I’ve borrowed this claim about Faulkner from an article I found folded inside Light in August.
I know I’ve mentioned before my personal filing system; and Light had several articles inside it. One was “Demon-Driven” by Casey Cep in The New Yorker, November 30, 2020: a four-page review of a book by Michael Gorra: The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War.
I’ve returned to Faulkner because the RCC-RILL book club will read Light in August for our next meeting in September, along with Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I first read William Faulkner during college and later used his short stories & novels in high school and college courses. Yet, after my recent read of Light, William from Oxford makes me yearn to understand his fiction much more deeply than before, and now in the context of our country today.
In “Demon’s” second paragraph is a statement about a central character from Light in August. It says, “Reverend Gail Hightower is haunted by his Confederate grandfather.” This character’s name gives me pause. I don’t recall a man named Gail that I’ve read about or met. Early in Light, the reader learns that Hightower is no longer standing above his parishioners in the Presbyterian Church of Jefferson, Mississippi. Hightower, a tangled fallen man, who “with his religion and his grandfather shot from the galloping horse all mixed up, as though the seed which his grandfather had transmitted to him had been on the horse that night and had been killed too and time had stopped…” Again,again, again… a tragic invocation, the word resonating because it “suggests that what was has simply gone on happening, a cycle of repetition that replays itself, forever.”
Just now, writing these words, I spoke Faulkner’s U.S. state aloud, spelling it out, the way we did in fifth grade when we learned every state and its capital. Always laughter in Mr. Moore’s class as we chanted… Miss iss ippi. This was in 1953, and no images of the South in our minds then in southern California. But in 1961, James Meridith tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi in Faulkner’s hometown.
At age 64 Faulkner died, and his death was only months before The Battle of Oxford (state against federal intervention) over Meridith’s enrollment.
Recurrence is why Faulkner remains so important.
Next week: Light in August with mulatto Joe Christmas…
Comments