Some Light (in August) Reading

This blogsite is appropriately titled because I want to begin every post by stating that I am not smart enough to be writing about this book. Light in August is no exception.

Trying to wrap my head around this book is like trying to fit a twin-sized sheet on a queen-sized bed: I can get one corner on, and then a second, but as I stretch to make the third corner fit, one of both of the first two comes flying off. The stories of Lena Grove, Byron Bunch, Joe Christmas, and Gail Hightower could each stand alone in a short story or in a novella, so what is Faulkner doing bringing all these lives under a single cover in a single novel? What unifies all these different tales? What do all these characters have in common?

After much mulling and pondering, I think that Faulkner is saying something about the way we deal with life by withdrawing from it. The thing that got me started in this direction was Reverend Hightower. When he delivers Lena’s baby, his dissatisfaction with Bryon changes, and he wants to thank Byron for pulling him out of his non-existence into the world around him. He has been so busy living in a world of ghosts that he has not interacted with the world around him. From there, I thought about Ms. Burden and her life of isolation on the hill. And then there was Byron himself, who is so afraid of becoming hurt that he avoids human contact, especially with women. When he works late on a Saturday he feels safe, like nothing will come and endanger him there. In this light, Lena’s imperturbability in the face of others opinions begins to look like something other than mere strength. She has checked out, in her own way, living in a fantasy nearly as complete as Hightower’s chasing down Joe Brown/Lucas Burch even after he is untraceable.

So how does Christmas fit into all of this? First, let us look at the way he impacts the world around him. He is a catalyst of sorts that upsets the whole world around him. In the most obvious way, he affects Ms. Burden. Before Christmas, she leads a solitary life, shunned by Jefferson’s white community and shunning them in return. As her relationship with Christmas progresses, she goes through something of a breakdown. At first, she is detached and calm, but then she begins to unravel, going to emotional extremes, and as Christmas observes, she behaves like three different women. Finally, she pushes Christmas in a way she has to know will end badly; she asks him to go to a school for blacks and then learn the law under a black lawyer. As if that weren’t enough, she pulls an ancient revolver on him to force him to act. I wonder if she is practically committing suicide by pushing Christmas as she does. After 40 years of controlling her world tightly, when she lets go and engages, it all falls apart.

Christmas doesn’t have this exact result on everyone else, but he crashes into all of their neatly monitored worlds and breaks them all apart. Byron brings Uncle Doc and his wife to Hightower, and Christmas charges into Hightower’s home where he is murdered. Christmas’s presence forces everyone to interact with each other.

Christmas. In all the novels we have read so far, none of them have dealt with race issues so bluntly. Passage to India dealt with race, but it was all put in the context of nationalism. Here, Christmas believes himself to be of a mixed race simply because other people tell him that he is. This information shapes his whole life. He uses it to start fights and to force others to react to him. He hates himself and those around him, both white and black. When Burden asks him how he is sure, he notes that he has certainly wasted much of his life if he isn’t indeed mixed. What is Faulkner saying about race here? Is Christmas somehow the South, mixed and struggling 70 years after the civil war to come to terms with its mixed heritage? Christmas is the most active of the characters in this novel, even if his actions are destructive and self destructive. What does that mean? Moreover, this novel deals more with the reaction to race than to race itself. This book does not show white and black characters working anything out; instead, it shows how all these people react to the suggestion that there is a black blood somewhere in the gene pool.

So now I have to devolve into a set of questions that I have and would love to hear anyone’s thoughts on. In a novel where we get everyone’s past, even the past of Grimm, who appears in one chapter to shoot Christmas, why is Joe Brown (or should I say Lucas Burch) given no history? We get nothing on him. Peculiar.

What is Faulker saying about authority and America through McEachern and Grimm? Faulkner makes it clear that each sees himself reacting without passion, following immutable laws of behavior. Neither man is set up as a model to emulate, certainly; one acts from religious piety, and one from patriotic vision. Both are cruel and as detached as the other characters in the novel. But acting through passion is just as problematic, as Uncle Doc and the folks who killed the Burden family illustrate. Withdrawing, bad. Following rules blindly, bad. Being blindly passionate, bad. The closest we get to a hero is Christmas and Hightower. That is rough.

How is Christmas’s relationship to his grandfather, Uncle Doc paralleled with Hightower’s relationship to his grandfather? I’ve heard that Christmas, who is 33 in the novel, is likened in some criticism to Christ; how does that idea follow through?

This novel is rich and complex and way beyond my meager intellect, but it sure is a compelling read. What do you have to add?

Bueller? Bueller?

The Sound and the Fury, a Post told by an Idiot

This was my second Faulkner novel. Years ago, I read As I Lay Dying and loved it. The Sound and the Fury did not disappoint, though it was a difficult read. It took me half way through the first section before I realized people were playing golf in the opening passage. I was very proud when I finished that first section, Benjy's section, because I had made it through the time-slipping cloudiness of Benjy's experiences, and I had even made a chart that covered the various events to which he referred. Alright, I said to myself, now I can move on the the easier section.

Ha ha ha! O Quentin, you are a difficult man to read. When the partially insane have something to tell you, they tend to tell it to you in an insane way. I read that Faulkner made Quentin talk without clear references because to a half-mad individual, he thinks he makes perfect sense and he assumes you can follow to. And that at the heart of it is one of the things that I treasure about the Faulkner and Woolf novels that we have read. While the novels require a lot of work, they are trying to represent the way the human mind experiences and processes the world, how it orders sensory input and interprets it. So for Benjy, Caddie smells like trees, and that is an important fact. Benjy's section misses interpretation and emotional valence because Benjy doesn't process the world that way--it's a series of facts and events. Even his crying is unemotional; it's just a sound his throat produces. Not a lot of writers can take you inside the mind like that and still manufacture a compelling narrative and compelling characters too boot.

Jason's section was mercifully clear, but absolutely maddening in his meanness. I can't remember the last time I wanted a character to have his come-uppance so badly. And again, I give Faulkner boundless credit for making such a mean-hearted and ugly-souled man who seems entirely consistent within himself. Faulkner didn't like Jason any more than I did, but he was thorough, and he made Jason make sense to himself. Jason truly believes that he has been wronged and that all his actions are justified, undeniably so. You can especially feel that in the final section, when the narrator follows Dilsey and makes his own observations about the Compson family.

I am sure that there is a big social critique here about Southern Culture and the family in decay, a theme we have been seeing a lot of in these novels from the 20s. But this is another case where I spent more of my energies trying to understand and appreciate the structure and approach of the novel rather than play out its full social implications. However, I did find it interesting that Jason was obsessed with the stock market and the economy as a whole, especially since the book was written and published just before the stock market crash of 1929. All the books that we read in the next 10 year time span will be impacted by the Great Depression and the mounting European political tensions.

I was also surprised at how Faulkner portrayed Caddie and her daughter, Quentin. While neither woman was given her own section, Faulkner seemed as taken with them as any other character in the novel was. The family freaked out and broke down over Caddie's sexual misadventures, but Faulkner passes no judgment. In fact, Quentin's habits are driven by Jason's behavior, as she declares at the dinner table at the end of Jason's section. I can't help but think that Faulkner supported that claim of hers. I expected a good deal of sexism from Faulkner but found very little. Mrs. Compson was hardly a flattering portrait of a southern woman, but she was no more dysfunctional than anyone else in the family, and her failure seems rooted in her efforts to be a "Southern Lady" and hold onto a position and manner of life that is long dead and gone, if it was ever truly here. The family falls apart trying to live in the past, by a moral and social code that is merely a quaint and unworkable notion.

I'm sure Ann will say things much more successfully than I. (No pressure, Ann.) ;)

Excellent novel, and I am very excited for a Light in August.