In the sixth chapter of Light In August Faulkner begins the chapter with the line “Memory believes before knowing remembers.” This perplexing line is the opening to a childhood story of Joe Christmas, an equally perplexing man. The placement of this line is significant to the beginning of the story of Joe Christmas, a man who has to rely on his subjective memory since he knows so little about himself.

In order to understand this quote I think it needs to be broken down by each word. Memory is the subjective recollection of a personal event. Belief (Believe) is when you have faith that something happened, even when you don’t necessarily have the facts to back it up. Knowing is the understanding of something as a fact and certainty. Remembers is a present realization of a memory. Given a break down of these words and the story that follows I take the line to mean that in order to know something you first have to believe the memory of it as a fact. However, given that memory is subjective you can never really know something to be real or not, which is shown through the incident between Joe Christmas and the dietitian.

What seems like an insignificant event of a child sneaking off to taste some toothpaste became the moment that created the woman hating Christmas we see as an adult. Since we are presented with this memory in a third person narrative we get both sides of the story, which shows how subjective memory can be. On pages 124-125 we see a moment where the dietitian tries to bribe 5 year old Christmas but he doesn’t take the bribe. She asks “Are you going to tell?” to which he thinks “that anyone should have known that the last thing in the world he would do would be to tell about the toothpaste, the vomit.” And when she tried to give him the dollar the text says “He didn’t know what she wanted him to do” (125). To the dietitian this was the moment when she caught 5 year old Christmas snuck into her room to spy on her and watch her get intimate with a man, and she bribed him to keep quiet. However, to Christmas this was the moment when he got in trouble for eating toothpaste and someone tried to give him money for reasons he could not figure out.

This chapter also gave us reasoning behind why Christmas thinks he is black. Since Christmas does not know anything about himself, including his racial background or even his birth name, everything he knows about himself is from the memories of how other people treated him. In the orphanage he gets called “nigger” by the other children, though they also know nothing of his racial background. When the dietician hears this she brings it to the attention of the matron so he can be sent to a black orphanage so she doesn’t have to worry about him telling on her. Though he was only five years old at the time, remembering it as an adult it signifies the time when he was removed from somewhere (the orphanage he grew up in) because of the color of his skin.

In this chapter we have a little boy sneaking around, being called nigger, and being mistreated by a woman. These memories developed into Christmas’s truths about him self. From this memory he knows that he must stay in the shadows, distrust women, and acknowledge that he is black. He believes in these memories and they become his knowlege. exp

[Blog 4]

The way in which the character Joe Christmas interacts with his adopted parents demonstrates that he is most comfortable viewing and dealing with the world in a purely rational manner and on a physical, rather than emotional, plane.  Despite the master/slave dynamic that exists between father and son, the novel reveals that they understand one another in a way that is inaccessible to the mother.  The young Christmas’ relationship with his adopted mother is strained largely because of the emotion that she brings to it.  Evidence of his preference for the logical and dislike of the emotional is visible in this character’s interactions with others in the novel.

Joe Christmas’ relationship with his father is characterized by a mutual understanding that each share concerning the logic of action and reaction.  Reason brings a set of stable and predictable expectations to their interactions.  It forms something of a contract or agreement between these two characters since both can expect that certain actions on the boy’s part will elicit specific reactions on McEachern’s part.  The novel reads, “The man [McEachern]…merely depended on him to act in a certain way and to receive the as certain reward or punishment, just as he [Christmas] could depend on the man to react in a certain way to his own certain doings and misdoings” (LIA 168).  For instance, when the boy fails to learn his religious lesson, he incurs a severe beating from his father.  The young Christmas accepts and complies with this punishment since this is the determined consequence of his failure.  This action/reaction dynamic forms a seal or bond between the father and son that the mother cannot penetrate.  When she attempts to interrupt an impending beating by calling out “Pa,” both men completely ignore her.  The novel registers their mutual complicity and disregard for Mrs. McEachern as it reads, “Neither of them so much as looked at her.  They might not have heard, she might not have spoken, at all” (LIA 148).  Furthermore, the way that the punishment is accepted and doled out without emotion indicates the purely rational grounds on which they interact.  This interaction resembles the matter-of-fact way that Joe Christmas performs his work and relates with others at the mill.  He arrives on time, speaks little, and works steadily—i.e. with a “brooding and savage steadiness” (LIA 39)—in exchange for a definite amount of pay.  The only time he does speak is to ask Byron Bunch how much the mill compensates for overtime (LIA 35).  Christmas performs the action (work) in order to exact a specific reaction (pay).

In addition to its rational nature, the relationship between McEachern and Joe Christmas is largely physical.  Because the father approaches the boy on a physical level, he does not engage the mental process that would promote conscientiousness and respect for the boy.  Such a process would likely invite temperance on the part of the father, the physically stronger party.  Instead, he exercises extreme dominance over the boy simply because he is physically superior and hence can do so.  And, Joe accepts his punishment knowing that he is the weaker party.  This arrangement provides a stable relationship framework between the man and boy.  It is not until the child ages and presumably presents a stronger physical challenge to his father that McEachern curbs his physical abuse.  This occurs when McEachern discovers that Christmas sold his cow and lied about it.  His father strikes him twice but stops when the son warns, “Don’t you hit me again” (LIA 165).

While his father’s purely physical behavior offers a constant set of expectations for the boy, his mother’s affection introduces an element of emotion that the boy reviles.  The novel contrasts his feelings towards his parents in this way: “It was not the hard work which he hated, nor the punishment and injustice…He expected no less, and so he was neither outraged nor surprised.  It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men” (LIA 168-169).  Christmas believes that the emotional element that the woman brings to interpersonal relations constitutes an added complication that muddies the interaction.  He claims that the woman adds a “faint taint of evil about the most trivial and innocent actions” (LIA 168).  The boy despises the emotional kindness that his adopted mother shows him.  He illustrates this by dumping out the tray of food she covertly offers him.  Accepting the food without McEachern’s knowledge would have bound Christmas to a contract of secrecy and trust with the mother.  Mrs. McEachern already forces him into such an agreement when she shows him her secret monetary savings hidden in the attic.  Forced to maintain this secret, the boy finds himself mentally subject to his mother’s power and dominance since divulging the secret would subject himself and his mother to the father’s wrath.  Also, the woman’s show of compassion constitutes another form of subjection in the way it coerces a sense of indebtedness on the recipient’s part.  This element of power, woven into the act of compassion, is likely part of what causes Christmas to reject Bunch’s offer of food stating, “I aint hungry.  Keep your muck” (LIA 35).  Accepting the food would demand an emotional bond—however slight—between the men thereby tainting and introducing a power dynamic into Joe’s straightforward and rational relationship with Bunch and his workplace.

Through his relationship with his parents, the novel reveals that Joe Christmas prefers physical and rational over mental and emotional forms of interaction.  Such relationship styles are turn up in his interactions with other characters throughout the novel.  For example, like his relationship with his mother, Joe Christmas is disturbed by Miss Burden’s show of compassion when she starts “praying over” him (LIA 106).  Instead, similar to his relationship with his father, he seems most comfortable maintaining a physical, sexual relationship with her in which he can “waken her with his hard brutal hand and sometimes take her as hard and as brutally before she was good awake” (LIA 106).

In his nobel awarded novel Light in August, William Faulkner interweaves characters’ conflicts into intricate parallel plots and sub-plots. Lena Grove’s fist journey in search of her alleged Lucas Burch and her complete unawareness of his treachery and denial to recognize his untrustworthiness sets the tone for Hightower’s dilemma and Joe Christmas’s anger outburst. It is through Jefferson’s ‘rumor cycle’ that Faulkner develops his different yet similar characters’ conflicts and their struggle through unawareness, denial and acceptance.

Lena’s justification of Lucas Burch’s absence reflects her willing unawareness of her situation,  her dialogue with Mrs.Armstid highlights her blinded views of Lucas Burch ” Like as not, he already sent me the word and it got lost on the way.”(p.19) and “But me and Lucas do not need no word promises between us.”(p.20) She even gives him credit for leaving her because “Lucas always did like excitement.He never did like to live quiet. That’s why it never suited him back at Doane’s Mill. Why he-we decided to make a change: for money and excitement.”(p.25)  Faulkner emphasizes this state of unawareness with his repetition of ” she is not listening….she is not thinking”(p.260). The “he-we decided” sums it all.

The murmuring gossip around Lena’s pregnancy and her gullible search for the ‘trustworthy’ Lucas Burch is but a preparation to the’ barbershop mentality’ we will face in Jefferson. Through the name switch between Burch and Bunch, Faulkner introduces the Jefferson community, a community which lives on cycles of rumors where each member performs his expected role in the cycle till the rumor rests and settles to an accepted end. The symbolic significance of names is clear and builds up the knots that are intermingled between the different characters. Joe Christmas’s name ties up with his search of his true identity. “He was left on the doorstep here on Christmas eve will be five years this two weeks.”(p.142) ” Christmas. A heathenish name. Scrilege. I will change that.”(p.144) “My name ain’t McEachern. My name is Christmas. There was no need to bother about that yet. There was plenty of time.”(p.145) It seems that in Chapter 6 & 7, Christams had ample of time and reasons to prove that he was Christmas and not  McEachern. It was a pleasing moment to have Faulkner present Mrs. McEachern as the only one who could reach out to Christmas and attempt to break this detaching cycle.” It is she who trusted him, who insisted on trusting him as she insisted on his eating: by conspiracy, in secret, making a secret of the very fact which the act of trusting was supposed to exemplify.”(p.168)

However, Hightower’s reaction to his wife’s scandal exemplifies the willing unawareness, denial and acceptance. ” Soon they didn’t even see the minister’s wife on the street anymore. And he still acting like there was nothing wrong.”(p.62)  Same as Lena, he tried to justify his wife’s absence ” he would tell that she had gone to visit her people downstate somewhere.”(p.63) Then, with his wife’s church outbreak and her constant blasphemy and tragic death, his denial felt out of place. ” They said he was not watching his congregation leaving; he was not looking at anything.”(p.68). Finally, Hightower was left to live in his high tower when Jefferson’s rumor cycle reached its final destination ” As though the entire affair had been a lot of people performing a play and that now and at last they had all played out their parts which had been alloted to them and now they could live quietly with one another.”(p.73) I wonder how the Jefferson community would have ended their Hightower rumor cycle, had he agreed on leaving the town? Would they have still accepted his story and his wife’s as part of Jefferson’s life? or Would it have been easier to cast them as outsiders and continue the act with the Utopia facade projected in everyone’s mind?

Race relations in Jefferson are toxic to sat the least. While Brown is being interrogated it’s clear to the reader that there is more to the story than Brown lets on. He is talking faster and faster and is really trying to implicate Christmas. As soon as Brown is in a bind he pulls out his secret weapon, Christmas’ racial identity. Even though Brown appears to be guilty, the marshal says, “You better be careful what you are saying if it is a white man you are talking about, I don’t care if he is a murderer or not” (LIA, 98). This moment highlights the severity of the race relations in Jefferson. Even though Christmas is being accused of murder, accusing him of being black is just (if not more severe) than being accused of being a murderer. Jefferson’s racial divide separates and alienates black townspeople as well as people that don’t prescribe to the town’s views (Hightower, Burden, Christmas, Lena).
Focusing on the alienation I was drawn to Joanna Burden. She was elusive in the first couple chapters. Everything we know about Burden is through word of mouth. As the reader, I felt like one of the gossiping town members about what Burden does in that house all alone. Joanna Burden like her name is a Burden to the town of Jefferson. Her identity as a Northerner (even though she has lived in the town her whole life) and her relationship with black townspeople isolates her and puts her in this ostracized part of town.

Byron tells the Lena Burden’s story, about her family’s involvement with the Reconstruction and her relationship to African Americans in the town. He ends with, “Folks says she claims that niggers are the same as white folks. That’s why folks don’t never go out there. Except one” (LIA, 53). Burden is physically isolated, by living in a house outside of town. She is also isolated from other people in town. No one goes to visit her or speaks to her accept the two misfits in Jefferson, Christmas, and Brown. The reader sees the extent of the isolation after the fire, it is said that Burden was hurt in the fire multiple times. But, it isn’t until Byron is telling his account that the reader finds out that she was a little more than hurt. The ostracization of Burden pushes the town to not burden themselves with what happened to her. She is more of a mythological creature or an idea than an actual person in these early chapters. She is considered a thing rather than a human. She is in the distant background of the minds of the townspeople.

When they find her body in the house Faulkner writes, “So he run back into the house and up the stairs again and into the room and jerked a cover off the bed and rolled her onto it and caught up the corners and swung it onto his back like a sack of meal and carried it out of the house and laid it down under a tree” (LIA, 92). Burden in one sentence is reduced to an ‘it’. She is rolled up into a blanket and her ‘self’ is reduced to a sack of meal. She is metaphorical ‘meal’ for the town. The town salivates and gorges on the gossip and reputation of Joanna Burden.

Ultimately, Burden’s borders between the African American sphere as well as the white sphere in this novel. She cannot successfully habitate both spheres. She is an object in both of them. She is an object of gossip and obsession in the white sphere and an object of obsession and wealth in the African American sphere (specifically with Christmas).

In the novel, Light in August, Faulkner questions why we help others. I think other characters see something in Lena they neither know nor understand, but nonetheless admire it anyway. Because they do not understand her, their words and thoughts evoke pity, they think her looking for the man who is the father of her unborn child is a useless, ridiculous idea, because they think he left her by choice. In spite of this, their actions are to help her, as if they disapprove of what she is doing, think it a hopeless cause, but her unusual unflagging determination still draws them to her. She repeats over and over how “‘Folks have been kind. They have been right kind”’ (12). She does not ask for help, and I do not think she expects it from everyone, but neither is she surprised when people do. When she encounters Armstid as he is driving his wagon, it is without hesitation that he stops the wagon to let her get on,
“And no one could have known that he had ever looked at her either as, without any semblance of progress in either of them, they draw slowly together as the wagon crawls terrifically along toward her in its slow palpable aura of somnolence and red dust in which the steady feet of the mules move dreamlike and punctuate by the sparse jingle of harness and the limber bobbing of jackrabbit ears, the mules neither asleep nor awake as he halts them” (11).
When he learns she is trying to get to Jefferson, he insists she sleep at his house for the night. Faulkner has him think something interesting on this ride home, about how once a woman gets in “trouble” like Lena, it is expected that all men help her since it was a man’s fault for getting her into said trouble in the first place, “Her own self one of the first ones to cut the ground from under a sister woman, she’ll walk the public country herself without shame because she knows that folks, menfolks, will take care of her” (14).  It seems like everyone will help, but women do not feel the emotional pity for Lena the same way men might.  It is an interesting comparison between the genders in seeing how or why they help Lena.
It makes me wonder what, if anything, Faulkner is trying to say about human nature and relationships. The characters in the book so far do not seem particularly friendly or generous, with a few exceptions, but they almost all help Lena in one way or another, without really thinking about it. Or maybe they are thinking about it, are aware of their inward desire to help her, do not like this awareness, but cannot help but help her anyway. When Armstid brings Lena to his house and his wife Martha, he is aware that she will help Lena without question, but not happily, “I reckon I do know what Martha’s going to say. I reckon womenfolks are likely to be good without being very kind” (12). And Martha does help. Not only does she host Lena for the night, she gives her all the money she has from selling eggs, money that she was probably saving for a long time. But she refuses to say goodbye to Lena the next day, as if she is embarrassed for helping her, or, angry with herself for helping.
Maybe what they admire is her simple unwillingness to be the damsel in distress. Women in similar situations to Lena’s, unmarried pregnant women, most of the time accept that the man will not be coming back for them, they accept this as a fact they cannot do anything about, and so they do nothing. Lena is different. Whether or not she believes what she tells people about how sure she is Lucas would come back for her, she does not just accept his leaving her to a fate of unwed mothership. It is unclear so far if Faulkner is praising humanity or criticizing it, so I am interested in how Lena’s journey will end.

In his essay, A Certain Slant of Light: Teaching Light in August Through Hightower’s Epiphany, Charles Baker makes a compelling case for reading Gail Hightower as a character who registers “Faulkner’s deep concern for the South and the collective suffering of its people” (CB). Baker presents this argument in order to supplement what he believes to be critics warranted, yet overdrawn fascination with Joe Christmas (“because he represents the problematic and touchy issue of racism”). This supplementation involves a reading of Hightower as “Faulkner’s own prescription for the woes of his region” (CB). While Baker makes a compelling case for casting light on Hightower as a figure of the unenlightened present, I think it is possible, and perhaps more interesting, to read Hightower’s unconscious present with the “touchy issue of racism” Joe Christmas figures in Light in August. 

While Hightower appears to register as the stranger figure upon his arrival in Jefferson, his manic glorification of the city’s past actually legitimizes his intimacy with both the place itself and its townspeople. Hightower’s obsession with his grandfather’s past as a Confederate cavalryman in Jefferson is ideologically quilted into the city’s present in such a way that it creates an ideological vacuum for the reproduction of violent racism.

It appears that Hightower’s unconventionality becomes the sticking point for the townspeople of Jefferson; both his relationship with his wife and his dogmatic approach to preaching operate antithetically to their oblique moral code. Yet even after he has been excommunicated and socially cast aside, the townspeople continue to use Hightower as a moral crutch in order to obfuscate the town’s racism. For example, their racial unconscious manifests in their obsession with the black female cook who continues to live with Hightower. Imagined rumors swirl about the “unnatural” relationship between Hightower and the cook, and she eventually quits after being violently threatened by the townspeople. Following her departure, Hightower hires a black male cook. Perhaps the thinking here being that a male cook won’t inspire the same rumors and response among the people of Jefferson. However, the K.K.K. smash a brick through Hightower’s window and beat the male cook unconscious.

While Hightower’s rhetoric functions as a manic deliverance or illumination of the past, the townspeople’s inability to hear this past simply makes him a repository for the racist moral agenda of the present. This resonates with Walter Benjamin’s idea that “for every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably (WB). In this sense, Hightower gestures the violent racism of the past that risks evaporating in the racial unconscious of Jefferson present.

Works Cited:

Charles Baker, A Certain Slant of Light: Teaching Light in August Through Hightower’s Epiphany

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History 

There is a series of occurrences early on in Faulkner’s Light in August where a character, or group of characters, share perceptions (and misperceptions) of other characters in telling ways. Sometimes these opinions are shared overtly between one another, and sometimes they are kept inside a character’s head; always, however, the perceptions are repeated, and offer insight into formations of character. The first notable instance is when Lena hitches a ride to Jefferson with the group of overall-ed men: they begin to talk amongst themselves and make asumptions about Lena and her situation. Faulkner writes, “The squatting men along the wall look at her still and placid face and they think as Armstid thought and as Varner thinks: that she is thinking of a scoundrel who deserted her in trouble and whom they believe that she will never see again… ‘Or maybe it’s about that Sloane’s or Bone’s Mill she is thinking,’ Varner thinks” (26). Here, we gain insight into Varner’s, and the other men’s, thoughts about Lena’s presumed upsettedness: they assume she is thinking ill of the father of her unborn child, of the locations in which he might be, and otherwise ruminating on her present circumstances. What is interesting to me in this moment is the pointed switch once we learn what Lena is actually thinking about, at this time. Faulkner clarifies that, rather, “She is not thinking about this at all. She is thinking about the coins knotted in the bundle beneath her hands. She is remembering breakfast, thinking how she can enter the store this moment and buy cheese and crackers and even sardines if she likes” (26). In this moment we gain great insight into Lena’s even-keeled character and strong will, as she is (surprisingly, to the men) not stressing about her impending future or even that she has been traveling alone for so long while being far along in her pregnancy. Instead, she seems to be deeply present and engaging in the tangibility of what is in her hands, what she recently ate, and what she might purchase soon, now that she has the means to do so thanks to Martha Armstid. Faulkner continues, clarifying: “So she seems to muse upon the mounting road while the slowspitting and squatting men watch her covertly, believing that she is thinking about the man and the approaching crisis, when in reality she is waging a mild battle with that providential caution of the old earth of and with and by which she lives” (26-27). I love the juxtaposition of what is assumed she would be feeling, and what her real feelings are. Her presence on this journey clearly inspires a multitude of opinions from those she encounters, ranging from shock, concern, disapproval, and surely many more, and I find that in these moments, Faulkner elucidates a lighthearted quality of Lena that challenges the misperceptions that people have of her and of her presumed struggles.

Another, quicker instance where Lena flips perceptions of her feelings is when she first meets Byron at the mill, and when he begins to describe a person who she is slowly realizing is potentially Lucas Burch, whom she seeks. Faulkner writes, “She continues to watch him with that expression not so much concerned for the future as suspicious of the now” (51). Like the previous passage, here we see a shift from the future to the present: Lena does not get caught up in the uncertainty and anxiety surrounding her future, but rather, stays extremely present. Lena cautiously considers the situation at hand with quiet care, interprets Byron’s words and descriptions, and tries to make meaning of what this means for her, moving forward. We learn that Lena prefers to stay practically rooted in the present moment instead of being consumed by worries of an uncertain future. 

Chapter five of the LIA provides the reader with the first moment of introspective access to Christmas, a character, up to this point, that has remained a prominent yet elusive agent in the narrative, occupying an ominous if romantic exterior role. The resulting scenes that unfold are rich in recurring images, tropes, and metaphors. Within in a few pages the character of Christmas is affiliated with so much associative imagery, that it almost feels like a literary bombardment: an explosion of linguistic possibility. It is perhaps no coincidence that such language erupts from Christmas directly following the moment the narrative disrupts his hereto before stable racial identity. Before Brown’s accusation (98) Christmas was not just passing within the fictionalized world on the pages, but he was also passing with the reader. There had been no overt evidence previous to suggest otherwise, and in an instant, a stable signifier is completely rendered unintelligible within the diametrically oppositional discursive codes Faulkner’s fictional world presents to us in the form of race.

“He contrived somehow to look more lonely than a lone telephone pole in the middle of a desert. In the wide, empty, shadowbrooded street he looked like a  phantom, a spirit, strayed out of its own world, and lost” (114).

Faulkner’s choice of the telephone pole to symbolize alienation is striking here. The subtext describes a nonoperational message system, a device with the potential to transmit messages, but with no other equipment, or indeed civilization, to transmit or communicate. Once out of its appropriate context (a desert, not a society), the telephone pole becomes a pointless thing. It is like a “phantom, a spirit, strayed out of its own world, and lost,” something that has lapsed outside of its appropriate space or system (phantoms and spirits are by definition things that have strayed from their appropriate domain).

In this way, the question of Christmas’ race opens up not just a question of identity and its stability within social discourse, but also the very stability of language itself. The moment that Brown drunkenly stumbles into the cabin (102) and proclaims him a “damn niggerblood” (103), it is as if something is punctured, ruptured, and begins to erupt with a myriad of different codes. At this point, Christmas’ identity, his signifier, begins to disseminate. He immediately attempts to repress the rupture, the forceful gesture of silencing Brown with violence (most tellingly holding his hand over Brown’s mouth), but it is inevitably a feeble attempt. Shortly after, when quiet has resumed in the cabin, an entire array of discursive fields begin to emerge for Christmas that were before contained.

Then it seemed to him, sitting on the cot in the dark room, that he was hearing a myriad of sounds of no greater volume- voices, murmurs, whispers: of trees, darkness, earth; people: his own voice; other voices evocative of names and times and places- which he had been conscious of all his life without knowing it, which were his like, thinking “God perhaps and me not knowing that too” He could see it like a printed sentence, fullborn and already dead “God loves me too” like the faded and weather letters on a last year’s billboard “God loves me too” (105)

Sounds, voices, and murmurs, the initiators of discourse speak and unleash otherwise repressed discourses from within Christmas “which he had been conscious of all of his life without knowing it.” They originate from seemingly everywhere, “trees, darkness, earth; people: his own voice,” a “myriad” of signs transmitting an over-abundance of ambiguous meaning. Christmas reacts to this dissemination by attempting to reincorporate himself into the discursive system that was ruptured. He muses, “God loves me too,” projecting a possible space for himself, a potential candidate for God’s affirmation. However, the possibility of return is left hanging in ambiguity, like a “printed sentence, fullborn and already dead,” it seems as if he were to be re-inscribed into the previous discursive system, his existence would be zombified, something both dead and alive, but ultimately, an aberration capable only of passing and not belonging to a set code of direct meaning. Put more simply, he can be neither white for whites, nor black blacks; he cannot “fit” into the system.

This problem is further affiliated with language, as Christmas attempts to force a cohesive narrative in the process of his own reading.

He had previously read but one story; he began the second one, reading the magazine straight through as though it were a novel. (111)

Removed from the immediate chronological context of the narrative, the first part of the quotation can be read to connote that it’s not just “one story” in the magazine that Christmas has read, but that he also has only been reading one story of his life. Before this moment, he had perhaps only ascribed to one potential story (discourse) for himself. As he reads further, the text seems to suggest that he is attempting to combine an otherwise disparate array of discourses into a unitary whole, reading a magazine, which is a series of articles with no necessary direct relation, as “though it were a novel.”

Then he read again. He turned the pages in steady progression, though now and then he would seem to linger upon one page, one line, perhaps one word. He would not move, apparently arrested and held immobile by a single word which had perhaps not impacted, his whole being suspended by the single trivial combinations of letters (112).

Here, Christmas shuts down, and is immobilized by the inability to make the text before him mean something (signify) . He seems to reduce ad absurdum from container (magazine), to page, to line, to word, reducing the components of language to their most atomistic unit, attempting to render significance from words that no longer signify for him, “his whole being suspended by the single trivial combinations of letters.”

The overall picture Faulkner presents to the reader in this sequence of events is of a world of language gone awry. Words seem to have lost their meaning for Christmas. He can no longer fit himself back into the story he himself was telling. His own dilemma, points to a greater complexity intrinsic to language.  It cannot be ordered into a singular all encompassing code. There will always be a “dangling” signifier, a part that doesn’t fit into the system and therefore ruptures the imposed logic of that system. Hence the great irony of Christmas name, a day celebrating the birth of Christ, the word of god made real into flesh.