520
PARTISAN REVIEW
earth and the road which man must travel on it, against which are
set images of fire and murder, of aimless wandering and of flight,
embodied in the figure who soon enters the book and dominates it
in his remorseless gray anonymity. Joe Christmas does not even have
a name of his own, only a mocking label stuck on him at the orphan–
age where he was deposited one Christmas eve. "Joe Christmas" is
worse than any real name could be, for it indicates not only that he
has no background, no roots, no name of his own, but that he is re–
garded as a
tabula rasa,
a white sheet of paper on which anyone can
write out an identity for him and make him believe it.
It is the contrast of Lena Grove and Joe Christmas, of the
country girl and the American wanderer, who is a stranger even to
himself, the ultimate personification in modern loneliness, that frames
the book-literally so, since Lena Grove begins and ends it, while
Joe Christmas's agony and crucifixion are enacted as within a circle
round which he runs
in
an effort to catch up with himself. When
he finds that he cannot run out of this circle and stands still at last
in order to die, the book comes back to Lena Grove and ends on
her ritualistic procession up the road with her baby and Byron
Bunch-Faulkner's version of the Holy Family. By the time we have
finished
Light in August,
we have come to feel that the real great–
ness of Faulkner in this book (and indeed of his extraordinary com–
passion) lies in the amazing depth which he brings to this contrast
of which American writers are so fond, particularly in Southern
writing, between the natural and the urban, between Lena Grove's
simplicity and the forces personified by Joe Christmas's walking all
smooth city pavements with the same isolation and indifference, eat–
ing. at the coldly smooth wooden counter, and murder. Faulkner
even leads up to a strange and tortured fantasy of Joe Christmas as
Lena Grove's still unnamed son. There is virtually an annunciation
to Lena, in the moving last phase of the book when Lena, delivered
of her child just as Joe Christmas is running for his life, hears Mrs.
Hines, Christmas's grandmother, calling the baby "Joey"-he who
is a "nigger" murderer, and whom Lena has never seen. The reader
comes to this with a shock, only because of Faulkner's reckless, des–
perate eagerness to wrest all the possible implications from
his
ma–
terial, to think it out interminably, since there is no end to all one's
possible meditations round and round the human cycle. One of the
