A Favorite Book

            My favorite book that I’ve ever read is William Faulkner’s Light in August because of its ability to present a realistic depiction of the world in which Faulkner lived (ie. the Deep South) while also shedding light upon many of the truths and paradoxes of our world and behaviors.

            One passage I remember in particular is the passage when Hightower is looking out from his high tower (pun exponentially much intended) upon the street, seeing the old and fading advertisement he had made to promote art classes he was teaching. At this point in the book (it’s fairly early on), we don’t know too much about Hightower’s character, so the eeriness of this chapter as he watches the sunset on his reminiscences strikes us with yet more distrust and uncertainty since nothing in the book has been guaranteed to be right from one perspective up until this point. We find out that Hightower has been ostracized from the town because of his wife’s formerly adulterous nature—I say formerly because she was found dead in Memphis, the newspaper being the medium through which the people of Jefferson found out about this fiasco. The townsfolk then begin to gossip about Hightower’s sexual life with a black women (heaven forbid; the book was written somewhere between the late 1920’s and early 1930’s).

            While this is mostly mere summary, I wanted to point out the inherent truths presented in just a summary of the pristinely worded work of art that Faulkner created in Light in August. First, from my own experience of living in Memphis for three years, the Mid-South can be operate in the mode of facades, assuming things to be true of people based on outside appearances and quickly judging and spreading rumors about such spot-analysis without so much as a passing thought of guilt. This truth is reflected in the way that the townsfolk quickly get Hightower fired from his job as a minister due to his wife’s actions and ostracize him from group activities. Moreover, the Ku Klux Klan beat him with sticks due to the gossip being spread about his relations with his African-American maid (if only he were Bill Clinton, he would “not have [had] sexual relations with that woman”). Second, this section of the book reflects incredibly clearly the imminent racism of the South in the 1930’s both by noting the relations with his servant as well as in the prominence of the KKK. Faulkner seems to be advocating against such racism in a mild satire of what the South looks like to him (race is one of the major themes of the book).

            Aside from this passage, I will note the eloquence with which Faulkner writes this book. The book is written in a stream-of-consciousness fashion (less so than his As I Lay Dying) and out of chronological order, throwing the reader through a loop in his or her attempts to understand the book. Additionally, the book reads like a poem: for 426 pages, every word is chosen carefully to have numerous meanings that all apply to the situation at hand and provide numerous insights into the characters and plotline on subtle levels. No wonder it took an entire wall in his house to map out the storyline for this book! To be honest, I’m mildly advertising this book as a great read here, but I enjoyed his prose and insights more than I have any other writer I’ve read.