Tag Archives: LIA

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.

Jefferson: a town of “gaunt” faces (Light in August Ch. 1 – 7)

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Gaunt – adjective

  1. (of a person) lean and haggard, especially because of suffering, hunger, or age.

In the first third of Light in August, readers are introduced to characters with faces that are insufferable, frozen, tight, grave, and perhaps the most recurring descriptor of them all, gaunt (32, 63, 69, 79, 89). Naturally, this leads me to raise a question with regard to the denizens of the novel’s hub: why the long faces?

As things would appear, there’s a lot more to Jefferson and its inhabitants than meets the untrained eye.

One of the most resonant themes in the novel presents itself in the Jeffersonian’s association of blackness with heathens. Indeed, the townsfolk cause a dramatic scene on minister Hightower’s premises on the notion “that he had that negro woman in the house alone with him all day” (71) blaming her for the suicide of his wife while the matron of the white orphanage expresses shocked disbelief at the knowledge that they’d been housing a black orphan and urgency to send him away. Even that very same orphan, Joseph Christmas, suggests the undoing of his foster father would be the knowledge that “he has nursed a nigger beneath his own roof” (169) and he is hunted after for the death of Mrs. Burden simply on the basis that “he’s got nigger blood in him” (98).

Black characters in the novel are persecuted when they are found out and as a result, bystanders are rendered sullen and droopy-faced as they are inevitably entangled in the society’s racist ideology just as German civilians during a Naziist regime.

Perhaps the most revealing character to examine for this phenomenon of widespread gauntness is Joseph Christmas. We are introduced to the character when he first steps on the scene in Jefferson’s mill community in raggedy clothes and upon closer examination, Byron describes that, “his face was gaunt, the flesh a level dead parchment color” (34).

When thinking about where Joseph’s gauntness comes from, it’s important to remember that the closest he had to any sort of tender loving figure was Alice who was torn away from him at a tender age of three. While Mrs. McEachern tries to take on that substitutive role as a nurturing foster mother, Joseph mentally and physically cannot bring himself to accept her caring even making a display of flipping her tray of food over and eating the scraps after she departs the room (155).

When I think of the type of gaunt face that Joseph bears, I think of a weathered face that has suffered lack of love and excessive physical labor, so much so that it even stands apart from the weathered faces of millworkers. Minister HIghtower is also described as having a long face and oddly enough “gaunt shoulders” (79) but when I think what weighs down his features, I think moreso about how he suffers the mental burden of painful knowledge such as that of his wife’s death or his dead grandfather. This sense of burden carries over when he begins thinking about how Lena, the one person who comes bursting on the scene without a trouble to boot, will fare amidst the troubled faces in the small world of Jefferson.

I do want to close on some questions that stood out to me. When the town (Jefferson) recounts the tale of Hightower refusing to evacuate town and the townsfolk lobbing accusations at him, the passage reads: “that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind” (71). What words came to your mind when you read that section? What sentiment do you think passes from person to person when a tragedy like the suicide of his wife occurs? Can you connect this moment to the one where Christmas is chased down for murdering Burden?

Echo, Echo!

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“History repeats itself,” so the old saying goes. I was thinking of Thomas Hardy, in whose work characters often disappear, are assumed to be dead, and reappear dramatically, in what I refer to as a kind of “living resurrection,” and the technique is effective both in a literary sense and in an example of art reflecting reality. People come in and out of our lives, and the circumstances around the coming and going are often completely out of our control. Faulkner employs a similar device in his works, with characters reappearing in the same or even different novels. The major difference is that for Hardy it was a strategic move to enhance plot, and in Faulkner it is not. Faulkner is interested not in the reappearance of a character for sake of effect, but in the shadow that is cast on the primary object by its secondary appearance; in other words, the echo. In a single line of AA, I had the sudden insight that for Faulkner, it is the echo itself that, more than anything else, he is absorbed by:

Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space… (AA 210)

The whole novel of AA seems to be a reverberating echo of a story that changes in meaning, implication, essence, and style. In the same way that the four gospels are each a variation or echo of the other three, yet all four are needed to gain a complete picture of the life and passion of Christ, so too do the looping stories about Sutpen, Henry, Bon, etc. depend on all of the narrators to give a comprehensive understanding of them.

The echo of an image, a character, or a word, is the thing that can retroactively modify itself, and serves as the proof of time. In fact, the echo may be Faulkner’s fundamental way of understanding time. We spoke in class of the circular motion of LIA, and I see clearly now that the circle is Faulkner’s central geometric, artistic, and designing principle. All action happens in anticipation of its own reverberations in the future, and those future reverberations serve to clarify the past action. This is why you so often see the ABBA technique in Faulkner’s writing. I first became acquainted with this while reading Hugh Kenner’s superbly didactic introduction to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist (Signet), where Kenner explains that this ABBA pattern is called a chiasmus, the literal definition of which is an inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases. I found this pattern all over the novels we read.

Yet Faulkner also uses variations of the pattern. Sometimes, as in the case of the chiasmus, the echo is instantaneous, and sometimes it is delayed. Sometimes the echo is identical and sometimes is has changed. The title of AA itself is an instantaneous echo, with a comma providing the pause in time that allows the second Absalom to reverberate with exclamation what the first Absalom merely pronounced. An example of a delayed echo is in LIA, when a young Christmas says, “It’s terrible to be young. It’s terrible. Terrible” (81) followed 137 pages later by Hightower saying, “To be young. To be young. There is nothing else like it: there is nothing else in the world” (318). The pattern is made more complex (in typical Faulkner fashion) by each part of the delayed echo being an echo itself: the former a cropped echo: ABC-AB-B and the latter a double echo with a variation on the second part: A-A-BC-BD. Faulkner seems to be playing with the idea of time and decay here. In one sense, the primary echo – the older Hightower’s echo of the young Christmas’s remark – has been inverted: what the youth saw as terrible the elder sees as unparalleled and fleeting. Further, Christmas’s echo points to what we traditionally perceive as an echo (the refracted sound getting softer and more distant as it travels) and Hightower’s points to the way that sound changes, not just in volume, but in essence as it travels.

When we started this class, I blogged that reading Faulkner was like being in a dense fog that slowly dissolves as you keep reading. Now, if someone were to ask what reading Faulkner is like, I would paint a different picture: Imagine yourself standing on the edge of a canyon, and you shout a word. You hear it repeating over and over, yet each time it grows softer, farther, until there is silence again. Now think back to when you first shouted the word. Are you still standing in the same spot? Are you still you?

Joe Christmas and the Ladies

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The mysterious character of Joe Christmas was often reacting in ways that seemed sociopathic as he was dealing with and in fact increasing his alienation from society. Light in August is littered with scenes of Christmas lashing out violently especially at those who attempt to help him or nurture him. His inability to function in normal social roles seems to be at its worst when he is dealing with a woman. The corrupted bildungsroman track of his backstory is marked with scenes of him regressing after failing to achieve “normal” relations with mother figures and females. He has a strange love/hate relationship with females that stems from the infamous toothpaste scene at the orphanage. This scene exposes him to female sexuality at a shockingly young age and the confused angry reaction of the dietitian; i.e. calling him a “little nigger bastard” (LIA 122) piles on a complete negative self-relation of being black and therefore being inherently bad. Carolyn Porter highlights this moment as the point where, “for Joe, the ‘woman-smelling’ closet is tied to the word ‘nigger,’ an identification of race and sex that will finally issue in the novel’s most telling verbal invention, ‘womanshenegro’ (LIA 156)” (Porter 94). The binding of this shaming of his racial identity and a fear of women plays a major role in Christmas’s ongoing issues with maturity and his inability to thrive as a part of his contemporary society. In relation to the bildungsroman, Christmas has been denied his first chance to connect with a mother figure. The once delicate and comforting image of the dietitian has been degraded into a source of personal shame and fear of the feminine other.
The first appearance of the Faulknerian term “womanshenegro” occurs in another iconic scene of Christmas’s epic life-story. The pre-arranged tryst in which the young country boys all enter manhood in a mass exploitation of a young black girl in the woods is the site of Christmas’s first attempted sexual experience. When Christmas enters the dark shed he is overcome with the feeling of “terrible haste” and the feeling of “something in him trying to get out, like when he used to think of toothpaste” (LIA 156). He is frozen in fear and overcome “smelling the woman smelling the negro all at once; enclosed by the womanshenegro and the haste” (156). The use of the word “enclosed” in this sentence infers the self- relation Christmas feels with the black female and the sense of being trapped within that social role. Porter theorizes this scene as a racial portrayal of Narcissus(98), as Christmas “seemed to look down into a black well and at the bottom saw two glints like reflections of dead stars”(LIA 156). The invoking of this myth is interpreted by Porter as revealing “Joe’s deep identification with the black as woman, the woman as black” (98). Christmas’s experiences as having “some nigger blood” in him lead him to this state of being associated with the negative feminine and black. In a moment when he “should” be losing his virginity and gaining his white manhood, he violently attacks the negro girl who inspired this fearful relation within him.
The culmination of Christmas’s tragic tale occurs in his murder of Joanna Burden and the lynching he is ended with. His relation to Burden is strange to say the least. He seems attracted to her masculine behavior and their relationship exists successfully in the perverse hypersexual realm that involves Joanna worshipping Christmas’s racial mixture. She “whispers ‘Negro, negro, negro,’ as she makes love to Joe, seduced by the very image that haunts the southern white men who fear the black man’s sexual power(LIA 260)” (Porter 99). Her attraction to his blackness builds a sick addiction between the two because he has found a female he is able to be somewhat himself with and she has found the perfect man who does not shun her for her racial open-mindedness. They mutually “corrupt” (LIA 260) each other as she seems to be attracted to him for the wrong reasons, for the taboo of it instead of the usual virtuous relations sought by southern white women. Christmas is described as feeling as though he was “like a man being sucked down into a bottomless morass” (LIA 260) while with Joanna during this wild phase of their relationship. He is unable to escape his entanglement with her and his new role of the taboo lover and he remains “as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia” (LIA 260). Christmas’s ongoing relationship with Joanna culminates in the “third phase” when reaching menopause, she seems to realize the error of her ways in not bearing children and becomes regretful of her wild years with Christmas. She begins to want more traditional things like children and he fears she wants marriage also. When Joanna attempts to force him to stop “wasting his life” and accept his role as a black man, attend a Negro college and pray is when their fate is decided. In the mysteriously climactic moment where she prays for him and he refuses to join, Joanna accedes, “Then there’s just one other thing to do” (LIA280). This moment hints towards their undoing and an end to their relationship but the grisly murder that results continues the violent trend of Christmas’s bildungsroman. He has been offered redemption and a solid role in society by Joanna who wants to support him and save him now but he is unable to assimilate and must end her to in the truest form of rejection and the strongest assertion of his own independence.
These episodes of Christmas’s relationships with women merely scratch the surface of his character. Joe Christmas is one of the most interesting creations in Faulkner’s universe and his complexity seems bottomless.

Porter, Carolyn. “The Major Phase, Part 1: As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, And Light In August.” William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 55-103. Print.

A Discussion of Form, Isolation and Knowledge

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Many people would label Light In August as Faulkner’s most conventional work. By this I believe that critics mean that he does not delve into stream of consciousness style tangents, uses punctuation frequently, and generally adheres to the style of novel that was established by the literary world prior to the advent of modernism in the early 20th century.  However, to me, this seems to be equally Faulknerian and totally unconventional, just in a completely different way than the previous two books we’ve read (TSAF and AILD). While this book is narrated, and uses sentences that end in periods more frequently than not, it is a series of completely separate (for now) stories that have similar themes, much like the structure of Go Down, Moses. This separation of the various plots from each other contributes heavily to the overarching theme of isolation that is present in this book, as well as the presence (or lack thereof) of the power of knowledge.

                A look at the various plots presented to us in LIAand the way that the characters are placed in their own spheres reveals the huge role that knowledge plays in this book. The first plotline we are introduced to is Lena’s who, not only goes from Alabama to Mississippi alone, but does so on a vague rumor she heard about the man she “knows” as Burch. Her isolation from society in the beginning of the book serves to illuminate the social norms of the South during this time and the way that women are perceived when they have gone against these norms. Her isolation is at the hands of society and not her own doing (although it could be argued that her having sex with Burch/Brown in the first place was of her own accord and therefore her fault), and this is the first type of isolation we encounter, as opposed to isolation by your own hand. Lena is further subjected to isolation, both physically and knowledge-wise by Byron Bunch, who leads her to a room and keeps her there to prevent her from learning about Joe Brown and his potential involvement in the Burden fire/murder.  This, I believe, further  highlights Faulkner’s implication of the South’s subjugation of women to a sphere of ignorance and impotence, much in the same way that blacks are treated.

                Byron Bunch’s story is isolated as well, as is his character, who shows a willful lack of participation in the normative behavior of Southern males in Faulkner’s world. He declines to whore and go to Memphis and is satisfied with working and going to church as the literal only activities he chooses to engage in. His isolation, however, is self-relegated. He chooses to live his life in this fashion, in opposition of (and perhaps because of) the lifestyles of the other men at his job. However, this self-imposed isolation comes at a cost: The narrator mentions that Bunch was in love with Lena but he himself did not know it yet. Bunch has isolated himself so far that the knowledge of romantic love and emotion is foreign to him. He is unable to recognize his own feelings because he is so far isolated from that type of love and emotion.  His placement of Lena in isolation shows a desire to bring to his level of isolation, but I don’t think he possesses the knowledge of that either.

                Hightower is a character who faces the same sort of isolation as Lena: at the behest of society. His past history with the congregation, with his wife, and with the various black people he had living on his property forced him into reclusion. We get an entirely separated story about his history as well; separate from Lena, Byron and the entire plot of the book in general. It’s interesting but I think it mainly serves to reinforce this notion that he is a lone, as is his plotline (for now).  Hightower’s lack of knowledge comes from the story of Lena and eventually the story of Joe Christmas’ negro blood, which is a major revelation to him and he comments on how this newfound knowledge the town has will not impact him (Christmas) positively, and will probably result in further isolation for Christmas.

                Finally- Joe Christmas is the epitome of isolation and lack of knowledge. Not in terms of smarts, but in terms of identity. He very clearly is not comfortable being in this fluid state of blackness and whiteness, depending on the time of day or the audience. He is never sure if he has negro blood in him, only heavy suspicions, but nevertheless it serves to set him at permanent unease. Not only that but it is clear from his backstory that he is only comfortable when alone. There are many examples to reference, but quickly we have the scene where he is only able to eat way after Mrs. McEachern leaves, his need to sneak out at night, alone, his burning of the magazine after reading it. He is a loner, and the form that his plot takes informs this notion. Faulkner inserted a full bildungsroman in the middle of a novel. Totally separate from everything else, we get Joe Christmas’ life story from 5-18 years old. Clearly, Christmas is to be the focus of the novel and his story deals with many of the main themes in this book: race, identity, isolation from society, the difference between knowledge and belief, and the impact of newfound knowledge on a person or persons. On a side note, Burden, who lives alone and has a backstory that is far from the rest of this book, is another example of isolation and form in this book.

                These characters and their respective plot lines are, for now, mostly isolated from one another and, like most of Faulkner’s writing, makes you wonder things like “I thought this book was about the pregnant chick? Why am I getting the backstory of a guy named Joe Christmas for 140 pages?” Anyway, the isolation in the characters informs their own plot, and the isolation of the plotlines within the book inform the overall plot, and the reader’s knowledge (or belief…or whatever).

Dead Folks CreateThe Most Damage

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The town situated in Light in August is controlled/ran on purely through rumors and gossips. Similarly, to both As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, the people and the town, as a whole, are unable to move forward because everyone is fixated on past events, particularly on “the others”, Joe Christmas and Joe Brown, Joanna Burden, and Reverend Gail Hightower. On page 75, as Hightower questions Byron’s addiction to work at the mill, Byron answers, “I don’t know, I reckon that’s just my life… It is because a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he cant escape from.” This passage I believe perfectly deconstructs the town’s manipulation for control through its usage of rumors and its isolation of others they view unfitting. The town metaphorically is considered “dead” since the town is unable to accept new changes and cannot identify with foreign ideas/ behaviors. The town and its people are also unable to forego past events such as the death of Hightower’s wife and overlook/ reaccept Hightower back into its community. Without the construction of rumors the town cannot function, it does not survive through capital received by the mills, but by the town’s desire to apprehend everything about each person’s past. The town’s identity is to be omniscient while obscuring the “other’s” identities. The town’s particular isolation of Joanna Burden and Joe Christmas are due to their affectionate behavior towards black people and their desire to challenge the town’s policy. Mrs. Burden’s isolation occurred from her parent’s desire to aid the blacks, but by Mrs. Burden hiring black works, it led to rumors and then complete isolation (53). The idea of what a black person signifies to the town is captured by the marshal’s inability to depart from the idea of Christmas possibly being black. The marshal immediately concludes Christmas is the murderer once his ethnicity is exposed and relieves Brown of questioning, “A nigger, I always thought there was something funny about that fellow… Well, I believe you are telling the truth at last. You go on Buck, now, get a good sleep. I’ll attend to Christmas”(98-99). This further reveals the church and the dependency of capital by the mill does not dictate the town’s actions, but through the town’s narrow minded views on race, identity, and inability for change. Typically, churches are depicted as the omniscient marker in a town, but by Reverend Gail Hightower’s denouncement as a reverend and his isolation from the town due to gossips formulated about his wife on pages 62-65, this indicates as well, the superiority of gossip and inability to accept new ideas.

Furthermore, the rumors constructed by the town are false, unreliable, and biased which are revealed in the conversations between Byron and Hightower. One rumor that is constructed on page 59 states, “No one has entered Hightower’s house in twenty-five years”, we know is false because Byron visits daily to converse/gossip with him. Hightower’s role in the novel is as a spectator. Isolated from the community, he is unable to be manipulated, to believe the rumors by the town are true, and questions the gossip Byron tells him (59). As Byron gossips to Hightower, the reader is able to catch a glimpse of Byron’s ordeal with identity. He’s stuck between being part of the town, its love for rumors and gossip, and as an “outsider”, excluding himself from the rumors and gossip. Though Byron is able to comprehend the rumors and gossips constructed by the town are false, he is so keen in not being excluded by the town that he works six days a week at the mill (75), but occasionally visits Hightower. On pages 73and 74 are two moments when Byron reveals the falsity of the rumors and gives his own perspective. Byron’s perspective of the town as stated, “…the entire affair had been a lot of people performing a play and that now at last they played out the parts which been allotted them and now they could live quietly with one another” (73). Also, he mentions, “He believed that the town had had the habit of saying things about the disgraced minister which they did not believe themselves, for too long a time to break themselves of it. “Because always’, he think, ‘when anything get to be a habit, it also manages to get a right good distance from truth and fact’ (74). From those two passages, I believe Faulkner may incorporate the South’s inability for change and its refusal to accept the loss of the Civil War into the novel. The character’s labeled as “outsiders” may symbolize the change forced onto the town while the town is indicative of the South’s internment of denial and refusal for change thus the reason the town chooses to live in the past by gossiping. Which leads me to believe the two passages foreshadows either the downfall of the town or the “outsiders” who perceive the town as their home. Overall, I believe the subplots within the book will come together with Byron as the main character who pieces together the significance of each character, Lena Grove, Hightower, Christmas, Brown, and Joanna Burden to one another.

Fascinating visualizations of social networks in LIA

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Haven’t quite digested this yet, but it’s a fascinating example of one branch of work in the emerging field of “digital humanities”: here, a graduate student has generated different graphs of the social relationships within the novel.  It won’t mean much until we’ve read much more of the novel, but even a quick look at the graph, once you’ve gotten the plot under your belt, reveals subterranean connections between and among characters.

[MA students] secondary reading for Tuesday

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I’ve just added a useful and accessible secondary reading for Tuesday’s class on LIGHT IN AUGUST.  It’s a chapter from Carolyn Porter’s critical survey of Faulkner’s work, and it nicely places the book in biographical context as it examines the tricky issue of the novel’s plot/s.  I recommend that you skip ahead and read the section on LIA, and as an added bonus, you’ll see that the first 2/3 of the chapter deals with AILD and the interesting potboiler from the 30s that didn’t fit on the syllabus, SANCTUARY.