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Hands down, my favorite class first semester sophomore year was Principles of Design. Every couple of weeks, our professor, Natsu Onada, would ask us to read a novel or a play and design a set or costumes for it. This process validated the very visual process I undergo when engaging with a piece of fiction and legitimized the previously self-decided importance I place on where the action of a story takes place. Natsu’s class completely transformed the way I look at fiction. Every time I read a book now, my head automatically wanders into musing about how and where I would construct the story on a stage, and what props, costume, lighting, etc. I would use to convey the mood of the words.
This photograph of a Charleston, South Carolina state building immediately following the Civil War is the exact picture I would include on my set design inspiration board if I were looking to put “Light in August” into play form. I love that fragments of what once was are just skewed about everywhere in such a random, obviously deconstructed pattern, just as the details of Joe Christmas’ and Lena’s lives are. The reader doesn’t get to know everything right away, just as a Southener looking for answers to “what’s next?” in the wake of the Civil War wouldn’t either. It is also highly appropriate that the people in the center of the photograph are overwhelmed by the destroyed building framing the picture. As a set, this would demonstrate that the issues the characters are struggling with are microcosms of the thematic problems troubling the time period and place they exist in. I think this makes sense in the Faulker context, as the identity struggles and coming to terms with the reprecussions of past decisions faced by all the main characters were absolutely struggles the Southern states faced as a whole in the wake of their defeat. Finally, I like that there’s no color, that everything is uniformly abysmal, as though the setting has been washed over with fragmentation and destruction. There’s no escape from it in terms of boundaries, and the lack of props means that the characters have no distraction from their personal pasts within the confines of their world. They have to settle in and be consumed by them, just as Faulker’s text is consumed by backstories moreso than plot driven action.
On another note: This might be stating the obvious, but our past exercise of connecting all the text has me questioning “why?” with every single source we bring into the curriculum. This might be stating the obvious, but here’s what I think for “Light in August”: the location. Our course title in In-Between Peoples, and the Southern population is something I feel we’ve largely ignored until now.