“MEMORY BELIEVES BEFORE KNOWING REMEMBERS”: EVANESCENCE AND/OR ENDURANCE IN WILLIAM FAULKNER
“MEMORY BELIEVES BEFORE KNOWING REMEMBERS”: EVANESCENCE AND/OR ENDURANCE IN WILLIAM FAULKNER

Summary/Abstract: My paper focuses on one of William Faulkner’s masterpieces, Light in August (1932). Literary ambiguity employed at its best renders this text inexhaustible. Aspects of identity - race, gender, religion – may offer various approaches; yet, as I would like to argue, they will not work as absolute clues to this enigmatic book. For a critical and theoretic background, I shall resort here to Toni Morrison’s set of academic essays (and former lectures) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). The strange thing about this tiny volume of Toni Morrison’s – the professor – is that it never mentions Faulkner’s Light in August; and yet it is here that her demonstration finds the most compelling set of arguments, as if the two books were in some mysterious resonance with each other.

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