The Stone and the Crucifixion: Faulkner’s “Light in August”

Without ado I wish to direct attention to the symbolic texture of Light in August. This texture is very much a matter of mechanics and dynamics—a poetry of physics. Repeatedly Faulkner presents appearance, event, and even character in the images of stasis, motion, velocity, weight, lightness, mass, line, relative position, circle, sphere, emptiness, fullness, light, and dark. The phrase “light in August” has at least two meanings. As Mr. Malcolm Cowley informs us in his Portable Faulkner, the phrase means “light” as opposed to “heavy” and refers to a pregnant woman who will give birth in August. And it also means “light” as opposed to “dark”—an affirmation of life and human spirit. Light in August may be described, in Faulkner’s own words (though he is describing something else), as “the mechanics, the theatring of evil.” This is not a complete or fully fair description of Faulkner’s novel, but it is complete and fair enough to demand that we look at the novel from this point of view—and that we finally ask, How successful is the author in extending his account of the mechanics and theatring of evil into an account of the human situation?

The reader of Light in August will be puzzled in the first few pages by what may be called “the string of beads image.” We read that the wagon in which Lena Grove rides through the August afternoon is like “a shabby bead upon a mild red string of road” and that the village beside the railroad, from which she begins her long journey, is like “a forgotten bead from a broken string.” Later our attention is called to the row of iron bars in the fence which surrounds the orphanage of Joe Christmas’ childhood, to the identical windows of a street car, to a picket fence, and to the rows of identical white houses in which the lower-middle-class whites live. To these images of linear discreteness Faulkner opposes images of the curve. Lena Grove—searching for Lucas Burch, the father of her unborn child—passes through “a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes from day to dark and dark to day”; but her mode of action and of consciousness is not of the order of the “string of beads.” She is “like something moving forever and without progress across an urn.” For her the road is not linear but like a string “being rewound onto a spool.” These images of linear discreteness and curve are extended into one of the central images of the book: flight and pursuit.