1

When Alfred Kazin describes the "pinched rotted look" of Faulkner's Light in August, he is referring to the influence of the depression on the atmosphere of the novel ["The Stillness of Light in August, in Faulkner, edited by Robert Penn Warren, 1966]. But his words have a resonance for the story of Joe Christmas that goes far beyond the superficial. Light in August looks "pinched and rotted," it seems to me, not only because its characters live stark, luxuryless lives on a barren landscape but because it contains buried within it an aversion to life, a profound inability to confront human existence with openness and joy. Though Faulkner's public utterances on the novel give heavy emphasis to Lena Grove, her "courage and endurance" and her pagan joy in giving birth, the novel itself embodies a denial of those things that Lena represents which is only partly compensated for by her rather bewitching presence. In fact, it is Joe Christmas—cold, violent, driven—and not the gentle Lena who dominates Light in August, and he dominates it not only because his is the central story but because his personality finds striking parallels in the implied world view of the novel as a whole.

Joe Christmas is a highly complex and difficult fictional character. Though Faulkner has presented him in great detail, his motives and reactions often seem bizarre and puzzling. Before we can understand his relationship to the atmosphere and significance of Light in August, we must understand Joe himself in some systematic way. I propose to analyze his character from the point of view of the Third Force psychology of Karen Horney, and to move from this analysis to a consideration of the relationship between Joe and his creator, and the effect of this relationship on the novel itself. Wayne Booth [in The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961] tells us that every novel implies an author, a guiding consciousness who is responsible for the "core of norms and choices" that shapes the novel, and who uses rhetorical devices to influence his readers to share his perspective on the world he has created. In the case of Light in August, as we shall see, this "implied author" gives evidence that his relationship to life is at times as troubled and contradictory as that of Joe Christmas, indeed that there is a kind of collusion between him and Joe that has a great deal to do with the vision of the world he ultimately portrays in the novel.

The detailed Horneyan analysis that follows indicates that Joe Christmas is a type of aggressive personality that Horney labels "arrogant-vindictive" [Neurosis and Human Growth]. A person afflicted with this kind of neurosis is consumed with the desire to seek vindictive triumph. His ideal self is immune to human attachments and needs and he seeks to quell his inner conflicts by focusing on his need to achieve revenge for the wrongs done him in childhood and since by a world he sees as hostile. He externalizes his own feelings of hostility and convinces himself that the world is hateful and mean—if he were not convinced of this, his solution would not "work" and he would be beset by the anxiety that accompanies inner conflict. Thus he sees all attempts by others to "move toward" their fellow man as hypocritical and revolting. In himself, self-effacing tendencies are deeply buried, and if he is threatened with their emergence he will feel intense shame and self-hate, perhaps in the form of rage. Self-effacing "shoulds" generally influence his behavior in a negative way. Whatever a loving or loyal or trusting person "should" do in a given situation is what he must avoid doing in order to avoid anxiety. Nevertheless, as we shall see, in a crisis his repressed desires to "move toward" others, to seek their acceptance and love, may emerge to haunt him, causing him to feel guilt for his aggressive behavior and motivating him to act in ways inconsistent with his dominant solution.

By analyzing Joe Christmas's nature and behavior in terms of Horney's theories about this particular type, we shall be able to understand much about him, and to appreciate Faulkner's artistry in creating a character of such vividness and coherence. And once we understand Joe's inner conflicts and the "solutions" that he brings to bear on them, we shall be able to study the conflicts present in Light in August itself, and thus to identify and analyze the bleakness that pervades it in spite of all that Lena's quiet cheerfulness can do and the energy that hums through its pages, holding the reader in thrall. While most of Faulkner's work ostensibly espouses "self-effacing" values, asking us to empathize with sensitive and/or helpless victims like Quentin Compson or Darl Bundren, and his public pronouncements on his work virtually always emphasize humanist themes such as the importance of love and of endurance in the face of trial, Light in August is permeated with an aggressive attitude which resembles that of Joe himself.

2

Like Jason Compson's, Joe Christmas's adulthood is made up of attempts to achieve revenge against and mastery over those people and forces responsible for his mistreatment and frustration as a child. As Horney describes it, the arrogant-vindictive person's development

started in childhood—with particularly bad human experiences and few, if any, redeeming factors. Sheer brutality, humiliations, derision, neglect, and flagrant hyprocrisy, all these assailed a child of especially great sensitivity.… He may make some pathetic and unsuccessful attempts to win sympathy, interest, or affection but finally chokes off all tender needs. He gradually "decides" that genuine affection is not only unattainable for him but that it does not exist at all. [Neurosis and Human Growth]

"Memory believes before knowing remembers," begins the chapter on Joe's childhood, indicating that Faulkner means to trace the unconscious legacy of the child to the man. And what a legacy it is. No child-victim of Victorian literature ever had a worse time of it than Joe. Imprisoned behind the bleak, soot-blackened walls of the orphanage, "small, still, round-headed, round-eyed," Joe grows to the age of reason without love, his only treat an occasional "pink work" of the dietitian's toothpaste. One older girl he likes "well enough to let her mother him a little," but she suddenly disappears (not t.b. or small pox, adoption). Like many another little victim he has someone assigned especially to hate him, Doc Hines, the racist lunatic who devotes his life to the destruction of the "abomination" that is Joe. In addition, he suffers the derision of his fellow inmates who, out of some natural but obscure evil impulse, since he does not then and never will look black at all, call him "nigger."

As the toothpaste episode unfolds, we see that Joe has very early (he is now five) come to see punishment and persecution as the central facts of his life. When the dietitian tries to bribe him instead of beating him, he becomes profoundly confused, and his mistrust of his fellow men increases. By the time he is adopted by the McEacherns he has taught himself not to expect anything good from life, in fact to defend himself from disappointment by hating, as Hyatt Waggoner says, "not even those who love him but especially those who love him" [William Faulkner, 1959]. He has learned to deny the very existence of the love that has been denied him, and seems not to hope for any positive results from the adoption. He does not reach out at all to McEachern during their long ride to his new home, sitting, a silent little bundle in the wagon, even more taciturn and unresponsive than McEachern himself. But it is Mrs. McEachern's welcome—the attempt to carry him to the house, the washing of his feet, the watching by his bedside—that is most wasted on him; he can only wait for "the part that would not be pleasant" to begin. Already he has taught himself not to believe in the genuineness of human affection, so her actions, the "trivial, clumsy, vain efforts," can only mystify and eventually disgust him.

His initial response to his foster mother is the first indication we have that Joe will make the transition from victim to victimizer typical of the arrogant-vindictive type. The real turning point occurs on a Sunday when the eight-year-old Joe is beaten and starved by his Calvinist foster father in an attempt to get him to learn his catechism. Unable to prevent the beatings, he accepts them without emotion, "with a rapt expression like a monk in a picture." He is calm because McEachern's treatment of him corresponds to his view that life consists of a series of punishments, and because by remaining "rapt" he can refuse McEachern mastery over him. After his inevitable collapse he awakens feeling "quite well," at peace, as if he has just made an important decision. Looking back on this day he thinks, "On this day I became a man," and it becomes apparent that at this moment, starved and aching from repeated beatings, he embarks on the search for vindictive triumph that will lead him to murder at least twice. Unable to revenge himself as yet on McEachern, he lashes out at his foster mother, violently rejecting her offer of love and comfort in the form of food by dumping the tray of secretly prepared dishes in the corner, only later, when it is just food and no longer a tangible symbol of the love in which he cannot believe, kneeling over it and eating, "like a savage, like a dog." The events of this day establish the pattern of Joe's life. He will for the rest of his days accept, and even seek out, punishment, taking his revenge where he can, and behaving with particular violence in response to offers of love or aid.

Once, however, taken off guard by the exigencies of adolescence, Joe displays the vulnerability to human feelings that his "solution" denies him. In his relationship with Bobbie Allen we find the lessons of his childhood confirmed, and the hardening process completed. Falling in love with a peculiarly stunted blonde waitress with oversized hands, Joe risks a partial abandonment of his drive for mastery and his need to deny and repress positive feelings, only to be taught again that there is not really any such thing as love. At first he is caught up in the mystery of Bobbie and of sexual love in general, but his belated discovery that Bobbie is a prostitute imported from Memphis (though, as the older blonde woman complains, in Joe's case she has brought "it" all the way down to Jefferson just to give it away) leads him to compensate for this vulnerability by aggressive behavior. Now he smokes and drinks and "in his loud drunken despairing young voice," calls Bobbie his whore.

It is in the midst of his sexual initiation into adulthood that Joe finds an opportunity for vindictive triumph. His murder, or attempted murder, of McEachern, and his brutal robbery of Mrs. McEachern free him from the role of victim and release him forever from the standards of behavior that govern mere mortals. On his way back to Bobbie, "The youth … rode lightly, balanced lightly, leaning well forward, exulting perhaps at that moment as Faustus had, of having put behind now at once and for all the Shalt Not, of being free at last of honor and law." For the moment he is his idealized self, but, as his haste to return to Bobbie indicates, he is not yet completely hardened.

Bobbie takes care of that. In the scene that follows Joe's heroic journey to her house with Mrs. McEachern's egg money, Bobbie provides Joe with the experience that finally "choke[s] off all tender needs," and leads him to behave for the rest of his life as if "genuine affection is not only unattainable for him but … does not exist at all." Her feelings presumably wounded by McEachern's rather polite reference to her as a "harlot," Bobbie has exchanged her usual cowlike demeanor for that of a cornered rat. Her rejection of Joe's offer of matrimony is ugly and vicious: "'He told me himself he was a nigger! The son of a bitch! Me f—ing for nothin a nigger son of a bitch that would get me in a jam with clodhopper police. At a clodhopper dance!'" No, Bobbie does not want to get married, and Joe's last attempt to win affection is rewarded by several cruel blows to the face. Now, with the taste of bitter rejection mingling on his tongue with the flavor of vindictive triumph, Joe embarks on his adult journey, "the street which was to run for fifteen years," and then for three more before Percy Grimm's knife and gun bring it to a close. During these years he systematically denies his connection to men of any race, and searches out opportunities for reenacting the punishment and revenge pattern established in his childhood.

We get our closest look at the adult Christmas during the three years that the spends in Jefferson before the murder of Joanna Burden. During this time he exhibits virtually every personal quality ascribed by Horney to the arrogant-vindictive type: arrogance, envy, the need to frustrate others, the inability to feel sympathy, the inability to ask for or receive aid graciously, the tendency toward uncontrollable rage. His need to keep others at bay, or, when he has the chance, to make them the recipients of his contempt, to triumph over them with tongue or fist, governs his every action. He manages to repress thoroughly all self-effacing or loving tendencies, thus avoiding the intense self-hate that would accompany any violation of his solution.

Appearing on the Jefferson scene, Joe is "sullen and quiet and fatal as a snake." The men at the mill know him by his "darkly contemptuous expression," and the "silent and unflagging savageness" with which he shovels saw-dust. These are apparently enough to keep them at bay, but with the arrival of Brown, made of denser stuff, Joe resorts to blows, curses, and murder threats.

But it is in the portrait of Joe's most "intimate" relationship that Faulkner shows most vividly the emotional paralysis and the compulsive need to deny others warmth that are the inevitable adjunct to the search for vindictive triumph. Joe first encounters Joanna Burden when she finds him standing in her kitchen, surreptitiously eating the food that he could have had for the asking. At first, their relationship is based on her supplying him with the food and shelter that he needs but will not ask for. It is not much of a connection, but it is enough to make Joe uncomfortable, especially when he realizes one day, "Uplifted," that she has put herself above him by not inviting him into the "house proper." He revenges himself by raping her, unfeminine and unattractive as she is, but his triumph is rendered incomplete by her failure to disintegrate at his touch. Her surrender is "hard, untearful and unpitying and almost manlike," and thus he is compelled to try again. This time he approaches her "in a quiet rage," determined to "show the bitch," but he meets neither enthusiasm nor resistance, and so is, again, denied the triumph that would allow him to leave her alone. "It was as though some enemy upon whom he had wreaked his utmost violence and contumely stood, unscathed and unscarred, and contemplated him with a musing and insufferable contempt." Eventually he rids himself of this sense of her contempt in a scene reminiscent of Catechism Sunday. As he sniffs and audibly identifies each dish of food that has been left for him before he sends it crashing into the kitchen wall, he feels an exhilarating sense of vindictive triumph. It is no accident that this is one of the few times in the novel that Joe really seems to come alive, to do more than cast a baleful shadow on the page. These are the moments for which the arrogant-vindictive type lives: the moments that deny his dependency on others and establish his ascendancy over them, the glittering prizes that inspire his search for glory.

Now that he has caught on to the way to establish his ascendancy over Joanna, Joe can stay on at her place and wait for her complete surrender, a surrender that comes in the form of a grotesque middle-aged sexual awakening: "In this way the second phase began. It was as though he had fallen into a sewer." The words "fallen" and "sewer" are important here. What happens to Joe in his relationship with Joanna is that her "surrender" threatens to confine him. In the "sewer" of her sexuality he might be trapped, and as Horney observes [in Neurosis and Human Growth], "all human ties … are felt as restraints on the path to a sinister glory" by the arrogant-vindictive type. Joe is wary, and tries to preserve his distance by having no daytime contact with Joanna at all, scarcely, indeed, exchanging any words with her at any time except for the obscenities that she perversely demands. And he is able to resume his progress down the path toward aggressive triumph when, following Faulkner's rather bizarre notion of female sexuality, Joanna abruptly becomes asexual at the onset of menopause, and insists on praying over Joe and trying to reform him. Now she is vulnerable because she is asking for something that he is adept at denying, expressing a need that he is indeed compelled to frustrate, just as he was compelled to frustrate Mrs. McEachern's need for affection. Again the "need for triumph and the need to deny positive feelings" [Neurosis] come into play at the same time. Now Joe can taste his triumph over Joanna, thinking, "There is something I am going to do." Now he can deny her any feelings of love or respect, "his lip lifted into the shape of a soundless and rigid snarl," saying, "'You just got old and it happened to you and now you are not any good any more.'"

He hates her now "with a fierce revulsion of dread and impotent rage" for threatening his solution by caring for him. His rage, maybe not really so impotent, leads him to tote his razor up her stairs and slit her throat so thoroughly that the country man who finds her body will be afraid to pick it up for fear that her head will stay behind. The intensity of his rage is partly a response to her determination to deny him mastery, but it is primarily his reply to her attempts to be a loving mother to him. "All I wanted was peace," he thinks, "'She ought not to started praying over me.'" By praying over Joe, Joanna, like Mrs. McEachern before her, violates Joe's "peace," threatening his vindictive solution by implying that the world is not entirely hostile, and reviving suppressed conflicts between his hated and repressed self-effacing shoulds and his need for vindictive triumph. Like any other human being, Joe has a deep-seated need to give and receive love, but if he recognized this aspect of himself at this point in his life, it would lead to the disintegration of his neurotic personality—the "solution" that allows him to function (albeit on a pitifully restricted level) without the agony of inner conflict. His fear of such conflict is reflected in the intensity of his rage, an intensity that eventually makes murder inevitable.

In examining Joe's relationship with Joanna we have seen all of the elements of his disturbed personality revealed. But his neurosis is not confined to one relationship—all of his contacts with the people of Jefferson reflect his compulsive need to move against others. To begin with, there is his consistently arrogant and rude demeanor. This is the result of his need to externalize the self-hate that is the inevitable concomitant of the gap between his actual self (a two-bit drifter) and his idealized self (the young Faustus above honor and law). It also serves his needs to deny positive feelings, to reject the self-effacing strategies that his childhood taught him were ineffective, and his need to intimidate others into allowing him the vindictive triumph that is his only source of satisfaction. All who come in contact with him—the McEacherns, the mill workers, "Joe Brown"—are treated with the same distancing coldness and contempt. He establishes around himself an impenetrable aura of sullenness.

Then there is his tendency to respond violently to the friendly gesture, his inability to ask for or receive help graciously, because to do so would be to admit a failure of mastery and to recognize the existence of the humane values that he must deny in order to protect his neurosis. This is especially evident in his response to preferred food. We have seen what he does with Joanna's and Mrs. McEachern's carefully prepared meals, and when Byron Bunch offers his lunch pail, Joe's response is again violently negative. "I ain't hungry,'" he says, "'Keep your muck.'" This tendency also extends to money. He is careful to remind Mrs. McEachern as he steals her little hoard that he has not accepted it as a gift: "'I didn't ask, because I was afraid you would give it to me. I just took it. Dont forget that.'" It is important to note that this inability to take from others is compulsive, and not a healthy desire to "live on the terms of his own self-definition," as John Lewis Longley, Jr., describes it [in The Tragic Mask: A Study of Faulkner's Heroes, 1963]. Joe does not merely refuse aid, he responds with fury, with physical or verbal violence when it is offered. He does so because of a need to reassert the false feeling of superiority that is threatened when people behave as if they think he needs help, and because such offers of aid remind him of the despised and repressed part of himself that would depend on others for love, approval, or aid.

Joe's relationship with Joanna also brings into clear perspective another pattern of dealing with others typical of the arrogant-vindictive personality. As we have seen, his most common stance is that of a highly controlled sullenness. But in opposition to this guardedness we find a tendency toward violent and uncontrollable rage. The vindictive type, though he may be very unpleasant indeed, ordinarily does not express much of the hostility that he feels (this would be too dangerous). But on occasion his compulsions overwhelm him, and he feels rage as something impinging on him from outside, something over which he has no control, something which frightens even him. These occasions arise when there is a clear threat to his idealized image, when his mastery or his freedom from positive feelings is threatened. When Brown laughs at him and calls him "nigger," Joe comes close to killing him, seeing his actions as out of control, as coming from another source: "Something is going to happen to me. I am going to do something." When he goes for a walk in Freedman Town and encounters some blacks talking and laughing, he almost cuts a man with his razor: "'What in hell is the matter with me?'" he wonders. Then, "Something is going to happen to me." As they are throughout the book, blacks here are a reminder to Joe of his despised actual self, the self that he is afraid might be black, and thus, in his mind, inferior. As we have seen, Joe's murder of Joanna is also the result of vindictive rage, a rage so far out of control that he begins to think of the murder as past before it has even happened: "'Maybe I have already done it,'" he thinks. "'Maybe it is no longer now waiting to be done.'" Again we must note a flaw in Longley's argument that Joe is an existential hero. His acts of violence are not evidence of rebellion against a controlling society. They are evidence of a profound loss of choice emanating from an irrational rage at those who threatened his identification with his ideal self.

Faulkner's portrayal of Joe Christmas builds to a climax in the description of his relationship with Joanna, but the events following the murder are also of importance to our understanding of his character and its significance. Once "something" has indeed happened, and Joanna's throat is slit, Joe's revenge for the damage done him in childhood is almost, but not quite, complete. He has destroyed the punishing man (McEachern) and the confining women (Joanna and Mrs. McEachern), but one more threat remains. He still has to triumph over the spectre of his weakness and inferiority, the "actual self that he has come to associate with blacks. To this end, he bursts in upon a black church, cursing God, slapping the minister, knocking a seventy-year-old man "clean down into the mourner's pew," fracturing the skull of that man's six-foot grandson with a bench leg. "'I'll cut a notch in it tomorrow,'" he thinks and, close to laughter for the second time in the novel, says, "'Have a butt, boys,'" as he flicks his cigarette into the bushes where the mystified and frightened black men wait. The next time we see Joe it is at dawn, and he is feeling a sense of peace and exhilaration, the rewards of complete vindictive triumph. His dragons slain, Joe need fight no longer.

Joe's passive surrender to the law, and then to the gun and knife of Percy Grimm, may seem to be grossly inconsistent with his character as I have described it, but in fact his martyrdom is readily explicable in Horneyan terms. Every arrogant-vindictive type, as I have mentioned, harbors powerful self-effacing trends. They are part of the actual self that he is compelled to despise. They threaten him with helplessness, and they cast doubt on the "truth" of his solution, but they remain to tempt him with a means of obtaining the affection and acceptance that he was first denied and has since denied himself. Drawing on her psychoanalytic experience, Horney describes the frequent reaction of a patient whose vindictive trends are brought to light by analysis: "a period ensues when he feels altogether contemptible and helpless and tends to prostrate himself for the sake of being loved" [Neurosis]. This extreme response is, in a sense, paralleled by Joe's response to the fulfillment of his vindictive desires. Once he has succeeded in slaying all of his demons—the confining women, the threat of negritude, the spectre of his helplessness in a hostile world—Joe has carried his aggressive solution to its logical conclusion. He has achieved a palpable vindictive triumph, and like Horney's patients who suddenly turn against their own solutions, he now feels compelled to allow his submerged needs for love and approval to surface. The self-effacing shoulds that he has so brutally repressed and violated are now the source of a guilt that must be expiated. That Joe that we see shaving and combing his hair, preparing himself, the town says, like a bridegroom, for death, is a Joe who has satisfied his compulsion to make others suffer, and has been overcome by that hitherto submerged part of his personality that wishes suffering on itself and cannot allow itself to fight back. As we shall see, this sudden emergence of Joe's self-effacing trends is part of his creator's plan to elicit our sympathy for and identification with Joe, but first let us understand the psychological implications of his surrender.

The suffering that Joe undergoes during his "passion" and death is, it is clear, very real suffering indeed. Nevertheless, in the context of Faulkner's characterization, it is "neurotic" or "functional" suffering in that Joe seeks it out deliberately, and uses it with the apparent object of "dying on the doorstep" of the world that has abused him for so long. Functional suffering, a prominent aspect of self-effacing neurosis, has as its purpose the accusing of others and the excusing of oneself [Neurosis], and Joe's sudden switch from murderer to passive victim can be understood as a product of his need to do just that. He is reacting to the fulfillment of his drive for vindication in the same way that Horney's patients react to the vision of their own vindictiveness: by switching the emphasis onto himself as needy victim and sufferer in order to mollify those self-effacing shoulds that he has repressed for his entire adult life but never eradicated. Captured in Mottstown, Joe allows Halliday to hit him in the face, "acting like a nigger" (i.e., prostrating himself) for the first time, according to the town. He escapes, apparently only in order to increase his suffering, to hurry his martyrdom, and does not defend himself against Grimm even though he is carrying a loaded pistol. Faulkner describes his castration and death in a remarkable passage:

For a long moment he looked up at them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself, and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. It will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading and not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant.

Once again we are witness to the successful completion of the search for glory, but this time the reward is the crowning glory of martyrdom rather than vindictive triumph. This glory is bought with suffering rather than mastery, and it is shown to be a thing greatly to be desired. Those who have neglected and persecuted Joe, who have denied him love and understanding, are now never to lose the memory of his suffering, the image of his martyred face.

3

Thus far my analysis has been restricted to making psychological sense of Faulkner's portrait of Joe Christmas. It would appear that his character is psychologically explicable as that of a man whose horrendous childhood has caused him to behave in rigidly prescribed patterns—first as avenging angel, then as suffering martyr—patterns responsive not to objective reality, but to his unrealistic vision of his idealized self. But we are left with some questions. We have evaluated Joe's motives and behavior from an objective standpoint, but we have not evaluated them in the context of Light in August as a whole. How is the reader to view Joe's troubled life and ultimate martyrdom? With admiration, or sympathy, or with the amiable condescension of the sociologist? And what of the other characters in the novel, particularly what of Lena Grove and Byron Bunch? How does their story of birth and love and ongoing life relate to Joe's story of death and death-in-life? In other words, what does the guiding consciousness of Light in August want us to think about the characters and events of the novel?

As we shall see, this question is not easily answered. An analysis of the subtle rhetoric of Light in August reveals that the author that it implies is, like Joe Christmas, a being in conflict. Like the Joe we have observed, he is ultimately torn between a need to deny positive feelings and pursue triumph over the weak, and a need to compensate for this aggressive activity. In fact, we can find much rhetorical evidence for the theory that Joe's creator identifies with him and with his world view. Light in August is primarily an aggressive novel that seeks to compensate for its tendency to "move against" humanity by martyring its aggressive protagonist, and by making various mostly halfhearted and unsuccessful attempts to affirm the value of life and love.

We can begin our analysis of the implied author and his intentions by examining his relationship to his protagonist. As we have seen, he has painted in Joe a portrait of a very disturbed man. But instead of always seeing Joe for what he is, he seems at times to see him for what he would be, to mistake his idealized for his actual self, and particularly to overemphasize his role as victim and martyr as a way of excusing his aggression. As we shall see, this treatment of Joe is reflected in the thematic structure of Light in August as a whole.

Though it is quite rare in Faulkner's major works to encounter lines or descriptions that do not ring true to the characterizations of which they are a part, this does happen, it seems to me, in the case of Joe Christmas. Occasionally he is given a line to speak that strikes a false note in relation to the rest of his characterization. These lines seem designed to ask our participation in his irrational sense of injury, to encourage us to identify with him, and to prepare us to accept his "apotheosis" at the end.

For example, there is Joe's plaintive reaction to Bobbie's rejection of his proposal of marriage: "Why, I committed murder for her. I even stole for her." As Waggoner points out, the effect of this passage is sentimental because Faulkner seems to ask us to accept this assessment of the situation, to pity Joe for being betrayed, when, in fact, what he says is a lie. Joe killed McEachern, gleefully, for revenge, and he stole from Mrs. McEachern, not to get the money for Bobbie, because he could have had it for the asking, but to demonstrate his complete rejection of his foster mother and her way of being. But putting this unlikely line in Joe's mouth (his motives seem clear enough to him moments before), Joe's creator is asking us to play down Joe's victimization of others.

A similar situation occurs when Faulkner has Joe ask Joanna, after hearing the story of her ancestors, "'Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?'" Hitherto Joe's only contribution to brotherly love between the races has been to hate whites for being white and blacks for being black. And the Joe Christmas that Faulkner shows us would never have said those words—self-pity and humanism are most definitely not his style. Here, as in the jarring passage that describes Joe as being "sick for two years" after sleeping with an unsegregated prostitute, his creator is asking us to give more weight to Joe's distress over his racial ambiguity than it will bear. He does so, I think, in order to increase our sympathy for and involvement in Joe's plight.

This sentimentalization of Joe's role as victim culminates in his final martyrdom. As we have seen, Joe's "conversion" itself is psychologically explicable. He is driven from one neurotic solution to another by an overwhelming sense of guilt that is brought on by repeated and flagrant violations of his deeply buried but still active self-effacing trends. But in attempting to discover what the author of Light in August wants us to think of all this, we find that he seems to share in Joe's desires to accuse others and excuse himself through suffering, that he too sees Joe's life as justified by his end, that, in fact, he sometimes sees Joe as his idealized self, as a god.

There is much discussion among critics as to whether the parallels between Joe and Jesus Christ are meant to be ironic or not. It seems clear to me that they are not. The language used to describe Joe's death, the idiotic cruelty of Percy Grimm, the ugliness of the lynch mob, the sympathy due Mrs. Hines, the dignity of Joe: these are just a few of the things that encourage our positive identification of Joe with Jesus. The religious imagery surrounding Joe's death has been heavily documented. There are angels and halos; there are "slashed garments," and a wound to the body. The language used to describe Joe's death makes it obvious that he is to be identified with the Jesus who ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of His Father. When, on the geyser of "pent black blood" from his loins, Joe seems to "rise soaring into [the] memories forever and ever" of the men who are watching him; when his face is immortalized, "of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant," it becomes clear that his death is meant by his creator to justify all that has gone before, in fact, to accuse others and excuse Joe. Like that of Jesus, Joe's martyrdom is seen as willed and redemptive. The compulsions shown to have been set in motion by his childhood are now forgotten as he soars into our memories, purified and glorified by his suffering. Critics have found this apotheosis difficult to account for, and no wonder. As our psychological analysis of Joe's character allows us to see, it is possible for a man like Joe to feel driven to martyrdom, but highly unlikely that he should achieve such glorious results (based on fantasy, like all other manifestations of the neurotic search for glory, such attempts at martyrdom are unlikely to buy one the kind of eternal life granted to Joe). Joe's soaring departure is made possible not by the realities of his characterization, but by the tendency of Joe's creator to mistake Joe's idealized self for reality, and to manipulate his fictional world to honor Joe's neurotic bargains with fate.

The emphasis on Joe's role as victim and martyr is evidence of the partial identification of Joe's creator with his creation, an identification the reader is invited to share. Though the implied author of Light in August never addresses the reader directly, an analysis of some of the patterns of imagery in the novel and of the treatment of some of the characters other than Joe will reveal that the novel often asks the reader to participate in the same denial of "weakness" and search for "triumph" that govern Joe's life until the bench leg comes in contact with Roz Thompson's head.

It has often been pointed out that for Faulkner women represent that aspect of humanity which is most basically human: physical as opposed to intellectual, realistic as opposed to idealistic, enduring as opposed to vengeful, accepting as opposed to aggressive. In Horneyan terms, women in his novels are ordinarily seen as superior to men because they tend to embody the self-effacing values espoused by his humanist themes. But if we look closely at the treatment of women in Light in August, we find that instead of representing the "weaker" (that is to say more human, more accepting, less aggressive) aspects of humanity in a positive sense, they are presented as by and large the objects of squeamishness and contempt. Their physical selves, accepting and giving rather than moving against, are either malfunctioning or nauseating; their attempts to love or to be kind are generally awkward, ridiculous, and unsuccessful. In other words, the novel as a whole tends to share Joe Christmas's perspective on women rather than the perspective of the public Faulkner. In the novel, as in Joe's mind, they are associated with "muck," this four letter word referring not only to their association with food but to their sexuality and to their tendency to try to make positive human connections.

Here is what happens to you if you are a female character in Light in August. If you are past menopause you are asexual; you are ugly; you dress funny; you wear your hair in an unattractive "tight screw" at the back of your head, and your gestures of kindness or affection are "savage," "clumsy," even ridiculous. If you are young and do not have sex then you look "frozen and skinny," are driven to run off to Memphis where you can get what you need, have a nervous breakdown in church, and finally feel so guilty that you jump out a hotel window. If you are young and do have sex then maybe you are the "prone and abject" recipient of organized fourteen-year-old lust, or maybe you are unnaturally short and have great big hands "dead and pale as a piece of cooking meat," the outer signs of your "inner corruption of the spirit." Or maybe you are a "pinksmelling" wild-eyed young woman willing to destroy a child's life to keep your activities secret. Or just maybe you can give off the air of an unravished bride of quietness even while eight months pregnant and demonstrate your "courage and endurance" by pursuing across three states a man who does not want you and would not be worth catching even if your "slow time" did not make it seem highly improbable that you would do any such thing. But if you are a middle-aged woman who has sex, then you are in real trouble, because while a man's "sin" can be "healthy and normal," making love with you is like falling into a sewer. You will try to draw a man into the "black thick pool" of your sexuality. You will be afflicted with that ghastliest of infirmities, nymphomania, and will cast yourself about in wild poses and shout obscenities. You too look funny in your clothes, but underneath is a "rotten richness ready to flow into putrefaction at a touch." Eventually you will reach menopause and make a fool of yourself by suddenly thinking you are pregnant. Then you will lose all interest in sex and absurdly transfer your energies to a scheme to send your ignorant millhand lover to law school, that is before you go completely nuts and try to shoot him with an old pistol that does not work. Then you will get your throat slit and look funny lying on the ground for all the world to see with your head turned around completely backwards (if you'd been able to do that before, they say, maybe you wouldn't be doing it now). As Albert J. Guerard points out [in The Triumph of the Novel: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, 1972], "The misogynous imagination selects for its female victims appalling situations and punishments." These things do not happen to Joanna Burden by chance. They happen to her because her creator manipulates her world to make her appear ridiculous and contemptible. It would seem that the guiding consciousness of Light in August, far from setting himself to admire the "courage and endurance" of women, wishes to reject or deny or ridicule the messy humanity that they represent. Their sexuality in particular is shown to be the source of corruption, ugliness, stupidity, mean-spirited behavior, and bad smells.

To a lesser extent the blacks of the novel are also the objects of this compulsive rejection of all that is "weak" or "inferior" in humanity. It has not gone unnoticed that there are some blatantly racist descriptions in the novel, such as that which refers to the "vacuous idiocy" of "idle and illiterate" Negro nursemaids, or the "fumbling and timeless Negro fashion" of a black expectant father. But there is also a consistent pattern of imagery that places blacks in the messily human, and thus despicable, category of women; their alleged inferiority and tendency to connect with others (they seem to crowd together and are over and over again described as "fecund") qualifying them to be the recipients of the implied author's contempt. Like women, blacks are associated with smells and unpleasant enclosure. Freedman Town is like "the bottom of a thick black pit." This echo of the description of Joanna's sexuality is no accident; a walk here is like a return to "the lightless hot wet primogenitive Female" and, as we have seen, that is like a stroll through the sewer. Joe can hardly breathe lying next to his ebony carving of a common-law wife, and blacks are smelled before they are seen. The air around whites is "cold and hard," and, if they are male, presumably odor-free.

Just as Faulkner's public statements ask us to see Light in August as a celebration of womanhood, however, some elements of the novel ask us to see it as a sympathetic tract on the race question. The novel seems at times to ask the question so improbably attributed to Joe, "'Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?'" As we have seen, Faulkner's portrayal of Joe asks for our sympathy for the outsider, the "nigger," the victim of the lynch mob, the man unjustly hated because of the "curse" of his alleged black blood. But at the same time we are subtly asked to despise all those who do not pursue mastery and deny positive feelings, and thus the black race, condemned to an inferior position and prone to close associations, is seen as fumbling, stupid, and smelly.

A look at the positive imagery associated with aggression in the novel confirms our theory that it tends to encourage aggressive fantasy. When Samuel A. Yorks points out that in the world of Light in August it seems "better to be castrated than seduced" ["Faulkner's Women; The Peril of Mankind," Arizona Quarterly, No. 17, 1961], he is obliquely referring to the way the novel continually contrasts the admirably "clean" tendency to move against people or things, or to separate oneself from them, as opposed to the "messy" tendency to move toward them, to make physical or emotional connections.

When Joe violently removes his undergarment in a bizarre "streaking" episode, his right hand slides "fast and smooth," striking the remaining button a "light, swift blow." Then the dark air breathes "smoothly" around his male nakedness: it is "soft" and "cool." This is his answer to the "thick still black pool of more than water" that is the image for Joanna's frantic attempts to move toward him. This same contrast of phallic with womb-sewer imagery is encountered in the description of Joe's trip through the black section of town. Here Joe is the "lone telephone pole," connoting something "clean, hard, and dry," as Yorks points out, while, as we have seen, the black area where people are gathered closely together, presumably in the process of being "fecund," is like the womb, "lightless, hot, wet," like "the bottom of a thick black pit." The contrast also appears in the description of Joe's response to Bobbie's explanation of menstruation. Nauseated, he runs to the woods where he takes brief solace in the "hard trunks" of the trees, "branch shadowed, quiet, hardfeeling, hardsmelling, invisible," and then seems to see a row of misshapen urns (the shape of the womb, the functions of which are to give and receive rather than move against): "Each one was cracked and from each crack there issued something liquid, deathcolored, and foul." Naturally, Joe vomits. But then he buys a nice new rope with which to escape from the house at night, and the next time he sees Bobbie manfully hauls her off to the woods with no preliminaries.

In the description of Joe's childhood the imagery used in connection with McEachern and his cruelty towards Joe tends to be more positive than that connected with Mrs. McEachern's ineffective attempts to move toward him. Mr. McEachern is frequently described by terms like "hard" and "vigorous." He is "rocklike," indomitable. He smells of the "clean hard virile living leather" with which he beats Joe coolly, without heat or anger. Mrs. McEachern, on the other hand, is a "stiff caricature" when she reaches out her hand to Joe. She is "shapeless, a little hunched." She hovers, she fumbles, and she huddles, like some unattractive little bird. This imagery is not wasted on Longley, who refers to her "sickening attempts to make [Joe] as cringing as herself." It is Joe, of course, who accepts and models himself after his foster father and despises his foster mother because he cannot understand or believe in love, but the novel seems to lend some support to his choice.

Even in Percy Grimm's final pursuit of Joe we see that the imagery gives a positive connotation to aggression and a negative connotation to its opposite. Grimm's face is "rocklike," "bright." It has "that serene, unearthly luminousness of angels in church windows." The rest of the community, on the other hand, huddled together, look at "his tense hard young face," their own faces "blanched and gaped with round, toothed orifices." And Hightower, who frantically and ineffectively tries to give Joe aid, has "[a] bald head and [a] big pale face."

Light in August presents a world where the warm gesture, the act of giving or physical union, and the source of life itself are seen as unbeautiful, awkward, even "foul," while the tendency to move against others, or at least to maintain a "clean" and "hard" separateness, is invested over and over again with a certain beauty. Like Joe Christmas, the consciousness that has created this world seems to have a compulsive need to deny the reality and efficacy of human bonds, and to indulge in pleasurable fantasies of triumph and separation. The novel also presents a world where human physical and emotional ties are warmly, if a bit condescendingly, accepted, but though this seems designed to compensate for the strain of aggression that we have been observing, it is undercut in various ways and does not do so effectively.

I am not the first to notice that the thematic impact of Byron and Lena is reduced by their creator's tendency to make light of their crises and motivations, to place himself and the reader at a distance from them for the sake of comic effect. Though Lena, for example, seems to be presented as an important thematic force when she draws Hightower into life through the birth of her baby, this impression is undercut when we see her reduced to a comic figure (in the Bergsonian as well as the conventional sense) as she mechanically resumes her pursuit of Lucas after he jumps out the window. "'Now I got to get up again,'" she says out loud to herself. And in the scenes that portray a Lena who could not resist the callow Burch rejecting the advances of Byron, her devoted protector, it is obvious that the implied author is more concerned with humor than with theme. The humor is very good, and Lord knows it is welcome, but it has a rather negative effect on Lena's status as a redeemer. The qualities that she represents—loyalty, endurance, an accepting spirit—are a little hard to take seriously. Her loyalty is misplaced, her endurance seems to be the result of a one-track mind, and her accepting spirit begins to seem primarily comic and mechanical, as she continues to ignore the negative aspects of her situation and extol the virtues of traveling. There is much to be said for Lena's enjoyment of her situation, and much to be appreciated in her characterization, but there is also in the novel at least a partial denial of the positive feelings that she represents, a denial which coincides with the strain of aggression that we have been tracing. Her creator is obviously smitten with her, but he demonstrates a certain contempt for her as well. Her femininity and fertility are the source of jokes, and her treatment of Byron puts her in a category with other women of loose morals and bad taste in men.

The strain of aggression is even more clearly at work in the novel's treatment of Byron Bunch. The original description of Byron is flavored with sentimentality. He works six days a week, not for money or pleasure, but because working is somehow the thing to do, and because it keeps him out of "trouble." On the seventh day, not content to go to the local church of his choice, or even to ride two hours to a different one like McEachern, he rides all night Saturday and all night Sunday in order to lead the choir at an all day country church service, only to be on hand with "clean overalls and shirt" when the mill whistle blows Monday morning. He eschews "meanness" to the extent that he does not even know who the local moonshiner is, and his only friend is an ex-minister who is neglected and persecuted by the rest of the town. He stumbles on this man's doorstep every time he goes to visit him until, transformed by love and a newly found decision-making ability, he is able on one occasion to stride right in. This portrait is sentimental because it is based on exaggeration and cliche. Unlike the Faulkner of Snopes who was able to create in V. K. Ratliff a "good" man of many dimensions, a character who gets right up and walks off the page, the implied author of Light in August seems only able to define a healthy lack of aggression in a character by relying on stereotype.

As Slatoff points out [in Quest For Failure: A Study of Faulkner, 1960], Faulkner allows Byron a brief gain in stature (as he arranges for Lena's lying-in and defies the Mrs. Grundies of Jefferson, he stands up straight and has a "new air born somewhere between assurance and defiance"). But in the final chapter he is greatly reduced. The furniture dealer, rather a wonderful narrator, describes Byron as "the kind of fellow you wouldn't see at first glance if he was alone by himself in the bottom of a empty concrete swimming pool," and says it is impossible to imagine "any woman knowing that they had ever slept with him, let alone having anything to show folks to prove it." He "trots" into the store and, over-eager, comes out with so many bags that, little as he is, he can hardly see over them. He is a "durn little cuss" about to "burst out crying" because of sexual frustration. He is not only rejected by Lena, but is hoisted out of the truck by her as if he were a six year old. I submit that in these scenes Byron's creator has castrated him just about as effectively as Percy Grimm castrates Joe Christmas. His thematic role as a man who accepts and involves himself in humanity is seriously undercut. He becomes first and foremost a "little" man, cute and amusing, but eunuchlike and ineffective.

We have seen that the desire for aggressive triumph and the need to deny positive feelings play important roles in the guiding consciousness of Light in August. But we have also seen that the canonization of the aggressive protagonist (with whom the implied author seems to identify) is bought with his suffering, with his ultimate assumption of the role of passive victim. And we have seen that various attempts (mostly half-hearted or unsuccessful) are made throughout the novel to portray the importance of positive feelings. What can we hypothesize about the implied author in relation to these conflicting aspects of the novel?

It seems to me that the occasional attempts to espouse nonaggressive values in Light in August are meant to serve the same purpose for the novel as a whole as Joe's "passion" and death serve in relation to his character. By showing Joe's assumption of a self-effacing value system at the end, and by closing the book with Hightower's conversion and the coziness of the furniture dealer's narration, the implied author is attempting to compensate for the intense aggressiveness of the novel. Guerard attributes much of the appeal of Faulkner's work to "highly liberated fantasy." It is my view that the central fact about Light in August, its source of appeal, the quality that makes it fairly hum with forbidden energy, is its "highly liberated" use of aggressive fantasy. Joe may be made to wonder why the blacks in the cabin are "of their brother afraid;" Hightower may come to see that he was wrong to neglect his wife; Mrs. Armstid may demonstrate the fundamental generosity of her kind by giving away her egg money; but these moments do not define the essence of Light in August. It would be more accurate to say that they seek to compensate for it. The essence of the novel is found in the disturbing and vicious chapters on Joe's affair with Joanna Burden, in the portrayal of his stand-off with McEachern and his cruel treatment of Mrs. McEachern, in Doc Hines's excruciating narration of his attempts to destroy "God's abomination," in the image of the bloody butcher knife in Percy Grimm's hand. These passages, permeated with a consciousness that is drawn again and again to the aggressive vision, appeal not to our reason, our social conscience, or our admiration for Nobel-Prize-speech sentiment, but to our less wholesome impulses.