FAULKNERS KINSHIP WITH SCHOPENHAUER: THE SABBATH OF THE IXION WHEEL

It is hard to overestimate the attraction that many modern writers have felt toward the thinking of Artur Schopenhauer. Bryan Magee says, All in all, especially when Wagner is taken into the reckoning, it looks to me as if the influence of Schopenhauer on creative artists of the very front rank surpasses that of any other philosopher since the ancient Greeks. Magee surveys adoptions of motifs and ideals from Schopenhauer by writers as diverse as Mann and Rilke; Tolstoy and Turgenev; Hardy and Conrad; Maupassant, Zola, and Proust; Maugham and T. S. Eliot; and Jorge Luis Borges (who claims to have an explicitly Schopenhauerian world-view).2 Given this enormous range of influence, it should not be surprising that the climatic vision of William Faulkners greatest novel, Light in August, exhibits striking similarities to the outlook enunciated in the chapters on aesthetic knowledge in Schopenhauers magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation. Parallels in thought are augmented by similar images, centering upon the metaphor of the aesthetic contemplators escape from a torture wheel. And parallels in aesthetic thinking are further clarified by analogous ideas in the realms of metaphysics and ethics, all closely interrelated in Faulkners novel as in Schopenhauers treatise. We know that Schopenhauer powerfully influenced Ellen Glasgow, Faulkners fellow Southerner. And we know, too, of Schopenhauers lasting effect upon Jules Laforgue, a self-declared disciple of Eduard von Hartmann, who had elaborated the ideas of The World as Will and Representation into a massive Philosophy of the Unconscious: Laforgue was high on the list of Faulkners favorite and oft-read poets.3 So it is more than probable that Faulkner, in his most visionary novel,4 may have borrowed some of the pervasive Schopenhauerianism with which Laforgue infused his poetic (and prose) writings. Of course, Harold Blooms recent remarks on Wallace Stevens5 and Erich Hellers excellent essay on Goethes Marienbader Elegie6 have both shown that, even in the absence of provable influence, Schopenhauerian affinities may greatly illuminate the mental workings of kindred creators. Faulkners kinship with Schopenhauer, whatever its causes, is both extensive and revealing. But although we cannot prove Faulkner studied Schopenhauer, the range of analogous motifs and insights indicates a strong likelihood that the American novelist was well acquainted with the German philosophers work. Like Schopenhauer, Faulkner shows great fondness for motifs borrowed from oriental religion. Lena Grove is seen in many avatars (LA 5); Joe Christmas appears in numberless avatars (LA 213); even Joanna Burden passes through every avatar of a woman in love (LA 244). Joes foster father, McEachern, is called juggernautish; Percy Grimm, too, is a Juggernaut (LA 190,435). One of these latter references neatly illustnkq7hilologus 7 I (1987) 4477459

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rates the way Faulkner recurrently halts, or greatly retards, the action of the book to provide moments of clairvoyance. Time seems illusory, space dreamlike, teleology suspended or abrogated:
He [McEachern] turned into the road at that slow and onerous gallop, the two of them, man and beast, leaning a little stiffly forward as though in some juggernautish simulation of terrific speed though the actual speed itself was absent, as if in that cold and implacable and undeviating conviction of both omnipotence and clairvoyance of which they both partook known destination and speed were not necessary. (LA 190)

Schopenhauer wants us to see things in a similar way when he argues that the Will, the thing-in-itself, is a unity that lies outside of time and space, which, as categories of the principle of sufficient reason or causality, deceive. This distortive principle is Maya, the veil of deception (WWR 113,8; WWV 174, 37).8 Schopenhauer summarizes the plot of the Bhugavad-Gita in an attempt to explain Maya (WWR 284, WWV 392). A synthesizer of Kant and the Hindu-Buddhist heritage, Schopenhauer wants to penetrate the veil of time, space, and causality to contemplate the thing-in-itself. The words avatar and juggernaut point to a similar dualism in Faulkners novel. The power of passion is often juggernautish, brutally and blindly violent, in this book. The murderous Percy Grimm - to take the most egregious example-is moved like a pawn by a mysterious Player (LA 437), very reminiscent of Schopenhauers amoral Will. But almost every character in Light in August is at some time granted a moment of quasi-elevation above his mental enslavement, and during these timeless moments is capable of seeing his (or her) innumerable apparent changes as mere transient avatars, incarnations or temporary embodiments, of an essence that never changes. Brown sees a timeless and beautiful infallibility in his unpredictable frustrations. As though somehow the very fact that he should be so consistently supplied with them elevates him somehow above the petty human hopes and desires which they abrogate and negative (LA 412; nothing could be more quintessentially Schopenhauerian than this derogation of petty human hopes and desires). Or we may think of Joes meditation as, breathing deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the neutral grayness, he becomes one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. That was all I wanted, he thinks in a quiet and slow amazement (LA 313). Time is slowed down; spatial form is dissolved; the will is stilled. Faulkner not only tends to cancel time and space, he also dissolves plurality into seeming avatars of underlying unity. Thus he sets up pairs of characters and families as mutual mirrors by giving them similar names (Burch and Grove), similar psychologies (Joe and Joanna), and similar histories (the Hines family of the South and the Burden family of the North). Seeming opposites - whether in spatial location, temporal background, or individual temperament - are resolved into unsuspected sameness.

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But each characters experience of the momentary suspension of time, space, and plurality is just that - momentary. For the most part they remain slaves of maya. Only the softly inwardlighted, Buddha-like Lena seems to have made a way of life out of calm, contemplative communion with the implacable and immemorial earth (LA 15,26). Sometimes she has to wage a mild battle with that providential caution of the old earth of and with and by which she lives, but she always retains that tranquil and calm unreason and detachment which makes her face calm as stone, but not hard (LA 23, 15). Her face wakes, serene, slow, warm (LA 24). It is an enigma, this grave face: it has either nothing in it, or everything, all knowledge (LA 409). Lenas enigmatic combination of warm earthiness and extreme, serene detachment may well remind us of the passage in which Schopenhauer, thinking of all the lost potential in the history of our troubled world, imagines how the personified earth would tranquilly assuage our childish distress:
But the earth-spirit would smile and say: The source from which the individuals and their powers flow is inexhaustible, and 1sas boundless as are time and space; for, just like these forms of every phenomenon, they too are only phenomenon, visibility of the will. No finite measure can exhaust that infinite source; therefore undiminished infinity is still always open for the return of any event or work that was nipped in the bud. In this world of the phenomenon, true loss is as little possible as is true gain. (WWR 183-84; WWV264)

Schopenhauer replies, It is art, the work of genius (WWR 184; WWV 265). Lena, too, seems essentially an aesthetic perceiver. Hers are the objectivity and spiritual peace which Schopenhauer finds in Dutch paintings of still life (WWR 197; WWV 281). In her we sense the power of an all-including receptivity combined with calm detachment, a combination memorably expressed in her single glance all-embracing, swift, innocent, and profound (LA 5). In privileged moments, other characters in the book can begin to feel the serenity that accompanies true aesthetic knowing. Lenas temperament alone seems to allow her this experience on a daily basis.9 But even though Lenas tranquil temperament may give us a clue to the nature of Faulknerian aesthetic knowing, only Hightowers richly developed vision reveals this mode of knowledge in its full articulation, with al1 its metaphysical and moral implications. Hightowers evasive, reclusive life is on the whole pathetic. But he, too, is presented as a sort of potential Buddha even if, for the greater part of his life, he has been merely an obese parody of one: Between his parallel and downturned palms and with his lower body concealed by the desk, his attitude is that of an eastern idol (LA 83). When Hightower is finally vouchsafed an epiphanic vision, it summarizes and gives philosophic shape to the whole novel. And it is in this vision that Faulkners Schopenhauerian affinities become evident in clear detail. Leaving the eastern idol image aside (and it is a very equivocal metaphor at best), we must admit that Hightower at first seems a rather unlikely

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candidate for the role of prime visionary in Faulkners novel. Schopenhauer tells us that some fortunate people can attain a wonderfully calm, tranquil, will-free frame of mind... simply and solely by the inner force of an artistic disposition (WWR 197; WWV 281). But Hightower has no such luck. His artistic disposition, such as it is, can rarely break free of bondage to narcissistic fixations dating from his earliest years. Obsessed by vivid memories of childhood identification with his supposedly heroic grandfather, Hightower is never in possession of these repetitious imaginings: they wholly control his will. On the whole, Hightower gives little evidence of that artistic genius which Schopenhauer finds requisite for a vision that looks completely through and beyond the principle of sufficient reason (time, space, causality) to the inner, timeless truth of things, the world as Idea, as thing-in-itself - a cool, distanced, will-free vision of that Will to which all things and persons are subject save the aesthetic knower.O But Schopenhauer also seems to imply that there may be another path to visionary freedom. Perhaps the unbearable tension of accumulated emotional pressure is what eventually propels Hightower into a new state of truly aesthetic awareness, of exemplary openness to what both Schopenhauer and Faulkner appear to regard as timeless truth. Schopenhauer points out that when suffering becomes intolerable, sometimes nature... seizes on madness as the last means of saving life ( WWR 193; WWV276). The madmans point of contact with the genius is that both disregard the principle of sufficient reason, ordinary cause-effect relations in space-time, in order to attain a vision that will transcend temporality (WWR 193-94; WWV 277). If, as Schopenhauer suggests, the transition from pain to madness (WWR 193; WWV 276) can help explain the sudden rupture of the connections laid down by the principle of sufficient reason, there seems no difficulty in positing (though Schopenhauer does not do so explicitly) an equally natural sudden transition from pain to aesthetic knowledge. There is no doubt that this is what Hightower actually experiences. The pain of Hightowers accumulated guilt at length becomes so overwhelming that we might well have expected nature to seize on madness, rather than aesthetic knowledge, as Hightowers means of escape. Realizing that his solipsistic absorption in Civil War fantasy had alienated his wife to the point of driving her to suicide (after an extramarital affair), Hightower calls himself her seducer and her murderer (LA 462). His thinking begins to slow now... like a wheel..., the power which propels it not yet aware (LA 462). He seeshimself surrounded by faces, the faces seem to be mirrors in which he watches himself, and the wheel of thinking slows; the axle knows it now but the vehicle itself is still unaware (LA 462). The faces at first seem to be those of this congregants, outraged at the behavior of their self-styled spiritual leader. Hightowers guilt becomes actual horror as the wheel of thinking turns on with the slow implaca-

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bility of a mediaeval torture instrument, until suddenly the climax comes: The wheel, released, seems to rush on with a long sighing sound... fast and smooth now, because it is freed now of burden, of vehicle, axle, all (LA 464-65). At this point, in the lambent suspension of August, the wheel, liberated from all constraints, seems to engender and surround itself with a faint glow like a halo... full of faces:
The faces are not shaped with suffering, not shaped with anything: not horror, pain, not even reproach. They are peaceful, as though they have escaped into an apotheosis; his own is among them. In fact, they all look a little alike, composite of all the faces which he has ever seen. But he can distinguish them one from another... (LA 465)

The faces include those of almost everyone in the novel, certainly everyone of any importance that Hightower has known in the town. His own face is among them, and more than that, all the faces are mirrors in which he watches himself. This vision of a halo of light in August, a halo of deified, will-free faces, is a microcosm of the book, and summarizes its major meanings. Let us look carefully at the behavior of Hightowers symbolic wheel or rather, wheels, since there are two of them: the guilt-burdened wheel of thinking and the liberated, visionary wheel or halo of light. To be even more precise about it, the first, slow, burdened wheel is not so much a wheel of thinking as of being thought - the power which propels it [i.e., the thought] not yet aware [i.e., not yet self-aware]. The thought is forced, not aware of what impels it; it is obsessive, compulsory, guilt- or emotionridden thought - not clear, conscious thought, which would be tranquil and objective (and which becomes so only when the wheel is freed of its emotional burden of compulsion and replaced by a halo of peaceful light). This first, burdened wheel attains self-awareness only very gradually; the axle becomes self-aware while the vehicle as a whole is still unaware. Total freedom from drivenness and compulsion, total awareness, comes only when the guilt-fever lifts: when thought becomes objective and tranquil, the wheel ceases to be a wheel of torment and instead emanates a wheel of light. Rather than the slow implacability of a mediaeval torture instrument, we now have a bright apotheosis. The apotheosized faces in the wheel of light are wholly free of suffering - of horror, pain,... reproach. They have escaped; they are peaceful. The seer who contemplates them is mirrored in their tranquil light of emotion-free knowledge. Schopenhauer has depicted the same contrast between an emotionburdened torture-wheel (he calls it the revolving wheel of Ixion or simply the wheel of Ixion) and a liberated, wholly aware apotheosis (he calls it the highest good and the state of the gods). Like Faulkner, Schopenhauer emphasizes the freedom from pain and suffering attainable in a state of knowledge, self-awareness, objective comprehension:

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No attained object of willing can give a satisfaction that lasts.... Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears [recall Browns derogation of petty human hopes and desires, noted above], so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace. Essentially, it is all the same whether we pursue or flee, fear harm or aspire to enjoyment; care for the constantly demanding will, no matter in what form, continually fills and moves consciousness; but without peace and calm, true well-being is absolutely impossible. Thus the subject of willing is constantly lying on the revolving wheel of Ixion... When, however. an external cause or inward disposition suddenly raises us out of the endless stream of willing, and snatches knowledge from the thraldom of the will, the attention is now no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will. Thus it considers things without interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively; it is entirely given up to them in so far as they are merely representations, and not motives. Then all at once the peace, always sought but always escaping us on that first path of willing, comes to us of its own accord, and all is well with us. It is the pamless state, prized by Epicurus as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for that moment we are delivered from the miserable pressure of the will. We celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still. ( WWR 196; WWV 279-80)

This Ixion wheel is not the only circular torture-machine we find in Schopenhauer. A variant of the image is his comparison of life to a circular path of red-hot coals having a few cool places, a path that we have to run over incessantly: the will-bound man keeps running, hoping to find a cool place, but the man who grasps the inner nature of the whole, who sees himself in all places simultaneously, wisely withdraws ( WWR 380; WWV 5 16). Hightowers mediaeval torture wheel of burdensome, driving emotion finds both classical and Gothic analogues in the philosophers metaphors for human bondage. Similarly, Faulkners metaphoric equation of spiritual/aesthetic deliverance with apotheosis in light finds parallels in Schopenhauer, who explains the symbolic value of light as eternal salvation in all religions on the following basis:
light is the correlative and condition of the most perfect kind of knowledge through perception, of the only knowledge that in no way directly affects the will. For sight, unlike the affections of the other senses, is in itself, directly, and by its sensuous effect, quite incapable of pleasantness or unpleasantness of sensation in the organ; in other words, it has no direct connexion with the will.... Therefore the pleasure from light is in fact the pleasure from the objective possibility of the purest and most perfect kind of knowledge from perception.

(WWR 199-200; WWV284-85)

From Schopenhauers perspective it would therefore make perfect sense to symbolize the painless state, the state of the gods, by a circle of light, as Faulkner does in Hightowers vision. This would take the heat out of the fiery circular path. For what heat is for the will light is for knowledge
(WWR 203; WWV 289).

The faces which Hightower sees, faces freed from the unaware and driven wheel of torment into the pure halo of serene and unreproachful knowledge, have three traits requiring special emphasis. They all seem to be mirrors in which Hightower watches himself. In addition, they all look a little alike, composite of all the faces which he has ever seen. Nevertheless (and this is the final point), he can distinguish them one from another; indeed, his own is among them (LA 465). The image of

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the mirrors suggests that, in this experience, the subject and object of perception, the seer and what he sees, are identical or coessential. This ties in neatly with the assertion that all the perceived faces themselves look a little alike, each of them being in fact a kind of universal composite (composite of all the faces which he has ever seen [emphasis mine]). We get a strong sense that what Hightower is seeing is a vision of universal humanity. Yet the faces are distinguishable; they can be perceived as those of distinct individuals: his wifes; townspeople, members of that congregation which denied him,... Byron Bunchs; the woman [Lena] with the child, and others (LA 465; only the faces of Christmas and Grimm are confused, a special case which we will deal with later). In one respect, then, Hightower sees himself mirrored in all faces and all faces mirroring each other. But in another respect, each of the faces remains unique, and Hightower sees his own face as one more among these irreproducibly unique individualities. The complexity of the relationship between individuality and universal humanity has rarely been figured forth so explicitly and engagingly in a single imaginative experience. Schopenhauers analysis of aesthetic perception reads like a commentary on all three aspects of this vision which we have just noted: 1) subject-object mirroring, 2) compositeness or universality of each face, and 3) unique individuality of each face. As regards the mirroring of perceiver and perceived, Schopenhauer notes that the Idea which is objectively comprehended by the aesthetic perceiver includes subject and object:
When the Idea appears, subject and object can no longer be distinguished in it, because the Idea, the adequate objectivity of the will, the real world as representation, arises only when subject and object reciprocally fill and penetrate each other completely. In just the same way the knowing and the known individual, as things-in-themselves, are likewise not different. . ..The will is the in-Itself ofthe Idea that completely objectifies it; it is also the *in-itself of the particular thing and of the individual that knows it.... As will, outside the representation and all Its forms, it is one and the same in the contemplated object and in the individual who soars aloft in thts contemplation, who becomes conscious of himself as pure subject. Therefore in themselves these two are not different; for in themselves they are the ~11 thaf here

knows Itself ( WWR 180; WWV 259).

Since the object of the aesthetic seers perception is an Idea in Platos sense, and absolutely nothing else (WWR 233; WWV 328), Schopenhauer would hardly be surprised to find Hightowers universal vision of united-self-and-other imaged as a lambent apotheosis, something both supernal and supremely beautiful. The Platonic Idea is more precisely an Idea-Image, something absolutely perceptive, and, although representing an infinite number of individual things, is yet thoroughly definite ( WWR 234; WWV 329). As such, it is not only true but beautiful as well. Anything aesthetically comprehended as the expression of an Idea is ( W WR 210; W WV 298). The clearer and more universal also beautiful the perception of the Idea, the more godlike the state of him who detachedly soars aloft in contemplating it. Not only each of the faces in the halo,

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but also Hightower as Platonic aesthetic perceiver, has escaped into an apotheosis. But the more we emphasize this first point about the Hightower vision, the unity of perceiver and perceived as expressed in the notion of a subjectobject mirroring, the more questions we may have concerning the second and third points: the compositeness of each face and its simultaneous unique individuality. If aesthetic perception is the contemplation of the one and universal will as it knows itself in its essential Idea and is thereby freed from itself, would not the presence of plurality-compositeness, individuality, or any form of multiplicity whatever - compromise the objectivity or adequacy of the vision, in Schopenhauers terms? For we have been told that Plurality and difference, like space and time, exist only in that defective mode of knowledge which is subject to the distortions of the principle of sufficient reason (WWR 160; WWV259). What have compositeness and individuality to do with the one and universal thing-in-itself, contemplated by the mirrored subject as will-free knower? Has Hightowers self-apotheosis been earned? Schopenhauer explains, in a way wholly consonant with the structure and import of Hightowers vision, that although aesthetic contemplation usually leaps straight to the universal, so that each particular thing at one stroke becomes the Idea of its species ( WWR 179; WWV 258) the human beings aesthetic self-knowledge is a very special case, a partial exception to this rule. For it is
one of the distinguishing features of mankind that therein the character of the species and that of the individual are separated so that... each person exhibits to a certain extent an Idea that is wholly characteristic of him. Therefore the arts, aiming at a presentation of the Idea of mankind, have as their problem both beauty as the character of the species,and the character excellence. Again, they have this only in so far of the individual, which is called characterpar as this character is to be regarded not as something accidental and quite peculiar to the man as a single individual, but as a side of the Idea of mankind, specially appearing in this particular individual: and thus the presentation of this individual serves to reveal this Idea. ( WWR 224; WWI316-17)

Hightowers vision, we may say, does not simply illustrate the end product of aesthetic contemplation - the Wills knowledge of itself in bright Platonic detachment - but also the way in which one proceeds toward this goal by first acquiring a correct aesthetic knowledge of human beings. Each human beings character or induplicable personality is to some extent an Idea in itself, and to this extent each face appearing in Hightowers vision must remain distinct from all others. Hightower understands the truth and beauty of individuality. But this individuality acquires its beauty and truth only in so far as it is not considered wholly separate from the Idea of mankind, but is regarded instead as a unique revelation of a particular side or aspect of this Idea. Distinguishing the chief characteristics of Hightowers vision so far in Schopenhauerian terms, we may sum them up as follows. Insofar as the individual himself embodies a distinct idea, Hightower achieves insight by

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contemplating his own image apotheosized in the bright circle of Ideas. Insofar as the individuality of any person is of value only as simultaneous manifestation of the Idea of humanity, Hightower attains insight by contemplating each of the individual faces (his own included) as to some extent a universal composite. Finally, insofar as the ultimate goal of aesthetic contemplation is the attainment of the Wills knowledge of itself, Hightower is correct in seeing all the faces as coequally mirroring his own in a subject-object union. Thus all three aspects of the Hightower vision have their clear analogues in principles of Schopenhauerian aesthetic cognition. But we are not yet at the last stage of Hightowers vision, which as a whole is by no means a static state of consciousness, but a process, a growth of awareness. Indeed, before looking at the visions final phase we should note the living, mobile, organic development which, according to Schopenhauer, always characterizes the contemplation of the Idea, as distinguished from mere reasoning with concepts. The concept, Schopenhauer says, is
like a dead receptacle... from which no more can be taken out (by analytical judgements) has been put in (by synthetical reflection). The Idea, on the other hand, develops in him has grasped it representations that are new as regards the concept of the same name; it is living organism, developing itself and endowed with generative force, which brings forth whtch was not previously put into it. ( WWR 235: WWV 330) than who like a that

The aesthetically perceived Idea alone has generative force. In cognitive terms (relevant because aesthetic perception, for Schopenhauer, is also objective cognition), the Idea contains the basis for new synthetic, not merely analytic, judgments. The artist of genius shows human beauty as he has never seen it, and in his presentation he surpasses nature (WWR 222; WWV 313). Because ne ourselves are the will which we perceive/ know in aesthetic cognition, we have an anticipation of what nature (which is in fact just the will constituting our own inner being) endeavours to present (WWR 222; WWV 313). By recognizing in the individual natures thing its Idea, the aesthetic perceiver, as it were, understands half-spoken words. He expresses clearly what she merely stammers ( WWR 222; WWV 3 13-14). Aesthetic cognition is a truly revelatory process insofar as, through it, the perceived object reveals more, or deeper, truths than our earlier (non-aesthetic) experience of it could ever have led us to induce. Genuinely unexpected knowledge comes upon us. This is certainly what happens to Hightower in the final stage of his vision. Studying the faces in the halo of light, he notices that the face of Joe Christmas presents an anomalous puzzle, whose solution he only gradually comes to see and understand:
This face alone is not clear. It IS confused more than any other, as though in the now peaceful throes of a more recent, a more inextricable, compositeness. Then he can see that tt is two faces which seem to strive (but not of themselves strivmg or desiring it: he knows that, but

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because of the motion and desire of the wheel itself) in turn to free themselves one from the other, then fade and blend again. But he has seen now. the other face, the one that is not Christmas. [Putting the clues together, he realizes it IS Christmas castrator and murderer, Percy Grimm.] Then it seemsto him that some ultimate dammed flood within him breaks and rushes away. He seems to watch it, feeling himself losing contact with earth, lighter and lighter, emptying, floating. [He thinks he is dying, thinks of praying, decides not to pray. He thinks of the lost and unheeded crying of all the living who ever lived, and he begins to pity himself along with them, but apparently stops.] The wheel turns on. It spins now, fading, without progress, as though turned by that final flood which had rushed out of him, leaving his body empty and lighter than a forgotten leaf... so that it can be now Now (LA 465-66; the paragraphs end with no period, and there is an extra space between the two last words)

Hightower reaches the final stage in his gradual liberation from the driven wheel only when he realizes that the murderer and his victim are more inextricably blended than any of the other composite faces in the halo. These two individuals, murderer and victim, are less free to be individual than any of the others whose faces appear to Hightower. Christmas and Grimm are striving, struggling with each other, not because either of them wants to, but because of the motion and desire of the wheel itself, the unabated power of Will which, even in the halo of light, is still not fully freed into knowledge. This struggling is left over from the emotion-burdened wheel of ego-bound thinking which the halo-faces all seemed to have escaped - but the escape was incomplete. To achieve the last and highest stage in aesthetic deliverance from the driven wheel, Hightower needs to learn one more thing: that murderer and victim are one. Hightower learns this lesson and is freed, raised aloft into a now Now of pure presentness beyond the distorting constrictions (time, space, causality) of the principle of sufficient reason, beyond will, beyond fear, beyond guilt. He has learned that good and evil are inextricably blended in man, and that for those who have not come to understand this fact through an aesthetic cognition of individual and universal human nature, the tragically complex interweaving of good and evil will continue to produce blind conflicts overruling conscious control. Hightower is finally freed from that burdensome guilt which has attached him to the wheel of torment when he understands the deep connection between guilt and the unawareness of our natures full complexity. He learns compassion for criminals as well as victims, and he learns compassion for himself. In arriving at this state of blissful freedom (however short-lived it may prove to be), Hightower could be said to have moved beyond the beautiful into the experience of what Schopenhauer would designate as the sublime. The feeling of the sublime is distinguished from that of the beautiful only by... exaltation beyond the known hostile relation of the contemplated object to the will in general (WWR 202; WWV 288). Perception of the beautiful is achieved without a struggle, but in sublime cognition the perceiver contemplates in pure, will-free detachment precisely those objects which are most terrible to the Will, particularly as manifested in To conits objectivity, the human body (WWR 200-01; WWV286-87). template a murderer without fear or repulsion despite ones instinctive,

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physical recoil from the contemplation is to triumph over the wills automatic shrinking from threat. To see a coessential humanity in murderer and victim underlying (and belying) their surface, will-bound, driven conflict and consequent tragedy, is to experience an exaltation not possible when aesthetic cognition is achieved without such an intensified internal struggle. A vision of individual and universal humanity whose central focus is an emblematic image of the coessential humanity of murderer and victim, can hardly help but suggest a message as much moral as intellectual or aesthetic: Tout comprendre, cest tout pardonner. All love (agape, caritas), says Schopenhauer, is compassion or sympathy ( WWR 374; WWV 510). In Schopenhauers view, the only adequate formula for conduct is the Vedantic aphorism, Tat tvam asi, or This art thou!: Whoever is able to declare this to himself with clear knowledge and firm inward conviction about every creature with whom he comes into contact, is certain of all virtue and bliss, and is on the direct path to salvation (WWR 374; WWV 509). Hightowers visionary expercience seems designed to emblematize precisely this insight: the compassion that issues from will-free aesthetic cognition is the root of all virtue (Schopenhauers word, Erlosing or salvation, is no more emphatic than Faulkners majestic term, apotheosis). Schopenhauer, however, is not content with compassion, or with the virtues arising from it. He urges the necessity of a further transition from virtue to asceticism, to denial of the will-to-live ( WWR 380,378; WWV 5 16,514). He ends his book by recommending a flowing away into nothing, and the books last word is appropriately the word nothing (WWR 411-12; WWV 557-58). Faulkner, by contrast, insists upon the need for engagement in the real world: he castigates reclusiveness and withdrawal. Though the emphasis on compassion in Light in August is very Schopenauerian in spirit, the similarity in ethical thinking between novelist and philosopher definitely stops at this point. Unfortunately, Hightower does not long remain in his hard-won state of aesthetic cognition, nor is he allowed to contemplate for long the liberating moral insights which have accompanied it. Almost instantly, Hightowers imagination betrays him. Schopenhauer notes that there are two ways of considering an imaginary object: in objective, will-free aesthetic perception, or in a will-bound way subject to the principle of sufficient reason.
Considered in the which is the work air, congenial to delight; thus only 187; WWV268) first way, it is a means to knowledge of the Idea, the communication of of art. In the second case, the imaginary object is used to build castles in the selfishness and to ones own whim, which for the moment delude and the relations of the phantasms so connected are really ever known. (WWR

There could hardly be a more precisely accurate, trenchant way of charac-

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terizing the difference between Hightowers sublime vision, which we have been considering, and its pathetic sequel. No sooner has Hightower felt himself liberated from his long-term Civil War fantasy-fixations into the light of compassionate knowledge of the thing-in-itself, than the eternal Now is rudely interrupted by the return of the past. Hightowers imaginings once again become will-bound, not revelatory of anything save his own narcissistic ancestor-worship. Schopenhauer says that, when will-bound, the imaginary object is used to build castles in the air (Luftschlosser): Hightowers newly revived fantasy-memories transform Civil War soldiers into chivalric wielders of beribboned lances in the wind. Schopenhauer warns against victimization by ones selfish phantasm (Phantasmen): Hightower fills the air with imagined phantom apparitions. Castles in the air or lances in the wind, phantoms or phantasms, such imaginings repeat all too literally Hightowers lifelong history of subjection to precisely those fantasies most congenial to selfishness:
It is as though they had merely waited until he could find something to pant with, to be reaffirmed in triumph and desire with, with this last left of honor and pride and life. He hears above his heart the thunder increase. myriad and drumming. Like a long sighing of wind in trees it begins, then they sweep into sight, borne now upon a cloud of phantom dust. They rush past, forwardleaning in the saddles, with brandished arms, beneath whipping ribbons from slanted and eager lances; with tumult and soundless yelling. ...his bandaged head huge and without depth upon the twin blobs of his hands upon the ledge, it seems to him that he still hears them: the wild bugles and the clashing sabres and the dying thunder ofhooves. (LA 467)

The past takes over; the imaginings lose depth. One might hope that the old frenzies might die away for good with the dying thunder of hooves, but Hightower still hears them. Old reflexes of the Will die hard.
SUNY/Binghamton
MARTIN BIDNEY

Notes I. Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 389-90. 2. See Appendix 7 (Schopenhauers Influence on Creative Writers), in Magee, pp. 37990. In Appendix 8 (A Conjecture about Dylan Thomas), pp. 391-93, Magee cogently argues for Schopenhauers influence upon that poet as well. And it may be of interest that the protagonist and first-person narrator of Saul Bellows Mr. Sammlers Planet (New York: Fawcett, 1969) is named Artur, after Schopenhauer (p. 191). 3. For Ellen Glasgow, see Vein oflron (New York: Scribners Sons, 1938) e.g., pp. 96, 353, 383. For Laforgue and Hartmann see Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination. 18801900, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 12021, For Faulkner on Laforgue see Lion in the Garden: Intervietvs with W&am Faulkner 1926 1962, ed. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate (New York: Random House, 1968) pp. 135. 211,234. 4. I agree with Virginia V. Hlavsas statement that this work may be the most significant novel by the centurys leading American novelist; see her essay, St. John and Frazer in Bulletin of Research in the Humamties Light in August: Biblical Form and Mythic Function. 83 (1980) 9.

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5. Harold Bloom, Poetry andRepression; Revisionismfrom Blake to Stevens (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), __ pp. 284-86. 6. Erich Heller, Die Marienbader Elegie. Uber das Verstummen und das Sagen, die Erfahrung und das Gedicht. Essavs iiber Goethe (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlaa. 1970). ,. pp. 11 l-62. 7. All Faulkner citations refer to William Faulkner. Lipht in Aupusr. mtrod. bv Cleanth Brooks (New York: Radom House, 1968) abbreviated Li. * 8. All Schopenhauer citations refer to Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols., vol I (New York: Dover, 1969) abbreviated WWR, and to the most recent, most accessible text-critical adition of Die Welt a/s Wille und Vorstellung, in Schopenhauers Siimtliche Werke, 5 ~01s..vol. 1, ed. Wolfgang Freiherr von Lijhneysen (Stuttgart/Frankfurt am Main: Cotta-Insel, 1960), abbreviated WWV. 9. There is a long tradition of Keatsian commentary on Light m August, starting with Norman Holmes Pearsons Lena Grove, Shenandoah 3 (1952) 3-7. Especially useful in this context is Karl E. Zink, Flux and the Frozen Moment: The Imagery of Stasis in Faulkners Prose, PMLA 71 (1956). 285-301. But Keats IS not the onlv noetic thinker intrigued bv the possibility that aesthetic perception might be a kind ofcogt&on. For Schopenh&er, too, it makes senseto say that beauty is truth, truth beauty. 10. Those, who, according to Schopenhauer. have risen even higher in the scale of liberation from Wtll than have the aesthetic knowers, namely the ascetic negators of the will-to-live, might also be mentioned here. I have postponed the theme of ascetic renunciation, important as it may be, in order not to confuse the discussion; it is treated in the section on ethics below. 11. This point is emphasized by Peter L. Hays in More Light on Light m August, Papers on Literature and Language 11 ( 1975), 4 17- 19, and by Olga Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner (Baton Rouae: Lousiana State Univ. Press. rev. ed. 1964). D. 79. For other useful perspectives on Highrowers vision see Robert M. Slabey, Myth and Ritual in Light in August, Texas Studies in LlteratureandLanguage 2 (1960) 238-49; Ilse Dusoir Lind, Apocalypttc Vision as Key to Light in August, Studies m American Fiction 3 (1975), 133-41.