What William Faulkner’s Joe Christmas Wanted

The bloodhounds and a Southern Mississippi posse are after Joe when he awakens and has this realization:

“It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the neutral greyness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. ‘That was all I wanted,’ he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. “That was all, for thirty years. That didn’t seem to be a whole lot to ask for in thirty years.”

Joe Christmas was 33 when he expressed this thought on page 246 in my two-tone hard-cover copy of Light in August. I mention the mixed tones of red as reflective of Faulkner’s novel.  Joe was named Christmas because he was left at the door of an orphanage (a white one) as a baby, and later taunted as being of mixed race. Even at the end of the novel, a tragic one, he has no absolute proof that his blood is both white and black.  Nor does the reader, with anything that can be called certainty. Yet Joe Christmas lived as if cursed by the mingling of one blood with the other. He says on page 344, “If I’m not (of mixed blood), damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time.”

Just now, Saturday evening, I spent time reading an NPR piece, “What Do We Call People of Multiple Backgrounds?”  I appreciated in this printed version of a radio presentation, a reference to Barack Obama. He, tongue in cheek, called himself a mongrel and mutt. Yet before I read this quip by a former President, I’d already considered a blog that posed the question: What if we all knew our roots and ethnic origin?

In my case, I knew of my English, Scottish- Irish heritage. But what delighted me was to learn I have both Iberian Peninsula and Jewish blood in me. I ask: Who is pure anything? Dogs with AKA papers, perhaps.  And giving a nod to Obama, I ask: Who isn’t a mongrel?  And asking this question brings to mind what Ishmael in Moby Dick asks:  Who ain’t a slave?

My parental name is Wilson from my father. This connotes Son of Will. Serf or slave? Who knows?  But one thing is certain. I do not come from the aristocracy. Yet it is doubtful Prince Harry can claim that either. -😊

All I know from Faulkner’s remarkable novel is that Joe Christmas has spent his life without being able to answer the question: Who am I? He becomes the outcast, the wanderer, the man without ties to land or family, a searcher, an enigma to others. It is true that Joe Christmas kills two persons: His adoptive father, the truly mad Presbyterian Evangelical, Mr. McEachern; and the Yankee, Negro-loving Joanna, who makes the fatal mistake of asking to pray for Joe Christmas.

What a reader will experience in Light in August is William Faulkner’s artistry and genius. He creates a sympathetic character, whose heinous death is unwarranted as it occurs. The novel’s relevance to our times unnerves me: a novel that etches itself on mind and body.

To be continued…

A Big and Relevant Word: Apotheosis

This word rings in my mind as a spiritual disease. Apotheosis is the elevation of a person to the rank of a god. We’re living with this disease now, as multitudes chant their God’s name, wear his hat, and twitch with fervor in glorifying the past, again and again and again.

“It was as if all their individual five senses had become one organ of looking…like an apotheosis, the words that flew among them, wind- or air-engendered.” These words are from page 216 in William Faulkner’s Light in August.

In this novel Faulkner explores apotheosis, a diseased state of mind, as depicted through the character, Gail Hightower. This deposed Presbyterian minister, an outcast in Jefferson, Mississippi, is a sad man of “soft and sedentary obesity,” and childless, his wife a suicide, his own father an unwanted phantom. What is it that sustains Hightower?  His daily twilight ritual when he invokes the memory of his grandfather, as he rides his horse into Jefferson during the Civil War.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. This Faulknerian claim at the beginning of chapter six can be related to other characters, but especially to Hightower. This sad and lonely man refuses to remember that his grandfather died in a chicken coop, shot to death in the act of stealing. Yet belief in Memory allows Hightower to see his grandfather atop a magnificent horse galloping into Jefferson with a Confederate calvary.

Is Faulkner not relevant now?

No matter that Mr. Apotheosis suggested quack remedies during the pandemic; that he talked with Putin and made sure there was no record of their conversation; that his buddy was the Korean dictator; that the rich got a huge tax break; that he compromised the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley; that he instigated an insurrection, and that he is a convicted felon. To multitudes in our nation none of the above matters… because he is divine and God (the Christian one) saved him in Butler, PA.

Okay, comic relief for me if not you.  Faulkner created compound words that amaze me. So, to get Mr. Apotheosis out of my mind, I will write a paragraph of description, borrowing from William.  Think of the 1930s, a country store in Oxford (Jefferson), Mississippi.

On a shadowdappled Saturday afternoon, outside a country store with its greasecrusted & frictionsmooth counter, three forwardleanin, fanaticfaced, hookwormridden mill workers in stiffbrim hats…sit on a heelgnawed porch. Their fecundmellow voices hum in Augusttremulous light, their bigbuckled hands hold thwartcurled cigarettes. In mansmelling, manstale, sweatfaded shirts, they believe themselves to be white “eagles: hard, sufficient, potent, remorseless, strong.  Somewhere a dog barks, mellow, sad, faraway.”  One sobereyed man, says, “Hey, what ya all think ‘bout that new guy… Joe Christmas?”

I’ll answer this question next week, por fin (at last). Joe IS the novel’s central character.                                                                                

My Faulknerian Moment on Ball’s Neck Road

William from Oxford was on my mind this morning in the Northern Neck of Virginia. There I was, on my way to my regular Sunday tennis game, only not in my tiny Miata, which awaits the return of a mechanic to town. I was in a large black Ford truck on Ball’s Neck (605). It has no center line. I was sailing along, heading to Shiloh School Road, thinking about Hightower, an important character in Light in August. This deposed Presbyterian pastor, imprisoned in the past, believes his Southern grandfather to have been a Civil War hero.

Then, from the truck’s lofty height, I saw in the middle of the road ahead, a big black turkey buzzard. As I got closer it did not fly up, as they do usually do. This buzzard stayed beside what had to be new roadkill. I stopped. The buzzard moved to the left, I slowly to the right. Then passing by, I saw a lifeless baby fox, a kit.

It all felt Faulknerian, given I was thinking about Hightower, and Jefferson, Mississippi in the 1930s, and the brutal death there of mulatto Joe Christmas. What should I write about in today’s blog? 

Late Saturday night, I listened to Faulkner deliver his Nobel Prize acceptance speech from 1950. It is one I know well and have used throughout the years with students.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1949/faulkner/speech/

Faulkner had not wanted to attend the ceremony in Stockholm. But he sobered up and went and charmed his Nordic audience. And later, when his daughter Jill graduated from high school, he gave a short address. I will quote from it because Faulkner has resonance now. By which I mean ‘rat’ now, this August of 2024, so close to the November election.

Here is the end of his short address to graduating high school students. It echoes in part the Nobel Prize speech.

“Man, the individual, men and women, will refuse always to be tricked or frightened or bribed into surrendering, not just the right but the duty too, to choose between justice and injustice, courage and cowardice, sacrifice and greed, pity and self; who will believe always not only in the right of man to be free of injustice and rapacity and deception, but the duty and responsibility of man to see that justice and truth and pity and compassion are done…So, never be afraid.  Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed…”

Yes, Faulkner was a flawed man. But the creator, the artist, the writer, moved into characters who depict the lie of living in the land of “was” rather than “is” and “will be.”  The recurrence of AGAIN, heard chanted and written now, is why Faulkner remains so necessary and valuable. More on Light In August and its characters next week.