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The burden of the history of the South is a heavy load to bear. Arguably more so than any other region, or any other distinct culture within the United States with the possible exception of the Native Americans, the South has had more unwanted change foisted upon it. Standing midstream waist deep in the flow of this change was William Faulkner, sensitive to the often hidden forces and currents, transcribing and recording their effects and erosions to the prevailing norms.

Because there is such an overlap between history and fiction, a remarkable writer has to understand both, particularly a writer that uses a region or culture as a foundation upon which to build a story. Good, lasting fiction exists at the crossroads of logic and imagination. A believable story must rest on the pillar of the known (logic), but must expand it upward and forward into a credibly imaginative scenario. It is nigh impossible to understand Southern literature without understanding the history of the South; it is nigh impossible to understand Southern history without studying the literature that sprung from it.

Faulkner was not the Gibbon of the South recording the Decline and Fall of Mississippi. Facts and dates, statistics and census data were not the cotton for his gin. Rather, Faulkner's sensitive antennae detected changes in the overall mood of the time, the effects of what was happening and what was going to happen. A bit of a soothsayer, Faulkner could read the tea leaves with brutal honesty. He wrote about race, industrialism, and the loss of a distinct Southern identity.

The character of Joe Christmas in "Light in August" is an example of the South's struggle with race. "Light in August" was published in 1932 when the discussion of race and the problems associated with race were largely taboo. Joe Christmas was born in the 1890's to a Caucasian mother and a father of either Mexican or African-American background. His mother died at childbirth and there was no one left that could or would tell him about his father's ethnicity.

Christmas did not know if he was black or white, and was not comfortable passing as one or the other. He could pass as white, but choose after a while to live as black. But he refused to accept the status of a Negro in white society. He murders a white woman that he is having an affair with and is brutally lynched.

The South of the time was struggling with racial identity and roles. Faulkner highlighted and focused on this struggle by creating a man of unknown color that was trying to find an identity based on threadbare stereotypes and historically inflexible roles of black and white. "Light in August" is often violent, as was the South of the twentieth century. Gail Hightower, a retired minister, says of the community of Jefferson in the novel, "Pleasure, ecstasy they cannot seem to bear. Their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying."

If the analysis stopped here, "Light in August" could easily be misread as a potboiler of doomed romance and mob violence. But Faulkner was a positivist, and his message was that men should treat each other charitably and be tolerant of differences. Faulkner reiterated the same message in his short Nobel Prize speech, "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail . . . because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

Almost any one of Faulkner's novels can be dissected to reveal themes that reflected broad changes that were drastically altering the face of the old South - the disappearance of an agrarian society and the growing prominence of industrialism, the omnipresent influence of the Yankee and the Yankee dollar, and a culture still weighed upon heavily by defeat on the battlefield, in addition to the paradox of race.

But Faulkner never wrote with an aim to a broad symbolism. In a letter to Malcolm Cowley he stated that he "had primarily been telling a story, but unconsciously the incidents came to form a structure symbolically applicable to the history of the South." Call Faulkner the unintentional historian of the South.

While many of the historical themes interwoven in Faulkner's stories seem prescient and right to us now, his fellow citizens of the time found them hard to swallow. He was never popular in Mississippi during his life. Begrudgingly at his death, his fellow citizens did feel a remembrance was appropriate. On Saturday, July 7th, 1962, the day after he died, the shopkeepers in Oxford, Mississippi, his hometown, placed notices in their store windows that proclaimed:

In memory of William Faulkner
This business will be CLOSED
From 2:00 to 2:15 PM today.