Light In August William Faulkner

Light in August, a novel that contrasts stark tragedy with hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, which features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, a lonely outcast haunted by visions of Confederate glory; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.


It occurs to me on reading Light in August for the third time, that if America were ever to try to come to terms with its legacy of slavery--unlikely now at this late date--but if it ever were to empanel some kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission, like the one South Africa had after apartheid, and which seems especially needed now that we are mourning the shooting deaths by cops of so many unarmed black men, then William Faulkner's novels, certainly this one, should be part of the background documentation of such a process. What Faulkner has done here is to lay bare the racial tragedy of the American South in the 1920s such as no one else has ever done. Certainly the works of Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison and others should be part of that documentation too. But what Faulkner shows us in Light in August seems to me a wholly unique recounting — despite the fact that it is fiction — of a huge part of our national catastrophe.