(Download) "American Emergencies: Whiteness, The National Guard, And Light in August (Critical Essay)" by The Faulkner Journal " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: American Emergencies: Whiteness, The National Guard, And Light in August (Critical Essay)
- Author : The Faulkner Journal
- Release Date : January 22, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 221 KB
Description
White Blood Right before the National Guard emerges in William Faulkner's Light in August (1932) as a bicycle-riding, uniformed Grim Reaper who packs a pistol and wields a butcher knife, the novel flashes forward so that the reader can meet Gavin Stevens, Jefferson's "District Attorney, [who is] a Harvard graduate [and] a Phi Beta Kappa" (444). Stevens's character serves two functions in the novel: to escort the exhausted Mrs. Hines and her delirious husband, the raving white supremacist old Doc Hines, to Jefferson's train station, and to rehearse the story of Joe Christmas's death in order to prepare the reader for its direct narration in the pages that follow. Faulkner supplies Stevens with a ready listener, a nameless college professor and friend, who, coincidentally, disembarks from the train to pay the D. A. a surprise visit at the exact moment in which Stevens delivers the Hineses to their train car. As they travel from the train station back to Stevens's home, Stevens spins a classically Gothic tale about the last moments of Christmas's life as a panicky, interior struggle of blood against blood, fetishizing and racializing his liquid interiors by repeating the terms "black blood" and "white blood" (448-49). (1) Christmas's white blood, Stevens explains, provides him with moral reasoning, but his black blood rises against it, pushing him to pistol-whip Reverend Hightower and, ultimately, sweeping him into an ecstatic state in which "death is desire and fulfillment" (449).