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3 Destructive and Destroyed Being

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Faulkner conceived and wrote four terrifying fictions about destructive being and the ways in which being is destroyed. Three of these four fictions have been brought together here in a single long chapter so that the ways in which Faulkner imagined destruction can be studied and meditated upon in a concentrated and unrelieved way. The Sound and the Fury has been taken up separately, in part because, as the fiction which signaled Faulkner’s emergence into greatness, it has a special place and significance. Its absolutely dazzling technical brilliance tends to blind the mind’s eye to its ontological concerns and to the ways in which it, too, is a regular catalogue of destroyed being and destructive being.

The Coffin of Being

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Like The Sound and the Fury, the title, As I Lay Dying describes a basic, suffering human action. But it derives from no tragic literary context in a Shakespearean play and does not gather to its true force and greatness as a title until one applies it to the troubled fiction it so beautifully essentializes. Sartoris may take its title from the family, but As I Lay Dying is a much more profound and disturbing fiction about the family. Like Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, it has death in the title (other Faulkner works with death in their titles are Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun) and that is where one must begin.

Unspecified at first, one does not know who the “I” of the title is, only that there is a certain immobility about the situation and finality about the process (dying), that it happened in the past (lay, instead of lie) and that other things related to it occurred at the same time. The human, psycho/physical process is one of degeneration rather than regeneration. The title localizes the fiction that is to follow in relation (it seems) to a specific individual self—the first person of the title. But, entering the fiction, one discovers that it is narrated by a whole series (fifteen) of I/eyes, only one of whom is actually lying dying. Addie Bundren (the mother, in this family of unmarried children, three of them adult males), who has death in her first name, is the I who actually lies dying through the first part of the fiction; but she “dies” early on (ALD 48) and her death is reported by Darl, who is not even there: “Jewel, I say, she is dead, Jewel. Addie Bundren is dead” and spends all the rest of the fiction decomposing—putrefying in her coffin. She speaks—for the first and only time—from her coffin, after she has been saved from the river by Jewel—and so extends the title’s application to her funeral journey. Her monologue seems, also, to extend the title backwards to her whole life. Vardaman and Darl hear Addie talking to them from the coffin in the barn, which continues the application of the title to the whole funeral journey. Addie can be said to lie dying until she is, finally, buried with her ancestors and the flesh can rot in the earth in peace. The “I,” the conventional term for the personal individual living self, is gradually complicated in its meanings, diffused, generalized until one does not know whether the one “I” (Addie Bundren) or other “I’s” are meant. The title, in other words, is extended backwards and forwards in time, diffused through the whole life and being of the person, extended to apply in different places, and generalized to apply to many different persons. There is, finally, that troublesome past tense, as if the whole fiction were coming from a future time zone and some other place (not heaven; there is no heaven in Faulkner anywhere) or from Addie’s still residual “I,” unlocated, just out there somewhere.

It is one of Faulkner’s most troubling titles; one returns to it again and again, trying to penetrate its mysteries—of being, surely, located, as we are, in that title, at the going out point, where all is known, finally. Addie’s monologue and the fiction generally resonate with self-mysteries (of coming into as well as going out of being and, it seems, everything in between), with the deep truths arrived at by Faulkner’s imaginative penetration of so many fictional beings. It is an eschatological title and an ontological fiction, concerned, in its very form (like The Sound and the Fury) with the creation, imagination, exploration and deep penetration of the inwardness of different beings, mediating as a fiction between the self and others, in the disguises made possible by fictions.

The whole fiction is narrated from within, and has as its principal narrator Darl, who narrates nineteen times, with regular periodicity.6 He is one of Faulkner’s major fictional penetrators of other selves. Darl, like Quentin, is one of those characters who is cursed with extraordinary powers of perception and then is destroyed (put away, here) because of them. He is a perfect example of what Norman. O. Brown (in Love’s Body) means by schizophrenic. Darl is the double seeing self, the man who knows—without mediation—all the hidden, private truths about people. One is always tempted to see him as a figure for the writer. Of all the children in the fiction, he is in some ways the one most like his mother Addie (the other knower in the novel); and like Addie, is isolated by what he knows; ironically he is the one she most completely rejects. Darl is also the other character to whom the title most obviously and disturbingly applies: Addie is put into the ground, finally, and Darl is put in a cage, in Jackson, which Vardaman says, in the true symbolic language he always uses, is “farther away than crazy” (ALD 245). At the end of the journey, Addie is interred; Darl is incarcerated: they are only dead in different ways and Darl will go on dying for many more years. The title can apply to both equally; each has the ability to see through to and speak from other worlds.

One approach to this fiction is through Addie because the title leads one so directly to her and to the section she narrates from her coffin, after she is saved from the flood by her Jewel. She is lying dying and rotting in her coffin, taking we discover (in section 40) her revenge against the living: Anse and her children—even Cash and Jewel, her treasures. And she takes her revenge by means of the very thing that betrayed her (words), binding Anse, the man incapable of action (who never sweated in his whole life) to his literal word, making him promise (give his word) to take her (Addie) back to Jefferson and bury her with her ancestors when she dies. True to his word (stupidly, stubbornly, in a kind of demonic literal-minded inversion of honor), Anse does just as he promised, so that the two parents, in different ways, work together toward the destruction of their children. We can see here that, in a whole series of reversals and inversions of the mother-function (conceiving, bring into the world and life, loving, tending, nurturing, even educating for the future), Addie is deconceiving, de-generating, destroying (killing), hating, “starving,” immobilizing (Cash, for example), driving mad (Darl), and betraying her husband and children—the family—as she lies dying. All in the name of—through Anse—decorum, propriety, burial rites (and rights), and a return to one’s ancestors. In many ways, this is surely a novel about the past killing or maiming the future. Meditating inward toward the point where Addie’s monologue provides one explanation of the funeral journey, the imagination collapses in disbelief when it comes upon the stark, brutal, conception of the family and the future which is at the center of this fiction.

As she lies dying, Addie is taking her revenge against the living for the long ago violations of, or intrusions into her inner circle of selfhood by Anse and Darl. As Addie explains in the early part of her monologue, her terrible aloneness—her virgin state—and the turbulence and restlessness (the boiling blood) that went with it, is not brought to an end when she takes Anse (or earlier, when she punishes her students in an attempt to make some kind of “blood” contact with them.) It is only brought to an end when she has Cash and realizes that living is terrible and being a mother is the answer to it. With Cash, she discovers love and for the first time experiences the blood union she has been seeking. It is Cash, not Anse, who brings her virgin state to an end because of the intensity of the direct experience of motherhood. It is Cash who violates her aloneness and in so doing makes her whole again. For the first time, she experiences real “living” and begins to understand what her father meant when he told her that living was getting ready to stay dead a long time. What her father meant is that you only live once and, as Thoreau said, you don’t want to die and come to realize that you have never really lived. Addie’s torment at the beginning of her section is her aloneness, a condition which she thinks might be brought to an end by taking Anse. But Anse, she comes to realize, is only empty words, and only intense experience, for which no words are needed, can make her alive and end her aloneness. She has this with Cash. Anse is reduced to his empty words—Anse or love, what difference did it make—and, though he does not know it, is dead to Addie. He can never be inside her circle and never be part of what she means by living.

When she discovers that she is pregnant with Darl, she thinks that she will kill Anse because he has tricked her and because he, by way of Darl, will be responsible for intruding upon the perfect relationship she has with Cash, her first experience of love and her fulfillment of herself in motherhood. Addie says that she and Cash know what love is and do not need a word for it. She rejects Darl (he is never inside her circle of selfhood) and decides that she will not kill Anse, but will take her revenge against him in such a way that he does not know she is doing it. Her revenge—the direct cause of the funeral journey that brings so much pain and suffering to the family and is the primary subject of the novel—is to make Anse promise (give his word, he being the man of empty words, like an empty door frame) that he will take her to Jefferson when she dies and bury her with her family. It is here that we encounter one of the main ambiguities of this novel. Addie says that she is going to take her revenge against Anse, but in fact her revenge turns out to be against all of her children, including the two “value” children she allows inside her circle of selfhood, Cash and Jewel. Anse alone does not suffer or lose anything during the terrible funeral journey and in fact gets both a new set of teeth and a new wife. Though Anse has given his word to Addie that he will have her buried in Jefferson, and does keep his word, we know that his main reason for continuing the funeral journey against every obstacle and all sense of decency and humanity and consideration for his children, is because he wants new teeth.

The ambiguity lies in the fact that we do not ever know if Addie—like Darl—has foreknowledge and whether, in fact, this punishment of her children was part of her motive, or an ironic consequence of it. We cannot ever really know whether the pain and suffering inflicted upon the five children by the funeral journey was really part of her revenge; but we can say, with certainty, that she is indirectly—and may be directly—responsible for it and that the two parents do in fact collaborate in bringing about the awful things that happen to the children during the journey. This is the central concern of the novel. Addie, of course, punishes Anse long before the funeral journey. After Darl, Anse is dead to her and never able to intrude upon her circle of selfhood again. Worse, he does not even know that he is dead to her. Time, Anse, the word love (Anse’s word) are all outside of Addie’s circle. At this point, only Cash is inside the circle and the only real knowledge about living that Addie has comes intuitively from her intense direct experiences. It is after this that she has her passionate adulterous affair with Whitfield (the blood boiling along the dark land, voiceless speech) and learns from experience again what real passion is (something she never knew with Anse), what real living is, and, because it is adulterous, what sin is. She says again she does not need words to tell her what passion and sin are; she must learn what they are from the direct physical experience of them. Whitfield, then, is also inside her circle of selfhood, as is Jewel, their passion child. Everything else is outside her circle.

When the affair with Whitfield is over, Addie decides it is time to clean house, to put her affairs in order. She has learned what living is and is getting ready to stay dead a long time. She settles her account with Anse, by giving him Dewey Dell to negate Jewel and Vardaman to replace Cash. In this way, she says, Anse has three of the Children (Darl, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman) and she has two (Cash and Jewel). Her aloneness has been violated three times by Cash, Whitfield, and Jewel, and each time she has been made whole again by these intense experiences of motherhood and sexual passion. At the end of her section, Addie contrasts herself to Cora, whom she says is, like Anse, all empty words, and who, though she speaks constantly of sin and redemption, has no knowledge of them because she has never experienced either.

This account of Addie’s section may tell us a lot about Addie who, along with Darl, is the most interesting character in the novel and, ontologically, it may tell us a lot about the relationship between words and actions (the vertical and horizontal in Addie’s account), experience and knowledge, aloneness and wholeness through love and union (not necessarily sexual) with another, about what constitutes true being and what it means to really “live”, and about a mother’s relationship to her children (whether they are inside or outside her circle of selfhood and love). It may also help us toward a fuller understanding of the implications of the title. Though this section tells us why the funeral journey took place, it does not account for the journey itself and the terrible things that happened to the children during this journey; or, more accurately, to the Bundren family, since all members of the family are present during the journey. The funeral journey is initiated by the mother as her revenge against the father and the child he “planted” in her—Darl; it is carried out by the father, with the help of the children—mainly the two inside Addie’s circle: Cash, who makes the coffin, and Jewel, who saves Addie from the flood and the fire and is instrumental in other ways in making sure she gets to Jefferson and is buried there. Under normal circumstances, this would have been an easy journey and could hardly be construed or understood as a form of revenge. The journey is more than half over by the time we even learn that it was meant to be Addie’s revenge against Anse, and up to this point we simply assume that some combination of bad luck, sheer pig-headedness on Anse’s part and a kind of stupefying willingness to do what Anse says by his four adult children accounts for what happens. We recognize Anse’s hypocrisy (“I given my word,” he says, which is true, but what he really wants is new teeth); we know Dewey Dell’s real reason for wanting to get to Jefferson, but it is difficult to explain Cash and Darl’s, even Jewel’s willingness to go with the journey. And yet they all do, abiding by the mother’s injunction and the father’s promise, with a kind of mindless, emotionally charged, filial piety.

As a character (as a mother, that is, rather than as a matrix of terms which we might try to use to organize a reading of the fiction), Addie Bundren is full of death and drives her family on toward ruin and destruction even as she lies “dying” and rotting in her coffin and should be done with the living, should have relinquished her hold on the family so that they could get on with their lives without her. The whole fiction moves, with terrible inevitability, toward the terrifying dark spaces Faulkner gives us at the end: the grave (for Addie), the cage (for Darl) and the cellar (for Dewey Dell). Mother Addie has somehow (Faulkner never explains this, he just presents it as fictional fact) kept her three older sons from marrying. They are all blocked from growth and fulfillment in different ways. And terrible things happen to all of them as they carry out the senseless act of filial piety Addie—through Anse—has laid on them like a doom, a curse. Her rotting corpse in the coffin functions symbolically to tell us that being—the generative seed of selfhood—is rotting, putrefying in all the members of the Bundren family. Everything conspires against being and fulfillment in this fiction. The funeral journey is the coffin of being.

Darl (Faulkner’s darling, if not Addie’s) is the son with the greatest amount of vertical being. He is the knower, the self with the greatest verbal, symbolic perceptual powers, the person who is capable of pure unmediated vision. It is Darl, finally, who tries to save the family from any more grief and suffering by setting fire to the barn so the rotting, destroying Addie will burn up, and the family will be purified of her and free at last from the tyranny of her revenge. It is a great act of sanity. But, as usual, Addie’s Jewel—the man of spontaneous, unthinking actions—saves her and prolongs the journey, just as he did when he saved her from the flood. Because of the barn burning, and because he knows both of their secrets, Jewel and Dewey Dell attack and subdue Darl (their sibling, our brother) when he is betrayed and sacrificed by the whole family (including Cash, who rationalizes the action, and Vardaman, who saw Darl set the fire and reports it to Dewey Dell). It is this betrayal by the whole family which finally drives Darl on over into schizophrenia and so completes Addie’s revenge against him. Darl, one must remember, was violently rejected by mother Addie even before he was born and was the initial decisive cause of her revenge; at the end, Darl is rejected—cast out—by the whole family and removed from the ongoing life of the whole community. He might as well be dead.

Cash, who is the maker, the craftsman, is the son with a great deal of horizontal being. His skills are manual, physical and, unlike Darl’s, get translated into outward, practical physical actions. He makes things which have cash value. He makes boxes and houses and coffins—all enclosures. Addie’s revenge is indiscriminate and includes even those close and precious to her as Cash and Jewel were. Aside from Cash’s excruciating pain during the funeral trip, he will be crippled the rest of his life and never again be the carpenter he was. Addie—or the funeral trip—has deprived him of the true centrality of his being: the ability to use his own great talents as a master craftsman. So, just as Darl is destroyed at his greatest strength, at the true centrality of his being by being driven on over from sanity into madness and rendered dysfunctional (nobody pays much attention to what a man locked up in a cage in an insane asylum says), so too with Cash. A crippled carpenter is not going to build many barns. The dying-dead mother with the help of the father takes the centrality of being from each child.

Jewel is the son with the greatest horizontal being. He is almost the embodiment of pure, unthinking action. He is the opposite of Darl in every way. He narrates the least (once), he is the closest to Addie, he acts without knowing (Darl knows without acting; knows without doing, also). Darl is vision without power. When he does act from knowledge, he is destroyed and locked up because of his capacity for vision. Cash shapes things; Jewel acts upon them; Darl sees into them. Like the other older sons, Jewel is going to be affected at the center of his being and deprived of something essential to his selfhood. Dying, Addie is going to attack and kill her children’s powers of being, their ability to be in any generative way, and always by means of the dead, empty word. The Mother and Father are going to punish and destroy their own children, at least the three older ones—all sons. In one of his many gnomic copulas of being, Darl correctly identifies this centrality of being in Jewel: “Jewel’s mother is a horse,” Darl says, usually to taunt his half-brother. Jewel—the passion child—has the purest Oedipal relationship with his mother through the horse, and there is a certain cruel appropriateness about his having to give up his horse (to agree, again, to be governed by Anse’s word) to help pay for the mules necessary to haul the wagon to get Addie into her grave. Jewel’s double loss—of his mother and his horse—is a kind of Oedipal disaster, the consequences of which are not exactly clear. Jewel is a lot like young Bayard Sartoris, but one has no clear future for him (Darl is in his cage, Dewey Dell will have her baby, Cash will be crippled) and it is idle to speculate or invent one for him. Say, only, that he suffers a massive withdrawal of the sources and resources of his being and that the loss of the horse symbolizes the loss of his animal and physical potency and strength; that, like Bayard, he may lapse into a kind of violent apathy and eventually become pure violent action without purpose and perhaps even destroy himself.

The last time we see Jewel doing and saying anything, he is helping to capture Darl so they can take him off to the cage in Jackson. Jewel is holding his half-brother Darl down and saying: “Kill him. Kill the son of a bitch” (ALD 514). Both are actions which epitomize the now purely negative, destructive sources of his being. Jewel, more than any other person, embodies the end toward which Addie’s life and her long revenge have been moving. Addie’s Jewel, like Addie herself, is bent on killing, imprisonment, and destruction. With Jewel, we see how the four generative powers—intellectual power, manual skill, physical power, sexual-physiological power—which the self may have (together or separately) and which are represented here in the three older sons and the daughter, are all destroyed, impaired, or inverted by the end of the journey. The family is left to Anse, the stupidest, laziest, and weakest man in the whole book, who has neither knowledge nor skill nor generative power—only new teeth, power to devour, to eat others. He embodies the basic, demonic principles of the fiction: where something can go wrong, it will; where there is something precious, cherished, it will be taken away; whatever is valued will be lost; if something is good or pure, it will be polluted—I list only some of the inverting, demonic principles, none of which, of course, apply to Anse. One can make up a rule for Anse, which will also be perverse and demonic: those who take away shall receive?

Vardaman, who is not old enough to be so clearly defined in his being as Cash, Darl, and Jewel, is old enough to experience loss and to suffer. If he is anything, he is the sufferer: from the loss of his mother and the subsequent ontological chaos (“My mother is a fish,” he says; and he bores those holes in the coffin so she can breathe); from the cruel effects of the prolonged funeral journey (the buzzards and the smell remind us of this); from inadvertently betraying and then losing his brother Darl—the one who, naturally, understands him the best, ministers to his grief, and who, with Vardaman, give us the two most frequent narrators and the major voices of sorrow in the fiction. Vardaman’s double loss of his main identity figures (Addie and Darl) nearly destroys him and reduces him at the end toward Ben’s situation, where he becomes the voice of pure grief, not the explanation of, but the expression of loss, dislocation, and suffering. Cash tries to explain it; Vardaman only experiences, witnesses, and expresses it. This is beautifully shown by Faulkner in Vardaman’s last monologue, where he acts as witness for two of the violations which occur at the end, one internal to the family and one a classic example of external victimage of the ignorant country girl. The first is Darl’s departure for the insane asylum and the second is Dewey Dell’s “seduction” in the cellar. Re-experiencing the anguish of Darl’s loss, Vardaman expresses it in the broken copulas of being and familial relationships which characterize so many of his monologues: “My brother he went crazy and he went to Jackson too. Jackson is further away than crazy [. . .] He had to get on the train to go to Jackson. I have not been on the train, but Darl has been on the train. Darl. Darl is my brother. Darl. Darl.” His monologue ends. “Darl he went to Jackson my brother Darl.” Vardaman says near the beginning, “Darl went to Jackson. Lots of people didn’t go to Jackson. Darl is my brother. My brother is going to Jackson [. . .] Going on the train to Jackson. My brother,” he goes on and pretty soon one realizes that the monologue is in two type faces and that the Darl parts, all in italics, are set and broken up in such a way as to be continuous, even though passages in roman type describing what is happening outside Vardaman come between. He resumes, for instance, four lines down the page, thus: “Darl” and then six more lines down, “Darl is my brother, Darl went crazy” and later

Darl he went to Jackson my brother Dar [. . .] He went to Jackson. He went crazy and went to Jackson both. Lots of people didn’t go crazy. Pa and Cash and Jewel and Dewey Dell and me didn’t go crazy. We didn’t go to Jackson either. Dar [. . .] My brother is Darl. He went to Jackson on the train. He didn’t go on the train to go crazy. He went crazy in our wagon. [. . .] Darl is my brother. My brother is Darl. (ALD 243-46)

Vardaman’s cri de coeur, somewhat more articulate than Ben’s roaring and bellowing and so further up the human scale, comes from the same matrix of helpless loss. Dying, Addie has set in motion an irreversible degenerative pattern which she is helpless to alter. Her revenge is this journey of disasters and only her burial will bring her specific revenge to an end, but the effects of it will go on for a long time. The helplessness—powerlessness—in the face of loss is most purely embodied in Vardaman because he has done nothing to deserve it and has no way to cope with it. He is one of Faulkner’s many figures for the self as innocent victim. Each of the children is victimized in some way by both parents, by circumstances and by others). Some—Dewey Dell and Jewel, especially—are also victimizers (of Darl) and perpetuate the victim–become-victimizer pattern that is so common in modern literature (all literature, all human life, really, as Kenneth Burke has made clear.)

Dewey Dell is the last of the victims and of all the children the least directly victimized by Addie. That is precisely the point about Dewey Dell, whose destiny is in her name. She repeats Addie’s pattern—as woman, as female, the dewey dell to be entered, violated, used: Lafe picks into her basket and fills it; MacGowan forces an entrance into this dewey dell; Darl enters her in symbolic incest again and again; the child growing in her is following its own pattern, which Dewey Dell is helpless to alter. She is tricked by Lafe’s money and words; by MacGowan’s words and promises. She is entering and beginning the pattern Addie is just completing. She is Addie, the female victim, all over again. Addie does not need to do anything to Dewey Dell: her destiny as sexual female, as a dewey dell, will do it all for her. Her own centrality of being—to be a dewey dell—is self-destructive because Faulkner has given her no way to protect herself, and like Addie, she will be victimized by the empty words and the “terrible blood” and in turn victimize the children who come, invariably, to violate her aloneness. The destructive future, the repeating pattern, is in her womb—the very ground of generation. She has already begun her revenge, her victimizing, turning on Darl because he has “entered” her without words, violated her aloneness, and knows her secret. Of all the children, Dewey Dell has the most completely predictable future. She goes back home already the victim of a biological pattern she cannot break, certain to be victimized again by the red blood “[. . .] the terrible blood, the red bitter blood boiling through the land” (ALD 166). And to take her revenge on her children.

There remains Anse, the only member of the family to gain anything on this funeral journey and a victimizer so stupid and inept as to fill the reader with helpless rage. Anse is the unmoved and unmoving mover in this fiction, almost a catalytic agent who, added to any human situation, will produce negative results, for everyone but himself. Addie could not have invented a more perfect agency for her revenge against the family. Anse, ironically, is beyond anyone’s revenge, which seems to be just the point: he is a kind of mindless, impervious negative force in the human universe. Anse is a completely non-productive self, without centrality of being: he has no intellectual power, no manual skill, and no physical power. He does not work at all and so denies one of the prime functions of the father, which is to provide. He does not sweat or suffer. Insofar as he is without generative being he is without life and is a negative force throughout. Anse is, as Addie says, faithful to the literal word, “a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame” (ALD 164). It is in the name of the literal word that the funeral journey is undertaken and continued, and always in the name of the empty word that Anse does everything: refuses intelligent help, refuses to turn back, takes Jewel’s horse and Dewey Dell’s money, and puts the family in debt to Flem Snopes for the next thousand years. Returning, Anse has new teeth (he is primarily a consumer) and a new wife to prepare food for him to consume. He has already partially consumed his children.

This fiction ends with a return to where it began after the long journey of disasters, deaths, losses, suffering, outrage, violations, indebtedness, betrayal, expulsion, imprisonment, putrefaction. The family returns but in some essential way the family is dead, its being having gone into the grave with Addie, into the cage with Darl, to Flem Snopes with the horse, down into the cellar with Dewey Dell’s last hope, out into the pain of Cash’s broken, cement encrusted leg, out into the broken syntax of Vardaman’s dislocation and suffering. The family can be no source of being here or seldom anywhere else in Faulkner. It is one of the terrible truths of his fictions. The “I” of As I Lay Dying can finally be understood as the collective “I” of the Bundrens; and the fiction can be read as a demonic chronicle of how these “I’s” individual being is lost, taken away, destroyed, frittered away by Anse and Addie—the two A’s, the double destructive beginning. It is truly a terrible fiction, almost without relief (save for the marvelous comic interlude about Jewel and his horse), thrusting, driving toward some zero point of absolute helplessness, victimage, outrage; some grammar of negative being. More dies and is buried than Addie Bundren in this novel.

Looking to the future, one knows that Anse was never a father anyway and that the new wife will be no mother. Looking at the present of the novel, one sees Darl gone, Cash crippled for life, Jewel without his horse, Dewey Dell about to begin repeating Addie’s destructive pattern, and Anse, the great parasite, carrying on as usual, exploiting the role and rhetoric of the father, victimizing family and friends alike, with the power that goes with the role. The cycle of this novel—that is, the projection of it into the future—does not bear thinking on. For this reason, it belongs with The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary rather than Light in August, which, through Lena Grove and Byron Bunch, does allow us to move beyond the agonies of Joe Christmas (who was in fact destroyed by his family in the person of his grandfather, old Doc Hines) and project a future in which a family (Lena, her baby, and Byron, who assumes the function of a father) is offered as a possible source of generative being.

A Grammar of Negative Being

Sanctuary (1931)

Faulkner arrives at an almost pure grammar of negative being in Sanctuary, his fiction with the most perfect title and the one which, when properly understood, tells us more about Faulkner’s early dark vision than any of the other titles. Faulkner’s own rather disconcerting remarks about this novel in the “Introduction” and the extreme purity (schematic, almost allegorical conception) of the work have misled many critics, causing them to under-read and to mistrust the authenticity of both the specific fiction and the vision. The French understood this fiction much earlier and better than American critics did because they have fewer biases against works as deliberately conceived and written as this one. I will follow their lead because it has always seemed to me that the most pure model of Faulkner’s negative vision can be found in this fiction.

One of the best ways to understand Sanctuary is to begin with the realization that the fiction is a black or inverted Romance and an almost absolute negation of the title—in all of its standard dictionary meanings as well as the many transferred symbolic meanings which are defined from within.7 The whole fiction flows counter to the title in a kind of perverse, demonic demonstration that there are no sanctuaries left, to be found, or to be created in this world, in this life. There is only one sanctuary and that is death, which is to be understood here, as it is almost everywhere in Faulkner, as a terminal (not a mediating) event, an absolute end to life. Almost the only relief Faulkner’s suffering characters get is from dying, often violently, and often in such a way as to render the motivation very ambiguous. The whole fiction consists of variations on the negation (inversion) of the title and the basic principle of the Romance, as defined by Northrop Frye and exemplified by Spenser’s Faerie Queene. That is the logic of the work, and Faulkner pursued it with brilliant, relentless imaginative fury. The end result is the grammar of negative being, a condition which may be defined as existence in a purely secular, human world where there are no sanctuaries. Otherwise put, there is a progressive constriction of human possibilities (as there often is in the work of Katherine Anne Porter): Heaven is eliminated; the old possibilities of a secular humanism are eliminated; gradually, everything is squeezed down into Hell; or, Hell is raised up, unchanged, and laid over the human world like a labyrinthine grid. The title, which starts us at one point, anticipating sanctuary, is progressively reversed in a brilliant exercise of negative imagination, until the root meaning of the term is canceled and the sanctuary available even to the fugitive and outlaw is gone because there is no holy of holies, nothing left that is sanctified, held sacred and inviolate, within the self, out in society, before or beyond man and society. It is as if even the ultimate sanctuary (something inviolate and pure in human affairs) has been violated and destroyed. No more completely and thoroughly negative fictional work exists in Faulkner. There is nowhere in Faulkner a purely negative work, for somewhere in even the most negative—As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary—there are wonderfully comic scenes which indicate the possibility of a whole other kind of world, order, vision, and style. These scenes are seldom ironic in a corrosive way; they are pure outbursts from a joyful comic perception of reality set into the context of and surrounded by, the usually otherwise unrelieved negative material. In Sanctuary they are all centered around the whorehouse, the ironic and comic sanctuary of the novel.

The central events of this fiction are related violent acts by Popeye, both of which can be said—finally—to have been caused by Temple. These acts are the corn cob “rape” of the “virgin” Temple in the corn crib where she has gone for “sanctuary,” and the murder of Tommy, her dim-witted but good-hearted protector. Once Temple (the eighteen-year-old daughter of a judge, the deflowered bloom of southern womanhood) has been brought into the situation (described later) by her drunk southern gentleman friend (Gowan—Gawain?—Stevens) and abandoned, she becomes, as Anse became in As I Lay Dying, the principal but never the sole causative factor or force in the sequence of events that Faulkner uses to negate the title.

Religion and sexuality as forces—usually negative—so often converge in Faulkner that one has to take Temple’s name seriously. Just in this central period alone, there are Addie and Whitfield: Temple, Popeye, and Red; Joanna Burden and Joe Christmas; Hightower and his wife. Already corrupt, or maybe just already desiring to be violated and corrupted, Temple is abandoned in a situation where she can become as corrupt as she wishes. Taken seriously, we have to understand her symbolically as the temple (the traditional location of the sanctuary) that wants to be corrupted and that in the reversed negative logic of the fiction, does not provide sanctuary and comfort or spread sanctity, beatitude, and the Word of God—but causes instead pestilence, destruction, violence, corruption, outrage. To describe what happens to Temple as a “rape” is rather inaccurate, for she has taunted and tempted the impotent Popeye with her sex until in an incredible compounded act of frustrated rage, he first shoots Tommy (an act of deflected impotent sexuality if ever there was one) and then deflowers and rapes Temple (which is what she has wanted all along) in the only way that is available to him—with another simulacrum (the gun first, then the corn cob—what a symbolic pair). These two acts of displaced sexuality and violence generate much of the rest of the fiction. To say that the Temple wants to be violated by the gangster is an understatement. The temple—so to speak in the purely symbolic formulaic terms this fiction encourages—seduces the criminal or gangster only to find that the gangster is sexually impotent and must act through mediators. The acting through mediators (the gun, the corn cob, the whorehouse, Red, the mob) is a basic principle of triangulation where, as one sees it so beautifully in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum; crime, evil, destruction, even simple pain and harm can all be inflicted through mediators without responsibility and guilt. Nobody in this fiction is ever punished for what he does; most often, he is punished and destroyed for what someone else does. The principle of mediation and triangulation work in another way, of course, in the person of Christ and in the office of the Church, to mediate between man and God and to take away guilt and evil by transfer to the other. That is, to guarantee sanctuary, especially in the final or eschatological sense. There is, in other words, malign and benign mediation and triangulation. What Faulkner has imagined here (as Claude-Edmonde Magny has pointed out) is a demonic inversion of benign/divine mediation: Temple is a whore, the temple is a whorehouse, the whorehouse is the only real (comic) sanctuary, Popeye is a petty antichrist, impotent, without the spermatic Word, his rod a gun, his penis a corn cob. All the generative sources are negated.

Once the opportunity is present, the corruption of Temple is complete. She is taken to her proper dwelling—the whorehouse—at once by Popeye. As in the case of Joanna Burden, there is a readiness for corruption and perversion in the female which only awaits the right circumstances. Between them, Temple and Popeye take care of nearly everybody in this fiction. Temple, for example, is, in the demonic triangulation of the novel, responsible for three deaths, all of males, and all sexually caused. Popeye shoots Tommy to get at Temple and to eliminate the witness. Red, the stud Popeye gets to do his screwing for him so that he can at least watch, is killed by Popeye after Temple taunts him once too often with Red’s potency and virility. Lee Goodwin (whose name is too obviously and cruelly punning to need commentary) is disemboweled and then burned at the stake by the mob for an act he tried to prevent (he was being tried for an act he never committed—the shooting of Tommy) solely on the basis of Temple’s perjured testimony. Temple’s giving of false testimony is arranged by her father, who is a Judge, in order, one supposes, to suppress the whorehouse episodes and save the family name. I am not trying to summarize the events here, but to assemble actions and events which negate that title. The law has always been a sanctuary; here the very integrity of the law is violated by the agencies which should administer, protect, and uphold it: the courts, lawyers, the judge; and the perjury comes from the sanctuary itself. And Justice, which should be directly related to the Law and administered with great caution and discretion by responsible people, is, in an action repeated over and over in Faulkner, taken over by the mob and administrated violently and wrongly so that an innocent person is outrageously victimized. What the action of the mob does is force, again, the central displaced irony of the fiction: which is that Temple could ever be raped at all. Only Horace Benbow has the proper response to Temple: after his return from the whorehouse interview, Horace finally vomits, not at what happened to Temple—the mob fixes on the lurid detail of the blood-stained corn cob and upon the abstraction of the young girl so violated—but out of a profound, delayed revulsion at her corruption and perversion. The polluted Temple is what makes him sick.

Horace Benbow is one of Faulkner’s earliest fictional lawyers, the most persistent and fully developed one being Gavin Stevens. It is Gavin Stevens who is the central lawyer figure in Requiem for a Nun, the work that redeems Sanctuary. Horace Benbow has a previous fictional existence (In Flags in the Dust and Sartoris) where he is taken from his sister Narcissa by that man-eating sexual female Belle; and in a manner that is softer, more traditionally erotic than Temple’s, is slowly corrupted to her needs. When Sanctuary begins, Horace Benbow is trying to save himself from Belle and become socially functional again as a lawyer. The plight of Ruby, her sick child, and Lee Goodwin moves Horace Benbow to action. It is part of the demonic logic of this fiction to turn back the thrust of this effort at justice, and to have what is a noble, lifesaving and just action result in its opposites (violent death for Goodwin, total failure for Horace, expulsion for Ruby) and to have Horace give up his desire for divorce and return to life with Belle—a sanctuary only in the most extreme ironic sense of that term. Horace’s role in this fiction is of extraordinary importance because he leaves what appears to be a sanctuary (his withdrawn life with Belle, only Belle is really like Temple and the house is not a home nor does he have the comforts that come from the love of a good woman) and re-enters the ongoing life of society in a decisive, productive, and worthwhile way. His efforts are all related to the title: he attempts to provide a sanctuary for the needy mother and sick child, only to have his motives and actions misunderstood and countered by the very elements of society which should approve of them; he attempts to provide the sanctuary of the law and justice for the innocent, falsely arrested Lee Goodwin, only to have his own witness and the only witness who knows the truth perjure herself, corrupting the law itself, perverting justice, and causing what is the most violent and terrible act of negation and destruction in the fiction. Defeated (again) Horace returns to his false sanctuary, his principal gains having been the negative knowledge he acquires in the course of his efforts to free himself and provide sanctuary for others. His negative knowledge, of course, is that there are no sanctuaries left, to be found, or to be achieved by purposeful human action.

Following the reversing logic of his own fiction, Faulkner has concluded the three main interrelated plot lines of this novel as follows: Popeye (Flem Snopes’s predecessor) who, with Temple, is the chief violator and destroyer in the fiction, is tried and hanged for a crime he did not even commit. Temple, who is the direct cause of three violent male deaths, and who, like Popeye and Anse in As I Lay Dying, is never held accountable or punished for them, is “saved” from the whorehouse (where she really belongs) and is taken to Europe for rest and recuperation. When we last see her, she is sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens, with her father, listening to music, yawning, making up her face. Horace Benbow’s last act after he returns home to Belle (direct from the disemboweling and burning of Goodwin, after ambiguous talk with the cab driver about how “we have to protect our girls”) is to call his stepdaughter, Little Belle, who is Temple’s age. She is away at a house party. It is a sad and ironic conversation. Little Belle is in the pre-Temple pattern; her Gowan is at her shoulder making wise cracks to Horace. “Little Belle’s voice was breathless, controlled, cool, discreet, detached” (SN 360). She’s having a good time. Horace, as usual, is well intentioned but inept. Little Belle will follow after her mother. The irony of the last sentence of the chapter falls on Horace, his house, little Belle, and the title of the fiction. “Lock the back door” Belle tells him. But that won’t do any good: there is no place to hide; nothing is inviolate and certainly no pretty young girl is safe, that night or the next.

The last word of the novel is “death;” the first is sanctuary. If there is any definition of the title that holds, it is the last word of the novel, understood, I think, as it is in Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider: oblivion, the black abyss, nothing, zero, the absolute negation of life. The circuit of the fiction is from sanctuary to death; the alternatives are Horace and Temple, who survive—the one older, abject and defeated, knowing only that it will happen again, that the irreversible sequence is Belle, Little Belle, Big Belle, Belle, knowing that it is not any longer the vanity of human wishes but the futility of human effort that prevails. Knowledge proves as useless here as the law, justice, truth, goodness and all of the other abstractions which have guided man in his attempts to humanize the word and create a culture. The other alternative, Temple, is younger, female, corrupt and perverted before she even gets to her teens, the fouled sanctuary, the holy of holies become the foul of foulness. We end with Temple, with an external image—a surface reality—that runs so counter to the absolute inner corruption and foulness, to the murderous last months of her life as to create, by this typical Faulknerian juxtaposition, a disparity and contradiction between outer and inner, appearance and reality so great as to produce again and again Darl’s helpless, hopeless, defeated laughter or Ben’s furious sound, the pure expression of “horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless.”

Temple is worse than Popeye, which is why, finally, Faulkner ends with Temple and why, we come to realize, it is not Temple who serves Popeye, but Popeye who serves and services that fouled Temple: Gowan, Tommy, Red, Goodwin, Popeye, even Horace—all feed the fires of her lust, her rapacity. She consumes them; but they do not destroy her, nor does her lust consume her, and her image remains the same. If there is a grammar of negative being to be found in Faulkner, it is embodied in Temple and Popeye, the indifferent destroyers and consumers (like Anse) of others in this fiction. Sanctuary is the most completely negative model of reality to be found anywhere in Faulkner. In some ways, all the rest of the dark fictions can be seen as working off of, away and up from this negative model. And in some ways, it is also the paradigmatic dark Faulknerian fiction because one feels very strongly the degree to which he is yearning and his creative imagination is yearning, throughout, for true sanctuary, for peace (for Faulkner’s was a profoundly gentle and peaceful imagination in many ways), but is creating, in a fury, helplessly because of the perception that inside the Temple is Popeye. The true power and potency of the redeeming godhead (sexual or spiritual) is gone, and in its place one finds only death, destruction, indifferent corruption, petty crime, voyeurism, impotence, simulacra, disembowelment, immolation, expulsion, drunkenness. And further, all of this is fathered and protected by the Judge, the Law, in a cruel and ironic deception. And outside the Temple, there is only Horace Benbow to come to one’s rescue—an inept, impotent, classical heritage reduced, now, to carrying home dripping shrimp and locking the back door for yet another corrupt female.

This fictional grammar of negative being gives us the deep case structure of ontological violation, the rape, corruption, and destruction of all generative being. Sanctuary is the reduction of ontological possibilities (sexual, spiritual, intellectual, legal, physical, moral, ethical) to the violators, the violations, and the violated. It is a hellish ontological grammar by means of which one can only conjugate everything to nothing. Addie Bundren is a familiar matrix of destruction who takes the essential being of each of her children into the coffin with her before they can lay her to rest in the ground. The other figure which applies to Addie because it so dominates As I Lay Dying is that she rots and putrefies the essential being of each of her children. But in Sanctuary, all of society is a matrix of destruction and the Temple is so polluted that only the extreme measures of Requiem For a Nun purge and redeem it.

More than the Temple is polluted in Sanctuary, and one way to discover the extent to which the moral, ethical, and legal codes (or grammars) have been contaminated in Faulkner’s imagination is to pursue—briefly—some of the ways in which Sanctuary is a black or inverted ironic Romance. Just as the fiction cancels its title, so it cancels the central vision of the convention or genre it inverts and subjects to such ferocious irony. The novel, as with many other Faulkner novels, is full of romance conventions.8 But the whole novel is one long furious inverting, canceling irony. There is no love anywhere in this romance, and, finally, the whole chivalric code, which does finally emerge as a generative social force in so many of Faulkner’s novels from Intruder in the Dust on, is canceled or inverted into irony. Romances were built, in part, on the absolute belief in sanctions and sanctuaries, in a moral and religious code which would prevail if man and God could make it prevail. In canceling his title, Faulkner canceled it absolutely, completely, by having the whole novel work ironically, corrosively against it. A sanctuary is a refuge. A world without sanctuaries is a world in which there is no refuge anywhere. Sanctuary is a fiction in which all the gods are either dead or ineffectual. A god is a center of being, as the Greeks well knew. If God is dead, there is still the world. If all the gods are dead, there is nothing. That is what a grammar of negative being conjugates to: nothing, the ontological void.

Demonic Incarnation and the Pestilential Word

Light in August (1932)

After Sanctuary—the absolute nadir of Faulkner’s vision, even though it is not his most terrifying fiction until one abstracts the vision and mediates upon it in ontological and metaphysical terms as a grammar of negative being—Faulkner went up, in the sense that he never again created a fiction so purely negative as either Sanctuary or As I Lay Dying. Using his own title, one can say that he got lighter in the 1930s or that he saw more light in the 1930s—both ambiguous, vague, but generally affirmative and true statements about Faulkner’s works between Light in August and Go Down, Moses. “Conjugating” the title of Light in August is a lesson in how this “lightening” occurred and in how Faulkner’s imagination works, re-individuating certain kinds of characters, reconceiving and so re-enacting a repeating but always varied ontological drama.9

Light in August is most obviously a time title because it locates something at a specific point in seasonal time. It stresses recurrence and is futuristic; it is full of expectation and hopefulness. The title is never negated in the way that Sanctuary is; it is diffused through a wide spectrum of applications and meanings to give us, for the first time in Faulkner, a much fuller range of human possibilities, ranging all the way from light to dark and back to light again. One does not know at first whether the title is optical, physical/spatial, physiological, moral, cognitive, or mystical/visionary—to name some of the possibilities; and one does not know for a long time which of these is going to have primacy.

Time, not history, is the central concern of this fiction. Even though one of the main images for Joe Christmas (the road) is spatial, 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 of August; he sees the light in August; he becomes light in August. The title applies more fully to Hightower than to any other character, largely because so many different forces in the fiction converge upon him.