Dual+Identity

Many characters in //Light in August// are haunted by a doubled consciousness as their identity is defined simultaneously by inner and outer forces. The reader observes how society and social history influence the development of the personal identity and sometimes prevent the character from finding a solid sense of self. The battle between the interiority of a person and the social perception that is impressed upon them seems to lead to the development of a dual or double identity in the character. The reader is constantly reintroduced to the characters from different angles as their stories are told by different members of the community, first person or by a third person narrator and from different points in their lives. For example, the reader is first introduced to Joe Christmas through the eyes of an everyman character, __Byron Bunch,__ when he arrives to work at the planing mill in __Jefferson__. His appearance and his name are discussed by the factory workers who are instantaneously placing judgments and solidifying opinions the moment they see “the stranger” with “something definitely rootless about him, as though no town nor city was his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his home” (31). The narrator highlights how in the factory workers’ minds he “looked like a tramp, yet not like a tramp either”, having this rootless appearance and air about him which he “carried…as though it were a banner with a quality ruthless, lonely and almost proud” (31). Christmas’s identity has already been assumed by the townspeople within the first few moments of his introduction into their lives. His status as an outsider is solidified when they first hear his name and label him “a foreigner” because his name is deemed unacceptable for a white man or even as a reasonable name of any man by their judgment. Byron Bunch epitomizes the critical behavior of the other Jeffersonian factory workers in his epiphonic realization of how a man’s name, which is symbolic of who he is, can also serve as “an augur of what he will do” (33) or foreshadow his future behavior. He seems to be promoting this tactic of understanding people by means of social symbols such as a name and the meanings associated with a name in that particular social setting. This tale of Christmas’s introduction into Jefferson is of course being told after the events have unfolded and the town has already witnessed the horrific events of Christmas and his murder which have been burned into Bunche's memory, but the reader is left only with a hint that resembles the common regret at the start of a dark tale that the townsfolk should have somehow known what trouble they were in when they first heard this stranger’s foreign name.

The reader only knows Christmas by the observations of the community in the beginning of the novel as he lives a somewhat secluded and irregular life outside of Jefferson’s social acceptance and on the edge of their speculative radar. His job at the mill places him within a normative social role yet he is unwilling or unable to connect to a soul around him as noted by Byron who remembers how Christmas “had nothing to say to anyone, even after six months” (35). He would ignore his coworkers and refuse having any familiarity with them while in the factory and off work hours on the street of the town square. All knowledge of him was subject to here- say, such as the rumored observations made by townspeople who would “see him following a path that came up through the woods on the edge of town, as if he might live out that way somewhere”(35). The narrator recognizes how mysterious Christmas’s existence was to the community left unaware to what he did “behind the veil, the screen, of his negro’s job at the mill” (35). The novel maintains this mystery in its form by only offering __gossip__ concerning his actions and lifestyle through the voice of Byron Bunch. The narrator does not venture into the interiority of Christmas until the fifth chapter when we witness his attack of his bootlegger partner Joe Brown. Here, the reader is introduced into this strange meta-consciousness within Christmas, a fragmented entity within him that he is aware of yet somehow unable to control. When Christmas physically silences the drunken Brown he responds provokingly with, “Take your black hand off me, you damn niggerblooded‒ ‒”, and “You’re a nigger, see? You said so yourself. You told me. But I’m white” (103). Christmas experiences a strange reaction to this insult when he calmly stands over Brown “thinking quietly //Something is going to happen to me. I am going to do something//” and then he considers how easily he could reach over to his razor but resolves that “//This is not the right one//” (104). Christmas’s interior monologue first appears in this moment and seems to signify a split within him; one side being beyond his control and subject to the forces of his surroundings and the other being a subject to his own will and desire. He exists on the border of these two identities, torn between the two as both a subject of his own will and an object at the mercy of the greater outside forces. This lack of agency or control that Christmas battles with is due to his mixed racial status and the resulting social imbalance that it creates. He is unable to associate himself with either white or black society during this time period that has zero tolerance for miscegenation. This could be the cause of his split identity; one part being the conscious entity that is able function in society as a white man and the other being this dark force which comes over him causing him to reproduce the stereotypical negative behavior that is aligned with his mixed blood.

Christmas’s past is explored starting on Chapter 6 and his life setting moments which made him into such a border personality are exposed. His experiences at the orphanage solidify his status as a “nigger bastard” by the age of five years old. His youth spent with the sadistic McEachern family implant a tendency for violence and refusal of authority and destiny into his ideal of being a “man”. Christmas is instilled with the characteristics imposed on him by his social environment based on his mixed race. The negative attention that has been paid to his racial background forces him to at times view himself in this negative fashion also. Laura Doyle theorizes the disunity between the body and the self in her study of Faulkner’s novel. Doyle highlights how in Faulkner’s work race is exposed as “an empty category, undefinable and unverifiable, projected onto the ‘coloured’ or ‘white’ body from the outside” (340). This projection of identity from the outside suits the study of Joe Christmas and his teetering position on the racial borderline. W. E. B. DuBois’s discussion of the black American’s “double-consciousness” is utilized by Doyle in her focus on Christmas who embodies this “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’ which issues in ‘two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings…in one dark body” (343). The strivings of Christmas expose his dual nature and result in his attempts to relate himself positively to one race or the other because being both is unacceptable by the majority of society.

The majority of Christmas’s life is spent on a journey which is related by Faulkner in surprisingly small section of Chapter 10. Christmas embarks on a quest in search of belonging and harmony with himself which led him to travel “thousands of streets [that] ran as one street” (223) which led him across the country, traveling north and south multiple times across racial dividing lines. The street ran for fifteen years and Christmas remained an anonymous traveler passing through “interchangeable” cities and exploiting his mixed blood as a way to avoid paying prostitutes and sometimes “tricking or teasing white men into calling him a negro in order to fight them”(224). This negative assumption of his blackness is halted when he traveled out of “the comparative south” and found a prostitute who accepted his mixed race and did reject his business (224). Christmas was shaken deeply by discovering “there were white women who would take a man with black skin” and his status as outsider or exile from society is removed, leading him to backtrack and now fight “the negro who called him white” (224). He attempts to align himself completely with his blackness and “lived as man and wife with a woman who resembled an ebony carving” and spent his nights “trying to breathe into himself the dark odor, the dark and inscrutable thinking and being of negroes”(225). This attempt to re-identify is describe by Doyle as “Joe’s desire to live in a frieze moment, to transcend the drama of race by finally achieving the fantasy of oneness and racial essence at its heart” (349). He is attempting to turn from the “imagined demons that harass him as white being and negro being, and he tries here to turn away from the one and wholly embrace the other” (349). This attempt to submerge himself into being wholly negro is failed as Christmas experiences his “nostrils at the odor which he was trying to make his own would whiten and tauten, his whole being writhe and strain with physical outrage and spiritual denial”(225). The fifteen year journey and the culminating scene in which he is unable to align himself with either social role of whiteness or blackness embodies Christmas’s dilemma of dueling consciousness’s. The experiences of Joe Christmas deny him any concrete place in the existing social order and therefore leave him stranded as an orphan without any true connection to a meaningful social role. Christmas is described as having thought that “it was the loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself” (225). His journey which culminates in his fateful experiences at Jefferson is seemingly failed for he is never able to absolve himself of his tainted blood or find a sense of peace with his self.

The double identity of the characters in Faulkner’s //Light in August// can be exemplified in Joe Christmas’s personal story. His mixed race and the negativity associated with it are instilled in him at a very young age and tear a rift within him that is virtually un-mendable. Christmas’s fifteen year long journey in search of a sense of racial oneness is indicative of his attempt to reconcile his dueling identities in the face of an ever disapproving society. His inability to maintain a complete sense of self is witnessed in such scenes as his near murder of Joe Brown for slinging racial slurs at him. The character is seen simultaneously as an object at the will of his societal affiliations and a subject who operates under his own will and desire. Towards the end of Joe Christmas’s timeline in the novel his italicized, usually aware and rational self reflects, “All I wanted was peace” (111). These words show how Christmas simply desires a harmony between his dual identities, an acceptance of his mixed heritage by himself and chance to transcend the bounds of his social status.

Work Cited: Doyle, Laura. "The Body against Itself in Faulkner's Phenomenology of Race." // American Literature // 73.2 (2001): 339-364. Web.

Faulkner, William. // Light in August: The Corrected Text //. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.