Caught Between Two Worlds

(The Faulkner Project) Light in August from Faulkner Novels 1930-1935.  Library of America.  pp. 399-774.  *****

Of Faulkner’s great novels, this is the one I like the least.[1]  I don’t believe I’d previously read it more than once, though I was shocked at how much of it I remembered, including whole paragraphs and sentences that stuck in my mind from that first reading, some fifty years ago.  I still have that Modern Library edition, with my name in the corner of the first page.

I dislike the novel because Joe Christmas is so unlikable, even as we try to have sympathy for him, and the scenes of his abused early life, where he was largely made into the unlikable man he became, are so difficult to read.  I remember hating them before and hated them just as much this time around.  As my mentor Reynolds Price used to say, when the central character is someone you’d rather not spend time with, it’s hard to keep reading.

It’s also the book where the rhetorical Faulkner cuts loose for the first time.  There were moments in Flags in the Dust and Sanctuary, to be sure, even in Soldiers’ Pay (to the point where I was surprised an editor didn’t take this first novelist to task more; I’m honestly surprised the young man got away with some of that}.  But paragraphs like this one from Light in August puzzled me when I was young and puzzle me still.

“Memory believes before knowing remembers.  Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.  Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinder-strewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten food steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.”

Pardon me?

In general I would say that when Faulkner is describing just about anything, or when he has a dramatic scene going, especially one with dialogue, he is invariably brilliant, but when his omniscient narrator starts to philosophize, I sometimes find myself cringing, or at least scratching my head.  And of course sometimes the characters themselves start to talk this way, as in the penultimate chapter of this novel.  But usually I think of Faulkner’s dialogue as brilliant; I’m more impressed with it in every novel.

I think of this as Faulkner’s first novel on the subject of race, though I’m not sure I can state what he makes of this subject.  It’s the first novel where someone uses the n-word (which is used quite liberally throughout his early novels; I was shocked at the extent of it) and someone else counters with the word negro.  There are several characters in this novel who adamantly oppose the racism of the South.  We assume the author is in sympathy with them.  But in Joe Christmas we meet the character who is the most ambiguous in all of Faulkner.  He looks for all the world like a white man, and could easily pass as one.  But he believes himself to be racially mixed (though how he came to know that is somewhat mysterious).  And he carries that fact around like a wound.

The weird thing is that, apart from the figure of Joe Christmas, Faulkner is telling a much milder story, which seems to give the novel its title.[2]  He has said, in fact, that this novel began—as did The Sound and the Fury—with a single image, of a pregnant woman walking along a country road.  Lena Grove has traveled from Alabama to Mississippi, looking for the man who impregnated her.  He said he was leaving to look for work and would get in touch with her as soon as he found a job.  We wonder at the woman’s naivete, but here she is, wandering along this road, believing her man, one Lucas Burch, has gotten a job in Jefferson and is waiting for her arrival.  The situation verges on being comic.

Even the overall plot has a comic cast: in looking for a man named Lucas Burch, she finds a man named Byron Bunch (who worked at the same factory where Lucas worked) who falls in love with her instantly and will be a much better husband and father than Burch.  It’s a kind of pastoral comic novel, with a happy and mildly amusing ending.  It’s comic in the same way the Snopes novels are.

But somewhere along the way Faulkner got diverted.  Burch did indeed have a job in Jefferson, shoveling sawdust, and in that job he met the mysterious Joe Christmas, who showed up one day in a suitjacket and asked for work (apparently they’ll take on anyone to shovel sawdust at this place), working in his good clothes on that first day.  The two of them eventually form a partnership selling bootleg liquor, though I was never sure how they supplied themselves with the stuff.  And we eventually discover that Christmas is having an affair with a white woman who has worked tirelessly all her life on the plight of African Americans.  She is completely shunned in the Mississippi town of Jefferson, though she goes on living there.  And Christmas’ attitude toward her is as ambivalent as his attitude toward his own skin.

Also a part of the novel is a now-elderly minister named Gail Hightower, who is also deeply sympathetic to blacks (and therefore was fired from his church, and cannot find another congregation in Jefferson) and two extraordinarily weird old people who claim to be Joe Christmas’ grandparents, and know the truth about his parentage.  These three characters are what I would call Southern grotesques, and my honest feeling is that I never quite believe in them.  Nor did I quite believe in the white woman Christmas was having the affair with, how she conducted that, how the two treated each other.  Faulkner is obviously dealing with deep psychological issues here, and with the curse of slavery, which was present in this country at its inception and which haunts it to this day, as he sees quite clearly.

“Remember this.  Your grandfather and brother are lying there, murdered not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race before your grandfather or your brother or me or you were even thought of.  A race doomed and cursed to be forever and ever a part of the white race’s doom and curse for its sins.  Remember that.  His doom and his curse.  Forever and ever.”

I wouldn’t argue with someone who tells me I’m just not imaginative enough to envision these characters, or that I haven’t lived in the South long enough (though I’ve lived here for over fifty years.  I do live in North Carolina, not Mississippi).  There are long stretches of this novel that I just don’t buy.  But the most important thing is that I didn’t like the people I was reading about and didn’t want to spend time with them.  I can see the writing is great.  I just didn’t like the book.

[1] The list is in dispute, of course.  The novels I’ve usually heard mentioned as great are The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Hamlet.  Some people would include Go Down, Moses instead of The Hamlet, or just include that novel as well.  But I think the first four titles, as different as they are, are not in dispute.

[2] The explanation I’ve heard is that it refers to a woman who is pregnant and expecting in that month.  She’ll be “light in August.”