Back to the Classics #10

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

20th Century Classic: Though with age the lure of “relatable characters” has become less pertinent to me, this novel starring a guy like me – racially ambiguous – may have had something to do with my inability to put this story down.  I won’t provide substantial framing or a content advisory relative to this novel. Suffice to say, its setting is Mississippi in the late Twenties – a racist society - so that rotten racist epithet is all over this novel. Not reading a great novel, a triumph of American literature, because of a rotten racist epithet is, I think, like pretending racism and white supremacy don't exist.

Light in August – William Faulkner

This excellent novel from 1932 is a Great Southern Novel, right up there with All the King’s Men or Margaret Walker's Jubilee. On one hand, the plot and incidents unfold in a readily comprehensible fashion. While there are flashbacks and shifts in narrative voice, they are not as baffling as in The Sound and the Fury (TS&TF) or As I Lay Dying.  This is nearly a stand-alone novel, with few references to other novels in his Yoknapatawpha cycle. As for theme, it’s Faulkner’s enduring theme, as one character sums up:

‘It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.’

On the other hand, just like reading TS&TF, even the most hardcore readers have to approach a Faulkner novel as if it were music, letting the need-to-comprehend-everything pedant-self be carried away by the rhythm and flow without trying to understand every note perfectly. In Faulkner’s prose there are notes that seem off and notes that seem only kind of clear or not clear at all. Just go with it.

Combinations of words are encountered in this novel as if they are heard in dreams or sedated coming out of surgery. Some phrases are like synesthesia, alluding to smells that are touched, light that is smelled, sounds that are savored like umami. I read, shaking my head, just gaping in disbelief at what Faulkner is putting down,

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

The stories that make up the novel are not, I think, as important as simply understanding the characters and their trials. The protagonist, Joe Christmas, is a hero on a quest in search of an identity that he never finds. He has to start with a parentage that is unknown but people make decisions about him and for him as if his origins clear were clear enough to pigeonhole him. Joe Christmas cannot free himself of the insomnia, anorexia, anger, loneliness, and social and emotional withdrawal caused by his abusive upbringing at the hands of a ruthless Christian. He is a rambler with a future doomed by the violence with which he is constantly treated and which he metes out to other people.

Joe Christmas also brings to mind the character Meursault in Camus’ The Stranger. Both are treated unjustly by cruel police and the stupid criminal justice system.  Both are atheists: Meursault curses and mocks the prison chaplain; Christmas utters blasphemies from the pulpit of a black church. Neither believe in prayer, Meursault scoffs at the preacher who urges him to and Christmas does likewise when Joanna Burden wants to pray with him. More existentially, staring into the face death, both resign themselves to the human condition (constantly fighting one's own and others' stupidity, injustice, fear, craving). They both are resigned to their inescapable cruel fate at end, seeing freedom in their ability to choose how they are going to respond to death. Life is difficult, and when you have to die you’ll die, but life’s a gas anyway.

Other well-drawn characters include lonely defrocked preacher Gail Hightower, his friend lonely Byron Bunch and lonely fanatic Joanna Burden. Not so lonely is single but pregnant teenager Lena Grove, the comic relief that calls to mind luckless Anse Bundren whose bewitched neighbors feel compelled to help. Using her youth and vulnerability, Lena is such a deft operator that she gets older married women to provide assistance even though they instinctively don’t like her for being so dumb as to couple with a smooth-talking drifter. But blessings rain down on faux-naïve Lena, while others like Joe Christmas can’t turn around without running into trouble. Ain’t nobody in a Faulkner novel gonna say life is fair and dealing with injustice is part of the endurance that we need to get out of life uncrushed, unbowed, unafraid. 

There is also the setting of the Southern small town of Jefferson (Mississippi) with the time being the late 1920s. For Faulkner, time is both fleeting and eternal. A person’s lifetime is transitory. But the historical memory of a people – e.g. Southerners, Americans - is haunted by undying ghosts, as implied in the quotation about memory above. Race-based chattel slavery. Deprivation, lawlessness and violence. White supremacy. People hold tight to their values about anti-smarts, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, Sodom and Gomorrah, beliefs rooted in a peasant past and bitter memories of defeat in the war. The angry spirit of racism seems especially irremediable and undying, because it is part of people’s religious and social identity.

Their culture-bound values drag themselves and other people into abysses. As if there were a compulsion in certain kinds of people to impose their principles on others even when they are moved by masochism, white nationalism, militarism, fascist power worship, fanaticism, and misery. Ordinary men and women just want to be left alone to mind their own business. Is it so much to ask, just a little peace, ask a couple of characters in this novel.

The pathos of Faulkner's writing and the cruelty of the incidents make the reader turn away from looking into the abysses even while there are plenty of those magical reading minutes in which the reader is so involved in the story that it is almost impossible to put the book down. The flashbacks are inserted with genius, especially that technique when the reader is told the upshot and then Faulkner backs up and recounts events that lead up to it.

After finishing this book, I am convinced of the greatness of William Faulkner.