The role of visuality in Light in August has been noted by critics such as Norman Byson and Hal Foster, who argue that the type of visual experience the novel extends “signals a kind of ocular stupor where the collective gaze looks blindly at the world, its vision not blocked or returned but temporarily co-opted and frozen, unable to comprehend the visual field before it” (394). This role of visuality is something that I’ve found fascinating throughout LIA, a fascination that begins at the beginning of the novel, when the narrator places emphasis on Lena’s relationship to the window she opens. “She had lived there eight years before she opened the window for the first time. She had not opened it a dozen times hardly before she discovered that she should not have opened it at all. She said to herself, ‘That’s just my luck’’ (LIA 5-6). Most obviously, this open window functions as a euphemism for Lena’s loss of virginity. She has opened the window to let another in.

Yet, I think it’s also interesting to understand this window as a line of escape, and perhaps, even as a line of sight. Windows as lines of sight, or more generally, spaces through which narrative tension unfolds visually, seems to function as a theme not only throughout LIA, but throughout Faulkner generally (think: the broken window in TSAF, the window as both Caddy’s escape from Jason and the window as her visual access into the house at Damuddy’s wake in TSAF, Hightower’s repeated glances out the windows of his sequestered home in LIA).

Perhaps it’s worth making the argument that the visual conditions windows create in Faulkner’s narratives respond to the “ocular stupor where the collective gaze looks blindly at the world” as noted by Byson and Foster. After all, Lena’s opening of the window, against her brother’s wishes, creates the narrative conditions for LIA. It’s as though her act of sexual deviance catalyzes the novel’s future spectacle that culminates in the fire that consumes Joanna Burden’s house.

Another area where we can see how windows function as a supplement to narrative ocularity is in LIA’s early account of Hightower’s relationship to gazing out windows. We know Hightower is molded by and into the past via his fascination with his grandfather’s history and obsession with Jefferson. Yet an early account of an interaction he has with Byron seems to imply that Hightower might transcend the very mold in which he is cemented. “Yet Byron can see in the other’s face something latent, about to wake, of which Hightower himself is unaware, as if something inside the man were trying to warn or prepare him” (LIA 81). Byron glances at something unknowable that lies dormant in Hightower’s conscious at the same time Hightower is arguably cultivating the seeds to gaze beyond that latent obfuscation. “He is not looking at the other now. Through the window, faint yet clear, the blended organ and voices come from the distant church, across the still evening” (LIA 81). The initial action Lena takes as she opens the window at the beginning of the novel and Hightower’s “faint yet clear” line of sight/sound of the “blended organ and voices,” suggest the conditions for comprehending “co-opted and frozen” visual fields. 

Works Cited:

Framing Joe Christmas: Vision and Detection in Light in August by Randall Wilhelm

In William Faulkner’s Light In August, Joe Christmas and Ms. Burden’s relationship exemplify the inner conflict of characters in their attempt to belong to the surrounding community or in Joe’s situation their constant endeavor to defy the community in choosing not to belong. The moment Joe Christmas senses Ms.Burden’s grounding impact on him, he reflects ” What he was now seeing was the street lonely, savage, and cool. That was it: cool; he was thinking aloud to himself sometimes, ‘I better move. I better get away from here.’ ”(260) The notion of being ‘cool’ and accepted in the community has a strange repulsive effect on Christmas which due to its extremity drive him to a shorter bloody path. He seeks to be relieved from this burden Ms.Burden and repeal any sense of belongingness. Jefferson’s Southern mentality of norms conforming to gain belongingness is applicable to many of the town people, yet leaves some marginalized outsiders like Hightower, Lena Grove, Ms.Burden and Joe Christmas in a relentless struggle to gain societal acceptance.

However, Joe Christmas presents the foil of this struggle in his firm refusal to belong. It is his statement against the long sought and denied acceptance. His childhood experiences with Miss Atkins at the orphanage and his brutally self-righteous father Simon McEachern heightens his sense of separation and the children’s racial epithets are never forgotten.The communal racism with the rumor that he is black not only effectively precipitates his removal from the orphanage , but also paves the way to his own willingness to be secluded from the community. It is through ” Memory believes before knowing remembers.” (119) that Joe Christmas’s actions can be understood and justified , especially in his three phase relationship with Ms.Burden.

In her research The Isolated Individual in William Faulkner’s Light in August  ,Irina Pănescu reflects on Joe Christmas’s alienated, disconnected and displaced situation. His relation to Joanna Burden exemplifies his distorted nature in his necessity to be with the woman on the one hand, and his final act of getting rid of the woman on the other hand. His fears come to surface when he is faced with a situation of genuine interaction, his actions destroying and being self-destructive. He murders the woman, thus murdering the hope of being saved from himself: “The closer Joe gets to a female the more he experiences vulnerability and a deathly threat to his selfhood, yet the vulnerability is an expression of the yearning for the female- perhaps as mother …” (Kartiganer, Abadie 190) Joe Christmas may have experienced relief in disposing of a woman who attempts at intruding into his selfhood, no matter how self-destructive and sick that selfhood appears to be. Thus, the character declares his self-crucifixion. It is not an other who imprisons him for life within his own damaged soul, but it is himself, his most perilous enemy.

From the moment, Christmas starts descending on his rope at McEachern’s house, the inner enemy is empowered and women become ” a diminishing row of suavely shaped urns in moonlight, blanched. And not one was perfect. Each one was cracked.”(189) Keat’s beautiful Grecian Urns for Christmas were ” deathcolored and foul”. It is extremely ironic that his relation to Ms. Burden whom he “watched her pass every avatar of a woman”(259) should have been his rescue route towards belongingness , but turned to be his repulsive force against society that leads his murder.

One of the best cinematic images that reflects Joe Christmas’s refusal to belong was presented in picturing Joe Christmas standing in the kitchen door of Ms. Burden’s house and ” with foreboding and premonition, the savage and lonely street which he had chosen of his own will, waiting for him, thinking This is not my life. I don’t belong here.” (258) Unknowingly, Ms. Burden’s futile attempts to endow Christmas with security and stability are the same driving force to awaken his sense of resistance and refusal to belong to the Southern conforming community. He chooses to say ” No. If I give in now, I will deny all the thirty years that I have lived to make me what I chose to be.”(265) Finally, it is through his refusal to belong that Joe Christmas gains a sense of freedom, the ability to get even with a racial society and have the will power to choose even if it is a fatal choice.His inner conflict is thus resolved and we are left to ponder on Faulkner’s questions: “How far evil extends into the appearance of evil? just where between doing and appearing evil stops?”(306)

It’s safe to say that Gail Hightower is rooted. As liberally ironic as that statement reads, Hightower proves again and again that he is a man of morals and values which he is not quick to break. Although quick to entertain an audience of those he perceives as foolish (namely one Byron Bunch), Hightower reminds said audience of the foolish nature of their ways whether through words or actions.

A scene telling of Hightower’s select view of correct moral behavior occurs when Byron brings the grandparents of Christmas to his house in hopes of convincing the minister to stand up for their grandson. Although realizing the petty nature of the request, Byron suggests to Hightower, “You could say he was here with you that night… They would rather believe that about you than to believe that he lived with her like a husband and then killed her” (LIA 390). Byron’s plan has a certain logic to it that suggests a way that Christmas can be reunited with his mother and justice can be restored all at the cost of an inconsequential lie from Hightower.

Despite the soundness of the argument, Hightower shuts down Byron realizing it a ploy so “then it would be just her and Byron” and in an outrage cries, “It’s not because I cant… it’s because I wont! I wont! do you hear?… Get out of my house! Get out of my house!” (391).

There are several elements at play dictating Hightower’s inability to concede assistance. One is his inability to permit Byron to be used by a woman used by a man and interfere in her relationship; Hightower even goes so far as to suggest Byron is in cahoots with the devil. The minister stands firmly behind his decision lecturing Byron on the nature of Lena and women in general: “For the Lena Groves there are always two men in the world and their number is legion: Lucas Burches and Byron Bunches. But no Lena, no woman, deserves more than one of them” (316). Minister Hightower’s stance on the role of women in society stands in stark contrast to Byron’s; while one sees them as the victims of evil, the other sees them as its perpetrators.

Thus, it is no surprise that Hightower cannot abide by a woman’s dying wishes, in this case Mrs. Hines, to defy the law for her in order to see her son. One might wonder then why he broke his cardinal rule of abiding by his morals in order to stand up for Christmas in his hour of hot pursuit by Grimm: “He was here that night. He was with me the night of the murder” — the very words Hightower promised he would not utter (464).

Although Hightower doesn’t necessarily pass away, this moment proves quite symbolic as a moment of transgression for the minister in several ways. Most noticeably, we have to speculate what caused this sudden change of heart. As I see it, Hightower stood up for Christmas not for Byron or for the mother but for the sake of Christmas. In the momentary glimpses into Hightower’s past, we readers are given insight into his accommodation of the racial other, negroes. The point that Hightower won’t let them cook for him is reiterated multiple times and Hightower is described as “an abolitionist almost before the sentiment had begun to percolate down from the North” (472). When Christmas comes storming into his house persecuted by those who persecute him for being a nigger that didn’t “let white women alone,” Hightower comes between the two parties in a sudden and surprising act of defiance.

Additionally, if we examine the scene on surface level alone, the names signify sentiments that resonate with the character’s identities and actions. The hybrid of words in “Hightower” imply that the character sits atop a sentinel where he overlooks the ongoings of his community, much in the vein of the all-seeing father in Heaven. Combined with the fact that Hightower has expertise as a doctor, the character signifies one who is sent to “save” the lives of those who come to him for help, in this case, of a fleeing negro seeking shelter.

The failure of Hightower to save Christmas to a character adequately named “Grimm” in addition to the minister’s splotchy background suggests an institutional failure that mirrors the dilapidated Compson household in TSAF which Christian values had failed. In Hightower’s apotheosis and moment of reprisal, he has a vision of faces in the skyline of an August dusk and at the sight of Christmas’ face, “he seems to watch it, feeling himself losing contact with earth, lighter and lighter, emptying, floating” (492).

For the first time in a long time, since the days of nostalgic war glory and family, Hightower has felt a sense of higher purpose and to see it stripped away from him so suddenly causes his spirit to fade. While there is no insight into the actual persistence of the character, Hightower’s last words begin in the following way: “I am dying… I should pray.”

Mr. McEachern of Light in August calls to mind another Faulkner character, the Sartoris matriarch of The Unvanquished, Granny Millard. Both foster children who are not biologically their own. McEachern adopts Joe Christmas from an orphanage and gives him his name. Granny fosters Ringo, who grew up extremely close to her own grandson Bayard. The bond between Granny and Ringo grows even stronger in later years when they work on the scheme to sell and re-sell mules to the Union Army.

Granny and McEachern also mirror one another in their piety and are characterized as extremely religious by their actions and their speech. Both attend church regularly. Both characters frequently kneel in prayer, particularly after they have experienced or witnessed sin. They speak to God and about God often. Despite their similarities, there is no doubt that McEachern is viewed as an antagonist in his story and Granny is made into a hero. Why this difference? The answer can be found in the way that each one interprets sin and their religious morality.

“Granny’s understanding of sin is closely tied to her wartime loyalties. The textual moment in which she confesses and justifies her sins in the empty church with the boys indicates that Granny sees things through a [lens]” (“Sin” Yoknapedia). “I have sinned. I have stolen and I have borne false witness against my neighbor, though that neighbor was an enemy of my country…but I did not sin for gain or for greed…I did not sin for revenge; I defy You or anyone to say I did. I sinned first for justice: I sinned for the sake of food and clothes for Your own creatures who could not help themselves; for children who had given their fathers, for wives who had given their husbands, for old people who had given their sons, to a holy cause…And if this be sin in Your sight, I take this on my conscience too” (U 146-147). Granny admits her sins, but is resolute in her justification for them. She submits her deeds and plea for forgiveness to God, believing that what she has done is morally acceptable, but willing to accept God’s retribution if it is not.

Just like Granny, McEachern also kneels before God after he has sinned. He is accompanied by young Joe Christmas, mirroring Granny who was flanked by Bayard and Ringo. “McEachern began to pray. He prayed for a long time, his voice droning, soporific, monotonous. He asked that he be forgiven for trespass against the Sabbath and for lifting his hand against a child, an orphan, who was dear to God. He asked that the child’s stubborn heart be softened and that the sin of disobedience be forgiven him also, through the advocacy of the man whom he had flouted and disobeyed, requesting that Almighty be as magnanimous as himself, and by and through and because of conscious grace” (LIA 152). Here, McEachern’s actions depart from Granny’s. He admits his sins, but offers no justification for them. Faulkner’s writing make it clear that McEachern continued to hit Joe throughout this adolescence. It seems that McEachern makes no effort to change his behavior and prevent sin. To him, it’s just as good to commit the sin and ask for forgiveness afterward. Has he misinterpreted God’s word? Or does he see himself being above it? Certainly, he holds himself above Joe and his wife, and this is reinforced by the use of “magnanimous.” McEachern believes that he is especially generous and forgiving to his family and he actually requests that God be as forgiving of Joe as he himself is. His language contrasts with Granny who makes no requests of God, but only confesses to him. This may be influenced by gender; in a patriarchal society, women are not in a position to make requests of those who are more powerful than them (men). Or it may simply be the way in which each character views the chain of people under God. Granny sees all people under God equally, although there are differences among them—some are poorer than others, some are Northerners and other are Southerners, etc. These differences alter the way in which she responds to them. Alternatively, McEachern views the “Almighty” and then the most devoted followers just under that. The rest of the people are on the lowest rung of the ladder.

This attitude is the moral flaw in McEachern’s character and is at the root of the issues that he has with others, especially Joe. Granny’s moral compass is more true and the way she practices her religion lifts her up. This contrast is even evident in the way that both characters are described directly after prayer. “She rose up. She got up easy, like she had no weight to herself” (U 147). Granny’s prayer was honest, humble, and immediately effective. On the other hand, McEachern “finished and rose, heaving to his feet” (LIA 153). Although a younger man, McEachern is heavily burdened by a convoluted conscience.

Joe Christmas’s death scene is horrific and graphic while never explicitly writing what exactly is happening. The final paragraphs, told through the perfective of the town, shows the final moments of Christmas’s life and what his death means for the those left behind. In the beginning of the chapter is says “It was as though he had set out and made plans to passively commit suicide” (443). Christmas has always been a man on the run and yet in the moment he should be hitting the road he chooses to stay in the town, knowing it would be his end.

The final paragraphs of this chapter shows a ridiculously submissive Christmas being murdered and castrated by Grimm (who’s name suggests he is the giver of death). After already shooting Christmas five times, Grimm decides to castrate him as well. The word castrate is never written in the text, Faulkner instead describes what the men see and do. He writes:

“when they saw what Grimm was doing one of the men gave a choked cry and stumbled back into the wall and began to vomit. Then Grimm too sprang back, flinging behind him the bloody butcher knife. “Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell,” he said. But the man on the floor had not moved… his face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself, and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket” (464).

It isn’t enough for Grimm to shoot him five times and wait for him to die, he must remove him of all “manhood” so that even in death he will not be a threat. In the first half of the final paragraph we have two images of bodily fluids spewing out of bodies. The first is the man vomiting at the site of Christmas’s castration. This scene is similar to Christmas’s childhood memory, where he throws up out from guilt of stealing and eating the toothpaste. Much like Christmas, this vomiting man is sickened over what he is a part of even if he is not the one doing it. The second image of bodily fluid spewing from the body is Christmas’s blood, which is described as “rush(ing) out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket” In this moment Christmas’s “black blood” is violently leaving his body, leaving a pale (white) man behind. He is the rising rocket, leaving behind the black and the white in the only way he can, through death.

In this last scene Christmas is not only shown as someone who has given up but someone who has left the earth all together: “But the man on the floor had not moved. He just lay there, with his eyes open and empty of everything save consciousness, and with something, a shadow, about his mouth. For a long

moment he looked up at them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes” (464). His eyes are lifeless and there is a “shadow about his mouth” which I read as either a) his mouth is filled with dark blood or b) his soul leaving his body. Christmas has been shown throughout the novel as moving like a shadow, so in his final moments his shadow-self has left his body to find peace.

In the final lines we have more imagery of Christmas leaving the earth while also making note of what this moment means for the town:

“upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. It will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading and not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant. Again from the town, deadened a little by the walls, the scream of the siren mounted toward its unbelievable crescendo, passing out of the realm of hearing” (465)

This moment will stay with the men who witnessed it forever. Men who seemed just as racists as Grimm now haunted by the scene that lay before them. They will live their lives with the memories of what they have done and try to be better people because of it. They will look into the faces of their children and remember this moment and hope the next generation learns from their “old disasters.” Christmas may have not been able to solve his own problems and save his own life, but he will live on in the memories of the town. In the final line Christmas hears the sirens of the firetruck heading towards Ms. Burden’s burning house, brining us back to the beginning of the story, where we must also move on from Joe Christmas.

[Blog 5]

The saga of Joe Christmas in Light in August ends brutally. Christmas is beaten, mutilated, and eventually hung, but for what end? The parallels between the final events leading up to his death suggest that the character in some way acts as an allegorical stand-in for Christ (perhaps anti-christ?), a necessary sacrifice that in some way serves the social whole. Yet this sacrifice is highly problematic, and the text suggests that rather than signalling the dawn of a new era (the forgiveness of sin in christian theology), his death serves to perpetuate a problematic status quo. Ostensibly, Christmas is condemned to death for murder (though it remains unclear who the murderer actually was), but as the social gaze begins to form his character and race, it more likely seems that he is simply murdered for the transgression of his race (the “truth” of which is likewise left unclear). He his eliminated for being an aberration, a devious essence of blackness threatening the whiteness that his skin belies. The social nexus of Jefferson cannot identify exactly what he is supposed to be, he defies their “coding” of racial order, and thus must be extirpated to preserve that homogeneity of the social paradigm as it is currently constituted. Inevitably, he is sacrificed to maintain the order of the world as it is reified by social language.

Here, in the play between what is un-iterated form and its subsequent linguistic translation, between what the “real” face of life is and how it is translated by social signification, Faulkner exposes a fundamental hypocrisy that threatens social hegemony: exceptions to the rules set by social paradigm threaten the stability of that paradigm. As Byron Brunch himself remarks, “if public talking makes truth, then I reckon that is truth,” (364)  a statement that admits that truth is arbitrary, that it relies on the condition that “public talking” forms truth within a purely linguistic sphere that may or may not conform to some exterior reality. This is why Joe Christmas is so threatening to the social sphere of Jefferson. It’s not just that he could he wear the markings of a white man, his blackness fooling all of them, confusing their sense of what should be a knowable and natural signifier: race, it’s that, even worse, Christmas does not know what he is.

[Christmas] was watching the nigger working in the rayd, following him around the yard while he worked until at last the nigger said ‘What you watching me for, boy?’ and [Christmas] said ‘How come you are a nigger? and the nigger said ‘Who told you I am a nigger, you little white trash bastard?’ and he says ‘I aint a  nigger’ and the nigger says ‘You are worse than that. You don’t even know what you are. And more than that, you wont never know. You’ll live and you’ll die and you wont never know’ and he says ‘God aint no nigger’ and the nigger says ‘I reckon you ought to know what God is , because dont nobody but god know what you is.’ But God wasn’t there to say… (384)

There however, is no intervention of God to deem the reality of Christmas’ race, for the simple fact  that Faulkner essentially leaves him raceless. The true essence of his race inevitably doesn’t matter. That the people of Jefferson cannot codify his race however does, so they must put the mark of blackness upon him to make his threat to the community intelligible. Rather than posing  as a threat to southern notions of how race itself is constructed, the social gaze transforms Christmas into a black body that threatens to enter into the white blood of the community, hence he must be castrated to eliminate this perceived threat, “Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell, [Grimm] said” (464).

However, upon being castrated, his sacrifice becomes clear:

…black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it… it will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast… (465)

The social psyche will retain the image of Christmas’ death in “their memories forever,” at once taking solace in the black blood being purged from the white body. But it is not a resolution. While the violence of his death may maintain a tentative symbolic order, it still remains to reemerge and threaten that order again, the simple fact of the ambiguity of his race still being deferred to the back of social mind.

I would like to build upon an interest of mine regarding Joe Christmas’ mysteriously peaceful reactions in times of stress in relation to Laura Doyle’s “The Body against Itself in Faulkner’s Phenomenology of Race”: particularly, her description of Joe Christmas’ negotiation of his double-ness regarding race and place. Doyle writes, “Faulkner shows how an existential lag, inherent to the doubled body, leaves an opening in being that social signs, and nations, urgently enter, splitting the body into two terms or poles, opposed and ranked: white over black, man over woman, sign over body” (342). I would argue that Christmas and his experience of happenings, expressed to readers via Faulkner’s telling adjectives, resides in this “existential lag” that is directly related to Christmas’ fascination with his own racial makeup.

Instances that I am referencing specifically entail an unusual calmness or peacefulness that Christmas seems to inhabit during times of extreme physical trauma and violence, such as when he is getting castrated: “But the man on the floor had not moved. He just lay there, with his eyes open and empty of everything save consciousness, and with something, a shadow, about his mouth. For a long moment he looked up at them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes.’’ (464– 65) At this time he seems to disassociate from his body in a ways he succumbs to violence. We see another, less deliberately violent depiction of this when Christmas keeps to the woods while on the run, not eating. Faulkner writes, “Then one day he was no longer hungry. It came sudden and peaceful. He felt cool, quiet” (334). Also, when he was at one of his heights with Joanna Burden: “But he began to see himself as from a distance, like a man being sucked down into a bottomless morass… That was it: cool” (260). These experiences center around central words such as “peaceful” “cool” and have a literal and presumed distance about them. He seems to be able to remove himself from his any presumed feelings, or reactions to these feelings, in a way that borders on the mystic. Doyle writes that, “Light in August exposes race as the phantom that both promises and withdraws the body’s unity—and the nation’s” (339). I would argue that Christmas is manifesting a phantom-like form of himself that is organized around his racialized self as he moves through the various social situations. Faulkner describes a moment of running, again, when he is fleeing from town that creates a phantom-like image: “Even in full stride his feet seemed to stray slowly and lightly and at deliberate random across an earth without solidity” (333). The juxtaposition of slow lightness to a panicky sprint from town that one would imagine he is doing is akin to a kind of phantasmic out-of-body-ness that can only be described in such ethereal terms.

This phantomlike doubleness that Christmas seems capable of doing manifests itself interestingly at a moment where he hails a car to take him to Mottstown. His presence immediately terrifies the two passengers, but Christmas seems to simply not notice. Multiple times during Faulkner’s description of this passage, he repeats of Christmas’ unawareness: “But Christmas did not notice this at the time… Christmas did not hear this either. He was sitting back now, completely unaware that he was riding directly behind desperate terror… But again Christmas did not notice” (283-284). This instance is particularly upsetting in that he is in such a contained space, a vehicle, with two other human beings, and simply fails to register or react to their verbal and emotional discomfort with him. Because of Christmas’ aforementioned “existential lag,” he is able to disengage his body from his surroundings, and react in ways that seem completely paradoxical to the events occurring.