LIGHT IN AUGUST
523
The world is narrowing down to the contest between the good
Christian laborer, Byron Bunch, the very essence of the common
ordinary good man, and those who, like Lena's seducer, have either
taken on a name which is not their own, "Brown," a name too con–
ventional even to be
his
name, or who, like Joe Christmas, have no
name to begin with.
This contrast is familiar enough in Southern opinion, and one
can find the same horror of miscegenation, of uprooting, of the city
man's anonymity, in any expression of Southern agrarianism. But
Faulkner does not stop at the abstraction of the alien: he carries it
on, he carries it out, to astonishing lengths. And it is this intensity
of conception that makes the portrait of Joe Christmas compelling
rather than believable, makes him a source of wonder, of horror,
yet above all of pity, rather than of pleasure in 'the creation of a
real human being. For Joe Christmas remains, as he is born, an
abstraction; from the moment he appears, "there was something
definitely rootless about him, as though no town nor city was his,
no street, no walls, no square of earth his home." He comes to work
in the only clothes he has, a serge suit and a white shirt; and Byron
Bunch, watching him, knows that Joe Christmas "carried his knowl–
edge with him always as though it were a banner, with a quality ruth–
less, lonely, and almost proud." So from the moment Joe Christmas
appears, he is seen as what others say about him, he is only a thought
in other people's minds. More than this, he is looked at always from
a distance, as if he were not quite human, which in many ways
he is not.
We
see Joe Christmas from a distance, and this distance is the
actual space between him and
his
fellows. It is also the distance
between the name "Joe Christmas," which is clownish, and the
actual suffering of someone who has to live up to the non-humanity
of his name, to the obsession (founded on hearsay, ndt on actual
evidence) that his father had " some" Negro blood in
him.
Joe
Christmas, then, is really "Man" trying to discover the particular
kind of man he is. He is an abstraction created by the racist mania
of
his
grandfather, a former preacher whose tormented life is spent
insisting that Negroes are guilty in the eyes of God and must serve
white men. When his daughter ran away with a "Mexican" circus
hand, Doc Hines not merely killed the man, and, after his daughter
