and with signs & wonders: considering art(ifacts) in LIA

Posted on by
1

Signs abound in Light in August—whether man-made, imagined, or metaphorical—and frequently present a preferred way of seeing within the specific perspectives of particular characters. These signs may be natural, as the fire, or they may be specifically or metaphorically generated by the characters themselves, but not all sights appear to be created equal. What and how these characters see the world highlights the subsequent acts of obfuscation that also take place, and the limitations of their sight: of which sight to choose to see and how to interpret it.

The novel itself, in its opening line, situates us within a scene of spectatorship with Lena, engaged in the act of “sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her” (3). This act of spectatorship opens for the narrative exploration of her journey through time and distance, which is then further presented through an image of artistic creation. Lena’s progression is remembered through her trips in “identical and anonymous and deliberate wagons” which stand as “creakwheeled and limpeared avatars, like something moving forever and without progress across an urn” (7). Her journey is not imagined as a progression, but rather as a ceaseless circular motion, one driven by similar icons—that of the wagons—that generates an artifact in its very movement. (As an aside, the etymology of avatar literally refers to a movement of descent, which seems in contradiction with the rising motion of the approaching wagon and fits in with the novel’s notion of the presence of competing perspectives/masks.) However, her fixation on this journey comes at the cost of visualizing and interpreting a competing visual sign: that of the burning of the Burden home.

In its first representation, the image of the fire is described in vivid detail amid the landscape of foliage around it: “Following his pointing whip, she sees two columns of smoke: the one the heavy density of burning coal above a tall stack, the other a tall yellow column standing apparently from among a clump of trees some distance beyond the town. ‘That’s a house burning,’ the driver says. ‘See?’” (30) However, despite the verbal cue and the driver’s physical gesturing towards the image, the sign does not stick in her recollection; her response is instead directed on the state of the progression of her journey. While the fire is, at this point, not significant for Lena, it proves to be significant for the residents in the town, for whom it appears “straight as a monument” (49). The choice to label it a “monument” seems to be a sign in itself: a monument is a physical (and often artistically rendered) structure of dedication or remembrance. Lena’s decision to prioritize the sight of her own “artifact,” that of her journey, over the sight of the fire indicates that the interpretation of signs then is not fixed, but one dependent on vantage point.

One striking example of this is the Rev. Hightower, who has his own “monument,” one that is self-constructed and subsequently ignored. It is “three feet long and eighteen inches high—a neat oblong presenting its face to who passes and its back to him” (58). The sign here is described as both visible and hidden, dependent on the particular audience; it is Hightower to whom the sign shows “its back,” while all others are able to see its face. After the description of the sign, the reader is given a description of process; the sign was “made… with hammer and saw, neatly, and he painted the legend which it bears,” as well as its being “by himself lettered, with bits of broken glass contrived cunningly into the paint, so that at night…the letters glittered” (58). Hightower, despite his title as Reverend, is largely defined by artistic tasks: the construction and artistry of the sign, as well as the tasks that he lists on the sign itself—“Art Lessons”, “Handpainted Xmas & Anniversary Cards”, “Photographs Developed”, the creation of physical artistic objects (58). However, despite his seemingly close relationship to the sign, which stands as his “monument” in terms of its construction, he remains closed off as to what it signifies. It “is even less to him than it is to the town; he is no longer conscious of it as a sign, a message” (60). Like Lena, he is also defined by a kind of selective seeing: despite the sign’s presence as an advertisement for his services, it operates instead as a reminder of just how much his status has fallen (since the incident involving his wife) for much of the town, who passes it without much notice. Additionally, there is a dual racial implication present in the inclusion of the act of developing photographs amid his talents given both his locational proximity and supposed intimacy with “that negro woman in the house”, and the significance of photo development to the novel’s handling of race overall; technically speaking, developing a photo involves generating an image from a negative through a somewhat inverse rendering of color where dark areas are produced as white, and white areas are produced as dark on the film (71).

The image of developing film is one of especial importance for Joe Christmas, who experiences a kind of transcendent moment of racial rewriting through a metaphor of film development. As he is exposed to the bright lights of a car, “[h]e watched his body grow white out of the darkness like a Kodak print emerging from the liquid” (108). The scene appears as an amalgam of product and process: Christmas’ body is “developed,” transforming from one color to the other, rendered through the metaphor of a technological process—Kodak, notably, has historically been significant because of its bias towards fair/white skin in balancing the color of its film stock as well—but the language also reinforces the status of his body as an artifact/object for the reader, who is to view it, “read” it, analyze it.

Artistic and critical distance remains between an artistic work and its viewer, and the same holds true for the characters in Light in August. As simultaneous viewers and creators, they necessarily privilege particular views—whether of especial focus or disregard—as they navigate through the potential sights and visions of Jefferson, which seems to bear particular weight against how they intend to view or navigate the world.

Wild Child – Light in August Response 1

Posted on by
1

What struck me most while reading Light in August, was how different and more modern it was from the works we have read so far. While reading I saw that the relationships between characters were way more developed, and that the notion of sex was more explicit in this novel than the others. The novel starts off with Lena, a pregnant, unmarried girl, in search for the man who slept with her and then filled her head with lies and false promises. But Faulkner debunks the romantic, chaste idea of sex- making it the the cause of all the characters problems. The first and most obvious is Lena- her relationship with “Lucas Burch” has led her to be casted out of her home and of a future, Armstid noting “the woman had gone now, slowly, with her swelling and unmistakable burden”(9). The burden for Lena is not just the physical one, but the emotional and societal burden that she now has to deal with. This is seen again in Joe Christmas, who caught the dietician in his orphanage having sex in her office. I don’t want to get too Freudian about it, but this first introduction to sex shaped Joe, and could be the reason for his aggressive attitude towards sex later on. He feels the need to exert his power over women, in attempt to make up for the woman who ruined his life. Even his first actual sexual experience was aggressive and has a violent tone to it, “she let herself be half carried, half dragged among the growing plants, the furrows, and into the woods, the trees”(190). Joe’s first real “relationship” was actually a contrived situation, and a money making scheme for Bobbie. There was no love in it- and the romance and infatuation Joe had at the start was completely taken away. In his relationship with Bobbie, we got to see these intimate moments, instead of just being placed in the future wondering why these characters are the way they are. In The Sound and the Fury, Caddy who wasn’t given a narrative, and her relationship with a man was the foundation for the downfall of the family- yet the reader is never given a direct glimpse into how that relationship developed. The relationship and the way that sex is written about in this novel much more explicit that I thought I would see in a Faulkner work. Joe having a relationship with Miss Burden (ha. another burden), is clearly shown, and written in clarity, “the doors were never locked, and it used to be that at whatever hour between dusk and dawn that desire took him, he would enter the house and go to her bedroom and take his sure way through the darkness to her bed”(106). With all the mistaken identities and murder, the first 8 chapters of Light in August read more to me like a Shakespeare play than the Faulkner works we have read so far.

Jefferson: a town of “gaunt” faces (Light in August Ch. 1 – 7)

Posted on by
1

Gaunt – adjective

  1. (of a person) lean and haggard, especially because of suffering, hunger, or age.

In the first third of Light in August, readers are introduced to characters with faces that are insufferable, frozen, tight, grave, and perhaps the most recurring descriptor of them all, gaunt (32, 63, 69, 79, 89). Naturally, this leads me to raise a question with regard to the denizens of the novel’s hub: why the long faces?

As things would appear, there’s a lot more to Jefferson and its inhabitants than meets the untrained eye.

One of the most resonant themes in the novel presents itself in the Jeffersonian’s association of blackness with heathens. Indeed, the townsfolk cause a dramatic scene on minister Hightower’s premises on the notion “that he had that negro woman in the house alone with him all day” (71) blaming her for the suicide of his wife while the matron of the white orphanage expresses shocked disbelief at the knowledge that they’d been housing a black orphan and urgency to send him away. Even that very same orphan, Joseph Christmas, suggests the undoing of his foster father would be the knowledge that “he has nursed a nigger beneath his own roof” (169) and he is hunted after for the death of Mrs. Burden simply on the basis that “he’s got nigger blood in him” (98).

Black characters in the novel are persecuted when they are found out and as a result, bystanders are rendered sullen and droopy-faced as they are inevitably entangled in the society’s racist ideology just as German civilians during a Naziist regime.

Perhaps the most revealing character to examine for this phenomenon of widespread gauntness is Joseph Christmas. We are introduced to the character when he first steps on the scene in Jefferson’s mill community in raggedy clothes and upon closer examination, Byron describes that, “his face was gaunt, the flesh a level dead parchment color” (34).

When thinking about where Joseph’s gauntness comes from, it’s important to remember that the closest he had to any sort of tender loving figure was Alice who was torn away from him at a tender age of three. While Mrs. McEachern tries to take on that substitutive role as a nurturing foster mother, Joseph mentally and physically cannot bring himself to accept her caring even making a display of flipping her tray of food over and eating the scraps after she departs the room (155).

When I think of the type of gaunt face that Joseph bears, I think of a weathered face that has suffered lack of love and excessive physical labor, so much so that it even stands apart from the weathered faces of millworkers. Minister HIghtower is also described as having a long face and oddly enough “gaunt shoulders” (79) but when I think what weighs down his features, I think moreso about how he suffers the mental burden of painful knowledge such as that of his wife’s death or his dead grandfather. This sense of burden carries over when he begins thinking about how Lena, the one person who comes bursting on the scene without a trouble to boot, will fare amidst the troubled faces in the small world of Jefferson.

I do want to close on some questions that stood out to me. When the town (Jefferson) recounts the tale of Hightower refusing to evacuate town and the townsfolk lobbing accusations at him, the passage reads: “that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind” (71). What words came to your mind when you read that section? What sentiment do you think passes from person to person when a tragedy like the suicide of his wife occurs? Can you connect this moment to the one where Christmas is chased down for murdering Burden?

summary post on Yoknapedia entries

Posted on by
Reply

I wanted to give a quick sense of how we’re doing collectively with the encyclopedia entries. Generally I’m very pleased, but there are a few persistent issues, and a few things I’d like to remind you about. So here goes:

  • make sure the entry hasn’t been done already! a couple students have duplicated entries, so be sure to check before you write to make sure the coast is clear.
  • analyze, don’t summarize: as we move beyond the “short” length, it’s important to avoid summary of characters and plot. Treat this space like any other literary critical outlet in this sense: assume the audience knows the basics and spend your energies on developing aspects of the text that would not be clear to the casual reader.
  • link and illustrate when possible: link to as many other entries as are appropriate, and feel free to find open-access images to illustrate your entry. Good sources include wikipedia (which has many creative commons-licensed images) and Flickr (again, check licenses before posting).
  • tag: most of you are adding tags, but at a minimum be sure to add short/medium/long and the title of the text with the proper shorthand (TSAF/LIA/AA!/and so on). U is traditional for THE UNVANQUISHED, but I think we should write that one out, since “U” in tagging brings up every single word with U in it, which is a pain to deal with.
  • follow formatting guidelines: I’ve given extensive guidelines on the GUIDE TO ENTRIES page, so please follow them so we have a uniform format. Katie’s entry on Jimson Weed is a great example: well formatted and inclusion of nice image as well.

All of the entries are good, but I wanted to call attention to a few that are especially thought-provoking and serve as good examples of writing at the “medium” entry length. Check out Cara’s Luster, Kristy’s Great Locomotive Chase, and Stephen’s Ringo, among others.

Have a great weekend and see you Thursday.

summary post on THE UNVANQUISHED

Posted on by
Reply

I wanted to give a quick tour through several excellent posts on  The Unvanquished from this week and give some broad-strokes comments on the text. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the main arc of the text moves from the chaos of the Civil War–specifically the moment after the fall of Vicksburg, MS when the war “came home” to northern Mississippi–to the rapid rollback of the Reconstruction in the aftermath of the war. One of the text’s most fascinating aspects is that this story can’t be stabilized by using the usual metanarratives of tragedy or comedy. The Rebels are neither victorious nor defeated (the title expresses this ambivalence); the Sartorises are neither preserved nor extinguished (John will never be The Sartoris in the eyes of many, does not achieve vengeance, but neither is he killed or exposed as a coward); there is no love match to guarantee the future (Drusilla flees, leaving Bayard at the altar, as it were); the status of the African American ex-slaves is left markedly uncertain (they are largely assimilated to a sentimental “loyal” role, preserving white supremacy against the “Yankees” but a figure like Ringo unsettles any simple equation between blackness and subservience). I’m fascinated by these loose ends and ironies, especially in light of the way Faulkner returns to these themes in a more experimental and daring way in AA! and GDM (more on that later, of course). For those interested in reading more of the historical background of this moment, check out this excellent encyclopedic piece on the destruction of Southern cities in the Civil War.

More locally, I was interested to read your takes on the texts. If you haven’t, read Sal’s riffs on size in the text, and especially regarding John Sartoris. Also check out Katie’s excellent analysis of the figure of the family silver in the text: she helps us to see a certain materialist bent in Faulkner’s work that thinks carefully about the contradictions that pertain between cash value and other forms of value. Stephen gives a great reading of the figure of the locomotive in the text, with a special emphasis on how locomotion appears to Bayard and Ringo, how ideas of modernization relate to racial antagonisms. Finally, see Melanie’s work on dreams and dreaming in the text: from Granny to Ringo to Bayard to John to Drusilla to Loosh, nearly every major character expresses his/her imagination of the War, a traumatic event that defies cognition or representation, through dreams in one way or another.

Father Wasn’t Big and Why it Doesn’t Matter.

Posted on by
2

In “Ambuscade,” Faulkner presents us with a narrator named Bayard reflecting back on a time during the Civil War. The narrator describes how things seemed to his twelve-year old self. Readers don’t yet know anything about the narrator save for what he describes about being twelve. The older Bayard looking back on his experience complicates the accuracy of the retelling, but inserts commentary and confusion where necessary. Readers are repeatedly told through an array of comparisons that Bayard’s father was not a big man. His physical stature is measured by horse, sabre, steps, and through the lens of being twelve. But for each of these, a contradiction looms: “He was not big; it was just the things he did, that we knew he was doing, had been doing in Virginia and Tennessee, that made him seem big to us” (9). Why would Bayard make this clarification? Is this an attempt at condemning the Confederacy? Young boys look up to soldiers (through socialization or instinctual admiration, I can’t say). Bayard is saying that the things his father was doing were big and admirable to a child. But if we assume that the narrator has matured and grown before looking back on this moment, then it might be possible to claim that physically diminishing the memory of his father is a way of conflating and then deflating the confederacy and father. A problem with this reading is that the text doesn’t offer justification for Bayard to dis his own father. If anything the descriptions in “Ambuscade” point to a deep admiration of Father and a longing to appear big in spite of a small stature: “That was it: not that Father worked faster and harder than anyone else, even though you do look bigger (to twelve at least, to me and Ringo at twelve, at least) standing still and saying, ‘Do this or that’ ” (12). The order of comments in each quote about size might inform us as to Bayard’s intentions. In the two above, he opens with a comment about Father not being big and offers the appropriate perspective to negate it immediately after. It happens again when talking about Father’s voice: “he cried, not loud yet stentorian: ‘Trot! Canter! Charge!’ ” (13). While the 2017 reader from NY in me wants to see a rejection of slavery in every text about the Civil War I read, I have to be conscious about what I bring to the text. The evidence isn’t there to definitively support this reading. What we have instead is a boy who respects his father for his masculinity and gravitas in spite of his size (which doesn’t really matter as Bayard tells us with each correction)

Luster in Control

Posted on by
Reply

Jason tries and tries to maintain order in the closing scene of the novel. But his methods only promote disorder. He comes into this scene hot after being robbed and humiliated by his niece. Jason’s rage caused by Quentin’s theft and the apathy of the police finds an outlet when he feels that Benjy and Luster are somehow injuring the Compson name in the public square. He sees Luster and Benjy causing a commotion in the town square and promptly berates them. He yells at them and strikes both of them in the face and head. The only one who responds positively to this violence is the horse, but Benjy continues to bellow and there is no indication from Luster that he won’t act impetuously in the future.

Benjy is one of maybe two or three characters who can sense order. He bellows when the status quo of his world is disturbed. In the closing lines, readers learn that Benjy needs to experience a carriage ride in a certain way or he will scream. Dilsey knows this, Queenie knows this (and would have marched along if Luster didn’t hit her with the switch), Jason knows this. Luster must know this, too. This “man, aged 14…was not only capable of the complete care  and security” of Benjy, “but could keep him entertained” (343). This note from the appendix tells us that when Luster seemingly acts impetuously and/or provokes Benjy, he actually has a deeper understanding of the man entrusted to his care than the readers. Faulkner transcribes an array of sounds and the emotions they connote as mere groans, bellows, and hush-Benjys. The maturity and role of entertainer he grants Luster begs readers to reconsider moments in the text where it seemed like Luster was teasing and provoking Benjy. If that’s the case, then we can trust Luster to have fun with Benjy and calm him down. The momentary excitement was caused by Benjy experiencing the ride around the square backwards, but it’s probably safe to assume the ride home wouldn’t vary that much and would give him time to calm down.

Jason’s rage and demands for order are ineffectual and result in disorder. Luster often appears to fly by the seat of his pants, but has more control of a given situation than Jason. It would be an understatement to say that Faulkner strikes a balance with these two characters because though they seem to foil each other, we know that Luster will prevail. His offbeat disorder has a future and his name will go on. Jason literally has no future, no progeny.

“The saddest word of all”

Posted on by
1

Quentin remembers a conversation with his father that in occasionally abstract terms addresses courage, incest, time, and improvement. The stream of consciousness mode though which the memory is written complicates the reading of this passage not merely because of the lack of dialogue punctuation, but because the reader has to decide if a given utterance is interrogative or declarative. As with most memories in this text, Faulkner throws the reader into the scene in medias res and forces the reader to fill in the blanks. This conversation is about Quentin’s incest and subsequent confession to his father before Jason even says the word. This conversation which may or may not have actually happened (the father’s diction is suspect until readers discover his career in the appendix) is Quentin’s way of coping with his incestuous affair after the fact. Whether or not he told his father and his father reacted this way is of little importance. It does not matter because readers aren’t presented with the conversation as it happened, but as an imagined retelling. The memory of the conversation belongs to Quentin to use and reuse, and if it had not happened, then he uses the mental effigy of his father as interlocutor to cope, reprimand himself, and dwell confusedly in the past.

This conversation does not offer Quentin a great opportunity to cope. His inability to effectively deal with the past keeps him in the past. But he tries to deal when he articulates the reasoning behind his actions: “it was to isolate her out of the loud world so that it would have to flee us of necessity and then the sound of it would be as though it had never happened”  (177). Quentin intended the incest to be a protective act, to keep Caddy from the loud world. The problem with Quentin’s using this dialogue as means of coping is that he is effectively silenced by the father shortly after he says this. The memory of this conversation repeats Quentin’s frustration instead of vindicating him.

Jason points out the flaws of Quentin’s reasons for incest, namely that the ideal of purity he is wrestling with is a temporary state. Quentin fixates on that one word, seemingly repeating it any chance he can get a word in while Jason monologues. The word destroys Quentin and prevents him from engaging in meaningful dialogue.

The arrangement of the text makes it appear as though Jason is finishing Quentin’s last sentence in the conversation. Even though Quentin is just repeating the word “temporary” for the last time, Jason’s response can be seen as his musings over a word he says is “the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was” (178). By ending the memory of the conversation on this line, Faulkner allows readers to have the same realization that Quentin had to more fully understand the character. Temporary is the saddest word to Quentin and there is no better word to understand Quentin, his life, and his fears. His life is temporary (and shorter than most), his actions do not have the lasting effect he wants.

Transcending Language in TSAF

Posted on by
Reply

In the last chapter of TSAF, the narration changes to third person omniscient and takes place on Easter Sunday. The narrative style is able to transcend the time obsessed loop the Compson family has been stuck in. Dilsey takes the main stage in this chapter with her going to her Easter Sunday sermon, and just like the narration, the reader sees a transcendent moment. The preacher, an out of towner, is slowly transcended out of his lackluster body. The preacher’s voice is first heard, “he sounded like a white man” (TSAF, 293). The reader begins to see the preacher moving out of his form, although the congregation is not that impressed. When the preacher starts with ‘Brethren’ the congregation starts to pay attention, and the narrator describes the preacher’s voice leaving and detaching from his body. The congregation “watches with its own eyes while the voice consumes him until he is nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words” (TSAF, 294). From this point we see the congregation replying with sounds (mmm) much like Benjy’s own sounds. Faulkner connects Benjy to the congregation. He is someone who is relatively on the outside of the family (much like the Dilsey and her family). Perhaps because of his outsider quality, Benjy is able to attend this segregated mass.

As the preacher’s voice continues to float, ‘brethren’ becomes ‘bredden.’ The preacher’s speech and jargon are morphing, he is connecting more and more with his congregation and leaving his own body. He is no longer the “white voice”, but rather the voice of the congregation and the connection between them is extending beyond the need for words. His own words (and the reading of these words) are difficult to understand, they are so far removed from when he had initially started (and far removed from Standard English). Language at the peak of the sermon is breaking down. While the sermon builds up the congregation is brought to only sounds, there are repeated mmm’s as they build up to language ceasing. Dilsey then sits “upright beside, crying rigidly and quietly in the annealment and the blood of the remembered Lamb” (TSAF, 297). She is speechless and moved. Her only response to the sermon is to cry, and she leaves.

As they are leaving the church Dilsey seems to have come to a realization from the sermon about the Compson family. She states, “I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin” (TSAF, 297), after a sermon about the eternity of Christ she is able to spot the ending for the Compsons and possibly her role with the Compsons. As the mammy figure, she too was stuck in a loop, one where the Compsons would have children and she would raise them and continue to cycle through watching the Compson family change and grow. She can see the ending of the Compsons as they have no real legitimate heirs to keep the family going, and their family is now broken and fragmented. Dilsey’s faith allows her to look at time in a linear fashion, she is always looking ahead and is not stuck in the past. Her final statement after this moving sermon shows that Dilsey has ‘seen the light.’