SOURCE: Bleikasten, André. “Light in August: The Closed Society and Its Subjects.” In New Essays on “Light in August,” edited by Michael Millgate, pp. 81-102. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Bleikasten explores Light in August in light of Faulkner's depiction of Southern society in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on his treatment of outsiders by the community.]

Until the subject of a tyrant's will
Became, worse fate, the abject of his own

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

As has often been pointed out, none of the main characters of Light in August belongs to the community of Jefferson.¹ They are all outsiders, if not outcasts, living in isolation, and in sharp contrast to most of Faulkner's earlier and later books, the family here fails to serve its purpose as mediating agency between individual and society.

“The Community and the Pariah,” the title of Cleanth Brooks's classic study of the novel, aptly summarizes its central theme.² And Brooks is equally right to call attention to the specific nature of the social environment in which the destinies of its characters are acted out: a traditional rural society, such as could still be found in the Deep South of the twenties and thirties—a society or, to use Brooks's term, a “community,” a tightly knit social organization with something like an “organic” character, whose stability is guaranteed by unanimous acceptance of inherited values and unquestioning compliance with established cultural codes. Brooks, however, is not content with underscoring the community's pull and power; he celebrates it as a “positive norm,”³ the ideal standard by which all individual actions ought to be judged. The causes of Joe Christmas's or Joanna Burden's sufferings are then not far to seek: if both lead miserable lives and die violent deaths, it is essentially because, in departing from the social roles prescribed for them, they have forfeited their right to membership in the community. Conversely, if both Hightower and Byron Bunch are eventually “redeemed,” it is because they have found their way back into the communal fold. In his reading of the novel Brooks refers several times to the characters' state of “alienation,” but he never seriously considers the possibility that alienation might originate, at least partially, in some flaw of the social fabric itself. To him the outsiders and outcasts of Light in August are primarily deviants, and his assumptions about deviance are those that have been held by conservative social thinkers from Plato to Parsons: deviance proceeds from anomie, that is, lawlessness, a lack of temperance and restraint, a collapse of personal morality.⁴ Which is to say that, whatever the circumstances may be, conformity is right, rebellion wrong; in the last resort, the wretched of the earth have only themselves to blame for their wretchedness.

There is little in Light in August, however, to warrant such a reading. Admittedly, one can find decent people in Jefferson as everywhere, and not all outsiders are brutally rejected by the community. Thus, even though Lena Grove has transgressed its sexual code, everybody takes her in and treats her with kindness. But the benevolence accorded to the pregnant girl should not make one forget Hightower's beating up by the KKK or Christmas's murder and mutilation by Percy Grimm. Extremist groups like the KKK and fanatics like Grimm may not be typical; still, they do the community's dirty work, and act as the unofficial agents of collective violence. Technically, the assassination of Christmas is perhaps no “lynching,”⁵ but it is condoned beforehand by the mob hysteria that sets in as soon as it is rumored that a white woman has been murdered.⁶ The community, then, to put it mildly, cannot be exonerated of all guilt. Even if it seems to disavow its self-appointed defenders and avengers, it supports their misdeeds by its cowardice and sanctions them by its consenting silence.

In Light in August, as in most of Faulkner's novels, the individual and the collective are inextricably entangled. Like all great novelists, Faulkner was well aware that individuality and society were always locked in a relationship of reciprocity: no one, not even the outsider, is outside the jurisdiction of society; we are all within society, for no sooner are we born than society is within us and starts to pattern our lives.

Whenever a conflict arises, it is therefore bound to become a war on two fronts: the enemy is both without and within. Christmas's destiny is a case in point. The conflict he is engaged in is at once an open contest with the community and a psychomachia, a long, fierce struggle of self against self, and it is one of the novel's supreme ironies that the origin of this dual conflict lies not at all in actual race difference but in fantasies—both public and private—about race. Christmas is not a black man pitted against the white community; he probably is not even a mulatto. There is no factual evidence for his mixed blood: his being partly black is sheer conjecture, and it should be remembered that the first person to conceive the hypothesis and to convert it into a certainty is Doc Hines, the rabid racist who happens to be Christmas's grandfather.⁷ Christmas's cruel secret is the unresolved riddle of his birth. His is, according to Faulkner himself, “the most tragic condition a man could find himself in—not to know what he is and to know that he will never know.”⁸ He does not know, but he often thinks he knows; he believes because he has been made to believe.⁹ As a child, at the Memphis orphanage, he became aware of himself as an object of contempt and hatred through the other children's taunting voices, through the dietitian's invectives, and above all through Hines's watchful gaze.¹⁰ Under more favorable circumstances, discovering himself to be different might have been a normal stage in the individuation process, perhaps even a positive step toward autonomy; for Christmas, though, it marked the beginning of his schizoid sense of himself as self-estranged and heralded a future of isolation, alienation, and fragmentation. And once the judgment passed upon him by hostile others had been internalized, he would never stop loathing himself, consumed both by the white racist's hatred of the “nigger” and the black man's hatred of his white oppressor.

To have an identity: to be one; to have two identities: to be no one. Christmas is a walking oxymoron and its negation: both white and black, and neither. He might choose, he could “pass,” yet he chooses not to choose, refuses to settle for either of the ready-made identity patterns urged upon him by Southern society. Were he able to merge or transcend them, he could achieve a self beyond race truly his own, but the feat cannot be accomplished and the dice are loaded anyway. So all he can do is to cling to his refusal, to persevere in his no-saying, to affirm what is left of his humanity through repudiation and revolt.¹¹

In delving into the depths of Christmas's memory Faulkner enables the reader to trace his tragedy back to its origin in childhood and youth. Light in August, however, though largely focused on the ravages of racism in an individual psyche, does not leave its public dimension out of account. Christmas's journey into darkness starts in an orphanage under the petrifying stare of a paranoid grandfather; when it reaches its final stage, there is once again an evil eye, but this time it is a collective one: the “organ” of the lynch mob gathered around Joanna's burning house.¹² Between the “ordinary” racism of the white community, most often latent but easily reactivated in times of tension, and the virulent, never abating racism of men like Hines or Grimm, the difference is at best one of degree, and little is needed to cancel the difference. Racism in Jefferson is a chronic and endemic disease, to the contagion of which no one, whether white or black, is totally immune.

Yet, just as Christmas's split self has been generated by an old man's manic suspicion, racism rests on nothing but preconceptions and misconceptions, and draws its power from a shared fiction. In the course of his erratic career Christmas is victimized by various people, but all of his victimizers pay allegiance to the same myths, and Christmas, the victim, is himself trapped within them. It could hardly be otherwise: his standards are all white standards, the only ones that have ever been available to him. Race hatred was instilled in him by his grandfather; McEachern, his foster father, taught him the harsh virtues of white Protestant virility and a solid contempt for women. Their teaching has made him what he is: a racist, a sexist, and a Puritan. Mentally and emotionally, he is indeed a white Southern male—or would be, did he not believe himself to be tainted with blackness.

What makes Christmas's position untenable is that he feels simultaneously imprisoned in and excluded from his white fathers' value system. However stubborn his desire to refuse, however heroic his will to resist, his entire being is caught in the social machinery, and at the end, inexorably, as in Kafka's Penal Colony, the death sentence will be inscribed on the prisoner's flesh. As Christmas himself comes to realize toward the close of his desperate search/flight, he has never been able to break out of the “circle” of his predetermined fate, and even his death is a false exit, since his crime—the slaying of a white woman—and its punishment—his being killed and castrated—provide the long awaited opportunity to coerce him into a recognizable identity and make him play a repertoried role. In death, as scapegoat, Christmas has at last become of service to the community. And, through the sacrificial magic of atonement, he has at last become one.

It is through the very paradox of his predicament that Christmas develops in the novel into a highly emblematic figure. Not that he is in any way typical in social or ethnic terms. But his eccentricity takes us to the very core of the Southern experience. Christmas is anything but representative of the South, yet in his single and singular fate he embodies its ambiguities and contradictions, acts out its conflicts, exemplifies in almost allegorical fashion the principle of division that both holds it together and threatens to tear it apart.

In much the same way Joanna Burden, for all her ties with the North, is used to explore some of the hidden recesses of the Southern mind.¹³ Besides, Joe and Joanna, already twinned by their first names, are very much alike. Joe has known neither of his parents and Joanna bows under the “burden” of a family tradition, but they share an abiding obsession with race, transmitted to them at a very early age and closely associated for both with the indelible memory of a father and/or a grandfather. These figures are, in turn, surprisingly similar. Though alleged to be from New England, Joanna's grandfather Calvin is in his theological fanaticism a worthy match for Doc Hines: both regard the black man as the accursed of God; the abolitionist's militant Negrophilia and the white supremacist's demented Negrophobia are antithetical rationalizations of the same racist delirium. Furthermore, if Joe's father, according to rumor, might have been a Mexican, Joanna has been named after Juana, her father's first Mexican wife, who looked exactly like Evangeline, her father's French Huguenot mother. In the chronicle of the Burdens, as recounted by Joanna to Joe, these women and their progeny are evoked as if they belonged to another race, and the physical contrast between Calvin and his son Nathaniel is heavily emphasized: “the tall, gaunt, Nordic man, and the small, dark, vivid child who had inherited his mother's build and coloring, like people of two different races” (229). Even more revealing are Calvin's outraged remarks when he sees Juana's son for the first time: “‘Another damn black Burden,’ he said. ‘Folks will think I bred to a damn slaver. And now he's got to breed to one too’ … ‘Damn, lowbuilt black folks: low built because of the weight of the wrath of God, black because of the sin of human bondage staining their blood and flesh,” (234). Prurient Puritans, the male Burdens were obviously attracted to “dark” ladies and beset with the exotic sin of miscegenation. No wonder then that Joanna, their female descendant, should repeat the pattern in reverse in becoming the mistress of a man whom she believes to be a mulatto and who may remind her—incestuously?—of her half-brother, shot at the age of twenty “over a question of negro voting” (235).

Like Joe's, Joanna's initiation into evil took place in early childhood. She was (re)born into guilt on the day her father took her to the grave of her grandfather and her half-brother to invest her with the curse of the white race:

Remember this. Your grandfather and brother are lying there, murdered not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race before your grandfather or your brother or me or you were even thought of. A race doomed and cursed to be forever and ever a part of the white race's doom and curse for its sins. Remember that. His doom and his curse. Forever and ever. Mine. Your mother's. Yours, even though you are a child. The curse of every white child that ever was born and that ever will be born. None can escape it.

(p. 239)

Words inflict wounds. Both testament and prophecy, the paternal pronouncement marks Joanna forever. There could hardly be a better illustration of the performative power of language. The father's words have conjured up a world of division and guilt, and for Joanna their magic is to last to the very end; their evil enchantment will never be dispelled:

I had seen and known negroes since I could remember. I just looked at them as I did at rain, or furniture, or food or sleep. But after that I seemed to see them for the first time not as people, but as a thing, a shadow in which I lived, we lived, all white people, all other people. I thought of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white, with the black shadow already falling upon them before they drew breath. And I seemed to see the black shadow in the shape of a cross. And it seemed like the white babies were struggling, even before they drew breath, to escape from the shadow that was not only upon them but beneath them too, flung out like their arms were flung out, as if they were nailed to the cross. I saw all the little babies that would ever be in the world, the ones not yet even born—a long line of them with their arms spread, on the black crosses.

(p. 239)

The father's speech is followed immediately by the daughter's bleak vision of universal and endless agony. But, ironically enough, the crucified child is first of all Joanna herself, nailed by her own father on the cross of a triple identity, a triple filiation. Through the baptismal rite on the ancestral grave she has entered simultaneously the family line, the white Southern community, and the communion of the damned, her fate sealed once and for all by the decree of three blended voices: the actual, living voice of her father, the posthumous voice of her grandfather, and, lending absolute authority to both, the remote overvoice of the heavenly Father.

With Faulkner, the Father—especially the Dead Father—is always the one who names, places, marks, the one who casts the spell, whether through his voice or his eyes.¹⁴ Like so many of Faulkner's doomed characters, both Joanna and Joe testify in their ultimate helplessness to the Father's irresistible power, and the identity impressed upon the former is hardly more viable than the latter's nonidentity: fractured and fraught with guilt from the start, marked out for suffering and disaster. Joanna will never escape from the “black shadow,” nor will Joe ever cease to perceive himself through the hate-filled eyes of a white. There is nothing metaphysical or theological about Faulknerian predestination: it is all a matter of evil utterances and evil eyes, of human, all too human predictions and previsions.

Joe's and Joanna's encounter is the fortuitous but fatal collision of two lives under the same malediction, their affair the inevitable working out of two complementary designs. By the end of their stormy relationship Joe has become for Joanna the “shadow” and the “cross”; for Joe, Joanna ends up as an ominous reincarnation of his first persecutor, “cold, dead white, fanatical, mad” (262). The time is ripe then for their final confrontation; the process of mutual destruction is now to come to its predictable end. When Joanna, recalling her father's speech and identifying with her fathers' will, insists on confining Joe within his mythic “Negro” identity, Joe has no other course but to kill her.

Even in the earlier “sewer” phase, however, Joanna in “the wild throes of nymphomania” would call him “Negro! Negro! Negro!” (245). Race and sex are at stake in the liaison from first to last, and they appear as correlate issues throughout the narrative of Christmas's life and death. Again. cherchez l'enfant: “You little nigger bastard!” (114), the dietitian hisses in fury, dragging the five-year-old boy from behind the curtain where he had hidden to eat her toothpaste while she was making love with a young doctor. The toothpaste episode is the “primal scene” in the course of which Joe's sense of blackness gets enmeshed for the first time with the temptations and terrors of sex. Henceforth womanhood, food, and sexuality will be joined with his racial obsession in a single knot of guilt.¹⁵ A pattern has been set for Joe's whole sexual career: of his successive encounters with women, from his failed initiation with a young black prostitute through his affair with Bobbie to his involvement with Joanna, there is scarcely one that does not end in similar fashion with extreme bewilderment and violent repudiation. As an adult, Joe cannot make love to a white woman without telling her about his black blood, and the idea of a white woman consenting to sleep with a black man is as unbearable to him as to any white racist. It takes two policemen to prevent him from killing a white prostitute for her indifference to his blackness, and her attitude upsets him so deeply that after the incident he stays “sick” for two years (212). Conversely, having chosen to live “as man and wife with a woman who resembled an ebony carving,” he is unable to share her bed without “his whole being [writhing] and [straining] with physical outrage and spiritual denial” (212). At each encounter, sexual difference is exacerbated by (presumed) racial difference. Always the antagonist, Joe feels black with a white woman and white with a black one. Sexual intercourse is to him twice cursed and twice tabooed, and so experienced each time as a monstrous mating, a kind of reciprocal rape bound to end in either nausea or murderous fury.

In Yoknapatawpha County sexism and racism go hand in hand. Luminous Lena notwithstanding, Woman and “Negro” alike appear throughout most of Light in August as carriers of strangeness and disorder, as uncanny, menacing figures of radical otherness, and they appear as such not only to the white male characters in the novel, but also, albeit much more ambiguously, to the reader. Even though Christmas's story is enclosed by the bright circle of Lena's journey, Light in August is indeed a tale of “darkness,”¹⁶ and its haunting rhetoric of corruption, with its Hawthornian dark/light imagery and its rich array of liquid metaphors (pools, pits, sewers, swamps, morasses), invariably refers back to the other race and/or the other sex, and suggests over and over again the disquieting closeness of an abysmal blackness in which both are secret sharers. The supreme horror, the ultimate abomination, is therefore the “womanshenegro” (147): blackness at its thickest and foulest, blackness with a vengeance.

Nowhere in the novel is this fantasmal equivalence of femininity and negritude as flagrant as in the scene at Freedman Town recounted at the end of chapter 5, just before the long retrospective sequence opening in the next chapter. Christmas's nocturnal visit to the Negro section of Jefferson is his descent into hell, an apposite mise en abîme of his whole life as well as a prefiguration of his imminent death:

As from the bottom of a thick black pit he saw himself enclosed by cabinshapes … as if the black life, the black breathing had compounded the substance of breath so that not only voices but moving bodies and light itself must become fluid and accrete slowly from particle to particle, of and with the now ponderable night inseparable and one.

(p. 107)

Darkness here has conquered everything and everybody. Even light has been absorbed into the opaque and fluid substance of the night, and for Christmas the night, filled with “the bodiless fecundmellow voices of negro women” (107), soon turns into a nightmare, the nightmare of “the lightless hot wet primogenitive Female” (107), which threatens to engulf his precarious manhood.

Christmas then runs up the hill, “out of the black hollow” to “the cold hard air of white people” (107). Yet the dark pit from which he flees in revulsion and terror, as if it were “the original quarry, abyss itself” (108), is described as a place of teeming fertility, and the voices he hears there are the mellow murmuring voices of primal motherhood. But to Christmas the (m)other's tongue is an alien idiom, “a language not his” (107), which he cannot and will not understand and listen to, because it speaks the unspeakable, the “other” without a name.¹⁷ Like all male characters in the novel, Christmas fears and hates the raw powers of life embodied by the “primogenitive Female”: life is bearable only to the extent that it is “manshaped” (107).

Life at its enigmatic source is disorderly, random, unpredictable. Hence the male strategies of containment, division, and control and the establishment of a repressive, male-made, and male-centered social order founded on the subjection of women to men and blacks to whites. Hence also the need for an ideology—or, if you prefer, a mythology—capable of investing maleness and whiteness with a measure of legitimacy. In Light in August the most vociferous spokesman of racist and sexist ideology is Doc Hines, yet nearly everybody subscribes to its basic tenets: only the white man can claim the privileges of full and sovereign humanity; he alone is entitled to lay down the Law. Women and blacks, on the other hand, the dangerous representatives of that which exceeds and negates all representation, are assigned to an inferior essence, and so are quite “naturally” destined to occupy subordinate positions in the social structure.

Such is the dominant discourse, and Faulkner allows us to measure its effects, to see how it works, how it warps, and how it kills. Count the corpses: Milly Hines bled to death by her own father, Hightower's wife driven to suicide, Joanna slain and beheaded, Christmas shot and emasculated—three women and one “nigger.” Their tragic deaths are eloquent testimony to the murderous violence of Southern ideology; yet, as we have already seen, its everyday ravages, though less visible and more insidious, are no less appalling: crippled minds, split selves, destruction from within. Christmas is no doubt the most exemplary case of self-division and self-laceration, but just as he wavers between his racial identities, so Joanna switches back and forth between her sexual identities. At the beginning of their affair, Christmas is impressed by, perhaps even secretly attracted to, her “mantrained muscles” (221), her “mantrained habit of thinking” (221-2), and deeply perplexed by the “almost manlike yielding of [her] surrender” (221). Even more stubbornly than she resists her outside aggressor, Joanna resists her own femininity, denying her flesh and sex in the very act of surrender, inviolate in violation, evincing that “imperviousness” to experience and change that in Faulkner's fiction is generally the index of masculine “innocence.” Even in her second “phase,” when succumbing to the filth and fury of seemingly naked lust, her “dual personality” (221) persists, for what she then seeks is not so much erotic gratification as the final, inexpiable transgression of the twofold—racial and sexual—taboo, which will ensure her damnation. Her mind keeps hovering above the obscene spectacle of the sinning flesh like a horrified voyeur, her body being no more acknowledged as her own in debauchery than it was in chastity.¹⁸

Joanna is at war with her womanhood as Christmas is with his blackness. For neither can there be acceptance of otherness within self. Subjection or abjection is the only alternative.

Masculine standards, white standards: tracing identical boundaries, serving identical purposes, they are the pillars of the power system, known as the Law, which governs the community and to which every one of its members is summoned to submit. And woe to the offenders: sooner or later they will be dismembered—not only ostracized but broken apart, body and soul.

For once, the hackneyed phrase “dominant ideology” seems perfectly appropriate. Southern ideology, however, has yet another, more official component: Puritanism,¹⁹ ideological discourse at its most articulate and most intimidating, the common idiom by means of which the community defines and vindicates its priorities, and whose authority is the more undisputed as it is assumed to be derived from divine transcendence itself. Indeed, whenever racist or sexist prejudice is spelled out, as it is by Doc Hines, McEachern, and Joanna's father and grandfather, the rhetoric assumes at once the harshly prophetic accents of Old Testament eloquence, and the final justification for any belief or behavior is nearly always theological. The rantings of backwoods fanatics like Hines can, of course, be readily dismissed as crude travesties of true Christianity and even as debased versions of its Calvinistic variant. The point, though, is that no one in Jefferson (with the partial and paradoxical exceptions of Hightower, the renegade Presbyterian minister, and of Byron Bunch, Faulkner's triumphant comic rebel, the only male character not irremediably locked in his cultural conditioning, and therefore capable of learning from experience) is able to express ideas on moral, social, or racial matters outside the framework of ingrained religious concepts. Puritanism imposes itself as an all but exclusive way of thinking and speaking, and insofar as it filters and controls people's thoughts and words, it patterns their very lives, netting them in its rigid code of prescriptions and prohibitions, requiring strict observance of its norms, and calling for ruthless punishment whenever the latter are violated. A collective neurosis as all cultures are, the Puritan culture dramatized in Faulkner's novel originates in and rests upon repression. What sets it apart is that the amount of repression exacted is exceptionally high, the neurosis exceptionally severe. Based on the presumption of humanity's innate depravity, Puritan morality stresses the need to discipline the body and mortify the flesh so as to ward off temptation. Flesh is filth, sex is sin, or, as Hines puts it, “Bitchery and abomination” (341). Life, for the Puritan, can only be life in death and for death, and for Joanna, the martyr of Calvinism, and Christmas, the Puritan malgré lui, it is indeed nothing else.

With the exposure and denunciation of Puritanism as life-negating, we are, of course, on fairly familiar ground. Light in August, however, goes well beyond the by now commonplace equation of Puritanism with sexual repression. For if it leaves us in no doubt as to the debilitating effects of the Puritan ethos on individuals, it allows us as well to detect the economic uses of repression: it is not simply a matter of subduing bodies in order to save souls; the sexual energies deflected from their natural goals are destined to become socially productive through work.

Simon McEachern, Joe Christmas's Presbyterian foster father, is in this respect the key figure: work is one of the articles of his faith; his is the Protestant work ethic in all its rigor, but also with its typical sense of ownership. In fact, his relations to other persons are all patterned on those of owner to owned. On arriving at the orphanage, he looks at the five-year-old Joe with “the same stare with which he might have examined a horse or a second hand plow” (133) and takes delivery of him as though he were a mere commodity. Once he has adopted him, he treats him like an object to be fashioned at will by its possessor. True, McEachern is also a man of duty, ready to assume responsibility for his possessions, and so pledges himself to take care of the child as he has done so far of his wife, his cattle, and his fields. The adoption, for him, is ruled by a businesslike mutual agreement, and he informs Joe without delay of what he takes to be its terms:

You will find food and shelter and the care of Christian people. … And the work within your strength that will keep you out of mischief. For I will have you learn soon that the two abominations are sloth and idle thinking, the two virtues are work and the fear of God.

(p. 135)

In teaching Joe the Presbyterian catechism, McEachern will do his best—and worst—to beat these virtues into his recalcitrant mind. However, if the boy must be taught the prophylactic virtue of toil, it is equally important for his foster father that he should be given proper training for his future tasks. Joe is his putative son, after all, who some day will inherit his property. Hence the gift of the heifer, a highly pedagogic gesture intended to teach the boy “the responsibility of possessing, owning, ownership” as well as “foresight and aggrandisement” (153). Yet once again McEachern's pedagogy fails: Joe sells the cow to buy himself a new suit. Had he sold it for a profit, McEachern would have forgiven him; what he cannot condone, however, is that Joe has sold it for his pleasure or, more precisely, for “whoring” (154). The sin is the more unpardonable in that it combines waste with lechery. Sexual morality and economic morality are the two sides of the same coin. To McEachern as to all Puritans, gratuitous expenditure and instant sensuous gratification are anathema; work, thrift, the pursuit of profit, and the accumulation of wealth, on the other hand, are approved of as intrinsically virtuous. Renounce the pleasures of the flesh, work hard, and get rich ad majorem Dei gloriam: such are the major commandments of McEachern's religion. It owes at least as much to Benjamin Franklin as to Calvin.

Sober manners, stern self-control, coldness in interpersonal relations, devotion to work, thrift, and gain—all these features remind one of the “worldly asceticism” that Max Weber regarded as essential to the rise of capitalism.²⁰ And in this connection one might also note the many hints in the novel at what Weber called the “religious foundations”²¹ of Protestant asceticism. In Light in August religious imagery is pervasive, and never so abundant as in the chilling scenes of Joe's indoctrination by McEachern:

[The boy] was looking straight ahead, with a rapt, calm expression like a monk in a picture.

(p. 140)

Save for surplice he might have been a Catholic choir boy, with for nave the looming and shadowy crib. …

(p. 140)

Then he returned to the bed, carrying the empty tray as though it were a monstrance and he the bearer, his surplice the cutdown undergarment which had been bought for a man to wear.

(p. 145)

The boy's body might have been wood or stone; a post or a tower upon which the sentient part of him mused like a hermit, contemplative and remote with ecstasy and selfcrucifixion.

(p. 150)

Hieratic postures, sacerdotal garments: it is as if the stark simplicity of the Presbyterian catechesis were given the lie by the ceremonious formality of Catholic liturgy. The immediate purpose of this imagery is no doubt to underscore the disturbing ritualistic quality of McEachern's and Joe's sadomasochistic relationship, yet there are other characters in the novel who are likened to monks and hermits and thus bring to mind the monastic practices of another age. Once again, Faulkner plays on contrasts and continuities, suggests the permanence, across centuries, of cultural traditions, and points to the recurrence of identical types of behavior. Whatever the differences between the mystical asceticism of early Christianity and the secular asceticism of Puritan America, they both bespeak the same compulsive urge to raise mind above matter, soul above flesh, the same monstrous pride in the guise of humility.

Puritan asceticism turns out to be yet another detour and disease of desire. What is repressed returns and takes revenge. Pain changes places with pleasure, and it is in violence, spontaneous or ritualized, individual or collective, that the Puritan seeks the “ecstasy” he is forbidden to experience otherwise:

Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying; catastrophe too, the violence identical and apparently inescapable And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another?

(p. 347)

In Hightower's thoughts—which one would be tempted to suspect if they did not seem to have the narrator's approval²²—Puritanism is explicitly accused of being the main cause of violence and suffering. Christ's sacrifice on the cross is no longer associated with the glad tidings of redemption: “crucifixion” has become an ironic paradigm of the torments men inflict on themselves and on others.

On Sunday evening, at twilight, sitting once again at his window, Hightower is listening to the music which comes to him from the church where he once used to preach:

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.

(p. 347)

This is the music we listen to in Light in August: a sinister celebration of death inspired by a religion of death. Whether in writing the novel Faulkner intended to indict Christianity or at any rate Protestantism remains debatable. For all we know, he was by no means hostile to Christian religion, and a judicious appraisal of his fictional treatment of religious matters would obviously require a good deal of circumspection and tact. One can hardly fail to be struck, however, by the utter fierceness of the attack in the two passages just quoted. Nietzsche at once comes to mind, and the impassioned critique of “ascetic ideals” in his Genealogy of Morals.²³ Faulkner, a Nietzschean? Certainly not, and yet when writing Light in August he was perhaps not far from sharing Nietzsche's assumption that in essence all religions were “systems of cruelty.”

Puritanism, sexism, racism. What joins them is obviously more than ideological kinship: a structural homology, an identical functioning.²⁴

Each of them generates an order by way of distinctions and disjunctions. Thus Puritanism, in accordance with the converging traditions of Christianity and Platonic idealism, reasserts the old dualistic patterns of Western thinking—reality and ideality, matter and spirit, body and soul—and radicalizes them in terms of the Calvinistic division of humanity into the elect and the reprobate. Sexism likewise takes advantage of sexual difference to disjoin masculine from feminine, and racism of a difference in skin color to separate white from black. The disjoining is, of course, anything but neutral. It is a matter of sorting out, of identifying, categorizing, and classifying. Its purpose is the production of a workable taxonomy, which in turn will lead to a mandatory hierarchy of values.

One divides to oppose: ideal versus real, male versus female, white versus black. One term in the binary opposition is always valued over the other. Whereas ideality, masculinity, and whiteness are exalted, their opposites are abased. To divide is to pass judgment, to name the categories of good and evil, to assign them to fixed locations, and to draw between them boundaries not to be crossed. On the good side, inside, the clear, clean, orderly space of all that is valuable; on the other, outside, the alien, enemy territories of darkness and disorder, the abject kingdom of evil.

To enforce these divisions in society and ensure their maintenance, it is important that they should be guaranteed by solid barriers blocking off all circulation, all communication between what has been ordered to be kept apart. A society founded on rigid divisions and arbitrary exclusions can only be a closed society,²⁵ regulated by immutable taboos and demanding from its members total subjection to its law. Personal identity is never in any circumstances a mere matter of individual preference, but in a closed society there is no choice at all. Identities are defined and distributed according to the prevalent codes: everyone must be tied to a class, a race, a gender. To have a clear-cut identity is a social imperative. Either/or: male or female, white or black, elect or non-elect. Above or below.

Small wonder, then, that any sign of ambiguity, any swerve from the straight path of conformity, should be interpreted as a potential threat to the established order. Nothing is more detestable and more alarming to such a society than the in-between, the intermingled, the impure—that which blurs its neat fictions and undermines its dogmatic certainties. Characteristically, in the community of Jefferson, all illicit contacts are perceived as contagions, all breaches of rule as defilements, all punishments as purgations, and the threat posed to it by such figures as Hightower, Joanna, and Christmas is indeed that of their ambiguity. Joanna, the “nigger lover,” is not quite a woman, at any rate not a white Southern woman (though she becomes a martyr of Southern womanhood in the public legend created after her death); Hightower, the unfrocked minister suspected both of being a homosexual and of having slept with a black woman, is not quite a man. It is Christmas, however, who provokes the greatest outrage:

He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad. For him to be a murderer and all dressed up and walking the town like he dared them to touch him, when he ought to have have been skulking and hiding in the woods, muddy and dirty and running. It was like he never even knew he was a murderer, let alone a nigger too.

(p. 331)

These are the comments of the “town” on Christmas's behavior at Mottstown shortly before his capture. They express amazement, indignation, and a deep sense of malaise. The mere existence of Christmas has suddenly become an unbearable scandal, but what renders it so scandalous is not that he is assumed to be the black rapist and murderer of a white woman; it is rather the fact that everything in him denies that assumption. What makes “the folks so mad” is not the presumed miscegenation, the guilty mixture of black and white blood, but the lack in Christmas of any trace of miscegenation, the visible invisibility of his blackness. This “nigger” is white; the blackness in his whiteness cannot be ascertained. Neither his physical aspect nor his style of behavior conforms to racist stereotypes. Now if a black man can look and act exactly like a white man, if appearances fail to match and confirm essences, whiteness and blackness alike become shady notions, and once the white/black opposition has broken down, the whole social structure threatens to crumble. Christmas is thus a living challenge to the community's elemental norms and categories. Whether on purpose or not, whether knowingly or not, he subverts its either/or logic, draws attention to the fragility of the law, and points to the unacknowledged origin of racism by showing it up as a cosa mentale, a mere thing of the mind.

Christmas must therefore die without further delay. Yet the account of his ignominious death at the hands of Percy Grimm, the tribal god's avenging “angel” (437), suggests some kind of ritual murder rather than simple retaliation. Moreover, the highly rhetorical description of Christmas's last agony announces the posthumous transfiguration of the sacrificial victim by collective memory (see 439-40). As in all scapegoat ceremonies, a reversal seems to have taken place: from agos, a figure of defilement, Christmas has turned into pharmakos, a collector of communal guilt and agent of purification, and at the point of death he is reborn into myth. For all of his associations with Christ and the Passion, however, Christmas can hardly be said to serve a cathartic or redemptive purpose. Violence does not put an end to violence, it breeds further violence and further guilt, and for the closed society to persevere in its closedness, for the distinction between a pure inside and a corrupt outside to be reaffirmed and maintained, there will have to be other expulsions and other “crucifixions.”

In Tristes Tropiques Claude Lévi-Strauss distinguishes two opposing types of society: anthropoemic societies (from the Greek emein, to vomit) and anthropophagic ones (from the Greek phagein, to digest).²⁶ Whereas the former expel their deviants by “vomiting” them into prisons and asylums or by putting them to death, the latter absorb and “digest” them by assigning a specific function to them within the community. The society portrayed by Faulkner in Light in August obviously belongs to the first category, and given the importance of nausea in his fiction, the vomiting metaphor seems here particularly relevant. Like Faulkner's many self-tormented idealists, from Horace Benbow in Sanctuary to David Levine in A Fable, this society becomes sick whenever it is confronted with its “others” and ends up vomiting what it cannot digest: intolerance in every possible sense, including the medical one.

Light in August may be read in many ways, and it would be mistaken, assuredly, to reduce it to a piece of fictionalized sociology. Yet it would be just as wrong to read Faulkner's novels as timeless evocations of a supposedly unchanging human condition. Faulkner wrote about specific people in specific places, and he did so in full awareness of his complex Southern experience. He took no shortcut to universality. And if his fiction illuminates “the human heart in conflict with itself,” it also tells us a good deal about the inner conflicts of the culture in which he lived. Revealingly, his very best novels, from The Sound and the Fury through Absalom, Absalom! and The Hamlet to Go Down, Moses, are all Yoknapatawpha novels, and they all probe and scan the South, past and present, with ruthless sharpness and thoroughness. Light in August has its place among them. It is probably not Faulkner's greatest book, but as a radiograph of the South in the late twenties and early thirties it stands as a unique achievement.

Notes

1. The absence of family ties was noted as early as 1949 by Phyllis Hirshleifer in “As Whirlwinds in the South: An Analysis of Light in August,” Perspective 2 (Summer 1949):225-38. On this point see also Alfred Kazin, “The Stillness of Light in August,” Partisan Review 24 (Autumn 1957):519-38.

2. See Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 47.

3. Brooks, William Faulkner, p. 69.

4. On the concept of anomie in social theory and its ideological implications, see Alvin W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Avon Books, 1970).

5. See Brooks's observations on this point (of honor?) in William Faulkner, pp. 51-2.

6. See LIA, 272: “So the hatless men, who had deserted counters and desks, swung down, even including the one who ground the siren. They came too and were shown several different places where the sheet had lain, and some of them with pistols already in their pockets began to canvass about for someone to crucify.”

7. It is remarkable that the manuscript version of chapter 5 includes references to Christmas's “black blood” and “Negro smell,” which Faulkner removed only when he wrote the final text. On this point, see Regina K. Fadiman, Faulkner's “Light in August”: A Description and Interpretation of the Revisions (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), pp. 42-3.

8. Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957-1958, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1959), p. 72.

9. When asked by Joanna how he knows that one of his parents was “part nigger,” Joe admits that he does not know and adds with sardonic bitterness: “If I'm not [a nigger], damned if I haven't wasted a lot of time” (LIA, 240-1).

10. This, according to the narrator, is what he then “might have thought” had he been older: “That is why I am different from the others: because he is watching me all the time” (LIA, 129). The scenes at the orphanage remind one of the transformation of an innocent child into an abject monster that Sartre describes in his Saint Genet (Paris: Gallimard, 1952). Sartre remarks in this connection that “the gaze of adults is a constitutive power which has changed [Genet] into a constituted nature” (Saint Genet, p. 55). Between Genet's childhood and Christmas's there are several intriguing analogies: the former, at seven, was committed to the charge of Morvan peasants; the latter, at five, is adopted by a couple of Mississippi farmers.

11. Alfred Kazin defines Christmas as “an abstraction seeking to become a human being” (“The Stillness of Light in August,” p. 524). It is rather the other way round: Christmas is a human being seeking not to become an abstraction. Faulkner criticism treats him all too often as if he were a human cipher or an arch-villain, or regards him as a character totally bent on self-destruction. Thadious M. Davis is closer to the truth when she notes that “Joe's refusal, though effectively defeated, is a positive, progressive impulse, but one doomed to failure because it cuts so sharply against the grain of traditional southern life and thought.” See Faulkner's “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), p. 133.

12. See LIA, 275: “It was as if all their individual five senses had become one organ of looking, like an apotheosis.”

13. For a perceptive discussion of Joanna, see R. G. Collins, “Light in August: Faulkner's Stained-Glass Triptych,” Mosaic 7 (Fall 1973):122-30.

14. On the role of paternity in Faulkner's fiction, see my essay, “Fathers in Faulkner,” in The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text, ed. Robert Con Davis (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), pp. 115-46.

15. For a more detailed discussion of the toothpaste episode, see my Parcours de Faulkner (Paris: Ophrys, 1982), pp. 300-1.

16. According to “Light in August”: A Concordance to the Novel, ed. Jack L. Capps (Faulkner Concordance Advisory Board, 1979), “dark” occurs 134 times, “darkness” 35 times. It is also worth recalling that Faulkner's working title for the novel was “Dark House.”

17. Similarly, as Byron Bunch runs to the cabin where Lena lies in labor, he hears her wail and cry “in a tongue unknown to man” (LIA, 378). Motherhood, it seems, has its own, inaccessible code.

18. It is noteworthy that, just like Addie in As I Lay Dying, Joanna feels the need to stage her sin, as if speech and theatrics were required to make it real. During her fits of nymphomania she shows “an avidity for the forbidden wordsymbols” (LIA, 244) and adopts “such formally erotic attitudes and gestures as a Beardsley of the time of Petronius might have drawn” (LIA, 245). Filth is only filth once named; sin is a role to be played. Hence the necessity of turning fornication into a series of “faultlessly played scenes” (LIA, 249). “The obscene,” as Gilles Deleuze has pointed out, “is not the intrusion of the body into language but their common reflection.” See Logique du sens (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969), p. 326.

19. Many critical studies have been devoted to this aspect of the novel. The most useful is still Ilse Dusoir Lind's “The Calvinistic Burden of Light in August,” New England Quarterly 30 (September 1957):307-29.

20. See Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribners, 1930); this influential essay first appeared in 1904-5.

21. See Weber, Protestant Ethic, p. 95.

22. In this passage the narrative is handled in such a way as to make it impossible to distinguish the narrator's from Hightower's point of view. The perspective here is dual or mixed.

23. Consider, for instance, the following reflections: “[A]n ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here rules ressentiment without equal, that of an insatiable instinct and power-will that wants to become master not over something in life but over life itself, over its most profound, powerful, and basic conditions; here an attempt is made to employ force to block up the wells of force; here physiological well-being itself is viewed askance, and especially the outward expression of this well-being, beauty and joy; while pleasure is felt and sought in ill-constitutedness, decay, pain, mischance, ugliness, voluntary deprivation, self-mortification, self-flagellation, self-sacrifice.” On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), pp. 117-18. There is scarcely a sentence in this passage that could not be applied to Faulkner's novel.

24. See John Tucker, “William Faulkner's Light in August: Toward a Structuralist Reading,” Modern Language Quarterly 43 (June 1982): 138-55.

25. The distinction between an “open society” and a “closed society” was first made by Henri Bergson in Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (1932). These terms were reused in a different, secular and rationalistic, sense by Karl R. Popper: “the closed society is characterized by the belief in magical taboos, while the open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence” (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 5th ed. [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966], Vol. I, p. 202). My own use of the phrase refers back to Popper. It is interesting to note that Popper's definition of the closed society, in its emphasis on the latter's “semi-organic” character (see p. 173), amounts to a liberal's unsympathetic redefinition of Brooks's “community.” It may also be worth recalling that Mississippi: The Closed Society is the title that the historian James W. Silver gave to his study of racial disturbances in Faulkner's home state during the early sixties. The book was published in 1964 by Harcourt, Brace & World.

26. See Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 386.