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Silence, Cycles, and Sounds in Light in August
| Article
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20430 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1992 |
5,529 Words |
| Author
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W.L.G. Collins
W.L.G. Collins is a free-lance writer living in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, and author of On the Razor's Edge, published last
year. |
Walter J. Slatoff vividly highlights the silence and sound motifs in Faulkner's novel Light in August when he says,
This juxtaposition of sound and silence, and the sense of silence as a container for sound and of sound as a kind of entity which intrudes upon a vast background of silence, is not merely a matter of intermittent images. Often it is a far more pervasive condition… it becomes, in effect, a more or less permanent part of the scenery or background for sound and action, at once intensifying and muting it.
This sense of pervasive silences is perhaps most strong in parts of Light in August.
And though he also remarks on "the remarkable extent to which Faulkner transforms life, virtually all aspects of life, external and internal, into motion, " Satoff does not pull silence, cycles, and sounds together and discover the grand theme of the novel. Of it is the motion, the cyclic revolutions, the turning wheels of time-defined life forms, spinning out their variegated courses through the deep silence, whose interactions are defined by sound. The grand theme of the novel is life consciousness.
This grand theme is approached from a cosmic viewpoint. Faulkner gives us, in Light in August, a new tragic myth patterned to the consciousness of twentieth century man and even perhaps beyond. The viewpoint of the narrator, or observer (and hopefully, the reader), is from what T.S. Eliot called "the still point of the turning world".
As many critics have pointed out, Light in August is filled with mythical allusions. These begin to appear in the very first paragraph, even in the first sentence. Our first traveler in this viewed journey through earth-defined time is Lena Grove. Change one letter of her first name and we have "Luna," another name for Diana of the woodland grove by the Lake of Nemi. And our traveler has come "a fur piece," as have all fleshclothed travelers, from Doane's (Diana's) Mill (the turning cycle of earth births and rebirths, interminably recurring.). Certainly Faulkner disguised the names but not so much as to conceal the opening setting; a mythic picture for our mind. It is a mythic picture he will build upon or from, if you prefer. And he is not repeating an ancient, or historically more recent, myth; he is presenting a new, modern one. Throughout the book he mixes word pattern allusions to myths ancient and not so ancient, often clothing them in a garment of Christian word symbols. But the nature of
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