Overview in Faulkner's "Light in August"

Yet other lector complained that the book lacked form: "it hops ab erupt on its toes, however the point is that it is on its toes either the time." The reviewer did acknowledge that cleverness in August "demonstrates considerable activity which will annex Faulkner's popularity with both the knowing reader and the general public" (490). Faulkner's look indifference during his Hollywood stay was no doubt a defense to ward off possible disappointment.

Faulkner knew that his financial protective cover and artistic reputation were at stake with tripping in August. This helps to explain the particular care with which the novel was constructed. A passageway from Joseph Blotner's 1984 biography reveals this concern:

The marginal inserts, the cancellations, the interpolations, the discarded sheets and the pasteons salvaged from others, all showed the combination of meticulousness and energy, the craftman's care and the determination to make the do match the dream. (282)

rough of Faulkner's early critics were averse to his method of narrating out of sequence. His technique of withholding essential information about genius plot line, only to shift to another, was considered sloppy. For example, at the end of chapter pentad of Light in August, Faulkner places Joe Christmas just outside of Joanna Burden's house. In another moment he will mount the stairs that jumper lead to her bedroom. Some 140 pages later, we actually watch Joe climb the stairs, only if in the interven

ing pages we have wise to(p) so much more about him that we can recognize why he believes that he must kill her (Brooks 180). Some of the early critics still saw Faulkner's outofsequence story as a drawback but were willing to concede the superpower of his prose. Henry Seidel Canby, who had called the novel sloppy, also granted that it had "extraordinary forcefulness and insight" (Karl 490). In addition, he had praise for its lyricism:

T. S. Eliot's supererogatory verse, particularly The Waste Land, stimulated Faulkner. Eliot's influence can be seen in Faulkner's ability to give mythic dimensions to his narrative. In Eliot's " unreal method," he personified natural forces to give his work mythical, or epic, proportions.

In a like manner, Faulkner evokes many mythic or antediluvian patriarch images in his descriptions of Lena Grove's inevitable movement toward her destiny. A primitive and ethnical credit, Lena is a kind outcast who has made herself vulnerable to social censure because she has violated certain moral convictions (Thompson 79). It is also most-valuable to note that Lena's movement resembles those of the figures on Keats's Grecian urn in their old-fashioned "movement without progress" (Minter 103). It may be disconcerting to readers that Lena appears at the beginning of Light in August, not to appear once more until the middle and the end. She finds a faithful husband after Christmas dies. Faulkner's pop the question in presenting her is twofold. There must be a author for the other characters to meet, and there must be a character representing the sustaining power of life itself. Lena serves as an affirmation of all the honesty in life, in sharp contrast to the murderous aspects of the switch men. By empowering her with an earth mother radiance, Faulkner is mythologizing her in the manner of Eliot.

Today, Light in August is interpreted as a happiness of theme and characterization. Its stylistic and technical achievements are worthy of attentive study by themselves. Light in August
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