SOURCE: Jarraway, David R. “The Gothic Import of Faulkner's ‘Black Son’ in Light in August.” In American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, pp. 57-74. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Jarraway explores gothic identity in Light in August in terms of Julia Kristeva's post-Freudian psychoanalysis.]

How much does it cost the subject to be able to tell the truth about itself?

—Michel Foucault, Foucault Live

I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you … It [is], as you say, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. But the truth, I would like to think, comes out, that when the reader has read all these thirteen different ways of looking at the blackbird, the reader has his own fourteenth image of that blackbird which I would like to think is the truth.

—William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University

No revisionary thinking about America's national narratives can overlook William Faulkner's version of southern gothic. Light in August (1932) is perhaps exemplary of the traditional gothic tale of mystery, horror, and violence in America that I suggest, in its modernist inflection, might profitably be reread alongside the theorizing of Julia Kristeva and her devotion to the psychodynamics of subjectivity. To move, however, from a classically gothic tale of mystery and horror, on the one hand, to the ultra-contemporary post-Freudian ruminations of Kristeva, on the other, as a means of providing one plausible method of illuminating William Faulkner's modernist intervention in the American canon seems almost to invite the construction of an “ontological gothic” in order to account for Faulkner's extraordinary renovation of a genre, if not an entire tradition.

“Ontology” may sound like a rather odd term to use in connection with the modernist, post-Freudian reinvention of subjectivity. But I'm thinking here of Slavoj Žižek's conception of such a subject which, inaugural with the modernism of Kant and Hegel, can no longer be thought of as “‘part of the world’ but is, on the contrary, correlative to ‘world’ as such and therefore ontologically constitutive [since] ‘world,’ [and] ‘reality,’ as we know them, can appear only within the horizon of the subject's finitude.” In this sense, Žižek goes on to explain, subjectivity as the “black space of the [Kantian] Thing” becomes “something extremely dangerous to approach if one gets too close to it, ‘world’ itself loses its ontological consistency, like the anamorphotic stain on Holbein's Ambassadors: when we shift our perspective and perceive it ‘as it is’ (as a skull), all remaining reality loses its consistency” (137). The several shifts in perspective, in world, in reality that Žižek attaches to the sea-change in the modernist treatment of subjectivity invite us to think that something parallel might be detected in the long-standing and ostensibly well-grounded tradition of gothic storytelling as well. If so, could it be that what we eventually come to discover is less an “ontology” but something rather more like the “temporality of gothic” in the general renovation of tradition in America? In terms of the way subjectivity may be redeployed in that tradition, therefore, in an important sense William Faulkner's modernism might be thought of as a highly evolved experimentation with gothic temporality.

As both Žižek's “black space” just mentioned and my title playfully suggest, Julia Kristeva's Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989) furnishes the means for a fresh, critical reappraisal of the tragic career of Joe Christmas, the problematical “black son” of Faulkner's novel. If the trajectory of southern gothic is mobilized by mystery, then the problematic identity of Faulkner's black son takes us very near the heart of that narrative trajectory. For as we shall see, Christmas's uncertain lineage, traceable equally through a heritage of either black or white blood, is never readily decidable—“the embrace of a chimaera,” as Faulkner describes it near the end.¹ A line, however, from Gérard de Nerval's “Chanson gothique”—“Fair-haired or dark / Must we choose?”—suggests a quite similar undecidability for Kristeva with respect to the determination of identity in poetic discourse. In fact, in the gothic context of Nerval's poetry, the truthful determination of identity may be well nigh impossible: “[i]f the ‘persons’ that have been named belong to the same world of love and loss, they suggest … a dispersal of the ‘I’ … among a constellation of elusive identities.” Hence, as Kristeva concludes, “[t]he litaneutical, hallucinatory gathering of their names allows one to suppose that they might merely have the value of signs, broken up and impossible to unify, of the lost Thing.”²

The gothic import that bilaterally infuses the texts of Faulkner and Kristeva through the join of the black son focuses much of our attention, then, upon the vexatious identification of human subjects. Before proceeding with this brief intertextual reading of their handling of identity, particularly with respect to its overlading with the issues of gender and race, I first want schematically to outline what we might consider to be the “structure” of gothic identity in their writing (extrapolated largely from Kristeva). This will then allow me later to differentiate between two “forms” of gothic (extrapolated largely from Faulkner) that are perhaps best foregrounded in the byplay of their titles—the difference, say, between “black” and “light”—and thereby address the issue of the “constant ambiguity” (BS 152) that might be said to attend the issue of identity in both their works.

A brief citation from Kristeva's chapter entitled “Holbein's Dead Christ” will begin to suggest the problematic nature of identity we are likely to encounter in its gothic context when, following Hegel, Kristeva writes:

Gothic art, under Dominican influence, favored a pathetic representation of natural death; Italian art, under Franciscan influence, exalted … the glory of the beyond made visible through the glory of the sublime. Holbein's Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb is one of the rare if not a unique realization located at the very place of the severance of representation of which Hegel spoke … What remains is the tightrope … a severance that is represented by death in the imagination and that melancholy conveys as a symptom[.] Holbein's answer is affirmative. Between classicism and mannerism his minimalism is the metaphor of severance: between life and death, meaning and nonmeaning, it is an intimate, slender response of our melancholia.

(BS 136-137)

In this extraordinarily resonant passage, which suspends the gothic on a tightrope between nonmeaning and death on one side and meaning and life on the other, severe and pathetic as opposed to sublime and transcendent representation, we should first begin to comprehend the gothic within the psychic space of “melancholy.” Kristeva, to a certain extent, follows Freud in making a clear separation between the pathos of “melancholy” here and a more life-affirming, life-sustaining “mourning” elsewhere. In the latter case, a loss is grieved and put by or negated through the transcending process of symbolization. Mourning thus assures that the loss of an essential object like “mother” will come to be recovered, once again, in “signs” or “language” (BS 43). Not so, however, with melancholy. At the center of its gothic pathos lies the disavowal of negation. Like tightrope artists, melancholiacs would suspend negation or, much worse, cancel it entirely “and nostalgically fall back on the real object (the Thing) of their loss, which is just what they do not manage to lose, to which they remain painfully riveted” (BS 43-44).³ The result of this negation-of-negation inevitably leads us back to that state of nonmeaning associated with death mentioned previously: in Kristeva's further elaboration, “the setting up of a fundamental sadness and an artificial, unbelievable language, cut out of the painful background that is not accessible to any signifier” (BS 44).

Within the gothic context, then, identity treads a constant line of disavowal and negation, precariously structured between what it cannot know enough of, at the level of Things, and what it can know only too well, at the level of Symbols. In other related theories of Kristeva's, gothic identity becomes “the subject in process/on trial,” tactfully negotiating a semiotic path of rhythmical force and energy along a “thetic” threshold or rim between maternal abjection, on the one hand, and paternal order, on the other (Revolution 22, 48; Powers of Horror 22-24). Endeavoring to foment “a rhythmic reverberation in the symbolic” (Lechte 27), the gothic subject in Black Sun is thus brought “to the threshold of naming, to the edge of the unsymbolized”: “[b]y representing that unsymbolized as a maternal object, a source of sorrow and nostalgia, but of ritual veneration as well, the melancholy imagination sublimates it and gives it a protection against collapsing into asymbolism … [through] the temporary triumph of that genuine arbor of names hauled up from the abyss of the lost ‘Thing’” (BS 165). This relentless fixation on an impossibly nonrepresentable maternal perhaps explains the perennially nostalgic cast of the gothic imagination and the childlike character of romance more generally. “There has never to my knowledge been any period of Gothic English literature,” Northrop Frye has observed, “but the list of Gothic revivalists stretches completely across its entire history, from the Beowulf poet to writers of our own day” (186). Frye, of course, is thinking mostly of British literature in formulating this insight. In America, what perhaps takes obsessive hold of the melancholy imagination more than the maternal itself is the experience of being separated from the maternal, as in the colonies' historical separation from the motherland in the War of Independence, or the American South's constitutional separation from the North in a mother country wracked by civil war, or, in more recent times, the multicultural dissolution of a mother tongue, since “the pluralism that characterizes American democracy depends on [its] devotion to an unvermögender Other,” that is, a “(m)other without qualities” (Copjec 33, 41 n8), and so forth.

If pressed to characterize definitively the sort of identity we are likely to encounter in structures of gothic discourse, along tightropes or thresholds or rims where their subjects are invariably constituted or put on trial, can there be any coincidence in Kristeva's lighting upon Holbein's dead Christ and Faulkner's choosing the name “Joe Christmas”? In the view of John Lechte, the figure of Christ would appear to be the very type of the gothic melancholiac, that is to say, the “imaginary subject (ego) forming the border between the real (Mother) and the symbolic (Father).”⁴ Accordingly, both Kristeva and Faulkner point, theoretically, to a quite similar “scenario” within which to position their travailing egos, a scenario that Lechte describes as follows:

to transcend death (which is also the death of the symbolic) it is necessary to identify with it for all we are worth, expanding our imaginary capacities, and thereby overcoming the unnameable basis of our depression. “To enter heaven, travel hell,” as Joyce put it. We need to put hell into the symbolic, to describe it, name all its aspects, experience it in imagination, and so constitute ourselves as subjects, with an identity. We will become … somebody and this, through transcending nothingness: the void, the unrepresentable.

(37)

Switching our attention now to Faulkner's gothic narrative, we can readily envision the subjectivity of Joe Christmas in the process of formation between two counterposed spheres of psychic investment-heaven and hell-rehearsed once again for us here. At least, that is the presentiment we get in Gail Hightower's concluding reminiscence of Faulkner's protagonist: “[t]his face alone is not clear. It is confused more than any other … [for] he (Hightower) can see that it is two faces which seem to strive … in turn to free themselves one from the other, then fade and blend again” (LA [Light in August] 491-492, my emphasis).

Through the course of Faulkner's novel, then, we find one face of Joe Christmas continually turned back upon the maternal, the sphere of loss, separation, and abjection. In Faulkner's words, “[i]t was as though he and all other manshaped life about him had been returned to the lightless hot wet primogenitive Female,” a maternal space not unlike the “black pit” from which Christmas, while on the run from the law, at one point mysteriously emerges: “black, impenetrable, in its garland of August-tremulous lights … the original quarry, abyss itself” (LA 115, 116).⁵ In endeavoring to fathom Christmas's facing backward in this way, we need to remind ourselves precisely of the extent to which he suffers, over and over again, the experience of maternal loss throughout the novel: in his abandonment by his real mother, Millie Hines, who dies while giving him birth, in his desertion by twelve-year-old Alice and rejection by the dietitian, Miss Atkins, during his stay at the Memphis orphanage, and in his subsequent betrayals by Bobbie Allen and Joanna Burden at crucial points, as we shall see later, in his sexually active youth and early adulthood. In his riveting rearward fixations, therefore, Joe Christmas conceivably becomes the type of Kristeva's “depressed narcissist” who fails to negotiate primal loss “on the basis of which the erotic Thing might become a captivating Object of desire” in the procession to maturity and sociosymbolic acculturation (BS 13, 14), and never more so than in his frequent misogynistic outpourings against females and their “periodical filth” and “Woman's muck”: “[i]t was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men” (LA 185, 238, 168-169; also on 109, 157, 189, 198, 225, 234, 265, and passim).

But there is, conceivably, in Faulkner's tale another face of Joe Christmas that looks to the future rather than the past, a side of him that can perceive an identity for himself as a kind of reward in heaven for having withstood so many of the torments of hell. The fifteen-year purgatory interposed between Christmas's confrontations with Bobbie early and Joanna later on, “where beneath the dark and symbolical archways of midnight he bedded with the women and paid them when he had the money, and when he did not have it he bedded anyway” (LA 224)—this period in Christmas's life would appear to match that “untiring quest for mistresses” which, according to Kristeva, theoretically “points to the elusive nature of that Thing—necessarily lost so that [the] ‘subject,’ separated from the ‘object,’ might become a speaking being” (BS 145). When Joe Christmas finally does speak, he constructs for himself the subject position of a black man, telling several of his paramours that “he was a negro” (LA 224). In so doing, however, he inserts himself within a circle of symbolic ideology that demands that this representation of himself be taken naturally, peremptorily, unalterably. The woman, for instance, who thinks Joe Christmas “just another wop or something” experiences horrifically just how murderous such essentializing ideologies can be, and at the hands of Christmas himself: “[i]t took two policemen to subdue him. At first they thought that the woman was dead” (LA 225).⁶ So that while it might seem possible for Christmas finally to have become “somebody” through transcending no-thing-ness, his inclination to exclude rather than cultivate maternal difference in so doing would appear to have made him as much a victim of the future as of the past. As Christmas himself admits just prior to his arrest for the murder of Joanna Burden, “I have been further in these seven days than in all the thirty years,” and yet “I have never got outside that circle. I have never broken out of the ring of what I have already done and cannot ever undo” (LA 339).

Exactly who, therefore, is Faulkner's tragic hero: the son of Milly Hines? the public ward of a Tennessee orphanage one day at Christmas? the foster-child of the Bible-punching McEacherns? Under the “Gothic force” (Kristeva's term) of melancholy “that turns out to be the source of the mysterious silence that striates writing” (BS 242), Kristeva would perhaps argue that Joe Christmas was all three, and maybe even more. Yet the true horror of Faulkner's gothic narrative would appear to lie not so much in his melancholy subject's inability to locate for himself a fixed identity in either the maternal or the paternal sphere. Rather, its frightfulness lies in that subject's complete lack of tolerance for, and perhaps skepticism about, experience in both spheres—a tolerance and skepticism that he ideally acquires from his earliest years by being able imaginatively to withstand primal separation or abjection rather than indifferently pathologizing it or aggressively attempting to overcome it. We're on the thin edge of the gothic wedge here, back once again on the suspenseful tightrope, as it were. For as Elizabeth Grosz remarks, “the abject is both a necessary condition of the subject, and what must be expelled or repressed by the subject in order to attain identity and a place within the symbolic” (88). Who's to say, then, that pathologizing or masterfully overcoming abject Otherness are not those very forms of expulsion and repression through which the subject comes to constitute itself as a fully functioning agent within the symbolic order?

My response to this line of reasoning would simply be to observe that overcoming abjection, in whatever form, presents to identity an equilibrium where none actually exists. The mysterious darkness and horrific suspense of the gothic narrative tells us that, in a sense, we never do get past our depressive melancholy, that the reality of abjection will always exceed even our best imaginative efforts to symbolize it (why, perhaps, we are so fixated on our separation from it), and that abjection, as such, through its eternal provocation of identificatory attainment, will always leave open for us the process of subjective construction to continuous and repeated articulation. “Even at times of its strongest cohesion and integration,” as Grosz quite rightly explains, “the subject teeters on the brink of this gaping abyss which attracts (and also repulses) it,” for “[t]his abyss is the locus of the subject's generation and the place of its potential obliteration” (89). I think, however, the difference between attraction and repulsion will largely depend upon whether or not, in expecting to extract a final equilibrium from the abyss, one might become outraged to discover, in its place, an abject excess as a threat to complacent self-adequation. For only at that overwhelming moment is attraction likely to turn into repulsion and, at that moment, is identity likely to slip helplessly from the tightrope and find itself spiraling uncontrollably downward into an abyss of complete and utter self-annihilation:

It seems to [Joe Christmas] that the past week has rushed like a torrent and that the week to come, which will begin tomorrow, is the abyss, and that now on the brink of cataract the stream has raised a single blended and sonorous and austere cry, not for justification but as a dying salute before its own plunge, and not to any god but to the doomed man in the barred cell within hearing of them and two other churches, and in whose crucifixion they too will raise a cross. “And they will do it gladly,” he says in the dark window. He feels his mouth and jaw muscles tauten with something premonitory, something more terrible than laughter even.

(LA 368)

The “something” premonitory and terrible in this ghastly description of the doomed protagonist reveals how subtly the tightrope, in gothic fiction, can modulate into a lynch rope, when the infinitizing of subjectivity (see Minow-Pinkney 158-159) turns murderously into its mere finalizing or, to borrow some recent phrasing of Judith Butler, when “the melancholy recesses of signification” can so unwittingly become exchanged for “the permanent pathos of symbolization” (Bodies that Matter 71, 207). And American gothic we may perhaps find fascinating in particular for its reenacting “a crisis of subjectivity which is the basis of all creation, one which takes as its very precondition the possibility of survival” itself (Kristeva qtd. in Lechte 25).

Earlier, I alluded to the ambiguity about which identity is hedged in gothic discourse and suggested that it might be useful to make a distinction between two of its “forms” in order to understand better the paradoxical nature of both Kristeva's and Faulkner's black sun/son. In what remains of this paper, I don't aim to systematize a typology for American gothic. Like Gail Hightower, I merely want to prize apart “two faces” of gothic textuality that I fully believe are both present in Kristeva's and Faulkner's work—accorded somewhat different emphases, however, as suggested by their titles—before these faces “fade and blend again.” Faulkner, I have no doubt, would be in complete agreement with Kristeva's observation that “serious depression or paroxysmal clinical melancholia represents a true hell for modern individuals,” especially so when “Christly dereliction presents that hell with an imaginary elaboration” that can so easily and so frighteningly come to naught (BS 133). Kristeva wants to draw out of this “dereliction” in Black Sun—and brilliantly so in the work of Dostoyevsky and Duras, in addition to that of Holbein and Nerval—“those unbearable moments when meaning was lost, when the meaning of life was lost,” as a consequence of what she elsewhere refers to as “an actual or imaginary razing of symbolic values” (BS 133, 128). John Lechte's call, cited earlier, “to put hell into the symbolic” (37) captures more accurately the significant shift in emphasis in Faulkner's own gothic agenda, and I would like to turn briefly to three additional characters in Light in August to show, finally, how this may be so.

To this point in our discussion, an analogous paraphrase for putting hell into the symbolic might read: “put the maternal into the paternal.” As I have argued elsewhere, however, it would be quite misleading to construe such an injunction strictly as an argument for feminism (Jarraway esp. 144-146). Hell, in its association with the maternal, we should more accurately construe as a trope for what we are given to think might be possible to emerge in heaven in the Name-of-the-Father, that is to say, in the day-to-day world of meaningful, practical, and regulated discourse. In terms of human identity, the chief focus of this rereading of gothic narrative, we view hell as a possible sign for a kind of characterological “polymorphism” (Kristeva, Revolution 156), knowing full well that even in heaven, choices do have to be made and that, as I noted earlier, an infinitized subjectivity ultimately does have to resolve itself into some form of finalized identity in order for us to take control of, and to get on with, our lives. Heaven, therefore, in its association with the paternal, is perhaps best construed as a trope for that very control—a control well beyond the realm of possibility now and more in touch with ideas like probability, necessity, inevitability. Kristeva is sometimes dismissed by feminists because her work is so often focused upon male writers, on modernists like Mallarmé, Artaud, and Joyce, for example. But clearly, hers is not a “paternal” attraction. She is most often drawn to figures such as these mainly because they are writers who are completely out of control ecstatically, exuberantly, extravagantly and, for this reason, are perhaps more characteristically “maternal,” in the counterhegemonic sense we have been using this term, than any social or cultural assignment of gender could ever possibly account for. And undoubtedly, there was perhaps something of a similar uncontrollable quality that drew Faulkner to a character like Joe Christmas: “‘My God,’ [Christmas] thought, ‘it was like I was the woman and she was the man’” (LA 235).

Although she acknowledges a debt to Claude Lefort and not Julia Kristeva, nonetheless Joan Copjec makes the very useful suggestion that in a radical democratic context, it will be “the contributions of detective and Gothic fiction” from which we can expect “a ‘mutation of the symbolic order’” (41 n6). I would like to think that Faulkner had conceived Light in August as making a similar contribution and, in somewhat of a departure from Kristeva, shifted much of the burden of the melancholiac's dark and depressive mutations onto the slightly more lightened plane of maternal intervention, with a view to paternal renovation. This is not to take anything away from much of the gothic import of what Faulkner himself described as the “tragic view of life” he consciously attempted to develop for his doomed hero, particularly in a novel that the author moreover once contemplated titling “Dark House” (Faulkner, Faulkner 96-97). But the shift in emphasis is there nevertheless. And the characterization of Joanna Burden gets us started thinking about Faulkner's discursive alterations.

The gossip in Jefferson concerning Joanna Burden as “a lover of negroes” (LA 46), exemplified most notably in her erotically charged though ultimately fatal attachment to Joe Christmas, suggests the possibility of deregulating egregiously paternalistic and racist attitudes entrenched in the cultural life of the hierarchically ordered South. However, the sense of Joanna's maternal disruption of white, patriarchal ideologies is considerably belied by her masculine portrayal (“[i]t was as if [Christmas] struggled physically with another man for an object of no actual value to either” [LA 235]), a portrayal that figuratively reveals the enormous extent to which Joanna has unwittingly internalized the rank prejudices of her father (and grandfather). “What I wanted to tell him,” she admits to Joe, “was that I must escape, get away from under the shadow” of the black man. “‘You cannot,’ he said. ‘You must struggle, rise. But in order to rise, you must raise the shadow with you. But you can never lift it to your own level … The curse of the black race is God's curse’” (LA 253). Joanna's subsequent schemes to mother a child with Joe and later have him take over her various integrationist projects are the typical manifestations of control, remarked previously, that we expect to find on the paternal “level” to which her father refers. And her “praying over” Joe (LA 105, 282) and, when he refuses, her taking a defective cap-and-ball pistol to him are the final vestiges of control that inevitably convert themselves into lethal violence, to Joanna's horrific misfortune. Joanna and Joe's incendiary predicament, of course, had all along been anticipated in Christmas's tempestuous relationship with the male-nominated Bobbie Allen fifteen years earlier. Yet by comparison, the latent sexual aggression that Faulkner carefully locates in Bobbie's “big-knuckled hands” prominently arrayed across her lap (LA 193, 192, 199, and passim) receives only a slight workout when Bobbie's pimps, characteristically, are allowed to fight her battles for her, beating Joe senseless for getting their moll “into a jam with clodhopper police” (LA 218).

Our second character, Gail Hightower, moves us a bit closer to the light at the end of Faulkner's very long, gothic tunnel. The femininity of Hightower's first name that seems conspicuously at odds with his domineering last name rather ingeniously corroborates what Judith Butler refers to as “the impossibility of a full recognition” in socially symbolic discourse, “that is, of ever fully inhabiting the name by which one's social identity is inaugurated and mobilized,” thus forever pointing to “the instability and incompleteness of subject-formation” (“Critically Queer” 18). Indeed, Hightower's appearance in Jefferson as a “shabby, queer-shaped, not-quite familiar figure” to the workmen of the town's planing mill, and one among those thought not incapable of “tak[ing] their pants down” to Joe Christmas, reveals a gendered existence potentially wide of the normative mark (LA 413, 464). This skewing of social identity is enlarged even further by Hightower's considerable skill at midwifery, most notably in the birthing of Lena Grove's bastard child, while his penchant for “Handpainted Xmas & Anniversary Cards” (LA 58) and for the lush lyricism of Tennyson's poetry hovers in the background. “Gail Hightower” thus presents us with, in Butler's words again, “the historically revisable possibility of a name,” a name that has “a certain priority and anonymity with respect to the life it animates” (“Critically Queer” 18). Such revisable possibility, in the most general sense, promises a significant realignment of social values, despite the fact (or perhaps because of it) that Hightower “was not a natural husband, [and] a natural man” (LA 71) for purportedly having driven his suicidal wife to an early grave. But there is a limit to the degree to which even Hightower is able to intervene in the paternal on behalf of the maternal. His refusal, for instance, to provide temporary shelter to the expectant and ailing Lena and, more crucially later, his reprobate fear of helping to stay the descent of Percy Grimm's castrating knife disclose a mind as complacently enmeshed in the toils of the present social order as it once was, a generation ago, among the “quiet and safe walls” of his religious order, beyond “horror or alarm” (LA 478). The fact that Joe Christmas should desperately head for Gail Hightower's dark house as a final refuge from arraignment for murder tellingly solidifies the bond between them as obliging victims of objective control rather than revisers of subjective truth.

In the end, then, Joe Christmas seems perfectly to fit Nerval's “El Desdichado” in the gothic refunctioning of identity—“I've twice, as a conqueror, been across the Acheron”—for which Julia Kristeva offers: “[t]here would be no third time” (BS 171). Having relinquished the imaginative optativeness of subjective constitution to the expedient choice of either controlling or being controlled—Joanna, on the one side, and Bobbie, on the other, as horrendous embodiments of “[t]he sighs of the saint and the screams of the fay” in Nerval's concluding line (BS 172)—Christmas has no third choices by the time he crosses the Acheron of Gail Hightower's haunted threshold, hounded by the hell of Percy Grimm's vengeful bloodlust. But what about us? A third and final character, Faulkner's Lena Grove, I think presents us with an alternative to social control and sexual legislation in the very image of her abjection and the repeated mobilization of subjective articulations that her impossible condition, outside the bourgeois family contract, deploys and sustains: “[m]y, my. A body does get around” (LA 30, 507). Abandoned or rejected, in turn, by her lover, Lucas Burch, her stepbrother McKinley, the traveler Armstid, Gail Hightower, and the rest, Lena is perhaps a type of the primogenitive Female “of the old earth and with and by which she lives … [and] conquers” (LA 27) that the Jefferson community cannot do anything with but cannot do without either.

In the final chapter, Lena Grove's continued pursuit of someone like Lucas Burch, though surely not Burch himself, and her refusing the sexual advances of Byron Bunch, though surely not Bunch himself, both suggest for her character a kind of “hiatus, blank, or spacing” that Kristeva herself attaches to “that other unrepresentable … the female body” (BS 26-27, also on 100, 124, 200, 243, 248, 256) and that raises the issue of the necessary incompleteness of identity formation once again:

Because do you know what I think? I think she was just travelling. I dont think she had any idea of finding whoever it was she was following. I dont think she had ever aimed to, only she hadnt told him yet … And so I think she had just made up her mind to travel a little further and see as much as she could, since I reckon she knew that when she settled down this time, it would likely be for the rest of her life.

(LA 506)

Why is it we feel that the anonymous furniture dealer in Faulkner's conclusion has everything right about Lena except her final settling down? Is it because Faulkner himself might envision thirteen ways of looking at Lena, as in the epigraph, but could always be provoked to imagine a fourteenth, or perhaps even a fifteenth or sixteenth resistant to allow her to settle on just one way? Or, as in the epigraph from Foucault, he could imagine the terrible cost that would have to be paid if, as in the case of the blackbird Joe Christmas, there could only possibly be one truth to tell? Toby Miller, who also invokes Foucault on the final pages of his recent The Well-Tempered Self, alludes to “a huge crisis” in contemporary life not unlike that period in Europe's shift to modernization, when, according to Foucault, “we must produce something that doesn't yet exist and about which we cannot know.” Observes Miller, “To be agile in such a crisis necessitates putting an end to attempts to embrace one's incompleteness in the service of obedience. In order to begin again, we must lose ourselves, and do so in sight of danger” (230-231). The “black son” of Light in August clearly puts us in the sight of danger. But its gothic import also shows us how we might swerve past arresting notions of human identity “in the service of obedience,” past, that is, the search for “any ultimate self,” as Miller elsewhere puts it, in the service of “an overarching account of the person” (223-224) when the loss, represented by Lena Grove, serves us admirably as our guide. In the end, her loss is our gain. Which ought only to substantiate Lena's final words in Faulkner's gothic tale: “[w]e got another fur piece to go tomorrow” (LA 503).

Notes

1. Faulkner, Light in August 449. Hereafter cited as LA. The closest we come to a definitive attribution of “nigger blood” to Joe Christmas is Byron Bunch's account of a story told to the ultraracist Doc Hines about Joe's mother's brief affair with a Mexican circus employee who may have been part black. But it is a highly moot attribution, according to Byron: “[m]aybe the circus folks told [Doc Hines]. I don't know. He aint never said how he found out, like that never made any difference” (LA 374).

2. Black Sun 156, 157. Hereafter cited as BS. See also BS 171.

3. Thus, as Charles Bernstein recently observed, “[d]enial marks the refusal to mourn: to understand what we have lost and its absolute irreparability” (216).

4. Eve Sedgwick's doctoral dissertation of 1976 only slightly verges on the notion of a transmigrant ego here in her linking of gothic conventions to an “insidious displacement of the boundaries of self” that she elsewhere and more generally attributes to “the dilativeness and the permeability of the self” and to “the real shiftiness inher[ing] in the notion of identity” characteristic of a great deal of early gothic fiction (33, 43, 111).

5. “Calvin,” Kristeva remarks in “Holbein's Dead Christ,” “insists on the formidabilis abysis into which Jesus had been thrust at the hour of his death,” a passage not unrelated to her characterization of the “maternal object” in terms of “the abyss of the lost ‘Thing,’” cited previously (BS 119, 165).

6. Faulkner's own judgment on the matter is that Joe Christmas “deliberately evicted himself from the human race because he didn't know which he was” and goes on to add: “[t]hat was the tragedy, that to me was the tragic, central idea of the story—that he didn't know what he was, and there was no way possible in life for him to find out. Which to me is the most tragic condition a man could find himself in—not to know what he is and to know that he will never know” (Faulkner 72, also 118). I shall return to this epistemological conundrum at the end of the essay.

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