fiction files redux discussion
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The Light in August in 2010
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Karen -- great to have you join our little campfire discussion. I will do what I can to avoid spoilers though we might slip a bit this far in... That said, the main skeletal structure of the story is in Part I, but more and more details get built on (as you may have read from earlier posts).
Here in the third section the whole Christmas/Burden dichotomy gets played out. I´m now convinced Faulkner is juxtaposing there stories as male and female versions of the same story -- caught up in this whole notion of destiny (what family has led them to become) and volition (what they do in response to their own sense of themselves (or the other.))
SPOILER
I'm also curious what people thought about the revelation that it was actually Joanna who tried to carry out their mutual "destiny" but fails... leaving it to Christmas to then act! (A-and with the same Civil War weapon that felled her grandfather and half brother!! (Looping further in: Hightower´s grandfather was shot from his horse; her grandfather was shot by a former slave owner.))
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MUST FIND MORE TIME TO READ.
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MUST FIND MORE TIME..."
Kerry (and anybody else who's worried about the pace)... no need for apologies, it's one of the challenges in that everyone has different schedules and ways they work their way through a book -- with Faulkner it makes all the sense in the world to linger over his prose... and anytime you hit a passage or insight you'd like to share, please do. I'm a particular fan of this one for the rhythm of it's sentences:
He feared; he loved in being afraid. Then on day while at the seminary he realised he was no longer afraid. It was as though a door shut somewhere. He was no longer afraid of darkness. He just hated it; he would flee from it, to walls, to artificial light. 'Yes,' he thinks. 'I should never have let myself get out of the habit of prayer.' He turns from the window. One wall of the study is lined with books. He pauses before them, seeking, until he finds the one which he wants. It is Tennyson. It is dogeared. He has had it ever since the seminary. He sits beneath the lamp and opens it. It does not take long. Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. it is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to understand.
Well, I must say that Faulkner must be laughing in his grave at me as I slog through this.At page 132, I was ready to give it up. My friend Pete, who is actually the only person I know who has read several of Faulkner's works talked me down from the ledge. And yesterday being a snow day here in Gotham, I read on and must say I am glad I've stuck with it. Faulkner's Joe is fascinating and I have definitely tuned in to the sound and cadence of the writing - yay!
And-- although it is still challenging, I may even read more Faulkner when I am done with this!
I don't see misogyny as stongly as stated in earlier poststo me the relationships of men and women have changed over time and that the way Faulkner depicts the women in the book are the way women in that era would have been.
If Faulkner were to write about women today in a book, I think He would depict them acting and thinking differently.
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Karen: Glad you're down from the ledge and you're appreciating it. I'm sure Faulkner is smiling (though perhaps with a rather creepy rictus grin boneashsmelling), smiling that folks are still reading and discussing his books. The characters who come on the scene late in the book -- no SPOILERS just encouragement -- help bring the story together in a way that I still find satisfying this fourth or fifth time reading it.
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Thanks!
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. . .okay, the writing is really starting to get on my nerves . . . faulkner has a gift for writing a great sentence now and then, but otherwise, his sentences are full of passive forms, and downright clunky and repetitive much of the time, and i swear to god if i read another sentence that has THREE of his little invented word contractions in it, i'm going to throw the fucking book across the room! . . . hemingroids may have been right when he said: "poor faulkner, he thinks big words mean big emotions." . . . i really like the story, the characters are fascinating, but fualkner needs to get the hell out of his own way as far as i'm concerned . . . again, i'm baffled that people can utter faulkner's name in the same sentence as joyce, nabakov, or even conrad, when they talk about a musicality of language . . . but for an occasional gem of a sentence, i feel like his prose are vastly overestimated . . . no, i'm not drunk, either (and i'm not scott, either) . . . for me, faulkner just gets in his own way with his wordplay most of the time . . . god almighty, the contracted words are just WAY WAY to prevalent! every time he manages to suspend my disbelief and let me sink into the story, here comes a string of words like duskfiltered . . .look, i'm sorry, but any writer can start inventing these words . . .mccarthy does it better (and way less) . . .now and then, a word like "bootworn" will come along that i can live with, but then he's gotta puch his luck with three more in the next paragraph . . . i've been reading some great writers lately: ron carlson, stewart o'nan, dan chaon, alan gurganus . . . and i feel like every one of them are superior to faulkner on a sentence level . . .sorry, but that's how i'm reading it . . . i will finish for sure, because the story is compelling when he allows me to enjoy it . . .
yo, bill: quit writing and tell me a story!!!
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JE, yes, yes and yes. It IS annoying. HE is annoying. I just read through and let the sounds lap at me. I am of the opinion that maybe that's all that's meant by it, the strange syntax, the repetition, the made up compound words, the lack of apostrophes and on and on -- just so much background muzak within the novel to convey the atmosphere. Don't know if that's what F intended, by that's the only way I can receive it at this point and so that'll just hafta do. I cannot imagine EVER rereading this again tho'!If I met him at a bar, I'd kick dirt on his shoes and knock his drink over! I'm not impressed with his bad use of 25 cent words. I have formed a definite opinion of this author from just this one go round and all I can say is I guess there's a reason why I'm not on the Nobel selection committee!
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Maybe we can agree to disagree(?) on whether Faulkner is just being obfuscatory for the sake of being obfuscatory (I know Faulkner had a few choice words back at Ernie Hemingway too!) Maybe it's having known a number of good friends from the South or just having listened to plenty of drunken stories -- but I see Faulkner as a writer separate from the voice in his books. Looking back on Absalom! Absalom! there is a different tone (yeah, yeah -- some of the big words) but what I LOVE about Faulkner is his dedication to Voice. I feel as if I'm hearing someone from that town telling me what happened. [When we get to the last section, I can say a bit more about what I think are the two GREAT chapters that close this book -- and which tell the story through very different voices....:]
I think the excess of language can bug the hell out of folks like yourself. (The same way the stodgy excess of tone-deaf ideology made me throw Ayn Rand's books across the room.) But for me, I'll take some more of that glossolalia, please, some more o' that joyful jumping prose, that luxuriating in language as if was God's own bubblebath.... Why? Because in passages like this one where it's simply Hightower sitting at a window listening to church music, he opens up the moment to some lightning flashes of insight (maybe just more subtle streaks of meteors in that night sky, but beautiful nonetheless....)
The organ strains come rich and resonant through the summer night, blended, sonorous, with that quality of abjectness and sublimation, as if the freed voices themselves were assuming the shapes and attitudes of crucifixions, ecstatic, solemn, and profound in gathering volume. Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon like all Protestant music. It was as though they who accepted it and raised voices to praise it within praise, having been made what they were by that which the music praised and symbolised, they took revenge upon that which made them so by means of the praise itself. Listening, he seems to hear within it the apotheosis of his own his history, his own land, his own environed blood: that people from which he sprang and among whom he lives who can never take either pleasure or catastrophe or escape from either, without brawling over it. Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying....
This moment of listening to church music opens up like a dark rose to a critique of a people who "cannot seem to bear" pleasure. Rave on, Mr. Faulkner. Rave on.
(And to your coda on themes and ambitions -- well, for me, I'm not sure which comes first: the language or the themes and ambitions; seems sorta like asking Mahler to wrap up his symphony's a little bit quicker. "Two hours for a Symphony, Gustav?!?! NO-body writes a freakin' two hour symphony.")
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Dan, We were shooting for about 4-5 chapters a week, but that may be a bit ambitious. But we can hold off a week or so to let folks catch up a bit before moving into the final chapters.
For those of you who've reached what I might call: "Return of the Janitor"... I'm curious to hear what folks have to say about the reveal of Joe Christmas' birth. (Don't know how many have seen Charles Laughton's "Night of the Hunter" but Uncle Eupheus "Doc" Hines may be the most gothically creepy character since Robert Mitchum's Reverand.)
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. . .leeeeeeeeaaaaaaaan-ing leeeeeeaaaaaaaaan-ing . . .
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Ah, Doc Hines on a porch with a shotgun keeping the doctor away... Got the same vibe.
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Are folks are catching up -- or giving up -- on Monsieur Faulkner?
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I finished it on Saturday. Reading Faulkner made me feel like a kid again! (In that snarky way you feel when there's an assignment you wish you could avoid, but on which you KNOW the teacher will test...)Have moved on and almost finished with The Ninth Life of Louis Drax by Liz Jensen.
Next up: Knut Hamsun, I think.
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HAHA! Love it JE.
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Karen, the great thing about this group though is that if you thought it sucked, feel free to raise your hand and say: "I thought it sucked." (though I'm hoping you'll tell us why (and NO that is not an assignment!!))
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"In a world where 'Who a man believes he is will shape his Destiny..." [Insert shot of Joe Christmas on the run.:] "one man struggles to know himself before others destroy him." [Cut to pasty-faced Percy Grimm loading his pistol, then Doc Hines raving "You ain't nothing. You are a instrument of God's wrathful purpose!":]
"In Jefferson, Mississippi," [Cut to: Lena watching the Burden house burning] "where no one is sure who is God-fearing" [Cut to: Gail Hightower's hands covered in blood] "and who is truly good" [Cut to: the sheriff staring at Percy Grimm] "the line between sinner" [cut to Brown climbing out the backwindow of one room shack:] "and saint is as sweat-blurred, bugladen and copper-colored as THE LIGHT IN AUGUST!"
[With apologies to William Cuthbert Faulkner and everyone on Goodreads -- but gosh that Percy Grimm is a great cinematic character!:]
Hugh wrote: "For those of you who have not read it... allow me a brief, pseudo-Faulknerian Coming Attractions trailer which would open with one of my favorite gothic scenes I alluded to above of a father, sitti..."Haha that was a great preview, Hugh! I actually want to do that now for all the books I'm going to teach in the future. I felt the same way about Grimm...I could see a really long tracking shot with ******* being chased by ******* near the end that could probably only be achieved by Scorsese. (Asterisks are to avoid spoilers and 1 asterisk does not equal 1 letter.)
I'm behind on the reading, but I've read it three times before, so whenever you're ready, I'm ready! And again, Hugh, thanks for defending Faulkner, because right now I haven't the time! ;)
I remember a bit of time ago, Hugh asked us to stick to the text when discussing the free will vs. destiny discussion of Faulkner's Joe Christmas. Since I'm not finding much of a thread to pick up on at the moment, I figured I would bring it up again. One of the best textual references I have showing the fatalism inherent in Joe Christmas's character is when he is eating the toothpaste in the dietician's room:
"He didn't have to wait long. At once the paste which he had already swallowed liften inside him, trying to get back out, into the air where it was cool. It was no longer sweet. In the rife, pinkwomansmelling obscurity behind the curtain he squatted, pinkfoamed, listening to his insides, waiting with astonished fatalism for what was about to happen to him. Then it happened. He said to himself with complete and astonished surrender: 'Well, here I am.'" (p. 122)
Clearly Christmas has some sort of fatalistic leanings. Other examples could be how he waited for his punishment from the dietician or how he seemed to simply acknowledge his identity through how others perceived him when he was younger. I find it interesting that as a child, people took him for a black person, but as he grew older people were willing to accept him for a white man. I wonder if there is any significance here.
Anyway, I'm sure others could find other passages to illustrate Christmas's fatalism or to contradict it and I would love to see both of those soon!
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For Joe: when he is in his self-loathing mode, he refers to himself as black. At one point, when he is North and sleeping with different women he finds that the best way to get out of a relationship with a white woman is to tell her he is black.
And then comes the scene when he tells one white woman he is black and she is okay with it.... At that point, he vomits. HE has defined "black" as his dark side.
But here we have a guy who can pass for white. It is only when the town wants to condemn him that the story of his being black catches fire in the town.
**SPOILER**
I think it's significant that Burden's step-brother who is shot with his grandfather is the child of a Mexican -- but is taken, by some, as black.
As we learn, that is Joe's true heritage. Crazy Doc Hines sees the baby his daughter has with a Mexican as "black" and that loathing both kills his own daughter and will haunt Joe the rest of his life.
Part of what Faulkner seems to be getting at is that here we are human beings able to have SOME affect on our own destiny, but it is our shadow nature (not black but a shadow) that causes us to move in ways that keep us down and less than what we might be.
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And I see that in multiple characters. Who they believe themselves to be, who their actions display them to be, and who 'the town' believes them to be -- and 'the town' has a fatalistic consciousness all its own.
There is a sense of predestiny, a grinding inevitability of cruelty & misunderstanding. That's the part of Faulkner that is hard for me to get through. Because I'm a big believer in redemption, in general and in my books. I had to wait for the final chapter for that one and even then...
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Wasn't that last chapter great? Wonderful bookend to the one that came before (talk about the choices made for one's destiny....)
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Light in August was selected by Time Magazine as one of the Best Novels of the 20th Century.
In the article they also include a link to the original Time Magazine review (which to my amazement was headlined, and I kid you not: N**ger in a Woodpile.) It reads in part:
Like the late great Joseph Conrad's method of spinning a yarn. Faulkner's is roundabout, circular: sometimes the suspense is awful, sometimes merely interminable. Like Conrad, Faulkner makes his people coherent to an unlikely and omnireminiscent degree. Unlike Conrad, Faulkner depends on madmen for his best effects. From the vasty deep of nightmares and bogeymen he can summon up ghosts that haunt nurseries and still frighten some grownups. With fewer bogeymen than usual, a happy issue out of some of its afflictions. Light in August continues the Faulkner tradition by a murder, a lynching and a good deal of morbid fornication....
"The Author. Unlike his chief rival. Ernest Hemingway, short, wiry, triangular-faced William Faulkner came late to popularity: not until The Sound and the Fury (his fifth book) was he on his way to become a literary household word. After two years at the University of Mississippi he enlisted in the Canadian Flying Corps, at the Armistice was a lieutenant. A dyed-in-the-wool Southerner but no unreconstructed rebel, Faulkner lives with a wife and two stepchildren on his own cotton plantation in Oxford, Miss, whence he makes rare, grudging expeditions to literary Manhattan. He still flies occasionally, in an old plane that belongs to a friend. Few of his Oxford neighbors know that Faulkner writes. He is considered none too well off, easygoing, fond of corn liquor. But, says he: "Ah write when the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me every day." He writes always in longhand, with pen & ink, in incredibly small script of which one sheet makes five or six printed pages. He plays jazz records while he writes; wrote Soldier's Pay to Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." As I Lay Dying he wrote in a power house, to the dynamo's whirr. He says he never reads reviews of his books."
More a press release than a review (IMHO) but thought it might provoke a comment or two.
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. . . interesting that the reviewer should choose conrad for comparison . . . i believe english was conrad's third (?) language, and yet i have aneasier time with his dense prose than faulkner's . . . seriously, though, does anyone else sense at times that faulkner was inbibing heavily in said corn liquor while he wrote? . . . i'm not just being a jerk, here-- this is the seasoned drunk in me speaking . . . the spiralling structure of some of his sentences, the effusive, palpably wet, sound of them, honestly reminds me quite a bit of a loquacious drunk-speak sometimes . . . but his tiny exacting handwriting would seem to suggest otherwise . . . and can anybody confirm the legend than hemingway stood up and ate raw onions as he typed? . . . i would SO LOVE to see some of faulkner's handwriting, and have it analyzed! in fact, i'm going to look for some!
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Interesting remark.
a murder, a lynching and a good deal of morbid fornication....
Wow. As though they are equal. I don't remember it being morbid. Maybe morbid is a code word I don't know that told people to "go out and buy this potboiler right away."
There is something to the glossing over of personal details that you just wouldn't get now, isn't there? Like... a fondness for corn liquor. Hmmmm.
Phew. That title.
Hugh wrote: "Ry- what I love about this book is the way it plays with this notion of fate or destiny (forgive me if I need to go back to the page references in a later post....) There seems to be a tension betw..."*SPOILER*
I like what you said about Burden's step-brother. Though even the Mexican heritage of Joe Christmas is questionable. Remember when Doc Hines went and talked to the circus master? He said that he didn't know for sure if the guy who impregnated Doc Hines's daughter was Mexican or not. It's somewhere around here...between pages 369-386.
Shelby wrote: "Unlike Conrad, Faulkner depends on madmen for his best effects.Interesting remark.
a murder, a lynching and a good deal of morbid fornication....
Wow. As though they are equal.
Did he really ..."
Haha I like what you wrote here, Shel.
And to J.E...bucking the traditional rose-colored glasses through which the alcohol-inspired artist is usually viewed (for some reason), Faulkner never wrote when drunk. Almost all accounts of this are synchronous with a couple exceptions, which were given regarding his early writing career in New Orleans.
The circular way his narratives wind always strike me as a way to view the story from many different perspectives, which is one of the things I like most about Faulkner. I probably say this a lot, but its true!
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http://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-f...
. . . once again, somebody makes me want to love faulkner . . .
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http://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-f...-..."
Thanks, JE. She said much better than I could what makes his prose so appealing to me...
I was seduced by Faulkner’s smallest details—underwear and shadows, moonshine and corn cobs—and by the way the tangible world seemed to turn dizzy and feverish in his pages: trees thrashed, honeysuckle drizzled, the soil grew sizzling-hot. His characters had desires that seemed ancient and startling at once: “if people could only change one another forever that way merge like a flame swirling up for an instant then blown cleanly out along the cool eternal dark…” His own prose worked like that, too—swirling up for an instant, casting sparks, taking my breath away and then returning it to my silent, damaged mouth—transformed and electric.
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"I think that in time the Jim Bonds [the lone and black descendant of a white family in the novel:] are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it wont quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they wont show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings. Now I want you to tell me one thing more. Why do you hate the South?"
"I don't hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; "I dont hate it," he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark. I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!
"I who regard you would also have sprung from the loins of African kings...." Oh, how the Percy Grimms of the world must hate THAT Destiny!
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I really like that even when given a glimpse of Christmas' parentage there is still a bit of mystery. The claim that his father was mexican and not black. Faulkner seems to enjoy this confusion, making Christmas' a bit more clear yet maybe not.
I hope to be finished with the book this weekend. Sorry for my slowness.
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A note on Themes
[Major SPOILER ALERT:]
Miscegenation is one of the core themes of this book. It fuels the violence. (If race provides the explosive material, the fuse is often driven by gender differences… as Lena Grove unstoppable forward momentum shows, propelling some characters forward.) In Joe Christmas we see both race and gender combined in one (literally) lethal character.
Here is the scene when Percy Grimm is found over Joe Christmas – doing something other than just ensuring the man is dead:
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 [Joe Christmas:] 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. But the man on the floor had not moved. He just lay there, with his eyes open and empty of everything save consciousness, and with something a shadow, about his mouth.
One of the things that makes this book so powerful for me is considering it in its historical context as well. Nearly 80 years after the book was written, I think it’s easy to gloss over what Faulkner was tackling.
In fact, right about this time, Faulkner was writing for Holly wood which just two years earlier had enacted the Motion Picture Production Code, known as Hays Code, which explicitly forbid the depiction of “miscegenation”. Basically, he was writing a book which could not have been made into a movie!
(The same year, Faulkner wrote LiA, Germany lifted its ban on the SS and SA and Hitler ran for president.)
To further put things in context: The infamous Supreme Court case, Plessy vs. Ferguson, in 1896 ruled that “separate but equal” facilities (such as the segregated train cars) were constitutional. And this “separate” would stand for another five decades – and was the state of the world Faulkner was writing about.
Here are a few choice bits from Wikipedia:
Laws banning "race-mixing" were enforced in Nazi Germany (the Nuremberg Laws) until 1945, in certain U.S. states from the Colonial era until 1967 and in South Africa during the early part of the Apartheid era. All these laws primarily banned marriage between spouses of different racially or ethnically defined groups, which was termed "amalgamation" or "miscegenation" in the U.S. The laws in Nazi Germany and many of the U.S. states, as well as South Africa, also banned sexual relations between such individuals.
In the United States, the various state laws prohibited the marriage of whites and blacks, and in many states also the intermarriage of whites with Native Americans or Asians. In the U.S., such laws were known as anti-miscegenation laws. From 1913 until 1948, 30 out of the then 48 states enforced such laws. Although an "Anti-Miscegenation Amendment" to the United States Constitution was proposed in 1871, in 1912–1913, and in 1928, no nation-wide law against racially mixed marriages was ever enacted. In 1967, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional. With this ruling, these laws were no longer in effect in the remaining 16 states that still had them.
What makes this book (for me) a classic is that through the structure of the novel (the telling and deeper retelling of the story) and its language, it is more than just a murder mystery. For example, only very late in the novel, do we learn that Joanne Burden is the one who tried to kill Joe Christmas first as part of her own strange suicide pact she wanted to make (again, underlying this conflict is differences in how she and Christmas approach this “relationship”) -- the differences between men and women fueling misunderstandings, anger and fear.
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The closing chapters: Part 1
We’ve talked a lot about Faulkner’s language which for some has been a barrier to enjoying the book. We’ve talked too about structure. For me, in the final two chapters we see examples of Faulkner’s gift as a master storytelling with both language and structure.
This last chapter of Light in August begins with the light itself: Now the final copper light of afternoon fades….
I might subtitle Chapter 20: The Story of Gail Hightower because as we listen to him reminisce about his life – after proving himself a coward in the end (he had been asked to bear false witness to save Christmas’ life earlier – but it is only when the drama literally spills into his own house that he steps forward to try and present that lie. And by then it is too late.)
We hear about his fascination as a child with one of the few relics from his grandfather. ”’I was eight then,’ he thinks. ‘It was raining.’ It seems to him that he can still smell the rain, the most grieving of the October earth, and the musty yawn as the lid of the trunk went back. Then the garment, the neat folds.” (Stylistically we see Faulkner’s synethesia (like Nabokov’s) in which sound and vision and taste and touch are all blended, in which a smell can be a smell of grieving and the sound of an opening trunk can be “musty”. And in some ways (perhaps for some) this is how memory works senses tied to each other by knotted threads.)
In the trunk is the grandfather’s frock coat – “patches of leather, mansewn and crude, patches of Confederate grey weathered leaf brown now, and one that has stopped his very heart: it was blue, dark blue; the blue of the United States”
This coat will become the banner under which Hightower lives his life. Imagining and then believing, then finally believing past the point where the real truth is revealed – that his grandfather was a war hero. And that blue might have been taken from a Union soldier, just as he might have galloped into battle with his sword drawn… but was not…
”Tell again about grandpa. How many Yankees did he kill?...”
So, the boy grows up among phantoms: his father who survived the war but is left a hollow, angry man; his mother who dies; and “the old negro woman” who will ultimately tell him the Truth of this grandfather. But to no avail now that the Myth has been set free to gallop in his imagination. At seminary he will wrestle with the hollowness those phantoms have given him and imagines what he will tell the church elders:
”Listen. God must call me to Jefferson because my life died there, was shot from the saddle of a galloping horse in a Jefferson street one night twenty years ago before it was ever born.”
But in the hollowness, what will he reclaim? Because as he will reveal to his wife on the train to Jefferson:
”Mind you they were hungry. They had been hungry for three years…” Then the images of war crash in on his story before we hear the words of Cinthy, the old black maid who had raised him…
”’Stealin’ chickens. A man growed, wid a married son, gone to a war whar his business was killin’ Yankees, killed in somebody else’s henhouse wid a hand’ful of feathers.” Stealing chickens. His grandfather wasn’t killed in battle but caught stealing chickens to feed himself in war.
Already his wife was cluthing his arm: Shhhhhhh! Shhhhhhhhhh! People are looking at you! But he did not seem to hear her at all.
No, he never hears her at all.... And so it is as he watches the Light in August fade he wonders:
Perhaps in the moment when I revealed to her not only the depth of my hunger but the fact that never and never would she have any part in the assuaging of it; perhaps at that moment I became her seducer and murderer, author and instrument of her shame and death.
Faulkner will go on to describe the man’s thought turning slowly like a wheel beginning to run in sand, the axle, the vehicle, the power which propels [the thinking:] not yet aware. As our thoughts do turn, over and over. Obsessively and often impotently. He has begun to see how the Myth in his life was also a hollowness that left him unapproachable, unlovable – not because he was not loved – but was incapable of holding that love in the hollow place his heart should have been. It all just spilled out.
Then, if this is so, if I am the instrument of her despair and death, then I am in turn instrument of someone outside myself. And I know that for fifty years I have not even been clay: I have been a single instant of darkness in which a horse galloped and a gun crashed. And if I am my dead grandfather on the instant of his death…
“Not even been clay”.... If, as the Bible tells us, “all men have feet of clay”… then Hightower is telling us he knows he is less than a man – and as the world progresses, as the wheel turns on, he sits at his window and listens to the wind in which in the last lines of the book, we hear the thundering hooves of the horses he still imagines from the Civil War, as so many others imagine the nobility and heroism of war, spin on in their imaginations as well….
And in these last lines Faulkner reiterates the tragedy of Joe Christmas: that we are what we believe our Destiny to be – all the while, our own Destiny is just out of reach, something which will be turned and affected by forces outside our control. We either try to keep running from it (Brown) or continue to try to beat it into the shape of our own self-loathing (Christmas) or sit impotently at the window watching the world spin as our own thoughts spin (Hightower).
Or – wait! – or, OR we can walk on: like Lena and Byron, walk on and try (as Byron Bunch has done) to capture the thing we love for reasons that elude our conscious thoughts or pursue what we believe to be the Truth, though all evidence tells us otherwise (as Lena Grove has done) because by the time we capture that romanticized Truth, perhaps it will have become the Truth.
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The closing chapters: Part 2
Although the author has deemed it Chapter 21, to me this “chapter” is more a “coda” both because of the finality of the previous chapter and the complete shift in tone. For me, this is: The Song of Lena Grove. Sung by the most curious of characters in the entire novel (perhaps in Faulkner’s entire gothic pantheon): a husband and wife in bed at night.
In terms of style, check out how Faulkner opens: There lives in the eastern part of th estate a furniture repairer and dealer who recently made a trip into Tennessee to get some old pieces of furniture which he had bought by correspondence….
It is the most straightahead, prosaic, tell-me-a-story language Faulkner has used in the book. And this story is about to be told without word-smashing without the swirling dustmotessmellingofgrandfatherandWarandmendacity… And here, for me, is the evidence that the storytelling Faulkner is about is about the language too. The guy can write your straightahead prose and dialog as he demonstrates in this chapter (though I would hasten to add he’s not doing it to SHOW us this fact but because what he is up to REQUIRES it…) but his language is always in service to the story.
Here then are Adam and Eve, talking about the world as they’ve encountered it. (And if we want to push the point we might also add that they are discussing a Grove here in bed at night….)
The couple are not calling each other “Hellspawn!” or “Womanfilth!”, as we’ve seen the angry and damned earlier in the book, but simply talking about a strange thing that happened on the road that day…. And here is where Faulkner as storyteller kicks in. Because each new character who has shown up in the chapters adds some new perspective on the story. (It’s one of the reasons I admire J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series so much: check out how each chapter introduces at least one new element to the mythology: a character, a spell, or a magic object. So that collectively we inhabit the landscape further.)
The couple banter:
”…I just couldn’t imagine anybody, any woman, knowing that they had ever slept with him, let alone having anything to show folks to prove it.”
Ain’t you shamed his wife says. Talking that way before a lady They are talking in the dark.
Anyway, I cant see you blushing any he says. He continues…
You can almost hear their smiles in the dark. You can feel the stillness in recounting of his encounter on the road. (Again, harkening back to all those other Biblical storytelling references: the two apostles meeting Jesus on the road to Emmaus, the Good Samaratin, even Joseph and Mary on the road looking for some place to rest.)
And here, this furniture repairer presents the most simply of explanations:
Yes, sir. You cant beat a woman. Because you know what I think? I think she was just traveling. I dont think she had any idea of finding whoever it was she was following. I don’t think she had ever had aimed to, only she hadn’t told him yet. I reckon this was the first time she had ever been further away from home than she could walk back before sundown in her life. And that she had got along all right this far, with folks taking good care of her. And so I think she must made up her mind to travel a little further and see as much as she could, since I reckon she knew that when she settled down this time, it would likely be for the rest of her life. That’s what I think.”
Too simplistic? Well, as the Reverand Hightower said sagely: Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying....
Two quotes came to mind as I reread this: Tolstoy’s memorable opening line to Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Happy families don’t make for good storytelling and Faulkner knows that as well as Tolstoy. But the unhappiness, the unfillable holes of longing and desire spill out of marriage bed and into the world. The novel ends with a happy family in bed talking about what was seen in the garden of Eden that day.
If Pascal is right, if “the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room”, then the wheel of progress will continue to turn as it does in this novel with no real resolution. Because any resolution would mean that we ourselves are resolute about who we are, that we are NOT tremendous messengers of Destiny taking the message of God into the world as Hightower imagined himself at one point. We are not souls damned by an angry God. And the simply truth that any human being might utter, pausing on the road in the midst of a long journey….
My, my. A body does get around.
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I will say that thanks to everyone's posts I have gotten far more out of it than I would have had I made a go at it alone.
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Hugh wrote: "Why I consider Light in August one of the great novels of the 20th century.The closing chapters: Part 2
Although the author has deemed it Chapter 21, to me this “chapter” is more a “coda” both b..."
I have to say thank you Hugh, for moderating this discussion and putting forth enough thoughts about this novel to keep me preoccupied for the next couple of times that I re-read it! I especially like your comments on Faulkner's representations of the different possibilities in which people can approach the notion of destiny in the characters of Lena Grove and Byron Bunch, Brown, Christmas, and Hightower. I'm a huge proponent of free will and determinism, so I was happy that you pointed out this kaleidoscopic view of approaches to determining or being determined by one's destiny.
Sorry I wasn't very involved in the later stages of the discussion, but I kept an eye on the discussions and it has made me love Faulkner all the more.
And to JE, I'm glad we Faulknerphiles are such an inspiration, though you're not quite converted yet. :)
(That's a lotta "a's" and "L's" in one sentence, I declare.)
Agree, Shelby, loved that passage and F's use of "augur" which also happened to be on Jeopardy! last week. Alex misspelled it (very surprising) but then caught the mistake and made a point of correcting himself!