CHAPTER 5
THE MOOD AND THE ATTITUDES present in much of Faulkner’s work of the early thirties, particularly in Sanctuary, are expressed in simple, almost outline form in a seventeen-page short story which he published in 1931 as a separate booklet, Idyll in the Desert. The sense of outrage and the feeling of pity given such powerful and beautiful embodiment in the novels here finds expression in a fable.
A man suffering from tuberculosis comes to the Southwest for a cure. His paramour leaves her husband and children to be with him and care for him. He recovers from the disease and she contracts it. He deserts her and marries a younger woman, leaving her alone to die. When, shortly before her death, she sees him with his bride, he does not recognize her, though an older generation would have put it that she has sacrificed “all,” even life itself, for him.
There is no irony in the telling. All the irony is reserved for the meaning: the irony and the pathos of fate. Even the man who leaves the woman to die in the desert is not treated as having made a questionable moral choice: all, he as well as she, are victims. And victims not of their choices but of “the way things are,” of the universe, acting in this instance through a disease. The story begins in irony and culminates in despair. Like Melville’s story of the Chola widow in The Encantadas, it is emotionally univocal, speaking a language in which all the words point finally to one referent, a generalized pity. Its only act of moral judgment is directed against the universe: in this kind of world this is what we can all expect.
It is not relevant that the woman’s suffering resulted from two human choices, her own decision to leave her husband and children to go to her lover, and his later decision to leave her. The story implies that choice is irrelevant or illusory. It suggests important aspects of the treatment of Popeye in Sanctuary and Joe Christmas in Light in August as well as the despairing pity that at times threatens to destroy those novels. The irony of Idyll in the Desert is not the same as that of As I Lay Dying; it is closer to the romantic irony sometimes apparent in Melville. The story makes a drastic simplification of experience.
2
SANCTUARY HAS often been called sensational, and Faulkner himself once referred to his original conception of it as a “cheap idea.” But he has also told us how he rewrote it after the first version was already in proof, to make it a work of which he would not be ashamed.1 Certainly the novel as we know it is a serious work of art. Yet if we need not concern ourselves further with the idea that it is cheap, I think we shall have to grant that the term sensational is not wholly inappropriate. A novel so violent and so despairing could hardly fail to strike us as sensational; but to say “sensational” is to describe rather than to evaluate. The significant questions for evaluation remain to be asked. If life itself is the outrage it seems in Sanctuary, if the will is always impotent and the intelligence baffled, if all our values must in the end lie “prone and vanquished in the embrace of the season of rain and death,” then to call the novel sensational in such a tone as to imply a dismissal of it is merely to reveal the tameness and timidity of our own vision of life. The question to ask first about the sensationalism of Sanctuary is how cheaply or dearly it is bought.
The despair may be sensed immediately in the style. Several of Faulkner’s favorite words, especially furious, outrage, profound, tragic, terrific, are here sometimes used idiosyncratically, without full contextual justification. In a sense the notes of the bird that sings as Horace and Popeye face each other across the spring could be called “profound,” though we are not likely to be able to see how until after we have finished the novel and gone back to the opening scene; but the same adjective applied to the ruined house—“lightless, desolate, and profound”—surely seems a little forced, as though what is about to take place here were already exerting an irresistible pull toward tragedy. When the bootleggers’ truck gets under way and grinds “terrifically” up the slope of the side road toward the highroad and Memphis, we are likely to feel that even the noisy, clashing gears of a truck of the 1920’s would hardly make a sound deserving to be called “terrific.” The feeling seems somewhat in excess of the facts.
But in most of the book the emotional style is justified by the horror of the objects it delineates. The picture of Goodwin’s father eating, the eager blind old man so close to nothing at all, so pitiful, so disgusting: here is an outrage that casts a terrible light on the human situation. “Then Benbow quit looking.” The paragraph is one of the most vivid evocations of mingled disgust and pity in modern writing, almost too vivid to be borne, and it is a clue to the atmosphere of the work as a whole.
Or again, consider the scene of Temple in the corn crib with the rats. There is a gruesome, macabre horror about this scene that makes us want to call it Gothic and reminds us of Poe, though I think it is more horrible than anything Poe ever wrote, perhaps because it is behavioristic, not cerebral. In its extreme vividness, its nightmarish intensity, its factual veracity (their faces “not twelve inches apart”), it subjects us to an experience that we feel it would be no exaggeration to call “terrific” and an “outrage.”
Finally, Red’s funeral. The whole scene is an outrage, even before the coffin is tipped over, but what happens then would justify adjectives expressive of grotesque horror:
The corpse tumbled slowly and sedately out and came to rest with its face in the center of a wreath.
“Play something!” the proprietor bawled, waving his arms; “play! Play!”
When they raised the corpse the wreath came too, attached to him by a hidden end of a wire driven into his cheek. He had worn a cap which, tumbling off, exposed a small blue hole in the center of his forehead. It had been neatly plugged with wax and was painted, but the wax had been jarred out and lost. They couldn’t find it, but by unfastening the snap in the peak, they could draw the cap down to his eyes.
Like the holes bored by Vardaman in Ma’s face, this wreath fastened to the face by its hidden wire is a violent reminder of our mortality. (It is suggestive of the difference in quality between Sanctuary and As I Lay Dying that here the incident is less closely tied in with character and theme than in the earlier novel.) It is hardly possible to go beyond this in the direction of macabre horror and emotional violence. This is the ultimate and climactic outrage. The lynching of Goodwin that follows occurs “off stage”; it could not increase the pure horror of Red’s funeral and might adulterate the purity of the horror with admiration for Goodwin’s stoical courage or a moral judgment of the action of the mob. The center of Sanctuary does not lie in social criticism or in moral judgment but in horror and despair. After Red’s funeral the action moves rapidly to its close.
The reasons for the despair are clear enough and easier to state than Quentin’s reasons. The bird by the spring that “sang three notes and ceased” first announces the loss that Horace Benbow and thoughtful people like him have suffered. The bird sings three times, three notes each time. Its song may not literally, but does symbolically, justify Faulkner’s “profound”:
Behind him the bird sang again, three bars in monotonous repetition: a sound meaningless and profound out of a suspirant and peaceful following silence which seemed to isolate the spot . . .
The song of the bird suggests the loss of a meaningful relation to nature and, in a more extended sense, of the meaningful relation to an ultimate reality symbolized in the hope of heaven. I think we are not over-reading when we see it as foreshadowing the many later references to the “heaven tree.” Negroes sing spirituals in “the ragged shadow of the heaven tree” which grows before the jail. Horace Benbow is very much aware of the tree but he neither sings spirituals nor stands in its shadow for any other purpose; he finds it cloying:
The last trumpet-shaped bloom had fallen from the heaven tree at the corner of the jail yard. They lay thick, viscid underfoot, sweet and over-sweet in the nostrils with a sweetness surfeitive and moribund, and at night now the ragged shadow of full-fledged leaves pulsed upon the barred window in shabby rise and fall.
When the Negro murderer sings on the last night before his execution, “clinging to the bars, gorilla-like . . . while upon his shadow, upon the checkered orifice of the window, the ragged grief of the heaven tree would pulse and change, the last bloom fallen now,” Horace thinks “They ought to clean that damn mess off the sidewalk.”
Horace is the Quentin of this novel, as Popeye is a Jason further dehumanized by “modernism,” but there is no Dilsey to counteract Popeye and complement Horace. When he thinks of the suffering people he is unable to help, Horace imagines them already dead, “removed, cauterized out of the old and tragic flank of the world.” He too, he thinks, might better be dead, though he does not seriously consider Quentin’s way of asserting his freedom; he thinks, instead, “of lying beneath a low cozy roof under the long sound of the rain: the evil, the injustice, the tears.” And no remedy, no relief:
Perhaps it is upon the instant that we realize, admit, that there is a logical pattern to evil, that we die, he thought, thinking of the expression he had once seen in the eyes of a dead child, and of other dead: the cooling indignation, the shocked despair fading, leaving two empty globes in which the motionless world lurked profoundly in miniature.
Horace is Prufrock once again: he can see, he knows, but he is barred from any effective action. He is Tiresias too, blind seer. And he is presented as a wholly sympathetic character. We must attend closely to his thoughts, even when their apparent subject is a matter of casual observation of the progression of the seasons:
There was still a little snow of locust blooms on the mounting drive. “It does last,” Horace said. “Spring does. You’d almost think there was some purpose to it.”
Piety wears many expressions in the novel, but none of them have the quality of Dilsey’s Easter service or Vardaman’s revealing delusion. Temple in her extremity prays, but since she cannot think of any name for God, she prays “My father’s a judge.” The Negroes before the jail and the condemned man sing their spirituals, but Horace does not stop “to listen to those who were sure to die and him who was already dead singing about heaven and being tired.” The singers remain on the edge of his and our consciousness, picturesque, meaningless, a little irritating, like the mess on the sidewalk left by the fallen blooms of the heaven tree. The Baptist minister exhibits another face of piety: he takes Goodwin as the subject of a sermon, finding him “a polluter of the free Democratico-Protestant atmosphere of Yoknapatawpha county.” Horace reports to Miss Jenny the essence of the sermon:
I gathered that his idea was that Goodwin and the woman should both be burned as a sole example to that child; the child to be reared and taught the English language for the sole end of being taught that it was begot in sin by two people who suffered by fire for having begot it. . . .
To which Miss Jenny makes a reply that, in this context, seems wholly sufficient: “‘They’re just Baptists,’ Miss Jenny said.”
A committee of Baptists force Ruby, a woman who has been “taken in sin,” to leave the hotel. “Christians,” Horace comments, “Christians.” The expressions on the faces of the committee as they went about their work are not recorded, but we can imagine the grim and rigid piety of them. Flem Snopes is a Baptist too, though of a more relaxed kind. When Horace asks him “Are you a Baptist, by any chance?” he answers: “My folks is. I’m pretty liberal, myself. I ain’t hidebound in no sense, as you’ll find when you know me better.”
In Sanctuary, Southern fundamentalist Protestantism is pictured as self-righteous moralism, “Puritan” as the populace in the opening scenes of The Scarlet Letter is Puritan. The religious conscience, thus portrayed, is the immediate antagonist, though the universe itself is man’s ultimate antagonist. In The Sound and the Fury, in contrast, what Jason stands for is the antagonist: Quentin can ignore Baptists while he concentrates on the challenge presented by Jason’s image of the world, and the omniscient observer of the last section can present Dilsey (who is probably a Baptist, and certainly a fundamentalist) without satire or the distance created by a sense of superiority.
What is left of the Christian tradition in Sanctuary is negative, perverted, and corrupt. It is not simply a belief we are unable to accept (we were not asked literally to believe with Dilsey) but one which we are compelled, with intelligent Miss Jenny and visionary Horace, to spurn and reject. There is a complex irony in Temple’s name: the temple has been violated, the Sanctuary broken into; but whether the temple ever held anything sacred that could properly speaking be “violated” is open to question. There is, at any rate, no sanctuary left anywhere now except that offered by Miss Reba’s house.
Traditional meanings are gone, traditional codes emptied of meaning. Though the annual rebirth of spring might make us “almost think there was some purpose” to life, there clearly is none for educated, thoughtful, intelligent men like Horace. The breaking of the image of man foreseen by Quentin is now complete. The peace and beauty of nature mock and torment us: this is the source of the terrible tension and irony of Sanctuary. It is not Temple herself, not even Horace, but the objective narrator who describes Temple, frantic and agonized, as she watches the old man go through the barn: “She opened the door and peered out, at the house in the bright May sunshine, the sabbath peace. . . .” This image of human agony and frustration against the backdrop of the “sabbath peace” of nature is at the very center of the work. We do not need the reminder of Temple’s thinking “about the bells in cool steeples against the blue, and pigeons crooning about the belfries like echoes of the organ’s bass.”
In the end Temple sits with her father in Paris, not listening to the band playing its stale romantic and heroic music, music that is given the lie by the cold gray light, but yawning and powdering her face. Like the woman in Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” who “yawned and drew her stocking up,” she seems to “dissolve” with the waves of music
into the dying brasses, across the pool and the opposite semicircle of trees where at sombre intervals the dead tranquil queens in stained marble mused, and on into the sky lying prone and vanquished in the embrace of the season of rain and death.
There is another way of looking at the despair that permeates the novel, a way that is closer, I suspect, to what Faulkner would now indicate as the meaning he intended. Faulkner is quoted by William Van O’Connor as having said of Popeye that “he was symbolical of evil. I just gave him two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a black suit. It was all allegory.”2 Allegorically, then, evil modernism has brought us to the situation that motivates Horace’s despair. Because the temple has been violated, because the sanctuary has been destroyed or degraded, the image of man has been destroyed. This may in fact be the intended meaning, but I shall give some reasons for not thinking it fully achieved.
Popeye, the mechanical man, impotent for life’s purposes and furiously active for death, with his eyes like rubber knobs and his appearance of being stamped from tin, is, by implication, a distinctively modern product. In Horace’s dualism of “nature” and “progress,” he is the product of “progress”: he spits into the spring.
Temple, “with her high delicate head and her bold painted mouth and soft chin, her eyes blankly right and left looking, cool, predatory, and discreet,” is much like him. He is compared repeatedly to a doll, she to “one of those papier-mâché Easter toys filled with candy.” But whereas Popeye is finally seen from inside, in terms of the causes that produced him, as a victim, she is utterly rejected, portrayed with cold fury. Like Popeye, she is somehow typical of a new generation and a new world, but unlike him she is finally seen, paradoxically, as doer, not victim, of evil.
The implication that she and Popeye are to be seen as typical is strengthened by the portrayal of her admirers. They look from a distance very much like Popeye and are cut from similar material:
Stooping they would drink from flasks and light cigarettes, then erect again, motionless against the light, the upturned collars, the hatted heads, would be like a row of hatted and muffled busts cut from black tin and nailed to the window sills.
Popeye once cut up live birds with scissors: they spread broken glass across the road. When Horace rides on the train with the group from the university, he finds that Snopesism is not limited to Flem and his tribe; it is becoming the way of life of the younger generation. When, some twenty years later, Faulkner continued in Requiem for a Nun the story of Temple Drake he had begun in Sanctuary, he made it very clear that Temple and her kind were to be held accountable for the suffering in the earlier novel: Temple would have to learn to ask forgiveness as well as to forgive.
But in Sanctuary the element of social criticism and moral judgment does not come to much.3 Faulkner’s later interpretation of Temple’s history may or may not have been the one he intended twenty years before; but whether or not intended, it was certainly not consistently achieved. To read it back into Sanctuary now, because of what Requiem has shown us, would be critically irresponsible. What we find when we look at Sanctuary itself, without keeping Requiem in mind, is an “outrage” for which there is no real solution, moral or otherwise. Though Horace is repelled by Snopes and Snopesism, by Popeye and modernism, by Temple and her amoral young men, he is never tempted to interpret the essential tragedy as caused primarily by the qualities that repel him in these people. Rather, as we have seen, he finds the ultimate outrage in the discovery that there is a “logical pattern” to evil. The meaning here is, I submit, obscure; but it seems to be connected with his feeling that there is no meaning in nature, outside of man. (“You’d almost think there was some purpose to it.”) If this is so, then the source of the evil is not moral but metaphysical. Gangsterism and bad manners in the young are only symptoms, and symptoms not of a falling away from the truth but of a discovery of it, natural concomitants of the “neutralization of nature.”
If Horace’s words about the “logical pattern” mean that the evil springs from the motivation and behavior shared by Popeye, Temple, Snopes, and Temple’s young men, then the book suffers by the lack of a character effective for right as these are effective for wrong. If this is the meaning, the book needs a Dilsey, or at least a Dr. Mahon or a Cash, a Lena or a Byron Bunch. Because there is no such character, because even Narcissa sides at the crucial moment against Horace and his futile effort for justice and mercy, because the Baptists are summed up with apparent adequacy by Miss Jenny as those from whom no real charity or understanding can be expected, we have in fact a novel of pure despair whether or not it was so intended. The moral evils and social failings are finally seen as merely exacerbating an outrage already unbearable for fully conscious and sensitive men.
What is left, so far as the effectively achieved meaning is concerned, is pity and horror. Pity: here is a significant difference between the poem and the novel that draws upon it for its conclusion. Sweeney and his “friends” are seen without pity in the poem, assimilated to the lower animals their actions resemble. Nothing mars the sharpness of the satire. Here our view of Popeye undergoes a drastic shift at the very end. In the last chapter we are made to see Popeye as he presumably sees himself, or perhaps as God in His infinite mercy may see him: like Joe Christmas (and Popeye was born on Christmas day) a victim driven to a sadomasochistic denial of life and search for death: a victim perhaps more than he is a doer of evil. By the time we have followed Popeye through his childhood the effectiveness of the opening portrayal of him has been destroyed. He has become as much a victim as Goodwin, not of Temple’s moral viciousness and Southern mores and the bungling of the processes of justice but of “fate” working through venereal disease and fire and accident.
The pity that is extended to Popeye reaches not only Horace but Goodwin and Ruby. It is withheld most notably from Temple, with the implication that she exercises more choice than Popeye and can be held accountable for her choices; but it is withheld from all who refuse pity for whatever reason. The Baptist general public, with their cruel piety, and Narcissa, with her religion of propriety, are alike rejected. Pity shapes the novel, and horror: the wreath on the face, the rats in the crib, the cold gray light.
The pity and the horror create the irony. Popeye was arrested on his way to visit his mother, not for the murder of Tommy or Red whom he had killed but for the murder of a man he had never seen in a town where he had never been. He finds the situation grimly appropriate in the world he has come to know and hate. The reader has been prepared to agree. The heaven tree prepared him, the sabbath peace at the time of Temple’s ordeal prepared him, Horace’s impotence and frustration prepared him. The ending, with Temple sitting “sullen and discontented and sad,” is one of the finest pieces of ironical writing in all fiction. The sense of horror here is too great for anything but understatement, and the tragedy is the more terrible because it is not Temple’s but man’s. The music of Massenet and Scriabine and Berlioz, “like a thin coating of tortured Tschaikowsky on a slice of stale bread,” impotently and irrelevantly asserts the possibility of tragedy, of Quentin’s “honor” and “sin,” but Temple is only bored and cold and empty. The irony is epitomized even in the order of the adjectives applied to her: she is “sullen” and “discontented” before she is “sad,” so that any element of the tragic or heroic in her sadness has already been discounted before it comes. The music might be playing in another world.
The wonderful humor of the scenes when the Snopes brothers take lodgings at Miss Reba’s and when Miss Reba entertains her friends after the funeral is in a sense “comic relief” from the tension of the deeper irony, but in another sense it extends that irony into another range, changing the key but not dropping the theme. In the perspective afforded by Miss Reba’s place, we may see that there has been the potentiality of a grotesque humor in Temple’s misadventures all along, but of humor withheld and denied by the predominance of the pity and the horror. Now the irony moves from the tragic to the comic, is pitched differently, but is never entirely lost as irony. Virgil’s supposition that the women in Miss Reba’s house are all married—“Aint you heard them?”—is pure folk humor, but Miss Reba’s judgment of Flem Snopes—who came in and “sat around the dining-room blowing his head off and feeling the girls’ behinds, but if he ever spent a cent I don’t know it”—as “Just a cheap, vulgar man, honey” is not far from the irony expressed in the description of Narcissa and the Baptist committee.
When Miss Reba and her two friends refresh themselves after the funeral they “talk politely, in decorous half-completed sentences, with little gasps of agreement.” This is a world in which words, and the standards they represent, have lost all real meaning and continue their existence quite apart from, and even in opposition to, reality—a world we have already come to know in the funeral itself, in Narcissa’s dedication to the standards of decency, and in the Negroes singing by the jail. Miss Reba and her friends are responding to a code which has very little connection with the situation. “‘Miss Reba’s the perfect hostess,’ the thin one said.” The fact that she is a “hostess” in a sense not intended in her friend’s statement is the basis not only of the obvious humor but of an irony never very far from the surface. Miss Reba’s disapproval of Popeye’s introduction of unusual pleasures into her house—and “Me trying to run a respectable house”—certainly suggests, and may very possibly have been suggested by, the speaker’s complaint in Eliot’s “Sweeney Erect”—“It does the house no sort of good.” The quality of the irony is the same in the poem and in this scene of the novel. In both places it springs from a sense that the image of man is lost and continues to exist only in language now grotesquely inappropriate. This is also the idea which inverts the story of the betrayed girl to make it the story of her betrayal of Goodwin and Red, a story sardonic, always on the verge of macabre humor, and violently ironic.
This suggests that the “comic relief’ of the scenes at Miss Reba’s is not wholly discontinuous with the rest of the work, though it is not so closely integrated as is the humor of As I Lay Dying. Though Sanctuary seems to me one of the finest novels in modern literature, when we compare it with Faulkner’s best—with The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom!—we note a comparative lack of connection and development. The symbolism is, comparatively—but only comparatively—superficial, “flashy.” The heaven tree has more obvious force and less meaning and relevance than Vardaman’s fish. Popeye’s mechanical appearance never leads into anything like Jason’s mechanical philosophy. At times we may feel that here violence does not so much embody and motivate judgment as serve in its absence. Perhaps the trouble is that there is so little hope in the novel that thinking lacks motive. At any rate it is clear that the tension is at times almost—but never quite—destroyed by being weighted on the side of despair. The result is a distinguished novel that is less an implicit judgment of experience than a compelling and almost unbearable subjection to it.
3
IN ONE OF Gail Hightower’s final meditations he pronounces an often quoted judgment on Southern Protestant Christianity. The music he hears coming from the church seems to him to have “a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death, as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music.” “Puritanism,” or punitive religious moralism, is perhaps the chief intended antagonist in Light in August, as it is the immediate antagonist in Sanctuary.
“Pleasure, ecstasy,” Hightower thinks, “they cannot seem to bear.” Hines and McEachern could be his illustrations, the two most obviously pious people in the story and the two most responsible for the fate of Joe Christmas. He does not think of them because he does not know what we know about Christmas’s past, but we, reading, supply them for him. And when we have finished the novel we feel that events have proved Hightower right when he pictures a crucifixion inflicted not despite but because of the religion of his fellow townsmen:
And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? . . . It seems to him 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 the 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 of the 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.
Hightower’s thoughts constitute a terrible indictment of Southern Christianity, charging that it has become so distorted that it leads men toward hatred and destruction and death, crucifying Christ all over again, and “gladly.” A great deal of the substance of the book has the effect of leading us to accept this judgment, and Light in August is Faulkner’s most fully documented statement on what he sees as the religious errors and the racist guilt of his region. The grim fanatical fundamentalism of McEachern and the mad fundamentalist racism of Hines are judged in negative terms and without any shadow of qualification.
But a recognition of this theme of the book, necessary as it is, will not alone take us to an understanding of the whole novel. We may get at a further meaning by going on with Hightower’s meditation to a passage which, unlike the negative judgment of the Southern Protestant churches, has not been quoted by the critics. Hightower has thought that the people would crucify “gladly.” Now he thinks why they will have to do it gladly:
‘Since to pity him would be to admit self-doubt and to hope for and need pity themselves. They will do it gladly, gladly. That’s why it is so terrible . . .’
They will do it as Percy Grimm commits his murder and mutilation, secure in the confidence that they are doing their duty, without the least shadow of self-doubt, with perfect confidence in their own rectitude; like Percy Grimm, whose face “above the blunt, cold rake of the automatic . . . had that serene, unearthly luminousness of angels in church windows.”
But the whole strategy of the book is designed to prevent the reader not only from sharing their sense of their rectitude—this would be easy—but from resting confident in his sense of his own rectitude, his superiority to Joe Christmas, the warped sadist and murderer, and to Christmas’s bigoted and cruel tormentors. Faulkner has said that a writer should be judged partly in terms of the difficulty of what he attempts, and that those writers who lack courage and so continue to do only what they know they can do well perhaps have earned less of our respect than those who attempt more and fail. In Light in August Faulkner attempts a task difficult enough to be a challenge to any novelist, too difficult perhaps to be perfectly accomplished. He attempts to make us pity, identify ourselves with and even, in the religious sense of the word, love, a man who would be rejected not only by Southern mores with their racial bias but by any humane standard. He tries to awaken compassion for “one of the least of these” based on a recognition of universal guilt and mutual responsibility, not so that we may suspend judgment entirely but so that we may judge with love. Light in August is addressed not only to the conscience of the South but to the conscience of all readers anywhere. It has never to my knowledge been called a tract, but if it were not so powerful as a work of art it might well justify that designation. The moral feeling in it is intense. It demands nothing less than a withholding of self-righteous negative moral judgments and a substitution of unlimited compassion. If it shows us how and why “faith without deeds is dead,” it shows us equally why we must “repent” before we “believe.”
The novel moves toward this end the hard way, aesthetically and morally. It never makes Joe Christmas attractive. With the exception of a few passages on which I shall comment later, it does not picture him as “good at heart,” forced into bad actions by circumstances. It shows us a man of whom we might say that it is surprising not that he commits one murder but that he has not committed more, a man apparently capable of any violent and repulsive deed, a man who hates not even those who love him but especially those who love him. It asks us to consider this man’s death as parallel to the crucifixion of Christ.
The Joe Christmas—Jesus Christ analogy is prominent and consistent throughout the novel, and not simply, as the introduction to the Modern Library edition would have it, begun and then forgotten. It has nothing to do with any resemblance in character or outlook between Christmas and Jesus: indeed, this is precisely the point, that we are asked to see Christmas’s death as a crucifixion despite the fact that Christmas is in every imaginable way different from Jesus. To make us pity a Christ-like figure would be easy, but the novel never attempts to do this. It asks pity for Christmas by making us see that the terrible things we do and become are all finally in self defense. We are asked to feel not that Christmas is really good or nice but that he epitomizes the human situation. To do this is difficult for precisely the reason given by Hightower: it must be preceded by a personal confession of sin and a felt need for pity, forgiveness.
When we first see Joe Christmas it is through Byron Bunch. Bunch refuses to judge him but we are not likely to make the same refusal. Christmas’s hat is “cocked at an angle arrogant and baleful above his still face.” And there is nothing superficial or deceptive about the appearance of arrogance. All the men in the mill note his “air of cold and quiet contempt.” The foreman speaks the general mind when he says “We ought to run him through the planer. Maybe that will take that look off his face.” Christmas is later run through a planer of suffering, but “that look” comes off his face only at the moment of his death. The foreman is right, in a way, but his judgment is that of the reader at this point, lacking compassion.
After we have seen Christmas at his baleful and repellent worst we are taken back into the childhood that produced the man. The homicidal maniac who now thinks in fantasy “God loves me too” is the product of a complete absence of love in his earliest formative years. The experiences in the orphanage beyond present conscious memory were the formative ones in Christmas’s life, and they all lead to one multiple impression: rejection, self-hatred, hatred of others.
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own . . . the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.
By the time the McEacherns take the boy he is already shaped to reject love and respond only to hatred. It is unnecessary to qualify the description of McEachern as a “ruthless and bigoted man,” a man cold, hard, and cruel, to recognize that he was faced with a virtually hopeless task in his efforts to transform Joe into an acceptable Presbyterian foster-son. We learn that though the man beat him and the wife attempted to be kind and was unfailingly sympathetic, the boy hated the woman more than the man:
It 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.
When we remember his response to Mrs. McEachern’s attempts to befriend him and his kicking of the Negro girl in the shed, we see that his finally murdering the woman who had loved him and was trying to help him was predictable, in character, true to form psychologically. Unable to accept himself, Joe Christmas seeks punishment and death throughout his life as, earlier, he had forced McEachern to beat him. Psychologists might describe his character as “sado-masochistic.” His aggressiveness is turned in upon himself as well as out toward others: he seeks to hurt and be hurt. Only when he has suffered the final pain and outrage inflicted by Percy Grimm does a look of peace come into his eyes. He had been waiting for this since the dietician offered him fifty cents instead of beating him.
Joe Christmas wants justice, not kindness—law, not mercy. The dietician should have punished him to preserve life’s moral clarity. Christmas would be justified by keeping the Law, not by declaring himself a sinner and throwing himself on the Grace of God. To be able to accept kindness is implicitly to acknowledge one’s self in need of it: Christmas is like his persecutors in having no humility, for all his “inferiority complex.” He is like them too, even like mad old Doc Hines, in being an absolutist and a legalist. This is the quality which creates the curious kinship between him and McEachern even while they oppose each other with all their strength. For both of them right and wrong must be clear and definite; only so may a system of rewards and punishments ensure justice. McEachern seeks to enforce his, and God’s, commandments, Christmas to violate them. The two are more alike than different.
All his life Christmas demands to know whether he is black or white. What he feels he cannot endure and will not accept is the not knowing, the ambiguity of his situation. Like many another Faulkner character, he is Ahab-like in his scorn of all petty satisfactions and his determination to “strike through the mask” to get at absolute truth, ultimate certainty and clarity, for good or for ill. He must know the truth, and for truth kindness is no substitute. In this sense his very “idealism” drives him to every degradation and finally to his destruction.
But there is still another light in which we may look at him. We have seen him as doubly victimized, first by circumstance and a loveless society, which together have made him what he is, second by his own need for the kind of justice and certainty not to be found (the novel implies) in life. But now, as we think of the final events of his life, we see him becoming society’s victim in still a further sense—its scapegoat. Society heaps on him all the sins which it cannot, will not, see in itself. Hightower has understood this too: “to pity him would be to admit self-doubt and to hope for and need pity themselves.” A scapegoat is needed not by the innocent but by the guilty. Joe Christmas makes it possible for his persecutors never to recognize their guilt. Hines, McEachern, and Grimm are all, in their several ways, “believers,” but they have never repented and their actions are unconsciously calculated to protect them from the need to repent. To concentrate on this aspect of the portrait of Christmas leads one to feel the religious profundity of Light in August, and to realize that the work is deeply Christian in its meaning, despite its excoriation of the exemplars of piety.
This is the man, then—debased murderer, victim, scapegoat—whom we are forced, by the frequent symbolic pointers, to think of in terms of Christ. Readers have generally taken the parallel either as pure irony—everything so much the same, and yet the two figures so utterly different as to be quite incomparable—or as an ironically expressed insight into a likeness that remains real despite the irony. For the latter reading, which seems much better able to account for all the facts of a highly complex portrait than the former, a passage of Scripture is helpful:
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. (Matthew 25:44-45).
Joe Christmas is surely “one of the least of these.” When the novel opens he is soon to be captured and put in prison; early in the book we see him naked beside the road; during his flight he suffers from hunger and thirst and is sick: every item in the catalogue of the unfortunate is paralleled in the book. The irony lies partly in the fact that he rejects or strikes down those who do try to “minister unto” him—Mrs. McEachern, Miss Burden, Gail Hightower. But we are invited to believe that by the time these attempts to help him came he was beyond being able to respond to them except with rejection.
The motif of Christmas’s adult life takes its pattern in part from the Agnus dei of the service of Holy Communion. In the Agnus dei the worshipper calls upon the “lamb of God” first to have mercy and then, in culmination, to “grant us thy peace.” “All I wanted was peace,” Christmas thinks after he has killed Miss Burden; and on another occasion, though the word used here is the close synonym “quiet”: “That was all I wanted . . . That was all, for thirty years.” In his boyhood he had slain a sheep and dipped his hands in the blood, thus in fantasy and symbol being “washed in the blood of the lamb.” When he is killed and his own blood flows he seems to find peace at last.
For a long moment he looked up at them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever.
It is perhaps the last irony of Joe Christmas’s life that at his death there is a kind of metaphoric ascension. There is a sense in which he himself has become “the slain sheep, the price paid for immunity,” to use a phrase applied earlier to his taking Bobbie Allen into the fields. Those who witnessed his death, into whose memories his blood has “ascended,” are never to lose this memory
in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. It will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading and not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant.
The career of Joe Christmas constitutes a rebuke to the community, a measure of its sin of racial arrogance and of its corruption of Christianity from a religion of love and life to one of hatred and death, from Jesus to Doc Hines and McEachern. But Christmas is not the only source of the rebuke. The novel opens with Lena, an “unconscious Christian”; it moves, except in the sections on Christmas’s childhood, largely through the minds of Byron Bunch and Gail Hightower, Christians of two different kinds; and it closes with Byron and Lena. The story of Christmas is thus framed and illuminated by the stories of several kinds of practicing Christians. McEachern and Hines, it would appear, do not give us the whole picture. Each is true to those aspects of religion under condemnation, but taken alone they would constitute a caricature. The force of the criticism comes from the recognition that they are so typical, their errors of practice or doctrine so widespread.
Meanwhile there is Lena to suggest a Christianity different from that of McEachern or Hines. She is not only a kind of nature or fertility goddess,4 but also a witness to the efficacy of the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and love. Her trust is in the Lord, as Armstid recognizes when he recalls how “she told Martha last night about how the Lord will see that what is right will get done.” She may have been created with a passage from St. Paul in mind; at any rate she suffers long, and is kind, does not envy and is not (like Joe Christmas) too proud to accept help, is never unseemly in her conduct, and (to shift to the Revised Standard Version) “is not irritable or resentful”; she “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Considering that she is so saintly an image, it is remarkable that she seems so real to us. Novelists have seldom been successful in portraying saints. No wonder there is what has been called a “pastoral” quality in the Lena episodes. No wonder she moves “with the untroubled unhaste of a change of season.” Unlike Christmas she is not in flight.
And Byron Bunch. He is the portrait of the unlettered practicing Christian. He works alone at the mill on Saturday afternoon to avoid any occasion of sin, thus following good Catholic precept. (He finds that even so he cannot avoid temptation.) Only Hightower knows that he “rides thirty miles into the country and spends Sunday leading the choir in a country church—a service which lasts all day long.” He immediately offers Christmas a part of his lunch when they first meet (the reply is typical: “I aint hungry. Keep your muck.”) and refuses to pass judgment on him when he is told that Brown and Christmas are bootleggers. He holds himself responsible for having listened to the gossip: “And so I reckon I aint no better than nobody else.” He thinks of Miss Burden and her reputation and the negative judgment the town makes of her; he makes no such judgment. He is a friend of the ruined outcast minister Hightower, not simply “befriending” him, refusing to share the town’s harsh judgment, but recognizing in him a kindred spirit, seeking him out for advice, paying him the compliment of putting burdens upon him that he would ask no one else to bear. He pities and tries to help not only Lena and Hightower but Christmas’s grandparents, bringing them to Hightower for advice. He extends his compassion to Christmas himself and might have been effective in his intended aid if Hightower had not refused until too late to accept the responsibility Byron tried to get him to see was his.
Byron Bunch has learned to bear the burden of being human. Generally inarticulate, he yet manages several times to define that burden for Hightower:
I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it’s the good men that cant deny the bill when it comes around.
What Byron knows, he has had to learn in painful experience. We see him repeatedly tempted to deny the bill. No man, he often feels, should have to bear what he has to bear. But in the end he discovers that he can bear even the thought that all his efforts have succeeded only in getting Lena married to Burch. “It seems like a man can just about bear anything. He can even bear what he never done.” His burden, finally, is total recognition of the impurity, the injustice, the unresolvable irony of life itself. When he has learned this, he knows not to ask for justice but for mercy and the strength to persevere. Like Lena, Byron is travelling the road recommended by the saints.5
And Hightower. Here the picture is more complicated, so complicated that many readers have had difficulty putting the pieces together. Fundamentally, Hightower is a romantic idealist who, confronted with a reality less pure and heroic than his dreams, has retreated to a spot where he hopes life cannot reach him to hurt him again. His master symbol is the galloping horsemen; he cannot steadily face the fact that the horsemen were engaged in raiding a chicken house. When he sits at his window at sunset waiting for the dusk and the image of the galloping horsemen, a part of him knows that he is really waiting only for death,
waiting for that instant when all light has failed out of the sky and it would be night save for that faint light which daygranaried leaf and grass blade reluctant suspire, making still a little light on earth though night itself has come.
“Daygranaried”: the natural light imagery here cannot be freed of its religious associations. The light of his religious faith has gone from Hightower and he has nothing to wait for now but the little light reflected, stored up perhaps from the source, but now coming, or seeming to come, from the earth itself,6 before the final coming of night. When he is about to die he thinks he should try to pray, but he does not try.
“With all air, all heaven, filled with the lost and unheeded crying of all the living who ever lived, wailing still like lost children among the cold and terrible stars.”
Yet he finally atones for whatever sin has been his by trying to protect Christmas from his pursuers, at a terrible cost to any pride he has left. Like Joe Christmas, Hightower thinks on one occasion that all he has ever really desired was peace; thinking too that it should rightly be his now, that he has earned it through suffering endured. It is Byron Bunch who teaches him that peace is not to be had by retreat, by taking no chances, that the purity achieved by denying the bill, refusing the risks of his humanity, is more like death than like life. As Hightower explicitly recognizes when he thinks Byron has left town without saying goodbye, Byron has restored him to life, or life to him. And so at the end he acts for once not like the romantic idealist and absolutist he has always been but like Byron, the practising Christian, the doer of the word who can submit to unreason and persevere in good works. Telling the pursuing men that Christmas was with him on the night of the murder, Hightower takes on himself the opprobrium of the town’s worst surmise.
Before his death Hightower has learned that he is not simply a victim, that in some degree at least he has brought his martyrdom on himself. He sees that he has been “wild too in the pulpit, using religion as though it were a dream,” getting religion and his romantic idolization of the past all mixed up together, using perhaps, he suspects, even his wife as a means to the end of his self-inflicted martyrdom. If he could pray at the end of his life he would pray not simply for peace but for mercy, as a sinner. He learns late what Byron Bunch has known all along. Before this when he and Byron sit together he looks “like an awkward beast tricked and befooled of the need for flight. . . . Byron alone seems to possess life.” Yet at the end if he has neither faith nor hope he has shown himself capable in the supreme test of acting in terms of love, “the greatest of these.” Hightower too is finally a redeemed and potentially redemptive character.
Joanna Burden is more complex than Byron Bunch and perhaps more perfectly realized than Hightower. Faulkner’s critics have generally passed over her in silence, leaving her unrelated to the central themes of the book. But I think that if we consider the clue offered by her name, we shall find a key to at least the most significant aspect of her symbolic role. To do so seems not to be capricious in considering a book filled with suggestive names: Hightower, who spends most of his life above the battle and only at the end of his life comes down into the common life of man; Bunch, whose name suggests something common and solid and unromantic; Grimm; Christmas. Miss Burden, then, may be seen in a preliminary way as one who has taken the opposite road from the one followed by Hightower during his years of isolation. She accepts the burden of working for human betterment and the other, often painful, burdens it entails. Her isolation in a hostile community has been the price she has had to pay, in Byron’s terms, for working for the cause of Negroes. For her, the white man’s burden is her own burden.
But her conscience is not just sensitive, it is sensitive in a special way, the way of her grandfather the abolitionist. Though she has responded to life by commitment instead of flight, she is fundamentally as “idealistic” and “absolutist” in her reactions as Hightower. She accepts Joe Christmas, paradoxically, because he is, or she thinks he is, a Negro, not because he is a human being. The crisis in their relationship comes when she tells him her plan to send him to a Negro college. Her very idealism forces her to place him, in black or white. Thus she ends by reinforcing for him the terrible need that has driven him all his life, the need to know what he is. He has become her world, and she cannot accept a mixed, impure, ambiguous world, any more than Joe himself can, or Hightower before Byron teaches him. Like Melville’s Pierre, she finds “the ambiguities” intolerable, just because she is so much an idealist. Her cause is finally more important to her even than Joe, and in her inflexible conscientiousness she drives him to murder her.
She is not, of course, an obvious sinner like Doc Hines and the other “righteous” characters in the story. There is real nobility in her that sets her quite apart from all the “idealists” but Hightower. She pays the price of goodness unflinchingly. But she can function only in a world of black and white; gray leaves her baffled, helpless. There is one burden, then, she cannot bear: precisely Byron Bunch’s burden, the perception of essential irony. She is murdered by a man neither white nor black, but in a deeper sense she is destroyed by her abolitionist grandfather, for whom moral issues were perfectly clear and unambiguous.
In these people and their relationships the theme of the novel finds whatever expression it gets. There are no author’s intrusions, no pointing fingers to tell us what it means. The meditations of Hightower come closer than anything else in the book to the voice of Faulkner the moralist but Hightower is portrayed as so clearly the victim of his own delusions that we are left to make our own decision as to which of his ideas are sound and which mere symptoms of his spiritual sickness. Byron Bunch is nearly as inarticulate as Lena, and we are given every opportunity to dismiss them both as essentially creatures of tender comedy in a pastoral idyl. The only characters of whom we may say that a definite and single judgment is required are McEachern, Hines, and Grimm; these are the only important characters approached wholly from outside, without any sympathetic identification with them on Faulkner’s part.
Yet the novel “says” some things clearly enough. To the region in which it is laid it says that its racial injustice is a sin of the most terrible proportions and consequences (not merely a mistake or an accident—there is no moral relativism here or anywhere else in Faulkner) but also an opportunity for moral action. It says that suffering is the universal lot of mankind: in every man’s death, even in that of a Joe Christmas, there is a kind of crucifixion. It says that the test of character is the individual’s response to suffering: the hatred of Joe Christmas, the flight from responsibility of Hightower, the humble engagement of Lena and Byron.
The fact that these two open and close the novel seems to me crucial and not to have been given sufficient weight in most interpretations. It is not enough to say that the beginning and end are comic relief from the pure tragedy of the major part of the work. Lena and Byron are comic, of course, and the ending is an anticlimax, but it is also an affirmation of the possibilities of life. The voice of the travelling man from Memphis is the voice of sanity which makes no excessive demands on life, the voice of “realism” if you will, but a realism capable of seeing two people of precisely Byron’s and Lena’s qualities as those who offer hope. That only Byron and Lena, in the end, are capable of carrying on is to be expected. We have been prepared for this kind of affirmation by Dilsey and Cash. Certainly one meaning of the ending is that though knowledge of absolutes is not granted to man, yet what he is given to know is enough, if he has the moral and religious qualities of Byron and Lena. If this is the central meaning of the ending, the final implication of the book is a kind of Christian existentialism which could be explicated in terms of the theology of a Tillich or a Bultmann. Byron and Lena have the courage and the faith to be in a world where man does not see God face to face and any localizing of the absolute is a mark of pride.
This much is tolerably clear, but there is a good deal that is not, and even this is likely to seem most plausible if we keep our attention centered on the contrast between Byron and Lena, on the one hand, and Hightower, Christmas, and Joanna Burden, on the other—as of course the structure of the book in the largest sense suggests that we should. There is a theological ambiguity and a moral one, each of which tends in some degree to run counter to what I have described as the implication of the ending. The theological seems not crucial in the context which the story itself has created. Whether ultimate meaning here should be thought of in a humanist or in a Christian sense, in Hightower’s way or in Byron’s way, it is perfectly clear that the humble commitment of Byron and Lena is presented as the only alternative to suicide or destruction. If God exists, and cares, he demands this of us; if He does not we must live, if we are to live at all, by the old virtues anyway. Humanists may be living only by “daygranaried” light, light stored up from a higher source that now only seems to seep up from below; or the light may really come from below, from the earth. In either case, the “old truths of the heart” are valid. The theological ambiguity is not crucial to an interpretation of the main thrust of the novel.
But the moral ambiguity is not so easily disposed of. It concerns, as so often in Faulkner, the problem of freedom and responsibility. We have seen Hightower as one who has demanded purity and, not finding it, has tried to isolate himself from an impure world; in this sense he is a victim of his own delusion and so in another sense not a victim at all but a man who has been mistaken. But most of the time during his years of seclusion he sees himself, and Faulkner seems to see him, as an innocent victim of other people or of life. His parishioners, the townspeople, the church, his wife, God, all seem to him to have failed him; and since we see them from his point of view, it is not entirely clear that he is wrong. Or at least it is not until toward the end. Then he thinks, “After all, there must be some things for which God cannot be accused by man and held responsible. There must be.” Presumably there must, but it is not entirely clear to Hightower or to the reader what they are. It is significant, I think, that after Hightower achieves this insight and the reader comes to see him in terms of what it implies, the man himself becomes clear and believable to us at last. His dying meditation is one of the most powerful passages in all of Faulkner.
The same ambiguity is more troublesome in the portrait of Christmas. We see him chiefly as a “bad” man who cannot help being what he is. Living and dead he is a condemnation of an unjust society and a perverted religious conscience. But it is difficult if not impossible for us to picture a man as simply a victim. We may withhold judgment, refusing to try to decide what he can be held responsible for in the Last, and true, Judgment, but we must assume that he has some degree of moral responsibility if we are to see him as fully human. Apparently Faulkner must, too. Though the chapters on Christmas’s childhood and boyhood, constituting a kind of case history of the growth of a sadomasochist, seems to remove from him all responsibility for what he later becomes, there are passages in which choice is imputed to Christmas. There are others in which, choice being denied but felt by the reader, the effect is sentimental. A couple of examples will serve to illustrate the point sufficiently.
When, after striking McEachern in the dance hall, Christmas runs away, there is a definite imputation of choice:
The youth . . . rode lightly . . . exulting perhaps at the moment as Faustus had, of having put behind now at once and for all the Shalt Not, of being free at last of honor and Law.
But the point of the Faustus myth is that Faustus, with full knowledge and acceptance of responsibility, made a choice. Most of the portrait of Christmas has the effect of suggesting that he was simply a victim, made no choices.
Again, and in contrast to the Faustus passage, the treatment of Christmas’s experience with Bobbie Allen culminates in an apparent acceptance by Faulkner of Christmas’s own view of the experience, a view which makes this the final betrayal, the last bitter blow of fate. “Why, I committed murder for her. I even stole for her,” Christmas thinks. But that is not quite the way it was. As for the stealing, he had been stealing for some time before, and this particular “theft”—he took Mrs. McEachern’s money in her presence, knowing well that she would have given it to him gladly—was not so much a theft as a final premeditated blow to the woman who had tried to help him. As for the “murder,” whether or not McEachern died from the blow we are not told, but we do know that the boy had been waiting for the opportunity to deliver it for a long time and “exulted” when the opportunity came to “get even.” It was not then in any real sense a murder committed “for her.” Yet there is no indication in the writing at this point that these rationalizations of the boy’s are not to be accepted at face value. The effect of the passage is sentimental.
A final example. As a part of the summary of Christmas’s years between the time when he ran away from the McEacherns and the time when he came to Jefferson we are told of the effect on him of his first experience of sexual relations with a white woman.
He was sick after that. He did not know until then that there were white women who would take a man with a black skin. He stayed sick for two years.
I am afraid I shall have to say that this seems to me just plain nonsense. The implication that he was sick for two years not simply “after that” but because of “that” is wrong from several points of view. Would this amazing discovery make a well man sick, and for two years? Anyway, he does not have a “black skin.” It is already perfectly clear, and even explicit, that he was very sick indeed psychologically long before this discovery, and is sick long after the two years are up. The passage is melodramatic in its imputation of too great an effect to too little a cause, and it is sentimental in its implication, once again, of innocence betrayed. It tells us more about Faulkner’s own mixed racial feelings than it does about Joe Christmas.
No doubt this was how Christmas remembered the incident, but the passage could be effective only if there were some indication that Faulkner himself did not accept Christmas’s sick notion of cause and effect. Faulkner’s submergence of himself in his characters, which accounts for some of his greatest triumphs, also sometimes accounts for his failures. Here he has become Joe Christmas, sickness and all, as he thinks “back down the street, past all the imperceptible corners of bitter defeats and more bitter victories.”7
It seems to me, finally, that all the street and corridor imagery, applied chiefly to Christmas but also, less conspicuously, to several of the others, comes to less than it should. Perhaps its chief effect is to imply that for a person with (possibly) mixed blood life is a one-way street with no exit, no escape, leading inevitably to defeat and death. This at least is the effect of the passage in which Christmas finds that the street has turned into a circle, that he is inside it, and that there is still no escape. But this idea is both banal and untrue, or true only in a sense that needs just the kind of qualification a novel could give it. Only one aspect of this too prominent image pattern seems to me interesting, and that one only partially justifies the elaborate and repeated treatment of the pattern. There is some indication that Lena is in a street or a corridor too, as in the passage which begins
Behind her the four weeks, the evocation of far, is a peaceful corridor paved with unflagging and tranquil faith and peopled with kind and nameless faces and voices . . .
or in the description of Armstid’s wagon as “a shabby bead upon the mild red string of the road.” It depends, apparently, how we take our corridor, whether it is “peaceful” or bitter, a string of beads, each bead intrinsically valuable, or an avenue of flight. Percy Grimm too has his corridor and to him it means an escape from the necessity of choice: “his life opening before him, uncomplex and inescapable as a barren corridor.” With her face lighted by the “unreason” of her faith, Lena finds friendly and helpful people everywhere, while Christmas finds only hatred and frustration.
These technical failings have the cumulative effect of creating an undeniable element of obscurity in a work nevertheless distinguished by its passion and immediacy and the seriousness of its imaginative grasp of reality. The obscurity here is quite different from the intentional ambiguity of The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying, and different from the ultimately functional obscurity of Absalom, Absalom! This obscurity must be seen as an aesthetic weakness. I have suggested that it may be related to the mood of despair that dominates Sanctuary. But perhaps we should say only that Light in August attempts more than Faulkner could perfectly accomplish.
4
A DEBATE on the comparative merits of Sanctuary and Light in August would be likely to reveal, and in the end to be decided in terms of, fundamental differences in approach to works of fiction. We may imagine the argument going something like this: Sanctuary is a finer novel because it shows greater evidence of artistic control; it is neater and tighter, with fewer loose ends; it moves more inevitably toward its conclusion; it is never obscure. Light in August is a finer novel because it is richer, more various, has more compassion, and does not over-simplify experience as Sanctuary does; its obscurity is a reflection of the irreducible opaqueness of life itself and could not be eliminated except by the kind of aesthetic sleight-of-hand that we see at work in that more unified but less meaningful work, Sanctuary. Overhearing such a debate, we might suspect that it would settle nothing except the incompatibility of the premises on which it was conducted, and we might suggest the irenic conclusion that both novels rank very high among Faulkner’s works and in the whole body of modern fiction.
More to the point than any such attempt to establish a hierarchy of merit would be to note similarities and differences and to try to see what these imply for these novels and for Faulkner’s career. That both are related to the kind of tragic vision expressed in Idyll in the Desert seems clear enough, but that they end by making somewhat different comments on the outrage that is life is also clear. Sanctuary seems to me to express no hope at all of any meaning, any achievement. Many of Faulkner’s works have been called negative and despairing when in fact a more perceptive comment would call them tragic, but Sanctuary really is negative and despairing: only the Snopes boys find any satisfaction in this world; the sensitive and intelligent find the outrage too terrible to bear.
Light in August offers hope, but only by shifting levels, changing perspectives. The central story of Joe Christmas is unrelieved tragedy; the story of Lena and Byron is tender comedy. The hope is real, but inevitably qualified by our feeling that we must smile at Lena and Byron even as we admire them: we are more like Hightower or Miss Burden, or even Joe Christmas. I have argued that we must not undervalue Lena and Byron, that certainly we must not dismiss them as bumpkins before we see their moral and religious implications; but I should certainly not want to imply that we can take them in the same way that we take Hightower or Christmas.
Hope may be found in Light in August only by giving up the intellectual and emotional struggle for ultimate certainty embodied in Hightower and Christmas and turning to the humble and unselfconscious engagement of Lena and Byron. Because this means, in effect, turning to what is likely to strike us as a lower level of apprehension, the novel is perhaps in its final effect more unrelievedly tragic than The Sound and the Fury. If we agree that Dilsey has truly heroic qualities we may say that redemptive hope in The Sound and the Fury lies within the tragedy itself. Because we feel Dilsey’s nobility, we feel that we move upward to identify with her and to achieve her view of life. But because we smile at Lena and Byron, though by an act of judgment appreciating their virtues, we must in a sense move down to a vision less serious than the tragic to reach the hope which they alone offer in Light in August. As we sit with Hightower in the twilight, we are likely to feel that the darkness is more powerful than the light.