Carolyn Porter talks about the disparate plots functioning within Faulkner’s Light in August. Readers are forced by habits of normalized plot structure to attempt to entertain, within the first three chapters, connections between Lena’s pregnant journey, Byron’s factory narrative, and Gail Hightower’s isolation. Porter points out that this intentional disorientation derives from Faulkner’s understanding that plot was “formally speaking, limited in both number and potential” and Faulkner exposes these limits “by piling plot upon plot” (Lives and Legacies, 87). It is the seriousness and devotion to these plots that brings depth to the otherwise hokey doppelgangers of Lucas Burch and Byron Bunch or Lena’s child and Mrs. Hines’ grandchild.

These overlapping plots and digressions can be understood in terms in one of the novel’s most skillfully created images of steady movement without progression. In the first pages of Lena’s journey  Faulkner describes that “though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of a road” (LIA, 8). While this image haunts the pages of the novel, Faulkner is also interested in problematizing the idea of “the middle” or unending suspension through the themes of Joe Christmas’ mixed racial identity and Ms. Burden attempts towards Southern assimilation. While both function within a liminal space (both not white or black and not northerner or southerner) they are fated to rupture this space through death. In chapter 13, the unlucky implications unignorable here, Faulkner explores these rupures through the second narration of the burning of Ms. Burden’s house.

The fire attracts the highest number of townspeople in recent memory and they all gaze at the fire “with that same dull and static amaze which they had brought down from the old fetid caves where knowing began, as though, like death, they had never seen fire before” (LIA, 288). While the gaze is static, such as Lena’s movement, the fire must not be. The fire is a moment of departure from the novels cyclical conception of movement — the before and after vastly different and the during steadily progressing.

Faulkner captures, in this chapter, a collective consciousness through the use of italicized inserts which strains against the omniscient narration that attributes the fire Burden’s and, though unknowingly so, Christmas’ transcendence of their own contradictions. “So they moiled and clotted, believing that the flames, the blood, the body that had died three years ago had just now begun to live again, cried out for vengeance, not believing that the rapt infury of the flames and the immobility of the body were both affirmations of an attained bourne beyond the hurt and harm of man.” Considering then the fire as a an “attained bourne” it is telling that Faulkner describes the firetruck as “arrogant and proud.” Proud as a symbol of the localized power and arrogant as it is convinced it will be able to remedy the heat and destruction of these deep rooted struggles (LIA, 288-9).

Indeed, within Jefferson this house could not do anything but burn. Afterall, behind these walls Christmas and Burden both hopelessly attempt to air out and resolve their own inconsistencies sexually. In Christmas’ violent and often forcible attempts to “make a woman or her,” he tries to resolve his deeply embedded conceptions of male power and its intermingling with white supremacy. At precisely the same moment Burden compromises her philanthropism by problematically shouting “Negro! Negro! Negro!” during sex, situating the black body as an object of desire and not as a subject of liberation (LIA, 260).