communication breakdown

Book Review: Light In August (1932)

[ 5 / 10 ] Faulkner's tale about racial tension and the wages of sin takes place in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County of Mississippi, the backdrop for most of his most successful novels. Like these others, it is a rich tale of the old South, both tragic and touching by nature. It weaves a tale of four characters, whose lives ultimately intersect for better or for worse. The heft of the novel and focus on several main figures allows Faulkner to employ all of his gifts of prose in giving his characters life, and in doing so, pens some of his most memorable figures. Through their misfortunes, we see a powerful lesson about how the past often consumes the wicked, while the future always holds hope for the virtuous...

Light in August is usually considered one of Faulkner's most accessible works for the uninitiated, since it lacks the complex stream-of-consciousness style which he employs in other works, such as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. The story is mainly told via an independent narrator, and despite the fact that the story is not always told linearly, it is usually pretty straightforward. However, all should be forewarned that, due to the time when this novel was written, as well as the subject matter, the language which is used might be found offensive to some.

Faulkner begins his tale with Lena Grove, a young pregnant woman who is walking from Alabama to Mississippi to find the father of her child so that they may be married. To those who help her along the way, she relates the story of how her man, Lucas Burch, had to leave months ago to find work, and since she has not heard from him, she's going to find him. She received a tip that he was in Mississippi, so she simply began walking. Her naivete is tragic: everyone else can see that she has been deserted by a womanizing lowlife, but no-one has the heart to tell her. Her resoluteness is staggering: she is absolutely firm in her convictions that she will find Lucas and settle down to be a family. With Lena, Faulkner succeeded in eliciting a reaction from me which has never happened before: he demanded my sympathy for her from the very first page of the book.

Eventually Lena arrives in Jefferson where she eventually crosses paths with the other characters: Joe Christmas, a man of mixed-race background who has been a drifter his whole life; Gail Hightower, a former reverend with a mysterious past; and Byron Bunch, a plain man who falls in love with Lena. Christmas' story dominates the novel in terms of sheer size - orphaned by his white family due to his part-black heritage, he is sent to an orphanage and eventually raised by a domineering, God-fearing abusive man and a woman who attempts to compensate by doting on him excessively. It is in this household that his self-destructive behavior takes hold, beginning a downward spiral of bad decisions which eventually lead him to Jefferson and a tragic end.

Christmas is a man obsessed by the conflict caused by being part white and black. Originally he felt his blackness to be a disease, as he was constantly ridiculed by other children who could sense his secret without actually seeing it. Then, as he reached maturity, he was compelled to shun whiteness and join his "true" people. He deserts his home and goes to live among negroes. Later he feels that his black blood is what drives him to do horrible things. He is a nomad, rejected by both peoples, having no home and no hope for a future. His obsession with finding his identity eventually leads him to a confrontation with Reverend Hightower, and a grisly death.

Faulkner's tale is powerful, exploring race and the consequences of action more deeply than I've seen in any of his other works. Each character's ultimate end is profoundly affected by their own choices throughout the novel. And you get a real feel for how important a part that race played in the lives of these people. But the ultimate downfall of this novel, what separates it from the rest of Faulkner's classic works, is its slow pace and tendency to get lost in its own storylines. Particularly while relating Joe Christmas' tale, Faulkner embarks upon flashback on top of flashback, expounding upon each in such rich detail that we forget that there is a story unfolding in the present. Even within his long sections of prose, some of his sentences are so weighty, so impossibly complex, that it took me sheer effort of will to stay focused at times and not gloss over entire passages. Despite the frustration that sometimes accompanies Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness style, I found his long, detached, and hopelessly abstract volumes of prose in Light in August to be much harder to follow.

Despite this, the novel often feels like an importantly ominous warning, encapsulating a lesson about sin and redemption. If this sounds interesting to you, then take a chance on this novel. Faulkner enthusiasts should definitely have a read, if only because of the critical acclaim of the book. But I feel that most casual readers will find themselves suffering through many of the same dense passages that I did, ultimately leaving a bad taste in their mouths.