Merry Christmas, from William Faulkner

William Faulkner is not an author who readily comes to mind as a bearer of good tidings for the Christmas season. Scholars like Michael Gorra usually describe Faulkner as a nominal Episcopalian: buried, it is true, in the cemetery of St. Peter’s Church in Oxford, Mississippi, but principally a modernist, an experimenter with language and literary style, and a distinctive voice of the American South on its history and traumas.

During the pandemic, like others, I undertook a project – to read all of Faulkner’s novels. Yet, as I worked my way through the Faulkner canon, I noticed something unusual: Christmas keeps popping up. In many instances, it is simply a marker of time and events. Of just passing interest, perhaps, but the frequency is suggestive, especially for someone as artful as Faulkner. In a number of the novels, though, the holiday takes on more significance and provides an occasion to situate the story and characters. Even more significantly, Faulkner uses Christmas as a key element in some novels.

In Flags in the Dust, the central figure is young Bayard Sartoris, the great-grandson of the Sartoris family’s patriarch. He is a fighter pilot and returns from World War I to his home near Jefferson, Mississippi. Suffering from survivor’s guilt after his better-liked and admired brother, also a fighter pilot in the war, was killed in action, and propelled by the reckless streak in his family line, he is complicit in his grandfather’s death by heart attack after a near-wreck.

The novel pivots at Christmas with a version of the Christmas story. After the death of his grandfather, Bayard flees to the woods and the home of a rustic family he knows. He leaves them on Christmas Eve and rides his horse through the country as day turns to night. Late at night, he looks for a place to stay. He comes upon the cabin of a poor Black family. At first, the father of the family denies Bayard entry, but then reluctantly allows him to sleep in the loft of his stable. The next morning Bayard imperiously asks to be driven to the train station, but the Black man wants to celebrate Christmas. Bayard relents and then joins the family in their cabin. He shares his jug of whiskey with the man and his wife and has dinner with them, after which the host drives Bayard to the station. Bayard leaves Jefferson, abandons his young, pregnant wife, and ultimately dies suicidally while test-flying a dangerous experimental aircraft.

The parallel to the Nativity in Bayard’s Christmas Eve sojourn is plain. With no room for him in the “inn,” the Black family’s cabin, he is allowed to stay in the stable. The flight into Egypt is echoed in Bayard’s departure. But in contrast to Joseph’s flight with his wife and newborn son into Egypt, Bayard leaves his wife and what will turn out to be his son. Instead of safety and redemption, Bayard gives himself over to dissolution and self-destruction. In Flags in the Dust, Christmas is “an illusion.”

Christmas provides another crucial pivot point in Absalom! Absalom! Referencing the biblical story of David and the death of his rebellious son, the novel recounts the saga of Thomas Sutpen, a poor white man originally from western Virginia who sets out to build a vast estate and fortune in Mississippi in its frontier period. He aims to be the lord of his domain, a dynast, and even a kind of god.

Before coming to Mississippi, Sutpen worked in Haiti and married a wealthy landowner’s daughter. He fathered a child, but then left his wife and child when he discovered that his wife had some Black ancestry. Years later, he is remarried and established at Sutpen’s Hundred near Jefferson. The son from Sutpen’s new marriage, Henry, and his close friend from university, Charles Bon, visit. Bon falls in love with Judith, Sutpen’s daughter, and they become engaged.

Sutpen, however, has investigated Bon and learns that he is Sutpen’s son from the Haiti marriage. Sutpen tells Henry that he must stop the marriage on grounds of incest. Henry refuses, and he and Bon ride off to fight in the Civil War. They remain friends and comrades, and toward the end of the war Sutpen joins Henry. Sutpen again demands that Henry stop Bon from marrying Judith and reveals Bon’s Black ancestry. Henry and Bon ride back to Sutpen’s Hundred, and at the gates of the mansion, Henry fulfills his father’s command and kills Bon. In the following years, death and destruction consume Sutpen, Henry, and eventually Sutpen’s Hundred.

The change in the trajectory of Sutpen’s fortunes — the point at which his ascent ceases and the downward path that his vanity, greed, vaulting ambition, and racism end in utter destruction — begins with the visit of Henry and Charles Bon to Sutpen’s Hundred at Christmas.

Another key juncture occurs at Christmas in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [ The Wild Palms]. Two stories involving two couples alternately unfold. In one story, Harry and Charlotte abandon their lives in New Orleans — Harry his medical career as an intern at a hospital and Charlotte her husband and two children. They make their way to Chicago and live hand-to-mouth. There, during the Christmas holidays, their life begins to become more settled. This very condition — an impending respectability that they feel threatens their love — impels them to leave for an isolated mining camp in Utah. Charlotte becomes pregnant, and they then head to the Mississippi coast. Harry botches performing an abortion on her, Charlotte dies, and Harry is sent to jail. Once again, Christmas is the fulcrum.

Faulkner’s description of Christmas in Chicago is harsh. He has Harry and Charlotte’s friend call it “an orgy of unbridled sentimental obeisance to the fairy tale which conquered the western world.” This seems consistent with what Faulkner had to say about Christmas in Flags in the Dust. Yet, whenever we think that we have pinned Faulkner down, he is elusive. As Harry has a goodbye drink with McCord, Harry tries to explain why they are going to Utah. The problem is love:

There is no place for it in the world today…We have eliminated it. It took us a long time, but man is resourceful and limitless in inventing too, and so we have got rid of love at last just as we have got rid of Christ…If Jesus returned today we would have to crucify him quick in our own defense, to justify and preserve the civilization we have worked and suffered and died shrieking in rage and impotence and terror for two thousand years to create and perfect in man’s own image.

And so, Faulkner suggests, the problem is not Christmas, but how our society has coopted and neutered it. If God so loved the world that he gave us his son, we have decided that we really don’t want him or God’s love.

We come finally to Faulkner’s most extended treatment of Christmas, the perplexing and perturbing character Joe Christmas in Light in August. Here, Christmas is more than a marker, more than a way to situate a story, more even than a pivot point. Christmas, in the form of the central character, is the story. And despite the skepticism of critics like Cleanth Brooks, the evidence is overwhelming that Joe Christmas is a Christ figure.

To begin with, Joe’s name: His surname is not only Christmas, but his initials are “J.C.” His birth is mysterious. (We learn later that his mother was unmarried). As a baby, he is left on the doorstep of an orphanage just before Christmas. A janitor takes a special interest in him, and when one of the staff appears ready to accuse Joe of being Black (Joe’s race is ambiguous) and thus to consign him to an orphanage for Black children, the janitor tries to steal Joe away to safety. Just before another Christmas, he is adopted by a childless couple, the McEacherns. As he reaches adulthood, he has a relationship with a prostitute and leaves home, wandering for 15 years. At the age of 33, he reappears out of nowhere, and for three years works at a wood-planing mill in Jefferson. As Faulkner describes him:

He looked like a tramp, yet not like a tramp either … there was something definitely rootless about him, as though no town nor city was his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his home. And that he carried this knowledge with him always as though it were a banner, with a quality ruthless, lonely, and almost proud.

Faulkner adds that his name was “somehow an augur of what he will do” and that to his coworkers at the mill, “as soon as they heard it, it was as though there was something in the sound of it that was trying to tell them what to expect … Only none of them had sense enough to recognize it.”

As Joe’s story nears its climax, he hears “voices, murmurs, whispers … which he had been conscious of all his life without knowing it, which were his life, thinking God perhaps and me not knowing that too .” He looks like “a phantom, a spirit, strayed out of its own world, and lost.”

After a crime that he is suspected of having committed by reason of betrayal by his “disciple” Brown — Faulkner, characteristically, does not directly describe the commission of the crime so that we are left uncertain about what in fact happened — Joe flees for a time. On a Tuesday, he enters a Black church and assaults the preacher and congregation. After making certain that it is Friday, he enters a town and allows himself to be apprehended. He doesn’t resist being beaten. As Faulkner states, “It was as though he had set out and made his plans to passively commit suicide.” In the end, Joe is hunted down, shot, and castrated by a self-important vigilante named Percy Grimm, who is compared to a “young priest” and cries “Jesus Christ!” as he administers his “justice” for the original sin, as conceived by Southern society, of the taint of race that Joe bears. Although armed, Joe does not fire at Grimm.

As Grimm’s posse reaches where Joe lays, Faulkner description of him recalls Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection: “For a long moment he looked up at them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then … from out the slashed garments … black blood seemed to rush like a released breath … like the sparks of a rising rocket.” Faulkner says the impression on the men was indelible: “upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever … not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant.”

The mystery of a baby’s birth, a flight to save the child, a childless couple who raise him, a relationship with a prostitute, a sudden appearance at age 33, a woodworker, a three-year “ministry,” hearing the voice of God, cleansing the temple/church, giving himself up, a humiliating and vicious death, and a resurrection. There are simply too many Christological elements in the story of Joe Christmas for the Christian reader not to think of Jesus. Faulkner plainly wanted us to consider Joe in relation to Christ.

And yet the skeptics are not wrong in pointing out the important ways that Joe diverges from Jesus. Joe is no paragon; he is a sinner. He violently assaults his adoptive father. He traffics in bootleg whiskey; that is the basis for Brown’s discipleship. He is arrogant and contemptuous. He fornicates with uncounted women and carries on a lust-filled relationship with Joanna Burden. He rejects her when she tries “praying over” him. He may well have murdered her and burned down her house. Faulkner plainly also made Joe antithetical to Christ, so much so that believers might consider the parallels between them blasphemous.

We are therefore left with the question of what Faulkner was trying to say about Christmas. There are too many uses of it throughout his novels, and especially in Light in August, to believe that it was unimportant or incidental to him. I believe that the clue to the answer may lie in Faulkner’s speech accepting the Nobel Prize. There he said that the writer must focus on “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths … love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Of these, he particularly emphasized pity and compassion. He believed man is “immortal … because he has a soul.” The writer’s duty, he said, was “to write about these things … to help man endure by lifting his heart.”

In Light in August,. as his doom approached, Joe Christmas thought, “All I wanted was peace But there was no peace for him. No one had the pity or compassion to see the Christlike qualities of Joe, sinner though he was. We risk not seeing them as well. Christmas may remind us that Christ is coming, and that gives us hope. In the meantime, Faulkner reminds us that Christmas should lead us to look, with pity and compassion and love, for Christ in each other, and to lift our hearts and endure.

Mark Pelesh is a lifelong Episcopalian and a member of the vestry of All Saints Church, Chevy Chase, Maryland.