William Faulkner: The Sanctuary of Evil

According to his own testimony, Faulkner wrote the first version of  Sanctuary in three weeks in 1929, immediately after The Sound and the Fury. The idea of the book, he explained in the second edition of the novel (1932), had always seemed to him 'cheap' because he had conceived it with the sole intention of making money (up to then, he had  only written for 'pleasure'). His method was 'to invent the most horrific tale that I could imagine', something that someone from the Mississippi could take as a topical theme. Aghast at the text, his editor told him that he would never publish such a book since, if he did so, both of them would go to prison.
Then, while he was working in a power plant, Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying. When this book came out, he received the proofs of Sanctuary which the editor had finally decided to publish. On rereading his work, Faulkner decided that the novel was indeed unpresentable as it stood and made many corrections and deletions, to such an extent that the version which appeared in 1931 differed considerably from the original. (A comparison of both texts can be found in Gerald Langford, Faulkner's Revision of Sanctuary, University of Texas Press, 1972.)
 The second version is no less 'horrific' than the first: the main horrifying events of the story occur in both versions, with the exception of the discreetly incestuous feelings between Horace and Narcissa Benbow and Horace and his stepdaughter Little Belle, which are much more explicit in the first version. The main difference is that the centre of the first version was Horace Benbow, while in the new one, Popeye and Temple Drake have grown and have relegated the honest and weak lawyer to a minor role. With regard to structure, the original version was much clearer, despite the temporal complexities, since Horace was the perspective from which nearly all the story was narrated, while in the definitive version the tale continually changes point of view, from chapter to chapter, and sometimes even within a single paragraph.
  Faulkner maintained his negative opinion of Sanctuary throughout his life. A half century after that self-critical prologue, in his Conversations at the University of Virginia (Vintage Books, New York, 1965), he once again called his story - at least in its first version - 'weak' and written with base intentions.
  In fact, Sanctuary is one of his masterpieces and deserves to be considered, after Light in August and Absalom, Absalom, among the best novels of the Yoknapatawpha saga. What is certain is that with its harrowing coarseness, its dizzying depiction of cruelty and madness, and its gloomy pessimism, it is scarcely tolerable. Precisely: only a genius could have told a story with such events and characters in a way that would be not only acceptable but even bewitching for the reader. This almost absurdly ferocious story is remarkable for the extraordinary mastery with which it is told, for its unnerving parable on the nature of evil, and for those symbolic and metaphysical echoes which have so excited the interpretative fantasy of the critics. For this is, without doubt, the novel of Faulkner that has generated the most diverse and baroque readings: it has been seen as the modernization of Greek tragedy, a rewriting of the Gothic novel, a biblical allegory, a metaphor against the industrial modernization of the culture of the South of the United States etc. When he introduced the book to the French public in 1933, André Malraux said that it represented 'the insertion of the detective novel into Greek tragedy', and Borges was surely thinking of this novel when he launched his famous boutade that North American novelists had turned 'brutality into a literary virtue'. Under the weight of so much attributed philosophical and moral symbolism, the story of Sanctuary tends to become diluted and disappear. And, in truth, every novel is important for what it tells, not for what it suggests.
  What is this story? In a couple of sentences, it is the sinister adventure of Temple Drake, a pretty, scatterbrained and wealthy girl of seventeen, the daughter of a judge, who is deflowered with an ear of corn by an impotent and psychopathic gangster - who is also a murderer. He then shuts her  away in a brothel in Memphis where he forces her to make love in front of him with a small-time hoodlum whom he has brought along and whom he later kills. Woven into this story is another, somewhat less horrific: Lee Goodwin, a murderer, an alcohol distiller and bootlegger who is tried for the death of a mental defective, Tommy (who was killed by Popeye), condemned and burned alive despite the efforts of Horace Benbow, a well-intentioned lawyer, to save him. Benbow cannot make good triumph.
  These horrors are a mere sampling of the many that appear in the book, in which the reader encounters a strangling, a lynching, various murders, a deliberate fire and a whole raft of moral and social degradation. In the first version, furthermore, the character endowed with a moral conscience, Horace, was caught in the grip of a double incestuous passion. In the final version this has been softened to the extent that it remains as scarcely a murky trace in the emotional life of the lawyer.
  In every novel it is the form - the style in which it is written and the order in which it is told - which determines the richness or poverty, the depth or triviality, of the story. But in novelists like Faulkner, the form is something so visible, so present in the narration that it appears at times to be a protagonist, and acts like another flesh and blood character, or else it appears as a fact, like the passions, crimes or upheavals; of its story.

   The effectiveness of Sanctuary's form stems above all from what the narrator hides from the reader, putting the facts in a different place in the chronology, or leaving them out altogether. The yawning gap in the novel - the barbarous deflowering of Temple - is an ominous silence,an expressive silence. Nothing is described, but from that unexpressed savagery a poisonous atmosphere seeps out and spreads to contaminate Memphis and other places in the novel, turning them into a land of evil, regions of ruin and horror, beyond all hope. There are many other hidden pieces of information, some of which are revealed retrospectively, after the effects that they cause - like the murder of Tommy or Red or the impotence of Popeye - and others which remain in the shadows, although we do learn something about them, enough to keep us intrigued and for us to surmise that in this darkness something murky and criminal is lurking, like the mysterious journeys and shady affairs of Clarence Snopes and the adventures of Belle, the wife of Horace.

   But this manipulation of the facts of the story, which are withheld momentarily or completely from the reader, is more cunning than these examples might indicate. It occurs at every stage, sometimes in every sentence. The narrator never tells us everything and often throws us off the scent: he reveals what a person does, but not what he thinks (Popeye's private life, for example, is never revealed), or vice versa, with no prior warning, he depicts actions and thoughts of unknown people, whose identity he reveals later, in a surprising way, like a magician who suddenly makes the vanished handkerchief reappear. In this way, the story lights up and fades; certain scenes dazzle us with their illumination while others, almost invisible in the shadows, can only be glimpsed.
  The pace of the narrative time is also capricious and variable: it speeds up and goes at the pace of the characters' dialogues, which the narrator recounts almost without commentary - as for example in the trial. In Chapter 13, the crater chapter, time is filmed in slow motion, almost stops and the movements of the characters seem like the rhythmic development of a Chinese shadow theatre. All the scenes of Temple Drake in the house of the old Frenchman are theatrical, they move at a ceremonial pace which turns actions into rites. In this tale, with some exceptions, the scenes are juxtaposed rather than dissolving into each other.
  All this is extremely artificial, but it is not arbitrary. Or rather, it does not seem arbitrary: it emerges as a necessary and authentic reality. The world, these creatures, these dialogues, these silences could not be otherwise. When a novelist succeeds in transmitting to the reader that compelling, inexorable sensation that what is being narrated in the novel could only happen in that way, be told in that way, then he has triumphed completely.
  Many of the almost infinite number of interpretations of Sanctuary stem from the unconscious desire of critics to come up with moral alibis which allow them to redeem a world which is described in the novel as so irrevocably negative. Here once more we come up against that perennial view - which, it seems, literature will never be able to shake off — that poems or fiction should have some kind of edifying function in order to be acceptable to society.
  The humanity that appears in this story is almost without exception execrable or, at the very least, wretched. Horace Benbow has some altruism, which makes him try to save Goodwin and help Ruby, but this is offset by his weakness and cowardice which condemn him to defeat when he tries to face up to injustice. Ruby also shows some spark of feeling and sympathy - she does at least try  to help Temple - but this does not have any useful outcome because she has been inhibited by all the blows and setbacks and is now too cowed by suffering for her generous impulses to be effective. Even the main victim, Temple, causes as much repugnance as sympathy in us because she is as vacuous and stupid - and, potentially as prone to evil - as her tormentors. The characters who do not kill, bootleg, rape and traffic — like the pious Baptist ladies who have Ruby thrown out of the hotel, or Narcissa Benbow - are hypocritical and smug, consumed by prejudice and racism. Only the idiots like Tommy seem less gifted than the rest of their fellow men in this world when it comes to causing harm to others.
   In this fictional reality, human evil is shown, above all, in and through sex. As in the fiercest Puritans, an apocalyptic vision of sexual life permeates all Faulkner's work, but in no other novel of the Yoknapatawpha saga is it felt more forcibly. Sex does not enrich the characters or make them happy, it does not aid communication or cement solidarity, nor does it inspire or enhance existence. It is almost always an experience that animalizes, degrades and often destroys the characters, as is shown in the upheaval caused by Temple's presence in the Old Frenchman's house.
   The arrival of the blonde, pale girl, with her long legs and delicate body, puts the four thugs - Popeye, Van, Tommy and Lee - into a state of excitement and belligerence, like four mastiffs with a bitch on heat. Whatever traces of dignity and decency that might still survive within them vanish when faced with this adolescent who, despite her fear and without really being conscious of what she is doing, provokes them. Purely instinctive and animal feelings prevail over all other feelings such as rationality and even the instinct for survival. In order to placate this instinct, they are prepared to rape and to kill each other. Once she is sullied and degraded by Popeye, Temple will adopt this condition and, for her as well, sex will from then on be a transgression of the norm, violence.
   Is this animated nastiness really humanity? Are we like that? No. This is the humanity that Faulkner has invented with such powers of persuasion that he makes us believe, at least for the duration of the absorbing reading of the novel, that it is not a fiction, but life itself. In fact life is never what it is in fiction. It is sometimes better, sometimes worse, but always more nuanced, diverse and predictable than even the most successful literary fantasies can suggest. Of course, real life is never as perfect, rounded, coherent and intelligible as its literary representations. In these representations, something has been added and cut, in accordance with the 'demons' - those obsessions and deep pulsations that are at the service of intelligence and reason, but are not necessarily controlled or understood by these faculties - of the person who invents them and bestows on them that illusory life that words can give.
  Fiction does not reproduce life; it denies it, putting in its place a  conjuring trick that pretends to replace it. But, in a way that is difficult to establish, fiction also completes life, adding to human experience something that men do not meet in their real lives, but only in those imaginary lives that they live vicariously, through fiction.
  The irrational depths that are also part of life are beginning to reveal their secrets and, thanks to men like Freud, Jung or Bataille, we are beginning to know the way (which is very difficult to detect) that they influence human behaviour. Before psychologists and psychoanalysts existed, even before sorcerers and magicians took on the role, fiction helped men (without their knowing it) to coexist and to come to terms wfth certain phantoms that welled out of their innermost selves, complicating their lives, filling them with impossible and destructive appetites. Fiction helped people not to free themselves from these phantoms, which would be quite difficult and perhaps counterproductive, but to live with them, to establish a modus vivendi between the angels that the community would like its members exclusively to be, and the demons that these members must also be, no matter how developed the culture or how powerful the religion of the society in which they are born. Fiction is also a form of purgation. What in real life is, or must be, repressed in accordance with the existing morality - often simply to ensure the survival of life - finds in fiction a refuge, a right to exist, a freedom to operate even in the most terrifying and horrific way.
  In some way, what happened to Temple Drake in Yoknapatawpha County according to the tortuous imagination of the most persuasive creator of fiction in our time, saves the beautiful schoolgirls of flesh and blood from being stained by that need for excess that makes up part of our nature and saves us from being burned or hanged for fulfilling that need.
London, December 1987