536
PARTISAN REVIEW
And it is in these terms that we come to understand why Joe Christ–
mas, in running away from a past that he cannot escape, seems
constantly to be looking back as he runs. Not only is no one free
of his past; he even has, at the most critical moments, the sense
not of moving at all, but of being silently lifted from position to
position. It is because of this curious effect of immobility in Faulk–
ner's characters as they run (as if they were held up in the air by
wires), that Faulkner can lavish such idle poetic largesse upon them:
can see in a Percy Grimm that "serene, unearthly luminousness of
angels in church windows," and at various points throughout the
book emphasize Joe Christmas's rigid likeness to a man in prayer.
Even the countrymen in overalls move at one point "with almost the
air of monks in a cloister." The reason is that all these characters
are lost in contemplation as they are moved here and there by the
Player. There is no free action for anyone: everyone is carried, as
Lena Grove was carried to Jefferson in a whole succession of farm
wagons, by the fate that was and so shall be.
Faulkner's world is grim-a world in which the Past exerts an
irresistible force, but against which there is no supernatural sanction,
no redeeming belief. He believes in original sin, but not in divine
love, and he is endlessly bemused by the human effort to read fate
or to avoid it. The highest reach of his belief is the effort to be–
come "a saint without God" (Albert Camus), but this is a point
not yet tried for in
Light in August.
Correspondingly, there is great
power in his work, but little color, and
Light in August,
for all its
brilliance, somehow wears the lack-luster look of the year in which
it was published, 1932.
It
is a grim book, and the countryside de–
scribed in it already has the pinched, rotted look that one sees in
so many depression novels about the South. The greatest fault of
the book is its overschematic, intellectualized cast. Although Faulkner
himself has lived more like Joe Christmas than like the Sartorises,
he is socially far from the world of Joe Christmas and Lena Grove,
and there are tell-tale signs in the novel that it is written
down–
for Faulkner, too much from his head down, and about people
whom he tends to generalize and to overpraise, as if he saw them
only as symbols rather than as entirely complex beings. And it is
a simple fact that the opening of
Light in August
is so beautiful that
nothing else quite comes up to it.
