Throughout a career spanning nearly four
decades, William Faulkner earned and enjoyed one of the most esteemed
reputations of any twentieth-century novelist. Born in New Albany,
Mississippi, in 1897, he is best known for
a series of seminal novels that explore the South’s historical legacy,
its fraught and often tensely violent present, and its uncertain
future. These major works include the novels The Sound and
the Fury (1929), As I Lay
Dying (1930), Light in August (1932),
and Absalom, Absalom! (1936),
all set in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.
By creating an imagined setting, Faulkner enables his
characters to inhabit a fully realized world that serves as a mirror
to and microcosm of the South as a whole. Faulkner’s legendary county
acts as a safe and distant, yet magnifying, lens through which he
examines the practices, folkways, and attitudes that divided and
united the people of the South since the nation’s inception. As
Faulkner’s stories unfold, his characters attempt to eke out an
emotional existence, but poverty, racism, violence, lack of education,
and other factors conspire to lace their lives with tragedy.
Faulkner was particularly interested in the moral implications
of history, depicting a time in which the South was emerging from
the Civil War and Reconstruction and attempting to shake off the stigma
of slavery. He portrays the South’s residents as being caught in
competing and evolving modes, torn between a new and an older, more
tenaciously rooted world order. Religion and politics frequently
fall short of their implied goals of providing order and guidance
and serve only to complicate and divide. Meanwhile, society—a repressive
if not asphyxiating entity, with its gossip, judgment, and harsh
pronouncements—conspires to thwart the desires and ambitions of
individuals struggling to unearth and embrace their identities.
Across Faulkner’s fictional landscapes, individual characters often
stage epic struggles, prevented from realizing their potential or establishing
and asserting a firm sense of their place in the world.
As he does in many of his novels, Faulkner takes a decidedly modernist
approach in Light in August, abandoning a conventional,
linear story in order to recount the inner lives and motivations
of his characters. During a brief, fateful period of time in the book’s
title month, the lives of various characters overlap and intersect
in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. Along the way, time is fractured,
shifted, and manipulated, as events are recounted from one perspective,
then revisited from an entirely new angle, integrating the complexity
of another—often seemingly unrelated—character’s viewpoint. Ultimately,
no one approach emerges as reliable or as the complete, full version
of what transpires. Instead, a multiplicity of subjective voices
emerges, dissecting and relating events, sometimes erroneously or
in a biased manner.
Similarly, Faulkner refrains from using a single, unified
narrative voice. His long, sinuous sentences attempt to replicate
the leaps and erratic bounds of his characters’ often stream-of-consciousness thought
patterns. He employs colloquialisms, regional dialect, compound
words of his own invention, monologues, unconscious thought, and
various asides to create a complex and richly textured world as
various and uncontainable as the real world itself.
Light in August is steeped in violence,
preoccupied with the distortions and distractions of religion and
racism—perhaps influenced by the fact that Faulkner started the
novel soon after his wife, Estelle, gave birth to a daughter who
died after only a few days in January 1931.
Using the working title Dark House, Faulkner explored
and plumbed the often dark interior spaces of his characters, who
are wounded in various ways by their forays into the world. Dogged
by guilt, shame, and humiliation, they strive—some ceaselessly,
others successfully, and still others for naught—for forgiveness,
salvation, and a place to call their own.
