Light in August by William Faulkner

At last the noise and the alarms, the sound and the fury of the hunt, dies away, dies out of his hearing.  He was not in the cottonhouse when the man and the dogs passed, as the sheriff believed.  He paused there only long enough to lace up the brogans: the black shoes, the black shoes smelling of negro.  They looked like they had been chopped out of iron ore with a dull axe.  Looking down at the harsh, crude, clumsy shapelessness of them, he said "Hah" through his teeth.  It seemed to him that he could see himself being hunted by white men at last into the black abyss which had been waiting, trying, for thirty years to drown him and into which now and at last he had actually entered, bearing now upon his ankles the definite and ineradicable gauge of its upward moving.

Lena Grove, in the last stages of her pregnancy, has walked all the way to Jefferson, Mississippi from her home in Alabama, looking for the man who promised to marry her.  He's there, but he's using a fake name--presumably so Lena can't find him--and working as a bootlegger alongside another outsider named Joe Christmas.  A mild-mannered millworker named Byron Bunch falls for Lena, and enlists his friend, a disgraced preacher named Hightower, to help keep her safe and hunt down her husband-to-be.  But this directive mixes them up not just with Lena and her beau, but also Christmas, who is the true center of Light in August: Christmas, a man tortured by the secret knowledge that he's half black, has, on the same day that Lena arrives in town, murdered his lover.  His lover, Joanna Burden, is an abolitionist who's widely hated in town, but Christmas' uncertain parentage makes the crime not just violent but transgressive: a white woman has been murdered by a black man.

What does Light in August have to say about race?  Well, for one thing, it reveals just how flimsy the whole thing really is.  Christmas is white-passing, and it seems that no one would know his secret at all if he didn't keep divulging it as if it were something rotten at the heart of him.  Those who learn Christmas' secret seem suddenly to forget who he is--a loner at the mill, mostly respectful, keeps to himself, not well-known but generally liked--because he's no longer that person, but a "n-----r."  When he kills Joanna, it sets into motion the machine of lynching, the social engine that overpowers the narrow limits of policemen and judges, and which exists to respond to threats it considers not just dangerous but existentially so.

But no one is more in the grip of the pathology of race than Christmas himself.  Faulkner uncovers his life history with the dramatic flair of an early modern revenge tragedy; we learn that his biraciality is the reason that his grandfather cast him out to be adopted in the first place.  He leads a troubled life, brought up by a man who is severe, religious, and cruel; when he finally escapes he's fit only to live a life of itinerant work and petty criminality.  Christmas is a victim; his alienation comes from a life of maltreatment, but his own anxiety about his racial identity supplants an honest reckoning.  He believes the brokenness of his life and his character--he is increasingly violent and dissociative--can be traced to his secret blackness, like a virus.  When he kills Joanna, it's because she presses him to attend a Negro college and become a Negro lawyer.  It's not her pity that enrages him; he believes himself to be pitiful.  It's the way she zeroes in on his own secret shame that his blackness is the root of that pitifulness.

One character, speaking against the possibility of a lynching, says he wants to see Christmas "Decently hung by a Force, a principle; not burned or hacked or dragged dead by a Thing."  That's a striking statement, but it makes you wonder: the racism that structures Southern society, is it a Force or a Thing?  Is it something separate from the more respectable institutions, the police, the judges, the mill, a shadow that haunts them, or is it just another piston in the engine?

Light in August is a novel of serious and deep questions like these.  It's hard for me to shake the sense that it might have been more incisive if it expressed more interest in black characters, beyond a supporting cast of unnamed sharecroppers and shack-dwellers.  Christmas isn't really black; he's a white man who fears his own blackness, and while Faulkner tells us that he moves between white and black communities in a kind of oscillating uncertainty, the black communities remain mostly opaque to the narrative voice.  You really have to wonder, if Christmas does spend time in black households, with black women, does he ever have to face the question, what's so bad about being black?  But even Faulkner, who I think really intends Light in August to be a critique of racism, is unable to get too far outside of white subjectivity.

I think one thing I learned from reading Light in August is that I have a limited patience when it comes to Faulkner.  The ones I've enjoyed most all have several discrete narratives, like the many voices of As I Lay Dying or three-fold structure of The Sound and the Fury, and especially the several connected stories of The Unvanquished.  By comparison, Light in August, which runs nearly 600 pages, seemed unnecessarily bloated to me, and I got easily bored by it.  Faulkner's high emotional intensity, which really does seem straight out of the 19th century Gothic genre, is difficult to sustain over so many pages.  And after a while, you really start to notice Faulkner's particular tics: this book probably uses the word myriad 50 times and chiaroscuro about a dozen.  For me, Light in August is just too much, too long.