Faulkner from Within. William H. Rueckert

the burdens so many others suffer and die from in this fiction. It would be a mistake to overvalue her ontological possibilities, as some critics have done; she is where being and life begin. After Sanctuary and As I Lay Dying, where little life and no generative being at all are possible, Lena Grove takes on a significance like that of the wonderful, stubborn, persistent, instinctual, and maternal skunk in Lowell’s “Skunk Hour.”

      It is Lena Grove who is the first to notice the burning of Joanna Burden’s house. This fire is another light in August and, like the birth of Lena’s baby, another of the main focal and symbolic events in the fiction. Joanna Burden is the opposite of Lena Grove in the sense that she is the non-generative female. She is the source of neither life nor being. She belongs with all of the other selves in this fiction who are tormented by sky demons, by the vertical absolutes which destroy so many of Faulkner’s characters. Most of them are Protestants and all are puritans. Her last name adds a moral-ethical significance to the title. Lena is heavy with child; Joanna is heavy with many different kinds of burdens, including, most notably, the ironically conceived white man’s burden in this southern novel. Just as Lena becomes light in August when she gives birth to the baby, so Joanna Burden becomes light in August when she is killed by Joe Christmas. This implication of the title, including death as the ultimate and only final unburdening, operates everywhere in the novel. Joe Christmas, the most heavily burdened of all the characters because of his racial schizophrenia, also—finally—becomes light in August when he is shot and castrated by Percy Grimm.

      Gail Hightower, whose great achievements in this fiction are to survive the punning symbolism of his first name and descend from the symbolism of his last name, also is heavily burdened, and, again, in ways that are different from the burdens carried by either Joanna Burden or Joe Christmas. Hightower died twenty-one years before he was even born when the rather curious ontological model he fixes on (his grandfather) was shot from his horse in Jefferson, during the Civil War, for stealing chickens. He exists in a state of pure negative being because the traditional age of one’s entrance into manhood is here reversed and given in negative numbers. Already dead when he arrives in Jefferson with his wife to become the minister of a church there, he preaches nothing but dead words, sermons which gallop back into the past and arrive, always, at the moment when, like his grandfather, he was shot from his saddle twenty-one years before he was even born; dead he drives his wife to adultery, insanity, and finally suicide; dead, the preacher of dead words, he dies to his profession and is finally removed from office by his congregation. Lost in the past (like so many other Faulkner characters) and so dead to the present, Hightower—at his advanced age—is radically altered by the events of the fiction: he is drawn into the present by Lena and the baby, and he is shocked into a long enlightenment by the killing and castration of Joe Christmas in his house. One can certainly say that Hightower manages to free himself from the past and be born, at last, into the present. He sees the light of August; he sees the light in August; he becomes light in August. The title applies more fully to Hightower than to any other character, largely because so many different forces in the fiction converge upon him.