I’ve got some kind of a bug, so no class today (Friday).  Sorry for the late notice and see you Tuesday.  Keep reading and we’ll catch up.

As promised, a couple of clarifications:

1. I think there was some confusion about the syllabus, but if you look at the syllabus on the site, I think the confusion dissipates: I’d revised it a couple of weeks ago to smooth out the later deadline for the second medium wiki entry.  So it’s the second medium wiki for next week, then blog post #5 for 11/5.

2. I’ve posted a few articles on LIA in dropbox.  The essay by Leigh Anne Duck is required; the other stuff is optional.

I’ve finally nailed down a time/place for our screening of the James Franco-directed AILD that’s just come out.  BAs are welcome, auditors included, and MAs are somewhat captive, since we’re starting the screening during the tail end of class time.  Here’s the 411:

WHEN: Tuesday, 11/26 from 7pm-9:30 or so

WHERE: the newly renovated meeting space at the cafeteria on the 3rd Fl. of HW (note: MAs will meet there at 5:30 and have our class there prior to the screening)

WHY: Because I don’t know if a little movie ain’t about the nicest thing a fellow can have.

Be there or lay dying trying.

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).

Compared to our previous engagements in Faulkner’s As I lay Dying and The Sound and The Fury, Light in August seems like a straightforward read. Beginning with the romantic description of Lena’s providence and faith in Lucas Burch, Lena’s story is simple and static. But, as a pregnant woman, her place in the world is dynamic–literally in between living and giving life. This obvious complication to Lena’s “unshakable,” “sheeplike,” and “allembracing” personality is set amongst the dynamic setting of time (6-7). For instance, Faulkner conveys Lena’s romantic journey “[…] like something moving forever and without progress across an urn” (7). Here, Faulkner alludes to the complicated notion of time and its transient effect not just on Lena but on other characters in the novel. 

Beginning with the images of decapitation, destruction, and wealth, Faulkner presents Joe’s persona as complicatedly as the Keatsian image of a Grecian urn. Faulkner’s theme of complication lying dormant in simplicity is evoked in the first sentence of the reader’s revelation of Joe’s sexual, religious, violent, and racial upbringing, “Memory believes before knowing remembers”(119). Uncontrollable experiences manifest an uncontrollable identity, “like the eagle” whose “[…flesh as well as all space was still a cage”(160). For Faulkner and indeed for Joe Christmas, repressed desire compresses an individual into fixed action, fixed personality, and isolation. Joe has the potential to be a loving individual, but, the only instance of love learned is memory that had been “forgotten”(136). Faulkner uses the word “believe” and “seem” to underline Joe’s persona as a once malleable thing. For Joe, it is only the bad memories that can catch up to his present personality. This rings true in our own daily lives where bad memories are the ones that stick so heavily onto our conscience. For instance, the image of the “aftertaste” of vomit-inducing experiences of violence, sex and racism–the known– come up only when Mrs. McEachern’s love–the unknown– interrupts the habitual beating of religion and the “strap” into Joe (167).  

Joe’s insistence on stasis is again underlined with the knowledge of a woman’s menstrual cycle. Upon fleeing into the woods, the same image of an aftertaste is induced upon “[…] seeing the ranked and moonlit urns,”(189). Shortly after this image of the temporal, Joe vomits, and further shows his complicated and sympathetic persona. Memory, or “the notseeing and the hardknowing[…],” is a discomfort for any young individual forming his identity(189). Every shift from Joe’s static world of violence and sex, to a world of humble knowledge of not-knowing is a sympathetic point for Joe Christmas and possibly other characteris in the novel. We will most definitely see the image of an urn alongside complicated personas such as Joe christmas and Lena who seem to desire a fixed identity.

I’ve posted some new study questions on LIA that cover the part of the text the BAs will be discussing tomorrow (chs. 6-8).

This is just a quick whatever blog post, in a world of more substantial ones. 

There is a lot of horror circulating around the female body in the Light in August, from Joe Christmas’ disgust for menstruation to the shameful physicality of Lena Grove’s pregnancy. In the novel, Faulkner represents the sexuality of women as a subject of repulsion within southern culture. Lena Grove’s pregnancy is repulsive because it is the result of a union of desire, rather than the social success of a married pregnancy. The ambivalence between desire for women and disgust with the actuality of their bodies and subjectivity is a central theme of the novel, and an important subtext of the larger theme of encroaching modernity. 

The fact of female sexuality is made explicit through the taboo of miscegenation. Through the logic of social structures, there can be no positive social or personal result from sexual contact between a white woman and a black man. The taboo of this coupling, a racist result originating in slavery, prohibits the generation of any “excuse” for the woman other than sexual desire. Subsequently, the subject of miscegenation is doubly invested with social horror–the racist context joined with a sort of proof of female desire. 

Joe Christmas is psychologically positioned within the conjunction of both of these socially repugnant transgressions. His very body represents a past of miscegenation, while his desire can only be realized in the act of miscegenation. Faulkner’s psychological representations of his violence towards women, and his disgust with the desire that they show for him indicts the paradox of a society that has set up, through slave history, both the reality of and the disgust for miscegenation.  

One of the most noticeable and intriguing motifs of Light In August is Faulkner’s usage of original compound words, beginning on pages 4 and 5 with bugswirled and stumppocked. Some of these inventions are lyrical but very specific one-and-dones (branchshadowed [189], pinewiney [8]) while others are perfect, endlessly useful articulations with no previous analogue (countryfaced [180], workhard [16], mansmelling [48]). With few exceptions, Faulkner’s new words elegantly complement the language (moreso, perhaps, than the Collins-recognized amazeballs?) and the English-speaking world would benefit from their wider adoption.

As someone who often feels hampered by the idiosyncratic restrictions of formal academic writing, I admire Faulkner’s boldness in the face of the rules, not only with such antiquated devices as comprehensible narrative, but also with the official lexicon and his subtle war on contractions. (Why not cant and dont? They’re better! I’m joining in on that one.) LIA proves that the contents of the dictionary are sometimes insufficient. And I’m not being sarcastic, by the way. And why cant a sentence begin with “and?”

Faulkner’s new compounds are all over the place (the novel is truly neologipocked). Here is a brief selection from the first half: creakwheeled, limpeared (7), slowspitting (26), manlooking (11), manhard (16), inwardlighted (18), fatherblood, motherblood (26), man-stale (42), manshaped (115), womansmelling (121), pinkwomansmelling (122), womansinning, womansuffering, woman filth (128-129, all coined by the oldtestament, misogynistic hospital janitor), womanshenegro (156, which Carolyn Porter calls “the novel’s most telling verbal invention”), overlarge, bigknuckled (179), greasecrusted, frictionsmooth, highboned (180), hardfeeling, hardsmelling, notseeing, hardknowing, deathcolored (189).

Faulkner places them inconsistently; we’ll see none for almost an entire chapter and then four within a single paragraph. The new compounds are most concentrated in passages that deal with gender, sex and race. When Joe meets with the white waitress for a sexual liaison on page 189, they suddenly come fast and furious. Faulkner has compounded words like this in previous works but not with such volume and significance. He leaves an impression of language echoing character, or more largely, theme, something like: people are compounds of various identities – a mashup of demographic overlaps and the sum of how others perceive them. The play with language metaphorically alludes to Joe Christmas’s identity above all. He is a whitehenegro, or perhaps an orphanwhitemannigger, which I humbly submit as an even more appropriate title for this remarkable book than Light In August or Dark House.