LIGHT IN AUGUST
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that his people ever want. The violence may be "outworn," but it
is the human passion. He describes his chorus, the townspeople,
scurrying around Joanna Burden's house after her murder, looking
"for someone to crucify":
But there wasn't anybody. She had lived such a quiet life, attended
so to her own affairs, that she bequeathed to the town in which she
had been born and lived and died a foreigner, an outlander, a kind of
heritage of astonishment and outrage, for which, even though she had
supplied them at last with an emotional barbecue, a Roman holiday
almost, they would never forgive her and let her be dead in peace and
quiet. Not that. Peace is not that often. So they moiled and clotted,
believing that the flames, the blood, the body that had died three years
ago and had just now begun to live again, cried out for vengeance, not
believing that the rapt infury of the flames and the immobility of the
body were both affirmations of an attained bourne beyond the hurt and
harm of man. Not that.
We can never let the event go, for that would mean an end to
the human history that is lived in retrospection. Just as Faulkner's
language is full of words, like "avatar" and "outrage," which are
really private symbols left over from his unceasing meditation, and
just as his style is formed from the fierce inner pressure of problems
which give no solution, so the actual texture of
Light in August
sug–
gests, in the tension and repetition of certain verbal motifs, that man
can never quite say what the event originally meant, or what he is
to think of it now. Language never quite comes up to the meaning
of events. To adapt Faulkner's phrase, it is not that, or that. The
townspeople exist in
Light in August,
as in so many Faulkner novels,
to ask questions whose very function is to deny the possibility of an
answer. Faulkner's grim sarcastic asides show that he views language
as in some basic sense unavailing. The astounding repetition of cer–
tain key phrases and verbal rhythms in his work signifies his return
back and back on the question.
Call the event history, call it the Fall: man is forever engaged
in meditating, not the past itself, for that would bring knowledge,
but man's guilt, for that may bring freedom. Guilt, not history, is
the nightmare from which all of Faulkner's deepest characters are
trying to escape. The guilt arises from man's endless complicity in
his own history, as when the innocent, gravely staring child that Joe
