526
PARTISAN REVIEW
the shadow with you. But you can never lift it to your level. I see
that now, which I did not see until I came down here. But escape
it you cannot. The curse of the black race is God's curse. But the
curse of the white race is the black man who will be forever God's
chosen own because He once cursed Him." The grounds of
this
obsession, then, can be a compassion for the Negro that is as pro–
found as hatred, and equally removed from brotherhood. This com–
passion seems to me the essence of Faulkner's approach to Joe Christ–
mas, and the triumph of the book is Faulkner's ability to keep
his
leading character a shadow, and yet to make us feel
all
his suffering.
Compare Joe Christmas with the types of the Northerner, the city
man, the "stranger" in Southern writing, to say nothing of the Negro,
and you realize that where so many neo-orthodox Southern literary
critics are hysterically fearful of the "stranger," Faulkner, by a tre–
mendous and moving act of imagination, has found in Joe Christmas
the incarnation of "man"- that is, of modern man, reduced entirely
to his unsupported and inexplicable human feelings. There are no
gods in Faulkner's world; there are only men-some are entirely
subject to circumstances, some protest against them, some are even
moved to change them. The hero of
A Fable
is of the last; Joe
Christmas is of the first. He is human to us because of the experience
he undergoes, but his passivity is so great that he is finally a body
castrated, a mere corpse on a dissection table-or someone whose
body has been turned into the host, material for a ritual, so that his
last agony will earn
him
the respect he never earned while he was
alive. He is not, like the Christ of
A Fable,
a man who gives new
meaning to life; like Benjy in
The Sound and the Fury,
he is an
incarnation of human suffering, unable to speak-except in the tre–
mendous action near the end of the book when he stops running
from his pursuers and waits for them, and attains in this first moment
of selfhood, the martyrdom that ends it.
We see Joe Christmas always from a distance. This distance
from ourselves to
him
seems to me the key to the book, for it explains
why Joe exists for us principally as a man who is described, not
seen. He is so far away that we cannot see him; he is reported to
us. And this distance is filled with the stillness of a continuous medi–
tation.
Light in August
tells a story of violence, but the book itself
