Movement and time are played with in such a beautiful and interesting way in the early chapters of Light in August, especially the sections revolving around Lena. We meet her well into her journey to Jefferson, come “all the way from Alabama a-walking” (3). She has been traveling for nearly four weeks. Her voyage, “bankrolling now behind her a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes from day to dark and dark to day again,” has been long but “peaceful.” The wagons, “a succession of creakwheeled and limpeared avatars,” having transported her along safely (7). In a few pages, we observe her entire history and are then returned to the present moment, waiting with Lena beside the road. She pulls off her dusty boots and watches the world. There is a sense that time has been stretched out here, like a piece of taffy. Faulkner takes the reader through each moment, one by one, and does, in fact, describe the journey as “something moving forever and without progress across an urn” (7).
The urn is an interesting metaphor to use here for a clear connection can be drawn between this image and John Keats’ famous poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Lena’s movements can be related to the scenes found upon the surface for they both seem to exist within this “Silence and slow Time” (Keats, 2), which does not operate within the boundaries of real time. One sliver of Lena travels are described as moving “slowly, steadily, as if here within the sunny loneliness of the enormous land it were outside of, beyond all time and all haste” (27). There is a tranquility to these images which place them outside the chaos of the real world. Everything here moves slower, so slow in fact that life “seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever” (8). It could also be said that Lena, though unwed and with child, still represents that “unravish’d bride of quietness” (Keats, 1). Despite her unfavorable circumstances, Lena has retained her faith and patience. She has not yet become embittered by the world. If we take the urn analysis further, it does seem possible that this could be Faulkner’s own story “Of deities or mortals, or of both” (Keats, 6). The comparison of wagons to avatars, the transformation of a god or goddess into human or animal form in order to fend off evil, also subtly reinforces the mythological undertones of the story and, in fact, I discovered a remark Faulkner made about the title of Light in August during a presentation at the University of Virginia. He explained that “in August in Mississippi there’s a few days about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not just from today but from back in old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and–from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere.” With that in mind, it’s clear that there is a mysticism that surrounds this novel, which features the tales of “mad pursuit” and “struggle to escape” (Keats, 9) also found on Keats’ grecian urn.
I noticed that sight was also frequently commented upon which, along with the jumble of plots and story lines that the first few chapters contain, seemed to illustrate the importance of perception. The varying viewpoints of the different characters presented in the first chapter, for example, show the layers of truth that exist within every situation. While Faulkner remarks that Lena sees with a vision, “allembracing, swift, innocent, profound” (7), the other characters we meet fail to take as careful a look. Armstid, without ever having “once looked full at her,” can see she does not wear a wedding ring and knows immediately that she is an unwed mother. He later makes a slew of rapid judgements based on the impression he’s drawn of Lena based on his understanding of her circumstances. “‘She’ll walk the public country herself without shame because she knows that folks, menfolks, will take care of her,'” Armstid asserts. “‘You just let one of them get married or get into trouble without being married, and right then and there is where she secedes from the woman race and species and spends the balance of her life trying to get joined up with the man race. That’s why they dip snuff and smoke and want to vote'” (14-15). Armstid is never unkind to Lena but the glimpse Faulkner provides into his thoughts illustrates the skewed impression the Southern community might have towards a woman in Lena’s position which relates, of course, on a larger scale, to the conflicting perceptions of the truth of all people. They do not see with the sort of untainted, all encompassing perception Lena possesses. Although she is naive, she has reserved all judgement for as long as we have traveled beside her. In the following chapters, a number of new plots are introduced including the story of Byron Bunch who further peruses this theme of perception. “Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were made enough to what that other man or women is doing” (47-48), he remarks at one point, quite poignantly. Similarly, a great deal of care is taken to describe certain things about Hightower that suggest an urgent need to pay close attention to each layer of truth because of the ways in which other layers can obscure things. Hightower’s house, for example, so overrun “by bushing crepe myrtle and syringa and althea,” is almost entirely concealed from the world, save for a gap in his study window where he can watch the street. So hidden, the narrator explains, “that the light from the corner street lamp scarily touches it” (57).
