I Need More Light, Less August!

I think that without the excellent initial musings of my husband, I would have walked away throwing this book over my shoulder like salt. This is an incredibly dense and complex book, the language twisted and inscrutable in passages, beautiful and painful in passages, poetic and enviable everywhere, though the story befuddled me thoroughly. At times, I felt like Lena, plodding along because I have to, because I need to find something - which in my case is only the last page. It took me well over a month to make my journey, and here are a few thoughts so that I can walk away respecting myself, as well as the book.

One disclaimer I must make before beginning is that I had not read Light in August before I sat down with it this summer. Since I have always believed that one must re-read Faulkner if one hopes to comprehend him, I must immediately admit that I don't. Those who do seem to be onto the same themes that Jason and I just discussed over lunch: race, religion, and a community that polices itself with rabid determination, punishing everyone whose interests or identity transgresses "sacred" racial and moral boundaries.

Light in August does seem almost entirely preoccupied with the stories of those transgressors: with Lena, who gets pregnant out of wedlock; with Joe Christmas, who was born out of wedlock and reportedly the product of miscegny; with Joanna Burden, who lives nearly in exile based upon her family's history with race and carries on an illicit sexual relationship with Joe Christmas; and with Gail Hightower, who is a whole fucking mystery unto himself, as far as I'm concerned. The savage sexism of Joe Christmas bothered me terribly, and I in my arrogance feel like I have better uses for my time than analyzing him in any detail, although I am interested in the relationship between gender and morality in the novel.

Traditionally, in America, the woman's consolation for her social and political inequity was her unchallenged command of the moral domain. She was to know morality, to embody it, and to imbue it in her family, as well as her community; this was God's intention. In this novel, women do function in this way - but only to a degree. Armstid predicts when he gives Lena a ride in his wagon that "womenfolks are likely to be good [to Lena] without being very kind. Men, now, might. But it's only a bad woman herself that is likely to be very kind to another woman that needs the kindess." His wife, Martha, is in fact very good to Lena without being kind, giving Lena her own egg money in a fit of fury - and emphasizing that it is her own, as if to dare Armstid to stop her. Men do treat Lena fairly well, but in that respect, Lena is alone. There are many "bad men" in the novel, and they make savage and terrible moral guardians, committing acts of appalling violence and cruelty in the name of upholding their own codes.

In a sense, Joe Christmas fits in with those men, insofar as he loathes himself and tries to provoke others to loathe and reject him, too. Of course, Joe also asks a central question, which he poses to Joanna Burden: "Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?" He himself isn't sure he even has "different blood," but if he doesn't, he says, he has "wasted a lot of time." Doing what? Exposing that hatred? Showing the absurdity of racism by revealing the violence that comes at the mere suggestion, the mere statement of racial difference?

It's almost as if I don't want to ascribe that to Joe Christmas because he is so deeply unlikeable - and because the novel itself is saturated with descriptions of blackness as a tangible, undesirable state. Gah!

To be sure, this novel is critical of the policing roles that Hines and Grimm and McEachern play, but what is the novel really about, in the end? I disagree vehemently with the idea that Lena is somehow a symbol of life that carries on in spite of all. Lena is delusional. She rejects Byron on some unstated basis, which I suspect is that he lost in his fight with Lucas Burch. He is not masculine enough for Lena, so she will go on searching (without actually searching) for a man she knows won't have her. I don't quite get it, which makes this whole blogging process seem frustratingly pointless.

Sigh.