Gossip

While gossip and town collectivity is found within much of Faulkner's work, this entry looks specifically at gossip as it is found within his novel //Light in August//.

//Light in August// deals with the tension between the outcasts of Jefferson and the town as an acting moral body. These outcasted characters become shaped and fated based on the the town's most powerful implementation of its own morality: gossip. Byron Bunch, perhaps the outcasted protagonist with the closest affiliations to the town, is exposed to a fair amount of gossip by working at the mill, though he never participates in the functions of the other workers. The gossip he attains is disseminated to Reverend Gail Hightower an extremely isolated and expelled community member. Other protagonists, Lena Grove, Joe Christmas and Mrs. Burden are all left severed from knowledge of the town's gossip, yet are often the subjects of it.

In a meditation on Hightower's expulsion from town, Byron offers his take on the insider-outsider dynamic of a small town, thinking of "how people everywhere are about the same, but that is did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind" (//LIA,// 71). The pronoun "it" in the second sentence is curiously unqualified, but can be taken to refer to the spread of gossip, which only requires a word or name. The town employs many of these single words within the production of gossip. The word connected to Christmas, whether we hear them or not, develops from "foreigner," to "nigger," to "murderer" and "rapist." Faulkner exposes the maleability of morality by making it clear that gossip and these words need not be grounded in fact for the town, but remain the most important aspect to the creation of its reality.

This dispersal of truth value is explored most prominently in the character of Joe Christmas. The entirety of his racial identity is created through gossip. It is explained that Christmas' mother was white and his father claimed to be mexican, though was assumed to be black by Christmas' grandfather, Doc Hines. There is never any definitive explanation of Christmas' heritage, yet his identity is created and reinforced through the gossip, perhaps initiated by Doc Hines, of his schoolmates, caretakers, and eventually internalized to Christmas himself. Christmas' identity highlights how gossip need not be grounded in fact, but effectively manufacturers reality. This truth is further explored when Mrs. Burden presses Christmas to explain how he knows he is part black. Christmas, after explaining he doesn't actually know, says "If I'm not, damned if I haven't wasted a lot of time" (LIA, 254). While the truth is clearly useless to him, neither are lies able to combat the force of gossip. In the final moments of the hunt for Christmas, Gail Hightower attempts to be a false alibi shouting to Grimm that Christmas was with him the night of the murder. Grimm, who can be read as a individual manifestation or instrument of the town's gossip, pushes Hightower aside and brutally murders and castrates Christmas.

Faulkner also uses gossip as a modernist technique to destabilize the authority of the text. In other works, such as //The Sound and the Fury//, Faulkner abandons third person narration and readers must piece together an understanding of the "truth" of the novel, however unattainable. //Light in August//, much more traditional in terms of narration, skews the understanding of truth by situating gossip as the most powerful determinate of a characters' fate.

Carolyn Porter talks about Faulkner's understanding of the limitations of plot. She argues that //Light in August// critiques plot not by eschewing it, but "by piling plot upon plot" (//Lives and Legacies//, 87). The scene in which Mrs. Burden's house burns down contextualizes this view through Faulkner's use of collective narration -- or, effectively, the live production of gossip. Many people from town congregate to watch the house burn. They vacillate between looking at the fire and the body, or the space where the body was. Once the sheriff arrives the town's attention focuses on his proceedings and Faulkner begins, through the italicized sections, to narrate a collective consciousness of the town. As no stranger to pot-boilers, Faulkner was well versed in creating and manipulating cathartic plot arcs that readers could easily recognize. Faulkner creates the lynch mob scenes which follow the destruction of the Burden house as a semi-normalized detective or mystery plot line, yet he fuels it completely by gossip. The town immediately begins to ask "//Who did it? Who did it?"// and "//Is he still free? Ah. Is he? Is he?//" when the sheriff is interrogating a black resident to find out who lived in the shacks the town begins to weave together their own reality "//Is that him? Is that the one that did it? Sheriff's got him. Sheriff has already caught him ... By God, if that's him, what are we doing, standing around here? Murdering a white woman the black son of a//". Faulkner points out here the unimportance of the town's morality shift by explaining that no one had ever entered Mrs. Burden's house, wives had been forbidden to call on her, and the children had shouted "Nigger lover! Nigger lover!" to her (//LIA//, 290-2).

Faulkner offers during the fire scene, in the height of the town's creation of gossip and morality, an explanation of their need for gossip. The town assumes the sheriff is leaving with the solution to the mystery, "that which moved and evoked them as with a promise of something beyond the sluttishness of stuffed entrails and monotonous days" (//LIA,// 294). This promise necessitates the production of gossip to move the town to this "beyond." For this reason, truth and a steady morality are left out of the equation and decay and boredom become the impetus for the expulsion and murder of several of the town's residents.

Works Cited

Porter, Carolyn. //William Faulkner: LIves and Legacies//. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.