B006JHRY9S EBOK (20 page)

With this as background,
Chapter 5
opens after midnight, on an unidentified date. It focuses wholly on Joe Christmas’s thoughts, feelings,
and actions during the next twenty-four hours. These sixteen pages are as brilliant as anything Faulkner ever wrote. Cryptically—in the present moment of consciousness—they convey Joe’s mounting anger toward Brown (they share the same cabin), his increasing frustration over previous actions unknown to us and only alluded to here, his aimless postmidnight wandering outside the cabin in his underclothes and with his knife, and his suffocating walk through Freedman’s Town (the black neighborhood of Jefferson). The chapter closes with him sitting outside a dark house at midnight:

He was not thinking
Maybe she is not asleep either
tonight. He was not thinking at all; thinking had not begun now; the voices had not begun now either. He just sat there, not moving, until after a while he heard the clock two miles away strike twelve. Then he rose and moved toward the house. He didn’t go fast. He didn’t think even then
Something is going to happen. Something is going to happen to me
. (LA 486, emphasis in the original)

The prose is lean, sharp as Joe’s knife. The italics suggest a sort of mental reflection deeper than conscious thought. There, lodged in this subterranean territory, the woman who occupies the dark house moves raging inside him. He is waiting for something, but he does not know what, as he sits listening to the clock strike midnight. When he rises and heads toward the house, he is at once wholly focused yet unaware of what he intends to do. The last clause in italics—“
something is going to happen to me”
—is eerily disturbing. The syntax may tell us why. The subject of the sentence is “something.” Joe himself is relegated to the subordinate position of the object of the preposition: “to me.” All our practice as speakers of English tells us that the clause, if healthy, would read otherwise: “I am going to do something.” But Faulkner has it exactly right.
Something
has priority. Whatever it is, he will not
do
it: it will
happen to
him. As we learn much later, he is only moments away from murderous violence. But he does not seem to know that. He does not even name—in this sentence—the other person on whom the violence will be released. In his roiling mind, it is all happening
to him
. The chapter ends teetering on the verge of an approaching climax.

Chapter 6 begins by ignoring everything that has preceded it: “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building” (LA 487). No first-time reader is prepared to recognize the time as thirty years earlier, the place as an orphanage in Memphis, and the consciousness as that of Joe Christmas,
a young child now. A first-time reader is especially unprepared to coordinate these cryptic data because the ending of the fifth chapter has all but promised something else. Instead of delivering on that promise, chapter 6 and the three subsequent ones unfold the events of Christmas’s childhood, concluding seventy-five pages later in another scene of violence. By this time Joe is eighteen.

Chapter 10 then summarizes, in under ten pages, the next fifteen years of Joe’s life. It ends by delivering him, now thirty-three years old, at the doorstep of the same dark house he sat outside of, six chapters ago. The time is two years earlier than the time of
chapter 5
. Entering the house stealthily at night, he meets its owner, a middle-aged woman named Joanna Burden. She thought she had heard a thief breaking in, and they confront each other in the kitchen. The next three chapters (we are at this point 170 pages into the novel) narrate their developing relationship. It is a liaison at once intimate and violent, and we watch it move toward a moment of pending violence that we have
already
witnessed, but not understood:

And so as he sat in the shadow of the ruined garden on that August night three months later and heard the clock in the courthouse two miles away strike ten and then eleven, he believed with calm paradox that he was the volitionless servant of the fatality in which he believed that he did not believe. He was saying to himself
I had to do it
already in the past tense;
I had to do it. She said so herself
. (LA 605, emphasis in the original)

We are with Joe again, outside that dark house, and he is about to perform what, so many pages earlier, he was on the edge of performing. He hears the same clock striking the same hours. Since this is not for him a repetition, he still does not know what he’s going to do. But for us it is a repetition, and, unlike him, we are now positioned—thanks to the intervening pages—to understand what is happening. We know that Joanna Burden lives—lived—inside that house. We also know that someone—almost certainly Christmas—slit her throat with a knife and fled the scene. Because Faulkner deploys time in such a way that later chapters introduce earlier materials heretofore unknown, a moment like the one above sets off remarkable reverberations. We experience simultaneously both our knowing what he has done and his not-knowing what he will do.

More, Faulkner has by now prepared us to decode those phrases about “volitionless servant” and “fatality” and belief or disbelief. We have witnessed (in preceding chapters) Joe’s adoption by an abusive foster father, the Calvinist McEachern. McEachern tried brutally to beat the doctrine
of predestination into the little boy. Joe silently endured the beatings, refusing to learn his catechism. This passage suggests that he has been penetrated by it nevertheless. Like a ghostly secret sharer, McEachern’s fatalistic teachings lodge inside Joe, cohabiting there unacknowledged, alongside Joanna’s Presbyterian gloom. Marked by both McEachern and Joanna, even as he thinks he shares none of their beliefs, Joe envisages the act he is about to do as already done.
“I had to do it
already in the past tense.” He is a Calvinist despite his repudiation of Calvinist doctrine. Faulkner arranges for us to recognize—as insight—a contradiction that his character lives as blindness.

Why would Faulkner present Christmas in this intricately recursive manner? What is Faulkner up to as he challenges our normal ways of reading events? Why does he refuse to supply the simpler temporal sequencing that is the bread and butter of narrative? As veteran readers of fiction, we not only anticipate such sequencing but virtually demand it. Faulkner’s great work does not provide it, and this is a major reason that he is difficult to read. The anticipated sequence is of course linear—a move from trouble seeded in the past to present complications arising from that trouble, and finally, satisfyingly, to later resolutions of what came before. A move of steadily increasing enlightenment, in the sense that usually the protago-nist—and always the narrator (and therefore the reader)—remains abreast of what is developing. Almost all novels supply that linearity—and the gradual illumination that accompanies it—in their ordering of materials. Why does Faulkner refuse to do so?

This entire book is an attempt to answer that question with the fullness it deserves. For now, let us consider the following. We do not in reality make sense of our lives by moving in that empowering way from past through present and into the future. As Kierkegaard noted, we
live
life forward, gropingly, even as we
understand
it backward, retrospectively. Or as Faulkner has Mr. Compson put it, “Its not even time until it was.” Only later, in looking back, do things already done become clear—often too late to intervene upon them. It is later that we find (impose) those demarcations that announce beginnings, middles, and endings in experience that has passed (been “excreted”).

But a “middle” is legible as a “middle” only if we know the beginning it follows and the ending it precedes. Until we know what comes before and after, a middle is—a muddle. Narrative fiction delights in muddles, but only to the extent that it satisfyingly turns them into middles. It then turns middles into precursors of endings. Narrative fiction
exists
to do this.
Going from muddle to meaning—trouble to illumination—is how novels make sense of life. This is what it means to
plot
human behavior. You start off (if you are a novelist) with a compelling idea about how things will turn out (or have turned out: you might start with the end itself). This idea can be and often is revised while the narrative is being written, but for the narrative to reach a satisfying conclusion, it must reveal—to retrospective hindsight—a gathered sense of beginning, middle, and end. Such emergent coherence—of lives shown, at the end, to have taken on shape and meaning—is the province, precisely, of narrative. No human being starts off or continues that way, however. Because we are in life, not in narrative, the end—our end—cannot yet be known.

If we press on the familiar verb
recognize
, it breaks apart into
re-cognize
. We must cognize twice before we recognize once. Until it happens the second time, we do not know what the first happening has meant. Faulkner is peerless in his capacity to dramatize the difference between cognizing and re-cognizing. His deployment of repetitions allows his readers, later, to move from the former to the latter. More than perhaps any other novelist, Faulkner invents procedures that pass on to us the turmoil of present time when seeing is not yet
seeing
. The insight we eventually arrive at is ours alone. Faulkner scrupulously keeps it from his characters because they—unlike us—are caught up in the blindness of their ongoing lives. They rarely are granted the privilege of becoming readers of their own lives, permitted to recognize themselves. In making us inhabit (for quite a while) their darkness, Faulkner generates in us a powerful sense of the stumbling of present moments not yet shaped into recognition.

These four masterpieces reconceive prior novelistic conventions for managing time (for making sure it delivers recognition). Benjy, Quentin, Temple, Joe: these characters’ lives are caught up in trouble that refuses to take on satisfying focus over time. The issue is
time
, how humans actually move through it. Faulkner astonishingly restores something of the living messi-ness of that motion. For instance, as he suggests when he writes “Memory believes before knowing remembers,” he immerses Joe Christmas in time in ways that escape Christmas’s own understanding. Joe unconsciously believes what he no longer remembers. Worse, what he has forgotten has not forgotten him. If you asked Christmas what his troubled life was all about, at most he might reflect: “
All I wanted was peace”
(LA 481, emphasis in the original). But there is no peace in his life, and no understanding of why it is missing. He lives his life not as retrospective understanding but as a sequence of violent missteps in the present. It took all of Faulkner’s
genius to make narrative
say
such missteps, to make readers experience the blindness of the present
as
blindness. Stumbling is likewise how Temple experiences the nightmare at Frenchman’s Bend—as well as how the idiot Benjy lives at the mercy of a time scheme whose logic forever escapes him.

Faulkner’s great work, in showing how we inhabit ongoing time differently from narrative conventions for representing life in time, sustains within us, longer than we might like, a state of unpreparedness for what comes next and why. This is why
Light in August
“begins” five different times. No given moment is the beginning. Each is saturated in what went earlier, resonant with what will come later—but none of this is clear from the start, or even soon thereafter. Joe’s moments are difficult to decipher because they contain so much more—diffusely, even unconsciously—than he knows to be in them when they actually occur. McEachern and Joanna Burden live inside him in ways he will never decipher. So he falters, and his creator makes us falter in reading him—makes us pause at cryptic thoughts or memories, start over again on hypotheses about what is happening and why. Light does eventually arrive in
Light in August
—unbearable light—but no character in the book is in possession of it. No reader gets to that light very quickly either. So let me say it again. Faulkner is hard to read—and at the same time supremely worth reading—because he makes his great work express the challenge of being in time. He had to reinvent novelistic form to get his fiction to do this. By 1928 he somehow grasped that this was the work before him. His muddled life had opened up the path.

The romance of flight began perhaps in childhood, as one of the brothers’ escapades. Under Faulkner’s guidance, the three of them (Dean would have been too little) had labored for weeks—with rotten wood, rusty nails, grocery bags, wrapping paper, and a design taken from a boys’ magazine—to build their own plane. Eventually he was satisfied with the results and determined to give their craft its trial run. He would be at the controls. The collapse that followed that comic enterprise eerily foreshadows a number of subsequent attempts to rise into the air.

At about the same time during their childhood, his brother Johncy would recall, there was another airborne adventure—one they witnessed rather than participated in. At one of the local fairs, the most spectacular stunt involved the exploits of a scruffy and drunken airman. This fellow would arrive on the scene already deep into booze, carrying a parachute and
a huge, shapeless, canvas bag. The plan was to fill the bag with hot air to the point where, with him attached below, it would rise as a sort of huge balloon off the ground. It took most of the day for the coal-supplied fire to produce enough hot air to launch the project. The boys watched, mesmerized, as the bag would slowly start to billow. During this time, the airman steadily cursed and clamored for more booze, his eyes red and streaming, thanks to the unremitting smoke and flames. Eventually the gigantic inflated balloon showed signs of imminent departure. Its inebriated passenger-pilot, still cursing, began to fasten his parachute harness and strap himself in. By the time the contraption rose into the air, the boys’ excitement would be beyond containing. They would run at full speed, following the airborne craft, hoping to see the pilot make his exit. They would come upon him minutes later, already on the ground and fumbling with the harness straps. He would be so intoxicated that he hardly felt the violence of his clumsy landing. Drink, grease, cursing, and desperate risk: did Faulkner always carry these associations with human attempts at flight? Or did he remember them only later, during the 1930s? These were the years when he avidly watched barnstorming flyers perform their daredevil stunts at county fairs—the years prior to his writing
Pylon
.