Tag Archives: LIA

New Orleans, the Confederacy, and Hating It

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I didn’t make nearly enough of the stirring story of toppling monuments to the Confederacy in New Orleans this month. After reading GDM and AA in particular, we should have a keen sense of the depth of historical resonance as Mayor Landrieu has overseen the removal of monuments to Confederate leaders such as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The removals have been accompanied by protests and counter-protests, often with valences of fascism (e.g., burning torches and heavy arms) as well as more reasoned reactions by writers from right to left meditating on what it means to remember and/or memorialize the past.

For us, we should think of certain aspects of Faulkner’s legacy. For example, we might remember how large the War looms in the imagination of Quentin Compson, so much so that he feels emptied out in the present, “his very body an … empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names.” We might also reflect on two contrary vectors in Faulkner’s work that are highly relevant. On the one hand, we have Faulkner’s strenuous effort, amid the resurgence of nativism and white supremacy, to reveal the absurdity of racial ideologies (especially in LIA and AA via Christmas and Bon), and to attempt, however awkwardly at times, to inhabit black subjectivities and imagine black desires (especially via Lucas and Molly in GDM).

In similar fashion, Landrieu and other white elites, who very much still dominate the city and state governments and control a vast share of capital and influence, nonetheless have made a courageous effort to chip away at the toxic legacy of white supremacy with this act. On the other hand, we should remember that Faulkner shares with his liberal Southern counterparts an antipathy to some aspect of antiracist progressivism of his era and a strong preference for the kind of “going slow” on racial issues that King later mocked as meaning “never.” The very existence of these monuments in 2017 speaks to the equivalence of “later” and “never” in many minds up to this point, and the push to remove them now represents, one hopes, a growing will on the part of a substantial majority of the nation to reckon with this painful past. We need to replace what Landrieu calls “a fictional, sanitized Confederacy” in our official modes of memory with a more complex narrative in which white supremacy and the violent subjugation of indigenous peoples and members of minority groups is central to the formation and maintenance of “The South.” Here’s Landrieu’s speech, which is well worth a read: .

Unmoored from Time

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Light in August has a fixation on time similar to that permeating The Sound and the Fury, although perhaps not to the level of obsession present in the latter. This focus is apparent in the novel’s exploration of some of its outsider characters’ interactions with time as a societal construct, Gail Hightower being a prime example. The characterization of Joe Christmas and Byron Bunch allows for an exploration of time as it intertwines with nature. Both of these characters display an inability to align themselves with time as well as nature, in which there is an absence of society’s conception of time and in which one might speculate that these outsiders could create a space for themselves.

Hightower is able to create his own sense of time, albeit one based on society’s construction of it, a vestige of his time spent “in life.” He uses this internalized sense of time to maintain a thread to this past life, particularly his time spent as minister of the church that he maintains within his periphery. Although enclosed within his home, Hightower remains alert to the emanation of music from the church during services: “He knows almost to the second when he should begin to hear it, without recourse to watch or clock. He uses neither, has needed neither for twentyfive years now. He lives dissociated from mechanical time. Yet for that reason he has never lost it” (366). Furthermore, “Without recourse to clock he could know immediately upon the thought just where, in his old life, he would be and what doing between the two fixed moments which marked the beginning and the end of Sunday morning service and Sunday evening service and prayer service on Wednesday night” (366). These threads thus have a double nature: they add a ghostlike, haunting presence to Hightower’s existence but are also sacrosanct for Hightower, revealing the contradictions inherent in his supposed isolation from the outside world.

Christmas’s contentious relationship with time and nature is at its most apparent during his brief attempt at escape after the murder of Joanna Burden. Within this short period, during which he exists off the grid, traveling through forests and living off the land, Christmas becomes completely disconnected from time, his state reflecting his status in society: a position on the margins. As we are told during this period, “He is not sleepy or hungry or even tired. He is somewhere between and among them, suspended, swaying to the motion of the wagon without thought, without feeling. He has lost account of time and distance; perhaps it is an hour later, perhaps three” (339). The reader also loses track of time along with Christmas; I found myself surprised to realize he had only been gone for a week or so before his capture. At the same time, he is paradoxically unable to become one with nature. We are told that “For a week now he has lurked and crept among its secret places, yet he remained a foreigner to the very immutable laws which earth must obey” (338). Thus, Christmas is a “foreigner” even when alone in nature and far from other people, unable to belong anywhere.

Like Christmas, Byron, upon quitting his job at the mill and briefly leaving Jefferson to start anew outside the town where he never truly belonged (although, as with Christmas, this is partially by choice), he finds himself becoming unmoored from time and also unable to feel at home in the land that surrounds him as he begins his journey. From the crest of a hill, he muses on nature’s indifference to him, not unlike Jefferson’s indifference to him:

But then from beyond the hill crest there begins to rise that which he knows is there: the trees which are trees, the terrific and tedious distance which, being moved by blood, he must compass forever and ever between two inescapable horizons of the implacable earth. Steadily they rise, not portentous, not threatful. That’s it. They are oblivious of him. ‘Don’t know and don’t care,’ he thinks. (424)

He is only roused during the events that follow and brought back into time by the sound of a train whistle. After his fight with Joe Brown/Lucas Burch, the train that will provide escape for Brown/Burch approaches and startles him awake, causing him to think, “this is the world and time too” (440). But this awakening is only temporary. Perhaps in his wanderings with Lena he will find belonging through constant movement.

Machinelike Existences in Light in August

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Descriptions in which humans and machines are equated abound in the beginning pages of Light in August. The purpose of these comparisons appears manifold, including both the more obvious commentary on work and automation and an engagement with the maintenance of social roles. Among the entities we are introduced to in the beginning portion of the novel are the various machines that may be left behind once the mill has exhausted the forests in the town of Doane’s Mill, along with its nameless and faceless men:

… some of the machinery would be left, since new pieces could always be bought on the installment plan–gaunt, staring, motionless wheels rising from mounds of brick rubble and ragged weeds with a quality profoundly astonishing, and gutted boilers lifting their rusting and unsmoking stacks with an air stubborn, baffled, and bemused. (4-5)

In Doane’s Mill, in which mill work is the only work available to able-bodied men such as Lena’s brother McKinley, the fates of these men and the machines they work with once they have outlived their usefulness are intertwined. Even Lena’s sister-in-law is reduced to a machine-like existence, stuck in an endless process of childbirth. The mill workers of Jefferson are characterized similarly. Despite the planing mill men’s interest in the arrival of a “foreigner” in the shape of Joe Christmas, they must soon return “to their work among the whirring and grating belts and shafts” (32). Soon enough Christmas himself, with his his “steady back and arms,” becomes one of these endlessly working men, albeit with a “baleful and restrained steadiness” (34). These characterizations recall Caroline Compson in The Sound and the Fury, who, comfortable in her role within the white patriarchy and accustomed to being waited on, calls out to Dilsey “with machinelike regularity” upon waking (Fury 270). Of course, Caroline’s machinelike existence is of a different quality; although associated with the fulfillment of a role typical of the time, it is the role of a wealthy white woman, and the life to which she has developed a mechanical adherence is one of leisure and pampering, unlike the laboring characters peopling Light in August thus far.

Lena, however, shows hope of breaking free from such an existence. She is in some ways a puzzling character, host to contradictory sentiments: she breaks boundaries by traveling alone as a visibly pregnant, visibly unmarried woman but seems to exist in a trancelike state while doing so. It is as if she has pushed her body, at least in the sense of movement from place to place, to break free from her expected role but her mind has not yet followed suit, therefore trapping her in a liminal zone. Her thoughts reveal this state as she reflects on her journey thus far and the people who have helped her: “She waits, not even watching the wagon now, while thinking goes idle and swift and smooth, filled with nameless kind faces and voices:…” (8). In their movement, the mules and wagons that carry Lena on her journey seem to progress in accord with her machinelike progress. While traveling on Armstid’s wagon, for example, his mules “plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis” (8).

Black Blood Annotated Bibliography

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Plenty has been written about Faulkner, race, how his characters are created, so it was not too difficult to find articles, mostly through CUNY+, Zotero [first time user!], Project Muse, Jstor, our Yonknapedia page for the sources used in the blood/miscegenation/racism entries, and google scholar. What was a bit difficult was finding [mostly] articles that were either specific to my topic or considering how its main points fit my central idea. I found it more challenging to find books that I could appropriately use as sources; I thought about considering some that focused on race, but I struggled to find a strong enough connection between my proposal and other Faulkner works such as Soldier’s Pay.  I wonder if I may have been too specific in my search. Overall, the process was not daunting and I’m grateful for the zotero site Prof. Allred built because it lead to some thought-provoking articles.

Works Cited:

  • Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage, 1936.
    An analysis of Henry’s anxiety with blackness and Sutpen’s seeming lack of anxiety and how both respond to Charles Bon’s lineage. I am fascinated with where and how this knowledge is revealed or hidden, and where it is used as a tool for power or destruction.
  • Entzminger, Betina. “Passing as Miscegenation: Whiteness and Homoeroticism in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!.” Faulkner Journal 22.1/2 (2007): 90.

In depth study of the Southern taboo of mixing blood [hemophobia] as well as the anxiety that it caused in society. This essay considers the parallels of “passing” [for white] with miscegenation and homoeroticism. Although my paper won’t focus on the homoeroticism of AA, it will focus on why Faulkner’s characters strived for clear and strict social and racial boundaries, as well as great anxiety blurring of these boundaries or lack of boundaries created within the characters.

 

  • Ladd, Barbara. “‘The Direction of the Howling’: Nationalism and the Color Line in Absalom, Absalom!” American Literature, vol. 66, no. 3, 1994, pp. 525–551., www.jstor.org/stable/2927603.

Ladd explores the octoroon identity as both a collage of others and an uncertainty of belonging. I want to use this article to explore how the structure of the  Yoknapatawpha cultural identity included race as well as how ‘the other’ [such as Black] was both embedded into it and threatened by it.

 

  • Masami Sugimori.“Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity in Absalom, Absalom!”  The Faulkner Journal. Mar. 1, 2008. P 3-22

This essay explores the correlation of Blackness and Whiteness and how they are perceived and why it matters in Yoknapatawpha County. The trouble with these perspectives is the ambiguity of Bon – where he fits in and how his mind is “limited and trapped by a body.”

 

  • Kartiganer, Donald. “The Blackness of Absalom, Absalom!” Faulkner and Mystery. Trefzer, Annette, and Ann J. Abadie, eds. JACKSON: U of Mississippi, 2014. 19-48. Web.

This article focuses on the language the four narrators use to describe, speak about, and grapple with Black. Based on their perspectives, we get subtle to very different responses and they all demonstrate some of that cultural anxiety of blurred boundaries, mixing labels, or a disregard for labels and borders.

  • Puxan-Oliva, Marta. “A Mysterious Heart: ‘Passing’ and the Narrative Enigma in Faulkner’s ‘Light in August’ and ‘Absalom, Absalom!”.” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 58, no. 1, 2013, pp. 51–78. www.jstor.org/stable/43485859.

This article focuses on a “narrative enigma of the characters who are able to pass for White, and because that narrative enigma is not resolved and it remains unclear if the characters passing, need to do so or if it is just paranoia.  Faulkner focuses more so on the fear that white Southerners have towards characters who can pass, than the actual passing.

 

  • Snead, James A. “Light in August and the Rhetorics of Racial Division.” Faulkner and Race: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha (1986): 152-169. Print.

This chapter focuses on the fracturing that a society imposes on itself because of the rigid divisions and racial rhetoric it creates and upholds. As stated, “The futility of applying these strictly binary categories to human affairs is the main lesson in Faulkner’s novels” is demonstrated with characters such as Charles Bon, Joe Christmas, and to an extent, Thomas Sutpen.

 

  • Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes.” “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Ed. Gates. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.1-20. Print.

This essay also focuses on author’s rhetoric on race and how it transforms characters and the world they inhabit. I am not entirely sure if I will use this source, however, I want to give myself a few more days to read it again and make a decision.

Black Blood Rumors

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For my final paper, I would like to explore the concept of speaking calumny into existence through the use of the “one drop” rule regarding Black ancestry.

Speaking aloud the perception that someone could be Black becomes a fact [they must be Black because it was a thought and so they are] which then becomes that character’s doom. In the case of Joe Christmas [LIA] and Charles Bon [AA], their fates are doomed when someone whispers “black blood.” Joe Christmas’s ancestral lineage remained a mystery throughout most of his life and yet, when someone whispered or shouted about Joe’s potential black blood, Joe was a pariah and was either removed or he fled to a new unknown. In AA, Sutpen confronts the arrival of Charles Bon at his Hundred by revealing to his son Henry Bon’s paternal lineage – Sutpen was his father [from a previous marriage which, Sutpen walked out on upon discovering that his wife also had negro blood] and thus, Charles was unfit to be betrothed to Judith -their – sister. Potential incest, though jarring, had a solution – keep the lovers apart. However, when Sutpen later reveals that Bon has black blood, the disgust and betrayal proves too much for Henry, who kills Bon right in front of his sister-bride at the gates to Sutpen’s Hundred.

There is great but damning power in revealing if someone has “black blood,” however, there were times in Joe Christmas’s life in which he took that damning power and made it his whenever he chose to reveal that possibility about his lineage. He would use it as a taunt, such as when he taunted his adopted father with the possibility that he [McEachern] had raised, clothed, and fed a negro. To the people, such as McEachern who were suddenly faced with the calumnity of association to “black blood,” it would mean to be tainted.

 

Pop South post on “The Mammy of Natchez”

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In the wake of our reading of LIA and anticipating our first stab at AA, check out this fascinating post from the excellent Pop South blog.  It details “Mammy’s Cupboard,” a cafe located near Natchez, MS (my mom’s hometown: I’ve seen it many times) that’s in the shape of a tray-bearing woman.  Not to steal the post’s thunder, but this object captures a lot of the grotesque aspects of race and gender in the South, especially when considering the history Prof. Cox outlines in the mini-essay.

summary post on LIA

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Especially since so many folks were conferencing or sick, I wanted to make a couple of comments about this week’s class and activity on the blog. Having spent so much time on the Christmas backstory last time, we talked a lot about the way the novel develops Hightower’s narrative in the final 1/3 of the novel, and how the novel reaches ambivalent closure to its three major subplots. We’ll talk more about this in the first few minutes of class next week, but here’s a little amuse bouche:

  • We talked about the striking moment in which Hightower, having declared himself “out of life” and hence insulated from involvement in Byron’s ethically questionable scheme to win Lena’s love, gets dragged back into life. Fascinatingly, especially for a man outwardly devoted to a rather Puritan worldview, even after his being cast out of the church, Hightower is invigorated by his being conscripted to deliver Lena’s baby. In the wake of this event, Hightower’s appetite is awakened, he lights a fire that would seem to correspond to his inner lust for life, and he even fantasizes about Lena’s naming her baby after him, figuring him as Lena’s husband and a bastard’s father. It’s dirtiness and pollution that links these influences: Hightower soils his hands with Byron’s scheme, he associates with disreputable characters, he engages in the literally messy practice of delivering a baby, and he even leaves his dishes dirty! As we’ll discuss next time, this invigoration finds its parallel in Hightower’s inner landscape, in which he returns to the figure of his father and grandfather, meditating on his dual parentage (as it were) and mediating between the “cavalier” ideal of his grandfather and the messier and more mixed-up figure of his father, who also shifted from being a preacher to a doctor and who returns from the War in a coat make of patches of other coats (including a conspicuous patch from a Union solider), a fitting metaphor for a more humane and “mixed up” social body that stands in sharp contrast to the ethnically cleansed polity Percy Grimm seeks.
  • We also discussed the very strange end of the novel, emphasizing the following:
    • the way the novel resists “comic” closure: we are primed to expect a union of Byron and Lena, but instead the novel ends with the odd couple’s continuing to meander with Lena’s “a body does get around” comment. We discussed ways in which this suspension rather than closure might be considered a “comic” ending in a sense: the novel arguably affirms liminal states–wanting rather than having, becoming rather than being, existing along vectors rather than dwelling at rest–as a means of resisting the proto-fascist mentality embodied most egregiously by Percy Grimm.
    • the importance of the frame of this last narrative vignette: the story is related by another “outsider” to Jefferson, a traveling furniture dealer who has returned to his young wife and relates the story to her in a bit of flirtatious postcoital (really intercoital!) pillow talk. This framing emphasizes the “lightness” of the ending after a very dark narrative and implies that the broader community contains elements that are capable of sensitive and morally generous listening/interpreting/sharing of stories of “mixed up” subjects like Byron and Lena.
    • We didn’t really get into Christmas’s death scene in any detail: next week we’ll wrestle with that very challenging moment, with its disturbing implications of Christian redemption and a peace that one might consider to be bought too cheaply.
  • I strongly recommend that you read (among others) Lynn’s post on the three endings of the novel; Stephen’s on what Christmas’s death means; and Karen’s on windows and other liminal spaces in the novel.

Finally, I emailed about this already, but take a look at the guide to the final assignment if you haven’t.

Overexposed: Joe Christmas’ “Kodak” Moment

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[#5]

In chapter 5 of Light in August (LIA) we are offered a glimpse into the thought process of Joe Christmas. It’s a small episode in which the chapter starts off with  JC not being able to sleep and is disturbed by the drunken Brown. Brown irritates Christmas to the point where JC   hits him.

Christmas is then analyzing and justifying his anger for  Joanna Burden. Even though it happened over two years ago, Christmas states that it was fine that she lied about her age, but the mere fact that she prayed over him bothered him immensely. Slowly as if coming to a realization, Christmas undresses himself and stands naked in the middle of the road, until he’s illuminated by an oncoming car’s headlights.

Then he could hear the car. He did not move. He stood with his hands on his hips, naked, thigh deep in the dusty weeds, while the car came over the hill and approached the lights full upon him. He watched his body grow white out of the darkness like a kodak print emerging from the liquid. He looked straight into the headlights as it shot past. (Faulkner, 108). 

The metaphor linking this moment with a developing “Kodak” print exposes Christmas. I think this metaphor is twofold (1) simply, this episode of Christmas naked watching his body “grow white” out of the darkness could be his latent desire to be “White” or to defend his own identity, (2) the fact that this episode was brought on by Joanna Burden praying over him, could have been an indication that he needed to be “saved” in some way. As if praying over him would spare him of his history or his struggle to assimilate into society.

In a broader sense, the entire scene leading up to him standing naked, can be viewed as a developing Kodak moment in itself. Or the car exposing him with headlights is a definitive moment for understanding Christmas’ motives. Quite simply, it functions like the metaphor, a snapshot that’s developed to reveal the image. It’s proof, permanence. In the opening of this chapter, Brown calls out Christmas for what he is, even using his own words against him, “You’re a nigger, see? You said so yourself. You told me. But I’m white.” (Faulkner, 104). This small moment with Brown must have triggered a memory of what conspired between Joanna Burden and himself. As if Brown reminding Joe Christmas of the apparent difference between them, only reopens a traumatic wound.

The relationship between Miss Burden and JC was complicated but she had wanted Christmas to make something of himself. To attend college, get a job, and have a real chance at living a proper life. What Burden was alluding to was  a life only attained by whites. It’s hard to tell if Christmas was insulted or bothered by this suggestion, but it’s clear that Christmas was never able to define his identity as it was always being ascribed to him by others.

Hence, the trigger of this moment between Brown and Christmas. In a sense, it wasn’t about what happened between Burden and JC that upset him but that she had prayed over him. This prayer, as I mentioned could have been a way to “save” him. And perhaps in this moment, when Joe Christmas decides to strip himself of his undergarments and walk naked through the weeds, is possibly an episode where he saves himself, or accepts his fate. That in every circumstance he will briefly be caught between two identities (white and black) but swinging towards a life that would resemble a white-man’s is only attained briefly. It’s a suspended moment, much like the flash of a camera. It’s fixed and temporary.  This continuous cycle of brief exposure versus hiding in the darkness, is a metaphor for Joe Christmas’ identity or lack thereof.

falling up: postures & positions of power

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As a text concerned with transgressions and transgressors, Light in August maps its explorations of power and progress onto and within specific geographies of the text. From the beginning, the image of progress the novel presents is one of motion pictures—-of stillness yielding into moments of animation. Consider, for example, the description of Lena’s initial journey as “a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes…through which she advanced” (7). Within this initial image, Faulkner presents the dynamic of progress within the novel—a train-like “succession” of “undeviating changes” that enable a movement of advancement. However, as his juxtaposition of “through” with the character of Lena suggests, within this vacuum-like space of progress, there is space for transgressors: for those who would move through this continuous space of progress. In particular: Lena Grove and Joe Christmas.

Transgressing figures apply particular weight to these spaces of progress by troubling how they operate. Within the physical space of Jefferson, Lena Grove and Joe Christmas prove to be troublesome figures in part because of their difficulty to locate and to place, to pin and secure. Ralph Watkins has examined their impact through a specific attention to boundaries and borders, linking Joe Christmas and Lena through their preferred means of egress—the window. The window is crucial as it represents “points of exit and entry for persons of low esteem” (Watkins 15). Exploring the symbolism of the role of the window, Watkins notes “these openings are vulnerable and therefore pose a danger to those who are inside the social structure” (16). Yet if these portals represent spaces where power dynamics become (potentially) further destabilized, then how Lena and Christmas move through these openings become as significant and interesting as the openings themselves. How they move through them, of course, is by climbing: Lena climbs out of her brother’s home, Joe “climbed from his window” to meet with Bobbie, and first enters Joanna Burden’s home by climbing “into the window” and “flow[ing] into the dark kitchen” (6, 186, 229-230). Climbing is an interesting image of entry or exit because it suggests an upward motion. For Lena and Joe, however, climbing is frequently an act of descent as much as ascent–both physically and within concerns of social and moral dynamics of power.

For example, consider Joanna Burden’s explanation regarding her commitment to racial justice and recompense: “I had seen and known negroes since I could remember. […] But after that I seemed to see them for the first time not as people, but as a thing, a shadow in which I lived, we lived, all white people, all other people. I thought of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white, with the black shadow already falling upon them before they drew breath. […] At last I told father, tried to tell him. What I wanted to tell him was that I must escape, get away from under the shadow, or I would die. ‘You cannot,’ he said. ‘You must struggle, rise. But in order to rise, you must raise the shadow with you. But you can never lift it to your level’” (253, emphasis mine). In congruity with the images of climbing, Burden’s representation of racial dynamics is reliant also on motion along a vertical axis: the blacks “fall” as a literal burden upon the whites who must struggle to “raise” and “lift” them, but appropriately (meaning never to match their own place). Not only does this seem to bear quite literally on the parameters of Joe and Joanna’s relationship, it also shows the difficulty and imprecision in attempting to maintain the balance of power. There is a necessity to uplift the blacks, at least, within Joanna’s consideration, but this must never be so sharp as to place them as equals.

Within the space of his relationship with both Joanna and Bobbie, Joe Christmas is positioned against this vertical axis–albeit, in different directional movements. Christmas’ relationship with Bobbie is one wherein his blackness is revealed as something revolting and vile, resulting in his physical beating, a reminder and re”place”ment of his body into the racial power order. In the depiction of the fight, there is continual emphasis placed on his low position (literally on the floor, having been knocked out) as well as the direction of his perspective. Having been rendered immobile, all Christmas can do is look “up at the two men” who are equally immobile (218). Then one of the men “lean[s] down and lift[s] his head from the floor” in order to hit him again (219). In his last glimpse of the scene, Christmas observes a raised hand that “did not fall” before realizing that it being held back by Bobbie. Within this scene, the “lifted arm” is invested with disciplining racial power. Notably, the arm is not indicated as being lowered or dropped, but remains suspended in the air, in its “lifted” state. Bobbie, in stopping the hand, only stays its motion by holding it, but does not correct its position in the air. Further, in relating the movements of characters, the white attackers are shown to be moving in a downward direction, “lifting” Christmas only so far so that he may be attacked.

In contrast, Christmas’ relationship with Joanna is defined by her attempts to push him higher, which complicates his own understanding of his social power. For example, before we are introduced to the complex nature of their relationship, Christmas repeats that her mistake was because she “started praying over me. […] She ought to have had better sense than to pray over me” (106). Again, there’s an image of posturing presented: Burden is positioned as being “over” him, a position with moral significance due to her act of praying. As in the scene with the beating, the location of the body as “over” his yields implications of power as well. In this instance, it is not a racial disciplining per se as it is in the beating, but rather a kind of moral disciplining – one which Christmas takes severe issue with.

As Christmas reveals, his relationship with Joanna is instead defined by an image of raising. Upon his first entrance into her home by climbing through the window, Christmas notes that she makes him repeat the gesture for an entire week (259). The racial dynamics within their relationship are thus defined by an upending: as opposed to the immediate and violent response of Bobbie and her defenders to discipline Christmas for his acts of climbing down from his own window to be with her, Burden specifically invites the transgression, compelling him to repeat it for a week. While the image is one imbued with connotations of racial violence and transgression, the emphasis on the upward motion of the climb, in conjunction with Burden’s presentation of her particular peculiar burden to raise black people, suggests greater complexity to the image, one of redress, though not equal standing.

However, Burden generates an extremely charged space of racial instability for Christmas, one which fundamentally threatens his sense of identity. By inviting him to communicate his identity and to enter the ranks of the educated black by sending him to a black law school, the charged, unstable space of their relationship breaks down, which is also tracked along the images of posture and vertical position:

“‘Tell them,’ she said.
‘Tell niggers that I am a nigger too?’ She now looked at him.
[…] He leaned down. She did not move” (277)

This culminates in a fight: when Joanna strikes him with her hand, he retaliates by striking her back. Unlike the earlier beating he receives at Bobbie’s, there is no clear disciplining and no clear delineation of boundary afterward. While Joanna strikes him, he answers with reciprocity, and, in so doing, evinces his authoritative (masculine) power. Upon striking her, “[she] fell huddled onto the bed, looking up at him, and he struck her in the face again and standing over her spoke to her the words which she had once loved to hear” (277). Within the unstable space of power of their relationship, Joanna has granted Christmas the tools with which to enact discipline of his own. In comparison to his climbing into the house through the window during the height of their relationship, here, within one of its troughs, Christmas forces Joanna into the lower position: she suffers a fall of her own, which is then reinforced through the image of her “looking up” at him, standing over her. The words, which she had once requested and “loved to hear”, are then returned to her in force, becoming additional ammunition.

While Faulkner’s boundaries and portals illustrate the containment of individual spaces, the very actions of transgression yield interesting revelations regarding the dynamics of relationships and characters within these spaces. Given the specific rhetoric of Joanna Burden’s aims of uplift, the ways in which the posturing and perspectives of sight shift between points of her relationship with Christmas illustrates the ways in which power is being contested throughout the novel; a power not just racially indicative, but also socially charged, motivated and defined through a conception of the proper that these transgressive bodies (Lena and Joe) then permeate and violate.

Watkins, Ralph. “‘It Was like I Was the Woman and She Was the Man’: Boundaries, Portals, and Pollution in ‘Light in August.'” The Southern Literary Journal 26, 2, 1994, pp. 11-24, www.jstor.org/stable/20078093.

Tennyson v. Byron

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Just thought you might like some context for the acerbic depiction of Hightower sinking into some Tennyson on p. 318 (last page of ch 13). The text tells us of Hightower’s almost narcotic reading of the poems in his “sanctuary” of a home, separated from the violence and injustice of town life: the poems are full of the “gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts” and reading them is “better than praying without having to bother to think aloud.”

I thought you might like to judge for yourself: I think it’s safe to say Faulkner was thinking of poems like “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” You can judge how sappy/lusty it is for yourself, but it’s hard not to hear one of Hightower’s raving sermons in the background as you read it. And I think the implicit contrast (if ironic) with Bunch’s Byron is strong: BB is one of the “bunch” of Jefferson WASPs, to be sure, but I think his willingness to side with the “outlandish” elements of society makes him an honorary member of the Society of Byron…