Light in August

by

William Faulkner

Light in August: Genre 1 key example

Genre
Explanation and Analysis:

Light in August borrows from several genres, but the two it matches best are the Gothic novel and the modernist novel. In fact, Faulkner is famous for helping define the American version of both these genres.

Gothic fiction, which often overlaps with horror, first became popular in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was a period of time when colonization, imperialism, and democratic reform were all causing huge changes in the distribution of wealth around the world. Often set in castles or large estates that seemed to be haunted, Gothic ghost stories were a way for literary writers to grapple with moral questions about wealth, property, and the politics of how it is acquired and passed on. Characters who acquire wealth in harmful or exploitative ways often find that they are haunted, either truly or in their imagination, by the people they have harmed. The genre relies heavily on dramatic irony, suspense, plot twists, and moments of confession when characters reveal their secrets to one another. Many Gothic novels center on orphans who lead downtrodden lives but eventually discover that they have long-lost wealthy relatives who have left them an inheritance. 

Faulkner leans heavily on tropes from Gothic novels. Light in August, too, leans on dramatic irony, suspense, plot twists, and confession. Joe Christmas is an orphan whose parentage is a major question throughout the book. There are moments in Christmas's childhood that Faulkner describes in a tone highly reminiscent of Dickens describing one of his fictional orphans. Faulkner's version of the Gothic, however, speaks to American instead of European anxieties. What hangs in the balance for Joe Christmas is not money or property but rather racial identity. Everyone in the novel wants to know for sure whether or not Christmas is Black because it will change how they relate to him. Racial identity is a consideration in European Gothic literature as well, largely because of how much European wealth was built through slavery. Faulkner goes a step further and suggests that racial identity is important enough in the United States to be an inheritance unto itself.

Faulkner is also an American modernist and is influenced by major modernist writers like James Joyce. Similar to Joyce's Ulysses, a sprawling novel that turns a single day in one man's life into an epic, Light in August uses heightened language and cultural references to turn common Southerners' lives into a parable about humanity. Modernism encouraged artists to capture humanity in its truest form by examining it under a microscope and from every angle imaginable. Faulkner's sampling of different writing styles and perspectives is a modernist technique that he uses to offer his readers a well-rounded picture of what is going on in his characters' lives. Stream-of-consciousness, flashbacks, and wordplay are all elements of Faulkner's writing that mark him as a modernist looking for new ways to express the truth.