530
PARTISAN REVIEW
with their bondage to the past, that seems to me the essence of what
Faulkner's characters are always thinking about.
Joe Christmas, Joanna Burden, Gail Hightower-each of these
is the prisoner of his own history, and is trying to come to terms
with this servitude in his own mind. That none of them can ever lift
himself out of the circumstances that enclose him, Faulkner sees as
the condition of man. Man is engulfed in events that are always too
much for
him.
Hightower, listening to Byron Bunch make plans for
Lena's confinement, thinks:
"It
is because so much happens. Too
much happens. That's it. Man performs, engenders, so much more
than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds out that
he can bear anything. That's it. That's what is so terrible. That he
can bear anything, anything." Endurance, as we know, is the key
word in Faulkner's system of values. At least this was so up to
A
Fable.
There, Faulkner himself has told us, the highest value is rep–
resented not by the young Jewish pilot officer who said, "This is
terrible. I refuse to accept it, even if I must refuse life to do so";
not by the old French quartermaster general who said, "This is ter–
rible, but we can weep and bear it"; but by the English battalion
runner who said, "This is terrible, I'm going to do something about
it."
Light in August
does not arrive at this step. Man never thinks
of changing the world; it is all he can do to get a grip on it,
to understand some part of what has happened to him and to endure
all of it. Any release that occurs is a purely individual one, as when
Hightower finally frees himself, in the one profoundly unselfish act
of his life, by delivering Lena's baby. In the freshness of the early
morning, after Lena has given birth, Hightower feels that he is in
touch with the earth again-the symbol throughout the book of
rightness, authenticity, peace. But the earth is not his life, as it is
Lena Grove's. Man's highest aim in this book is to meet his destiny
without everlasting self-concern. Yet this profoundly tragic cast to
Light in August,
so much like a Hardy novel in the implacable pattern
that unrolls against a country background and in the inarticulate still–
ness of its leading characters, is matched by Faulkner's ironic aware–
ness that man, even in his endless brooding over the event, can never
stop, that the event is nothing compared with the speculation that
follows and in a sense replaces it. One of the most revealing phrases
in Faulkner's rhetoric is: "not that"-it is not peace, not an end,
