528
PARTISAN REVIEW
within it. Describing Doc Hines, Faulkner notes about him "a quality
of outworn violence like a scent, an odor," and the actual violence
of Joe Christmas is always felt about him even when he sits rigidly
still at counters like a man in prayer. When Joe's back history is run
off in the rapid newsreel style of Dos Passos, one feels not only his
personal insignificance, but the just-leashed violence of American
life of which Joe is, in his way, completely the creature:
He stepped from the dark porch, into the moonlight, and with
his bloody head and his empty stomach hot, savage, and courageous
with whiskey, he entered the street which was to run for fifteen years.
The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again,
but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one
street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene, broken by in–
tervals of begged and stolen rides, on trains and trucks, and on country
wagons with he at twenty and twentyfive and thirty sitting on the seat
with his still, hard face and the clothes (even when soiled and worn)
of a
city
man and the driver of the wagon not knowing who or what
the passenger was and not daring to ask.
Yet it is a stillness of thought that generally pervades the book, in
the form of enormous meditations by which Faulkner tries to lift
his material into place. The stillness is interrupted by shooting, burn–
ing, beating, the barking of bloodhounds and Percy Grimm's mu–
tilation of Joe Christmas, which interrupt like the sound which
nails must make when they are driven into wood through human
flesh. Yet, just behind this obvious figure of the Roman soldier
torturing Christ, there is a pastoral world.
As
Irving Howe has
noted, the arrangement of the book "resembles an early Renais–
sance painting-in the foreground a bleeding martyr, far to the
rear a scene of bucolic peacefulness, with women quietly working
in the fields." Despite its violence,
Light in August
is one of the
few American novels that remind one of the humanized and tranquil
landscape in European novels. Its stillness is rooted in the peaceful
and timeless world which Lena Grove personifies and in which she
has her being. It is the stillness of the personal darkness inside which
Joe Christmas lives. But this stillness is also the sickly, after-dark
silence of the Reverend Gail Hightower sitting in his study, with his
stale clothes and stale thoughts, going over and over the tragedy of
