Knowledge and Control in William Faulkner's Light in August

The community portrayed in Light in August shares more or less rigid social convictions that are to a great extent determined by religious beliefs. The dominant denomination in Yoknapatawpha County is Presbyterianism, a Calvinist branch of the Christian church, one of its tenets being that man take control over the earth and exploit its resources. By sexist and racist implications this tenet is extended to women and non-white people, subjecting them to white male control, which makes the society in question a white supremacist patriarchy. In analyzing the power relations in the novel against this background, this paper demonstrates how knowledge is a vital tool to achieve and maintain control. Throughout the novel most of the major characters betray an almost obsessive urge to know or an equally strong impulse to obscure knowledge in order to establish control or escape that of others. However, in Faulkner's novel knowledge is an ambiguous concept. Applying the theories of Hélène Cixous, Jacques Lacan, and Louis Althusser to the text, various kinds of knowledge are discerned: the awareness of factual circumstances, fixed categories imposed on reality, and ostensible truth as defined by ideology. The discrepancy between these versions (together with the basic religious tenets) is proven to determine the major conflicts between and within the principal characters.