Light in August (The Corrected Text) | William Faulkner | Faulkner's Best (One of them, anyway)

Light in August (The Corrected Text) | William Faulkner | Light in August (The Corrected Text)

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Light in August (T...

	Light in August (The Corrected Text) William Faulkner Vintage International/Random House, 1990 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 76 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Joe Christmas does not know whether he is black or white. Faulkner makes of Joe's tragedy a powerful indictment of racism; at the same time Joe's life is a study of the divided self and becomes a symbol of 20th century man.

Faulkner's Best (One of them, anyway)

This "Absalom,Absalom", and "Go Down, Moses" are my favorite novels by Faulkner. "Light in August" has the advantage of being his most readable book. I will let you in on a little secret, though. I have found that Faulkner is much better to LISTEN to than read straight. I'd read several of his books when I discovered my local library had a number of tapes and CDs of his work. Those read by Mark Hammer are in a class by themselves. Not only does he have the proper accent, but his pauses in Faulkner's often long,involved sentences show a great familiarity with the work and add a strong element that make his words sparkle like jewels with brilliance and an uncanny insight into the characters he displays for us. After that, reading Faulkner is never the same.

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Light in August (The Corrected Text)

The American paperback editions of Faulkner published by Vintage are far more readable and user-friendly than the British editions due to font size, layout, page size, gutter width, paper and general design. This is a wonderful book which should be a pleasure to read. My one concern, and I am not alone in expressing it, is that the 'corrected' text is to some extent a reversion to a draft that Faulkner himself (as I understand it) agreed to change in the light of editorial suggestions which, in many cases, he accepted as improvements. To correct back to an editorial stage before the involvement of an editor is an odd editorial practice and, when a writer has been as tactfully and agreeably edited as Faulkner, rather a doubtful one. A parallel text, or a fuller description of the logic of the Polk emendation, would have been useful, for the general as well as the specialist reader. All the same, a wonderful edition to read.

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Epiphany of Gail Hightower

Light in August with numerous characters and plots seems to be always opening, boundary crossing, and fighting shy of borders. Lena Grove, Joe Christmas, Gail Hightower, Byron Bunch, and Joanna Burden are only a few of the people that populate this expansive novel. The different plot lines intersect at points and diverge again with little novelistic responsibility. I don't say that as a criticism because I think Faulkner was trying to cross the literary boundary of the novel and arrest life here and there and present it fresh, surprised to find itself captured on paper. The main characters in Light in August are outsiders all alienated from society. One of these outsiders the Reverend Gail Hightower has a tragic obsession with his Grandfather a figure Hightower enshrines with all the romantic heroic imagery of the doomed, chivalrous exploits of the Civil war. His Grandfather had been involved in a successful raid on Grant's stores in Jefferson and later on a looting expedition he was shot by a householder in a henhouse while stealing a chicken. Hightower manages to keep that latter detail of his Grandfather's vulgar demise blocked from his romantic vision of raids and galloping cavalry. Fresh out of seminary Hightower gets himself posted as minister to a church in Jefferson the scene of his Grandfather's exploits. Hightower's vision becomes inextricably part of his religion. His sermons are a violent mixture of christian dogma and martial glory. "up there in the pulpit with his hands flying all around him and the dogma he was supposed to preach all full of galloping cavalry and defeat and glory" Hightower finally understands that he had neglected his wife and his life for a romantic vision of the past. In this epiphany Hightower sees a vision of the church. "That which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples. He seems to see them, endless, without order, empty, symbolical, bleak, skypointed not with ecstasy or passion but in adjuration, threat, and doom. He seems to see the churches of the world like a rampart, like one of those barricades of the middle ages planted with dead and sharpened stakes, against truth and that peace in which to sin and be forgiven which is the life of man." In part of his epiphanic revelation Hightower views his time as a minister. "a charlatan preaching worse than heresy, in utter disregard of that whose very stage he preempted, offering instead of the crucified shape of pity and love, a swaggering and unchastened bravo killed with a shotgun in a peaceful henhouse.." Despite his tragic flaws I liked the Reverend Hightower and leave the novel and him with "the wild bugles and the clashing sabres and the dying thunder of hooves."

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My first Faulkner

I found my first Faulkner a bit too disquieting to be rated as a 5-star classic. Faulkner's flashback-filled style of writing in "Light in August" goes backwards as much as forwards, and the first major character introduced and followed through the first third of the book disappears for the middle third and most of the last third. While Faulkner makes Lena Grove likable and unforgettably strong in her straightforward simplicity, the character Joe Christmas who is introduced and dominates the middle third seems too over-the-top to be believed; he ends up reading more like a literary type than a real character.

Faulkner by toning down Joe Christmas and focusing on Lena Grove could have written a heartwarming story about the girl who redeems her youthful mistake to become a strong Southern women in, in spite of, and even because of her heritage and surroundings. But that wouldn't be the story Faulkner has in mind--every character has flaws, and one's heritage and surroundings may be greater than even the most moral character can overcome. The best one can hope, as does Lena by the end of the story, is to survive by moving on (as another great Southern writer would pen, you can't go home again).

The story is heightened and perhaps driven by its contrasts--set in the Depression-era deep South, townsfolk live uneasily alongside country folk, whites share geography but can scarcely be said to live beside blacks, cars and mule-drawn wagons share the roads, houses are lit by kerosene and electricity, the occasional open-minded unprejudiced citizen (universally hated and condemned by their neighbors) lives uneasily alongside and amidst the virulently racist majority and the atmosphere that breeds this backwards-looking, closed, feudal society.

I can tell from this first reading that I concur with the majority of literary critics that Faulkner is one of the great writers of the last century. I respect him, I'm just not sure I can say I found the story likable. The Amazon-suggested tag "southern discomfort" captures the essence of this book succinctly.

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