Light in August

Lena Grove, where the book began

Faulkner told students at the University of Virginia that the novel began with Lena Grove. He had in mind a young girl with nothing, pregnant and determined to find her sweetheart. He said the idea came out of his admiration for the courage and endurance of women.

Lena's chapters are slow and calm. Faulkner describes the wagon coming up the hill as a shabby bead on a red string of road, hardly seeming to move. Everything around her is patient, and she is patient too. The Library of America calls her guileless.

Faulkner also tied the title to her. In Mississippi, he said, there are a few days every August when the light turns luminous, as if it came from an older time than Christianity. He thought Lena had something of that pagan quality. She was never ashamed of her child, whether it had a father or not.

Joe Christmas, a man who does not know what he is

Joe Christmas is left at an orphanage as a baby at Christmas time, which is where his name comes from. His grandfather, Doc Hines, put him there. Hines believed Joe's father had Black ancestry, and had let Joe's mother die in childbirth. The other children call Joe by a racial slur.

Nobody in the book ever proves what Joe is. A student at Virginia noticed this and asked whether Joe was supposed to be part Black. Faulkner answered that this was his tragedy. Joe did not know what he was, there was no way for him to find out, and so he felt he was nothing.

He didn't know what he was, and so he was nothing.

Late in the book Gavin Stevens, a man of the town, explains Joe's last hours as a conflict between his white blood and his Black blood. Faulkner called that a guess and a rationalization. The people who destroyed Joe decided what he was, he said, but Joe himself never knew.

Donald Kartiganer, in the Mississippi Encyclopedia, reads the novel the same way. He writes that Faulkner shows race as something a culture makes, not something in the blood, and that Joe's final freedom is his refusal to live by the town's two categories.

The killing, the manhunt and Percy Grimm

Joe is adopted by McEachern, a religious and heartless farmer who treats him cruelly. As a teenager Joe knocks McEachern unconscious at a country dance and leaves home. For years he drifts from town to town.

In Jefferson he lives in an old cabin near the house of Joanna Burden, a white woman from a family of Northern abolitionists whom the town shuns. They become lovers for three years. Toward the end she prays over him and tries to make him repent. One night she points an old pistol at him. It misfires, and he cuts her throat with a razor.

The town hunts Joe with bloodhounds. He is caught, escapes on the way to court and runs to the house of Gail Hightower, a disgraced minister. There a young man named Percy Grimm, leading a band of volunteers, shoots him and mutilates his body with a knife.

In March 1957 a student asked whether men like Grimm were common in the South, perhaps in the White Citizens' Councils. Faulkner said Grimm was a Nazi storm trooper, written in 1932 before he had heard of Hitler's storm troopers. Such men, he said, exist everywhere, and probably most of all in the White Citizens' Councils.

The novel uses the n-word, and much of its violence is racial violence. The murder, the manhunt, the call for a lynching and the killing of Joe are all told directly.

Hightower and Byron Bunch

Gail Hightower lost his church years before the story starts. The town believes that his obsession with his grandfather's death in the Civil War drove his wife to ruin. The grandfather, as Faulkner told it, galloped into Jefferson to burn the Union army's stores. Now Hightower lives alone and dreams of Confederate cavalry charges.

Faulkner described him as a man of God who had failed every time. He believed he had failed his wife, and he failed Joe Christmas when courage might have saved him. What he had left was the memory of a brave grandfather riding into town.

Byron Bunch is Hightower's only friend. The Library of America notes that he works Saturdays at the mill because he thought it would keep a man out of trouble. He is the one who looks after Lena and makes her as comfortable as he can in the cabin where she has the baby.

How it was written, and Paris

Much of the novel is told in the present tense. Students asked whether that was a deliberate change of style. Faulkner said no. It just seemed the best way to tell the story, and a writer with a great deal pushing to get out has no time to bother with style.

Asked whether James Joyce's Ulysses had affected the book, he said it had probably influenced everything he ever wrote. So had everything else he ever read, he added, from the telephone directory up.

French readers had the novel within three years. Éditions Gallimard published Lumière d'août in Paris in 1935, translated and introduced by Maurice-Edgar Coindreau. Faulkner's own Paris time came earlier, in the autumn of 1925, at 26 rue Servandoni.