left, to be found, or to be achieved by purposeful human action.
Following the reversing logic of his own fiction, Faulkner has concluded the three main interrelated plot lines of this novel as follows: Popeye (Flem Snopes’s predecessor) who, with Temple, is the chief violator and destroyer in the fiction, is tried and hanged for a crime he did not even commit. Temple, who is the direct cause of three violent male deaths, and who, like Popeye and Anse in As I Lay Dying, is never held accountable or punished for them, is “saved” from the whorehouse (where she really belongs) and is taken to Europe for rest and recuperation. When we last see her, she is sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens, with her father, listening to music, yawning, making up her face. Horace Benbow’s last act after he returns home to Belle (direct from the disemboweling and burning of Goodwin, after ambiguous talk with the cab driver about how “we have to protect our girls”) is to call his stepdaughter, Little Belle, who is Temple’s age. She is away at a house party. It is a sad and ironic conversation. Little Belle is in the pre-Temple pattern; her Gowan is at her shoulder making wise cracks to Horace. “Little Belle’s voice was breathless, controlled, cool, discreet, detached” (SN 360). She’s having a good time. Horace, as usual, is well intentioned but inept. Little Belle will follow after her mother. The irony of the last sentence of the chapter falls on Horace, his house, little Belle, and the title of the fiction. “Lock the back door” Belle tells him. But that won’t do any good: there is no place to hide; nothing is inviolate and certainly no pretty young girl is safe, that night or the next.
The last word of the novel is “death;” the first is sanctuary. If there is any definition of the title that holds, it is the last word of the novel, understood, I think, as it is in Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider: oblivion, the black abyss, nothing, zero, the absolute negation of life. The circuit of the fiction is from sanctuary to death; the alternatives are Horace and Temple, who survive—the one older, abject and defeated, knowing only that it will happen again, that the irreversible sequence is Belle, Little Belle, Big Belle, Belle, knowing that it is not any longer the vanity of human wishes but the futility of human effort that prevails. Knowledge proves as useless here as the law, justice, truth, goodness and all of the other abstractions which have guided man in his attempts to humanize the word and create a culture. The other alternative, Temple, is younger, female, corrupt and perverted before she even gets to her teens, the fouled sanctuary, the holy of holies become the foul of foulness. We end with Temple, with an external image—a surface reality—that runs so counter to the absolute inner corruption and foulness, to the murderous last months of her life as to create, by this typical Faulknerian juxtaposition, a disparity and contradiction between outer and inner, appearance and reality so great as to produce again and again Darl’s helpless, hopeless, defeated laughter or Ben’s furious sound, the pure expression of “horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless.”
Temple is worse than Popeye, which is why, finally, Faulkner ends with Temple and why, we come to realize, it is not Temple who serves Popeye, but Popeye who serves and services that fouled Temple: Gowan, Tommy, Red, Goodwin, Popeye, even Horace—all feed the fires of her lust, her rapacity. She consumes them; but they do not destroy her, nor does her lust consume her, and her image remains the same. If there is a grammar of negative being to be found in Faulkner, it is embodied in Temple and Popeye, the indifferent destroyers and consumers (like Anse) of others in this fiction. Sanctuary is the most completely negative model of reality to be found anywhere in Faulkner. In some ways, all the rest of the dark fictions can be seen as working off of, away and up from this negative model. And in some ways, it is also the paradigmatic dark Faulknerian fiction because one feels very strongly the degree to which he is yearning and his creative imagination is yearning, throughout, for true sanctuary, for peace (for Faulkner’s was a profoundly gentle and peaceful imagination in many ways), but is creating, in a fury, helplessly because of the perception that inside the Temple is Popeye. The true power and potency of the redeeming godhead (sexual or spiritual) is gone, and in its place one finds only death, destruction, indifferent corruption, petty crime, voyeurism, impotence, simulacra, disembowelment, immolation, expulsion, drunkenness. And further, all of this is fathered and protected by the Judge, the Law, in a cruel and ironic deception. And outside the Temple, there is only Horace Benbow to come to one’s rescue—an inept, impotent, classical heritage reduced, now, to carrying home dripping shrimp and locking the back door for yet another corrupt female.
This fictional grammar of negative being gives us the deep case structure of ontological violation, the rape, corruption, and destruction of all generative being. Sanctuary is the reduction of ontological possibilities (sexual, spiritual, intellectual, legal, physical, moral, ethical) to the violators, the violations, and the violated. It is a hellish ontological grammar by means of which one can only conjugate everything to nothing. Addie Bundren is a familiar matrix of destruction who takes the essential being of each of her children into the coffin with her before they can lay her to rest in the ground. The other figure which applies to Addie because it so dominates As I Lay Dying is that she rots and putrefies the essential being of each of her children. But in Sanctuary, all of society is a matrix of destruction and the Temple is so polluted that only the extreme measures of Requiem For a Nun purge and redeem it.
More than the Temple is polluted in Sanctuary, and one way to discover the extent to which the moral, ethical, and legal codes (or grammars) have been contaminated in Faulkner’s imagination is to pursue—briefly—some of the ways in which Sanctuary is a black or inverted ironic Romance. Just as the fiction cancels its title, so it cancels the central vision of the convention or genre it inverts and subjects to such ferocious irony. The novel, as with many other Faulkner novels, is full of romance conventions.8 But the whole novel is one long furious inverting, canceling irony. There is no love anywhere in this romance, and, finally, the whole chivalric code, which does finally emerge as a generative social force in so many of Faulkner’s novels from Intruder in the Dust on, is canceled or inverted into irony. Romances were built, in part, on the absolute belief in sanctions and sanctuaries, in a moral and religious code which would prevail if man and God could make it prevail. In canceling his title, Faulkner canceled it absolutely, completely, by having the whole novel work ironically, corrosively against it. A sanctuary is a refuge. A world without sanctuaries is a world in which there is no refuge anywhere. Sanctuary is a fiction in which all the gods are either dead or ineffectual. A god is a center of being, as the Greeks well knew. If God is dead, there is still the world. If all the gods are dead, there is nothing. That is what a grammar of negative being conjugates to: nothing, the ontological void.
Demonic Incarnation and the Pestilential Word
Light in August (1932)
After Sanctuary—the absolute nadir of Faulkner’s vision, even though it is not his most terrifying fiction until one abstracts the vision and mediates upon it in ontological and metaphysical terms as a grammar of negative being—Faulkner went up, in the sense that he never again created a fiction so purely negative as either Sanctuary or As I Lay Dying. Using his own title, one can say that he got lighter in the 1930s or that he saw more light in the 1930s—both ambiguous, vague, but generally affirmative and true statements about Faulkner’s works between Light in August and Go Down, Moses. “Conjugating” the title of Light in August is a lesson in how this “lightening” occurred and in how Faulkner’s imagination works, re-individuating certain kinds of characters, reconceiving and so re-enacting a repeating but always varied ontological drama.9
Light in August is most obviously a time title because it locates something at a specific point in seasonal time. It stresses recurrence and is futuristic; it is full of expectation and hopefulness. The title is never negated in the way that Sanctuary is; it is diffused through a wide spectrum of applications and meanings to give us, for the first time in Faulkner, a much fuller range of human possibilities, ranging all the way from light to dark and back to light again. One does not know at first whether the title is optical, physical/spatial, physiological, moral, cognitive, or mystical/visionary—to name some of the possibilities; and one does not know for a long time which of these is going to have primacy.
Time, not history, is the central concern of this fiction. Even
