"Light in August" William Faulkner

“Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.” 

― William Faulkner, Light in August

I won't pretend to be able to analyze Faulkner's writing.  I have read some literary analyses of some of his works, but mostly I read Faulkner to capture the flavor of the time and the place.  This was one of the books on my mother's bookshelf, but I don't know if she had read it or not.  It was written two years after she was born, and I imagine that the society it describes is the same as what she grew up in even though she was born across the Mississippi.

I spent 6 weeks in Oxford the summer I was 17 and visited Rowan Oak.  I have difficulty imaging the area as Faulkner saw it some 40-odd years earlier, but I did picture his home as the home of Joanna Burden, conjuring up a slave shack in the nearby woods where Lucas Burch and Joe Christmas lived.

While I was visiting my family in southern Arkansas a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about the dirt in the road beside our house.  In the summer when it was dry the dirt on the road was incredibly fine having been ground from the road bed by the traffic.  You could hold it in your hand and it would pour out of it.  We would fill empty coke bottles with it and watch it flow back onto the road.  This is how I imagine the roads to be as Lena Grove is walking across Alabama and Mississippi looking for Lucas Burch, the father of the baby she is about to give birth to.

Like "Intruder in the Dust", this story is an examination of the relationships between black and white, but I found the constant struggle between man and woman much more powerful.  Joanna is both lover and parent to Joe Christmas, wanting to provide for him a life that she sees for him and ignoring the life he wants.  Although the daughter of abolitionists and a supporter of colleges for Negroes, she cannot place herself in the mind of Joe, who has been passing for white.  She knows nothing of the psychological abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of a fundamentalist adopted father.  I would have to reread the passages, but I suspect that when Joe 'discovers' that Joanna is not a young woman, it is not only the differences in their ages that he is struggling with.

The variety of the dances between men and women is told by many of the characters.  The former minister Gail Hightower lives a life of singular purpose never leaving the town despite the disgrace he suffers from the way in which his wife lived and died.  Byron Bunch does not expect to love, but finds he is devoted to Lena Grove regardless of her lack of affection for him.  He enables her to have her child, with Reverend Hightower's help, in relative comfort and safety.  His denial continues as he helps Lena search for Lucas Burch.  Lucas, for his own part, is a philanderer who has run and hidden from Lena, not able to engage in a relationship with a woman beyond the pleasures of the flesh.

Beyond the relationships between the main characters, Faulkner also gives insight into the loves and lusts of their parents and grandparents helping us to understand their motivations.  Personally I believe he writes about the true relationships between man and woman, which are never like the fairy tales we see on the screen.

Before I started in on his novels I didn't know what to expect from Faulkner, thinking his writing would be too difficult to understand.  And while I won't claim to a deep understanding, I am drawn to his dark, gritty insight into the human soul.