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FROM the first reviews to some of the most recent articles, critics of Light in August have been anxious about the novel's structure. Praise of its characterization, themes, language, mythic strength, and so on, has been characteristically given despite an acknowledged formal instability. Disturbing the numerous accolades the novel has received is an audible undercurrent of critical doubt: Where is its structural coherence? What of its unity? Is there wholeness? Comprehensive design? The question of the novel's narrative structure has invaded, tacitly or openly, almost every discussion of the text, avowedly formalist or not. Light in August is a text whose narrative structure calls attention to itself, although not in such terms as symmetrical balance (as in The Ambassadors ), architechtonics (as in Tom Jones ), or progression d'effet (as in Madame Bovary ). The novel does not, in fact, project wholeness, but precisely its opposite, positively flaunting its disunity, structural lapses, digressions, asymmetries, and imbalances. Its very narrative form, its overall structure, questions some of the genre's most cherished conventions: the expectations that the text will contain a single, unified (Aristotelian) plot, identifiable protagonists, and, perhaps most insistently, formal wholeness. But, at the same time, Light in August also rhetorically assures us that its broken and lopsided organization - Faulkner, at one point, called it “topheavy” - is indeed some kind of an organization and not an accident or miscalculation: there is an inconsistent but insistent pull toward interaction, dialogue, and mutual attention.
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