Faulkner’s characters in Light in August all seem to possess a fair amount of determination and willpower. But some characters seem to take it to an extreme, until it becomes a stubbornness. It makes me wonder what Faulkner is trying to say about these two qualities. At one point in the novel Byron says something interesting, a possible explanation for why people are stubborn and not just determined. He says, “’It is because a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change’” (75). Maybe people cannot help being stubborn, but they can control their determination. Or maybe stubborn is born from fear while determination comes from a sense of courage? My question for Faulkner after reading these characters is whether he thinks determination can lead to stubbornness, or if they are completely different qualities…maybe some people are just plain stubborn. Does the one lead to the other, or is the latter (stubbornness) a kind of trait to be born with?

If we look at Lena Grove, the first character we meet in the novel, she is determined to find the father of her unborn child before it is born. She travels alone, follows rumors all the way to Mississippi from Alabama, and refuses to see what everyone else sees: that the father—Lucas Burch ran away from her when she got pregnant. There is something admirable in Lena’s refusal to stick within the societal norms of being an unwed mother in the South at the time within the novel, but as the novel goes on it turns from determination to a kind of stubbornness to find him. She does find him, even after he changed his name (to Joe Brown), but he just runs away again. At this point, if it were me, I would give up trying to find him because I now know for sure he does not want to be married or a father, or keep having a relationship with Lena. To want to find him now would be stubbornness on my part. But after he runs away the second time, she refuses to stop chasing him and continues, only now with a newborn baby and the accompaniment of Byron Bundy. Despite being just as determined as ever, it changes to stubbornness, a refusal to accept the fact that Lucas Burch does not want to be a part of her or his child’s life.

If we look at the character Reverend Hightower, he is determined to preach to the people of Jefferson, despite the problems going on in his own life. He is determined that his marital problems not interfere with his work, which he seems to worship in itself, and tries to continue preaching even after the people of Jefferson reject him. When Faulkner writes, “And how Hightower had come straight to Jefferson from the seminary, refusing to accept any other call; how he had pulled every string he could in order to be sent to Jefferson. And how he arrived with his young wife, descending from the train in a state of excitement already, talking, telling the old men and women who were the pillars of the church how he had set his mind on Jefferson from the first, since he had decided to become a minister…” (61), I saw him as a man full of determination. But after falling into disgrace, his determination to stay in Jefferson becomes one of stubbornness, as he knows he is not wanted, and his staying bothers the townspeople. His refusal to leave the town is not determination anymore, “He had to resign from the church, but he wouldn’t leave Jefferson, for some reason. They tried to get him to, for his own sake as well as the town’s, the church’s. That was pretty bad on the church, you see. Having strangers come here and hear about it, and him refusing to leave the town. But he wouldn’t go away” (59). Does his refusal to leave stem from fear, or is he just trying to be brave by staying? The answer to this would determine whether Hightower is truly determined or stubborn.

If we look at Joe Christmas, he is determined to keep his name, do what he wants, and maintain independence no matter the cost. But this too is taken too far. Originally I took his not wanting to take his adoptive father’s name as a determination to keep his identity, “He didn’t even bother to say to himself My name aint McEachern. My name is Christmas There was no need to bother about that yet. There was plenty of time” (145). I took his refusal to adopt his adoptive father’s religion and views on life as a part of him growing into his own person. But soon his determination to not even try to form connections or bonds with his adoptive parents, especially Mrs. McEachern, becomes stubbornness.  When she brings him food after going a day without eating, instead of accepting it, or even refusing politely, he purposefully dumps it on his bedroom floor, waits until she leaves, and then eats the food on the floor “…like a savage, like a dog” (155). His refusal to take Byron’s offering of food after not eating for three days, is stubbornness.  The lengths he takes to isolate himself from other people, from letting people get to know him, becomes stubbornness, especially after Bobbie leaves him.

With Joanna Burden, initially she is determined to help Christmas: send him to school, give him a career, make money. When he (stubbornly I might say) refuses her efforts, her determination to help again becomes an extreme stubbornness, until the only thing left for her is murder-suicide. Even the character of the town of Jefferson is more stubborn than determined. Being in the South and not too long after the Civil War, as a whole the people are reluctant to accept change, uniqueness, problems, essentially.  If you have a problem, you are different, which they do not like. They are stubborn in their ways of unaccepting. They were determined to make Hightower leave, but when he does not, their determination seems to fade into a stubbornness not to accept him as part of the town anymore.

Other characters not mentioned, most if not all of them actually, seem to possess either some level of determination or stubbornness. In some of the characters that I brought up here determination seems to fade into stubbornness, while others seem to skip determination altogether. Is there even a difference between the two?  Or will determination always give way to stubbornness, eventually?

Percy Grimm, the white-supremacist vigilante, maniacally guided by the god-like “Player” who moves him like a pawn, shoots and castrates Joe Christmas in Chapter 19. Grimm has slain the dragon of miscegenation in Jefferson. This scene is the climax of what Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman calls Faulkner’s “meditation on the civic equality of black men in the post-Reconstruction era and its effects on the psyche of whites” that plays out in the “crises in the established economic, gender, and racial systems of that historical moment” (Abdur-Rahman 177). Grimm restores law and order and reasserts the patriarchal rule of white masculinity by identifying and eliminating the threat of the black beast. More importantly, as John T. Matthews has noted, Joe Christmas is punished for discovering the truth that identity is arbitrary and is “an effect of performance,” a truth that “constitutes the greatest menace to Southern order” (Matthews 168). Why does Faulkner write two additional chapters after the threat of Joe Christmas is eliminated and the reader has experienced the brutality of the fear that miscegenation creates in the South? What does this chapter structure signal and what is the way forward for the reader?

Judith Bryant Wittenberg sees a “triadic quality” to the structure of the novel, with the opening and closing chapters focusing on “the coercive process by which linguistic classification is imposed” and the middle chapters, the story of Joe Christmas, revealing the “destructiveness” and “fundamental inadequacy” of that process (Wittenberg 164). The novel calls the reader’s attention to habits of belief and behavior, and to the difficulties, dangers, and importance of actively examining and adapting habits – including habits of reading. Byron Bunch is our exemplar in considering this when he tells us early on that “when anything gets to be a habit, it also manages to get a right good distance away from truth and fact” (Light in August 74). (One can argue that it is, in fact, Bunch who does the most work considering and changing his habits and his life.) Faulkner will attempt to break readers of the habit of following the traditional narrative and looking for closure by swirling narratives through the novel in a modernist revision of form. Light in August is loose and difficult, with multiple narratives moving back and forth, full of gaps that are only partially filled by doubling back. The center remains empty; we never learn Christmas’s race and it does not matter. Laura Doyle emphasizes how the form of the novel models the “chiasm” of the nation and “exposes race as the phantom that both promises and withdraws the body’s unity—and the nation’s” drawing the reader to see the “fundamental loophole or slippage of self-coherence that mirrors the ontological rupture of the racialized body in the South, which itself reiterates the traumatic crossing of liberty and slavery in the nation’s body” (Doyle 339). She argues that reading and writing feed on “habitual equivocations” and proposes this as a possible focus of Faulkner’s novel (Doyle 350).

If readers seek to maintain power by searching meaning in a straight-line, completed narrative, we are acting in a role like that of the community surveilling and labeling individuals and exhibiting paranoia about those who, as Matthews notes, “go off script” (Matthews 168). As author, Faulkner is aware of this paradox and writes beyond traditional narrative confinement in looking for a way forward. The novel wraps the haunting horrors of the Old South and its brutal writing-onto-the-parchmentfaced Joe Christmas within the amused telling (in the bed of a loving couple) of the travels of the patchwork-family of the New South, Lena and Byron and baby. Abdur-Rahman argues that in Light in August Faulkner looks for and finds ways of “revamping and reconstituting whiteness in the modern-meaning postslavery-moment” (Abdur-Rahman 177).  In turning both the meaning of race and the reader experience of narrative inside out, Faulkner points to habits for reconsideration. Matthews refers to “Faulkner’s preferred rate of social change – patient, steady, somehow in tune with natural rhythms, ‘peaceful’” (Matthews 161). Despite the swirls and counterpoints in the multiple narratives of the novel, forward movement into the future is incremental, with the pace of Lena’s journey picking up just a little, from the wagons that she rides into the novel on, to the truck that she rides out on which moves in a “moderate speed” that the driver feels prudent to restrict himself to in the final chapter (494). Faulkner leaves us with the way forward vested in the moderated speed of the journey of the unmarried couple of Lena and Byron, who (presumably) will raise the son of the “dark complected” (55) Lucas Burch/Joe Brown. The son with the “terracotta face” leads the way forward (407).

Works Cited

Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. “White Disavowal, Black Enfranchisement, and the Homoerotic in William Faulkner’s Light In August.” The Faulkner Journal (Fall 2006/Spring 2007): 176-192.

Doyle, Laura. “The Body Against Itself in Faulkner’s Phenomenology of Race.” American Literature (June 2001): 339-364.

Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: Vintage, 1932, 1990.

Matthews, John T. William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Porter, Carolyn. William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Wittenberg, Judith Bryant. “Race in Light In August: Wordsymbols and Obverse Reflections.” The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. Ed. Philip M. Weinstein. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 146-167.

The fact that Joanna Burden’s virginity, which bears such an ephemeral or illusive quality, plays a central role in the first stage of her and Joe Christmas’ relationship shows how that relationship is largely based on fantasy.  The object—Burden’s virginity—that Christmas supposedly pillages every night does not exist, and because of this, he is unable to exercise violence on it.  But such violence is something essential to his expression of masculinity.

The text reports, “Even after a year it was as though he entered by stealth to despoil her virginity each time anew.  It was as though each turn of dark saw him faced again with the necessity to despoil again that which he had already despoiled—or never had and never would” (LIA 234).  The phrase, “it was as though,” indicates the subjunctive mood, which suggests that the real state of affairs is contrary to what is being claimed.  In other words, even though he seems to take her virginity “each time anew” the real situation differs from this.  This conclusion can be derived from an analysis of the term “virgin,” which, as an adjective, denotes something untouched or unaltered.  Once that thing has been altered, touched, or effaced, it can no longer be considered “virgin.”  Therefore, virgin or virginity is a state that only exists once.  It is that state of an object prior to being changed.  For this reason the text reads that it was “as though” Christmas took her virginity day after day.  In actuality, virginity is not something that can be repeatedly despoiled since it only exists once; that is, it only exists prior to her first experience of intercourse.  Furthermore, it is possible that Joe Christmas never takes Burden’s virginity in the first place; this is indicted with the phrase, “or never had and never would.”  Instead, her virginity is more like a mythic entity that serves as the organizing principle behind her and Christmas’ physical/sexual relationship.  But because this object no longer exists, its import is questionable.  The novel details this situation as it reads, “It was as if he struggled physically with another man for an object of no actual value to either, and for which they struggled on principle alone” (LIA 235).  The two have arranged to battle for something that does not actually exist to be won.

Yet, it is problematic that they engage in relations that center around something that does not exist.  It is in Christmas’ character to express power and violence over women, especially those whom he meets in a sexual context.  When he cannot sexually scandalize the woman, he frequently resorts to physical violence.  For instance, this occurs when he has sex with a prostitute who he attempts to insult and get out of paying by revealing that he is black.  When he realizes that that this revelation does not offend her, he resorts to severely beating her.  Similarly, the fact that he cannot do violence on Burden’s virginity and violate her sexually strips him of the force that he desires to exert on the woman.  He cannot express violence over her by taking and defiling that most coveted aspect of womanhood since it never exists.  Instead, he engages in a mechanical act of make believe at “each turn of dark” in which he pretends to do her violence.

Joe Christmas finally tires of this arrangement and storms into the home not according to their arrangement, and “with rage” (LIA 236), he takes her by force.  He hopes that this act finally violates her by stripping her of her hard masculine qualities—the aspects of her that fail to take offence at sexual acts.   He believes that with this violent sexual act he has “made a woman of her at last” (LIA 236).  Yet, just as her virginity proves impossible to plunder, this act does not seriously threaten her sexuality or psyche.  The text demonstrates that she proves impossible to offend when it reveals that, the next night, instead of angrily sending Christmas away, she leaves the door to the home unlocked for him to enter just as easily as the previous nights.  Burden’s inability to be shaken by Joe’s aggression outrages him.  The narrator reports that “it was as though some enemy upon whom he had wreaked his utmost of violence and contumely stood, unscathed and unscarred, and contemplated him with a musing and insufferable contempt” (LIA 237).  Because Joanna Burden’s virginity and some incarnations of her sexuality exist only in the fantasy realm, she is able to negate the acts of violence that Christmas directs towards these entities.  Like the absurd notion of despoiling something that cannot be repeatedly despoiled, Joanna’s negation of sexual violence makes Christmas’ acts rather meaningless.  Ultimately, she benefits sexually from this arrangement because she is able to continually play out the fantasy, while he is unable to express the violent version of manhood that he knows and desires.

Blood is an interesting motif throughout this novel, because it is so subtle but yet it runs so deep. Joe Christmas was considered fully black because of the “one drop rule” which stated that a person with even one drop of African American blood, was not considered white. Joe’s blood was seen as tainted- which is why his grandfather left him in an orphanage. The woman at the orphanage took advantage of Joe and his lower position- his age and his color- and placed him in a home where he was not loved. It’s as if Joe never even had a chance at becoming a good, successful person- and that his moral decline was somehow genetic. In one of the more violent and upsetting scenes of this novel (it had plenty), Joe Christmas is beaten up after Bobbie’s “parents” find out he is black. While they are hitting him the men say, “We’ll find out. We’ll see if his blood is black”(219). Here the reader sees that the idea of blood is greater than the sameness of actual blood. Meaning blood symbolizes ties between certain people- families- but at the end of the day, blood is blood no matter what color or gender someone is. This entire scene reminded me of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice when he says,

“and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath

not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,

dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with

the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject

to the same diseases, healed by the same means,

warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as

a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?

if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison

us, do we not die?” (Act 3, Scene 1)

Throughout history, dominant white society has used blood- and the “impurity” of it, in order to justify oppression and segregation. But we all bleed- and we all feel. Blood ties people together, and binds people who otherwise would never get along or be together. This aspect of blood is especially manifested in the unborn child of Lena and Joe Brown. This future child shares both of their blood, therefore binding the two together forever. This is a responsibility Joe Brown runs away from- but even though Byron Burch (in my hopeful alternate ending for the novel) will claim this child as his own- he will never be truly his by blood. Lena knows that this child will forever carry the blood of her and Joe which is why she is so determined to find him- even when he has run away while she was giving birth.

The final pages of Light in August provide a surprising re-contextualization of Lena Grove, whose narrative opens the novel and threads throughout it. For most of the novel, there is no great impression of interiority to the character, nor any great intellect, as we read. Her calm insistence that God will provide and reconnect her with Burch seems naive if not pitiable, although her unselfconsciousness about her quest also does lend her a sort of dignity so that this pity is mixed with something like admiration.

But this script of benign readerly benevolence is undermined entirely in the final pages, when the furniture repairer who picks up Grove and Byron Bunch tells his wife:

“I think she was just travelling. I don’t think she had ever aimed to, only she hadn’t told him yet. I reckon this was the first time she had ever been further away from home than she could walk back before sundown in her life. And that she got along all right this far, with folks taking good care of her. And so I think she had just made up her mind to travel a little further and see as much as she could, since I reckon she knew that when she settled down it would likely be for the rest of her life.” (506)

What a punch – the assumptions that everyone has been making about Grove’s intelligence and motivations are neatly overturned; the effect reminds me of nothing so much as The Book of Mormon‘s most brilliant moment, in which (spoiler alert) one of the Ugandan villagers says to the true-believing Nabalungi that “Salt Lake City isn’t an actual place. It’s an idea. It’s a metaphor!”, overturning (and criticizing) audience assumptions about the naivete of the Ugandan villagers who have been embracing Elder Cunningham’s absurdist, Star Wars-infused brand of Mormon preaching, in which Boba Fett turns sinners into frogs. (That Salt Lake City is, in fact, a real place, is a secondary joke layered on top of the first.) In the same way, Grove’s unthinking faith in what appears to be providence is suddenly recontextualized. Has Grove been playing everybody all along?

In doing so – and it’s not quite clear how intentional it has been, not that intentionality particularly matters here – Grove has taken advantage of the only social narrative available to her and turned it to her own uses. A young woman could hardly travel alone, jobless and unconnected, and be considered respectable. Pregnant, she is hardly respectable, but she does become an object of pity, particularly when she insists that she will find the father and that his letter to her was simply lost. One would certainly not think (even today) of pregnancy providing a good opportunity to travel and see the world, but Lena turns it to her advantage. It is a remarkable moment of agency on the part of Grove, who seems to cast herself of the winds of fate, taking whatever transportation is available. Grove’s may not be a hero quest, but it is something. In her movements through Faulkner’s landscapes, she is able to see the world for herself, more or less on her own terms, before finding a place to settle down, “likely for the rest of her life.” Her rejection of Bunch’s proposal suggest that she will choose this moment and place to suit herself.

This agency is presented in contrast to the narrative of Joe Christmas, who, after murdering McEachern, “entered the street which was to run for fifteen years” (223). Grove is able to turn her narrative to her advantage, grasping what power she can through manipulating other people’s assumptions. Christmas does a similar thing for some time, passing as white or as a foreigner. But while Lena will presumably attain some respectability by eventually settling down and marrying Bunch, the cost for Christmas for doing so, as presented by Joanna Burden, would have required identifying himself as black, which he decisively rejects.  This contrast emphasizes the ways in which social assumptions around race and gender might be manipulated to one’s advantage by some (a “naive” young pregnant white woman), but it is not clear what sort of manipulation, if any, could have been available to Christmas.

Joe Christmas is a threat. He cannot be claimed or tamed by any community because he refuses to signify himself as black or white and take an assigned place in a group. John T. Matthews notes Faulkner’s focus in Light In August on the “ways societies reproduce themselves” necessitating that individuals accept “communal conventions through volitional acts of identification with the possibilities on offer” (Seeing Through the South 165). Communities exist through shared signifiers that separate “us” from “them.” Though some variance across the signified may be tolerated, borders must be identified. The borders of the small Southern town of Jefferson that the “rootless” Joe Christmas wanders into are strained by, “new historical conditions” and “anomalous individuals” (Matthews 165). Eric J. Sundquist highlights the centrality of the racial line in LIA, noting that the novel was published in 1932 appearing “approximately at the crest of a forty-year wave of Jim Crow laws that grew in part out of a threatened economy, in part out of increasingly vocal demands for black equality during and after World War I, and in greater part out of reawakened racist fears that had … simmered restlessly for a generation between Reconstruction and the twentieth century” (The House Divided 68). These tensions pressurize LIA and intensify the danger from any outsider who is unidentifiable, unlabeled, and unsignifiable, threatening the fragile stability of this community warped by racist fear.

Byron Bunch describes Joe Christmas’s face as “parchment color” and notes that his arrival in town only draws attention from the mill workers when his odd name can’t be classified (33-34). Christmas is the blank page that must be written upon, but there is no word for him. It is the failure of a signifier, language that will classify him, that dooms Joe Christmas. There is no word to signify his place, he is alien, outside definition. We have seen in the story of the Hightowers that this community punishes those who will not conform. Faulkner highlights Joe Christmas as a dangerous blank in the scene where he is caught in the headlights of an oncoming car and watches “his body grow white out of the darkness like a kodak print emerging from the liquid” (108). This is one of Faulkner’s many uses of light and dark in the novel to complicate the binary of black and white and the inherent interdependence and shifting borders of these signifiers. Sundquist interprets this scene and the anxiety of “passing” the color boundary it generates as a “figure of simultaneous concealment and revelation, a figure that marks with explosive precision, at a point of passing from one to the other, the ambiguity of Joe Christmas, who—like Jim Crow, yet with the doubled ironic pressure of already appearing to be what he must but cannot become—virtually is a figure rather than a person” (Sundquist 71). Joe Christmas is both black and white and neither, he is a threat to the boundaries of the community and embodies its fear and trauma. He is an example of the paradox of the fluid boundary and the forbidden mixing of signifiers.

As a figure and not a person Joe Christmas is one-dimensional and has no depth. He cannot become a person without a signifier, without a word to define him. Joe Christmas has not been integrated into society, moving from orphan to adopted son to violent nomad, he has been warped, like his society, into a twisted fear of race and sexuality. The distortions of his traumatized society alienate Joe Christmas as he searches for his signifiers, but rejects choosing. Matthews describes socialization as the process by which “individuals become aware of the possibilities they have been trained to believe they must choose among,” followed by a “process of recognition” where “each subject answers a call to claim certain elements of identity, to personalize a script from the social archive” (Matthews 169). Joe Christmas cannot choose, cannot write the script that socializes him. Again it is signifiers that fail, language is insufficient to identify Joe Christmas.

Faulkner’s focus on the modernist struggle of language and meaning, between signifier and signified is written into the scene where Joe Christmas sits in the woods reading a magazine. The moment is pastorally described as this “yellow day opening peacefully … into a still chiaroscuro without urgency” (111). Faulkner’s use of the word “chiaroscuro” here is interesting. Chiaroscuro in visual art is a technique that uses light and dark shading to create depth and dimension. But, as we’ve seen, Christmas is a figure who cannot achieve depth through shading or highlighting, since he refuses any core identity to be accentuated. As he eats his breakfast of a tin of potted meat (111) [Does anyone else see Leopold Bloom: “What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat? Incomplete. With it an abode of bliss” (Ulysses 61)?] the act of reading gives him hope, but it is a false and fleeting hope. The murder of Joanna Burden is just a couple of days away. Time is suspended for a moment as Christmas is “arrested and held immobile by a single word which had perhaps not yet impacted, his whole being suspended by the single trivial combination of letters in quiet and sunny space, so that hanging motionless and without physical weight he seemed to watch the slow flowing of time beneath him, thinking    All I wanted was peace    thinking, ‘She ought not to started praying over me’” (112). Christmas’s reading of the magazine is Faulkner’s text acknowledging itself as words on a page, black ink on a white page attempting to create a world. Faulkner cannot write out the seething rage of racial history and the fear generated by shifts in modern society, they are written into this community. Faulkner suspends the relentless forward movement of time in this novel to prompt the reader to experience herself as reader, reading his text, and then reading the text through Christmas’s reading, as he oddly reads a magazine as a novel. Finishing “the last and final page, the last and final word,” Christmas strikes a match and lights fire to the magazine, destroying the word that held him, prefiguring the lack of and power of the words that doom him. Another light in August burns. Matthews said of Faulkner’s sentences that they arced across centuries and uncannily rendered “characters’ private thoughts as readable script” in his “nearly inhuman devotion to making language exceed itself” (Seeing Through the South 5). Joe Christmas exists as the signifier of the South that is the fire consuming itself in the early twentieth century.

Works Cited

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage, 1986.

Matthews, John T. William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Sundquist, Eric J. Faulkner: The House Divided. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

In the third paragraph of The Light in August, the reader encounters the first neologism of Faulkner’s text, wherein he describes “a bugswirled kerosene lamp” (4). This is the first of many such coinages, all of which are immediately understandable compounds, and most of which, as it turns out, are decidedly less poetic. In the first chapter alone, Faulkner describes:

• “a stumppocked scene of profound and peaceful desolation” (5)
• “a succession of creakwheeled and limpeared avatars” (7)
• “slow and mileconsuming clatter” (10)
• “heavy, manlooking shoes” (11)
• “sagging and brokenspringed seat” (12)
• “distance perhaps roadcarved and definite” (13)
• “inwardlistening deliberation” (15)
• “shirt of sweatfaded blue” (16)
• “manhard, workhard [woman]” (16)
• “an inwardlighted quality of tranquil and calm unreason” (18)
• “hunched, bleacheyed” (24)
• “slowspitting and squatting men” (26)

There are also a few places where Faulkner semi-coins a word by eliding a space or a dash. These, too, are usually adjectives. They include “Postoffice Department annals” (5); “apparitionlike suddenness” (5); “labor- and childridden wife” (5); “a leanto room” (5); and the least characteristic “eggmoney” (21), which is a noun. There are only two other places where Faulkner coins nouns in the first chapter: he writes of “the bleak heritage of his bloodpride” (6) and how “she sat down on the ditchbank” (7).

The vast majority of Faulkner’s neologisms are adjectives, and among these, the majority include verbs in their construction. These are active adjectives, that specify exactly what kind of swirling, wheeling, pocking, listening, and spitting is going on. Looking at the above list, too, one is struck by how characteristic of Faulkner’s setting and characters the above coinages feel: they describe work, wear, imperfections; landscapes and clothing that are worn, bleached, desolate, and masculine.

Perhaps the most famous neologist of the previous century – whose works were not published until the 1918, making him an odd sort of almost-contemporary of Faulkner’s – Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of “disremembering,” “beak-leaved boughs dragonish”, “throughther” “tool-smooth,” “selfstrung, selfwrung” (“Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”); “heaven-roysterers,” “roughcast,” “Shivelights and shadowtackle,” “yestertempest,” “manmarks treadmire,” “Footfretted,” “clearest-selved,” “firedint,” “Manshape (“That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection”); “dovewinged,” “Carrier-witted,” “womb-life” (“The Wreck of the Deutschland”) and more. In reading his poetry (and there is some reason to think that Faulkner also read it), one can sense how Hopkins must coin new words to encompass his sense of the sublime, and of the destructive, awe-inspiring beauty of nature that seems to call for the invention of a new language, a new grammar, a new sense of rhyme, a new way of counting meter. Hopkins does all of these things, with extraordinary results.

But what becomes evident through this comparison to Hopkins is the strangeness of Faulkner’s neologisms: Faulkner insists upon the same necessity of invention to describe the mundane, the worn, the everyday. Faulkner is also largely describing landscapes, but in something of the opposite way: his coinages insist on the non-sublime, on the mundane and worn, on the everyday, the broken, and the ugly. Hopkins writes of “Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; / And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim”, while Faulkner writes of a “stumpocked scene” (5) and a “sagging and brokenspringed seat” (12). Hopkins elevates the mundane; Faulkner insists upon it, with the occasional flash of poetry  (“inwardlighted” [18]).

It would be easy to suggest that in coining new words to describe his Yoknapatawphan landscapes, Faulkner is working to elevate the everyday, to make it worthy of a second look and closer examination. But this does not feel quite right. Rather, Faulkner’s language–even the coinages–seems decidedly everyday, familiar rather than sublime. To write of a “Postoffice Department” or “eggmoney” rather than “Post office” and “egg money” – it’s as though Faulkner gently picked up part of American English and rotated it a few degrees before setting it back down again, much as he does when he turns Lafayette County into Yoknapatawpha, and Oxford into Jefferson. And his coinages are generally more concentrated in the early pages of each chapter, as though to signify to that the reader that they are in a different but familiar place.