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| Light in August |
| 作者Author / William Faulkner 威廉．福克納 |
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Light in August
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William Faulkner
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| Page numbers in these notes refer to the Vintage International edition (New York: Vintage, 1990). |
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| Introduction∣Chapter 1∣Chapter 2∣Chapter 3∣Chapter 4∣Chapter 5∣Chapter 6∣ Chapter 7
Chapter 8∣Chapter 9∣Chapter 10∣Chapter 11∣Chapter 12∣Chapter 13∣ Chapter 14∣Chapter 15
Chapter 16∣Chapter 17∣Chapter 18∣Chapter 19∣ Chapter 20∣Chapter 21
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 Introduction |
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Light in August (1932), Faulkner's seventh novel, is remarkable for the depth at which it explores the relationships between race, religion, and sexuality in the American South. Its central character, Joe Christmas, is a drifter haunted by the possibility that he might have black blood. An orphan, Christmas is raised by a brutal fundamentalist stepfather whose religion of hatred launches him on a desperate quest for acceptance in the sexual embrace of women. His relationship with and alleged murder of one white woman, a Negro sympathizer named Joanna Burden, transforms his body into a screen on which Southern anxieties about race, sex, religion, and history are projected. Faulkner surrounds Christmas with a circle of characters caught up in these same anxieties, all of whom are touched directly or indirectly by his life and death. Gale Hightower is a Presbyterian minister whose obsession with family history derails his ministry and stifles his gospel of forgiveness and love, until he crosses paths with Christmas. Joanna Burden's attraction to Joe is warped by her Puritan ancestors' condescending support of the black race and her loneliness as a single Yankee woman in a Southern town. Byron Bunch is a chaste worker whose discovery of love is comically interrupted by the manhunt for Christmas. The Christmas plot also thwarts the efforts of Lena Grove to find the father of her child, but the birth of that child becomes the novel's center of hope, and the future marriage of Lena and Byron promises to transcend the pathologies that plague the novel's other sexual unions. They form a comic type of Christian holy family, emerging after the "crucifixion" of Joe Christmas.
The novel's major Christian imagery surrounds the figure of Joe Christmas: his bloody sacrifice to the South's racial hatred and religious bigotry is the novel's ironic act of redemption. Faulkner presents the "memory" of Joe Christmas as triumphing over the hatred of his killers, just as Christianity focuses on remembering the death and resurrection of Christ. However, this memory does not, like Christian memory, bring salvation to his killers and their descendents; rather, it seems to haunt the society with the burden of guilt and self-hatred that has fueled racism thus far.
Memory is at the heart of Light in August: it is through memory that racial anxieties persist, and through historical understanding that hatred might be dispelled, but Faulkner's fictional South seems unable to transcend the cycle of violence his novel exposes. Memory is also a principle of Faulkner's narration—the faculty through which he experiments with the representation of time and space. As such, Faulkner modernist literary principles are connected to his social vision of the South.
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| Chapter 1 |
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The novel begins with the travels of Lena Grove, a woman of great faith and endurance. Some might also call her gullible: in an advanced stage of pregnancy, she has been traveling (walking and hitching rides) four weeks from Alabama to Mississippi, seeking Lucas Burch, the father of her child, who left to find work after learning of the pregnancy six months earlier. Lena's "reserve of patient and steadfast fidelity" (6) outshines the precariousness of her situation (she's not married, and Lucas never promised her anything in words), and wins the respect and support of people she meets, like Mr. and Mrs. Armstid and the storeowner Varner. Mr. and Mrs. Armstid, an old married couple with five grown children, can anticipate one another's responses and sometimes communicate without speaking. They present a foil for the Lena-Lucas relationship, in which communication—spoken and unspoken—has failed.
Through Faulkner's narrative method and Lena's consciousness, time becomes a major theme. For a month she has been advancing "like something moving forever and without progress across an urn" (7). (The urn recalls Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which explores the timeless, frozen quality of visual art.) The present-tense narration adds to this sense of suspense and incompletion. However, Lena's consciousness of time is not static but dynamic: she is always remembering and anticipating. Armstid's approaching wagon, for example, are like "a ghost travelling a half mile ahead of its own shape. ‘That far within my hearing before my seeing,' Lena thinks. She thinks of herself as already moving, riding again...." (8). By asking people about Lucas, she is following people's memories of him and anticipating the time when she will meet him again. In Faulkner's narration, frequently the "ghosts" of events precede their shape: that is, we witness things before we know their significance. The smoke coming from (what we later know to be) Joanna Burden's house is one example of this technique.
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| Chapter 2 |
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This chapter introduces the other main characters of the novel, each of whom is a mystery to the people of Jefferson , Mississippi. Byron Bunch is the center of consciousness here, and it is from his perspective that we see the two strangers show up: Joe Christmas and, much later, Joe Brown. Byron has suspicions about each name: Christmas's name seems (consistent with the idea of a ghost traveling ahead of its own shape) to "be somehow an augur of what he will do" (33), while Brown's seems "a little kind of too quick and too easy for a natural name" (54). Christmas and Brown are rumored to be involved in illegal sales of whiskey, and they live somewhere near a middle-aged Northern woman (Joanna Burden) who is rejected by the community for her (and her ancestors') support of the black race. Meanwhile, Byron has his own secret life: choir directing at a country church on Sundays, and regular nighttime visits to the ex-minister Hightower. The fire mentioned at the end of chapter 1 is raging in the distance as Byron falls in love with Lena and unwittingly reveals Joe Brown to be the man she is seeking. Faulkner continues to stress the uneasy fit between time and human consciousness: "Byron is already in love, though he does not yet know it" (55).
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| Chapter 3 |
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The twenty-five-year history of the Gail Hightower in Jefferson reveals much about this man and also about the town. The town is correct in sensing that Hightower became Jefferson's Presbyterian minister in order to live in the town, not to serve its people. Hightower is obsessed with the death of his grandfather in Jefferson during the Civil War—"shot from the galloping horse" (62)—and this event, mixed up with religious ideas, becomes the recurrent subject of his sermons. The people can tolerate Hightower, but they cannot tolerate his wife's moral failings and scandalous death, which they somehow associate with Hightower's strange obsessions. The events in this chapter expose the fickleness and perversity of the town, rejecting but later reconciling with Hightower, like people playing dramatic roles and then dropping them (72-73). The town is particularly obsessed with sex and race. Because of the wife's scandal, it is assumed that 1) Hightower is "not a natural husband, a natural man" (71); and 2) that the black woman who cooks for him must be somehow involved. Here the theme of miscegenation (sexual relations between different races) is first introduced, and we see the madness that even the hint of miscegenation can unleash in Southern society. Note that Hightower becomes involved in delivering a black woman's stillborn baby because the woman's husband is reluctant to ask a white woman to phone the doctor (74): the society instructs black men to fear any contact with white women.
Every night Hightower keeps watch at sunset until he witnesses "that faint light which daygranaried leaf and grass blade suspire, making still a little light on earth though night itself has come." This declining light (the "light in August" of the title) is associated with the decline of his family and of his personal fortunes, but also with the belief in some remaining "honor and pride" (60). It is like the sign with his name on it—his "monument"—faded but still legible (57-58).
On this Sunday night, Hightower sees Byron Bunch approaching—sees him as a "puny, unhorsed figure moving with that precarious and meretricious cleverness of animals balanced on their hinder legs," a "cleverness of which the man animal is so fatuously proud and which constantly betrays him"—in other words, men are always slipping and falling (76). Why does Faulkner characterize Byron in such antiheroic and comic terms? How does this image of Byron contrast with Hightower's dream of his grandfather?
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| Chapter 4 |
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Byron tells Hightower the sensational facts about the fire on Saturday: it was Joanna Burden's house in flames, and she was found murdered, her head nearly severed from her body. Joe Brown, under interrogation, accuses Joe Christmas of the murder and, moreover, reveals that Christmas is part black. The identification of Christmas as a "nigger" seems to make his guilt more credible: "I always thought there was something funny about that fellow," says the marshal (99). Hightower immediately foresees that the consequences for a black man murdering a white woman are horrific: "Think, Byron; what it will mean when the people——if they catch....... Poor man. Poor mankind" (100).
There is a double drama of storytelling in this chapter. On one level, we watch Hightower's sympathetic appraisal of Byron's narration. Hightower expresses sympathy for Christmas (100) and senses something strange in Byron's feelings toward Lena (82). The second level of storytelling—the story within the story—is Byron's highly selective reporting of events to Lena , whom he wants to shield from Brown's embarrassing connection to Christmas. In the background, the sound of singing from the distant Presbyterian church serves as a reminder of the faith community from which Hightower has been ejected.
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| Chapter 5 |
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This chapter is the first to see events from Christmas's perspective. It chronicles the twenty-four-hour period, roughly from midnight to midnight, leading up to the murder of Joanna Burden. Christmas is preoccupied with the future (" Something is going to happen to me. I am going to do something " [104]) and looks to the past for an explanation ("That's it. Because she started praying over me" [105]). From the past, Christmas sees the words " God loves me too like the faded and weathered letters on a last year's billboard" (105)—reminiscent of the faded sign Hightower can see from his window (57-58). The implication is that Christmas and Hightower are linked—though they have never met—linked, perhaps, by a damaging experience of religion. Meanwhile, Faulkner's narrator offers more specific glimpses into the past, for example, Christmas's brutal sexual relationship with Joanna two years earlier (106).
Christmas's experiences during this period reveal the complexity of his racial identity. Despite the rumor of his black blood, Christmas's "body grow[s] white out of the darkness" in the headlights of a car. Then he yells, "White bastards!" to the people in the car, as if to separate himself from their whiteness (108). Wandering through " Freedman Town ," a black section, he feels "as if the black life, the black breathing had compounded the substance of breath" (114). In the voices of black women he feels suffocated by "the lightless hot wet primogenitive Female," a passage suggesting that blackness and femininity are somehow linked in Christmas's mind. Escaping to the "higher street" where white people live, he observes their family lives, and thinks, "That's all I wanted" (115). Later he passes a group of blacks, one of whom looks at him and says, "It's a white man.... What you want, whitefolks?" (117). Christmas feels cut off from the white world, but unrecognized, and overwhelmed, by the black world. He is like a "phantom, a spirit, strayed out of its own world, and lost" (114).
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| Chapter 6 |
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Joe Christmas's earliest memories center around an orphanage where, when he was five years old, he had a traumatic experience that changed his life forever. In this experience, the novel's themes of sex and race, and the additional motif of eating, are closely intertwined. Christmas eats the worm-shaped toothpaste in the dietitian's room—a kind of "forbidden fruit"—and at the same time accidentally witnesses the dietitian having sex with a young medical intern. He vomits from eating too much toothpaste, and is discovered. The dietitian calls him, "You little nigger bastard!" (122): moral transgression and blackness are linked from this early stage. From this moment, the dietitian and Christmas keep their eyes on each other but completely misunderstand each other's intentions: while Christmas expects punishment for eating the toothpaste, the dietitian expects Christmas to report her sexual activity to her supervisors (in fact, Christmas is too young to have any understanding of sex). This misunderstanding is one of several cases in the novel where looking leads to ignorance rather than knowledge. What are some other examples?
The orphanage, a place for children without families, is in fact a place of strange, largely unspoken and hateful, ties between people. The connection between the dietitian and Christmas opens up a tie between the dietitian and the old janitor as well: she senses that he has been watching, and hating, Christmas for much longer than she has. For his part, the janitor has had his eye on the dietitian as guilty of "woman-sinning and bitchery" (128), while the dietitian considers the janitor as someone to manipulate to take revenge on Christmas. Indeed, the janitor has been watching Christmas, and Christmas has always sensed "something between them that did not need to be spoken," which, were he older, he would have explained as: " He hates and fears me " (138). As a result of this triangle of hatred and mistrust, Christmas ends up with the McEacherns. What are the signs, at this point, of how Mr. McEachern will treat Christmas?
The chapter begins: "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders" (119). Memory, in other words, shapes our beliefs even before we fully know what is happening to us in life. Knowledge comes later—but those beliefs persist even after we have stopped remembering or stopped wondering about the past. How does this opening statement apply to these early events in the life of Joe Christmas?
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| Chapter 7 |
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Christmas's upbringing with the McEacherns extends the psychological patterns he has already developed in the orphanage. Properly speaking, it is no upbringing—no childhood—at all, because Christmas steels himself against any emotional involvement with his parents. Therefore, at the beginning of chapter 7 Faulkner immediately anticipates the ending of this tedious and fruitless period: On this day I became a man " (146).
Mr. McEachern, a "ruthless man who had never known either pity or doubt" (152), forces his son to memorize the Bible and whips him when he refuses; later, he whips him regularly, regardless of his behavior. His voice is "cold, implacable, like written or printed words" (149). What does this description suggest about McEachern's theory of fatherhood, and, for that matter, about his theory of the Bible? McEachern gives Joe a heifer in order to teach him the "responsibility of the owner to that which he owns under God's sufferance" (163). What does this remark reveal about McEachern's sense of himself as father?
Strangely, Joe accepts McEachern's punishments as "natural and inescapable" (167), as readily as McEachern expects that Joe will commit sin. From the moment he arrives at the McEacherns, in fact, Joe is "waiting for the part to begin which he would not like, whatever it was, whatever it was that he had done" (167). He still expects punishment for eating the toothpaste. McEachern sees growing up as a succession of sinful acts, and he acknowledges Joe is a man when he suspects him of lechery (sexual indulgence). McEachern's suspicion is correct (as will be revealed in chapter 8), but earlier when his four friends have sex with a black girl, Joe kicks the girl instead of having sex (156-57). What does this behavior reveal about Joe Christmas?
For his part, Joe marks his entry into manhood by, for the first time, telling McEachern, "Don't you hit me again" (165). Until this point, Joe tolerates his stepfather's whippings; it is his stepmother's private sympathy and resistance (stealthily bringing Joe food and hoarding coins) that he cannot stand: "the woman... with a woman's affinity and instinct for secrecy, for casting a faint taint of evil about the most trivial and innocent actions" (168). This instinct for secrecy links Mrs. McEachern to the dietitian, whose obsessive secrecy led to Joe's adoption by the McEacherns in the first place. Meanwhile, Joe harbors what he believes to be a much more terrible secret: his Negro blood.
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| Chapter 8 |
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Joe Christmas's affair with the waitress named Bobbie seems strangely inevitable. It deepens his understanding of female sexuality, taking him a step beyond his earlier slaughter of a sheep in order to somehow overcome the reality of a woman's monthly bleeding (184-86). On some level, his attraction to the waitress—beyond his natural sexual interest—reflects a desire for a circle of acceptance outside the home. Fittingly, this alternative home centers around a restaurant business, and his lover is an older woman who serves food, something with which Christmas has had troubled relationship since the toothpaste incident. In his behavior toward the waitress Joe exhibits physically the disrespect toward women he has developed by observing his stepfather's treatment of his stepmother, and by nurturing his own resentment of his mother. He strikes Bobbie, and she seems to tolerate this abuse. His stepparents unwittingly facilitate the affair: Mr. McEachern by bringing him to the cheap restaurant (because it is cheap), and Mrs. McEachern by providing a stash of ready change with which Joe pays Bobbie. The relationship has an element of prostitution (Bobbie has other such lovers too), but for both there seems some tenderness and personal feeling, more so for Joe. Lying naked with Bobbie, Christmas for the first time mentions his racial identity peacefully and openly (196-97).
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| Chapter 9 |
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The flimsiness of Christmas's relationships at the restaurant—with Bobbie, Max, and Mame—is here exposed. Christmas follows through with his warning to McEachern not to hit him anymore: when McEachern trails Christmas to a dance and strikes him (and insults Bobbie), Christmas floors him with a chair to the head. Adopting his stepfather's "complete faith in an infallibility of events" (in other words, predestination—a Puritan concept), and at the same time feeling a Faustian freedom from "honor and law" (207), Christmas steals his stepmother's trove of coins and heads into town on a horse to take Bobbie as his wife. However, the horse (his father's horse) runs out of steam, reducing Joe to a less heroic stature, a regular two-legged creature of the sort caricatured in Faulkner's narration at the end of chapter 3 (76). Christmas finds Max, Mame, Bobbie, and a male stranger with bags packed, ready to jump town, leaving Christmas to suffer the consequences of his attack on McEachern. Bobbie and her employers prove to be as transient as the customers they serve at the restaurant. At the end of the chapter, Joe finds himself flat on the floor, like his stepfather, listening to racial slurs coming from his onetime friends. The blonde woman Mame, though a minor character, cuts a rather striking figure: she has "that diamondsurfaced tranquillity which invested her with a respectability as implacable and calm as the white lifted glove of a policeman" (218). How does she compare and contrast to other female characters presented so far in the novel?
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| Chapter 10 |
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After the "severed wireends of volition and sentience" (will and consciousness) reconnect, Christmas rises from the floor—a strange kind of rebirth (almost reminiscent of Frankenstein's monster rising from the slab) in which he has no more self-knowledge than when he fell unconscious (220). What Christmas does have is freedom to roam the American continent—a particular modern, directionless American freedom that takes him south and north, to small towns and big cities, always returning to the whorehouses of cities. He uses his secret black identity mostly as a way of driving off prostitutes he can't pay, then brutally beats a prostitute who accepts blacks. He then switches to a black lifestyle, taking a dark-skinned lover, "trying to breath into himself the dark odor, the dark and inscrutable thinking and being of Negroes, and with each suspiration trying to expel from himself the white blood and white thinking and being" (225-26). The long "street" running fifteen years ends at the window of Joanna Burden. Christmas is thirty-three years old—the traditional age of Jesus at Crucifixion, confirming an association already apparent in his surname and his initials (J.C.). Gravitating toward the open kitchen window, Christmas steps in and helps himself to "an invisible dish" that takes him back twenty-five years to when McEachern was praying over the food and young Joe was anticipating the taste of "Field peas cooked with molasses" (230). Joanna catches Joe in this moment of reminiscence, and he remains frozen, stuck between his past and his future.
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| Chapter 11 |
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Joanna's "almost manlike yielding" to his sexual advances insults and confuses Christmas, "as if he struggled physically with another man for an object of no actual value to either" (234-35). He reads her seeming independence as "contempt" for himself, possibly related to his Negro blood. He retaliates with sexual brutality and childish rebellion, smashing the food she leaves out for him, a scene recalling his overturning the tray of food Mrs. McEachern brought him as a boy (154-55). When Joanna finally does "surrender completely" to him (241), she does it in words, that is, by telling the history of her family:
Calvin Burden: Joanna's grandfather. Son of a minister, Nathaniel Burrington, he ran away from home, became a Catholic and learned Spanish, eventually married a Huguenot (French Protestant) and became an anti-Catholic Protestant. Changed name to Burden.
Nathaniel Burden: Joanna's father. Son of Calvin Burden, he ran away from home and married a Mexican woman named Juana.
Calvin Burden (II): Joanna's half-brother. Son of Nathaniel Burden and Juana.
These three generations of men—Calvin, Nathaniel, and Calvin II—are staunchly anti-slavery. Calvin and Nathaniel move to Jefferson , Mississippi , "to help with freed negroes" after the Civil War (251). They are hated as "foreigners, strangers" (255). Calvin and his grandson Calvin II are killed on the same day by the ex-slaveholder Sartoris in Jefferson.
Although they hate slavery, Joanna's grandfather and father are both racists of a peculiar sort. Calvin believes blacks bear "the weight of the wrath of God" and are "black because of the sin of human bondage staining their blood and flesh" (247). (He is even uncomfortable with the dark skin of Nathaniel's Mexican wife, and that of his late Huguenot wife as well.) Calvin thinks that the black race will disappear through intermarriage with the white race. Nathaniel develops and alters his father's philosophy. He sees the black race as a curse placed on the white race for its sins: "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. And I seemed to see the black shadow in the shape of a cross." White people, Nathaniel tells Joanna, must "raise the shadow" in order to rise, but they can never raise blacks to the level of whites. The black man, then, is inferior to the white but, in another sense, he is "forever God's chosen own because He once cursed him" (253). Moreover, Nathaniel does not, like his father, think that the black race will disappear; God will preserve them.
Joanna has a great "burden" of family history to tell Joe, but Joe can only tell Joanna that he thinks one of his parents was part black—though he can't be sure. "If I'm not [part black]," he continues, "damned if I haven't wasted a lot of time" (254). This statement, coming at the exact center of the novel, expresses the tragedy of Joe's uncertainty about his racial origins in a society where race means everything. Joe has spent his life contending with the mystery of his origins, just as Joanna has spent her life contending with her precise knowledge of her own.
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| Chapter 12 |
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Joe's relationship with Joanna enters a second phase, characterized as "the abject fury of the New England glacier exposed suddenly to the fire of the New England biblical hell" (258). In other words, according to Joanna's New England Puritan background, her affair with Joe is sinful, but in this phase she embraces, explores, and celebrates the sin. She enjoys saying "forbidden wordsymbols" and shows "that rapt and tireless and detached interest of a surgeon in the physical body and its possibilities" (258). The "still, cold, contained figure of the first phase" and the corrupt figure of the second phase are like two sisters locked in combat (260-61). Like Joe, Joanna is a double figure, divided between these two sisters, and between her day self and her night self—just as Joe is a white man by day, but with Joanna a black man at night. In this second phase Joanna seems to be acting out a drama in which she "pass[es] through every avatar [embodiment] of a woman in love," including fictions of jealousy and secrecy (259). Joanna's behavior becomes all the more extreme because "she knew somehow that time was short, that autumn was almost upon her" (262). She tells Christmas she is pregnant, but as the months go by it becomes clear that she is not. Their relationship enters a third, non-sexual phase in which Joanna tries to get Joe to attend a Negro college and take over her philanthropic enterprises or, failing that, to get Joe to pray with her. Her stern religious voice—"It's not I who ask it. Kneel with me" (282)— is reminiscent of McEachern's. Not surprisingly, Joe refuses. The events of their final meeting are partly narrated, partly suggested: Joe comes to her bedroom with a razor blade, but Joanna pulls a gun on him when he refuses to pray. Joe departs with this gun, which was fired once but failed to shoot: it still has two bullets. Joe concludes that Joanna intended to kill him and then herself. Apparently, Christmas has slashed her throat with the razor blade.
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| Chapter 13 |
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The burning house is surrounded by a crowd frustrated because there is no murder suspect. Already some suggest that "Negro" (that is, black people in general) is to blame; some of the firemen, who can't fight the fire because there's no running water, start searching "for someone to crucify" (289). The people want vengeance because vengeance gives them something better to believe in than the business, law, and medicine that occupies their everyday lives (289). For the sheriff, the fire seems a "selfborn" agent that has destroyed the evidence of the crime scene. He sees human history ("that by and because of which he had had ancestors long enough to come himself to be") and crime as allied (290).
Faulkner's narration of the sheriff's investigative method is a damning study of the society's racism. To find out who was living in the cabin, the sheriff asks for "a nigger"—any black man will do (291). This black man is whipped until he reveals that two white men were living in the cabin. A white man confirms this information, revealing that 1) the whipping was effective (the black man was withholding information that he revealed only under torture); and 2) it was unnecessary, because the information revealed was already generally known. This incident shows in microcosm the problem of race relations in Jefferson. Black civil rights are blatantly ignored even by the chief law enforcement officer of the county, a man of "benevolent aspect" (287) who is otherwise a sympathetic character. The sheriff even threatens the black man with lynching by the crowd; this is the implication of saying that the crowd "wouldn't bother to put him into a jail" (293). In such a culture of abuse and fear, communication between races is poisoned: the black man is afraid to say what he knows until he is terrorized into speaking. His initial protest—"I can't remember because I cant know" (292)—negates the line in chapter 2 that is perhaps the novel's most famous: "Memory believes before knowing remembers" (119). What does this say about the truth that the legal system finds vs. the truth that Faulkner is seeking as novelist?
Byron's plan to move Lena to the cabin vacated by Christmas and Brown is resisted by Hightower. Hightower suspects Byron is trying to come between Lena and Burch—whom he considers to be man and wife, despite their lack of a formal marriage. Moreover, he thinks that Lena doesn't deserve a second chance with another man. By going through with his plan, Byron increases his confidence (for the first time, he doesn't stumble as he enters Hightower's house [312]) and reveals Hightower to be an aging man surrounded by "that smell of people who no longer live in life" (317-18)—in contrast to Byron's earlier characterization of this smell as the "odor of goodness" (299). Already Hightower seems to be in retreat from any involvement in the Joe Christmas case, despite his sympathy for that man. "I have bought immunity," he thinks (310-11)—that is, excused himself from getting involved by having endured years of rejection by the community. When at the end of the chapter Hightower picks up the "gutless" prose of Tennyson to console himself, the reader senses Faulkner's impatience with Tennyson as a writer and with Hightower as a character (318). Byron's risk-taking appears superior to Hightower's retreat.
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| Chapter 14 |
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Christmas enters a black church, tries to take the black minister from the pulpit, then knocks out the lights and disappears among the terrified black congregation hiding from him outside. He leaves an "unprintable" message on a cigarette container (326). What is the significance of Christmas's actions?
The bloodhounds set loose on Christmas are comically unsuccessfully at trailing him. Already Faulkner has explored the limitations of the senses in discerning truth. On a practical, and perhaps also on a symbolic level, why do the bloodhounds have trouble finding Joe Christmas?
Christmas evades his pursuers by exchanging shoes with a black woman wearing her husband's brogans. These black shoes symbolize for him the "black abyss which has been waiting, trying, for thirty years to drown him and into which now and at last he had actually entered" (331). At the same time, Christmas feels that he has escaped "an orderly parade of named and numbered days like fence pickets" within which he has lived for thirty years (331). The markers of orderly existence—day and night and regular meals—become blurred for him: whole days escape his notice, and he eats constantly without hunger or satisfaction. While Christmas's inner experience becomes a blur, his external identity becomes, for the first time, quite clear in the mind of the public: he is now a notorious Negro outlaw. When people see him, they flee. By the end of this chapter, Christmas seems to want to get caught, and he heads into Mottstown on a Friday (the day of Christ's Crucifixion) thinking: "I have been further in these seven days than in all the thirty years.... But I have never got outside that circle" (339). Why does Christmas want to get caught? What "circle" is he unable to escape?
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| Chapter 15 |
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Doc Hines is yet another character warped by the culture of racism. He preaches white supremacy in black churches, where the "Negroes believed that he was crazy, touched by God, or having once touched Him. They probably did not listen to, could not understand much of, what he said. Perhaps they took him to be God Himself, since God to them was a white man too and His doings also a little inexplicable" (344). He and his wife receive food from the black community, a fact the people of Mottstown willfully ignore.
Christmas's manner of getting caught doesn't play by the society's rules of race and crime, and this angers them: "For him to be a murderer and all dressed up and walking the town like he dared them to touch him, when he ought to have been skulking around and hiding in the woods, muddy, and dirty and running. It was like he never even knew he was a murderer, let along a nigger too" (350). The crowd wants to lynch Christmas without sending him to Jefferson for trial, but the rule of law prevails. How does the Mottstown sheriff persuade the crowd to let Christmas stand trial, and why are they persuaded?
Both Mr. and Mrs. Hines recognize Christmas but obviously each takes a different interest in him, and has a different reason for following him to Jefferson. The Hinses are an interesting variation on the McEacherns. Like McEachern, Hines has extreme personal convictions that have shaped the course of his family. Like Mrs. McEachern, Mrs. Hines has apparently submitted to her husband's madness; however, unlike Mrs. McEachern, Mrs. Hines seems to exercise real power over her husband, "like she had got something on him and he had to mind her" (352).
Note that most of this chapter (beginning on page 349) is narrated by the townspeople ("they"). What is the perspective of these townspeople? How is the perspective of these narrating townspeople different from the perspective of the townspeople participating in the events?
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| Chapter 16 |
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Byron associates Hightower with "the shabby remoteness from the world" evoked by Hightower's chair, continuing a theme Faulkner introduced in chapter 13. By asking for Hightower's assistance in the Christmas case, Byron works on the assumption that Hightower, although rejected by his church, is still "a man of God" (365). Hightower replies that the town took this role away from him; he had no choice. Byron stresses that Hightower did make a choice—to be a minister—and he needs to stick to it. At some level Hightower agrees, because the instinct to help Christmas is something he needs to fight against.
Like Christmas at the end of chapter 14, Hightower "lives dissociated from mechanical time," but he still listens to the church services regularly on Sundays and Wednesdays. In the Sunday evening prayer service Hightower can still feel "that peace which is the promise and the end of the Church." However, on this Sunday evening what he hears in the congregation's song is a pleading for death, a vengeance against God for making them who they are, and a rejection of pleasure and ecstasy. Specifically, he can hear "a dying salute... to the doomed man in the barred cell" whose "crucifixion" they support (366-68). Why, according to Hightower's thinking, are the people unwilling to pity Joe Christmas?
The visit of Mr. and Mrs. Hines to Hightower fleshes out the early history of Joe Christmas and reveals Hines to be the janitor at the Memphis orphanage (see chapter 6). Hines, like McEachern, is driven by absolute religious certainty. Just as a mysterious instinct leads McEachern to find Joe at the dance hall, so Hines follows a sixth sense to discover his daughter Milly with the circus man. Mrs. Hines claims the devil led him, but Hines himself says it was God. In all his actions—killing the circus man, allowing Milly to die, putting Joe in an orphanage and teaching him to hate himself as a "nigger"—Hines claims to be an instrument of God's will.
A black worker at the orphanage tells Joe he is worse than "a nigger": "You don't know what you are. And more than that you wont never know" (384). Indeed, the identity of Joe's father is unclear: he is either Mexican or part black. (The association of black and Mexican identity has already been seen in Joanna Burden's family; see chapter 11.) Aside from Hines's madness, the other overwhelming fact in this story is the love and hope that Mrs. Hines maintains for her grandson. Could she have done more to save Joe from her husband's madness? Why or why not?
Byron's request of Hightower at the end of the chapter is probably even more than Hightower expected: to create an alibi for Christmas by testifying that Christmas spent nights at Hightower's (including the night of Joanna's murder)—suggesting a homosexual relationship between the two. The people, Byron says, "would rather believe that about you than to believe that he [Christmas] lived with her like a husband and then killed her" (390). Is Byron's claim correct? Recall that the first impulse of the people was to blame Joanna's death on a Negro whom they "knew, believed, and hoped" had "ravished" her too (288).
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| Chapter 17 |
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Lena's baby is seen into the world by a group of people whose psychological relationships with the baby are much more complicated than Lena's. For Hightower, who serves as "midwife," this is a moment of "triumph and pride" (404); for the second time he has stood in for a doctor at a delivery, and this time the baby survives. He goes home to fall asleep to Shakespeare's Henry IV —"food for a man"—rather than to Tennyson (405). In Mrs. Hines's imagination, the baby becomes the newborn Joe Christmas, whose birth has evaded the watch of the sleeping Mr. Hines, so now the mother (Milly) will live. For Byron, the baby's birth is more of a challenge, its single cry (397) revealing to him two facts that he has tried to avoid: 1) " that she [Lena] is not a virgin "; and 2) that he will need to notify Lucas Burch about the birth of his child (401).
The birth has brought Hightower back into life, but only partly. He is still set against Byron's love for Lena, and advises Lena to "[s]end him away," characterizing Byron as a man who will never "catch up with you, because he has wasted too much time" (411). His advice doesn't recognize Lena's own feelings toward Byron, which are obviously strong when she cries at the prospect of losing him (412). What motivates Hightower's objections to the Byron-Lena relationship? What are his attitudes toward women? Note that his vision of Lena's destiny as one of giving birth (406) is followed by a vision in which he associates "fecund woman" with a bustling plantation full of slaves in the old South (407).
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| Chapter 18 |
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Byron arranges for the reunion of Lena and Lucas Burch (Brown) and prepares for his own departure from Jefferson. After watching Brown enter the cabin where Lena waits, Byron rides away on his mule, thinking he will "ride right off into nothing" and not look back. However, when he faces the real future of "terrific and tedious distance," he does look back and discovers Brown running from the cabin across an "almost toylike" landscape (424-25). The toy image anticipates the subsequent actions of both Byron and Brown, because both are playing a game—each a different game. Brown's is a game against an "Opponent" trying to keep him from the reward money. Byron's game is one of male honor, in which he must try to marry Lena to the father of her child. After taking a beating from Brown, Byron sees the pieces of this game "like discarded and fragmentary toys... which he had played with in childhood and then broken and forgot" (440). What is the significance of this imagery? Has Byron grown up somehow? Is the game over? Was it a childish game? In considering these questions, it is important to note that by this point Lena has already "released him [Brown] by her own will, deliberately" (432). In other words, Lena's female power dominates these relationships; she has already called an end to the game, but Byron and Brown continue to go through its motions. In their last view of each other Byron and Brown pass "one another as though on opposite orbits and with an effect as of phantoms or apparitions" (441).
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| Chapter 19 |
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By this point Faulkner's narrative has backed away from Christmas's consciousness, and the events surrounding his death are seen only through the minds of other characters. One explanation of Christmas's final actions is offered by Gavin Stevens, the District Attorney. Stevens is a character of complex loyalties: he is Harvard educated (thus a product of Yankee culture at some level), yet his own grandfather hated Joanna Burden's grandfather and brother, and Stevens himself enjoys talking to local country folks "in their own idiom" (444). Stevens's account is sophisticated and insightful—for example, he perceives that Mrs. Hines might have recommended Hightower to Christmas as a "sanctuary"—yet in the end he descends into the local racist idiom of black and white blood struggling within Christmas: the black blood driven toward violence, and the white blood toward Hightower's sanctuary (448-49).
Faulkner offers a second view of Christmas's death through the story of Percy Grimm, the young man who kills Christmas and castrates him. Grimm is a natural military type driven by "a sublime and implicit faith in physical courage and blind obedience, and a belief that the white race is superior to any and all other races and that the American is superior to all other white races and that the American uniform is superior to all men, and that all that would ever be required of him in payment for this belief, this privilege, would be his own life" (451). Grimm's case offers a study of how the extremist views of an individual and the swayable views of a crowd are a lethal mix. Grimm gains public respect leading a militia to protect Christmas from lynching, only to turn around and become the leader of the lynch mob. Like McEachern and Hines, Grimm is a man of "blind and untroubled faith in the rightness and infallibility of his actions" (459). He is described as being moved by a "Player" on the "Board" (462), recalling the game imagery associated with Byron and Brown in the previous chapter, and also the characterization of the townspeople as play-acting in their treatment of Hightower (chapter 3). What "Player" is moving Percy Grimm?
Grimm's words after castrating Christmas—"Now you'll let white women alone, even in hell" (464)—underscores the threat that the community has associated with Joanna Burden's murder from the beginning: the threat of the "Negro" against the white female, even though the specific white female in question was disliked by the community. In death, the body of Joe Christmas transcends the racist ideologies that ruined his life: "the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever" (465). Christmas's blood enters the memories of his killers, just as the fear of that blood infected his own memory from the dawn of his consciousness. In a sense, Christmas's blood has already troubled the memories of the townspeople: the fear of black blood tainting whiteness (a fear embodied in Christmas himself) is what motivates the lynching. But now that blood is "itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant" (465). What effect, if any, will this memory have on these men? What is Faulkner saying about the relationship between race and memory in the South?
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| Chapter 20 |
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Hightower grew up surrounded by three phantoms and a ghost. "The phantoms were his father, his mother, and an old negro woman" (474). His father was an abolitionist who served in the Civil War as a medical assistant treating "friend and foe alike" (473). His mother was a sickly woman whose weakness was probably aggravated because his father refused slave labor, thus leaving her to manage her own food during the War. The Negro woman, the third phantom, was his grandfather's cook, a slave who criticized her own Emancipation because the War killed her husband and her master. The ghost is the grandfather, a self-taught lawyer/slaveholder celebrated for his heroics in the War but killed unheroically, stealing chickens in a henhouse after honorably burning Yankee supplies in a garrisoned town. Hightower fixates on the grandfather's ghost (different from a phantom because never seen in the flesh) as a reaction against his father, whom he sees as "a foreigner" (475). Looking back to his grandfather, he feels he died with him twenty years before his own birth.
Hightower's obsession with his grandfather is one with his desire to be a minister. He sees the seminary as a place where he can live a ghostlike existence, "intact and on all sides complete and inviolable, like a classic and serene vase, where the spirit could be born anew sheltered from the harsh gale of living" (478)—recalling the image of the timeless "urn" that Lena moves across in chapter 1. His idea of marriage is also ghostlike, "a dead state carried over and existing still among the living like two shadows chained together with the shadow of a chain" (480). In his reflections, Hightower recognizes his responsibility for the death of his wife: living with the ghost of his grandfather, he "revealed to her not only the depth of my hunger but the fact that never and never would she have any part in the assuaging of it" (488). He recognizes, too, that he has failed his congregation, giving them "instead of the crucified shape of pity and love, a swaggering and unchastened bravo killed with a shotgun in a peaceful henhouse" (488). He even takes responsibility for his own persecution by the town—realizing that he unconsciously desired it, using martyrdom as an excuse for his own retreat into selfishness. His "greatest social sin" is having failed to satisfy the spiritual hunger of his congregation; he has participated in making "the churches of the world like a rampart, like one of those barricades of the middleages planted with dead and sharpened stakes, against truth and against that peace in which to sin and be forgiven which is the life of man" (486-87). Wearing the head bandage of his injuries from Joe Christmas, Hightower admits his own role in perpetuating the spirit of death that he heard in the church hymns on Sunday night, the spirit that called for the crucifixion of Christmas (see chapter 16).
In the dying light of August, Hightower envisions a halo full of the faces of the main characters in his life, including the unclear face of Christmas blending with the face of his killer Percy Gryce. Why are the identities of Joe Christmas and Percy Gryce connected? Hightower thinks he is dying, but he isn't. He thinks he should pray, but doesn't try. Instead, in words that echo those of Joe Christmas (see chapter 5), he laments the outcome of his life: "I wanted so little. I asked so little" (492). Finally he falls, once again, into dreaming about his grandfather's death. Hightower gains considerable self-knowledge in this chapter, but does he change?
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| Chapter 21 |
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After the conclusions of the Christmas and Hightower narratives (chapters 19 and 20, respectively), this last chapter, like the first, focuses on the travels of Lena Grove. The point of view, however, has shifted to an anonymous furniture dealer, who tells this story, in the dark, to his wife. This young narrator, speaking from his marriage bed, is able to depict these closing interactions between Lena and Byron with humor, sympathy, and foresight. After witnessing Byron's humiliation, he sees that Lena fully intends to marry Byron: her rebuffs to Byron and ongoing pursuit of Lucas are merely fictions cloaking her desire to travel a bit before "she settled down this time... likely... for the rest of her life" (506). Lena's words at the end of this chapter echo those at the end of the first: "A body does get around" (507). Is Lena the same as at the beginning, or has she grown? Has she gained knowledge? Memory? Are her travels in the end different from her travels in the beginning? |
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