ABSTRACT
The modern mind is dialectical to an extreme; it looks for division, it dramatizes oppositions. For this emphasis, Faulkner's Light in August is a classic of the modern imagination as well as perhaps the most representative of his works. Division is corruption in the world of Faulkner, and miscegenation is its vivid symbolic act. Opposed to this act of violent disorder, we understand an ideal of implicit unity, which is thereby purity. Violence is the ironically appropriate and naturalistically inevitable fate of the passive agent. Crumbling below her rigid surface, reached in her isolation, Joanna Burden falls to unlimited license. The two faces on the wheel are a supreme violent duality of blind matter and blind inhibition separated without the resolutions of the moral intelligence. Grimm and Christmas are complements of a debased substance, force meeting force in passion and repression. A third force is needed, that of the moral will and spiritual sympathy.
