Reading Reading: Faulkner's Queer Exercise in Reader Complicity in Light in August

Abstract

Reading Reading:Faulkner's Queer Exercise in Reader Complicity in Light in August Daniella Gáti (bio) William Faulkner's Light in August ends with a brutal lynching and a scene of hopeful love.1 Yet between the tragic dimension of Joe Christmas's violent murder and the comic satisfaction of Byron Bunch's suit for love, the novel offers a third plot ending—the apparent death of the Reverend Gail Hightower. The novel's penultimate chapter, chapter 20, both evokes and obscures Hightower's death; the minister glimpses and yet does not achieve ultimate clarity. Readers of Light in August have systematically found this chapter "puzzling" (Watson 169): it is, to quote Doreen Fowler, "at best, mysterious, at worst, anti-climactic," and its function among the other plot endings is "seemingly unaccountabl[e]" (Fowler 139). What is the purpose of this ambiguous chapter, which teases with cathartic significance but never quite provides it? I argue that the "mysterious" and "puzzling" effect of chapter 20 is a product of a deliberate textual construction that asks us to reassess our reading of the novel. Hightower, whom the text has hitherto encouraged us to regard as relatively insignificant, is suddenly at the center of an important, if ambiguous, epiphanic moment at odds with his previous, seemingly sidelined role. Indeed, I propose that Light in August uses Hightower across the novel to complement its analysis of normative power by juxtaposing Christmas's manifestly brutal death with a hidden, participatory violence that excludes Hightower from full humanity. Through a crafty management of the narratee's attention and sympathies, Faulkner's novel guides the reader's evaluation of the relative significances of characters towards an assessment in which Hightower does not attain the status of protagonist in his own drama. According to Alex Woloch, arranging characters in a [End Page 153] system of distributed attention fundamentally informs "our sense of the human figure" (13): in Light in August, that system replicates Jefferson's assessments of whose fate matters and whose does not. Hightower's plot denouement is "puzzling," then, because it affords the minister a significance that runs counter to what the narrative has hitherto encouraged. Chapter 20 gains its force from its gesture towards the novel's mechanisms to manage readers' sympathies towards an alignment with Jefferson's normative system. My project in this essay, then, is to carry out what might be called a reading of a reading to explore the dynamics of readers' participation in oppressive systems of valuation and to draw out what I propose is Faulkner's critique of ethically motivated—but ultimately compromised—reading practices. Christmas's story demonstrates Foucault's influential point that power structures an individual's every interaction with society (Discipline and Punish 26–28), but an attention to Hightower allows us to go further than the recognition of power's omnipresence. Because, arguably, the text does not invite the reader to dismiss Christmas's fate as insignificant, the minister's case demonstrates how forceful coercion, as with Christmas, is only one part of normative boundary policing. Simultaneously, and equally effectively, power works in a subtle and veiled way through what Edward Said describes as "unself-conscious bad innocence" (116), precisely through those well-meaning agents whose values may not even align with the normative order. Innocence, even benevolence, plays a key role in enabling a position of complicit indifference towards Hightower. Byron's good intentions towards Lena and Christmas both allow and require that he reduce Hightower from friend to aide, degrading the minister from the subject of his story to an instrument in theirs. To save Christmas from lynching, for example, Byron has to ask Hightower to confirm Jefferson's suspicions regarding his "queerness" by "outing" himself as having put up Christmas for those nights when the latter was actually with Joanna Burden. The gravity of this request is mollified by the fact that preventing Christmas's lynching is morally good. The sense of being morally right invites the reader's emotional and ethical participation in Byron's project by testifying to Byron's benevolence, which makes it easier to regard him as innocent of other, similarly violent, erasures. For the narratee, then, Byron...