This is not a very pretty image of the faun. You see basically it’s like human beings, except, the feet are the hooves of a goat. This is from the Roman mosaics, the satyr.

I think that those words are just words to most of us, so I just found some illustrations. So that’s very important to consider this, that while Christianity is very, very important in this novel, but it’s very important to remember that Faulkner actually also has a reference point that is older than Christianity.īecause Faulkner was talking about fauns and satyrs.

But it also sees itself as looking back to a long literary tradition, going back to the classic times. It has this very important, local dimension to it. It’s about quality of light inMississippi. Maybe the connection is with Lena Grove, who has something of that pagan quality.” It was just to me a pleasant, evocative title, because it reminded me of that time of the luminosity older than our Christian civilization. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods from Greece. It’s cool, there’s a lambence, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from today, but from back in the old classic times. “In August, inMississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when actually there’s a foretaste of fall. This is much later when he was talking about it at the University of Virginia in 1957. This is what Faulkner says about the title that we now have, Light in August. In fact, it could just as well have been dark. Light and dark obviously are the two constitutive parts of the novel, even though it’s the light that has been foregrounded in the present title. It’s an interesting fact that actually this novel could be described as either Dark House or Light in August. You can see that the eventual title is right on the other side of the spectrum. This started out having a different title. There’s so many stories to tell about Faulkner, just about the composition of the novel. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner AMST 246 - Lecture 22 - Faulkner's Light in AugustĬhapter 1: The Pagan Quality of Lena and Light in August

A light in august