More than the Temple is polluted in Sanctuary, and one way to discover the extent to which the moral, ethical, and legal codes (or grammars) have been contaminated in Faulkner’s imagination is to pursue—briefly—some of the ways in which Sanctuary is a black or inverted ironic Romance. Just as the fiction cancels its title, so it cancels the central vision of the convention or genre it inverts and subjects to such ferocious irony. The novel, as with many other Faulkner novels, is full of romance conventions.8 But the whole novel is one long furious inverting, canceling irony. There is no love anywhere in this romance, and, finally, the whole chivalric code, which does finally emerge as a generative social force in so many of Faulkner’s novels from Intruder in the Dust on, is canceled or inverted into irony. Romances were built, in part, on the absolute belief in sanctions and sanctuaries, in a moral and religious code which would prevail if man and God could make it prevail. In canceling his title, Faulkner canceled it absolutely, completely, by having the whole novel work ironically, corrosively against it. A sanctuary is a refuge. A world without sanctuaries is a world in which there is no refuge anywhere. Sanctuary is a fiction in which all the gods are either dead or ineffectual. A god is a center of being, as the Greeks well knew. If God is dead, there is still the world. If all the gods are dead, there is nothing. That is what a grammar of negative being conjugates to: nothing, the ontological void.
Demonic Incarnation and the Pestilential Word
Light in August (1932)
After Sanctuary—the absolute nadir of Faulkner’s vision, even though it is not his most terrifying fiction until one abstracts the vision and mediates upon it in ontological and metaphysical terms as a grammar of negative being—Faulkner went up, in the sense that he never again created a fiction so purely negative as either Sanctuary or As I Lay Dying. Using his own title, one can say that he got lighter in the 1930s or that he saw more light in the 1930s—both ambiguous, vague, but generally affirmative and true statements about Faulkner’s works between Light in August and Go Down, Moses. “Conjugating” the title of Light in August is a lesson in how this “lightening” occurred and in how Faulkner’s imagination works, re-individuating certain kinds of characters, reconceiving and so re-enacting a repeating but always varied ontological drama.9
Light in August is most obviously a time title because it locates something at a specific point in seasonal time. It stresses recurrence and is futuristic; it is full of expectation and hopefulness. The title is never negated in the way that Sanctuary is; it is diffused through a wide spectrum of applications and meanings to give us, for the first time in Faulkner, a much fuller range of human possibilities, ranging all the way from light to dark and back to light again. One does not know at first whether the title is optical, physical/spatial, physiological, moral, cognitive, or mystical/visionary—to name some of the possibilities; and one does not know for a long time which of these is going to have primacy.
Time, not history, is the central concern of this fiction. Even though one of the main images for Joe Christmas (the road) is spatial, his life is so completely time-centered and this fiction so time-obsessed that one could almost say time is one of its main subjects. When the long account of Joe Christmas’s life begins in Chapter 6, we are plunged into time as if it were the very medium of his existence: “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders” (104). Joe Christmas can never escape from time until he is crucified and castrated near the end of the fiction. Born an orphan, he is driven through all his days by an ambiguity of the blood. His life flows in a torrent from the past into the present of the fiction until it is ended and his persecution by this ontological ambivalence is ended. Hightower, through most of the fiction, is the opposite of Joe Christmas: he is lost in the past and time flows by him. Not the road, but dark, enclosed vertical space is the basic image for Hightower. Until Joe Christmas and Lena Grove—the two characters associated with the road, with the horizontal thrust of time—directly affect him and cause him, finally, to enter the stream or on-streaming of time, Hightower remains out of present time, a total victim of either the past or of verticality. For Lena Grove, time is purposeful, forward moving, and is to be understood in terms of the physiological purposefulness and inevitability of her pregnancy. For Byron Bunch, whose basic symbol is the watch, time is mechanical and punctual; like Hightower, he allows time to flow by him because he has turned himself into a fixed circle of repeating mechanical time. Ontologically, he is like the face of the watch he is always consulting. Until, that is, he too is affected by Lena Grove (and Christmas) and is drawn into and compelled to flow with on-streaming time.
Light in August is not primarily about history as such at all, but about different kinds of being, different ways of being in and out of time, different kinds of time, and different kinds of relationships between selves, being, and time. This whole fiction, largely in the person of Lena Grove (and later, the baby and Byron Bunch) flows from past into present and on into the future. (Absalom, Absalom!, for example, is about history and often seems to flow backwards into “dead” history.) It does not resolve the ambiguities and madnesses which make time persecutional for Joe Christmas, nor does it punish the persecutors. It redeems two men (Byron Bunch and Gail Hightower) from different kinds of existences outside of time and ends the persecution of one man by time; but nothing is resolved in any ultimate sense and everything coexists, even continues. One gets a very full and comprehensive view of reality in this fiction, in spite of its apparent obsession with partial, monomaniacal selves. One is especially conscious of this reading Light in August after Sanctuary.
Light in August begins and ends with Lena Grove, who is directly related to a biological, natural, and maternal time and so to generative human purposefulness. When the fiction begins, Lena is coming to term; she will have her baby on the eleventh day and so become light in August. She arrives pregnant and single at the beginning; she leaves at the end already beginning to fulfill the destiny in her name—to form a grove or family—with her baby and her man—Byron Bunch, who, by virtue of his last name, is destined for Lena as a member of the Grove family. Hardly a character at all, Lena Grove is best understood as some kind of life or light or familial principle. All through this fiction, people come forward to help Lena Grove. At the end, people are still helping her. No one ever does her any harm in this violent and destructive work. She never has any serious needs which are not supplied or ministered to, by males and females alike. She has a curious immunity to harm and to all forms of evil. She is best understood as a female in the same situation as Dewey Dell, but with an exactly opposite destiny. She is not so much a dewy dell but a grove—a sexual-maternal-familial female, rather than a purely and helplessly sexual one. Instead of a MacGowan to exploit her ignorance and trick her into a quick, safe lay, Lena Grove finds Byron Bunch in her time of need. Byron is one of those selves of absolute integrity one finds all through Faulkner. A good and honest man, he shelters and feeds Lena Grove and, when her time is upon her, gets her a place to nest and someone—Hightower—to deliver her baby.
Byron does the right thing at the right time and is rewarded for his actions. He can be contrasted to Horace Benbow in Sanctuary, who also tries to do the right thing for people in need, but is caught in the perverse logic—whatever can go wrong does—of that fiction. The contrasts between Lena Grove and Dewey Dell, Byron Bunch and Horace Benbow simply indicate that, where Lena is concerned, a very different kind of causality from what one finds in Sanctuary and As I Lay Dying is operating. The perverse negative determinism—the demonism—of those fictions is mostly applied to Joe Christmas in Light in August, and never to Lena Grove.
The last composite image one has of Lena Grove is gentle, comic, familial, faithful: Byron, Lena, and the baby—as usual, being helped by someone else—are moving on in that destinationless but completely purposeful way that has characterized all of Lena’s actions in this fiction. She is a character who, as we would say today, knows how to go with the flow of things. She is a “horizontal” self, completely without violence and one of the most placid characters in Faulkner. Structurally, her actions and values frame and enclose everything else in this fiction; she moves on, purposefully, into the future, an action which always has extraordinary significance in Faulkner. Free of