“MEMORY BELIEVES BEFORE KNOWING REMEMBERS”: EVANESCENCE AND /OR ENDURANCE IN WILLIAM FAULKNER

Abstract

My paper focuses on one of William Faulkner’s masterpieces, Light in August (1932). Literary ambiguity employed at its best renders this text inexhaustible. Aspects of identity - race, gender, religion – may offer various approaches; yet, as I would like to argue, they will not work as absolute clues to this enigmatic book. For a critical and theoretic background, I shall resort here to Toni Morrison’s set of academic essays (and former lectures) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). The strange thing about this tiny volume of Toni Morrison’s – the professor – is that it never mentions Faulkner’s Light in August; and yet it is here that her demonstration finds the most compelling set of arguments, as if the two books were in some mysterious resonance with each other.

Keywords

• darkness
• africanism
• ambiguity
• race
• gender
• religion
• self
• otherness
• identity
• temporality.