Brace yourselves everyone you’re in for a shock: there is actually something I liked about As I Lay Dying. Or I guess I should say someone. I know it’s probably a sign of the apocalypse. But, it’s true; I not only liked but maybe even loved the character of Cash Bundren. There is something so concrete about Cash; he is solidly and firmly rooted in his own identity in a way the rest of the Bundrens are not. When Darl first considers Cash he does not say he is his brother but that he is “a good carpenter” (Faulkner 4). Reading Cash’s narrative chapters gives one the comforting sense that Cash knows who he is and what is all about. This is especially true when he is compared to his brother Darl who is considerably more fluid in his understanding of himself or Vardaman who has connection to his identity only through those around him. The confusion that momentarily undoes Vardaman when Darl declares, “Jewel’s mother is a horse” would not throw Cash for a loop at all (Faulkner 101). Cash is a carpenter; this is his complete and total identity. One gets the sense that a Cash Bundren who is not a carpenter is not really a Cash Bundren at all.

            This strong understanding of his own identity is perhaps the reason Cash is so silent. The first several times Cash is mentioned by other characters they speak not about what Cash says but about the sound of his saw making Addie’s coffin. Jewel describes the sounds of Cash’s carpentry as saying, “See. See what a good one I am making for you” (Faulkner 14). Cash is so identified with his carpentry that is easy to understand how the “voice” of his tools becomes an extension of his actual voice. There is no need for Cash to speak when the “snores” of his saw moving “steadily into the board” can convey his feelings (Faulkner 46). The constant presence of that sound in the time leading up to Addie’s death is a substitution for the sounds of Cash’s mourning. Cash does not need to put words to his feelings because his profession can speak for him.

            Once his ability to speak through his tools is taken away from him Cash is almost forced to become more vocal. However, his first narrative chapters seem almost as if he does not remember how to use his physical voice. They are tentative and easily interrupted, as though he cannot get his words out. The first chapter we hear in Cash’s voice is not speech but a list. The list is vocal; it is an internal organization of his thoughts, but it is not spoken. One can almost hear what it would be like for Cash to read his list; the interruption of point 6, the single word “Except”, is almost yelled (Faulkner 83). Yet we do not really hear him speak. After Cash breaks his leg he becomes entirely unable to use his profession as his voice and so his narrative chapters become actual narratives, much like everyone else’s. He becomes removed from his defining characteristic, his sense of self, and so he becomes like every other member of his family.

            Cash’s strong identity allows him to anchor the story of the Bundrens. One never really knows how anyone else in the family will behave but one can feel certain that Cash will always be a carpenter. Perhaps it is this solid identity that makes Cash the logical choice to end the novel. He is almost removed from the fluidity of the rest of the Bundrens and is able to see his family from the outside. So it makes sense that his voice should be the last we hear as the Bundrens move on to their new life. Everything is changing around him but he will almost certainly always be Cash Bundren, the carpenter.

Faulkner’s fictional county, which serves as the setting in many of his works, Yoknapatawpha county, represents his native Mississippi Lafayette County, where he spent most of his life. The Yocona River, which runs through the south side of Lafayette County, was once called Yockney-Patafa by the Chickasaw tribe. Faulkner claimed it meant “water runs slow through flat land” (AILD 267). Faulkner’s famous Yoknapatawpha county is flat land where time, like Yockney-Patafa’s water, runs very slow. The Sound and The Fury and As I Lay Dying share the common theme of acute awareness to time and preoccupation with the past or future. The Compsons and the Bundrens, though financially two different classes, express a similar unrest to time. The agitations that time inflicts on Faulkner’s characters cause them to fantasize or at the very least become guided by their awareness to it. Almost every one of them is either caught up with time that’s past or a future that’s unclear.

Quentin, from The Sound and The Fury, is stuck in the past and although most of the time he is away from Yoknapatawpha county, it’s slow and dreadful movement like trekking through the mud, travels with him. Faulkner uses Quentin’s obsession with time and his watch to convey the Civil War’s impact on the South’s adherence to modernism. Quentin wants to live in the past as many southerners do, to reclaim former power and escape modern assimilation. Benjy, though not completely conscious of his ability to relive moments in the past, is so engrossed with his memories because everything around him reminds him of his inescapable past. Vardaman, from As I Lay Dying, is very young but he already reveals his sensitivity to time: “The barn is still red. It used to be redder than this. Then it went swirling, making the stars run backward without falling. It hurt my heart like the train did” (225). Already he feels the pain of time slipping away, which hurts him more than his impatience for Christmastime.

Darl doesn’t necessarily look to the future or past for salvation from his constant stream of questions; rather he conveys agitation to his present circumstance. From acute observations of his family and the rest of existence that surrounds him he is unable to comprehend the reasons for it all, “How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls” (207).  The “dead gestures of dolls” refers to all the people around him who live without questioning, like wood, they ignore or otherwise never even come into conflict with the absurdity of life with no answers. Darl is uneasy with the drudgery of living in the fixed movement of time in which he lives, “If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice” (208). Faulkner develops these introspective characters with the same internal conflict which leads them to either give up on life or become removed by those made out of wood. 

In many pieces of modern literature the theme of ‘passing’ is often explored. ‘Passing’, is a term used to describe someone who is bi-racial and is either light skinned or dark skinned enough to pass as one race or the other.  In Light in August the character Christmas and Lucas Burch/Joe Brown are examples of people who are passing.

Bryon is puzzled by Lucas Burch’s name proclamation as Joe Brown. Symbolically the reader can see that his name Brown is an indicator of his African American roots. Brown is also often described as someone with a “mobile face perform[ing] one of those instantaneous changes” (45). This description of Brown being a man of changing faces displays his ability to ‘pass’ as a white man. In addition, Lena and Byron’s description of Brown as “Tall, young. Dark complected;”(55) also aides to the fact that Brown is of mixed race.

Similarly, Christmas is also a character that is bi-racial. However, Christmas’ racial background is made much more apparent than Brown’s. In one of the first descriptions of Christmas the reader learns of “his face [that is] darkly and contemptuously still” (31) with “flesh a level dead parchment color” (34).  Christmas is able to successfully pass as a white man when the racist foreman hires him. “‘Did you ever hear of a white man named Christmas?’ the foreman said. ‘I never heard of nobody a-tall named it” (32).  As the chapters progress, and most evidently in chapter four, it becomes more apparent that Christmas is mixed race.

In chapter four, Byron begins to tell the story of Miss Burden’s house catching fire. After Brown had been caught at the scene of the crime and brought to the sheriff’s office for questioning he uses his knowledge of Christmas’ racial background to pin the offense on Christmas. Brown admits that Christmas “admitted” to him he was “part nigger” (97-98) when he was drunk one night and instills shame in the sheriff when he accuses him of “accus[ing] the white man and let the nigger go free. Accuse the white and let the nigger run” (97).  Brown is able to successfully pass as a white man and use his lighter skin tone to his advantage. The reader sees Brown turn on his ‘whiteness’ by calling his own work “the work of a nigger slave”(95) as well as using Christmas’ racial roots to be set free.

Additionally news of Christmas’ mixed racial background is perhaps most jarring to his foster father, Joe McEachern.  Thus far, McEachern, is the most violent, abusive, and racist character in the novel. In a private thought and after a fight with his foster-father Christmas admits he would tell his foster-mother his secret. “I dare you to tell him what he has nursed. That he has nursed a nigger beneath his own roof, with his own food and his own table” (167).   Here, Christmas admits his passing in with his white foster-family, but knows that he can use his secret to somewhat destroy his evil foster-father.

While in TSAF, the use of third-person narration allows Faulkner to tie the previous three first-persona narratives together, the technique seems to have a more sinister effect in Light In August.  Rather than resolving a complicated narrative, it serves to complicate it further by featuring multiple characters and their inner thoughts and contextualizing these characters with sometimes extensive back-stories.  By the conclusion of chapter seven, it seems as though two separate novels are occurring simultaneously.  Almost opposite to the approach in AILD, the reader is inundated with information.  The exposure of characters’ private information for pubic consumption occurs often and creates spectacles for the townspeople to observe and discuss.  A sense of claustrophobia and surveillance is created by the narrative mode, sometimes omniscient third-person, and intensified by the language with the frequent use of the words look and watch.  

In the first chapter, there are multiple accounts of men watching Lena covertly.  Armstid observes her hands and profile from “the corner of his eye” (12).    “Slowspitting and squatting men watch her covertly” as she passes (27).  This occurs again when she boards the wagon to Jefferson in a scene in which neither she nor the driver look at each other, at least not overtly:  ”Apparently he has never looked at her, not even when she got into the wagon.  Apparently she has never looked at him, either” (28).  Of course, this driver covertly observes Lena “from the corner of his eye” while she eats (29).  In all of these cases, the men Lena interacts with are trying to help her find the father of her unborn child, even though they all seem to think it is a hopeless pursuit.  Perhaps they cannot overtly observe her for the same reason they feel compelled to help her, guilt for the position she is in because of a man.  Unlike Dewey Dell who could still hide her pregnancy from everyone (except Darl), Lena’s personal predicament as an unwed pregnant woman is on display for everyone to see, discuss and judge.

The word look certainly has a different connotation from watch.  When Lena and Armstid’s wife meet, they are not only looking at one another, but also watching: “They look at one another, suddenly naked, watching one another” (18).   It is interesting that the more aggressive watch (rather than look) is first attributed to two women looking at each other rather than a man looking at a woman. While the use of watch seems to imply suspicion or judgment, it’s difficult to discern Mrs. Armstid’s reaction to Lena.  She seems to both hate and pity Lena, but ultimately sides with womankind as also condemns the “durn men”(16) for Lena’s plight, which motivates her to give Lena her hard-earned egg money.

The adolescent Joe Christmas gets caught “watching” the orphanage dietitian having sex with a doctor from the county hospital, in a scene of accidental surveillance (121). Joe doesn’t understand what he overhears on the other side of the curtain and instead of succumbing to the role of voyeur, “he seemed to be turned in upon himself, watching himself sweating, watching himself smear another worm of past into his mouth which his stomach did not want” (122).  Christmas is too young to interpret the dietician’s actions.  Because he is so young, he is also not aware of the social constructs of virginity.  As a result, he is incapable of judging her behavior.  Despite his innocence, the dietician is still convinced that Christmas will reveal her secret and imagines him “watching her with the profound and intent interrogation of an animal” (123).  Christmas embodies the guilt she feels for trespassing against the southern womanly code.  As she continues to spiral into madness, the dietician approaches the janitor who she “has watched for five years” and knows has been “watching” Christmas, a sort of neurotic circular surveillance where everyone is watching everyone else (127). 

The usually unwitting young Christmas perceptively senses the janitor’s surveillance.  However the narrator guesses at how Christmas might examine it without providing Christmas’ actual reaction.  An older Christmas would think: “He hates me and fears me.  So much so that he cannot let me out of sight.”  A more educated child might have thought: “that is why I am different from the others: because he is watching me all the time” (138).  It is interesting that Christmas’ thoughts are no included here and are instead replaced by the narrator’s own speculation.  Not only does this suggest that the narrator is not omniscient, but it suggests what is at the root of this watchful community, hate and fear.  Both interpretations have a cause and effect relationship.  The adult interpretation is that he is watched because he is different and the youthful interpretation is he is different because he is watched.  Either way, his identity is social constructed literally through the eyes of others. 

There are a number of other examples of surveillance, spectacle and spectatorship.  When the Burden house is on fire Byron knows that people will gather to watch it burn (81).  Joe Brown a.k.a. Lucas Burch is also the subject of the town’s voyeurism when questioned during the investigation into Joanna Burden’s death:  “they had locked the door, but the windows was lined with folks’ faces against the glass” (97).  Hightower is also at the center of a town spectacle as a result of his wife’s promiscuity and eventual death, and later as a result of his employment of black servants.  Hightower rises above the town speculation as his name implies, and remains in spite of their efforts to push him out.  Sensitive to the town’s mob mentality, Hightower is described as watching as opposed to listening, while Byron while he tells his story of the search for Joe Christmas (80, 82, 83).  Hightower’s name could also signal his advantageous vantage point.  According to Byron, he is the only person who knows that Hightower “sits in that window from sundown to full dark every day that comes” implying that Hightower is able to survey the street, in view from his window, without anyone knowing (73).   

 The narrative seems to indict the townspeople for their surveillance and the unfounded assumptions that result from them and the constant focus on observation in the novel makes the reader aware of their complicity in this voyeuristic society. 

The image that is striking to me in the first several chapters of Light in August is a shoe.  Within the first few pages Lena’s shoes are referenced on several occasions. As she is walking up the hill: “She went on out of sight, walking slowly, the shoes unlaced about her ankles…” (7). Additionally, when Armstid drops her off at the store in the morning: “She reached the earth, in the heavy, dusty shoes” (23).  Many of the “shoe” references concern Lena.  There is never any strong emphasis on her shoes, but rather just a passing mention of her usually unlaced, manly footwear.  However, Lena is not the only character that Faulkner employs the imagery of shoes with.  Joe Christmas also becomes victim to the constant reference and description of shoes.  In Christmas’s introduction he is described as “…like a tramp, yet not like a tramp either. His shoes were dusty and his trousers were soiled too” (31).  Then, much later on, when Christmas’s childhood is being explained, his unlaced shoes are brought up.  “His shoes were not laced. He had not learned to do that by himself yet…As they crossed the empty playground his dangling feet swung rhythmically to the man’s striding, the unlaced shoes flapping about his ankles” (138-39).  Of course, it is possible to say that mentioning a character’s shoe is merely just a part of his or her description, however the references are so numerous it appears to be more than mere character exposition, especially when one considers that the character of Hightower seems to be left out of the shoe imagery.

Light in August centers on the intertwining stories of three main characters: Lena, Hightower and Joe Christmas.  From what I have read of the novel thus far, the current theme that seems to connect them is this search for a place of acceptance and belonging.  Lena is walking across the country in search of her unborn child’s father. Christmas is a drifter trying to cope with a mixed identity within himself. Finally, Hightower seems to be the opposite. As opposed to Lena and Joe, Hightower is not physically searching for a place to belong, rather he is forcing his acceptance upon his town that does not want him there.  With Lena and Joe on these constant and literal quests – it makes sense to have the image of a shoe represent those journeys.  Lena has mainly walked from Alabama to Jefferson (not a short commute!) while pregnant in search of Lucas. Christmas is a drifter and really has no place to call home.  Both of these charactersspend a lot of time on their feet and therefore in some type of shoe.  On the other hand, we have Hightower who stays in one place (so far!).  As opposed to Lena and Joe who are searching for a place to belong, Hightower is searching for acceptance in a place he is already in.  It is because of this lack of physical searching that the image of a the shoe is not really associated with him at all.

So, it seems to be quite clear why Lena and Joe have this shoe imagery associated with them. However, why are the references always to a dusty shoe? Or an unlaced shoe? Or even, a heavy and manly shoe?  The shoes that are referenced are always imperfect.  There is never a clean, laced and perfectly fitted shoe.  The “flawed” shoes associated with Lena and Joe seem to be a representation of their flawed journeys.  The reader is aware almost immediately that Lena’s quest for Lucas will end in heartbreak. She seems to be unaware, or unwilling to admit, that her possible reunion with the father of her child will not have a happy ending.  Therefore, since the journey is flawed, so must be the item that represents that journey.  Christmas is a bit more difficult to analyze because at this point in the novel, there is still much to learn about him and where he is going.  In terms of his journey, the reader knows he is a drifter and that is about it.  However, his association with flawed shoes leads to the assumption that there is a definite flaw in his journey as well.

While reading LIA for the second time, I was continually reminded of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Apparently Faulkner was influenced and greatly encouraged by Anderson, with whom he spent some time in New Orleans. Anderson, like Faulkner, was a weaver of stories. Winesburg would later see its shadow in works like LIA and Go Down, Moses. It also occurred to me while reading that Faulkner is first and foremost a writer of stories. Each of the chapters in LIA has an autonomy of narration: each correlates to the others but in the same way that a quilt can be of many images that are stitched together. Reading Faulkner is like flipping through a family album and listening while the owner tells a story about each photo, not just who the person in the picture is, but the most significant moments of their life.

Joe Christmas is a fascinating character because, unlike any other we’ve read so far, he embodies all the major Faulknerian themes. He is part white, part negro, a quiet, shy child who becomes a violent and cold adult, a Christ figure and yet a villain, a kind of angel-turned-devil. He is conflicted about his roots, his origin, his upbringing, his sexual nature, and his religious nature. But more than anything he is superbly conflicted about the relationship between these things within him. What does it mean to be part white, part negro? Aside from an inability to find a proper social connection, Christmas is dislocated from his own body, his own soul. As Faulkner writes, “he looked like a phantom, a spirit, strayed out of its own world, and lost.” (114) Christmas is the Everyman of the Post-War South. He is another one of Faulkner’s “orphans” in search of a home but he is unique in that his primary internal struggle is also the primary struggle of the South, namely its racial divide. The voice of the South is as much a negro voice as it is a white voice.

It is in the following remarkable episode where Christmas, dressed in a white shirt, strays rudderless down a lonely, dark street, where the shadows of leaves slide “like scraps of black velvet” across his body, into a place called Freedman Town. He begins to hear the voices of invisible negroes:

They seemed to enclose him like bodiless voices murmuring talking laughing in a language not his… as if the black life, the black breathing had compounded the substance of breath so that not only voices but moving bodies and light itself must become fluid… with the now ponderable night inseparable and one.  (114)

I haven’t fully digested this entire episode yet, but it seems to me that in this moment Christmas becomes aware of his Negro blood, on a deeply personal level. More importantly it also seems that, despite the internal conflict he has experienced until now, Christmas, in this moment of supreme awareness, becomes conscious of a budding racial and spiritual unity. The episode begins, “Then he found himself” and, a page later, continues, “He could see now, the vague spreading world, the horizon.”  (116) Ultimately I don’t think the episode suggests a triumphant victory of self-discovery, however, but rather the profound need for one, and in this way Christmas goes far beyond the South, right to the heart of man.

In The Sound and the Fury, Quentin points out that “a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among” (86). Christmas’s character in Light in August demonstrates this concept, as a secretly biracial individual with a primarily white phenotype, working among white colleagues in Jefferson, Mississippi. Understanding the social consequences of his complicated identity, Christmas attempts to dismiss himself from society altogether by living in the woods and largely keeping to himself. But regardless of how hermetic a lifestyle Christmas tries to maintain, he cannot escape his black roots in the south. Interestingly, Faulkner’s narrative style demonstrates Christmas’s own deep discomfort with his biracial identity in adult life, even before Joe Brown (his only accidental confidant) reveals his secret to Jefferson. 

Christmas’s internal struggle with his biracial identity is particularly poignant when he wanders into Freedman Town, the “negro section” of Jefferson. Faulkner’s third person narrative takes on dream-like quality mirroring the sleepy haze in which Christmas finds himself in this neighborhood: “without his being aware the street had begun to slope and before he knew it he was in Freedman Town, surrounded by the summer smell and the summer voices of invisible negroes” (114). Just as Christmas tries to avoid sleep and falls into it pages earlier when he is in the woods (111), he tries to avoid Freedman Town and falls into it when he is in society.

The description of his surroundings transitions from vivid images such as “the redbarred trousers and the soiled colored shirt” that Joe Brown wears in the white neighborhood  (113) to smells, noises, and feelings that illuminate the black neighborhood. These senses are all more physical than sight in that they require a close physical proximity to the source of the smell, noise, or feeling, which brings attention to the physicality of the black body. Ironically, the narrative frequently attempts to deny the presence of black bodies, attributing the voices and smells to “invisible” (114), “fluid” (114), “bodiless” (115) beings surrounding Christmas in his dreamlike Freedman Town experience. This reflects Christmas’s own denial of his partially black body, but he is terribly aware of his physical form as he wanders through the neighborhood as white-looking foreigner. This attention to the black body disregards any cognitive or social aspects of the black individuals in that society, evoking of a kind of feral environment that is beyond words or convention. Even when Christmas acknowledges the voices of the neighborhood folk, he describes their speech as “a language not his” (114). Just being in Freedman Town for a short time reduces Christmas to his own feral state, and he tries to escape as quickly as possible consumed by his overworked, over-stimulated physical state: “He began to run, glaring, his teeth glaring , his inbreath cold on his dry teeth and lips, toward the next street lamp… his heart hammering… he stopped here, panting, glaring, his heart thudding” (115). The entire scene is reminiscent of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Just as Marlow floats down the river and loses touch with his sense of civilized behavior, Christmas is temporarily “returned to the lightless hot wet primogenitive Female” (115). Christmas contrasts blackness and whiteness with physical states, using adjectives such as “liquid,” “hot,” and “wet” to describe blackness versus “cold” and “dry” to describe whiteness. He experiences all of these sensations as he makes his way back to the white part of Jefferson, and eventually back to his home in the woods, all the time reflecting his biracial identity.

Faulkner’s language in this section also mirrors Christmas’s biracial identity in that he combines unrelated words to describe the people and environment surrounding Christmas. The voices of the negro women are “fecundmellow” (115), Freedman Town exists in garland of “Augusttremulous” lights (116), Christmas’s earliest memory is of a “sootbleakened” red brick building (119), and the orphans he lives with in that building are “sparrowlike” and “childtrebling” (119). Christmas is a combination of two unlike things, and his perception of the world is described by combining unlike words that create one exact image.

Unfortunately, navigating his way through society is not as simple as putting two unlike words together to make a new word. While he may be willing to forge new definitions to understand the world, the South is not ready at Christmas’s time to accept his complicated heredity (black or white), so he is left to his own devices and naturally uncomfortable with his rejected identity.

As we learn more about Christmas’s upbringing, Faulkner relates a somewhat disturbing scene from the McEachern era that I would like to examine more closely. The beginning of chapter 7 includes a key line, signaled by the use of italics: “On this day I became a man.” The episode subsequently related deals with McEachern demanding that Christmas memorize a piece of the Catechism and then brutally punishing him when he fails to do so. After several failed attempts, Faulkner describes McEachern’s voice: “His voice was not unkind. It was not human, personal, at all. It was just cold, implacable, like written or printed words” (149). These lines echo Addie Bundren, in some ways, with her skepticism of the value of words. It is also crucial that McEachern’s voice is compared to “written or printed words”–like the Catechism he is forcing Christmas to memorize.

For the 8-year-old Christmas, these words are dead on the page; he cannot relate to them or absorb their meaning. The question this raises for me is, does their “written-ness” cause this? Or does McEachern’s brutality create a kind of rift between the words of the Catechism and reality? We talked a lot about speech vs written text in terms of narration, but it seems relevant in this context as well.

A few pages later, this theme is explored in greater detail. “When McEachern approached he saw that the boy was not looking at the page at all, that his eyes were quite fixed and quite blank. When he put his hand on the book he found that the boy was clinging to it as if it were a rope or a post” (151). Here, we see that Christmas is not even processing the text before him. His eyes glaze over and the words become not only meaningless, but essentially nonexistent. At the same time, the second sentence suggests that Christmas is physically attached to the book in a very different way. This disconnect between the absence of meaning in the book and a desperate “clinging” to it is very intriguing. If the words do nothing for Christmas, why does he feel this attachment to the book itself? Again, how do we separate Christmas’s feelings about the text from his feelings about McEachern?

Shifting back to the conclusion of chapter 6, this line stands out: “The child was not listening. He was not bothered. He did not especially care, anymore than if the man had said the day was hot when it was not hot. He didn’t even both to say to himself My name ain’t McEachern. My name is Christmas There was no need to bother about that yet. There was plenty of time” (145). This last piece is essential, as it seems to set up the rebelliousness that will follow as Christmas gets older (and his “becoming a man” in chapter 7). The story of the Catechism is significant, then, as it signals an early demonstration of protest against McEachern. Christmas refuses food from Mrs McEachern, and passively accepts his beating without acquiescing to McEachern’s demands. Ironically, this image of an innocent child being whipped conjures up the idea of a Christ figure. For all of McEachern’s alleged piety, he overlooks the Christ-like actions of the child he is trying to punish. Given Faulkner’s depictions of Christians (here and elsewhere) this contradiction is not surprising.