LIGHT IN AUGUST
533
was free and good and natural; but something inexplicable, a curse,
was put on it. Perhaps the curse is nothing more than man's effort
to get the better of events that are "too much for us"; the evil lies
in arrogance. Doc Hines hears God addressing him personally, order–
ing him to act for Him. Calvin MacEachern, Joe Christmas's adopted
father, starves and beats him because he cannot memorize portions
of the catechism on order. "He asked that the child's stubborn heart
be softened and that the sin of disobedience be forgiven him also,
through the advocacy of the man whom he had flouted and dis–
obeyed, requesting that Almighty be as magnanimous ,as himself, and
by and through and because of conscious grace." Even Joanna Bur–
den tries to play God to her Negro charges.
Light in August
is one
of the sharpest criticisms of Calvinism ever written, but unlike so
many Southern writers on Puritanism, Faulkner knows that the same
religion is found in Doc Hines and Joanna Burden. The guilt that
is the mainstay of their faith is embodied in the assumption of exces–
sive authority by fathers, law-givers, teachers, ministers. Everyone
wants to play God to the orphan Joe Christmas. In Faulkner's eyes,
life is an ironic and tragic affair that is beyond human rule and
mis–
rule; but Calvinists like Doc Hines and Calvin MacEachern, or the
children of Calvinists like Joanna Burden, even murdering simon–
pure "patriots" like Percy Grimm, take life in their hands, they
dominate, and they murder. Joe Christmas is their favorite charge;
he is the man "things are done to." His final ignominy comes when
his mistress, Joanna Burden, regarding him in her new phase as a
Negro charge to be "brought up," tells him that she wants him to
go to school so that he can become a lawyer. And it is at this point
that he breaks.
It
is this point that has always been the signature
of the everlasting victim. Other men are the law-givers; the law is
passed out to him, through him, inflicted on him. And so finally
he murders and dies, a pure victim, shot, castrated, treated like a
thing. It is the final ignominy. But in the very unattainability of
his suffering, in its inexpressibility, is the key to his healing power
over others. For where life exists so much in the relation of master
to man, of the elect to the sinner, the only possible consummation
man can ever reach, for Joe Christmas as for Uncle Tom, is in the
final consistency of his suffering, in a fate so extreme that it becomes
a single human word which men can read. This is what Faulkner
