his life is so completely time-centered and this fiction so time-obsessed that one could almost say time is one of its main subjects. When the long account of Joe Christmas’s life begins in Chapter 6, we are plunged into time as if it were the very medium of his existence: “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders” (104). Joe Christmas can never escape from time until he is crucified and castrated near the end of the fiction. Born an orphan, he is driven through all his days by an ambiguity of the blood. His life flows in a torrent from the past into the present of the fiction until it is ended and his persecution by this ontological ambivalence is ended. Hightower, through most of the fiction, is the opposite of Joe Christmas: he is lost in the past and time flows by him. Not the road, but dark, enclosed vertical space is the basic image for Hightower. Until Joe Christmas and Lena Grove—the two characters associated with the road, with the horizontal thrust of time—directly affect him and cause him, finally, to enter the stream or on-streaming of time, Hightower remains out of present time, a total victim of either the past or of verticality. For Lena Grove, time is purposeful, forward moving, and is to be understood in terms of the physiological purposefulness and inevitability of her pregnancy. For Byron Bunch, whose basic symbol is the watch, time is mechanical and punctual; like Hightower, he allows time to flow by him because he has turned himself into a fixed circle of repeating mechanical time. Ontologically, he is like the face of the watch he is always consulting. Until, that is, he too is affected by Lena Grove (and Christmas) and is drawn into and compelled to flow with on-streaming time.
Light in August is not primarily about history as such at all, but about different kinds of being, different ways of being in and out of time, different kinds of time, and different kinds of relationships between selves, being, and time. This whole fiction, largely in the person of Lena Grove (and later, the baby and Byron Bunch) flows from past into present and on into the future. (Absalom, Absalom!, for example, is about history and often seems to flow backwards into “dead” history.) It does not resolve the ambiguities and madnesses which make time persecutional for Joe Christmas, nor does it punish the persecutors. It redeems two men (Byron Bunch and Gail Hightower) from different kinds of existences outside of time and ends the persecution of one man by time; but nothing is resolved in any ultimate sense and everything coexists, even continues. One gets a very full and comprehensive view of reality in this fiction, in spite of its apparent obsession with partial, monomaniacal selves. One is especially conscious of this reading Light in August after Sanctuary.
Light in August begins and ends with Lena Grove, who is directly related to a biological, natural, and maternal time and so to generative human purposefulness. When the fiction begins, Lena is coming to term; she will have her baby on the eleventh day and so become light in August. She arrives pregnant and single at the beginning; she leaves at the end already beginning to fulfill the destiny in her name—to form a grove or family—with her baby and her man—Byron Bunch, who, by virtue of his last name, is destined for Lena as a member of the Grove family. Hardly a character at all, Lena Grove is best understood as some kind of life or light or familial principle. All through this fiction, people come forward to help Lena Grove. At the end, people are still helping her. No one ever does her any harm in this violent and destructive work. She never has any serious needs which are not supplied or ministered to, by males and females alike. She has a curious immunity to harm and to all forms of evil. She is best understood as a female in the same situation as Dewey Dell, but with an exactly opposite destiny. She is not so much a dewy dell but a grove—a sexual-maternal-familial female, rather than a purely and helplessly sexual one. Instead of a MacGowan to exploit her ignorance and trick her into a quick, safe lay, Lena Grove finds Byron Bunch in her time of need. Byron is one of those selves of absolute integrity one finds all through Faulkner. A good and honest man, he shelters and feeds Lena Grove and, when her time is upon her, gets her a place to nest and someone—Hightower—to deliver her baby.
Byron does the right thing at the right time and is rewarded for his actions. He can be contrasted to Horace Benbow in Sanctuary, who also tries to do the right thing for people in need, but is caught in the perverse logic—whatever can go wrong does—of that fiction. The contrasts between Lena Grove and Dewey Dell, Byron Bunch and Horace Benbow simply indicate that, where Lena is concerned, a very different kind of causality from what one finds in Sanctuary and As I Lay Dying is operating. The perverse negative determinism—the demonism—of those fictions is mostly applied to Joe Christmas in Light in August, and never to Lena Grove.
The last composite image one has of Lena Grove is gentle, comic, familial, faithful: Byron, Lena, and the baby—as usual, being helped by someone else—are moving on in that destinationless but completely purposeful way that has characterized all of Lena’s actions in this fiction. She is a character who, as we would say today, knows how to go with the flow of things. She is a “horizontal” self, completely without violence and one of the most placid characters in Faulkner. Structurally, her actions and values frame and enclose everything else in this fiction; she moves on, purposefully, into the future, an action which always has extraordinary significance in Faulkner. Free of clock and mechanical time; free of any rigid human conception of space; free of the sky demons and vertical torments which drive Hines, Hightower, McEachern, Burden, and Grimm; and free of the racial, ontological ambiguity which drives Joe Christmas, she simply goes on, lightened, in her peculiar and limited way, of the burdens so many others suffer and die from in this fiction. It would be a mistake to overvalue her ontological possibilities, as some critics have done; she is where being and life begin. After Sanctuary and As I Lay Dying, where little life and no generative being at all are possible, Lena Grove takes on a significance like that of the wonderful, stubborn, persistent, instinctual, and maternal skunk in Lowell’s “Skunk Hour.”
It is Lena Grove who is the first to notice the burning of Joanna Burden’s house. This fire is another light in August and, like the birth of Lena’s baby, another of the main focal and symbolic events in the fiction. Joanna Burden is the opposite of Lena Grove in the sense that she is the non-generative female. She is the source of neither life nor being. She belongs with all of the other selves in this fiction who are tormented by sky demons, by the vertical absolutes which destroy so many of Faulkner’s characters. Most of them are Protestants and all are puritans. Her last name adds a moral-ethical significance to the title. Lena is heavy with child; Joanna is heavy with many different kinds of burdens, including, most notably, the ironically conceived white man’s burden in this southern novel. Just as Lena becomes light in August when she gives birth to the baby, so Joanna Burden becomes light in August when she is killed by Joe Christmas. This implication of the title, including death as the ultimate and only final unburdening, operates everywhere in the novel. Joe Christmas, the most heavily burdened of all the characters because of his racial schizophrenia, also—finally—becomes light in August when he is shot and castrated by Percy Grimm.
Gail Hightower, whose great achievements in this fiction are to survive the punning symbolism of his first name and descend from the symbolism of his last name, also is heavily burdened, and, again, in ways that are different from the burdens carried by either Joanna Burden or Joe Christmas. Hightower died twenty-one years before he was even born when the rather curious ontological model he fixes on (his grandfather) was shot from his horse in Jefferson, during the Civil War, for stealing chickens. He exists in a state of pure negative being because the traditional age of one’s entrance into manhood is here reversed and given in negative numbers. Already dead when he arrives in Jefferson with his wife to become the minister of a church there, he preaches nothing but dead words, sermons which gallop back into the past and arrive, always, at the moment when, like his grandfather, he was shot from his saddle twenty-one years before he was even born; dead he drives his wife to adultery, insanity, and finally suicide; dead, the preacher of dead words, he dies to his profession and is finally removed from office by his congregation. Lost in the past (like so many other Faulkner characters) and so dead to the present, Hightower—at his advanced age—is radically altered by the events of the fiction: he is drawn into the present by Lena and the baby, and he is shocked into a long enlightenment by the killing and castration of Joe Christmas in his house. One can certainly say that Hightower manages to free himself from the past and be born, at last, into the present. He sees the light
