Juggernaut

At two points in //Light in August//, Faulkner references the juggernaut.

The juggernaut has two existences: one in reality, as the Hindu temple car from the Jagannath Temple in Puri used in an annual festivals. These were named "juggernauts" by the British in India, after the temple and after one of the Gods (Jagganath) honored in one of the carts.

In its secondary existence, the carts became part of [|a larger colonial narrative]: according to apocryphal stories, devotees were supposed to have thrown themselves to be crushed beneath the cart's wheels, feeding into a colonial narrative about Indian barbarianism (along with practices like [|suttee]) and their need to be civilized by the English. Charles Maturin's 1820 //Melmoth the Wanderer// [|has a particularly gory description of the supposed practice].

In Faulkner, the term is used twice, and in both cases Joe Christmas is being pursued by a wrathful white man. When McEachern chases after Christmas to confront him at the dance, Faulkner writes that:

"[McEachern] turned into the road at that slow and ponderous gallop, the two of them, man and beast, leaning a little stiffly forward as though in some juggernautish simulation of terrific speed though the actual speed itself was absent, as if in that cold and implacable and undeviating conviction of both omnipotence and clairvoyance of which they both partook known destination and speed were not necessary." (LIA 203)

"Juggernaut" is a particularly appropriate word for McEachern, as it emphasizes the unthinking and destructive nature of his pursuit of Christmas, further emphasized by "implacable," "undeviating," "omnipotentence," and "clairvoyance" (LIA 203).

And it is Christmas again being pursed by the text's second juggernaut, Percy Grimm, who chases him with "the implacable undeviation of Juggernaut or Fate" (460). In this case the wheels of Grimm's bicycle stands in wry contrast to the crushing wheels of a juggernaut, but it's evidently the implacable attitude and destructive bent that is more important.

In using this term for both descriptions of Christmas' pursuers, Faulkner emphasizes the implacability of Christmas's fate, lending his pursuers the cold crushing power of the juggernaut, as well as the contradictory implications of divine right and meaningless fervor on the pursuers' part. Christmas may avoid the juggernaut of McEachern the first time around, but he cannot escape it the second time.

Juggernaut, from the western perspective, is also a pagan idea - there is no Christian mercy or forgiveness, not even for a man named Joe Christmas himself, and not even though McEachern, the first juggernaut, is himself supposedly driven by Christian ideals.

Perhaps most importantly, Christmas being pursued by the juggernaut - itself a product of the meeting of two cultures (British and Indian) - emphasizes the violence of white oppression, which seeks to elevate itself at the expense of the other. In re-writing the purpose of the Hindu religious festival into one of violence and barbarism, white[| British colonials constructed a narrative of knowledge about India that justified their imperial domination]. Similarly, white narratives of black barbarity in America have been used (and continue to be used) to justify the oppression of black Americans and black culture. Christmas is beaten, chased and ultimately castrated by juggernauts - emblems of a kind of "white knowledge" about the other that is not based in reality but only oppression. In turn, Christmas himself, son of a white mother and a black father, cannot navigate this impossible, imaginary knowledge alongside his own reality, and this impossible situation - mirrored, appropriately, in the contradiction of a white juggernaut - is what drives much of his own inability to construct a successful narrative of himself.

"[McEachern] turned into the road at that slow and ponderous gallop, the two of them, man and beast, leaning a little stiffly forward as though in some juggernautish simulation of terrific speed though the actual speed itself was absent, as if in that cold and implacable and undeviating conviction of both omnipotence and clairvoyance of which they both partook known destination and speed were not necessary." (LIA 203)

"[Grimm] was going fast too, silent, with the delicate swiftness of an apparition, the implacable undeviation of Juggernaut or Fate." (LIA 460)

//Image: "Procession of the Juggernaut at the Hindu Festival of Rutt Jattra," from Quarterly Papers in News from Afar or Missionary Varieties; Chiefly Relating to The Baptist Missionary Society; Being a Re-Publication of The Quarterly Papers of the Said Society, from 1822 to 1830 Inclusive, 4th ed. (London: Printed and Published for the Society, 1830). via http://www.wmcarey.edu/carey/new/newapr2005.htm//

K. Montgomery