Light in August: Faulkner's Best

Mr. and Mrs. Buce just finished a readaloud of Faulkner’s Light in August, and I suspect it’s probably his best. Kind of a shame, then, that it took me 40 years since my first Faulkner to get around to it. And I have to admit that, much as I admire it, still it didn’t knock me flat the way it would have back in the 60s. But that’s life: a lot of other things don’t knock me over any more, either. And hey, it is probably a good idea to save some of the good stuff for dessert.

I think you can divide Faulkner novels (and stories) into those that try to make a point and those that just try to make themselves. That’s why my favorite remains The Hamlet, which has no pretension beyond being comic, sympathetic and comprehensive—not as rich in detail as, say Middlemarch or Hundred Years of Solitude, but almost their match in conveying a sense of place. Absalom is the other end of the continuum, the most freighted with Meaning. It’s fine overall and wonderful in parts, but it never quite wriggles out from under its freightload.

Light in August carries almost as much freight (it has a protagonist whose initials are “J.C.”), but it bears the load more lightly, woven more convincingly into the thread of the story. And while it is only incidentally comic, it has many of the virtues of The Hamlet—a comprehensive and multidimensional portrait of a place and a people unique in time. Faulkner also brings off, more smoothly and convincingly than in Absalom, that sense of history that lies like an incubus on the backs of the living. Joe Christmas has a past; so does Gail Hightower; so did Joanna Burden before Joe murdered her and so, by indirection, we can infer does the whole community.

Light in August does bear (what Faulkner novel does not?) some of the peculiarly Faulknerian overwriting that could win a prize as parody on itself. Yet here (as with Dreiser and maybe Balzac) there is a mystery: the writing is so convincingly bad you almost wouldn’t have it any other way. And anyway, there isn’t very much of it.

I (rather, "we") reread Absalom, and Sound and the Fury and The Hamlet just a couple of years back. Newly invigorated, I think it would be a good idea to go back and reread some more.

N.b.: As I guess I wrote before, still for a Faulkner newbie, I wouldn’t recommend any of these. If you must do a novel, do Sartoris or The Unvaquished—rich, forceful storytelling, a lot of good background on the larger saga, and no heavy symbolism. But best of all is still Malcolm Cowley’s Viking Portable Faulkner, convincing in its own right and irrefultable proof that Faulkner wrote not a bunch of novels but one big novel of which (most of) the others are a part.