"with Judgment Reserved": Reading Both Predictably and Unpredictably in William Faulkner's Light in August and the Wild Palms (Practicing Theory) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Before killing Joanna Burden (one of the many 'somethings' which are "going to happen" to Joe Christmas in the course of Faulkner's Light in August (118)), Joe prepares himself: he goes to the water, cleans, shaves, and reads from the magazine that he has stored "beneath his cot" (110). Of the magazine we are told only that it "was of that type whose covers bear either pictures of young women in underclothes or pictures of men in the act of shooting one another with pistols" (110), yet, despite its lurid appearance, this pulp magazine seems at least initially to provide Joe with a moment of relief--free time (1) from the flow of events which went before, and those which are still before him. However, from Faulkner's description of Joe's reading it becomes clear that this magazine is not so much a respite from his worldly concerns as an affirmation of the fatalism that Joe already suspects governs his actions. The reified gender roles apparent from the magazine's cover are only this process's beginning: it is really the mechanical act of reading itself which provides the most powerful analogy for Joe's self-perceived yet selfless sense of his life's seemingly absolute determination. Reading his magazine "in steady progression," yet also "apparently arrested and held immobile ... hanging motionless and without physical weight ... to watch the slow flowing of time beneath him" (112), Joe becomes convinced that this something which is to come (this violence) is "already done" (111); that there is, in other words, "no more event to come" from him, no more "unpredictable things" in his future. Joe's act of reading, therefore, has a double force: reading is both an act which persists in the full flow of sensual time (as Joe's eyes scan the magazine and the story unfolds its plot with the turning of each page), yet also one which is rendered strangely "immobile" by the very presence of the material text (removed from the pressure of chronological time since the future of the story is always accessible to the reader simply by flipping just a few pages ahead). It is in part through this double act of reading that Joe resigns himself to the inevitability of his own somethings. However, this is not some tricky way of absolving Joe from 'guilt' for the killing of Joanna Burden, but rather, like Judith's weaving analogy in Absalom, Absalom!, (2) this moment of quiet reading suggests that Faulkner's work demonstrates a more deeply nuanced appreciation of subjectivity and agency than the usual legal or theological implications of a strictly personal accountability for one's actions. Like many of Faulkner's characters, for Joe the possibility of a future not already entirely predicted and determined by the past offers the only hope of eluding the comfortably horrible path of Percy Grimm: "uncomplex and inescapable as a barren corridor, completely freed ... of ever again having to think or decide ... a sublime and implicit faith in physical courage and blind obedience" (451). Yet, Joe's alternative is not salvation through "courage," but, rather through backfire: as Gavin Stevens suggests, it is "the passive patience to endure and recognise and accept the one opportunity which he had to break in the middle of that crowded square, manacled, and run" (448; emphasis mine) which separates Joe from this oppressive ideology of grim "courage." Although Joe takes his one opportunity to flee, it is not with the conviction that he will be free, but only that, manacled as he is, he may still remain unpredictable and therefore, as Jacques Derrida suggests when writing his Circumfession, he may still have a future more personal than the already-determined one of Percy Grimm. Even the community's discourse after Joe's escape centers not on "how Christmas had escaped"--the heroic act--"but why when free, he had taken refuge in the place which he did, where he must have known he would be certainly run to earth, and why when that occurred he neither surrende