The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Faulkner · a novel in twenty-one chapters · Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1932 · scored on Faulkner’s English in the corrected text, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
A novel in counterpoint; pastoral comedy, a life history of an outcast, a manhunt and a passion held in one book
Mythos
The Passion: the foundling named for the day he was found, betrayed for a reward, wounded in the side by a soldier, dead at thirty-three; the pregnant woman on the road in whom life goes on; the dead horseman riding at dusk as a country’s myth of itself
Phase
About a week in a Mississippi August, from a woman’s arrival in Jefferson to her leaving it, with seven chapters of one man’s past, from the orphanage to the killing, set into the middle, and a family’s history from the Civil War behind them
Presentation
Fiction in the third person, mostly in the past tense with long stretches in the historical present; some chapters handed to tellers inside the town, the last to a furniture dealer telling his wife
Register
From the mild comedy of the road and the talk of the mill and the wagon to theological rage, terror in a kitchen and a visionary rhetoric at a window
Scale
One county and one week; a planing mill, an orphanage, a farm, the Burden house and a pulpit; the sheriff, the law and the National Guard; the past running down into the present through four or five lives
Governing Proposition
A pregnant young woman walks from Alabama to Jefferson and arrives as a house is burning; the woman who owned it has been killed, and the man the town hunts for it, Joe Christmas, has lived thirty-three years without knowing whether he has any Black ancestry. The novel holds three stories that barely touch, Lena Grove’s, Christmas’s and that of a fallen minister, Gail Hightower, in one county and one week. Its wager is that race in the South is not a fact of the body but a sentence passed by the community and accepted by the man, and that a life made by that sentence can be shown whole only inside the lives that never notice it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens on a road. Lena Grove, young and pregnant, has walked from Alabama, and rides on the wagons of the road; her speech has the country’s measure of a long way, “a fur piece”. The first chapter is told in long stretches of the historical present, and its pace is hers: patient, mild, unhurried, in no doubt that the road will bring her where she is going. It brings her to Jefferson, and the last thing she sees as she arrives is the smoke of a burning house.
Harrison Smith and Robert Haas published the novel in New York in October 1932, after Sanctuary and four years before Absalom, Absalom!. Its working title, “Dark House”, was replaced by the present one. It is scored here as the novel as published, twenty-one unnamed chapters, read in the corrected text established by Noel Polk from Faulkner’s typescript, now standard in the Library of America and Vintage International editions. It was complete and published in Faulkner’s lifetime; there is no version to choose and no assembly to charge.
Chapters 2 to 5 are the present in Jefferson. Byron Bunch works at the planing mill, and keeps his Saturdays. Gail Hightower, a minister fallen from his pulpit, is visited in his house by Byron, who brings him the town’s news, and with it the stories that will meet in that house. Joe Christmas passes the night before the killing. The book holds these lives side by side, and they barely touch.
Movement II
At the end of chapter 5 the book stops the present and goes back. Chapter 6 opens: “Memory believes before knowing remembers”. What follows is Christmas’s life from the orphanage, where he was left on the steps and named for the day he was found, told from inside its conditioning, as memory working on a man the reader already knows to be doomed. The seven chapters run backward from the night of chapter 5 and return to it.
In the orphanage a child eats toothpaste in the dietitian’s closet and waits to be whipped for what he has seen, and instead is given money. The word that will govern his life reaches him in pieces: a circus man’s claim, a grandfather’s mania, the taunts of other children. He never learns whether he has any Black ancestry. The book does not say either, and never will.
He is taken to McEachern’s farm. McEachern teaches him the catechism, and the boy refuses it in the barn; the Calvinism of the house makes cruelty a duty. Years later McEachern is struck down at a dance. Christmas’s life runs on from there toward Jefferson: his, too, is a road, and it does not stop.
Movement III
The road brings him to the Burden house. Joanna Burden is the last of a line of abolitionists, and her family history comes in a block in chapter 11, as she recites it, down to the Burdens killed in Jefferson in Reconstruction. Her recital is the book’s plainest stretch of exposition, and the scene gives way to it.
What passes between Joanna and Christmas is told through her divided self and through his terror of the female body, which the book shares with every man in it, the dietitian’s and the Burden house’s alike. Whether she is victim, tormentor or both the book leaves open, and it has stayed open.
The seven chapters end where they began, with the night before the killing, and then with the killing. Joanna Burden is murdered and her house burns, and the smoke Lena saw from the road at the end of chapter 1 is this smoke. The reader now holds the whole life that the town will hunt as a crime, and has watched it made.
Movement IV
Chapters 13 to 19 are the week after. The town becomes a single mind and chooses its victim: the sheriff, the bloodhounds, the manhunt. Brown, who has called himself Christmas’s friend, betrays him for a reward of a thousand dollars, and later runs. In chapter 14 Christmas hides for a week, loses count of the days, and walks among the Black cabins as if into the depth he has spent his life fleeing.
He is taken at Mottstown. The Hineses enter, and with them Hines’s God, in whose name cruelty is a duty. In a cabin Lena gives birth, and Hightower is there. Byron, whose decency has carried him from one story to the other, has stepped outside the community’s sentence, and is changed by it.
Chapter 19 opens on the biography of Percy Grimm, a captain of the National Guard who becomes the town’s executioner. In the kitchen of Hightower’s house Grimm kills Christmas. He is wounded in the side, and castrated, and the blood rushes from him “like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket”. He is thirty-three. He redeems no one; he rises only into the memories of the men who watched.
Movement V
Chapter 20 belongs to Hightower. His grandfather’s cavalry raid in the Civil War, already told in chapter 3, is told again at length: the dead horseman who kept the grandson from living. Hightower’s story is governed by that private law, the grandfather and the dead wife, and touches the book’s law only at its edges. At his window at dusk Hightower sees a wheel of faces turn, and then the cavalry passes, galloping. It is the book’s visionary height, and it is reached by insistence as much as by event.
Chapter 21 gives the close to a stranger. A furniture dealer tells his wife of a young woman with a baby and a man who travelled with them on the road into Tennessee: Lena and Byron, whose courtship is still frustrated, days after the killing. The anecdote is comic, and the comedy is a dissonance the book means and does not resolve.
So the book ends where it began, on a woman on a road whom the violence has not touched. Christmas’s thirty-three years have been one passage on that road. The town named Lena a fallen woman and made room for her; it named Christmas a Black man and killed him; and the road runs on, past the frame of either story.
Act III · The Twelve
The great bones are required. Remove Lena and the book loses the frame by which Christmas’s thirty-three years are seen as one passage among others on a road that does not stop; remove the seven chapters of his past and his walk through Jefferson is a crime report. Byron Bunch carries news from one story to the other, and Hightower’s house is where the two meet, at a birth and at a death. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is matter told twice or at length beyond its need: the Burden family history that Joanna recites in a block in chapter 11, the biography of Percy Grimm that opens chapter 19, and the grandfather’s cavalry raid, told in chapter 3 and told again at length in chapter 20. None is idle; none is compelled at its length.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: race in the South is not a fact of the body but a sentence passed by the community and accepted by the man, and a man who does not know what he is will be made into what the town needs him to be. Christmas never learns whether he has any Black ancestry. The word comes to him from a circus man’s claim, a grandfather’s mania and children’s taunts, and he lives his whole life inside it. Beside this the book discloses a Calvinism that makes cruelty a duty, in McEachern’s catechism and Hines’s God; a terror of the female body that runs through its men; and the town as a single mind that chooses its victim. Held off the top because its fear of women is shared by the book as much as shown by it.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Height is reached often and in more than one register. The dreadful: the night at the Burden house; McEachern struck down at the dance; the kitchen of Hightower’s house, where Christmas is castrated and the blood rushes from him “like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket”, and he rises into the men’s memories for good. The still: Lena’s first chapter, the wagon on the road and her patience; Christmas’s week in hiding, when he loses count of the days and walks among the Black cabins as if into the depth he has fled. The visionary: Hightower at his window as a wheel of faces turns and the cavalry passes at dusk. Held a step below the top because the visionary passages are sometimes rhetorical, and the height of chapter 20 is reached by insistence as much as by event.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. Christmas is named for the day he was found on the orphanage steps, bears the initials J.C., dies at thirty-three, is betrayed for a reward of a thousand dollars by a man who calls himself his friend, and is wounded in the side by a soldier. The Passion bears load, and it is kept unresolved: he is no saviour, and redeems nothing but a few men’s memories. Against him the book sets Lena, the pregnant woman on the road, the pagan and Marian figure in whom life simply goes on, and whom it sets beside the image of an urn. Hightower’s dead grandfather riding at dusk is the South’s myth of itself, shown as the ghost that kept a man from living. Held a tenth below the top only because the Christ pattern is visible enough to invite counting.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance is the Southern novel and the European novel of the outcast, with Dostoevsky behind it. The turn: three stories that barely touch, held in one book by counterpoint rather than plot; seven chapters of a man’s past dropped into the middle of a manhunt; a whole life told from inside its conditioning, on the principle the sixth chapter opens with, “Memory believes before knowing remembers”; the historical present carried for chapters at a time; the close given to a stranger’s comic anecdote. The stake was real: the charge that the book is three novels and not one is as old as the book. Held below the top because Faulkner’s larger breaks had been made already, in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying; this book turns back toward a public, legible form and bends it rather than breaking it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told in sequence, Christmas’s life is a case history that explains its murderer. Set as the book sets it, between the night before the killing and the week after, his past arrives as memory working on a man already doomed, and the reader holds the end while watching it made. Lena’s frame is the argument: the book opens and closes on a woman the violence does not touch, so that the town’s fury is seen as a passing weather on a road that runs on. The form says what the book knows: that a life is made by what others decide about it, and that it is surrounded by lives that do not notice it. Held a step down because Hightower’s double function, witness and confessant, strains the frame in chapter 20, and the joins are sometimes visible.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence, not promise: over ninety years of reading that have not settled the book. The questions it holds open are real ones. Whether Christmas has any Black ancestry at all, which the book refuses to say. Whether the novel is one work or three, argued since it appeared and answered differently by Cleanth Brooks, by Irving Howe and by the criticism centred on race that followed. Whether Joanna Burden is victim, tormentor or both; what Hightower’s vision earns him; whether Lena is comic grace or indifference. The formal yield is as deep: the shifts of tense, the repeated images of the road, the urn and the wheel, the paired kitchens of the dietitian, of Joanna and of Hightower. Held off the very top because its open questions lie nearer the surface than those of Absalom, Absalom!.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is the American novel of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high: the book made race the central subject of the high modernist American novel, showed that a white Southern writer could enter the consciousness of a man undone by the colour line without sentiment or minstrelsy, and fused the means of modernism, memory, interior time and counterpoint, with a plot as public as a lynching. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book stands with Faulkner’s other major novels behind the Nobel Prize for 1949, behind the Southern novel that followed, Flannery O’Connor’s and Cormac McCarthy’s, and behind the novel of the colour line, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s. Held below the top because that reach is in large part the reach of the author’s whole body, not of this book alone.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over ninety-four years. Form: the text survives whole, as published, and has a corrected edition. Presence: continuous and wide, in print since 1932, through the Modern Library and Vintage; taught at universities in the United States and abroad as one of Faulkner’s three or four central novels; widely translated; and read outside the academy more than Absalom, Absalom!. It has outlived its conditions: Jim Crow and the lynching are history, and the book is read for what they were. Held a tenth under the widest figure because its presence, though wide, is narrower than the widest, and is in good part the presence of a book read in the academy and as one of a body.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Faulkner’s command in this book is at its most various. The scene: Lena at the roadside and her “a fur piece”; the toothpaste in the dietitian’s closet and the child waiting to be whipped; McEachern with the catechism and the boy refusing it in the barn; the manhunt and the bloodhounds; the birth in the cabin. The voices are distinct: Byron’s careful decency, the rural chorus of the wagon and the mill, the furniture dealer’s comic idiom. The prose carries the book’s thought in its compounded nouns and its long periodic rhythm. Charged: rhetoric that runs ahead of its matter in parts of chapters 19 and 20; a habit of abstraction, “something”, “somehow”, “immemorial” and their kin, that becomes a manner; and expository blocks, as in chapter 11, where the scene gives way to recital.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Lena on the wagon, mild and comic and serenely unaware, and Christmas castrated on Hightower’s kitchen floor. One law governs them, the law of a community that decides what a person is. Lena is named a fallen woman, and the town makes room for her; Christmas is named a Black man, and the town kills him; Byron and Hightower, who step outside the community’s sentence, are the ones changed. The law holds a wide range: farce, theology, pastoral, a manhunt and a crucifixion. Charged: the tonal joins are hard, and the furniture dealer’s comic coda, landing on Byron’s frustrated courtship days after the killing, is a dissonance the book sustains rather than resolves; and Hightower’s story is governed by a private law, the grandfather and the dead wife, that touches the book’s law only at its edges.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Held, not listed. Consciousness: Christmas’s memory, Hightower’s, Joanna’s divided self. The family: the orphanage, McEachern’s farm, the Hineses, Lena’s child, the Burdens’ line of abolitionists. Labour: the planing mill, Byron’s Saturdays, the farm. The state: the sheriff, the law, the National Guard captain who becomes the town’s executioner. History: the Civil War raid, Reconstruction and the killing of Burdens in Jefferson, the shadow of the Klan, the colour line. The sacred: Hightower’s pulpit and his fall, Hines’s God and McEachern’s, the Black church that Christmas invades. The natural order: the road, the August light, the season. All of it is routed through one county and one week, with the past running down into the present through four or five lives. Held a step down only because the world beyond the South enters as nothing.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, then The Imperishable at 9.1. A disclosure that race is a sentence passed by a community and accepted by the man, held through a life whose subject never learns what he is; a Passion that bears load and is inverted, since the man redeems no one, set against the woman on the road in whom life goes on; and a survival continuous and wide for ninety-four years, outside the academy as well as in it.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.3: the great bones are required, but the Burden history, Grimm’s biography and the grandfather’s raid are told at lengths the book does not compel. Next above it, The Swerve at 8.6: a real departure in counterpoint and in the placing of a life’s past, but one that bends a public form rather than breaking it, after Faulkner’s larger breaks had been made.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.9, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.1, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 8.3, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of William Faulkner’s Light in August, published by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, New York, in October 1932. It is scored as the novel as published, in twenty-one unnamed chapters, read in the corrected text established by Noel Polk from Faulkner’s typescript, the text now standard in the Library of America and Vintage International editions. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Faulkner’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: Lena’s “a fur piece”, the first words of chapter 6, and the phrase of the rising rocket in chapter 19; the words “something”, “somehow” and “immemorial” are cited as words of the book’s manner. The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom! are named as the measure of Faulkner’s swerve and depth, and Sanctuary for the order of the books; the novels of O’Connor, McCarthy, Ellison and Morrison are named as the record of the book’s reach; none is part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the word count, the length of the first edition in pages, the months in which the book was written, the years of the corrected text, the exact words of the urn image, of the image of the wagon on the road and of the book’s last line, the reception of the first reviews, the names of later critics beyond two, the book’s first translator into French, and the details of Morrison’s debt, are not given. Citations are by chapter.