Light in August by William Faulkner

After his first three early novels (Soldier’s Pay, 1926, Mosquitoes, 1927, Sartoris, 1929) Faulkner published his first masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, 1929. Next he wrote Sanctuary, specifically intending to write a popular novel that would earn him money for his new family (he had married a woman who already had two children from a previous marriage. Faulkner and she would later have a daughter together). But his publisher found Sanctuary too offensive and refused to publish it. Putting aside the idea of popular success, Faulkner wrote As I Dying, which was published in 1930. And then, surprisingly, Faulkner received the galleys for Sanctuary, which his publisher had decided to publish after all. Reading the galleys, Faulkner now saw the popular novel’s limitations, especially compared to The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, which were establishing his credentials as a modernist literary artist, so he substantially re-wrote Sanctuary, while retaining its potboiler style, and published the revision in 1931. Light in August came out the following year, 1932, his seventh novel in six years.

Faulkner is regarded as a high-modernist, experimental, intellectual writer. He is that. But his novels are also firmly in the Southern Gothic genre. The settings are filled with poverty and ugliness. He writes more often of the lower class, uneducated, bigoted, than of the genteel and college-educated, as Faulkner was himself. When his characters do come from wealth, the money is often long behind them and they live in the remnants of their fortunes and plantation houses. Faulkner’s use of stream-of-conscious style to reveal the inner thoughts and psychology of his characters usually shows them to be base and mean, not high-minded, and his plots include surprisingly extreme acts of violence: suicide, rape, murder and more.

The plot of Light in August shares many elements with the intentional thriller Sanctuary. The Depression era setting is the same. The physical setting of the fictional city of Jefferson, Mississippi in Faulkner’s Yoknapotawpha County is the same. The main character in each novel is a violent psychopath, although Joe Christmas in Light in August is more complexly motivated than is Popeye in Sanctuary. Both are bootleggers. Both end up in jail for murder. Both end up dead. But Light in August is a much more consciously literary novel. It delivers its thrills, but they aren’t cheap thrills. The writing is more straightforward than the most experimental sections of The Sound and the Fury or Absalom Absalom! (Faulkner’s ninth novel, coming four years later, 1936 after Pylon, 1935), but is dense with interior thoughts, psychological obersvations, literary and biblical references, and insightful explorations of the effect of trauma, both personal, and cultural. The story is told from multiple perspectives, sometimes narrated in first person by a character in the novel, sometimes in third person, and also slipping frequently between past and present test. The sense is not hard to follow but the novel requires much from a reader. I found it overly long in places, often-disturbing, dispiriting, shocking, only a sliver of barely-relieved hope at the conclusion, but ultimately entirely rewarding.

The novel beings with a young, unmarried, pregnant woman, Lena Grove, in search of a man named Lucas Burch, the father of her unborn child. Lena is persistent and optimistic. Burch left Alabama when he lost his job at a sawmill leaving Lena with the promise that he would send for her once he established himself somewhere. Not having heard from Burch, Lena sets off to find him. Folks point her toward Jefferson, Mississippi, where there’s a man with a similar name, Byron Bunch working at a sawmill. Maybe that’s him. Lena arrives at the sawmill on a Saturday afternoon when Bunch is working alone. It isn’t him. But from Lena’s description Bunch immediately realizes that Lucas Burch does work at the mill using the name Joe Brown. Joe Brown and another millworker, Joe Christmas, have become partners in a bootlegging operation and the two of them are living together a couple of miles out of town in a cabin on the grounds of a former plantation, owned by a middle-aged spinster, Joanna Burden. Joanna, the last survivor of a Yankee family that came down from New England during reconstruction lives in the plantation house. Coincidentally, on the day that Lena arrives in Jefferson, the plantation house is burned to the ground. Lena and Byron can see the smoke rising as they talk together at the mill.

The burning house is discovered by a farmer riding into Jefferson. When he stops to see if he can help he finds Lucas Burch, drunk, inside the house, and Joanna, upstairs with her throat cut. When the sheriff contacts Joanna’s family in New England with the news of her murder, a nephew offers a reward of $1,000. When Burch hears about the reward he rushes to tell the Sheriff that Joe Christmas is the murderer. The Sheriff is skeptical (it was Burch who was found at the crime scene), but when Burch adds the information that Joe Christmas, who people think is white is actually part black, the Sheriff immediately decides that Joe is the murderer and they embark on a manhunt to find him.

There then follows a long back story about Joe Christmas. He was raised in an orphanage. At age five, he’s adopted by a family named McEachern. The father is religious, demanding, and violent. Joe is regularly beaten. At seventeen he begins an affair with an older woman who works as a prostitute and as a waitress at a diner. Joe arranges to meet the woman at a dance, but his father follows him. Joe attacks his father, possibly kills him, and then arranges to run away with the woman. But she won’t go with him. Joe then spends the next many years drifting alone from town to town. He’s traumatized by the violence of his childhood. And he’s lost in both white and black society, unsure who he is.

I’ll insert a note here that Faulkner is very careful to keep much of the specifics of the story ambiguous. We aren’t sure for a long time whether it was actually Joe Christmas that killed Joanna and the actual murder is not described. We aren’t ever told whether Joe Christmas’ father died at the dance when Joe attacked him. And we’re never told with certainty whether Joe actually is part black. Faulkner describes him as “parchment colored.” Other characters take him for a “foreigner.” His mother believed the father was Mexican. The tragedy for Joe is that he doesn’t know and can’t ever know who he is or where he belongs in the severely segregated society.

Eventually Joe shows up in Jefferson. He gets a job at the mill. He lives on Joanna’s property. Joe and Joanna become lovers. But after a time, the sexual excitement fades. Joanna tells Joe her back story, deepening their intimacy in ways that makes Joe uncomfortable. Joanna becomes religious and she starts to pressure Joe to get education and find a respectable job. Joe feels trapped. Damaged by his childhood trauma and confused racial identity, and with Joanna, too, feeling the impossibility of their situation, the two enter a kind of death pact. She tries to shoot him. He kills her.

Joe flees, tracked by bloodhounds. He ends up in a town about 20 miles from Jefferson called Mottstown, where he is arrested and sent back to Jefferson. Coincidentally, living in Mottstown and are an old man and woman named Hines who turn out to be the parents of Joe’s mother. So we hear that story, too, how the daughter, Milly, gets pregnant from an affair with a circus performer and attempts to run away with him. Her father, kills the circus performer and brings Milly back home. When he’s unable to find a doctor who will abort the baby he waits until the baby is born and then steals it away. Milly dies after giving birth. Milly’s mother never knew what happened to the baby but it turns out the grandfather, Eupheus got a job for himself as a custodian at an orphanage in Memphis and deposited the baby there so he could keep an eye on it. The orphanage staff call the baby “Christmas” because he was deposited at the orphanage on Christmas Eve. It was Eupheus who gave him the name Joe. And it was Eupheus who spread the gossip that the child was part black.

The grandparents follow Joe to Jefferson. A grand jury is convened and quickly indicts him. The trial is set for the following month.

Meanwhile, Byron Bunch is trying to do right by Lena Grove, who he has fallen in love with. He sets her up in the cabin on the plantation property that Burch and Joe Christmas shared, reasoning that if that was Burch’s home then it ought to be hers now. Byron is torn because he wants to do right, which in this case would be to try and reconnect Lena and Burch, but Bunch would like to marry her himself.

Bunch talks all this over and gets advice from yet another important character in the novel, a former Presbyterian minister named Gail Hightower. We get his back story, too. He’s obsessed by a story of his grandfather who he believes died heroically during the civil war, shot from his horse, right there in Jefferson. It’s that story that led Hightower to seek a church in Jefferson. But his obsession with that story confused his sermons and displeased his congregation. And when his wife was involved in a scandal having an illicit affair with a man she would meet in Memphis and killed herself jumping out of a hotel window, Hightower’s congregation forced him to resign his pulpit and tried to get him to leave town. Instead he stayed, living alone in a dark house, living off a small inheritance, and visited by practically no one except Byron Bunch who comes to him for conversation and moral advice.

Byron takes the Hines couple and Hightower out to the cabin where they assist in Lena giving birth. Then, when they’re gone, he arranges for the sheriff’s deputy to bring Lucas Burch out to the cabin, but seeing Lena and the baby, Lucas runs away. Bunch follows him and sees him hop a train out of town.

Joe Christmas is taken from jail to the courthouse but in the gathered crowd he breaks free. He runs through the town in handcuffs, followed by a vigilante named Grimm and his fellows. Joe ends up in Hightower’s house where Hightower briefly tries to protect him, but Grimm shoots Joe as he hides behind a table, and then brutally castrates him as he’s dying.

Then there’s a long chapter of Hightower musing on all of this. And here we’re told that long ago Hightower learned the truth of his grandfather’s death from a family servant who had formerly been a slave, that the grandfather didn’t die heroically, shot off his horse, but he’d been shot in a henhouse while stealing chickens, and probably not by a union soldier, but by a woman defending her house. Hightower, like so many others in the South always knew his history, but lived his life trapped in a story he knew to be false.

The final chapter is a coda that follows Lena Grove and Byron Bunch traveling together with her new baby. The story is told by a man on a business trip who gave them a ride in his wagon and spent a night camping out with them. During the night he witnessed Byron awkwardly trying to seduce Lena and she refusing him, and then, the next day, Byron more boldly asserting his intention, and Lena, pleased, accepting his proposal.

That’s a lot of plot. And the novel is quite long, over 500 pages in the edition I read. Some of the plot points Faulkner repeats from other novels. When Joe Christmas runs away he steals money that had been secreted at home under a floorboard, just as Quentin steals money that her uncle had been keeping at home when she runs away in The Sound and the Fury. Quentin runs off with a performer from a traveling show, just as Milly in this novel runs away with a man from the circus. There are also a few plot holes. I never understood why Mr. and Mrs. Hines when they arrived in Jefferson got hooked up with Byron Bunch. They had no prior connection. Or why Byron wanted to help them defend Joe Christmas. Some of the long back stories, particularly Joanna Burden’s story, fill out the novel but take us pretty far afield from the central narrative. The bigoted racial attitudes of Jim Crow Mississippi are hard to take, but crucial to Faulkner’s point of showing how trauma destroys lives both individually and collectively for multiple generations.

The initial failure of Light in August led Faulkner to accept a work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. His fortune as a fiction writer only changed with the publication of A Portable Faulkner in 1946. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1949.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.