『팔월의 빛』에 나타난 가부장적 남부 공동체와 오이디푸스적 상황의 의미

The Patriarchal Southern Community and the Oedipal Situation in Light in August

In William Faulkner's Light in August (1932), the consciousness of the individual beings may reflect the collective unconscious of the Southerners who suffer from the oppressive outer forces, the white patriarchy which dominated the Southern community of the Deep South. When it comes to the marginal beings of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and the town, Jefferson, the community members are obsessed with the shadow images which may be interpreted as Jungian collective unconscious features. The Reverend Gail Hightower recollects of the past, his grandfather at "that transitory moment of lost grandeur" which comes out through his imagination and fantasies. The flux of time exists with its spatialized moment at which Faulkner, as an artist, hopes to arrest his own truth. The strangeness of dreams or fantasies of Faulkner's characters reflects the human alienation and their struggle to survive, and their free will against the oppressive Southern community, as well. Joe Christmas, who is in an Oedipal situation, may be regarded as an archetypal hero or villain who comes to be a victim of his strange community. Like the Oedipus myth, Christmas becomes a tragic figure and through his evasive and equivocal behavior the reader may feel pity and horror. Through Christmas's apocryphal parentage and his desperate situation like Oedipus, Faulkner shows that he delved into the deep structure of the human psyche, and asked the universal question, "Who/What am I?" and attained the universal goal inherent in his creation.