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.

Sho

I’ve always thought that William Faulkner has an uncanny ear for the rhythms and patterns of Southern speech. But he doesn’t do it (as Mark Twain does it) with “dialect spelling;” he trusts the language to carry itself.

One noteworthy exception is the N-word for African Americans (Faulkner wrote before “black”). Most of the time, Faulkner says “Negro” (which, I assume, most of his characters would have pronounced “Nigrah.”). Sometimes he says “Nigger.” I don’t think this happens by accident: I think Faulkner is very particular about when his characters say which.

Another possible exception is the word that Faulkner rights as “sho.” This is a word that looks like “sure,” as in “yes, certainly.” But I call it only a possible exception, because in context, I am not at all sure that “sho” does mean “sure.” Rather, read in context, you can hear the word taking on a subtle and complex network of meanings that tell you a lot about the characters and the world they live in. Here are some examples from the opening pages of Light in August, the current readaloud selection at the Buce library, together with suggested translations:

“I reckon I got a few days left.”

“Sho.” (15) [Lady, you’ve got a peck of trouble ahead, but I am not going to aggravate the issue by rubbing your nose in it.]

I wouldn’t be beholden,” she says. “I wouldn’t trouble.”

“Sho.” (Id.) [In fact, you will be trouble, but I will not embarrass you by saying so.]

“I’d sho by that cultivator at that figure. If you don’t buy it, I be dog if I aint a good mind to buy it, myself, at that price. I reckon the fellow that owns it aint got a span of mules to sell for about five dollars has he?”

“Sho.” (11) [You’re baiting me now, but I won’t take the bait—and note the earlier “sho,” meaning (for once) just “certainly.”]

“You’ll have to say goodbye to her for me. I had hopened to see her myself, but …..”

“Sho.” (25) [It’s lucky for you she is not here.]

“It’s been right kind,” she said.

“Sho.” (Id.) [Thank you.]

As it happens, all these examples come from the speech of Henry Armistead, the kindly farmer who comes to the aid of Lena in her distress. But Henry is not the only one who says "sho." Talking about the mysterious Brown who gads about like “a worthless horse,” Byron says “But I reckon maybe the mares like him.” Mooney the foreman responds “Sho,” as in “Ha! I’ll bet he’s got girls in trouble all over North Mississippi!” (40) And on the next page, Mooney himself says “sho,” when he means “you’re probably right.” (41)

There is so much going on here—such a network of overlapping meanings. There is a kind of civility and tact, or at any rate disposition to sidestep conflict, but also a thread of irony, sometimes bitter, almost always stoic. Someone (Cleanth Brooks?) has argued that Faulkner characters are passive, witnessing and accepting the world and not doing much about it. This is true in its way, but most of them are also dirt-poor, uneducated and unskilled, not knowing how to do much except to bear with dignity. It’s a tough like. It’s not going well, and it won’t end well. But there is no point in making a fuss over things you can’t change. Sho.

Page refs are to the Vintage Books paperback edition, 1987.

You Gotta Read Faulkner

"Nobody," says Samuel Johnson, "ever reads a book he was given." When it comes to imposing my literary tastes on others, I try to restrain myself, but I make one exception: Faulkner. I didn't get Faulkner the first time around. It was my friend Ivan (aka Underbelly's Alabama bureau) who insisted I take another chance. By that time I was working as a newspaper reporter, covering politics in Kentucky, which might have made things easier. Anyway, I am eternally grateful for having been noodged into the second chance -- "came to scoff, and stayed to pray," as they say in that part of the world. So I feel I owe it to folks to try to carry on the tradition. Here's the latest--an email to a friend, based in part on what I learned from Ivan, 45 years ago:

You really owe it to yourself to take another shot at Faulkner.

The thing is that Faulkner wrote, not a bunch of novels, but one long novel, like Proust. They just package it in parts. So do this:

Get the Viking Portable Faulkner, with the Malcolm Cowley intro.

Read “That Evening Sun.” If you do not think it the most perfect story you ever read, then exit, there is no hope for you.

Still here? Then read “Spotted Horses.” If you do not think it is the funniest story you ever read, then exit, there is no hope for you.

Still here? Go read the Cowley introduction. From then on, you can be on your own, but I would suggest continuing with the entire reader, skipping “The Bear” which is a big moony overloaded piece of English teacher crap.

Then perhaps The Hamlet. Then several others that don’t claim the attention of English teachers, but are the better for it: Sartoris, The Unvanquished, maybe Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner tries the mystery).

The monuments are still there. Absalom, Absalom! has wonderful parts, but it is heavy weighted with Meaning. Sound and Fury is a literary stunt, but a good novel anyway. It is four overlapping stories from overlapping points of view. Begins with the idiot child (“Tale told by an idiot/Full of sound and fury,” get it?). Skip that, and read Jason IV (“the only sane Compson since the battle of Culloden”). Then Quentin, then Benjy the idiot, and finally Dilsey.

As I Lay Dying is a bit of a stunt also, but perfectly readable, if you like stories about decaying bodies.

From there on you will make your own decision as to whether to reads the rest. I never read Mosquitos. Or A Fable. Or Light in August, although that last I think I should read.

There, now that wasn't so hard, was it?

The Long and Short of It

Marginal Revolution has been puzzling over short books v. long books. Let me weigh in with a personal observation.

I wasn’t much of a reader as a kid. Given the choice, I always voted for short stories because they were, well, short.

Imagine my surprise, the summer I was 14 when I fell into W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and more or less sank—conquered, for the first time, with the sense of what it was to be totally enveloped by a book, as an alternate life, so fully realized that I didn’t want it to end. I had the experience a few times more in my adolescence—I remember reading one by Thomas B. Costain, though at this point I can’t remember much of anything except the sense of being committed to it (it might have been this one). I remember reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden, (and being struck, inter alia, by the Chinese body-servant who reads Marcus Aurelius in his cupboard-bed (and never made it to the movie at all)).

But the real breakthrough for me was, and remains, War and Peace, one novel which I have always insisted is too short. It’s a same-only-different world, as convincing as one’s own, but more luminous and intense. I did not, and do not, want it to end.

I’ve come to feel the same way about a few other novels in life, mostly the usual suspects: Middlemarch, Remembrance of Things Past, that sort of thing, you get the drift. But my immediate point is: a long novel is not just a short story made longer. A long novel can achieve a kind of richness and texture a short story (alone) can never do.

There are complications. Some short-story novels can give the complete-world feel through extended exposure: I think of Bernard Malamud’s “parables of New York immigrant life,” as they are called, or Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories. And as if to complicate matters War and Peace itself is not so much a novel as a series of intensely articulated episodes, almost any one of which would be enough on its own to make the reputation of almost any lesser writer. On the other hand, a few novelists—Faulkner, Balzac—carry the “fully realized world” over their entire corpus. Indeed, I haven’t any idea where to put Proust: did he write one big book, or a series of interlocked novellae?

I don’t mean to knock the idea of the individual short story; plenty of them are little jewels. Indeed, some of the most arresting achieve the novelistic trick of capturing a whole world (Faulkner’s That Evening Sun is a favorite example). It’s wonderful. But it’s not the same thing. The relationship is not linear. A novel is not just a short story writ long.

Faulkner at his Best: Shade Tree Justice

Michael Gilleland has a characteristically elegant and graceful post up under the title of “Under the Greenwood Tree,” where he calls together an array of classical texts on the theme of, well, of sitting under a tree.

It’s a genre almost impossible to contain and he was wise to limit himself to a few classical examples. Eve ate from the tree of knowledge; we flourish like the green bay tree; “Even as are the generations of leaves such are those likewise of men;” (Homer, Iliad: Lang, Leaf and Myers trans.); and I got my ’65 Mustang rebuilt by a “shade tree mechanic.”

Michael (quoting) recalls the Guatama dispensing wisdom from under a Bo Tree. One of my favorites in the genre may be a riff on the Guatama. It is the scene in William Faulkner’s novel The Hamlet, where the Justice of the Peace presides—or attempts to preside—over law-as-theatre in Yoknapatapaw County. Faulkner’s stock seems to be down these days, and The Hamlet has never quite made it into the first tier among academic Faulknerians—not as freighted with meaning as Absalom, Abasalom! not as abstruse as Sound and the Fury, not as grotesque as As I Lay Dying. But as an exemplar of unsullied pastoral comedy, it has no equal (you get some of the same flavor from the sheep-shearing in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, but the comparison only goes so far):

[T]he wagons, the buggies and the saddled horses and mules … moved out of the village on that May Saturday morning, to converge upon Whiteleaf store eight miles away, coming not only from Frenchman’s Bend but from other directions too… . So by the time the Frenchman’s Bend people began to arrive, there were two dozen wagons, the teams reversed and eased of harness and tied to the rear wheels in order to pass the day, and twice that many saddled animals already standing about the locust grove beside the store and the site of the hearing had already been transferred from the store to an adjacent shed where in the fall cotton would be stored. But by nine oclock it was seen that even the shed would not hold them all, so the palladium was moved again, from the shed to the grove itself. The horses and mules and wagons were cleared from it; the single chair, the gnawed table bearing a thick bible which had the appearance of loving and constant use of a piece of old and perfectly-kept machinery and an almanac and a copy of Mississippi Reports dated 1881 and bearing along its opening edge as single thread-thin line of soilure as if during all the time of his possession its owner (or user) had opened it at only one page though that quite often, were fetched from the shed to the grove; a wagon and four men were dispatched and returned presently from the church a mile away with four wooden pews for the litigants and their clansmen and witnesses; behind these in turn the spectators stood—the men, the women, the children, sober, attentive, and neat. Not in their Sunday clothes to be sure, but in the clean working garments donned that morning for the Saturday’s diversion of sitting about the country store or trips into the county seat, and in which they would return to the field on Monday morning and would wear all that week until Friday night came round again. The Justice of the Peace was a neat, small, plump old man resembling a tender caricature of all grandfathers who ever breathed, iin a beautifully laundered though collarless white shirt with immaculate starch-gleaming cuffs and bosom, and steel-framed spectacles and neat, faintly curling hair. He sat looking at them…

--William Faulkner, The Hamlet 356-7
(Vintage International ed. 1991)

For my money, this is pure Faulkner, mesmerizing, but stopping just a gnat’s crotchet short of self-parody. The whole story combines lyric charm with falling-down comedy—funny enough, I think, to rank with the very best of Mark Twain and, of course, the very best of Faulkner himself.