English 242
Professor Leslie
4.19.03
Faulkner’s Light in August: Tragedy and Treasure
From February 1957 to June 1958, William Faulkner was writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. Through the course of his insightful tenure, he lectured frequently and held thirty-seven conferences with students, faculty and staff, and legions of his admirers. He was, at the time, a writer of great knowledge and understanding of the human spirit – and with the leisurely openness he brought to these conferences, he was able to answer meaningful questions of his attempts to capture the “endurance of man” in his novels. When asked on May 6, 1957, which of his characters were “nearly perfectly tragic”, Faulkner replied: “It would be between Sutpen and Christmas, Dilsey.” (Gwynn 119) “It would be between those three.” The writer admitted he didn’t have a choice, but he chose with ample reason. Thomas Sutpen was the tragic hero of his major work, Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Dilsey was the Negro servant of The Sound and the Fury (1929). Perhaps no other character deeply rooted in Faulkner’s subconscious, has the terrible condition of uncertainty in his blood and the rapidly negative evolution surrounding him than Joe Christmas, the wandering murderer of perhaps Faulkner’s most balanced and subtly innovative novel, Light in August (1932). In Joe Christmas, Faulkner wrote a character that lived, spoke and represented the terrible uncertainty of the times, the tragedy of racial separation, the regional association of racism, the wrath of radical followers of Calvinism. All of the forces of his mythical south come together in an intricately and innovatively constructed novel that he himself called “a novel: not an anecdote” (Millgate 31).
Light in August indeed held a special place in the heart of the writer. Although Faulkner was a masterful creator of worlds with centrifugal forces, his labeling the novel a novel suggests an intricate symbiotic relationship. It is not easy however, to discuss the relationship without a careful look at comparisons between the work and the man. We can suggest that there was something overtly different about the artistic undertaking that was to become Light in August, and that in the construction Faulkner was at the height of what has been known as his “great period,” an artist fully aware of his capabilities as a writer and the power in which to translate those capabilities into a biblical representation of the horrors of the human spirit, a horror so great that it in fact it had the power to influence him, albeit not directly, into a full realization of these horrors. Light in August as a human entity separate from the mastery of the man, was different in the sense that it began as an image, developed into a story, and soon became one of his most masterful works. Therefore, the reader can see that the uncertainty in Joe Christmas was in a sense a distorted reflection of the combination of uncertainty in the artist, Faulkner, and the forces in the world in which he created himself as a way to understand these horrors.
The Book
The origin of Light in August is somewhat faded with the legend. Sometime in the summer of 1931, Faulkner created the Reverend Gail Hightower out of his unique association with obsession the character had with his grandfather’s fatal raid during the Civil War. It had become apparent, although later he would say that the central image spurring Light in August was the pregnant Lena Grove walking barren country roads in search of her lover, that Rev. Gail Hightower would become a cog in the wheel of a “drama far more powerful” (Blotner 281) suggesting the novel’s origins with Hightower’s obsession. On August 17, 1931, Faulkner penned the title of his new novel: “Dark House.” This however, like so many of the novel’s potential openings, was temporary.
Later, Faulkner and his wife Estelle were sharing an afternoon drink on their porch in Rowan Oak, the Faulkner family’s Oxford, Mississippi estate. Estelle remarked, “Bill, does it ever seem to you that the light in August is different from any other time of the year?” in which Faulkner rose to his feet, somewhat instinctively, and said, “That’s it.” (Blotner 281). The novel title was then changed to “Light in August.” The genesis of the novel seems to indicate a somewhat mystical quality that would perpetuate its creation: the idea of twilight, freezing a moment in time that in itself would be far more indicative of mysticism and troublesome air.
Failing to regain the artistic rapture and spontaneous, creative euphoria he felt while writing The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner initiated a nearly five-month chaotic trek towards the novel’s completion with the remark to a friend, “I am written out.” (Blotner 281). Soon however, new characters developed from the recesses of his troubled and suffering mind. Lena Grove, the pregnant country girl searching for her cowardly and scheming lover, was one of the images that spurred the successful completion of the novel. Byron Bunch, the moral, compassionate sawmill worker, would be the connection that brought Lena Grove together with Gail Hightower, an ostracized reverend haunted by mistakes and crimes of the past. Soon however, the story of Joe Christmas would take “an increasingly powerful hold upon his imagination” (Blotner 300), thus encouraging the rapid rate in which he wrote the novel. During the novel’s birth, Joe Christmas was a “relatively minor character who for the most part remained offstage” (Singal 184).
Faulkner’s publishers, meanwhile, were in a bit of a financial crisis, so Harrison Smith, Faulkner’s publisher and close friend, paid for a trip to New York to tend to the writer’s needs. There he would spend eight weeks writing Light in August and apparently from later observations on the original manuscript that it appeared Faulkner was “moving rapidly” (Blotner 301).
Faulkner was a schizophrenically private man, and rarely accepted offers for interviews, but when he did, he was as mysterious and psychological as the weighty characters in his novels. During the duration of his writing Light in August, Faulkner granted several interviews that shed dim light on the seemingly symbiotic relationship he shared with his newest and most profound work. In an interview that took place in his Oxford home with Memphis-Press Scimitar reporter Marshall J. Smith, Faulkner confessed that he hadn’t “written a real novel yet. I’m too young in experience” (Meriwether 11), showing the special relationship between the construction of Light in August and his growing pains as a writer. In yet another interview with the University of Virginia undergraduate newspaper College Topics on November 2, 1931, Faulkner again revealed he hadn’t begun to write a novel. He also foreshadowed the complexity of the structure of Light in August: A “novel is anything that moves you enough to keep working on it … a story usually makes its own plot” (Meriwether 17). Faulkner apparently had had little to base his new novel on other than the stark images of his unique characters that played out potential stories in his mind. The novel must have moved him enough to keep working on it, despite the lack of euphoria he felt while writing The Sound and the Fury. On November 28, 1931, while secluded in a New York hotel, he granted yet another interview with The New Yorker. In it he stated that he wrote “when the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me everyday” (Meriwether 24). He often would wake early in the morning, work till ten-thirty or eleven, and conduct other affairs to keep him away from the new manuscript. In light of his ill cooperation with interviewers and his sometimes hard to decipher statements given to them, it is difficult to discern the relationship he held with the fledgling novel unless such statements of furious writing and possessed creation are taken into consideration.
When embarking on the novel, Faulkner had little idea or literary premonition on where it was going or how it would end. It is somewhat sophomoric to assume that his earlier works like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying weren’t novels, but according to the nature of the creation of Light in August, the writing itself was an experiment in novel-writing and apparently a totally different experience for Faulkner than what he had with his earlier work.
While in New York, Faulkner was prone to bouts of drinking and mysterious disappearances from his known whereabouts by his publisher, Harrison Smith. Faulkner had disappeared for some days in late November and found at the Hotel Algonquin. To those that were there when he was discovered he appeared “agitated, emotionally upset … and didn’t want to be alone. It was midnight when he decided he had to replenish his whiskey supply” (Blotner 295). He spent eight weeks of writing Light in August under stressful circumstances, and he declined invitations to literary parties, explaining later that he didn’t like talking literature. His friends would often
miss him for two or three days at a time. Jim Devine knew that sometimes the city would close in on him. When it did, he might get on a commuters’ train and get off at some station in Connecticut that had woods nearby, to walk there in the autumn
weather. (Blotner 294-295).
Faulkner’s wife, Estelle, would soon join him in New York for the remainder of his stay. The visit was complete with terrible drinking bouts, but he kept work on the manuscript until his departure. When he returned to Oxford, he wrote to a friend, “Home again now, where it is quiet” (Blotner 297). In that same letter, he stated that he would “stay on the wagon until the novel is written. It is going great guns” (Blotner 298). His vow to stay sober while writing the novel helped the novel’s completion in such a way that it was the work itself keeping him sober, the interaction of novelist and novel a special relationship that cannot be deterred by outside forces. It is undoubtedly true that the majority of Light in August was written in the privacy and silence of his drawing room at Rowan Oak, where the intense sessions of early-morning writing could carry him away into the darkest realms of his most intricate characters.
On February 19, 1932, Faulkner finished the longhand manuscript of Light in August. He had at once completed one of his longer manuscripts and also the most heavily reworked and organized. The characters, according to Stephen B. Oates, were “the most complex and contradictory Faulkner ever conceived.” His dual experience of writing the novel, from its genesis in the twilight of August in 1931, from his extensively troublesome stay in New York and finally to his retreat back into the solitude of his drawing room in Oxford, provided the creation of characters conceived and developed during a time of severe emotional chaos in the writer’s life. It is often difficult to provide biographical readings of Faulkner’s work, but given the circumstances under which Faulkner worked: the slow genesis and reworking of openings, the developments of surprising and new characters like Joe Christmas, and the heavy reorganization of the often misinterpreted and misunderstood plot – Faulkner had at once achieved his subconscious goal of actually writing a “novel, not an anecdote.”
Analysis
Faulkner’s unequivocal undertaking paved the way for altogether positive reviews of his new work. Light in August at once was considered a tamer realistic expose on the horrors of his mythical but truthful south than his previous novel, Sanctuary. When the galleys of Light in August arrived at his office upon his return from a Hollywood script-writing stint in California, Faulkner was hesitant to change a word, as if he wanted nothing more to do with the novel. When editors questioned his style, he penned in statements like “okay as set, goddamn it,” and “Jesus Christ, okay as set.” The novel for him had been a groundbreaking experience, and he wanted nothing more than to have it finished and off.
And altogether warranted as well. The novel takes place in and around his mythical town of Jefferson in the all-to-familiar Yoknapatawpha County. The story begins with the image of the twenty-year old Lena Grove wandering country roads in search of her lover, Lucas Burch, who had impregnated her and left her Alabama town in “search of work.” Her naiveté begets a terrible but optimistic realization: “I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old” (3). Upon her arrival and endurance of the cynical eyes of local farmer’s wives, she hitches rides on wagons to get to Jefferson, where she’d heard there was a “Bunch” there working at the sawmill. She was looking for Burch, not Bunch, and when she meets the compassionate and tragically meddlesome Byron Bunch at the sawmill, she fails to see that he has fallen fast in love with her.
Before the extensive flashback, the image of yellow smoke from Joanna Burden’s burnt house provides the backdrop for the entrance of the migrant Joe Christmas, the novel’s central focus. Byron Bunch knows that her lover, Lucas Burch, alias Joe Brown, was a bootlegger and local scoundrel and that he was deeply involved in the search for the suspect accused of murdering Joanna Burden, Joe Christmas. Perhaps even we see a little of Faulkner’s suffering in the scoundrel Joe Brown – Faulkner himself had become a Hollywood stooge in order to secure his financial situation. Joe Brown, nevertheless, is stark contrast with Faulkner himself. Although Joe Brown plays a minor role in the novel, his insistence upon searching for Christmas to gain the thousand dollar reward all to himself proves that Faulkner may have detested his own financial situation, but knew that had he forgotten his artistic integrity, his novels, especially Light in August, would have had far less impact on his readership.
As Byron Bunch hides the truth from the worry of Lena Grove, Faulkner embarks on one of literature’s most embellished and often misinterpreted flashbacks. He takes us back to the origins of the fugitive Christmas to a time of religious fury and consequential irony. In an orphanage, controversy erupts around the mysterious Christmas, whom the other children call “nigger.” The radically puritan Doc Hines isn’t identified as Joe’s “watcher” until the middle section of the novel, but nevertheless plays an important part in carrying out “the Lord’s will,” with almost horrifying catchphrases, like when he describes the actions of women: “Bitchery and abomination,” he says in response to the wanton acts of Christmas’ female caretakers and that of his own daughter. Here we see the reflections of Calvinism, as Faulkner later pointed out, on the development of Joe Christmas. He is adopted by a puritan man named Simon McEachern, whose views of work and religious study provoke the development of an often confused and later defiant Christmas. During his thirteen-year stay with the McEacherns, Joe develops a confused hatred for organized religious oppression. Parallels can even be made to the “night-doings” of Jewel Bundren to the symbolism of Joe’s nightly escapes to lie with a local prostitute in the center of town. The idea of love and sex confuses the eighteen-year-old Christmas to the point of boiled frustration. The tensions between his adoptive father come to a halt when he is discovered at a local dance with the prostitute and a fight ensues; Christmas strikes down his oppressive father with a chair and runs to the prostitute’s care. There he learns the true nature of his relationship with the prostitute – that of pity and business, a cruel interpretation of nightly visits (Christmas was to propose to the prostitute, until her cronies viciously attack him). From that point his fate is established in one of the most memorable lines of the novel: “Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.”
Following this rationale, one can immediately draw parallels from Faulkner himself to Christmas. Before the genesis of Christmas, Faulkner had lost his daughter Alabama only ten days after she was born. The simple fact that Faulkner must had been aware of his daughter’s death and even the uncertainty of his own outcome when embarking on Light in August may have contributed to the creation of Christmas – the character within the mind of Faulkner that was unaware of his fate, or his own origin. Faulkner later added that that was Christmas’ tragedy, that he didn’t know whether he was black or white, or both, or even anything, and that he would never know “what he is and to know that he will never know” (Gwynn 72). Faulkner stated that it was the worst condition for a man to be in, to not know who he was. The “savage and lonely streets” in a sense could represent two fold: the self-eviction of Christmas from the human race and finally the acceptance of uncertainty in Faulkner’s literary, personal and spiritual existence.
The horror of Christmas’ eviction is evident. He wanders from city to city in search of nothing but the ample sustenance to retain his life. In fact, he doesn’t know why he lives. When he comes to Jefferson and encounters the reclusive Joanna Burden, a psychological battle between the two erupts both under sexually repressed and origin-based circumstances. Joanna Burden too had been the subject of radical Calvinism – her grandfather and brother were murdered for their open support of Negroes in the South. When she meets Christmas, it is her own repression that forces her to engage in almost “nymphomaniac” acts of sex, according to the text. When Joanna Burden tries to encounter Christmas about changing his life, Christmas doesn’t bend. In a sense he has already affirmed his nature of life, just as Faulkner had finally become the novelist and not the writer with Light in August as a whole.
Christmas murders Joanna Burden and sets her house on fire, finally completing the “savage and lonely streets” segment of his troubled life. He runs from the law and ends up in Mottstown, a neighboring village in Yoknapatawpha. When he is captured, it is with the help of the radical Doc Hines, his not-yet-revealed grandfather. It seems that for everyone in the novel, with the exception of the laboring Lena Grove, Joe Christmas’ existence was marked and judged with fierce cruelty. No objection in the novel is made that although Joe Christmas appears white, he is nonetheless called a “nigger.” Although his origin is explained (his mother was Doc Hines’ daughter and was carrying Christmas, the seed of a debated “black” Mexican from the carnival) it appears that Christmas never in fact learns his origin, and his death seems all the more suicidal. Percy Grimm, a radical supremacist storm trooper, cornered Christmas in Hightower’s house, shooting him three times. Faulkner depicts Christmas’ castration in a grizzly scene:
When the others reached the kitchen they saw the table flung aside now and Grimm stooping over the body. When they approached to see what he was about, they saw that the man was not dead yet, and when they saw what Grimm was doing one of the men gave a choked cry and stumbled back into the wall and began to vomit. Then Grimm too sprang back, flinging behind him the bloody butcher knife. “Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell,” he said. (464).
Faulkner’s own sexual enthusiasm could be a crux of the interpretation of this novel. When asked which is easier to write, men or women, Faulkner replied:
It’s much more fun to try to write about women because I think women are marvelous, they’re
wonderful, and I know very little about them, and … more difficult, yes (Gwynn 45).
Faulkner’s depiction of women in the novel is at once a balancing act and a counterpoint to the Joe Christmas story. Lena Grove, the ignorant Alabama girl, who at the end of the novel seems stuck in a vacuum of exploration and travel, is the novel’s beginning and end focus. She is both beautiful and peaceful, hopeful and naïve. The story’s horrible circumstances, including her search for the father of her child (Lucas Burch/Joe Brown) and the murder of Joanna Burden and subsequent “lynching” of Joe Christmas, seem to occur outside her own small world of childcare and obliviousness. Joanna Burden, however, surrenders herself to the vagrant Christmas in an act of defiance against her secluded life. She becomes sexually uninhibited in the presence of the dreary and often subtly melancholy Christmas, and succumbs to his silent will during nighttime visits. She prepares a gun with two bullets, “one for her and one for me,” when she has realized the futility of trying to change Christmas for the better. Faulkner’s women in Light in August become fulcrums on which the men bend, or in Christmas’ case, don’t bend.
One can easily see the model simply as a mirror of change – Faulkner’s depiction of radical puritanical actions, in the case of Doc Hines’ murdering of his wayward daughter’s mixed lover, is nonetheless strengthened when Joe Christmas breaks away from his captors and runs aimlessly around Jefferson, as if to commit suicide in an act of defiance against the radicals who raised and shaped him. In Hightower’s case, he is reminded of the suffering he both caused and received by the church bells he hears from his study window, where he sits in solitude – the only human interaction he gains in the novel is with the advice-needing Byron Bunch and his impromptu deliver of Lena Grove’s son in the cabin behind Joanna Burden’s house. Instantly we see the balance of life and death, both strong themes in the novel – which subsequently give way to the nature in which the book was written: both during a time of creative genius, peace, and personal strife. The balance in Light in August reflects the chaotic nature of events surrounding its creation.
Black, White, or Both?
In his modernist biography of Faulkner, author Daniel J. Singal brings to mind the transformation of what began as an extremely prejudiced manuscript but metamorphosed into one of the most “powerful indictments ever written of the white South’s racial sins” (Singal 185). Undoubtedly enough, it has since become a great testament to the religiosity and race prejudices of the changing South, a change that Faulkner himself was aware of.
It could also be said that while Faulkner detested literary parties and associations, the genesis of Joe Christmas could have stemmed from his awkwardness and out-of-place feelings while in the company of literary types. Just like Joe Christmas, Faulkner was in an uncertain world, forced into situations he couldn’t quite handle with the mastery of a writer. Joe Christmas’ main motivation for the horrible acts he commits in the text may be directly related to Faulkner’s visit to New York, thus encapsulating nature of Christmas’ search for identity. At times Faulkner felt so vulnerable to the “falseness” of his literary peers that “he drank so hard at times he moved in a deep alcoholic haze” (Minter 135). Amid all the embarrassment he caused (at one point he passed out, unable to move, at a party at Alfred Knopf’s), Faulkner had brought Light in August with him, and was “apparently still trying to write” (Minter 135).
One man he identified with in New York was a writer named Dashiel Hammett. Both Faulkner and Hammett shared a love of telling stories, and above all, hard drinking, “sometimes for days at a time” (Minter 134). Faulkner specifically told a reporter, “I don’t like literary people” (Minter 134). Perhaps the development of Christmas came about on one of his drinking bouts, for this, we can only speculate. But somewhere in the subconscious, somewhere in the milieu of ideas swarming in his head came the thought of a man who was unable to know or even fit into a society that had labeled him an outcast, both religiously and socially. Just as Faulkner had many admirers and courtiers, Joe Christmas had enemies, and just as with Faulkner, these men and women attached themselves to his life either in good circumstances or in the horrible. The literary attraction for Faulkner was unheard of, considering that both Alfred Knopf and Viking publishers were interested in signing him, as well as Harrison Smith, his close friend, who was struggling to debut a new publishing partnership with Robert Haas. In Faulkner’s words, he described himself as some “strange and valuable beast” (Minter 135), a term that can also be used for the divided Christmas.
Just as Faulkner felt a divided and inner turmoil during the writing of Light in August and attracted the attention of writers, editors and publishers with his often violent drinking episodes, so did the “white nigger” Christmas attract the attention of the racially divided Jefferson. Christmas, when on the brink of murdering Joanna Burden, thought “something will happen to me. This time I will do something.” Faulkner himself did in fact do something with his uneasiness. The first time his pen touched the paper and the characters and ideas came flowing out like a violent stream, he did something, and the subconscious result was the horribly divided Joe Christmas and what many critics view as “Faulkner’s grandest achievement” (Bloom 4), Light in August. Why it was so successful? It introduced the post-Civil War South to a new brand of thinking, a new introduction of ideas: futility of old thinking, the banishing of old ideas into a rocky abyss. Miscegenation may have been the word on all the critic’s minds, but for Faulkner, the word appeared to have been “unity.”