Slave to Form: ‘Light In August’ (William Faulkner, 1932)

A review of Light in August, by William Faulkner (1932)

As my friend (and fellow reviewer)

Noah Perez

said to me about his last review:

“I was 2,000 words in before I realised I hadn’t even said if it was good or not”

I am as guilty of this as he is. I often leave my ‘is it good?’ rating of novels entirely ambiguous. A book can be good/erudite/insightful/etc. without me liking it, after all. But for Light In August, I think my personal experience of this Southern Gothic masterpiece, which varied considerably throughout the reading, actually does reflect on the qualities and deficiencies of Faulkner’s writing.

The plot of Light in August takes quite a long time to take shape, like just about everything in the book. Faulkner’s writing could be described as flowery if what it depicted was not so grinding and implacable. The story revolves around a man named Christmas in 1930s Mississippi. Traumatised from a strict religious childhood and confused by his ambiguous racial heritage, he develops into a violent, solitary creature. Eventually murdering his white lover, Christmas is pursued by a lynch hungry mob that convulses Yoknapatawpha County. Most of the pages of the novel, however, are instead dedicated to characters all bound by their connections to Christmas—each locked in their own cycles of inertia, stubbornness, and self-inflicted misery.

The plot isn’t hard to follow, it just takes a long time to get to the point where there’s anything to follow. The baroque, ornate writing lends itself beautifully to certain scenes. The oppressive misery of Christmas’ religious upbringing can be viscerally felt. The lingering prose draws out every beating, every austere lecture, and every religious recitation into an endless agony.

Yet there are also times when this style does not work, at all. At one point Christmas runs into a room and sees his lover smoking in bed, not looking at him. The flowery recitation takes 1510 words, and you get the awkward impression he’s somehow sprinting on the spot for half an hour whilst everyone pretends he does not exist. Baroque language has its place, but Faulkner employs it almost everywhere.

And this is all the more frustrating because Faulkner occasionally breaks form. In recounting the years of Christmas’ life from adolescence to ‘the present day’, we are presented a breathless summary of a man flitting across America as he tries (and fails) to find external peace for his inner turmoil. And all in barely a full page! Or this wonderfully economical couple of lines:

“There’s somebody out there in that cabin,” the deputy told the sheriff. “Not hiding: living in it.” “Go and see,” the sheriff said. The deputy went and returned.

All in all, Light in August is an exceptional work. Faulkner’s dwelling on certain moments, feelings, and actions allows the writer to bore down past their surface meaning into the rich and dark undercurrent that lies implicit in the mundane and trivial acts of life. A defrocked minister’s self-imposed isolation turns into an unending religious mortification. A good man’s shyness becomes a crippling prison to even the most humble ambition.

There are certain states of mind—ennui, self-hatred, and perverse fascinations—that I have never seen better presented in literature. But his form can also make for really dull (and often confusing) reading. The “terrific slowness“ of Christmas’ post-murder night ride deserved the length and depth of prose dedicated to it. Him eating a plate of peas did not.

Even so, for every odd, verbose passage describing mundanities, there are ten of timeless beauty that make the occasional slog worth it. And maybe that’s the point? One of the quintessential features of Faulkner’s South is the sheer weight of life. If the novel is designed to make you feel this heaviness of existence, then to slacken his prose would give a relief that is not afforded to the lives of those Light in August depicts.

Anyway, maybe this is just me outing myself as a midwit who can’t hack modernist writing, so here’s my favourite line to close out:

The walk out to the cabin does not take him as long as the walk home did, even though he goes now through the woods where the walking is harder. ‘I must do this more often,’ he thinks, feeling the intermittent sun, the heat, smelling the savage and fecund odor of the earth, the woods, the loud silence. ‘I should never have lost this habit, too. But perhaps they both come back to me, if this itself be not the same prayer.’

-Ben Shread-Hewitt