Tag Archives: lena grove

the Unalone and Unknown

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In what can only be described as a very 2013 article for The Atlantic, then-staff writer Michelle Willens, nominally writing about “chauvinist king of the stage, David Mamet,” explores the notion of whether or not male writers can pen female characters with any finesse, depth or dimension. Willens sort of punts on coming down on the any particular side, advocating for the absolutely necessary increase gender parity in the authorial space and then quoting the literary critic Sarah Seltzer, who says, “the attempt at understanding, empathy, and inhabiting the soul of someone whose life experience is not ours, helps us grow as writers, and people too.” Willens’ question is one I have considered often over the past half-decade as I’ve reexamined some of my favorite novels – I laughed again, sadly, in re-reading her article, at the line “Where are the vivid, realistic and rounded portrayals of women in Roth, Bellow, Updike?” – and it has been at the forefront of my mind as we’ve read Faulkner’s work this semester. One need only google “Faulkner and Women” to see that there is a veritable buffet of criticism on the subject, the intersection of Yoknapatawpha scholarship and Academic Feminism being an apparently robust crossing. Our pal Bill may not have a ‘woman problem’ on the magnitude of say Mamet or Mailer, but neither would his novels – the three we’ve read anyway – pass the Bechdel Test. Many of female characters in Faulkner’s work are peripheral at best, appended with harsh physical descriptors, and played as a sort of two-dimensional character of either neurosis (Caroline Compson’s affliction in TSAF), histrionic piety (Cora Tull in AILD), judgement (Martha, described as a “gray woman with a cold, harsh, irascible face” in LIA), or, most often, gossip (Cora Tull again, among many, many others). Addie, As I Lay Dying’s titular matriarch, is one of the few exceptions, but in many ways her narrative functions as a foil to those of her predominantly male kin, and it would be a stretch to call Faulkner’s time in her head a ‘sympathetic portrait’. And yet, in reading Light in August, which represents Faulkner’s most direct attempt to plumb deeper into the experience of racism in the south, and in to central non-white characters, I was struck most not by the psychological portrait of Joe Christmas, but by the familiar character whose narrative bookends the novel, one of Faulkner’s most consistent motifs: a young woman, pregnant and unwed.

What are we to make of the persistence of this archetype in Faulkner’s work? And by taking up their narrative mantle, does the author do this trio (Caddie, Dewey Dell, Lena) any more justice, provide a more dimensional study, than his other female characters? It’s worth pondering. On the one hand one could argue it’s a mark against Faulkner that he lacks the imagination to saddle these young women with any other problem than this pending “unaloneness”, but taken side by side the differences between them provide a way to read Faulkner’s attempts to “inhabit the soul.” In fact, if you probe the difference between the girls, and read through a lens of class dialectic, their parallel plight could be read as a polemic on the limited means available to each. It’s interesting, too, to track across the three novels Faulkner’s growing comfort at spending time in the narrative space of these women. Caddie Compson is in many ways the most self-aware and empowered of the three (the highest borne and educated, as well) and yet we are deprived entirely of her narrative within TSAF. This may well be by design – that profound lack doing more to illuminate the insufficiencies of the narratives of her brothers – but it could also be that Faulkner was not yet ready to attempt such understanding or to inhabit so complex a character, one he himself professed to hold strong emotions toward. By that rubric, Dewey Dell represents baby-steps (a horrible pun!) in the right direction. She has a less sure grasp than Caddie on what little agency she possesses — indeed, she is heartbreakingly resigned, even as she knows she’s being abused, in the last third of the novel – but she is nearly as self-aware. The time we spend inside of her narrative is marked by a distinct mixture of her mother’s anger as the pronounced failures of the men around her, and her brother Darl’s near-spiritual dreaminess. Her narrative holds secrets and any attendant shallowness reads as a specific character trait and not just a lazy signifier of her sex. It’s worth noting here that the adjectives Faulkner uses to these young women (I mean her name is DEWEY Dell) are often “bright” and “warm”, in laughable contrast to his other female sketches of matronly utility. Which brings us to Lena Grove – described no less than 1,500 times as “serene”, as well as “calm”, “warm” and “detached without being bemused” – who in class and disposition falls somewhere between Dewey Dell and Caddie.

Lena’s narrative is defined largely by her naivete and childlike sense of wonder – another knock on Faulkner’s limited imagination here could be his insistent fetishization of a Madonna-like innocence, even in those in possession of carnal knowledge – but is also charmingly idiosyncratic. From the opening pages as she muses on her distance from Doane’s Mill to her yen for the sardines, there is a alluring peculiarity to Lena, even as she appears foolish in her naked class aspirations, or hopeless in her search for Burch, that feel lived in, wholly hers. I was astonished by the many moments in her narrative that held echoes of the future: she asks her father to stop the wagon outside of town and let her walk unaccompanied in the belief that “the people who saw her and who she passed on foot would believe that she lived in the town too,” just as Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird asks her father to let her walk the final blocks to the private school she attends on scholarship; the window in her lean-to that she sneaks in and out of recalls Juliet as much as it presages Lux Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides (…both written by men, it may be worth noting; Shakespeare gets a pass from most critics as some of his most enduring characters are singular females–Team Rosalind forever!!!–though Eugenidies falls under fire from Willens for The Marriage Plot). All of which is to say, there’s a growing boldness in Faulkner’s work as he grows more comfortable inhabiting these female characters – even if it’s only the young objects of desire to whom he affords this designation. It’s worth noting that though it may not have the immediate formal daring of TSAF and AILD, Light in August is the most structurally assured of the three and is crucially bookended with Lena’s narrative.

Carolyn Porter, in her biography of Faulkner, points to Light in August as marking Faulkner’s “move from a single, nuclear family as the focalizing subject of the story to an array of families, both present and past, set within a densely textured culture,” and both she and Avak Hasratian use the phrase “Human Community” to define the larger preoccupation that overtakes his career in its later stages. It says something, then, that our entrée into this new phase in his novels – engaging with broader mechanisms to interrogate the tarnished Soul of the American South, the twinned violence of Masculinity and Misogyny, and our central racial trauma – is not a male proxy for Faulkner but is the solitary young woman at a literal crossroads. I’m not sure how much weight to afford it – like Willens I shall punt! – but there’s something admirable in Faulkner’s naked attempts to, as Michael Gorra puts it in The Saddest Words “[become] better than he was…when writing fiction,” by “[thinking] his way into other people”. It’s fascinating to mark the progress and watch the wheels turn.

Machinelike Existences in Light in August

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Descriptions in which humans and machines are equated abound in the beginning pages of Light in August. The purpose of these comparisons appears manifold, including both the more obvious commentary on work and automation and an engagement with the maintenance of social roles. Among the entities we are introduced to in the beginning portion of the novel are the various machines that may be left behind once the mill has exhausted the forests in the town of Doane’s Mill, along with its nameless and faceless men:

… some of the machinery would be left, since new pieces could always be bought on the installment plan–gaunt, staring, motionless wheels rising from mounds of brick rubble and ragged weeds with a quality profoundly astonishing, and gutted boilers lifting their rusting and unsmoking stacks with an air stubborn, baffled, and bemused. (4-5)

In Doane’s Mill, in which mill work is the only work available to able-bodied men such as Lena’s brother McKinley, the fates of these men and the machines they work with once they have outlived their usefulness are intertwined. Even Lena’s sister-in-law is reduced to a machine-like existence, stuck in an endless process of childbirth. The mill workers of Jefferson are characterized similarly. Despite the planing mill men’s interest in the arrival of a “foreigner” in the shape of Joe Christmas, they must soon return “to their work among the whirring and grating belts and shafts” (32). Soon enough Christmas himself, with his his “steady back and arms,” becomes one of these endlessly working men, albeit with a “baleful and restrained steadiness” (34). These characterizations recall Caroline Compson in The Sound and the Fury, who, comfortable in her role within the white patriarchy and accustomed to being waited on, calls out to Dilsey “with machinelike regularity” upon waking (Fury 270). Of course, Caroline’s machinelike existence is of a different quality; although associated with the fulfillment of a role typical of the time, it is the role of a wealthy white woman, and the life to which she has developed a mechanical adherence is one of leisure and pampering, unlike the laboring characters peopling Light in August thus far.

Lena, however, shows hope of breaking free from such an existence. She is in some ways a puzzling character, host to contradictory sentiments: she breaks boundaries by traveling alone as a visibly pregnant, visibly unmarried woman but seems to exist in a trancelike state while doing so. It is as if she has pushed her body, at least in the sense of movement from place to place, to break free from her expected role but her mind has not yet followed suit, therefore trapping her in a liminal zone. Her thoughts reveal this state as she reflects on her journey thus far and the people who have helped her: “She waits, not even watching the wagon now, while thinking goes idle and swift and smooth, filled with nameless kind faces and voices:…” (8). In their movement, the mules and wagons that carry Lena on her journey seem to progress in accord with her machinelike progress. While traveling on Armstid’s wagon, for example, his mules “plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis” (8).

Lena Grove as a “Moving Present”

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[#4]

Upon reading chapter 2 from Carolyn Porter’s, William Faulkner, she describes the first opening pages of Light in August as a “world in motion […] a moving present capable of leading us virtually anywhere” (87). In the first chapter of LIA we learn about Lena Grove and her quest to find the father of her unborn father.

Lena is a character that represents this motion of “moving present” and she goes about doing so in such a dream-like manner. All of her actions seem slow paced, as if she’s in no particular rush. We know very little about her past and what Faulkner does expose is very bleak and dull. In fact, Lena’s past is quite simple so it would make sense that her story would be centered around the present.

Behind her the four weeks, the evocation of far is a peaceful corridor paved with unflagging and tranquil faith and peopled with kind and nameless faces and voices: […] bankrolling now behind her a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes from day to dark and dark to day again, through which she advanced in identical and anonymous and deliberate wagons… (LIA, 7)

Lena however is a small piece of an even larger story. LIA allows us to shift between the past and the present simultaneously through the narratives of Joe Christmas, Hightower, Byron Bunch, etc. and then have them all culminate at the end. Each of these characters are alien to the town and the narrative also shifts to the view of the town itself. It functions as a community rejecting outsiders such as Lena, Joe Christmas, and Hightower. Carolyn Porter expands on this idea in more eloquent way, “As time moves on and plots multiply and crosshatch with each other, the novel sets itself an enormous task of assimilation; as the structure expands to encompass a lengthening history within an ordered whole, that order is continually revealing itself as inadequate to larger demands for meaning posed by the continuously moving present.” (91).  That’s a lot to unpack, but essentially what Porter is trying to say is that memory/ histories are centered around time, and the novel seems to offer a story in which past and present move parallel to one another and then converge at the middle only to be explained side by side again. Faulkner manipulates memory and creates a novel that could possibly be read as a myth or fairy-tale, or maybe even a fable as the novel seeks to explore the need for redemption.

As LIA began with Lena, it ends with her as well. “Lena’s story acts not only as bracket but also as ellipsis; it encloses and relieves the tragedy of Joe Christmas, but it also extends and amplifies its intensity.” (Porter, 92). The structure of the novel very much functions like memory itself. It is in fact a “moving present.” Faulkner takes the concept of time and memory and frames them to make them appear as if they are always moving forward, even if it is a memory itself because the past is always working towards the ever moving present. In simplest terms, its the need to move forward despite where we’ve come from. The idea to move forward is indicative of the human condition. Is this not what Gail Hightower tried to achieve? The need to atone and redeem ourselves; to find a meaning and a purpose. This is what Lena offers us at the end of the novel, the need to redeem or start over. The opportunity to change what we’ve perceived to be true. Lena forces us to challenge the norm by venturing out of our comfort zone.

Hear, See, Speak No Evil [1st LIA post]

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Lena Grove does not want to hear no evil. After Lucas Burch, her mysterious lover, implies he must go away but he will send for her once he’s all settled down, she patiently and serenely waits, while her belly continues to swell. She does not hear the awful truth in his honey-covered lie; he will not send for her. He won’t make her a Burch. She will not see him again.

Lena relies on the kindness of her Southern strangers to help her meet her lover all the way in Mississippi. She does not hear the incredulity and  contempt and pity in their voices, when she tells them [often without being asked] of his promise, the time past, and her goal. Even among strangers who quietly listen to her tale, like the squatting, overalled men, she “tells her story again, with that patient and transparent recapitulation of a lying child” [25]. It is a summary she continues to tell, as though with each telling, it becomes more real to Lena. As I read her recapitulation again, I find myself feeling pity for Lena, as some of her audiences also demonstrate. But as I analyze the analogy of a lying child, my sentiments of pity heighten, because Lena is aware, though she would prefer not to be, that she is pursuing not a man waiting at the finish line, but one who will continue to run evermore. Her patient and serene profile is how she survives; it’s what allows her to put one barefoot in front of the other, all the way from Alabama.

While there is a lack of hearing on Lena Grove’s part, there is a lack of seeing Lena among the strangers she encounters. Mr. Armstid, who dropped Lena off at a crossroads that should have brought her closer to her lover thought, “she’s not listening…If she could hear words like that, she would not be getting down from this wagon…hunting for a man she aint going to ever see again and that she has already seen one time too many as it is…” [24]. It takes Armstid a good long while before he fully looks at her. In fact, he intentionally avoids fully looking at her and does not touch her to help her on and off the wagon he offers her a ride in. Even after she has slowly but finally climbed onto his wagon and they’ve spoken, “Armstid has never once looked full at her. Yet he has already seen that she wears no wedding ring” [12]. People look for markers – as well as the absence of particular markers – to tell them what is deemed important about a person. Lena’s swollen belly and empty finger ring of evil. To fully see her is to see sadness and sin.

Yet Byron hears the evil; “he listened quietly [to Jefferson], while thinking to himself how people everywhere are about the same, but at the same time [in a small town]…people can invent more of it in other people’s names” [71].  He tries not to speak the evil of hurtful gossip or to lie, not to Rev. Hightower and not to a very pregnant Lena, whom he has fallen in love with. Though he is able to see her fully, he cannot speak evil, he cannot lie. He unwillingly  and partially unwittingly reveals who Joe Brown is. He speaks a truth, yet he is filled with regret at the possibility of reuniting the woman he’s fallen in love with, with a horrible drunk.

and with signs & wonders: considering art(ifacts) in LIA

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Signs abound in Light in August—whether man-made, imagined, or metaphorical—and frequently present a preferred way of seeing within the specific perspectives of particular characters. These signs may be natural, as the fire, or they may be specifically or metaphorically generated by the characters themselves, but not all sights appear to be created equal. What and how these characters see the world highlights the subsequent acts of obfuscation that also take place, and the limitations of their sight: of which sight to choose to see and how to interpret it.

The novel itself, in its opening line, situates us within a scene of spectatorship with Lena, engaged in the act of “sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her” (3). This act of spectatorship opens for the narrative exploration of her journey through time and distance, which is then further presented through an image of artistic creation. Lena’s progression is remembered through her trips in “identical and anonymous and deliberate wagons” which stand as “creakwheeled and limpeared avatars, like something moving forever and without progress across an urn” (7). Her journey is not imagined as a progression, but rather as a ceaseless circular motion, one driven by similar icons—that of the wagons—that generates an artifact in its very movement. (As an aside, the etymology of avatar literally refers to a movement of descent, which seems in contradiction with the rising motion of the approaching wagon and fits in with the novel’s notion of the presence of competing perspectives/masks.) However, her fixation on this journey comes at the cost of visualizing and interpreting a competing visual sign: that of the burning of the Burden home.

In its first representation, the image of the fire is described in vivid detail amid the landscape of foliage around it: “Following his pointing whip, she sees two columns of smoke: the one the heavy density of burning coal above a tall stack, the other a tall yellow column standing apparently from among a clump of trees some distance beyond the town. ‘That’s a house burning,’ the driver says. ‘See?’” (30) However, despite the verbal cue and the driver’s physical gesturing towards the image, the sign does not stick in her recollection; her response is instead directed on the state of the progression of her journey. While the fire is, at this point, not significant for Lena, it proves to be significant for the residents in the town, for whom it appears “straight as a monument” (49). The choice to label it a “monument” seems to be a sign in itself: a monument is a physical (and often artistically rendered) structure of dedication or remembrance. Lena’s decision to prioritize the sight of her own “artifact,” that of her journey, over the sight of the fire indicates that the interpretation of signs then is not fixed, but one dependent on vantage point.

One striking example of this is the Rev. Hightower, who has his own “monument,” one that is self-constructed and subsequently ignored. It is “three feet long and eighteen inches high—a neat oblong presenting its face to who passes and its back to him” (58). The sign here is described as both visible and hidden, dependent on the particular audience; it is Hightower to whom the sign shows “its back,” while all others are able to see its face. After the description of the sign, the reader is given a description of process; the sign was “made… with hammer and saw, neatly, and he painted the legend which it bears,” as well as its being “by himself lettered, with bits of broken glass contrived cunningly into the paint, so that at night…the letters glittered” (58). Hightower, despite his title as Reverend, is largely defined by artistic tasks: the construction and artistry of the sign, as well as the tasks that he lists on the sign itself—“Art Lessons”, “Handpainted Xmas & Anniversary Cards”, “Photographs Developed”, the creation of physical artistic objects (58). However, despite his seemingly close relationship to the sign, which stands as his “monument” in terms of its construction, he remains closed off as to what it signifies. It “is even less to him than it is to the town; he is no longer conscious of it as a sign, a message” (60). Like Lena, he is also defined by a kind of selective seeing: despite the sign’s presence as an advertisement for his services, it operates instead as a reminder of just how much his status has fallen (since the incident involving his wife) for much of the town, who passes it without much notice. Additionally, there is a dual racial implication present in the inclusion of the act of developing photographs amid his talents given both his locational proximity and supposed intimacy with “that negro woman in the house”, and the significance of photo development to the novel’s handling of race overall; technically speaking, developing a photo involves generating an image from a negative through a somewhat inverse rendering of color where dark areas are produced as white, and white areas are produced as dark on the film (71).

The image of developing film is one of especial importance for Joe Christmas, who experiences a kind of transcendent moment of racial rewriting through a metaphor of film development. As he is exposed to the bright lights of a car, “[h]e watched his body grow white out of the darkness like a Kodak print emerging from the liquid” (108). The scene appears as an amalgam of product and process: Christmas’ body is “developed,” transforming from one color to the other, rendered through the metaphor of a technological process—Kodak, notably, has historically been significant because of its bias towards fair/white skin in balancing the color of its film stock as well—but the language also reinforces the status of his body as an artifact/object for the reader, who is to view it, “read” it, analyze it.

Artistic and critical distance remains between an artistic work and its viewer, and the same holds true for the characters in Light in August. As simultaneous viewers and creators, they necessarily privilege particular views—whether of especial focus or disregard—as they navigate through the potential sights and visions of Jefferson, which seems to bear particular weight against how they intend to view or navigate the world.