As history unfolds, William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) is proving itself to be an enduring classic. It remains relevant both to the universal quest to understand the human psyche and the human heart across historical times and places, and to the more situated and particular task of understanding the social dynamics of racism in the United States (US) today. It will remain relevant on both its universal and its particular import for generations to come.
I first read it many years ago, when I was still trying to understand the dynamics of racism in the US. However, I did not read it in Arkansas, where I first lived and studied when I arrived, a state close in geography and culture to Faulkner’s native Mississippi. Rather, I read it in central Pennsylvania, in a college town surrounded by farms and small towns, a place where a different, but also mean, racism raged just underneath the surface of social mores. What strikes me, all these years later, is that Faulkner’s novel seems more contemporary today than it seemed two decades ago.
The novel’s central conflict is embodied by Joe Christmas, a man who grew up as an orphan in a home for “white” children in Mississippi and, later, as the abused foster-child of a white religious zealot in a farm. As a youth, Joe is initiated into the violent prejudices of white supremacy in the US American South while suspecting, even sensing in his bones, that he is “black” (that means, in terms of the specific racism of the US, that he has a black ancestor, probably a black parent). In his only and very brief moment of open and articulate frankness in the story –the only flash of reflective self-disclosure–, as he converses with Joanna, the egalitarian white woman of Yankee ancestry who is his lover in Mississippi, Joe asks: “Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?”
In the novel, set in the racially segregated South after WWI, there is no end to that animosity in sight. Joe himself lives that struggle in his very own body-mind, in his “mixed blood”: he sways between hating that which is suffering, violated, and “black” inside him, and that which is “white” and mean, violating, and destructive inside him as well. In the South, he looks and publicly acts “white,” but he suspects that he is “black.” During a period of life in the North, he chose black neighborhoods and even lived with a black woman. But he kept drifting, never belonging in any one community, never forming permanent bonds and grounding firm roots.
Back in Jackson, Mississippi, he is an abusive lover, and he commits a violent crime that arises from the unconscious shadows of his abused psyche but is partly an act of self-defense. In turn, he is executed by a white avenger, a military-minded racist, who wants to kill him because he dared to be the lover (“rapist”) and (presumed, unverified) murderer of a woman — Joanna, a woman that every white person in Jackson ostracized for being a Yankee, a northerner, who worked charitably on behalf of students of “Negro” colleges but who, after death, everyone defended as their own for being the white victim of a black murderer.
The forces of passion, desire, instinctive care, and impulsive harm –these forces that act inside and upon Joe Christmas, inwardly and outwardly– are universal human forces, particularly shaped by the racism of the US American South. And these forces endure. The hatred between “different bloods” in a story written nearly a century ago remains pulsating and active today, at least from the direction of white supremacy.
The current political reality of the US reveals, unequivocally, that the hatred of everyone else by white supremacists endures, perhaps lurking in the shadows during periods of relative social progress –seemingly dormant, as it was when I first read Light in August two decades ago in Pennsylvania–, but waiting to resurface in all its meanness and grotesqueness when the opportunity arises; for example, in personified Orange Sociopathy and its sick followers. Faulkner’s description of Percy Grimm, the self-appointed militia-man who murders Joe Christmas in an act of racial revenge without legal consequences, could describe many of the masked, unidentified, armed agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who are persecuting immigrants and terrorizing communities, even murdering people, in the US today, with the encouragement and protection of their superiors, all the way up the chain of command. In Faulkner’s words, Grimm embraces “a sublime and implicit faith in physical courage and blind obedience, and a belief that the white race is superior to any and all other races and that the American is superior to all other white races and that the American uniform is superior to all men.”
It is well-proven generally and quite evident in the example of some ICE agents, moreover, that a person does not need to be “white” to hoist the flag of white supremacy. Faulkner’s Light in August shows, however, how everyone suffers the brunt of the supremacists’ violent hatred; these racists even suffer it themselves, in their self-degradation, moral self-harm, and enervated, if not deadened, human capacity for loving their neighbors and acting justly.
[Cover photograph: “Jackson, Mississippi, Railroad Spur Bridge Near West Monument Street – Town Creek” by Andy Tucker.]
Daniel G. Campos 