Past and Present in Light in August

Abstract

T HE convoluted time-scheme of William Faulkner's Light in August has led readers to misread or misunderstand the details of the novel, to charge that it full of contradictions and inconsistencies, and to deny it unity.1 Many readers believe that Joe Christmas thirty-three when he killed, that his love affair with Joanna Burden brief and violent, and that Lena Grove has little to do with Joanna, either thematically or causally. But careful study of the timescheme shows that Christmas close to his thirty-eighth birthday when he dies, that his affair with Joanna lasts almost four and a half years, and that the real pregnancy of Lena Grove closely coincides with the false pregnancy of Joanna Burden. Faulkner created difficulties for his readers partly by his narrative technique and partly by three instances of authorial forgetfulness. Mostly, however, the difficulties arise because Faulkner abides by the current of the individual's psychic life, as Francois Pitavy says.2 Each of the five main characters in Light in August experiences time in a different way. novel counterpoints the five, not only in their moral worlds but also in their ways of experiencing time. Most readers have seen the moral but not the experiential contrast. They have expected chronology to be constructed as Joanna Burden constructs it, with dates, genealogies, objective history, and have rejected other ways of organizing time. Half of Light in August flashbacks because, for Faulkner, the past determines the present. The present, Pitavy says (p. 49), is woven from the thread of the past, not remembered as memories, but