| The novelists Feodor Dostoevsky and William Faulkner, though separated in both time and space, are remarkably similar in that both make kenotic action the organizing principle of their fiction. The word kenosis , taken from Philippians 2:7, has been used theologically to depict Christ's emptying himself of divinity to take on humanity. Applied analogically to human beings, it would denote the process of divesting oneself of selfishness and self-centeredness in imitation of Christ's action.; In nineteenth-century Russia, Dostoevsky worked closely with the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, whose best-known philosophic work The Justification of the Good reflects their common thought in connecting kenosis with shame, pity, and piety. Dostoevksy's kenotic characters are grounded in shame, which can become for them a catalyst bringing about the surrender of self. Pity, then, engenders human society, and piety leads to a recognition of a divine order.; Faulkner's blacks, his yeoman farmers, and some of his other characters demonstrate this kenotic emptying out of self in order to maintain a political order in the small community of Yoknapatawpha County. Like Dostoevsky, Faulkner worked closely with philosophic ideas. He was greatly influenced by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, in particular concerning the concepts of memory and consciousness in the formation of the soul. Although each of the Yoknapatawpha novels contains a different set of rhetorical strategies and literary purposes not necessarily consistent with each other, Faulkner nevertheless maintains in them an interest in surrender to suffering, a process similar to Dostoevsky's kenosis.; Through an analysis of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov one can arrive at a definition of kenosis and its relationship to shame, pity, and piety that can then be applied to Faulkner's short story "Barn Burning" and his novel Light in August. In this novel, Joe Christmas, like Dostoevsky's Underground Man, serves to show that kenosis grounded in shame, pity, and piety affects the relationship between reader and text as well as motivates the characters within the text. The writings of both Dostoevsky and Faulkner thus ultimately suggest that careful and active participation in the literary work of art results, through the strategies of shame, pity, and piety, in a heightened consciousness of human being as such, enabling readers to be actors in, rather than voyeurs of, the literary work of art. |
