay, the family most likely would have crossed one of the bridges before they were washed away. And why does he try to burn the coffin? Cash assumes it’s an attempt to end the disgraceful cortège with a rotting corpse at its center, but we have no direct evidence for this. Instead, like the $3 errand, it can be seen as a triple act of punishment: at directly at Addie, but also at Jewel, both by burning Jewel’s actual mother and negating Jewel’s sacrifice of his mother substitute–the horse–which was sold to make the journey possible.

Despite his flaws, Jason is the most adaptable of the Compson men, able as he is to hold a job and support his family financially without resorting to suicide or alcoholism. One way to account for his success is to note the high degree of control he has over his own thoughts–a high degree at least when compared to that his brothers.

Jason’s thoughts are usually closely tied to speech. Frequently in his section, Jason’s thoughts return to real or imagined conversations, especially conversations with his mother. Often his thoughts are so fully speech-like that he is capable being witty in his own internal monologue: “She [Dilsey] was so old she couldn’t do any more than move hardly. But that’s all right: we need somebody in the kitchen to eat up the grub the young ones cant tote off.” (185) He frequently repeats to himself judgments and witticisms that he has apparently made in the past, as on p. 227: “You take a little two by four country storekeeper like I say it takes a man with just five hundred dollars to worry about it fifty thousand dollars’ worth.” (Emphasis mine.) An electronic search of the text reveals the string “like I say” occurs no fewer than 26 times in Jason’s section. He repeats these worn-down scraps of speech like mantras throughout the day. Jason makes these constant efforts to order his thoughts as rational, comprehensible speech, in order to keep them under conscious control, to shield himself from other unwanted thoughts–in particular, his repressed sexual desires.

It is not what Jason speaks to himself but rather what he refuses to speak that illustrates this repressed content most fully. Jason often dwells on resentment towards his sister’s sexual exploits, and yet the name “Caddy” occurs only three times in Jason’s section. (In contrast “Ben”/”Benjamin” appears 23 times, and “Quentin” 48.) While Benjy can’t hear the name “Caddy” without bellowing, Jason can barely bring himself to think the name. When recalling his father’s funeral Jason notices that he was experiencing emotion, and yet he refuses to name this feeling, whether it is grief, or a murderous Oedipal rage: “We stood there, looking at the grave, and then I got to thinking about when we were little and one thing and another and I got to feeling funny again, kind of mad or something.” (203) Perhaps Jason unconsciously believes that if he names the experience, even in his internal monologue, he thereby grants it existence.

In the last paragraph of his section, when Jason’s thoughts turn toward Benjy’s castration, he likewise avoids descriptive terms like “penis” and “castration,” but rather alludes to the act indirectly. At one point he thinks, “Well, like I say they never started soon enough with their cutting, and they quit too quick. I know at least two more that needed something like that, and one of them not over a mile away, either.” (263) The ambiguity of the passage perhaps reveals an unconscious wish that he himself be castrated, to be free from his unspeakable desires, in the same state that he imagines Benjy to be, with desires that “he couldn’t even remember . . . and couldn’t want any longer.” (253)

It is difficult to imagine either of the other Compson brothers deliberately avoiding the act of thinking about something. Certainly not Benjy! Quentin’s thoughts frequently turn to taboo subjects that Jason avoids, like incest and abortion, which he is unwilling or, more likely, unable to repress. Moreover, he is frequently swept away by his own thoughts–once to the extent that he attacks Gerald Bland without realizing it or remembering it. In comparison, Jason’s repressive tactics can be seen as positive and adaptive; and in a time and place devoid of psychotherapy, yoga, and mediation retreats, what options does Jason have besides repression?

Throughout Quentin’s section, he reveals an obsession with time, and with escaping from time. His first thought on awaking on the day of his suicide is “I was in time again,” as he ascertains the time from the position of shadows in his room (76). One of his first act of the day is to twist off the hands of his watch (80). One can view his suicide at the end of the day as his most drastic gesture toward escaping time. While this may be true, I believe that it is not so much the suicide itself, as it is the meticulous planning and absolute resolve that allow Quentin to both exist within time and simultaneously escape from time, at least temporarily.

And it is clear that Quentin has planned his suicide carefully. Previous to the day narrated in his section, Quentin has prepared letters, presumably suicide notes, to his father and to his friend Shreve (81). He prepares a second outfit knowing he will return to his apartment later to change (81). He buys the irons that he will use to weight himself down in the water well ahead of time, and leaves them at the bridge where he will jump into the river later in the day (116). We as readers are privy to Quentin’s many thoughts, but he apparently does not question his intention to kill himself at all, and when he does think direcly about the act, it is with a certain serenity: “And then I’ll not be. The peacefullest words. Peacefullest words.” (174)

According to Martin Heidegger, one of the fundamental problems of human existence in time is the fact that one never has access to the whole story: one can remember the past and be aware of the present, but future events are unknown. The one moment we have access to this totality is the moment we cease to have access to anything–our death. For as long as we are alive, our understanding of ourselves is incomplete. As Heidegger wrote, “This ‘not-yet’ ‘belongs’ to Dasein [human existence] as long as it is; this is how things stand phenomenally” (Heidegger 286). Quentin attempts to circumvent this shortcoming of existence within time by planing the rest of his short life out in meticulous detail, so he will know, or come close to knowing, the unknowable “not-yet,” at least for a day. Quentin frees himself from some of the negative aspects of time, while still existing in time, just as his watch stripped of its hands continues to tick in his pocket.

(The Heidegger reference is to the Macquerrie & Robinson translation of Being and Time; all other references are to the Vintage edition of The Sound and the Fury.)