Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Thomas J. Cousineau
Professor of English (emeritus)
Washington College
USA
“Now the final copper light of afternoon fades; now the street beyond the low
maples and the low signboard is prepared and empty, framed by the study
This essay will eventually become the final chapter my current work-in-progress
began several years ago when I stumbled upon Vladimir Nabokov’s advice that “A
wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but
with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle.” William Faulkner’s novel Light
in August has always produced tingles in me ever since I first read it as a graduate student
in California back in the 1960s. My experience of a truly telltale tingle, however, came
only recently while I was reading an article entitled “Framing Joe Christmas: Vision and
Detection in Light in August,” in which the author, Randall Wilhelm, argues that the
narrator of Faulkner’s novel “uses the window frame for a variety of narrative functions,
each one implicated in the framing of Christmas as a murderer” (401; my emphasis). The
word “frame” has been a commonplace in discussions of Light in August since its
publication in 1932, but it had always been used to describe the way that Faulkner
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surrounds the main story of the novel – involving the tragic fates of Joe Christmas, Gail
Hightower, and Joanna Burden – with the comic “frame-tale” of Lena Grove’s quest to
find the father of her baby, who was about-to-be-born in the first chapter and recently
born in the last. See, for example, Alan Friedman’s ‘The Frame-like Structure of Light in
August.” Thanks to Wihelm’s article, I suddenly saw for the first time the “uncanny
design” of a novel in which “framing” points both to stories that are told by members of
the fictional community to unjustly frame certain characters as guilty of punishable acts
and Faulkner’s technique of framing these same stories to achieve an aesthetic effect. The
forward movement of the plot of Light in August, which begins with the framing of Joe
uncannily with the static structure of the novel as a whole, which is epitomized by the
The word “frame” itself – although holding the key to the uncanny design of
Light in August – only appears three times in the novel. It is twice used as a noun to
indicate a merely literal frame: on one occasion, the narrator describes Joe as lying
on the cot in his cabin and watching fireflies as they “began to drift across the open
frame of the door” (237); several pages later, in the course of recalling one of his
meetings with Joanna Burden, Joe describes her demeanor as being “as grave and
tranquil as a portrait in a frame” (269). Its third appearance – which occurs in the
passage that I have chosen as the epigraph for this essay – is in the form of a
commonplace metaphor that describes the way in which the window of Gail
Hightower’s study frames the street that runs in front of his house. The near-
invisibility of the word “frame” is curiously mirrored by the subliminal ways that the
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act of framing achieves the ambiguous co-presence of movement and stasis that the
narrator attributes in the opening pages of Light in August to the wagons that are
taking Lena on her journey: “she advanced in identical and anonymous and
avatars, like something moving forever and without progress across an urn” (7; my
emphasis).
* * *
Faulkner sets the stage for the uncanny design of a novel characterized by what we
exclusively on the changeless distinction between “white folks” and “niggers.” The
word “nigger” pervades the novel from beginning to end, first appearing in Joe
Brown’s complaint that his job at the saw mill involves his “starting in at daylight
and slaving all day like a durn nigger” (44), and is used for the last time by the
unnamed furniture repairer and dealer who refers to Jefferson as the town “Where
they lynched that nigger” (497). Most of its intervening appearances serve to divide
the community into two mutually exclusive sub-groups. Mooney, the foreman at the
saw mill, clearly distinguishes between the work habits of each group: “a nigger
wouldn’t last till the noon whistle, working on this job like some white folks work on it”
(44); we are later reminded of the strict segregation of the races by the suggestion that
Joe Christmas, if the so-called truth about his Negro blood is revealed, risks being sent to
“the nigger orphanage”; much later, he lives in the “nigger cabin” on Joanna Burden’s
property (79), and Joanna herself wants him to study law at a “nigger school” (276). The
sexual mores of Negro women are likewise held to be different from those of white
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women, a detail that comes to light when the Negro woman who lives with Hightower
says that she quit because he asked her to do something that was “against God and
nature,” to which some of the younger men respond that “if a nigger woman considered it
One of the most detailed expositions of the dichotomy between the two races is
offered by Gavin Stevens, who presents a lengthy explanation as to why Joe Christmas,
after escaping from jail, undertakes a flight that takes him alternately to back and white
communities:
But his blood would not be quiet, let him save it. It would not be either one or the
other and let his body save itself. Because the black blood drove him first to the
negro cabin. And then the white blood drove him out of there, as it was the black
blood which snatched up the pistol and the white blood which would not let him
fire it. And it was the white blood which sent him to the minister, which rising in
him for the last and final time, sent him against all reason and all reality, into the
* * *
Against the background of a stable community founded upon this “natural” and
Gail Hightower, and Joanna Burden – whose framing as a destabilizing threat to this
foundation sets in motion the plot of Light in August: Joe Christmas is a “white nigger,”
Joanna Burden is a “nigger lover,” and Gail Hightower is said to have sexual relations
Our first encounter with Joe Christmas’s framing occurs in chapter 6, where the
dietitian at his orphanage, fearing that he will reveal her sexual encounter with her lover
decides to tell the matron about his Negro blood. The actual truth about Joe’s ancestry is,
to be sure, obscure; he is a Negro only by conjecture. (Faulkner had given him a Negro
father in an early draft of Light in August but left his parentage indeterminate in the
published version). So indistinguishable is he with respect to skin color from the other
children at this all-white orphanage, that it is only his “framing” as a Negro by the
dietician that will, as it were, make him one: “’All I need do is to make the madam
believe,’ she thought. And then she thought He will look like a pea in a pan full of coffee
beans” (130). Joe is similarly framed by the other children at the orphanage, all of
whom call him “Nigger” (127). He does the same to himself when he tells his girlfriend
Bobbie “I got some nigger blood in me” (196); not long afterwards, he is beaten for being
Gail Hightower, who has no “nigger blood,” was born and bred into a well-to-
do southern family, had a father who served in the Confederate Army, and was well
Jefferson to serve as the minister in its Presbyterian church. His father, however,
did not share the community’s acceptance of slavery: “But though born and bred
and dwelling in an age and land where to own slaves was less expensive than to not
own them, he would neither eat food grown and cooked by, nor sleep in a bed
prepared by a negro slave (467). We learn as well that his father was “an
abolitionist almost before the sentiment had become a word to percolate down from
What we might then call the suspect “abolitionist blood” that was passed on
to Hightower by his father manifests itself in certain aspects of his behavior that
frame him as an outsider. He allows a Negro woman to live with him in his house
(71), for which “un-white” misdeed he is beaten unconscious by the Ku Klux Klan
(72) and, as we had learned just a bit earlier, was judged as “done damned” by the
woman further contributed to his framing: “Because within two days there were
those who said that the child was Hightower’s and that he had let it die deliberately”
(74).
means fully integrated into the white community. As Byron Bunch explains to Lena
Grove, who has asked him about the house that she sees burning in the distance:
“It’s a right big old house. It’s been there a long time. Don’t nobody live in it but one
lady, by herself. I reckon there are folks in this town will call it a judgment on her,
even now.” Byron then enumerates the offenses that would lead the community to
regard the destruction of Joanna’s home as a sign of divine retribution: “Her folks
come down here in the Reconstruction to stir up the niggers. Two of them got killed
doing it. They say she is still mixed up with niggers. Visits them when they are sick,
like they was white. Won’t have a cook because it would have to be a nigger cook.
Folks say she claims that niggers are the same as white folks. That’s why folks dont
never go out there” (53). As Joanna herself tells Joe Christmas, her Yankee origins
frame her in the eyes as the community as an undesirable alien: “They hated us
* * *
At the same time that the community frames Joe Christmas, Gail Hightower, and
Joanna Burden in a way that leads each of them inexorably towards a tragic
Lena Grove, Byron Bunch, and Lucas Burch – who represent a threat, not to racial,
but to marital norms. Lena Grove is framed as an unmarried mother, who attracts
pregnancy, her brother “called her whore” (6). Armstid, who drives her into
Jefferson, notices – but in a nonjudgmental way -- “ that she wears no wedding ring”
(12). He expects that “womenfolk are likely to be good [to Lena] without being very
kind” (12). While Armstid thinks he knows exactly what his wife will say
(presumably words expressing her strong disapproval), she is actually quite kind to
Lena, telling her to stay off her feet rather than helping in the kitchen (17) and
giving her savings to the unwed mother-to-be before she departs (22). She chastises
Lena, not for her pregnancy, but for her naïve belief that Lucas will welcome her
arrival wherever he happens to be: “And you believe that he will be there when you
get there. Granted that he ever was there at all. That he will here you are in the
same town with him, and still be there when the sun sets” (21).
Hightower warns him against serving as Lena’s would-be husband: “there begins to
Byron talks quietly, telling about how he decided after they reached the square to
take Lena on to Mrs. Beard’s” (82-3). Hightower, likewise counsels him against
“attempting to come between man and wife” (307) and advises him to marry a
virgin rather than sacrificing himself “to a woman who has chosen once and now
wishes to renege that choice” (316). The price that Byron pays for failing to follows
Hightower’s advice is, however, nothing more that his becoming occasionally the
object of good-natured scorn: “Byron Bunch, that weeded another man’s laidby crop,
without any halvers. The fellow that took care of another man’s whore while the other
Lucas Burch, for his part, has fathered a child without, however, bothering to
become a husband: He flees from Lena shortly after discovering that he has
impregnated her and, after arriving in Jefferson, moves into the “nigger cabin”
where Joe has been living. Upon entering the cabin after the birth of Lena’s baby
(and where he expects that his reward for identifying Joanna Burden’s killer awaits
him) and discovering the unwelcome surprise that actually awaits him there – “he
was gone, through the window, without a sound, in a single motion almost like a
As was true with Byron, his wayward behavior leads to nothing more
threatening than his becoming the object of sarcasm. He is described as a man who
“was just living on the country like a locust” and who “can’t even do a good job of
shirking.” He reminds Byron of “one of these cars running along the street with a
radio in it. You cant make out what it is saying and the car aint going anywhere in
particular and when you look at it close you see that there aint even anybody in it”
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and Mooney, his foreman, “of a horse. Not a mean horse. Just a worthless horse”
(37).
trio and the novel’s three tragic protagonists together is framed by the community
in a way that leaves them essentially unchanged. Like the Negro woman who, as
Hightower remembers, returned after the Civil War “still a slave” (476), at the end
of Light in August, Byron is still in love with Lena, who is still searching for Lucas,
* * *
The effect of stillness Faulkner achieves by portraying the trio of characters formed by
Lena, Byron, and Bunch as “moving forever and without progress” mirrors uncannily
the frame-tale of Light in August. Lena arrives in Jefferson in chapter 1 and departs in
chapter 21. In both chapters, she comes and goes in the company of an amicable man –
first Armstid, then the unnamed furniture dealer -- who offer to take her in their wagons.
Her first thought, expressed silently in the opening paragraph of the novel, are “I have
come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece”
(3). The final words of the novel, which she speaks aloud, echo this thought: “My, my.
A body does get around. Here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and
now it’s already Tennessee” (507). A similar framing occurs between the story that Lena
tells Mrs. Armstid in chapter 1 about Lucas leaving her, whose purpose is to deceive her
into believing that Lucas is better than he is by inventing a tale about his going in search
of better work prospects – and the story that the furniture repairer and dealer tells his wife
This framing technique applies as well to chapters 2 and 19. Joe Christmas
arrives at the saw mill at the beginning of chapter 2, where he is immediately framed as
an outsider: “He looked like a tramp, yet not like a tramp either . . . there was something
definitely rootless about him” (31). Words like “stranger” and “foreigner” come
naturally to the lips of his co-workers, whose foreman says to them “We ought to run him
through the planer, . . . Maybe that will take that look off his face” (32). The violence
that is invoked here as only a potential threat is finally fulfilled when Percy Grimm kills
and castrates Joe in the kitchen of Gail Hightower’s home at the end of chapter
19:”Grimm emptied the automatic’s magazine into the table; later someone covered all
five shots with a folded handkerchief.” Following the castration, Grimm taunts Joe
Christmas with the prophecy that “Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell”
(465).
Likewise, in the first sentence of chapter 2, we see Gail Hightower sitting at the
window of his study: “From his study window he can see the street. It is not far away,
since the lawn is not deep. It is a small lawn, containing a half dozen low growing
maples. . . . From the window he can also see the sign, which he calls his monument”
(57). The window, the street, the maples, and the sign all return in the opening sentence
of chapter 20, which I have chosen as the epigraph for this chapter, and the window
reappears at the very end of the chapter, in which we see Hightower “leaning forward in
the window, his bandaged head huge and without depth above the twin blobs of his hands
upon the ledge” (493). As was true with the first and last appearances of Joe Christmas,
the chapters in which we see Hightower for the first and last times are framed by acts of
violence: in chapter 2, we learn that he was beaten into unconsciousness by the Ku Klux
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Klan; in chapter 20, this physical attack returns as the (completely gratuitous) blow that
Joe Christmas deals to Hightower’s head with his manacled hands: Grimm and his men
“stooped and raised Hightower, his face bleeding, from the floor where Christmas,
running up the hall, his raised and armed and manacled hands full of glare and glitter like
lightning bolts, so that he resembled a vengeful and furious god pronouncing a doom, had
* * *
The obvious as well as the not-so-obvious ways in which Faulkner frames, not only the
novel’s “frame-tale,” but all three of the opening and closing chapters of Light in August
episodes that occur elsewhere in the novel Light in August contains 21 chapters, which
are arranged in such a way as to create a loosely constructed chiasm, with the couple
formed by Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden, which occupies the entirety of chapter 11,
placed precisely at its midpoint. On either side of this pivotal chapter, Faulkner frames
Joe’s early years at the orphanage, for example, are recounted in chapter 6, where
we learn of the circumstances that led to his expulsion; his actual arrival at the orphanage
is not, however, recounted until chapter 16. His sexual relationship with Bobbie (a
prostitute whose masculine name at first confuses him) begins in chapter 8; gender
confusion then returns in chapter 12, where Joanna Burden is described three times as
“manlike.” Joe hits McEachern over the head with a chair midway in chapter 9, leaving
him – at least he thinks so – for dead; this motif then returns at the end of chapter 19,
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when he he hits Hightower over the head with his manacled hands, leaving us to wonder
Yet another coupling of episodes occurs between the two accounts of Joe’s
flights: in chapter 10, we see him in flight from the McEachern’s for a period of fifteen
years, during which time he moves back and forth between black and white communities;
in chapter 19, a similar flight – this time from the town jail and lasting only a few hours --
takes him once again from one racial community to another. Finally, Faulkner presents
the birth of Lena’s baby in such a way as to frame it in relation to the birth of the negro
baby over which Hightower had similarly presided many years previously: In chapter 17,
as Hightower and Byron are preparing to leave Hightower’s home and to be on their way
to the “nigger cabin” in which Lena is about the give birth, Byron asks Hightower if he
has “the book you used when the nigger baby came” (394). The episode to which Byron
is referring here occurred in chapter 3, where we learn that Hightower “ran back to his
house and took one of his books from the study shelf and got his razor and some cord and
ran back to the cabin and delivered the child. But it was already dead” (70).
narrating in close proximity to each other certain episodes that are widely separated in
time. We notice, for example, that Joe is framed as a “nigger” by the dietitian at the
orphanage (an event that occurred in 1900) in chapter 6 and again in 1932 by Joe Brown,
an event that is reported in chapter 5, where Joe tells the sheriff that Joe is “part nigger”
and taunts him with the charge of “Accus[ing] the white man and let[ting] the nigger go
free” (97). Likewise, the birth of Lena’s baby in 1932 is recounted in chapter 17, just a
few pages after the account in chapter 16 of Joe Christmas’s birth, an event that occurred
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either in 1895 or 1896. His strategy here bears an uncanny resemblance Mrs. Hines’s
hallucinatory conflation of the birth of Lena’s baby with the birth of Joe Christmas,
two events that occurred more than thirty years apart: “Her movement roused it
[Lena’s baby] perhaps; it cried once. Then the bafflement too flowed away. It fled as
ludicrous. ‘it’s Joey,” she said. It’s my Milly’s little boy’” (397-8).
* * *
Returning to the passage that I chose as the epigraph for this essay – in which the
window of Hightower’s study “frames” the street in front of his house – we now
notice the way in which the window itself serves throughout Light in August as a
literal framing device that is uncannily associated with both movement and stasis.
References to actual windows occur more than one hundred times in the novel, a
great many of them in reference to the window of Hightower’s study, next to which
looking out of this window, “from which he can see the street,” at the beginning of
chapter 3; as the chapter continues, Faulkner shows him “tak[ing] his place in the
study window just before dusk . . . . waiting for that instant when all light has failed
out of the sky” (60); at its conclusion, we see him “still sit[ting] at the study window,
the room still dark behind him” (75-6). Hightower’s study returns in the final
section of chapter 13, which begins with him “sitting in the study window in the first
dark” (311) and concludes with him “lean[ing] there in the window, in the August
heat, oblivious of the odor in which he lives” (317) and “hear[ing] now only the
myriad and interminable insects, leaning in the window, breathing the hot, still rich
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maculate earth, thinking of how when he was young, he had loved darkness, of
walking or sitting alone among trees at night” (318). The entirety of chapter 20, in
which we will see Hightower for the last time, has the study window as its setting. It
begins with him sitting by it, remembering his youth, passing from there to
memories of his middle age, and being left at the end “leaning forward in it”
While Hightower either sits or stands at his window, almost all of the other
sneaks out of a window of her brother’s house to meet Lucas Burch: “It had a
window which she learned to open and close again in the dark without making a
sound” (5). Discovering that she is pregnant and deciding to go in search of Lucas,
she leaves once again through this window: “Two weeks later she climbed again
through the window. It was a little difficult this time. ‘If it had been this hard to do
before, I reckon I would not be doing it now,’ she thought” (6). We remember, too,
the circumstances of the death of Hightower’s wife: “she had jumped or fallen from a
with the bedroom window of the house where he lives with the McEacherns: “he
climbed from his window and dropped the ten feet to the earth and walked the five
miles in to town” (186). Faulkner later conflates the McEachern years with those he
spends in the company of Joanna Burden by having him first enter the latter’s home
through the window of her kitchen (229-30), where eating the peas that he finds on
the table suddenly brings back the past: “his jaw stopped suddenly in midchewing
15
and thinking fled for twentyfive years back down the street, past all the
imperceptible corners of bitter defeats and more bitter victories, and five miles even
beyond a corner where he used to wait in the terrible early time of love, for
someone whose name he had forgot” (230). He also connects Joe’s first experience
of love with Bobbie and his sexual relationship with Joanna Burden by associating
the latter both with secrecy -- “She insisted on a place for concealing notes, letters”
-- and a window: “for a whole week she forced him to climb into a window to come
to her” (259). Finally, we notice that the window of her brother’s house, out of
which the pregnant Lena has climbed with difficulty returns towards the end of
Light in August as the window of the “nigger cabin” out of which Lucas Burch leaps
with preternatural agility upon discovering that he has been made a father: “Then
he was gone, through the window, without a sound, in a single motion almost like a
* * *
the reader as the touchstone for a series of readings of classic literary works of the
modernist period whose “uncanny design” emerges in two stages: in the first of these, we
discover that a nearly invisible word – “framing,” for example, in Light in August – is
a misdeed is not focused exclusively on Joe Christmas, and Faulkner’s use of framing as
a narrative technique goes well beyond the frame-tale itself. In the second phase of our
séance, we discover the uncanny way in which the ubiquitous activity designated by this
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word is both a stumbling stone for the protagonists of the work in question and the
uncovering the archetype of this paradoxical symmetry between a stumbling stone and a
attention to the curious way in which the dream of flying -- which leads to tragic
consequences both for Icarus, who falls to his death, and for Daedalus, who is left to bury
him and to mourn his loss – coexists with the apotheosis that Ovid predicts for himself in
I then discuss the revisiting of this archetype, first, in Dante’s Inferno in which love leads
both to damnation for Paolo and Francesca and, thanks to the intercession of Beatrice, to
Dante’s salvation and, second, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which being bound to double-
business is both a human predicament to which its characters fall victim and a dramatic
As their titles indicate, the nine chapters that follow this introduction invite
which nearly invisible words reveal the ubiquitous reciprocity of stumbling stones
and cornerstones. They include: “Fixing Things in The Great Gatsby,” “Incarnating
Loss in The Book of Disquiet,” “Doing Nothing in Waiting for Godot,” “Turning Back in
Bibliography
Writing.” https://sites.google.com/site/thedaedaluscomplex/home.
Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: Random House, 2002. Modern
Library Edition.
ed. Readings on William Faulkner. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 1998; 134-40.
Wilhelm, Randall. “Framing Joe Christmas: Vision and Detection in Light in August.