« A Sitting on the side of the road, her eyes fixed on the cart heading up to her, Lena thinks, “I’m coming from Alabama: a long stretch of the road. Walk from Alabama to here. A good stretch of road. ” While thinking “it’s not yet a month since I set out and here I am already in Mississippi. I had never been so far from home. Never, since the age of twelve, have I I was so far from the Doane sawmill ”. “
So begins August light (1932), seventh novel by William Faulkner. A sunny start, bathed in the warm summer light on a road where carts drawn by mules guided by placid peasants circulate, on the border of two States of the Deep South. Yet the beginning of one of Faulkner’s hardest novels. We can imagine what will come from the third page. Lena Grove, a young pregnant woman, tells the farmer who agreed to let her get into his cart why she embarked on this adventure. She is looking for the man who gave her a child, promised him marriage, and who immediately left the sawmill where he worked to look elsewhere for a new job. He would come back for her as soon as he found a new place to stay. Usual justifications. But the novelist is not there to judge. It’s the very words of Lena’s story, her unfailing naivety, even that of reality, that make sense. No one is mistaken, not even the peasant’s wife with whom she is going to spend the night.
And even less the reader: this Lucas Burch is one of the most common seducers. We will find him a little later. And we will discover, in the same way that we can say oblique, all the characters of this tragedy under the sun of the deep South. Flashbacks, chance encounters, unexpected connections, everything is done to go towards a night of anguish: the lynching of a sawmill worker known as Joe Christmas in the small town of Jefferson (Mississippi) believed white and had a few drops of black blood. This, we learn over the course of the story, without being passed judgment on the fact (interbreeding) or those who peddle the hearsay. Faulkner is not a judge. He is a novelist, and one of the greatest. Of those who, having given life to his characters, leave them, so to speak, the bridle on the neck. So, and to take just one example, while he spares few details on the life of one of the pivotal characters from his childhood to his death, Joe Christmas, he spends two pages over thirty years of this life. . A life of wandering and drunkenness from which he will one day wake up. These thirty years that Faulkner calls ” the street “ the sidewalks are so alike in all these towns where they picked up the drunken wanderer in the morning. Master of his characters, the novelist is also master of time.
Time and space, which too can only be his. It is in Jefferson that Lena Grove will find Lucas Burch, under another name. In Jefferson where Christmas works, lives and many other people she may or may not meet. Jefferson City, capital of the state of Missouri? No, just Jefferson, a city that only existed in the imagination of the novelist, the capital of the equally imaginary county of Yoknapatawpha. Faulkner had drawn the map, villages, hills, plantations. He had drawn the map on the margin of his novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936). And took care to write: “William Faulkner, sole owner and owner. “
There he placed sixteen of his most important novels, a play ( Requiem for a nun, 1951) and fifty short stories. An innumerable people for a county that did not exist. And a people in their contradictions, as they lived, from the Civil War to the thirties of the last century. So there were critics to reproach Faulkner for making whites real characters and blacks extras. Likewise, if he took part in the educational integration of blacks in the 1950s, he never concealed that he would have preferred this initiative to come from the South which was his. Contradictions of a man. The West Indian writer Édouard Glissant wrote the most accurate pages on this ( Faulkner Mississippi, Stock, 1996), marked by his great admiration for the writer. Thus he notes at the outset: “ In the real world, Faulkner will tirelessly take the side of this South, with its prejudices, its limits, its unspoken. In the work, on the contrary, he will question. “
Read againAugust light, let’s go back to these images of Christmas’s adoptive father who, Bible in hand and head, whips him with a harness at the slightest deviation, to Joanna Burden, a single woman in a large house, a Puritan from New England transplanted to the South out of humanitarian vocation and abandoning himself to the furies of lust, to Pastor Hightower despised by his fellow citizens and bent on wanting to help them, to all these beings born out of the novelist’s sole will and steeped in contradictions and we will see that this work is only questions, as Édouard Glissant says. And we will add: anguished questions.
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