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The Unity of Faulkner's Light in August

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

C. Hugh Holman
C. Hugh Holman*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Extract

The nature of the unity in William Faulkner's Light in August, in fact, even the existence of such unity, has been seriously disputed by his critics. The debate has ranged from Malcolm Cowley's insistence that the work combines “two or more themes having little relation to each other” to Richard Chase's elaborate theory of “images of the curve” opposed to “images of linear discreteness.” Those critics who see a unity in the novel find its organizing principle in theme or philosophical statement—“a successful metaphysical conceit,” a concern with Southern religion, the tragedy of human isolation, man's lonely search for community—but they fail to find a common ground for the unity they perceive because they neglect properly to evaluate the objective device which Faulkner employs in the novel as an expression of theme. That device is the pervasive paralleling of character traits, actions, and larger structural shapes to the story of Christ. Viewed in terms of this device the novel becomes the story of the life and death of a man peculiarly like Christ in many particulars, an account of what Ilse D. Lind has called “the path to Gethsemane which is reserved for the Joe Christmases of this world.” However, that account is in itself perverse, “a monstrous and grotesque irony,” unless the other strands of action in the book—the Hightower story and the Lena Grove story—are seen as being contrasting portions of a thematic statement also made suggestively by analogies to the Christ story. This essay is an attempt to demonstrate that such, indeed, is the basic nature of the novel and that it has a unity which is a function of its uses of the Christ story.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , March 1958 , pp. 155 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958

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References

1 Introd., The Portable Faulkner, ed. Cowley (New York, 1946), p. 18; “The Stone and the Crucifixion: Faulkner's Light in August,” William Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. Frederick J. Hofiman and Olga W. Vickery (Michigan State Coll., 1951), pp. 205–217. Between these 2 extremes a great variety of attitudes have been held. Irving Howe, although he praises the novel, feels that it “suffers from a certain structural incoherence” resulting from its use of “a triad of actions” (William Faulkner: A Critical Study, New York, 1952, pp. 153, 149). Conrad Aiken feels that it fails because Faulkner's excessive concern with formal technique is not here “matched with the characters and the theme” (“William Faulkner: The Novel as Form,” Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism, p. 145). George M. O'Donnell also feels that the novel is a failure “because of the disproportionate emphasis upon Christmas—who ought to be the antagonist but who becomes, like Milton's Satan, the real protagonist in the novel” (“Faulkner's Mythology,” ibid., p. 57).

2 Harry M. Campbell and Ruel E. Foster find unity in the book through an interplay of its incidents in terms of their contribution to “a successful metaphysical conceit” (William Faulkner: A Critical Appraisal, Norman, Okla., 1951, pp. 68 ff.). William V. O'Connor believes that it achieves unity through its pervasive concern with Southern Protestant mores (“Protestantism in Yoknapatawpha County,” Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and Robert D. Jacobs, Baltimore, 1953, pp. 153–169. This essay is reprinted in an abridged and modified form as Ch. vi of O'Connor, The Tangled Fire of William Faulkner, Minneapolis, 1954, pp. 72–87). Jacobs sees the book as centered in the tragedy of human isolation (“Faulkner's Tragedy of Isolation,” Southern Renascence, pp. 170–191). Carl Benson finds its theme in man's tragic search for community (“Thematic Design in Light in August,” South Atlantic Quart., liii [1954], 540–555). In an interesting but largely ignored examination of the novel just 3 years after its publication, James W. Linn and H. W. Taylor advanced the provocative idea that Light in August is a “counterpoint of stories,” and said, “Through this ... device ... the novelist can, without any distortion of the individual elements of the material, still express his inner vision, his most personal intuitions, not in so many sentences, but in a design, which, like the structure of music, represents nothing but is a sort of meaning in itself” (A Foreword to Fiction, New York, 1935, p. 157).

3 “The Design and Meaning of Absalom! Absalom!” PMLA, lxx (Dec. 1955), 904.

4 O'Connor, Southern Renascence, p. 169.

5 For example, Richard H. Rovere says, “Although it seems indisputable to me that some sort of connection [between Christ and Joe Christmas] was in Faulkner's mind at one point or another, I cannot believe that there is much profit ... in exploring the matter very deeply or in using it to interpret the novel” (Introd., Light in August, Modern Library ed., New York, 1950, p. xiii). Richard Chase says, “Faulkner seems not to sense exactly how the Christ theme should be handled, sometimes making it too overt and sometimes not overt enough. His attempts to enlarge Joe's character by adducing a willed mythology remind one of Melville's similar attempts in Pierre” (Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism, p. 212). Carl Benson says, “I am not certain as to just how far we may push the Christ-Christmas parallel (which has often been recognized as a troublesome problem in the book)” (South Atlantic Quart., p. 552). Irene C. Edmonds states: “One feels that he had a very definite connection in his mind between Christmas and Christ. The vagueness with which he establishes the connection suggests that the magnitude of his theme was too great for the limits of his imaginative powers to assimilate. ... One feels that Faulkner, a Southerner, when confronted by the enormity of his attempt to liken a man with Negro blood in his veins to Christ, could not find the moral courage to make the analogy inescapably clear. So it remained a suggestion, trailing away into the obfuscation of It-Could-or-Could-Not-Have-Been” (“Faulkner and the Black Shadow,” Southern Renascence, p. 196). Beekman W. Cottrell's article, “Christian Symbolism in ‘Light in August’, ” Modern Fiction Studies, n (Winter 1956-1957), 207–213, which takes seriously Faulkner's use of Christian materials in the novel, appeared after the present study had been accepted for publication. However, Cottrell's approach, although illuminating and provocative, is so different from mine that in only one respect, indicated in n. 24, would it have altered my case appreciably. Three other studies have appeared since this essay was written, but they would not have modified seriously the reading given here: John L. Longley, Jr., “Joe Christmas: The Hero in the Modern World,” Virginia Quart. Rev., xxxiii (1957), 233–249; Ilse D. Lind, “The Calvinistic Burden of Light in August,” New England Quart., xxx (1957), 307–329; and Alfred Kazin, “The Stillness of ‘Light in August’, ” Partisan Rev., xxiv (1957), 519–538.

6 Ward L. Miner, in The World of William Faulkner (Durham, N. C, 1952), pp. 139–141; Robert M. Adams, in “Poetry in the Novel: Or Faulkner Esemplastic,” Virginia Quart. Rev., xxix (1953), 419–434; and Carvel Collins, in a review of A Fable in New York Times Bk. Rev., 1 Aug. 1954, p. 1, have called attention to Faulkner's use of the Holy Week in The Sound and the Fury (1929). George K. Smart has shown that the very early newspaper sketches assembled in Mirrors of Chartres Street used materials from the Christ story (“Faulkner's Use of Religious Terms,” a paper read before the Southeastern Amer. Stud. Assoc., Daytona Beach, Fla., 26 Nov. 1955).

7 “The Art of Fiction XII: William Faulkner,” Paris Rev., iv (Spring 1956), 42.

8 “A Fable: The Novel as Myth,” College English, xvi (1955), 475. Significantly Faulkner has called Joyce and Mann the 2 great European men of his time and has said, “You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith,” Paris Rev., p. 46.

9 Light in August (New York, 1932). All page references are to this edition of the novel. The Modern Readers Series edition, published by New Directions, apparently duplicates the 1932 edition by photoreproduction.

10 Southern Renascence, pp. 175–176.

11 Ibid., p. 176.

12 Irene C. Edmonds' objection that Faulkner is here indulging in the fallacious “tragic mulatto” theme (Southern Renascence, pp. 196–197) seems justified. However, it seems also true that Faulkner's use of “black blood” has here transcended the level of racial qualities, whether true or false, and has been universalized to all mankind.

13 Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (New York, 1956), pp. 121–122. It is this aspect of Faulkner's work that seems to bother Edith Hamilton most in her “Faulkner: Sorcerer or Slave?” Sat. Rev., xxxv (12 July 1952), 8–10, 39–41.

14 See headnote and text, “Barbey Ellen,” in Willard Thorp, A Southern Reader (New York, 1955), pp. 618–620, for this ballad in its Southern version.

15 The 1936 Census of Religious Bodies, Bureau of the Census (Washington, 1941), i, 234–237, shows for Mississippi 150,000 communicants in the Southern Baptist Church, 322,362 in the Negro Baptist Church, 107,245 in the Methodist Church, and only 18,445 in the Presbyterian Church.

16 See ibid., ii, 1382, 1402–1403.

17 Ibid., ii, 1402–1403, and esp. p. 1444.

18 “Ode to the Confederate Dead” ll. 53–55.

19 Portable Faulkner, p. 15.

20 World of William Faulkner, p. 143.

21 Norman H. Pearson, in “Lena Grove,” Shenandoah, iii (Spring 1952), 3–7, has the provocative idea that Lena is the “leaf-fringed legend” and the “foster-child of silence and slow time” of Keats's “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”

22 The passage reads:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self-contain'd,

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. (11. 684–691)

23 See Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, pp. 109–126, 297–302.

24 Portable Faulkner, p. 652. It has been called to my attention by several people that Faulkner is said orally to have questioned Cowley's Mississippi folklore. However, the reading here given is physically appropriate to the action of the, story and to the broad meaning of the theme, whether such a folk saying does or does not in fact exist. Cottrell (Modern Fiction Studies, ii, 213), has an excellent discussion of the complex meanings of the title: “The light is certainly two things in connection with Joanna Burden—the light in her bedroom which brings about her ruin and the subsequent blaze of her home. The same light is seen by Lena as ominous but she does not understand its full implications. ... Lena's baby is born in the light of dawn, and the birth makes her, in the country phrase, ‘light’ again in the month of August. Joe Christmas' skin is light—neither black nor white ...”

25 Faulkner, speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, quoted from Ten Modern Masters, ed. Robert G. Davis (New York, 1953), p. 506.

26 “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim,” ll. 14–15.