Religious Feeling and Religious Commitment in Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Werfel and Bernanos

Jeremy Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138670051
• eBook ISBN: 9781317209072
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1988, the aim of this study is to define the role of religious meaning in the modern novel and to demonstrate that the novel can successfully express a religious feeling, but not a religious commitment. Through the analysis of four novels by Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Werfel and Bernanos, the work explains why novels with a single definite commitment tend to be implausible and lacking in aesthetic unity.

This book will be of interest to those studying religion in 19th Century literature.

Part One

CHAPTER I
Empathy and Characterization in Light in August

In this chapter I will treat the question of the reader's experience of fictional characters in Light in August, and of the relation between that experience and explicit propositions. I will argue that our concrete, empathetic experience of fictional characters is different in kind from our experience of propositions, and that no set of propositions can ever be adequate to such concrete experience. But that they are inadequate should not imply that they are never valid. My method will be, while developing an interpretation of the character of Joe Christmas in Light in August, to constantly call attention to and specify the various kinds of inadequacy that are inevitable in the interpretive statements I offer. The statements I will discuss include descriptions of experience, literary analyses, psychological explanations, and statements of moral ideals.

In Light in August, Faulkner is interested in how each of his main characters succeeds or fails in being loyal to another human being. The ideal of loyalty or fidelity to be found in Faulkner can be compared with the Christian ideal of unselfish love. Such fidelity or love is more than a warm inner feeling. It involves making promises and abiding by those promises even when it is difficult or unbearable to do so. Love and fidelity are not abstract. They consist not in rigid adherence to the terms of an agreement or to definite moral rules, but in a willingness to do whatever the good of the person to whom one is loyal requires. Finally, fidelity and love have not only an ethical, but what we might call a religious or spiritual aspect. While love may impose unbearable burdens, to be incapable of giving or receiving love has often been seen as a spiritual horror identical with hell itself.¹

The main characters of Light in August--Lena Grove, Byron Bunch, Joe Christmas, and Joanna Burden--along with minor characters such as Lucas Burch and Doc Hines, impress me as nearly exhausting the possibilities people have of failing one another, or of being true to one another. Lena is loyal almost to the point of absurdity. She is willing to set off on foot in search of Lucas even though she does not have the slightest idea where he might be, and persists for a month until she finds him, unswerving in her conviction that "a family ought to all be together when a chap comes," and that "The Lord will see to that.^"2 Literary critics have accused her of selfishness and stupidity; but the fact remains that she does find, not only Lucas, but a good husband and father for her child, and that she was willing to face almost impossible circumstances in order to do so. The dominant feature of her character is the loyalty of a mother to her child.

Byron is the kind of person who is capable of committing himself to another, but whose fear of doing so leads him to withdraw from human involvement. Hiding behind his rigid routine at the planing mill for seven years, he believes that such a life will prevent him from ever hurting anyone. In fact he sticks to it to be sure he will never be hurt. The arrival of the pregnant Lena shocks him out of his self-absorption, forcing a decision upon him. He falls in love and makes a commitment. His is obviously the kind of love that is willing to do without any reward. He is willing to endure the pains and humiliations his commitment imposes. He abandons his former security and stands up to the disapprobation both of the town and of his closest friend, Hightower, in order to ensure that Lena's child is born in peace, and that she is reunited with Lucas. He even tries to enlist Hightower's support in a desperate plot to save Joe from prison or execution.

Hightower is the kind of person who is capable of committing himself to another, but willfully refuses to do so. As a young man, he learned to live for the sake of his own private enjoyment of a fantasy culled from his family's past. Hightower, in a sense, does participate in the world--but only in terms of his personal fantasy. Byron is more honest--he honestly withdraws. Hightower's view of the world of other people and of his vocation as a preacher became grotesquely distorted by his vain obsession. His self-absorption drove his wife mad and drove the community of Jefferson to utterly reject him. And yet he is capable of a genuine friendship with Byron. For all Hightower's overt disapproval of Byron's course of action, in the end he is really proud of Byron; and Hightower's involvement with the destinies of Byron, Lena, Joe, and the Hineses leads him both to recognize the selfishness of his life and to accept it without despairing.

Lucas represents the absurd extreme of irresponsibility. He is utterly incapable of making commitments, of keeping promises, of aspiring to any kind of integrity. The very idea of such things seems to have never crossed his mind. Joe is also incapable of real fidelity to another human being. But maintaining a certain kind of consistency is extremely important to him. When Lucas asks him, at one point just after Joe has threatened his life, "aint we buddies [ ••• ] cant you trust me?", Joe answers, "I dont know. I dont care, neither. But you can trust me." (p. 88) The dependability Joe aspires to is inseparable from a kind of cold contempt. Joe is hardly able to even imagine what love is. Yet he secretly knows something is terribly wrong, and he cannot bear that knowledge. Joe is a serious and tragic character, while Lucas is comical and inconsequential. Joe's inner unease prods him relentlessly to search for a sense of identity, but his quest only drives him further and further into spiritual chaos.³

The foregoing discussion of Light in August in terms of an ideal such as Christian love may be useful insofar as it begins to call attention to patterns that really do hold the novel together. But it is also very misleading. Such a discussion can give the impression that Faulkner is trying to use his novel to express his commitment to a moral ideal, or to some form of Christian or quasi-Christian religious faith. A paraphrase of the meaning of the novel such as the one I have given is possible and valid because feelings are relevant to ideas and commitments. But such a paraphrase is misleading because it suggests that the meaning of the novel is a statement or assertion about reality. It is true that, in some sense, the novel "says something" about reality. But what the novel says is inseparable from the way the novel says it, and cannot be reduced to any supposedly implicit theological, philosophical, or psychological assertions.⁴ My overall purpose is to demonstrate that the aim of Light in August is to evoke feelings, not express commitments. But before I can show that the meaning of Light in August is something other than an assertion or a commitment, I need to map out the area of experience suggested by the phrase 'evoked feelings.'

I think that the statement 'because Joe was deprived of love as a child, for the rest of his life he was unable to even imagine the possibility of really loving another human being' is true. But it seems that as long as we are concerned only with such statements, and the kind of thinking they represent, we have not even begun to understand the novel. Such statements are objective: they attribute certain qualities to certain situations and postulate connections between the situations in terms of the attributed qualities. 'Joe was deprived of love' is a statement about Joe. But in reading even the first few pages of the story of Joe's childhood, we are reliving Joe's experience itself--we are reliving the reality the statement is about. Something beyond predication and assertion is going on. A dimension of reality, accessible in no other way, is opened up to us. It might be better to say that the dimension of reality is opened up. Objective statements do refer to reality, but their function is merely to attribute particular, isolated qualities to various segments of reality. Literature has to do with the indefinable difference between a thing, a person, a life, and statements or facts about things, people, and lives. To illustrate this point, I will examine in detail the empathetic experience evoked by the first few pages of Chapter Six, contrasting that experience with the statement 'Joe was deprived of love.'

The style of Chapter Six seems to be fairly straightforward narration, but the impression the manner of description creates is manifold. At times the description suggests the way the world appears to Joe; at times the way Joe would appear to the reader if the reader were there; at times the narration moves toward a more factual description of the actions and thoughts of other characters--and all of these approaches are at times intermingled. The description of the orphanage in the first paragraph creates a vivid, dismal scene in the reader's mind. But the description suggests not simply dismalness as it would appear to an observer, but the impression it would make on a child. The building appears as a threatening, confusing power, a dark presence. The phrase "big long garbled cold echoing building" has a remorseless hammering quality. The whole paragraph is full of adjectives that suggest a feeling of being dwarfed by things you cannot make sense of that constitute a sickening threat. Joe is surrounded by things that tower above him and enclose him. The compound is "surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel and wire fence," which is later to appear to Joe to be "like a parade of starved soldiers." That the fenced-in compound should be compared to a "penitentiary or a zoo" suggests a feeling of being trapped, punished, and humiliated. The use of the word zoo adds an overtone of the grotesque. Above all, Joe's environment is described as dirty, bleak, and abrasive. The word bleak occurs three times in the first paragraph, and the word soot twice. The very repetition of these words helps suggest the numbing, depressing quality of the world Joe faces. The building is "sootbleakened," the playground is "grassless" and "cinderstrewnpacked," the fence is made with wire, the air is full of smoke, the orphans all wear "identical and uniform blue denim."

Soot and dirt take on an added significance when we consider the way Doc Hines, the janitor who we later learn is his grandfather, is described. He sits, watching Joe, in the "sootgrimed doorway" of the furnace room that looks out on the playground. His eyes are "quite cold" and "icecold." His face is "quite dirty, with a dirty stubble." When Byron Bunch and Hightower meet him thirty-one years later, he is described as being "incredibly old, incredibly dirty" (p. 361).

In the second paragraph, we are given a description of Joe, "sober and quiet as a shadow," and we learn that he has been sneaking into the dietician's apartment for a year to eat toothpaste. The images and feelings associated with the dietician are in direct contrast to those associated with the building, the compound, and Doc Hines. While everything in the first paragraph is dirty and abrasive, the things Joe links with the dietician are all clean, or have to do with cleaning or washing. The toothpaste sitting on the washstand is the obvious example. Toothpaste is also smooth and sweet. The sentence "he was watching the pink worm coil smooth and cool and slow onto his parchmentcolored finger" has a smooth and soothing quality in its very sound and rhythm. The dietician's things are also soft--Joe slips behind a cloth curtain when he hears the dietician and intern approach, and squats "among delicate shoes and suspended soft womangarments."

Instead of saying that Joe was deprived of l ove, Faulkner tells us that Joe lived in a dirty, ugly, confusing place, that he was watched by a dirty man who sat at the entrance of a furnace room, that he was like a shadow, and that he ate toothpaste. Faulkner does not so much describe Joe as make us experience the world as Joe experiences it. He manages to evoke in a very vivid way the whole inner quality of Joe's life as a child-- and the quality he evokes is beyond the ability of any mere description or objective definition to capture.

The shadow, the soot, and the toothpaste, along with all that is associated with each, attain their full suggestive power through the particular way Faulkner combines them. The likening of a child to a shadow has many evocations that seem to me to emerge especially in this context. Being like a shadow suggests that the predominant bleakness has somehow entered into Joe, intruded into his life and taken residence there. A person who was like a shadow would appear to be drained of something essential, somehow worn out, exhausted, and insubstantial. Shadows are also furtive, elusive, and evasive. They slip around corners, and suddenly vanish. And most of all, shadows are blank. They do not speak to you; they do not respond; nothing comes out of them. Joe's shadowlike quality is not one of many appearances he can take on--it is dominant, constant, and indelibly impressed upon his nature. This becomes clear in many ways. He is isolated from the other children. They are like sparrows, not shadows. Joe is always silent and alone. He does not respond to or try to resist even the worst mistreatment. He simply stiffens up and waits for it to be over, waits to be released. He knows that Doc Hines is watching him and that Doc Hines hates him, and, we are told, "he accepted it.''

In the above paragraphs, I have been attempting to call attention to various aspects of the inner current of Joe's feeling that objective statements cannot begin to capture. Reliving someone's inner life in its concreteness is an experience of a different order from merely entertaining propositions and facts. I would suggest that there are certain things that can be known only through such concrete experience. Thinking merely in terms of objective facts cannot experience the difference between fact and reality; it cannot experience the importance of reality; it cannot experience things and people as presences and powers; and it cannot experience the vague but insistent background of feeling inseparable from things and people experienced in their importance as presences and powers. It is often said that empathy can give us an understanding of people's actions obtainable in no other way. If we assume that the reason people do what they do is that certain things matter to them, then by reliving the qualities of mattering, of importance, in their experience, we do gain a unique understanding of their actions. This quality of mattering is not accessible in the abstract. It can only be reached through empathy. The words power and presence suggest the deep involvement of things that are important in the lives of those who experience them as such. Values do not simply exist; they matter to people. Importance is inseparable from power. The primary aim of literary technique is to convey this sense of the importance of things.

But what is importance? No matter how exhaustive a list of directly experienceable qualities one ascribes to a thing, one will never hit upon the one quality that can be identified with the importance of the thing. Only when people and things are considered concretely, in their particular connectedness, does the sense of their importance and power emerge, and then only indirectly, in the background. However insistent the feeling of importance may become, it remains something ungraspable and elusive.⁵

The central point I wish to make is that through literature we gain a kind of knowledge of reality that merely objective discourse cannot communicate. I am claiming that literature is communication of a certain kind, but that it must be distinguished from the kind of communication that directly confronts the reader with objective propositio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• PART THREE
• Conclusion
• Works Cited