Light in August

The novel begins with a young woman, at the last stages of her pregnancy, traveling by foot from Alabama into Mississippi. She is tracking down the father of her baby. She is cheerful and grateful for any assistance she receives, even though her swollen belly and lack of a ring on her finger instantly mark her (for this is a Mississippi of long ago). Her name is Lena Grove.

After one chapter of Light in August, William Faulkner's novel from 1932, one would think that this book will be about Lena, and in a certain sense it is--but it is about the birth of her baby (the oldest plot known to man). But along the way the book is shanghaied by a sinister figure named Joe Christmas, who sort of sneaks in a back room and takes the text over. While Lena is a force of nature, Christmas is something of an abomination--he suspects that he has black blood in him, but he can't be sure. He is stained, and what's worse, he can never know the truth. He is a man without identity.

This is the fourth Faulkner novel I've read. Previously I've read The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and The Reivers, and for a Faulkner book, Light in August is fairly accessible. The bare bones of the plot are a kind of Southern Gothic that are familiar to readers and moviegoers, full of miscegenation and bigotry. What's startling is that it was written over seventy years ago, since the discussion of premarital and interracial sex is quite frank. It is also the first novel of Faulkner's that confronts what has haunted America, and specifically the South, for over two hundred years: race.

Christmas, as his name suggests, is something of a Christ-like figure, but in a very twisted manner, as he is not holy. When we first meet him, he's a taciturn man working at a saw mill, living in a shack where black folk usually live. He is also selling booze and carrying on an affair with his landlady, an older woman who is shunned by the town because she and her family have always been kind to blacks. But then she turns up dead, her head nearly cut off, and Christmas is the number one suspect.

The book then flashes back to his upbringing, when he was in an orphanage. He is adopted by a strictly religious man who attempts to beat God into him. Christmas is warped from an early age, particularly sexually, as his first encounter is part of a gang-bang of a black girl, whom he beats viciously until the other boys pull him off of her. Then he falls in love with a waitress (also an older woman), but he scotches things when, in a way that suggests he is sabotaging himself on purpose, he post-coitally confesses that he has black blood.

The third major character in the book is Gail Hightower, a disgraced minister. He gets drawn into both Lena and Christmas' stories, and seems to be representative of the old South, as his father was a Civil War veteran, though an abolitionist. For many years, after he is banished from his church for the misconduct of his wife, he hides in his house, but events bring him out into the sunlight.

This is a spellbinding book, written in a style that is both extremely poetic but also offensive to modern ears. A certain word beginning with N is used quite liberally, as it certainly would have been back then. Faulkner does not judge his characters for their prejudices. But the poetry is frequently beautiful: "Now the copper light of afternoon fades; now the street beyond the low maples and the low signboard is prepared and empty, framed by the study window like a stage," and "The wagon goes on, slow, timeless. The red and unhurried miles unroll beneath the steady feet of the mules, beneath the creaking and clanking wheels."

Joe Christmas has been termed the loneliest man in all of American literature, for he fits in nowhere. At the end of the book he is hunted down and castrated, one of the more brutal endings in fiction. He is not an exemplary figure by any means, and in fact has hardly one single thing to recommend him as a human being, but there is also something pitiable about his fate, as if it were part of a greater scheme, the wound of the Southern culture.