The Pattern of Thought in Light in August

THE PATTERN OF THOUGHT IN LIGHT IN AUGUST Robert Rawdon Wilson Light In August is not everyone's idea of a funny novel. Most readers would no doubt agree with Kazin, Sewall, and other critics, as well as with Faulkner himself, that it is essentially a "tragic" story.1 Certainly, it is suffused wifh pathos, sorrow, and most of the variables of tragedy. Nonetheless , there are, I believe, several comic elements in the novel which have been generally neglected. Taken in isolation, some of the novel's comic situations and characterizations might be passed over, but in their totality they are a significant element in its structure. I should like to argue that in particular there are ironic patterns which are central to the major concerns of Light In August. "Irony," of course, is not necessarily comic: the peripeteia of Greek tragedy, the "irony of events" which defines the novels of Hardy, and the dramatic reversals of Shakespeare's tragedies are all proofs that "irony" is a genuinely amphibian term existing healthily in both the comic and non-comic experience of literature. For the purposes of Ulis paper, however, I shall take "irony" to be mtimately related to, if not inseparable from, the comic experience. The peculiar lands of Faulknerian irony which I am going to discuss have more of Cervantes or Ariosto in them than Sophocles or Shakespeare. They are ironies not merely of reversal and frustration but of circularity as well. Faulkner's characters, in the moment of their thwarted, frustrated expectations, resemble less an Oedipus or a Lear confronting an awesome destiny—the dreadful image of some promised end—than they do a Quixote confronting the empty air of vanished giants or a Ruggiero clasping the empty space left by an invisible Angelica. That is, they are left not with the compensation of something exterior to themselves, both awesome and sacred, but with nothing but themselves and their own self-consciousness. Seen in another perspective, the ironies of Light In August recall the frustration of characters in works by Sartre, Camus, and Pynchon, among others. They are frustrations which are defined by their interiority, solitariness, and selffocusing . There are a number of ironic situations in Light In August, all of which involve the experience of an unforeseen event quite different from that which has been expected. For example, when Lucas Burch confronts Lena 1That Light In August is a "tragedy" has been compellingly argued by Alfred Kazin in his "The Stillness of Light In August" in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism , eds. Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (New York, 1963), pp. 247-265. It has been taken for granted by Richard B. Sewall in his The Vision of Tragedy ( New Haven, 1962). Edmond L. Volpe, in A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner (New York, 1964), also assumes that Light in August is a tragedy. Faulkner himself called the narration of Joe Christmas' life a "tragedy"; see Faulkner in The University, eds. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (New York, 1965), p. 72. 155 156RMMLA BulletinDecember 1970 in the cabin, his sudden perception of her and the child, existing there in the exact point of space and time where his expectations had foreseen the reward, is ironic.2 Similarly, Hightower's conviction, after delivering Lena's child, that "this must be all" (p. 363), points up his ironic confrontation with Joe Christmas immediately afterwards. It might even be argued that the convergence of the novel's two basic series of events—Lena's search for Lucas which culminates in the birth of the child, and Joe's search for identity which ends in his death—is (to the perception of the reader, at least) inherently ironic. The most interesting of these patterns, however, occurs in the minds of the characters. This cognitive pattern wholly dominates the behavior of two characters —Christmas and Hightower—and is partially observable in others, particularly Byron Bunch. In fact, the nature of this pattern is suggested by the Negro's protest to Sheriff Watt: "I cant remember because I cant know" (p. 255). Here the seeming paradox that remembering should hinge upon knowledge could be dismissed, but perhaps...