Faulkner from Within. William H. Rueckert
as the collective “I” of the Bundrens; and the fiction can be read as a demonic chronicle of how these “I’s” individual being is lost, taken away, destroyed, frittered away by Anse and Addie—the two A’s, the double destructive beginning. It is truly a terrible fiction, almost without relief (save for the marvelous comic interlude about Jewel and his horse), thrusting, driving toward some zero point of absolute helplessness, victimage, outrage; some grammar of negative being. More dies and is buried than Addie Bundren in this novel.
Looking to the future, one knows that Anse was never a father anyway and that the new wife will be no mother. Looking at the present of the novel, one sees Darl gone, Cash crippled for life, Jewel without his horse, Dewey Dell about to begin repeating Addie’s destructive pattern, and Anse, the great parasite, carrying on as usual, exploiting the role and rhetoric of the father, victimizing family and friends alike, with the power that goes with the role. The cycle of this novel—that is, the projection of it into the future—does not bear thinking on. For this reason, it belongs with The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary rather than Light in August, which, through Lena Grove and Byron Bunch, does allow us to move beyond the agonies of Joe Christmas (who was in fact destroyed by his family in the person of his grandfather, old Doc Hines) and project a future in which a family (Lena, her baby, and Byron, who assumes the function of a father) is offered as a possible source of generative being.
A Grammar of Negative Being
Sanctuary (1931)
Faulkner arrives at an almost pure grammar of negative being in Sanctuary, his fiction with the most perfect title and the one which, when properly understood, tells us more about Faulkner’s early dark vision than any of the other titles. Faulkner’s own rather disconcerting remarks about this novel in the “Introduction” and the extreme purity (schematic, almost allegorical conception) of the work have misled many critics, causing them to under-read and to mistrust the authenticity of both the specific fiction and the vision. The French understood this fiction much earlier and better than American critics did because they have fewer biases against works as deliberately conceived and written as this one. I will follow their lead because it has always seemed to me that the most pure model of Faulkner’s negative vision can be found in this fiction.
One of the best ways to understand Sanctuary is to begin with the realization that the fiction is a black or inverted Romance and an almost absolute negation of the title—in all of its standard dictionary meanings as well as the many transferred symbolic meanings which are defined from within.7 The whole fiction flows counter to the title in a kind of perverse, demonic demonstration that there are no sanctuaries left, to be found, or to be created in this world, in this life. There is only one sanctuary and that is death, which is to be understood here, as it is almost everywhere in Faulkner, as a terminal (not a mediating) event, an absolute end to life. Almost the only relief Faulkner’s suffering characters get is from dying, often violently, and often in such a way as to render the motivation very ambiguous. The whole fiction consists of variations on the negation (inversion) of the title and the basic principle of the Romance, as defined by Northrop Frye and exemplified by Spenser’s Faerie Queene. That is the logic of the work, and Faulkner pursued it with brilliant, relentless imaginative fury. The end result is the grammar of negative being, a condition which may be defined as existence in a purely secular, human world where there are no sanctuaries. Otherwise put, there is a progressive constriction of human possibilities (as there often is in the work of Katherine Anne Porter): Heaven is eliminated; the old possibilities of a secular humanism are eliminated; gradually, everything is squeezed down into Hell; or, Hell is raised up, unchanged, and laid over the human world like a labyrinthine grid. The title, which starts us at one point, anticipating sanctuary, is progressively reversed in a brilliant exercise of negative imagination, until the root meaning of the term is canceled and the sanctuary available even to the fugitive and outlaw is gone because there is no holy of holies, nothing left that is sanctified, held sacred and inviolate, within the self, out in society, before or beyond man and society. It is as if even the ultimate sanctuary (something inviolate and pure in human affairs) has been violated and destroyed. No more completely and thoroughly negative fictional work exists in Faulkner. There is nowhere in Faulkner a purely negative work, for somewhere in even the most negative—As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary—there are wonderfully comic scenes which indicate the possibility of a whole other kind of world, order, vision, and style. These scenes are seldom ironic in a corrosive way; they are pure outbursts from a joyful comic perception of reality set into the context of and surrounded by, the usually otherwise unrelieved negative material. In Sanctuary they are all centered around the whorehouse, the ironic and comic sanctuary of the novel.
The central events of this fiction are related violent acts by Popeye, both of which can be said—finally—to have been caused by Temple. These acts are the corn cob “rape” of the “virgin” Temple in the corn crib where she has gone for “sanctuary,” and the murder of Tommy, her dim-witted but good-hearted protector. Once Temple (the eighteen-year-old daughter of a judge, the deflowered bloom of southern womanhood) has been brought into the situation (described later) by her drunk southern gentleman friend (Gowan—Gawain?—Stevens) and abandoned, she becomes, as Anse became in As I Lay Dying, the principal but never the sole causative factor or force in the sequence of events that Faulkner uses to negate the title.
Religion and sexuality as forces—usually negative—so often converge in Faulkner that one has to take Temple’s name seriously. Just in this central period alone, there are Addie and Whitfield: Temple, Popeye, and Red; Joanna Burden and Joe Christmas; Hightower and his wife. Already corrupt, or maybe just already desiring to be violated and corrupted, Temple is abandoned in a situation where she can become as corrupt as she wishes. Taken seriously, we have to understand her symbolically as the temple (the traditional location of the sanctuary) that wants to be corrupted and that in the reversed negative logic of the fiction, does not provide sanctuary and comfort or spread sanctity, beatitude, and the Word of God—but causes instead pestilence, destruction, violence, corruption, outrage. To describe what happens to Temple as a “rape” is rather inaccurate, for she has taunted and tempted the impotent Popeye with her sex until in an incredible compounded act of frustrated rage, he first shoots Tommy (an act of deflected impotent sexuality if ever there was one) and then deflowers and rapes Temple (which is what she has wanted all along) in the only way that is available to him—with another simulacrum (the gun first, then the corn cob—what a symbolic pair). These two acts of displaced sexuality and violence generate much of the rest of the fiction. To say that the Temple wants to be violated by the gangster is an understatement. The temple—so to speak in the purely symbolic formulaic terms this fiction encourages—seduces the criminal or gangster only to find that the gangster is sexually impotent and must act through mediators. The acting through mediators (the gun, the corn cob, the whorehouse, Red, the mob) is a basic principle of triangulation where, as one sees it so beautifully in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum; crime, evil, destruction, even simple pain and harm can all be inflicted through mediators without responsibility and guilt. Nobody in this fiction is ever punished for what he does; most often, he is punished and destroyed for what someone else does. The principle of mediation and triangulation work in another way, of course, in the person of Christ and in the office of the Church, to mediate between man and God and to take away guilt and evil by transfer to the other. That is, to guarantee sanctuary, especially in the final or eschatological sense. There is, in other words, malign and benign mediation and triangulation. What Faulkner has imagined here (as Claude-Edmonde Magny has pointed out) is a demonic inversion of benign/divine mediation: Temple is a whore, the temple is a whorehouse, the whorehouse is the only real (comic) sanctuary, Popeye is a petty antichrist, impotent, without the spermatic Word, his rod a gun, his penis a corn cob. All the generative sources are negated.
Once the opportunity is present, the corruption of Temple is complete. She is taken to her proper dwelling—the whorehouse—at once by Popeye. As in the case of Joanna Burden, there is a readiness for corruption and perversion in the female which only awaits the right circumstances. Between them, Temple and Popeye take care of nearly everybody in this fiction. Temple, for example, is, in the demonic triangulation of the novel, responsible for three deaths, all of males, and all sexually caused. Popeye shoots Tommy to get at Temple and to eliminate the witness. Red, the stud Popeye gets to do his screwing