Goodness Faulkner!

A powerful depiction of racial tensions in the South during the early 1900s. Faulkner manages to curve out the consequences of identity crisis through Christmas, who is a racially mixed man that can't fit in with the black or white people because he doesn't truly know his parentage.

Faulkner strikingly paints the racism and discrimination against black people in the Southern U.S.A whilst creating well-rounded main characters such as Lena and Hightower and Christmas himself.

However, the black characters apart from Christmas, were cliché and nowhere as striking as the main characters.

All in all a strong work by an extraordinary talent that I'd recommend to anyone! ( )

49. Light in August by William Faulkner
Introduction: Richard H. Rovere (1950)
OPD: 1932
format: 454-page Modern Library hardcover from 1950
acquired: 2006 read: Jul 20 – Aug 8 time reading: 17:31, 2.3 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Classic novel theme: Faulkner
locations: Yoknapatawpha county, Mississippi
about the author: 1897-1962. American Noble Laureate who was born in New Albany, MS, and lived most of his life in Oxford, MS.

I'm a little spoiled after [The Sound and the Fury], and [As I Lay Dying], which were astounding to read this year for the first time. This more traditional narrative does some great stuff, but it's on a different, lower stage, occasionally lifting itself above that plain. Also sometimes making me very uncomfortable, as Faulkner's characterizations of racism in his county have no critical component to them.

My edition has an introduction by [[Richard H. Rovere]], where he tells us with Faulkner, "we do not so much observe experience as undergo it". I think that's a terrific way to capture Faulkner. But it's not a blind compliment. It means to get the rewards you also have suffer more, suffer tangibly, through the parts that may not work for you.

Light in August has a wonderful opening section on Lena, a pregnant teenager from Alabama, wandering into Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, knowing no one, trusting everyone, and looking for the father of her baby. The book is her story in a way, except that Faulkner inserted within this the story of Joe Christmas, a restless orphan who suspects he is of mixed race. The two are loosely connected, but together they bring in several other stories, notably Byron Bunch, who falls in love with already pregnant Lena. Joe Brown, who helps Joe Christmas run liquor (this is the Prohibition era). Joanna Burden, the daughter of murdered abolitionists who spends her life working with African American communities across the south. And Gail Hightower, an ex-minister, ousted by his own church because of his wife's infidelity, now self-isolated in his own unkept home. Hightower's role seems curious but pointless, until suddenly we get his story, resulting in one of the best, and most moving chapters this book.

This is all just a mixed, imperfect bag. Lena is terrific. Joanna is also a wonderful character, and tragic. Hightower becomes a great character. But Joe Christmas does not. And yet, Christmas is most of the book. Strange choice. I can't help but feel that Faulkner gets lost in his narrative sometimes, and I think he just couldn't let Christmas go - not his past, present or future.

One of the themes in this book is how a character's heritage determines their fate. Hightower is doomed by his heritage of southern ministers and doctors, resistant to slavery in a slave state. Their personal principles condemning them. But Joe Christmas is doomed by his mixed blood. And that's an uncomfortable statement at any time period, including 1932. It's cruel. On the flip side is how Faulkner captures the kindness of black community. Joanna, who mainly interacts with the black community, has no fear of crime or any danger. No one would hurt her. Meanwhile we have a sheriff who beats information out innocent black men, and not only tolerates, but blesses a posse of armed white racists who will eventually carry out a kind of lynching. But the narrative hovers on the sheriff's interesting aspects and passes over the black characters as if they aren't worth the narrator's attention.

I'm not literary critic, and they like this book. I seemed to like it a lot when Joe Christmas wasn't the focus, especially the beginning and the end. But I didn't enjoy the Joe Christmas sections.

For those interested, I guess my advice is, have some patience. You may not like all aspects.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/362165#8596799 ( )

This synopsis (which I find kind of hilarious and not quite accurate) is hand-written inside the back cover of my copy:

Joe Christmas, who, because of his heritage, finds it impossible to assimilate into either the black or white cultures. He is doomed to remain until his death, in the isolation of self brought on by social norms and mores.
( )

Published in 1932, this classic American southern gothic novel, set during Prohibition, follows the intersecting lives of five people not following a traditional path in life. They are viewed as outsiders because they do not adhere to social norms. Joe Christmas is an orphan who is abused as a child and believes he is of mixed racial ancestry but has no proof. He is searching for his place in the world. Lena Grove is in an unwed pregnant young woman looking for the father of her unborn child. Gail Hightower is a disgraced reverend who is plagued by his family’s past and his wife’s scandalous death. Joanna Burden, now living alone on a large property, is part of an abolitionist family that has been ostracized for years by their rural southern community. Byron Bunch is a nondescript, poor, hardworking, quiet man whom no one notices. The plot centers around a criminal act of murder and arson. Themes include the search for identity and how individuals are oppressed by racism, patriarchy, and religious zealotry.

The book is written in third person omniscient. It focuses on one character, then shifts to another. It is not chronological. The storyline goes forward and backward in time fluidly, catching the reader up on what has been missed after focusing closely on what happens to one specific character. It sounds convoluted but it really works well in keeping the reader’s interest. Faulkner uses unusual pairings of words, running them together to create vivid images.

This novel is mostly dark, violent, tragic, and sad, with only a faint flicker of hope. It requires a certain maturity to assimilate the metaphors, religious allegory, and complexities inherent in this story. I tried reading Faulkner when I was young, but most of it flew over my head. I think it requires a breadth of life experience to appreciate his work. I have not read his entire canon, but this book would be a better starting point than The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom! ( )

Monday mornings at the planing mill:
P.41:
"some of the other workers were family men and some were bachelors and they were of different ages and they led a catholic variety of lives, yet on Monday morning they all came to work with a kind of gravity, almost decorum. some of them were young, and they drank and gambled on Saturday night, and even went to Memphis now and then. yet on Monday morning they came quietly and soberly to work, in clean overalls and clean shirts, waiting quietly until the whistle blew and then going quietly to work, as though there were still something of Sabbath in the over lingering air which established a tenet that, no matter what a man had done with his sabbath, to come quiet and clean to work on Monday morning was no more than seemly and right to do."

There's a fire in Jackson, the day Lena arrives, looking for the father of her baby:
P.53:
" 'we could see it from the wagon before we got to town," she says. 'it's a right big fire.'
'it's a right big old house. It's been there a long time. don't nobody live in it but one lady, by herself. I reckon there are folks in this town will call it a judgment on her, even now. she is a Yankee. her folks come down here in the reconstruction, to stir up the n******. Two of them got killed doing it. They say she is still mixed up with the n******. visits them when they are sick, like they was white. won't have a cook because it would have to be a n***** cook. folks say she claims that n****** are the same as white folks. That's why folks don't never go out there. Except one.' "

Christmas grows up sheltered, knowing nothing about women:
P.184-5:
"but he and the other boys talked about girls. Perhaps some of them – the one who arranged with the negro girl that afternoon, for instance – knew. 'they all want to,' he told the others. 'but sometimes they can't.' the others did not know that. they did not know that all girls wanted to, let alone that there were times when they could not. They thought differently. but to admit that they did not know the latter would be to admit that they had not discovered the former. So they listened while the boy told them. 'it's something that happens to them once a month.' he described his idea of the physical ceremony. perhaps he knew. Anyway he was graphic enough, convincing enough. if he had tried to describe it as a mental state, something which he only believed, they would not have listened. but he drew a picture, physical, actual, to be discerned by the sense of smell and even of sight. It moved them: the temporary and abject helplessness of that which tantalized and frustrated desire; the smooth and Superior shape in which volition dwelled doomed to be at stated and inescapable intervals victims of periodical filth. that was how the boy told it, with the other five listening quietly, looking at one another, questioning and secret."

The first woman Christmas has sex with:
P.198:
"Usually they met outside, went somewhere else or just loitered on the way to where she lived. perhaps he believed up to the last that he had suggested it. then one night she did not meet him where he waited. he waited until the clock in the courthouse struck 12. Then he went on to where she lived. He had never done that before, so even then he could not have said that she had ever forbidden him to come there unless she was with him. but he went there that night, expecting to find the house dark and asleep. The house was dark, but it was not asleep. He knew that, that beyond the Dark Shades of her room people were not asleep and that she was not there alone. How he knew it he could not have said. neither would he admit what he knew. 'it's just max,' he thought. 'it's just max.' But he knew better. He knew that there was a man in the room with her."

Christmas runs away from home and kills his stepfather's horse ( )