Reverend+Gail+Hightower

“In the South, the war is what AD is elsewhere; they date from it.” – Mark Twain, //[|Life on the Mississippi]//

In Gail Hightower, Faulkner personifies the modern South more than half a century after the end of the Civil War. Like Hightower, the South is suspended in time, transfixed on a lost war and a lost way of life. Also like Hightower, the South cannot figure out how their God – the God who was supposed to lead them to a Confederate victory – fits into this modern world. There is hope in Faulkner’s allegory, however, as we see Hightower release himself from this suspended reality and become proactive.

After his wife’s suicide and losing his position with the church, the people of Jefferson try to drive Hightower out of town. Instead, he buys a home, an “unpainted and unobtrusive bungalow,” (57) and essentially separates himself from the community of Jefferson. The first time Hightower appears in the novel, he is standing in his home, looking out the window: “From his study window he can see the street” (57). From the beginning, we are to understand that Hightower is a man of contemplation, rather than action. He is a man who would rather //watch// than //participate//. In her essay, “The Body against Itself in Faulkner’s Phenomenology of Race,” Laura Doyle articulates this point further: “The ‘street’ in this novel is a stage and on it is played the drama of bodies in public… But Gail Hightower only watches the street. He has withdrawn, he thinks, from the stage of the world” (357). However, I would argue further that Hightower’s seclusion is a mutual one. Not only does Hightower wish to remain apart from the world, stewing in his obsession with the image of his grandfather, but it is also significant that the townspeople want him gone from Jefferson. In this sense, Faulkner is showing how the war has become that-which-is-not-to-be-named.

While the war, and its consequences, is ever-present in the culture and daily goings on of the city, it is never spoken of, and those consequences are often pushed to the fringes of society (i.e. the black communities). Because the townspeople do not know how to make sense of the trauma of the war, they choose to not speak of it. Hightower, however, fuses his attempt to make sense of this trauma into his life, and most notably his sermons. “It was as if he couldn’t get religion and that galloping cavalry and his dead grandfather shot from the galloping horse untangled from each other” (62). These feverish sermons upset the congregation because they are uncomfortable by Hightower’s very public attempt to make sense of this trauma, one that is both personal for him and collective for the community and southern culture as well – how do we make sense of ourselves now that the war is //lost//?

Faulkner’s depiction of life in Jefferson, and in the post-war South, makes it clear that modern Southerners have been unable to answer this question. As a result, Southern culture has become stuck in this trauma of reconstruction that has caused American modernity – the modernity of the union – to move on without them. Hightower personifies this trauma, this obsession with the past and repeatedly asking questions for which you do not have an answer. Hightower’s own preoccupation with the Civil War begins at the age of eight, when he finds his grandfather’s confederate uniform hidden away in a trunk in the attic. “The cloth itself had assumed the properties of those phantoms who loomed heroic and tremendous against a background of thunder and smoke and torn flags which now filled his waking and sleeping life” (469). In Hightower’s childhood home, memories of the war are literally hidden away, and he is only able to confront this past by sneaking up to the attic, an act that assumedly would have led to a scolding had he been caught. Unearthing this relic of the war, Hightower is filled with equal parts “terror and awe” (469) and is unable to make sense of his feelings. This traumatic reaction stays with Hightower through his adult life, so much so that he says to himself, “It’s no wonder that I had no father and that I had already died that one night twenty years before I saw light. And that my only salvation must be to return to the place to die where my life had already ceased before it began” (478). Faulkner believes that, like Hightower, the South’s way of life, of making sense of the world, died on the battlefield.

Hightower’s position as a preacher allows him to not only illustrate the South’s collective paralysis after the war, but also the white Southern community’s relationship with the church. In her essay, “W.E.B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and the Dialectic of Black and White: In Search of Exodus for a Postcolonial American South,” Anna Hartnell cites critic Alfred Kazin’s claim that //Light in August// conveys the anxiety around the question of “why the devout and God-fearing confederacy could have gone down in defeat” (529). In other words, how could God //allow// them to lose? This is a question that, in Faulkner’s novel, the church has not been able to answer. Hightower, too, comes to this realization in the novel’s final pages, “that that which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples” (487). Church bells act as a literal marker of the progression of time, and the church’s existence and central place within that progression. Hightower’s image is one of castration, in which “the professionals” have stripped the church of its ability to progress into modern, post-war Southern life. Carolyn Porter, in her book //William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies//, says that, “what Hightower’s vision reveals is that the people of Jefferson form a community devoted not to fostering life…but rather to death” (100). This is a community that does not have a roadmap, does not know how to move forward. In this same scene, Hightower goes on to say, “I came here where faces full of bafflement and hunger and eagerness waited for me, waiting to believe; I did not see them” (487). The members of Hightower’s congregation had the same confusion that caused him to keep turning back to the image of his grandfather: //How do we make sense of ourselves now that the war is lost?// And while they looked for the answer to that question in Hightower, he could only provide more bafflement.

This depiction of a character stuck, unable progress naturally in the society within which he lives is not exclusive to Hightower. We see this in many of the novel’s characters – Joe Christmas, who wanders through the cities and towns of American searching for manhood; the Hineses, who live on the fringes of Mottsville for thirty years without being a part of the community; and Byron Bunch, who works the same job and follows the same weekly routine for seven years before finally breaking the cycle. Like Bunch, all of these characters break the cyclical, frozen nature of their lives, though Hightower seems to be the only one who might find any sort of redemption. Through this character, Faulkner is showing that there is a way for the South to progress into the modern world, but only if it first comes to terms with that which has left it in paralysis – the Civil War.

Works 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.

Hartnell, Anna. "W.E.B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and the Dialectic of Black and White: In Search of Exodus for a Postcolonial American South." //Callaloo// 32.1 (2010): 521-536). Web.

Porter, Carolyn. //William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies//. Oxford University Press, 2007. Web.