SOURCE: Hlavsa, Virginia A. “The Mirror, the Lamp, and the Bed: Faulkner and the Modernists.” American Literature 57, no. 1 (March 1985): 23-43.

[In the following essay, Hlavsa outlines the facets of modernist writing and distinguishes Faulkner as a modernist writer.]

Although Faulkner is frequently called a Romantic, it is time that he be placed where he belongs, among the Modernists. In The Mirror and the Lamp, M. H. Abrams distinguishes between the Neo-classical, eighteenth-century artist as a “perceiving” mind, reflecting the external world like a mirror, and the Romantic, nineteenth-century artist as a “projecting” mind, casting a self-image out onto the world like a lamp. T. S. Eliot suggested that the Modernist movement was a return to the hard, spare world of classicism, the exact observation of the external object. But this overlooks the new temporal and spatial reordering and even disordering of the external world, primarily in response to psychology. Gertrude Stein, especially, saw the implications of William James's “flow” or “stream” of consciousness for revealing repressed instinct, and suggested that artists return to repetitions and primitive rhythms. Thus, we could say that the Modernist movement (and Faulkner) represents not the perceiving nor the projecting mind, but the promiscuous mind. And the appropriate image is neither the enlightened mirror nor the enlightening lamp, but the darkened bed.

The choice would rest on more than a greater frankness regarding sexuality. The word promiscuous means “having diverse parts,” an apt description of the Freudian awareness of the mind's divisions, the many levels of unawareness below the conscious. Modernists such as Eugene O'Neill even sounded Jungian depths to the racial unconscious. While the Romantic had seen the primitive as a purifying spring, the Modernist saw it as a muddy riverbottom, full of blind creatures that bump in the mire. Romantic nature, wild, was still an English garden, not a wasteland. Promiscuous also means “indiscriminate,” “lacking standards of selection.” Indeed, Modernists did set out to remove personal judgment or censure from the material chosen. Joyce wanted to represent “the thousand complexities” of the mind and as many activities of the body, with the instincts central to both. As Hemingway's Frederic Henry says in A Farewell to Arms, “I was not made to think. I was made to eat. My God, yes. Eat and drink and sleep with Catherine.” Promiscuous is also apt in its “casual” sense. The Modernist writer, knowing that the unconscious leads our “free associations” by the nose, felt free to mix casually with the night crawlers, our dreams, where words refuse to lie still, undoing the pious by calling a funeral a funforall or toppling the innocent with “the cock struck mine.” Thus, the promiscuously-minded Modern artist played with his material, having his own hidden designs.

In this profusion of free associations and primordial rhythms, the Modern artist turned to the bed for primary relationships and ancient rites of passage. Sister Carrie could say goodbye to her family in chapter one and never glance back, but the Modernist carried that first bed on his back like Kafka's bug. Moreover, the Modernist recognized the essential sameness for all in the big bed moments of birth, death, sickness, or sex. In the nineteenth century, the butler simply helped you with your coat. In the twentieth century, he might snicker at your bald spot. And that mattered. The agony of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts is knowing that the most odious human beings suffer an agony as great as his own. Above all, the bed is an apt metaphor because, unlike previous artists, who believed they controlled the illumination of their work (whether reflecting or projecting), the Modern artist knew he was one of the featured partners in the performance, the other being the work of art itself. In other words, besides the driving forces of character, plot, or genre, the artist knew that one engine was his own, usually unconscious, obsessions. Therefore, the greater his nakedness, the more prodigious his cover.

Three types of covers may be observed in the Modernist movement. Most obviously, writers organized their work by external patterns. Of course, great writers of the past have often turned to ordering structures. Chaucer used Boccaccio and Boethius; Shakespeare used Plutarch and Holinshed; Milton used the Bible and the Talmud. With the rise of Romanticism, which glorified the individual imagination, the practice of building on older works came into disfavor. Although Coleridge evidently used ship logs for his descriptions in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the source was obscure and he kept it quiet. Modernists such as Eliot, Pound and Joyce returned to the practice, sometimes with a vengeance. The eighteen episodic chapter units in Ulysses relate to parts of the body, disciplines of the mind, times of the day, techniques of discourse, colors, symbols, and other wonders too numerous to mention. Beckett reported Joyce's saying, “I may have oversystematized Ulysses.” But ironically, he and the Modernists set up these elaborate frameworks as they also set out to represent reality, the highest goal of a literature in competition with the age of photography.

A second cover of Modernist writers involved fragmentation and distortion. For example, Joyce's Cyclops chapter begins with the word “I,” repeats expressions such as “says I,” uses phrases such as “cod's eye” (to rhyme with God's eye), discusses the Irish and the Emerald Isle, and Joe and John and Jesus (whose names, in Greek, begin with an I), and refers to a local watchtower or a one-eyed merchant, all glancing off references to “blinding.” In fact, Modernists such as Pound or Crane were so obscure they seemed cabalistic. Yet recent psychological experiments suggest that communication may be occurring without our awareness. Evidently every time a word is encountered, all the meanings we know, no matter how disparate, are available to us on some level. Thus, if I say, “This room has bugs in it,” you might promptly produce several meanings for “bugs.” But tests, demonstrating the human being's ability to quick-shift, show that on the unconscious level, you probably have all five meanings in readiness: cockroaches, germs, problems, enthusiasts, or hidden microphones.

It was Freud's studies of dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue that brought this phenomenon into the Modern awareness. In these mundane circumstances were found four types of word play: displacement (shifting emphases), condensation (compressing meanings), representation (making symbols), and misrepresentation (garbling and gainsaying with puns and adversatives). Of course, the reason for these routine distortions is that they protect us from those thoughts that lie too deep for tears (or titterings). Given, this, the artist's task is to pluck the words and set them vibrating in the mind to register a wider range of meaning. Sherwood Anderson, a profound influence on Faulkner, had himself been influenced by Gertrude Stein's “strange sentences,” which gave words “an oddly new intimate flavor” while they made “familiar words seem almost like strangers.” Anderson encouraged young writers to join the “great revolution in the art of words.” Imagine the delight of these Modern word bugs when they discovered they could jam words together to make “dimmansions” or spread them out to make “her wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevy hair”; that they could slip letters out, making “word” out of “world”; or garble them, making “calvary” out of “cavalry”; or reverse them, making “dog” out of “god.” Again, the justification for this word play was the creation of realism, to catch what Joyce called that “great part of every human existence … which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.”

The third cover of the Modernist writer—that he chose the ironic mode—follows logically from the first two. For if the writer was both hiding and distorting, he was a dissembler, the meaning of the Greek root eiron. And this, again, despite our shared sense that his fictive world was somehow more real. Of course, as J. H. Robinson, the Modern historian, suggested, the complexities of human thought and experience could only be treated in a mood of tolerant irony. But for the racked artist, the tolerance was feigned and the detachment was probably like the fantasy of Modern parents, imagining they could avoid conflict with their children if they “used” psychology. In fact, sometimes the ironic mode leaves us, like the children, aware of intense feeling but puzzled about the specifics. Scholars are still quarreling over the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels: were the Houyhnhnms Swift's ideal or an overnice contrast to the Yahoos? Although we can usually center the authors of previous ages within the beliefs of their own time, for the Modernists the center would not hold. And as for asking them what they meant, if they were willing to speak, we might learn their conscious desires. But what parent wants to know his or her own unconscious desires?

Faulkner was a notoriously untrustworthy commentator on his own writing, and he worked beneath all the covers. It is not surprising that both he and Joyce thought of themselves first as poets, for they both loved to write under the constraints of form and with the freedom of word play. Moreover, a direct influence may be claimed. Faulkner's reading in the Modernists is suggested by the book list, ordered for him by Phil Stone, who encouraged the young Faulkner in his writing. His awareness of Joyce is documented through biography¹ and text, with allusions to and devices from Ulysses appearing as early as Soldiers' Pay and Mosquitoes.

As Joseph Blotner says, Faulkner was in the habit of “setting new technical challenges for himself in successive novels,” and by now scholarship has uncovered some of those challenges. But since he was more secretive than Joyce, who could not wait for his café set to uncover his schemes, Faulkner never disclosed his game-plans. Indeed, asked if he had ever felt the need to discuss his writing with anyone, Faulkner said “No. No one but me knew what I was writing about or writing from.”

My own findings on Faulkner indicate we must ask of every work: what happens in what chapter or division? The nine chapters of Absalom, Absalom! represent nine types of evidence, admissible and not, in giving legal testimony.² Highly ironic, in the first four chapters, the testimony by actual witnesses to Sutpen's “crime” violates the four exclusionary rules: irrelevance, hearsay, immateriality, and best evidence withheld. The middle chapter registers the deaths, giving proof of the crime, before the hearings move north. In the last four chapters, pure conjectures by Quentin and Shreve are given increasing weight, because they represent legal procedures: viewing the scene, admissions or confessions, probable reasoning, and finally Faulkner's substantial proof, the old “mindless meat.” And there is good reason to believe that this is but one level of Faulkner's gameplan; Maxine Rose's study demonstrates the book's movement from Genesis to Revelation.³

Certainly Light in August shows Faulkner's Dantesque ability to work on multiple levels. To review his gameplan there,⁴ the first rule was to parallel the twenty-one chapters of Light in August with the twenty-one chapters of the St. John gospel. For example, echoing John's famous, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” is Lena's insistent faith in the “word” of Lucas, who is, after all, the father: “I said for him to … just send me word. … Like as not, he already sent me the word and it got lost. … I told him … ‘You just send me your mouthword.’ … But me and Lucas dont need no word promises between us … he [must have] sent the word and it got lost.”⁵ Or the healing of the halt man by immersion occurs in chapter 5 where, in Faulkner, Joe is repeatedly immersed in liquids, real and imagined: “In the less than halflight he appeared to be watching his body … turning slow and lascivious in a whispering of gutter filth like a drowned corpse in a thick still black pool of more than water. … The dark air breathed upon him … he could feel the dark air like water. … He watched his body grow white out of the darkness like a kodak print emerging from the liquid” (pp. 99-100). The teaching in the temple—learning the Father's will—occurs in chapter 7, the chapter in which McEachern is trying to teach Joe his catechism, all the while Joe is actually learning his father's will: “the two blacks in their rigid abnegation of all compromise more alike than actual blood could have made them” (p. 139). Most important, the crucifixion occurs in chapter 19, in which Joe, slain and castrated, soars into memory like a “rising rocket” on the “black blast” of his breath.

The second rule of Faulkner's gameplan was that he know and respond to biblical commentary on John.⁶ Consider just the outlines of the two books. Following John's prologue, the chapters up through 12 are called the Book of Signs; chapters 13 through 20 (the final days) are the Book of Glory; and chapter 21 was written by someone other than John. In Light in August, the chapters up through 12 depict events leading up to the explanation of the murder; chapters 13 through 20 depict Joe's final days; while chapter 21, beyond Jefferson, is told by a new narrator.

The third rule was that John be viewed in the light of James Frazer's complete work, The Golden Bough, not in any casual way but using particular sections to develop particular themes in John. For example, in John 14, Jesus discusses his coming death in terms of the “many mansions” (or dwelling places) of his Father's house; that he is “the way,” for his Father “dwelleth” in him and he in the Father; and that our final “abode” will be with him. Place is central, yet time and place collapse in on each other as the “way” becomes an in-dwelling, both now and “at that day.” With this in mind, it is not surprising that Regina Fadiman's study of the manuscript Light [Light in August] shows that the “episodes were originally written chronologically and then purposely reshuffled.”⁷ For all the characters (not just Joe), time and place are scrambled, and the “many mansions” include Lena's cabin, the Negro church, the sheriff's house, his office, the cottonhouse, the farmhouse, and Joe's recall: “somewhere a house, a cabin. House or cabin … ‘It was a cabin that time.’” But Joe's behavior is further understood by reading Frazer's discussions of the purification rites for mourners, warriors, and manslayers. Because of their contact with the dead, such persons must be isolated from the community, living in the brush or in huts, with special strictures not to touch food and to purify themselves before they return by taking emetics, washing, and shaving in a stream. Thus, Joe lives in the brush or in barns; he has food set before him, “appearing suddenly between long, limber black hands fleeing too in the act of setting down the dishes”; he makes himself eat rotten fruit and hard corn “with the resultant crises of bleeding flux”; and his last act before surrendering is to wash and shave in the stream. Although all of this might be explained by his role of fugitive killer, his buffeting the Negro churchleaders is almost inexplicable until we read, in Frazer's same discussions of tabooed persons, that territorial strangers are also believed to carry the spirits of the dead. Before acceptance, they must first commit some act of hostility, knocking over an idol or exchanging blows with the local shamen.⁸ Thus, Joe may be understood to be entering, for the first time, the world of blacks. Receiving their food, he says, almost in wonder, “And they were afraid. Of their brother afraid” (pp. 316-17).

The fourth rule, which has had the widest attention, was that the characters have religious and mythic counterparts. Even in this, Faulkner selected his mythic figures from Frazer in accordance with their compatibility with the biblical figures: Isis (Lena), out looking for Osiris (Lucas), was early confused with the Virgin Mary. Dionysus (Joe Christmas), god of tree and vine, was buried and resurrected like Christ. Moreover, as in myth, characters can take up several appropriate roles. Besides the obvious ties to Jesus Christ, Joe Christmas can also represent the challenger in Frazer's famous description of the golden bough in Diana's oak grove. If a runaway slave could break off the bough, he could fight the priest of the grove and become “King of the Wood” (I, 1-24). Thus, Joe contends with Joanna (called a “priest”) “as if he struggled physically with another man for an object of no actual value to either, and for which they struggled on principle alone” (p. 222). Joe can also represent the golden bough, god-empowered by lightning, which hangs on the sacred tree, like Christ. Seeing Joanna, Joe senses “instantaneous as a landscape in a lightning-flash, a horizon of physical security and adultery if not pleasure” (p. 221). At his death, he is even the originating god: “his raised and armed and manacled hands full of glare and glitter like lightning bolts, so that he resembled a vengeful and furious god pronouncing a doom” (p. 438).

When critics complained to Joyce that the puns he used to establish themes were trivial, he retorted, “Yes, some of my means are trivial, and some are quadrivial.” As a similarly deliberate craftsman, Faulkner makes every word count, every metaphor or phrase. He once said that Flaubert was “a man who wasted nothing … whose approach toward his language was almost the lapidary's.” Faulkner's use of names has been most obvious. Anse is for the ants of this world; Snopes for—what?—the low, snotty stoops? Narcissa is the mirror; Popeye the voyeur. What has not been realized is that the chapter in which we learn a character's name can be significant. In Absalom, Absalom! we only learn the names of Clytemnestra and Charles Bon in chapter 3, amid a barrage of historical or fictional personae such as Bluebeard or Cassandra, which strengthens the legal principle of “immateriality.”

Less observed than the naming game is the significant diction and metaphor. Some uses of dialect will illustrate. In Light in August, the word “sho” for “sure” occurs prominently in chapters 1, 18, and 21. In these chapters of John, the central theme is Christ's identification: at his first appearance to the disciples, at the public trial, and at his final appearance, which begins, “After these things Jesus shewed himself to the disciples at the sea of Tiberias; and in this wise shewed he himself.” Thus, “sho” can be both “sure” and the homonym “show.” Or in Absalom, Absalom! Wash Jones says to Sutpen, “I know that whatever your hands tech, whether hit's a regiment of men or a ignorant gal or just a hound dog, that you will make hit right,” and he also says, “how could I have lived nigh to him for twenty years without being touched and changed by him?” Thus, when Wash comes at him with the scythe and Sutpen says, “Stand back, Wash. Don't you touch me,” and Wash says, “I'm going to tech you, Kernel” (italics mine), we realize Sutpen will be both taught and touched, as he should have been by his son, Charles Bon.

How do we know these structural and dictional patterns were Faulkner's designs? For example, in my study of Light in August, I proposed chapter 2 could be entitled “external changes” because that theme relates to John 2 and appropriate passages in Frazer. While “change” is a high-frequency word in Faulkner's chapter, the word never occurs in John 2 (the marriage at Cana and the scourge of the temple) although “changers” does. It may seem like circular reasoning to propose using a term which is analyzed and then “discovered” in the text to support the use of the proposed term. Can the use of this key term be justified?

Only because it works. Following Faulkner's lead, reading John through Faulkner's themes, can reveal patterns unnoticed in John. But first we must determine the direction of Faulkner's lead, and since Faulkner himself is a playful or perplexing guide, each chapter demands some close scrutiny. In other words, to solve John, you must first solve Faulkner's chapters as you would a riddle. Take the anonymous medieval verse:

All night by the rose, rose,
All night by the rose I lay,
Dared I not the rose steal,
Yet I bore that flower away.

Five types of observation help us to discover the meaning of this riddle: the repetition, the positioning, the accent, the associations, and the anomalies. Thus, “all night,” repeated once and placed at line's beginning, and “rose,” repeated three times and placed at line's end, should be noted. Regarding “rose,” we think of the flower and its tradition of youth, passion, and purity. We also think of the past tense of “rise,” sexually suggestive, especially in conjunction with “all night,” the rhymed word “lay,” and that striking word “bore.” Beyond all, we notice that the manifest content, the riddle, makes no sense: how can one both lie by a rose and bear it away? One can, but only when the action is in the past tense.

Were I to title this riddle “The Maid's Deflowering,” you might complain that I don't know that this is the meaning. Nowhere does the word “maid” appear; “deflower” is not “flower”; and even if the poem is about sex, it could be about adultery rather than the loss of virginity. All this is true. However, this title does fit the parts—it works. Furthermore, for me, the young man's delight (and notice that I assume it is a young man), his “roguishness,” is increased by imagining his lay involves a young girl. It is not wrong to use our imagination. If we, as informed readers, can establish a pattern on the strength of the most verifiable evidence, then we may take the next step and extrapolate, bringing to light less obvious (though perhaps equally important) evidence.

In fact, if we use the five types of observations in Faulkner's chapter 2 and discover the theme of “change,” we find, returning to John 2, that it does apply to all three episodes, a unity previously unnoticed. The first story in John has been called “the changing of water to wine”; the second involves the changes Jesus would effect by driving from the temple those “changers of money”; and the third has Christ foretelling his own resurrection, a change in the “temple of his body.” Notice that John himself uses “temple” metaphorically. In fact, word play is a distinguishing feature of John.

Many examples of this pleasurable puzzle-solving could be given. Although John is the most “written” of the four gospels, the unity of his chapters is by no means always apparent. But Faulkner evidently saw or sensed the compatibilities, perhaps because, as a Modernist writer, he was willing to pull the word out of context, make it concrete or invert it. Or perhaps these compatibilities came to Faulkner from seeking the primitive or archetypal designs behind John's stories. In other words, The Golden Bough may have suggested some of these matches between concrete behavior and abstract thought. For example, if we turn to Frazer for the folk or mythic traditions surrounding the changing of water to wine, we find that certain people marked Easter by holding their tongues in buckets of water mixed with fodder, waiting to gulp it at the “miraculous change” (X, 124). Thus, along with the second chapter's examples of external change—of clothing, of name, of the underworld bootlegging of that Underworld wine god, Joe Christmas as Dionysus (whose rites involved changing water to wine)—Faulkner suggests internal changes of attitude or expectations, but even these are signalled by the concrete—the loosened tongue and the buckets of “muck.”

To be sure, if we had to rely on any one chapter for the basic pattern, our analysis would seem altogether too convenient. On the other hand, if every cream sauce has a fishy taste, it is time to look for the trout in the milk. If we, by reading Faulkner, are able to discover unifying themes in John and compatible discussions in Frazer, twenty-one times over, certainly Faulkner could have made the same discoveries.

The question is how much of this unifying work was conscious on Faulkner's part? Theories on creativity tend to go in two directions: artists may have more conscious awareness than the rest of us, or less. Either they bring the unconscious up to the light, or they descend into the darkness, intuitively guided. Going to either extreme starts throats to clearing. If Faulkner attended to every detail, he might be thought of as obsessive. If the unconscious took over, he might be thought of as lacking art.

There are good reasons to lean toward obsessiveness. To begin with, this inclination goes with the trade. The writer is obsessed (the word means “to sit on”), playing by the hour with pieces of his own creation (while the critic plays with another's creation!). One can still see the complex notes for A Fable, in large and minuscule lettering, all over the walls of Faulkner's working study at Rowan Oak. Moreover, Faulkner was obsessed, with the South, with racism, with religion, with women. His bathroom obsessions are painfully obvious in Mosquitoes. Obsessions are useful; they keep us at the task. But just as Faulkner's obsessions led him to do the work, so they also led to some overreaching for parallels.⁹ In A Fable, a coil of barbed wire evidently signifies Christ's crown of thorns. Alas, Light in August has many such examples: in chapter 4, the “living water” of Christ, testified to by Jacob's well, becomes Hightower's sweat, rolling down his face as he hears Byron's testimony. In chapter 6, Christ's discourse on bread and the eating of his flesh becomes Joe Christmas, descended of Ham, eating “bread, with ham between” on the way out of the orphanage, and “bread, with ham between” on the way back.¹⁰ In chapter 11, the raising of Mary's and Martha's brother Lazarus from the dead becomes the sexual revival of Joanna, with her “body of a dead woman not yet stiffened,” while in 20, the raising of Christ from the dead becomes the rising—the erection—of Hightower, masturbating.¹¹

But side by side with this adolescent snickering is a passionate cry of rage. Each of those outlandish parallels is just one instance of a significant chapter theme. In chapter 4, Brown's testimony brings many people to life, but especially Joe Christmas as “nigger.” Chapter 6 describes the process of making Joe into the dough-man, to be broken and shared by each new communicant. Chapter 11 represents a revived not brother, but brotherhood in the union of Joanna and Joe, north and south, white and black, while chapter 20 reveals that Hightower does hold the image of life—in all its tragic absurdity—within his Golgothian bandaged skull.

Faulkner's world is, above all, one of paradox, of extremes. In such a world, it is the women who are harder on Lena than the men. It is the kind mother who is more of a danger to Joe than the cruel father. It is the rational milquetoast who nightly relives the foolhardy violence of the cavalry charge. And it is the low, brutal scapegoat who finally soars into sanctity.

Operating by extremes permitted Faulkner to suggest the whole range of human experience—the realism Modernists sought—while he worked with some fairly stock characters: the earth mother, the hot spinster, the prostitute with the heart of gold, the weak-kneed intellectual, the mean half-breed. The fact that he animated these lumps of rage and jest under secret wraps suggests that they may have been shaped by a fierce sentimentality,¹² an expression of unfulfilled longings. Apparently one of Faulkner's engines was a treacherous tenderness toward his characters, glaringly evident in The Reivers. To protect himself from his own pathos, he permitted his characters brutal or ludicrous behavior—behavior which he alone (like the Creator) could explain. In Light in August, by following what Eliot called the “mythical method,” Faulkner made all of his characters operate by forces they cannot begin to understand, let alone resist. Place Joe on the analyst's couch, he might dredge up the dietitian, but he would never imagine he was playing the role of Dionysus. Joanna knows only that she is a carpetbagger's granddaughter, not that she is Diana of the Woods. In chapter 6, Faulkner protected himself from the heartbreaking knowledge of Joe, the victimized child, by filling his chapter (in John, the feeding of the multitude) with food jokes: the matron has “jellied” eyes; the dietitian makes Joe think of “something sweet and sticky to eat”; while she thinks of him among blacks as “a pea in a pan full of coffee beans.” Similarly, in chapter 12, Faulkner protected himself from the heartbreaking knowledge of Joanna, the aching old maid, by filling this chapter (in which Jesus announces, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone”) with parallels to the harvesting of the Corn-Maiden and other slightly ludicrous rain-making behavior, described in Frazer.

The secrecy has also had the effect of keeping Faulkner's characters more firmly under his own control, less vulnerable to critical scrutiny, with Faulkner even having later to set the record straight. In chapter 20, Hightower, he had to tell us, does not die. That might have been obvious had we known that Hightower is playing the Doubting Thomas, who must be shown everything before he believes. Such a figure deserves nothing more dramatic than one dim moment of insight before he returns to his nightly “charge.”

As for our reaction, when the covers are off the Modernist writer, the truth can be like a psychoanalytic truth about one's self, both better and worse than we supposed. For example, fortunately there is reason for Faulkner's having introduced a new narrator in his chapter 21 to parallel the new narrator in John 21, for he demonstrates the power of faith (despite some fishy appearances) to sustain the good and simple people of this earth. Unfortunately, his version of the drawing-in of nets is that Byron is the poor fish that didn't get away.

But the good and bad of the Modernist techniques must be faced. Many people don't like puns, and especially they don't like bad puns, which simply interrupt their train of thought. In fact, someone has said that encountering puns in Modernist novels can be like coming on metallic prizes in a cake—more disturbing than pleasant. Then too, many people actively resent Faulkner's obscurities and the vague hints of goings-on. Often, his writing makes one feel like a child in a roomful of adults who are speaking of something fascinating (like sex) in riddles and grimaces. Moreover, the explanations for the anomalies do not make them disappear. Indeed, far from satisfying our novelistic need for realism, they seem to send us off to other, unrelated, worlds. Worst of all, without explanations, we can lose our way completely. There is an elitist, rejecting side to the ironic mode, which even the cognoscenti may dislike.

Naturally, these arguments can be countered. Just as the Modern artist used bright colors, thick outlines, and abstract shapes, so Faulkner used his materials, the words themselves, the odd structures and the ironic, dissembling mode to disturb and distract us. Indeed, they suggest that the train of thought may have more than one destination. Reality does encompass strange and distant lands, all within our personal or collective past. Freud's main thesis might be that our sense of what is real must be expanded to include some rather peculiar impulses and behavior. Eliot maintained that The Golden Bough opened Modern writers to “that vanished mind of which our own civilization is a continuation.” While E. M. Forster was saying “only connect,” Faulkner was demonstrating that the connections are there, willy-nilly, evidently reasoning that human behavior, however odd, must follow universal impulses. Without knowing Joe Christmas is a tree god, we do understand that his dark, contemptuously still face could make a community of decent, hard-working men want to “run him through the planer.”

The fragmentation works in a similar way. As Harold Kaplan noted, “Faulkner's characters are fragments of men needing each other to compose the full image.”¹³ In A Fable, Christ is crucified as Corporal Brzewsky, the English Boggan, the American Brzewski, and the Rev. Tobe Sutterfield, alias Tooleyman (Tout le Monde). In Light in August, Christmas is the crucified Christ while Lena's baby is the infant Jesus. As John Edward Hardy says, “Mystically, the God dies and is born simultaneously. Moreover, it is sound cultural history as well as sound theology. For the pattern of the Christian myth does … survive only in fragments.”¹⁴

Where each character enacts a chapter theme, there are no heroes or villains, only better or worse people at better or worse moments. “Hero” becomes a momentary “heroism,” and “betrayals” must be considered individually and in context. Lucas, rebelling from his master, Christmas, is a traitor, yet Byron, rebelling from Hightower, is becoming his own man. McEachern's stubborn indoctrination has a disastrous effect on Joe, yet the same behavior by Calvin Burden, who would “beat the loving God” into his children, produces a returning son who engages his father in “deadly play and smiling seriousness.” When the sheriff harks to Brown's assertion that Christmas is black with the crescendoing, “Nigger? … Nigger?” we see a good man disappearing into the haze of his racist background. When Grimm castrates Joe and shouts, “Now you'll let white women alone, even in hell,” we see a bad man using racism as a blind for his own paranoia.

This thematic engagement of all the elements, working like poetry, is what makes the minor episodes so strong in Faulkner. At any point in his novels, the main action up on center stage is reflected and re-echoed back and forth from every corner of the theatre. Thus Faulkner strengthens the realism of his fiction; life does consist of more than center stage. But also the ironic use of external structures undercuts that realism, reminding us that we are still in the theatre, reliving scenes from a very old script.

The point is, if we do not read Faulkner in the light of these Modern techniques, we misread Faulkner. Not recognizing the connections between the alternating stories of The Wild Palms, editors disengaged “The Old Man,” and as McHaney notes, the convict's “No to life” must be balanced by Harry's “No to death.”¹⁵ Not recognizing the significance of the manner and order by which the information is revealed in Absalom, Absalom! commentators set about “unscrambling” the book with genealogical charts and chronological checks. Not recognizing the humorous parallel to the fourth gospel's 21st chapter, penned by a lesser writer, critics deemed the ending of Light in August a failure.

Just as Faulkner's technique followed the artistic current of his day, so did his beliefs. As with other Modernists, Faulkner was writing against a background of Victorian religiosity. The Christ Story—itself filled with ironies—was owned and operated by the Sincere who were keeping the Store going by capitalizing more and more of Its Goods. When the Modernists seized it for their ironic mode, they seemed impious. Consider the shocked response to The Man Who Died, D. H. Lawrence's Passion according to Frazer's Osiris. But often they believed themselves to be more, not less religious. Having experienced the first world war, they believed they struggled with a scale of evil unknown to their elders. If religion had personal validity, one had to work on it. Many set out to solve the problem of God and evil, going from scholarship to séance. Yeats made his religion out of Irish history and the occult; Pound, out of American history and Confucius. Others, keeping within Christianity, made their separate peace with God. Perhaps Joyce meant it ironically, but the lapsed Catholic said, “I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.”

When Faulkner was questioned about supplanting a faith in God with a faith in Man, he said, “Probably you are wrong in doing away with God in that fashion. God is. It is He who created man. If you don't reckon with God, you won't wind up anywhere. You question God, and then you begin to doubt, and you begin to ask ‘Why? Why? Why?’ and God fades away by the very act of your doubting Him.” He also said Hemingway did his best work when “he discovered … God. Up to that time his people functioned in a vacuum, they had no past, but suddenly in The Old Man and the Sea, he found God.” Granted, Faulkner loved to diddle his interviewers. But these statements about God have a ring of truth, probably because they are not directly about himself. He is not saying, in other words, “I believe in God”; his secretiveness would have made that difficult. He says, “God is.” Indeed, he even said, “Within my own rights I feel that I'm a good Christian.”

However, Light in August's Christian parallels may give some insights into this question. Begin hierarchically with Old Doc Hines, whom the blacks perhaps “took … to be God Himself.” That he is God the Father is evident in his relationship to Joe Christmas, especially as described in chapter 15, which begins in John, “I am the true vine and my Father is the husbandman.” Since for Jesus, “I and my Father are one,” Hines shows that he is both the true source of the murderer and his destroyer. Well. God? Creator of evil and destroyer? Is this the (Manichean) God that Faulkner believed in? Hines is simply insane, a fanatic, obsessed with—the chosen race. As soon as we say the words, the parallel emerges of Hines with the parochial God of the Old Testament (not a stranger to John), the vengeful Yahweh of the Israelites, the chosen people.

This suggests that Faulkner was using the specifics of the Hebraic-Christian tradition as a leverage to uncover the deeper principles. It also appears that he had some fun at the task. Again, consider Lena. As the Virgin Mary, she suffers some lowering of status, for the parallel reminds us that she is, in fact, a fallen woman. Well. So might the Virgin have been. On the other hand, Lena is a good and kind person, especially worthy in her innocent belief in the word, and in her ability to carry her burden lightly. So might the Virgin have been—even without the virginity. Perhaps Faulkner wanted his Christianity without the fancy footwork.

Lucas/Judas also places Faulkner within a context sympathetic to the essentials of Christianity. If all were Black Mass, all reversed, we might expect Faulkner to have given Judas some redeeming features. Lucas has none.

Similarly, the do-nothing Hightower, as Pilate or Doubting Thomas, comes in for some of Faulkner's greatest scorn. Although he does finally realize that he is as guilty of castrating the church as the “professionals” who have “removed the bells from its steeples,” even this does him no good, returning as he does to his nightly “charge.” Unlike Lena and Byron and the people of the town, who receive him with “hunger and eagerness,” wanting to believe, Hightower never had any faith to begin with. That's his problem; religion is irrelevant. Real religion, the kind that depends on faith and charity, is not possible for the impotent rationalist, and as Hardy says, one of Faulkner's favorite themes is the inevitable defeat of “purely rational purpose.”¹⁶

Actually Faulkner's attitude toward Hightower is best understood by reading Frazer on “The Burden of Royalty.” Among primitives, the sacred ruler is responsible for the whole course of nature, so “the least irregularity on his part may set up a tremor which shall shake the earth to its foundations.” From the moment he ascends the throne, “he is lost in the ocean of rites and taboos.” Unapproachable by his subjects, he “must be celibate; if he is married he must leave his wife.” One ruler was allowed down from the hills only once a year “to make purchases in the market.” Another “may not touch a woman nor leave his house; indeed he may not even quit his chair, in which he is obligated to sleep sitting.” Because of these heavy strictures, “few kings are natives of the countries they govern”; “either men refused to accept the office … or accepting it, they sank under its weight into spiritless creatures, cloistered recluses, from whose nerveless fingers the reins of government slipped.” Most of this suggests Hightower, but that Jefferson has another cloistered ruler in Joanna Burden has precedence in the practice of a priesthood shared by a war chief and a taboo chief, the latter office being, like Joanna's, hereditary (III, 1-25).

Undoubtedly, the most difficult analogy is Joe Christmas as Jesus Christ. It is this characterization especially which has led many to believe that Faulkner was engaged in Black Mass. This position assumes Joe's guilt, regarding what he does (or may have done, or may have been forced to do) without acknowledging the ambiguities. Does Joe kill McEachern? If all we know is the swing of the chair, we are still within our own dreams. Does Joe kill Joanna? If we believe he did so in self-defense, we are still within our rights. As we are essentially innocent when we have sufficient reasons for our guilt, so Joe is essentially innocent.¹⁷

But any explanation of Joe must take into account the parallel with John and the use of Frazer, two perspectives which would seem to be irreconcilable. After all, John would scorn the notion that Christ was a “typical scapegoat.”¹⁸ Indeed, for the synoptics, good acts made one like God; for John, God made one like God. Christ is the Word made flesh. But John and Frazer may be reconciled in the Modern perspective of thinkers such as Santayana and Unamuno which takes the burden of belief out of the hands of science and returns it to the individual will. Such believers would not refuse to look through the Galilean telescope; rather they would recognize that the telescope can be extended by what religions have imagined beyond and within. Belief in God creates God within. Belief in the “Christian myth” renews its efficacy in human affairs. Faulkner called God “the most complete expression of mankind.” Such a perspective requires that individuals find their unique relationships to God through the timeless and universal imperatives of the human community.

During Joe's agony in the garden, he thinks “God loves me too.” Thus, even as he moves with perplexed but growing awareness of his coming role in the human drama, so he senses that role's potential for making him, finally, more than the mask he has been all his life. The paradox may be understood by examining his two-fold creation, as flesh and spirit. His flesh is the creation of Hines and the dietitian, who thrust him into an intermediary non-place, between white and black. His spirit is the creation of the McEacherns, who thrust him into an intermediary non-place, between the rock-like damnation of the father and the drowning forbearance of the mother.

Understanding the pattern of Joe's beginnings helps us to understand his ending, for it is there that he loses both intermediary positions, like Jesus, binding himself to the human community, allowing events in time to grind inexorably over him. In killing Joanna, Joe finally becomes flesh in the form of nigger-murderer, the only possible explanation the community could have for his relationship with Joanna. Now he will enter the world of blacks, violently impress his being upon them by challenging their leaders, seizing their pulpit and putting himself—literally—in their shoes. In killing himself, provoking the community's involvement in and then revulsion over Grimm's excesses, he finally becomes spirit in the form of suffering man, rising into their memories, forever “serene” and even “triumphant.”¹⁹

Still this explanation remains incomplete unless we return to the Modernist techniques of fragmentation, external structuring, and irony. Joe Christmas makes us squirm because, although he does represent a Christ who is, like John's, highly mysterious and eschatological, he does not reflect Luke's “gentle Jesus,” Matthew's “great Rabbi,” or Mark's less articulate “man of action,” perspectives which are reflected by the other three main characters, Lena, Hightower and Byron.²⁰ The four narrators of Absalom, Absalom! may represent a similar fragmentation, and notice that the non-synoptic fourth, Shreve, like John, is the most removed from the original vision, yet he seems to intuit the most.

Thus, in Modernist writing, the fragmented parts must be reassembled and viewed ironically through the external structure. In Absalom, Absalom! this means that Quentin's final forswearing of the South, (“I dont hate it!”), matching Miss Rosa's opening indictment of the demon she loves, is not Faulkner's central message, any more than Genesis or Revelation is the central message of Christianity; rather it is an individual act of chosen suffering and, so that others might be saved, the reporting of that act. Similarly, in Light of August, Joe Christmas is not the new Christ, although his death does serve, like Christ's, to break into the circle of time, spilling blood to rid us of our guilt.²¹ But after our wrong has been entombed in Hightower's “place of skulls,” a revived spirit arises in the form of Byron and Lena's new life and child, part of the older, more encompassing circle—beyond guilt—which embraces all time and blood. Using Modernist techniques, Faulkner demonstrates that the traditional beliefs can be broken apart, distorted, and reassembled in the unlikeliest of forms and folk—a maid, a stable, a man—of the Mississippi clay.

Notes

1. In Faulkner: A Biography, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1974) Joseph Blotner indicates that Faulkner received and dated a copy of Ulysses in 1924 (I, 352); that Joyce was common currency in Sherwood Anderson's New Orleans circle (I, 329); that Faulkner discussed Joyce with Hamilton Basso in 1925 (I, 418); that Faulkner gave his wife Ulysses in 1931 to help her understand Sanctuary (I, 746); the same year, he admitted to Paul Green and Milton Abernathy that he had lied about not knowing Joyce (I, 716); in fact, he recited Joyce to them and then read aloud from his Light in August manuscript (I, 721).

2. See Hlavsa, “The Vision of the Advocate in Absalom, Absalom!” Novel, 8 (1974), 51-70.

3. “From Genesis to Revelation: The Grand Design of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!” Diss., Alabama 1973.

4. Hlavsa, “St. John and Frazer in Light in August: Biblical Form and Mythic Function,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 83 (1980), 9-26.

5. Light in August (New York: Random House, 1932), pp. 16-17. All subsequent page citations to this edition are given in the text.

6. Blotner (I, 777), giving evidence that Faulkner read such commentary, quotes Laurence Stallings from Hollywood: “Unlike practically everyone else, he has remained cold sober. He bought one book to read over his lonely nights. It was a second-hand twelve-volume … Cambridge edition of the Holy Bible.”

7. Faulkner's “Light in August”: A Description and Interpretation of the Revisions (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1975), p. 49.

8. Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd ed., 12 vols. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1911-15), III, 101-90. All subsequent page citations to this edition are given in the text by volume and page.

9. Frazer himself often reached for humorous effect by apparently ludicrous comparisons. For example, quoting an African king—“God made me after his own image; I am all the same as God”—Frazer footnotes, “A slight mental confusion may perhaps be detected in this utterance of the dark-skinned deity. But such confusion, or rather obscurity, is almost inseparable from any attempt to define with philosophic precision the profound mystery of incarnation” (I, 396).

10. Recall in the Laestrygonian chapter of Ulysses: “Sandwich? Ham and his descendants mustered and bred there.”

11. In “The Design of Faulkner's Light in August: A Comprehensive Study,” Diss., Michigan 1970, Don N. Smith believes that Hightower's “daily vision represents a form of autoeroticism or masturbation” (p. 173). Our last view of Harry Wilbourne, in The Wild Palms, may be similar. Thomas L. McHaney relates the book's title and the passage's palms and hands to jokes about masturbation: William Faulkner's “The Wild Palms”: A Study (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1975), pp. 172-73. One of the more hilarious misreadings of Hightower is the notion that he had a homosexual relationship with Christmas, which suggests we should re-examine those weekly visits of Byron.

12. Leslie Fiedler early recognized this sentimentality in “William Faulkner: An American Dickens,” Commentary, 10 (1950), 384-87.

13. The Passive Voice: An Approach to Modern Fiction (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1966), p. 111.

14. Man in the Modern Novel (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1964), p. 156.

15. McHaney, p. 194.

16. Hardy, p. 140.

17. In American Thought and Religious Typology (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1970), p. 219, Ursula Brumm says, “At bottom even the cruel Joe Christmas is a basically innocent person who is prevented from being innocent all his life.” In Faulkner's Search for a South (Champaign: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 79, Walter Taylor maintains that “Faulkner was trying to show that this ‘criminal’ was no more guilty or innocent than society itself. [Joe was] caught up in processes that produced first the ‘criminal,’ then his crime, then his inevitable martyrdom.”

18. Frazer asserted, “To dissolve the founder of Christianity into a myth” is “absurd” (IX, 412n). Rather, he suggested that Jesus' role in the annual Passover ceremony was an accident that his enemies forced upon him because of his “outspoken strictures” (IX, 422).

19. In The Classic Vision: The Retreat from Extremity in Modern Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971), p. 324, Murray Krieger notes that in his death, “Joe seems closest to Christ.” In The Novels of William Faulkner, A Critical Interpretation, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 72-74, Olga Vickery suggests that Joe takes on the mythic role of Negro, but that in his death, he is called “the man.” Indeed, “the man” echoes Pilate's ironic words (only in John), “Behold the Man.”

20. C. Hugh Holman suggests that each of the main characters “is a representation of certain limited aspects of Christ.” See “The Unity of Faulkner's Light in August,” PMLA, 73 (1958), 166.

21. As R. G. Collins says, Joe's sacrifice “sanctifies life. Because of the common identity of mankind, that man who dies as the victim of society throws into symbolic relief the life and death relationship of mankind. It is, indeed, death which gives life its meaning and value.” See “Light in August: Faulkner's Stained Glass Triptych,” Mosaic, (1973), 148.