Language and the Status of the Real in William Faulkner’s Light in August: A Historio-cultural Study

This study tries to bring a historio-cultural analysis of language and the status of the real in Faulkner’s Light in August. The creation of Yoknapatawpha County implies a dualism central to the works of William Faulkner. Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner’s fictional reconstruction of the American South and the land of his birth, expresses his dramatization of what he understood as reality. This involved an awareness of the distinction of a modern society, reified in its history and institutions from an older order of myth and tradition. The creation of Yoknapatawpha was ‘‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’’ (Eliot, 1984, p. 201) This dualism of order and disorder, art and reality creates the dual perspective of Faulkner’s fiction which views experience as at once meaningless and significant. This dichotomy helps to define the basic premises of Faulkner’s fictional world by identifying the conflict between the autonomy of the artist and his immersion in history; his power to create an imaginary world free from the constraints of reality and the spatial and temporal coordinates that bind him to that reality. Light in August may be viewed as a significant attempt on Faulkner’s part, at finding a way that could explore and dramatize the polyvalent significance of self, history and art in a modern world denied a fixed referential centre. The result is, what Bakhtin(1981) has called, a truly polyphonic novel that views reality as essentially multiple in nature.