포크너의 비희극적 구조: 『8월의 빛』

Abstract

Light in August is a tragedy in a tragicomic structure. My main interest here is in Faulkner's achievement of such a tragicomic mode and the implications suggested by the ironic contrast of tragic and comic actions. In Light in August the comic action develops around Lena Grove presented as a woman eternally chased by a lover in a pastoral world as depicted in Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Byron Bunch falls in love with Lena at first sight and helps her find the father of the baby she is expecting; yet she ends up travelling with both her baby and Byron, who intends to be a father to the child. Lena's comic action accounts for the novel's bookends frame as she enters the tragic scene of Jefferson just as Miss Joanna Burden's house is being burned and then exits the tragic stage just after Joe Christmas is executed by Percy Grimm whose posse assumed that Joe had raped and killed Miss Burden. The comic plot is, however, subservient to the primary tragic plot centering on Christmas, the central character whose alleged possession of “Negro” blood becomes a tragic inevitability. Christmas seeks racial identity by trying to escape from both his own consciousness and the collective. Miss Burden's tragic death results from a clash between Christmas' rebellious spirit and her Northern family's perverse abolitionist heritage, including her father's Calvinistic beliefs. The tragedy of Gail Hightower, another tragic figure, lies in his obsession with his Southern heritage. This defrocked minister's blind vision of galloping cavalry portrays his grandfather as a symbol of the heroic, legendary South and Hightower thus resolves to emulate this heroic possibility at the pulpit in Jefferson, the scene of his grandfather's death. In actuality, he romanticizes the past and evades facing the fact that his grandfather was killed stealing chickens. The subplot of Hightower serves two functions. First, his contact with Byron leads him to his involvement in situations involving Lena and Christmas respectively, thus connecting her comic world with his tragic world. Second, Hightower's self-scrutiny presents a Southerner's guilt at the death of Christmas whose tragedy lies in his repudiation of a bifurcated racial view that Southern society has imposed on him. It is tragic that Hightower confronts the real face of the South epitomized by Grimm's gesture in castrating the alleged black rapist and murderer as well as his own denial of his life-long vision of the heroic, galloping cavalry, which turns out to be nothing but "false optimism and egoism."While Hightower's tragic vision reinforces Christmas' tragic consciousness, the bookends framing device in the novel produces an ironic contrast between Lena's comic suspension in the pastoral and Christmas' tragic struggle against his abstract fate. The novel's tragic poignancy is thus intensified by its comic action.