Curious

I begin with a sheepish confession. For years I’ve put off reading Faulkner’s Light in August only to discover my misgivings naive. Blame it on self-inflicted exposure to Go Down, Moses in the seventh grade; I’ve avoided the 560-page Light in August since I was 13 (that’s right, its vanilla binding has been staring at me from its shelf for eleven years). Now I’m setting the record straight. Despite its length the novel proves clean-limbed and accessible, yet its exoteric prose in no way dampens Faulkner’s artistic complexity.

Light in August paradoxically explores the interior and exterior worlds of language, psyche, and circumstance. I find the novel’s self-conscious dance between interior and exterior realities intriguing and delightful. Every reality appears as a duality, a beautiful irony for a coming-of-age novel about the bitter Joe Christmas. The community’s reaction (outside) to Christmas, a man readers understand (inside) less the more they learn of him, establishes Christmas as the consummate outlaw throughout the novel. Reality’s internal and exterior paradox unfolds on a linguistic level. Although his circumstances sufficiently identify Joe’s social position, Faulkner takes pains to allow the language to shape that reality too:

[Joe] heard their actual voices without knowing what they said, without even listening: Ask him

How would he know Perhaps he heard the words. But likely not. Likely they were as yet no more significant than the rasping of insects beyond the closedrawn window, or the packed bags which he had looked at and had not yet seen. He cleared out right afterward, Bobbie said

He might know. Let’s find out if we can just what we are running from, at least

Though Joe had not moved since he entered, he was still running…“Let’s have it, kid,” Max said. “What about it?”

“What about what?” Joe said.

I love the way that even Faulkner’s compound neologisms become linguistic outsiders in their opposition to traditional, linguistic purity. The novel communicates most truths through gossip (exterior) or, thanks to third-person omniscience, reflection (interior). This dualistic pattern continues in Faulkner’s exploration of the human psyche; each character journeys through phases of self-exposure and cloistering just as every character is revealed through their history and/or destiny. Additionally, Light in August’s geographical consciousness points up the significance of location to each character’s reality whether those characters sneak inside or outside a house, travel into or out of town, enter or exit the cabin, escape or endure a womb. In these ways Faulkner’s inside/outside frame entangles all modes of being.