“Then I said That wont do. I ought to be a man. So I was an old man, with a long white beard, and then the little black man got littler and littler and I was saying Now. You see now. I’m a man now. Then I thought about being a man, and as soon as I thought it, it happened. It made a kind of plopping sound, like blowing a little rubber tube wrong-side outward. It felt cold, like the inside of your mouth when you hold it open. I could feel it, and I lay right still to keep from laughing about how surprised he was going to be. I could feel the jerking going inside my knickers ahead of his hand and me lying there trying not to laugh about how surprised and mad he was going to be in a minute.” (331)
In this passage we encounter Temple’s traumatic wound itself; Faulkner makes it speak. The fantasy-narrative it speaks articulates and conceals the assault she has undergone. We see everything materially relevant—the corncob, the invaded body, the jerking flesh—but we see it fantastically reconfigured. That is, we see the crazily crossgendered scenario that her defenses have summoned into being for psychic survival. In The Sound and the Fury, Quentin imagined himself as Dalton Ames’s mother, withdrawing her husband’s penis before ejaculation, killing Ames before he lived. No less bizarrely, Temple has fantasized herself onto an impossible stage. Faulkner narrates less what is done to Temple than what she does with what is done to her. Her doing is psychic alone because there is no way of escaping Popeye except by fantasy. Popeye co-opts reality; she absents herself through fantasy. The poetry of this passage is the poetry of Temple’s outraged system of defenses. Inasmuch as the purpose of defenses is to forestall such outrage, Faulkner’s prose finds its way to Temple’s very core. With horror and astonishment, we hear her psyche speak. What it speaks is no feral barnyard, no release of animal instinct, but a kind of pain that only human beings, on the rack, are capable of.
I began this discussion of Sanctuary with “the faint furious uproar of the shucks,” and I shall end there. Brilliant as is Faulkner’s making Temple’s wound speak for itself, he is no less attentive to the psychic transfers that fill this novel. Characters obsessively watch others who may or may not know they are being watched, a silent transfer moving across the gaze. Sanctuary opens on the edge of a spring in the woods—a mirroring body of water whose Narcissus echoes go all the way back to The Marble Faun. The self sees no alluring image of itself in that mirror, however. Instead, the bookish Horace—who is leaving his marriage and has stopped en route to get a drink of water—stares into the reflection of the criminal Popeye. Squatting, they silently “face one another across the spring, for two hours” (SAN 5). What is passing between them? Faulkner does not say, yet he launches Sanctuary on that note. He thus prepares us to envisage Horace—who by way of gender, morality, and education is Temple’s opposite—as, unspeakably, her secret sharer. Over two-thirds of the way through the novel, Horace finally comes upon Temple, holed up in a Memphis brothel. She has become corrupted by Popeye, sexually besotted with Red. Only now do we hear what has actually happened to her, as (in the passage just quoted) she tells Horace of her rape. Stunned, silent, he makes his way back to Jefferson. Once home, he picks up a photo of his stepdaughter, the sexually alluring Little Belle. Staring at it, entering her swooning gaze, he becomes enveloped in the voluptuous odor of honeysuckle. His entire physical economy buckles, unable to bear the contradictory impulses surging through him. He rushes to the bathroom and plunges toward the toilet bowl:
[he] leaned upon his braced arms while the shucks set up a terrific uproar beneath her thighs. Lying with her head lifted slightly … she watched something black and furious go roaring out of her pale body. She was bound naked on her back on a flat car moving at speed through a black tunnel, the blackness streaming in rigid threads overhead, a roar of iron wheels in her ears. The car shot bodily from the tunnel in a long upward slant … toward a crescendo…. Far beneath her she could hear the faint, furious uproar of the shucks. (333)
The corncob man. Nowhere in the novel do we get a more powerful image of the assault Temple undergoes. Drawing on that 1921 New York subway experience, Faulkner renders the bound, naked body of Temple as undergoing a subterranean ordeal at inhuman speed. The pervasive blackness suggests Popeye in his unchanging black suits, suggests evil and the underworld more broadly. The corn shucks are both all around her and far beneath her, faintly audible. She is both penetrated and detached, a sacrificial victim. Most tellingly, however, this passage does not begin with Temple at all. For three pages, the text has been following Horace, as he shakily makes his way home past midnight and picks up the photo of Little Belle. Then it becomes hallucinatory, a nightmarish scene of unspeakable transfers. Horace becomes Temple, it is happening to him. More disturbing yet, Horace’s helpless attraction to his nubile stepdaughter transfers to his attraction to Temple (the two young women are the same age, and neither of them is innocent despite their pretence). His body erupts at the signs of his arousal. About to retch, he rushes to the toilet bowl—which now becomes the bed of “furious” shucks. Leaning on his braced arms over that uproar beneath her thighs, it is Horace who, aghast, seems to be both raping her and suffering her rape.
Faulkner called this book a cheap idea, a potboiler. His critics saw deeper and glimpsed Dostoevsky. Svidrigaylov in Crime and Punishment both protects and violates children. At the end of that novel, he dreams of doing the first and finds—in the dream—that he is doing the second. Abruptly awakened by what he has glimpsed in the nighttime theater of himself, he rises from bed, wanders to the seediest part of St. Petersburg, and commits suicide. Faulkner claimed not to have read Dostoevsky, but he said that about a number of writers he was familiar with. Secret sharers—the term is Conrad’s, a writer Faulkner never disowned—were his imaginative familiars. His great work penetrates beneath the sanctuaries of identity—those conceptual bulwarks within which we can claim that we are thus and so, and not otherwise. Exerting unbearable pressure, these novels come upon unspeakable transformations—as though, deep down, human being itself were shapeless plasma rather than fixed essence. The clotting that is you can unclot. At awful times it does unclot. The one who writes a misogynistic potboiler—a man who sees his difference from a woman as absolute, who abuses her and believes she deserves what she gets—is the corncob man. But the one who writes the nightmarish transferences that stalk our daytime identities is a genius. They are both Faulkner, and it took them both to write Sanctuary.
“SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ME”: LIGHT IN AUGUST
Light in August is perhaps Faulkner’s most piercing narrative of race, and I shall attend to it in that light in the next chapter. Appearing in the fall of 1932, it is the fourth of the masterpieces he produced within a time frame of less than thirty-six months. By then, thanks to Sanctuary’s corncob, Faulkner had become notorious, and by then he had experienced his first bout of Hollywood glitz. Light in August points in two directions. It announces his newfound concern with his region’s most abiding trouble—race relations—a concern he would return to repeatedly during the next sixteen years. It reprises, as well, the signature interests of his three previous novels: the unpreparedness of childhood and the assault of the present moment.
The sequencing of events in Light in August was not easy for Faulkner to get right, and the novel communicates to its reader a growing anxiety about what follows what, and why. It opens in the present tense, on the road. Pregnant Lena Grove, swollen and on the verge of labor, is walking toward Jefferson, catching wagon rides as she can. Actually, she is trying to find her departed lover, Lucas Burch, who left her about six months earlier, when certain bodily events revealed their meaning. Nothing in the book is easier to decode than her belly and the plight it announces. So every reader settles down, after the first thirty pages, to read the developing story of abandoned Lena Grove.
Chapter 2, however, opens on “Byron Bunch knows this” (LA 421). The next twenty pages recount a pair of matters from the perspective of heretofore unannounced Byron. First, he recalls the earl
ier arrival in Jefferson of two strangers—one of them sinister and rootless (named Joe Christmas), the other loudmouthed and shiftless (named Joe Brown). They both took jobs at the sawmill where Byron works. Second, he recalls the arrival of Lena Grove at the sawmill on Saturday afternoon—just a day earlier—when he was the only one still at work. Byron’s interest in Lena becomes swiftly transparent to the reader. For her part, inquiring about Burch, she had been told of Bunch. She thought—hoped—that maybe it was a mispronunciation and that Bunch would turn out to be Burch; she headed to the mill to find him. We are entering a rural comedy of manners, and we now expect to get the rest of Bunch’s story.
Chapter 3 opens, instead, in the dark household of a man whom Bunch tends to visit a few times each week—a former preacher named Hightower. It dilates for the next fifteen pages on Hightower’s painful history in this town. He is not just a former minister but a defrocked one. His house is not just dark but is deliberately avoided by the community of Jefferson. With chapter 4 we finally get a sequence we expect: twenty pages of conversation between Byron and Hightower, in Hightower’s house. They speak of Christmas and Brown, and of Lena and her quest for Burch. It is clear to them both that Joe Brown is the Lucas Burch she is seeking. It is clear to us as well that Byron is falling for this heavily pregnant woman, even as he feels the responsibility to join her to her fleeing and worthless lover.
With this as background, Chapter 5 opens after midnight, on an unidentified date. It focuses wholly on Joe Christmas’s thoughts, feelings, and actions during the next twenty-four hours. These sixteen pages are as brilliant as anything Faulkner ever wrote. Cryptically—in the present moment of consciousness—they convey Joe’s mounting anger toward Brown (they share the same cabin), his increasing frustration over previous actions unknown to us and only alluded to here, his aimless postmidnight wandering outside the cabin in his underclothes and with his knife, and his suffocating walk through Freedman’s Town (the black neighborhood of Jefferson). The chapter closes with him sitting outside a dark house at midnight:
He was not thinking Maybe she is not asleep either tonight. He was not thinking at all; thinking had not begun now; the voices had not begun now either. He just sat there, not moving, until after a while he heard the clock two miles away strike twelve. Then he rose and moved toward the house. He didn’t go fast. He didn’t think even then Something is going to happen. Something is going to happen to me. (LA 486, emphasis in the original)
The prose is lean, sharp as Joe’s knife. The italics suggest a sort of mental reflection deeper than conscious thought. There, lodged in this subterranean territory, the woman who occupies the dark house moves raging inside him. He is waiting for something, but he does not know what, as he sits listening to the clock strike midnight. When he rises and heads toward the house, he is at once wholly focused yet unaware of what he intends to do. The last clause in italics—“something is going to happen to me”—is eerily disturbing. The syntax may tell us why. The subject of the sentence is “something.” Joe himself is relegated to the subordinate position of the object of the preposition: “to me.” All our practice as speakers of English tells us that the clause, if healthy, would read otherwise: “I am going to do something.” But Faulkner has it exactly right. Something has priority. Whatever it is, he will not do it: it will happen to him. As we learn much later, he is only moments away from murderous violence. But he does not seem to know that. He does not even name—in this sentence—the other person on whom the violence will be released. In his roiling mind, it is all happening to him. The chapter ends teetering on the verge of an approaching climax.
Chapter 6 begins by ignoring everything that has preceded it: “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building” (LA 487). No first-time reader is prepared to recognize the time as thirty years earlier, the place as an orphanage in Memphis, and the consciousness as that of Joe Christmas, a young child now. A first-time reader is especially unprepared to coordinate these cryptic data because the ending of the fifth chapter has all but promised something else. Instead of delivering on that promise, chapter 6 and the three subsequent ones unfold the events of Christmas’s childhood, concluding seventy-five pages later in another scene of violence. By this time Joe is eighteen.
Chapter 10 then summarizes, in under ten pages, the next fifteen years of Joe’s life. It ends by delivering him, now thirty-three years old, at the doorstep of the same dark house he sat outside of, six chapters ago. The time is two years earlier than the time of chapter 5. Entering the house stealthily at night, he meets its owner, a middle-aged woman named Joanna Burden. She thought she had heard a thief breaking in, and they confront each other in the kitchen. The next three chapters (we are at this point 170 pages into the novel) narrate their developing relationship. It is a liaison at once intimate and violent, and we watch it move toward a moment of pending violence that we have already witnessed, but not understood:
And so as he sat in the shadow of the ruined garden on that August night three months later and heard the clock in the courthouse two miles away strike ten and then eleven, he believed with calm paradox that he was the volitionless servant of the fatality in which he believed that he did not believe. He was saying to himself I had to do it already in the past tense; I had to do it. She said so herself. (LA 605, emphasis in the original)
We are with Joe again, outside that dark house, and he is about to perform what, so many pages earlier, he was on the edge of performing. He hears the same clock striking the same hours. Since this is not for him a repetition, he still does not know what he’s going to do. But for us it is a repetition, and, unlike him, we are now positioned—thanks to the intervening pages—to understand what is happening. We know that Joanna Burden lives—lived—inside that house. We also know that someone—almost certainly Christmas—slit her throat with a knife and fled the scene. Because Faulkner deploys time in such a way that later chapters introduce earlier materials heretofore unknown, a moment like the one above sets off remarkable reverberations. We experience simultaneously both our knowing what he has done and his not-knowing what he will do.
More, Faulkner has by now prepared us to decode those phrases about “volitionless servant” and “fatality” and belief or disbelief. We have witnessed (in preceding chapters) Joe’s adoption by an abusive foster father, the Calvinist McEachern. McEachern tried brutally to beat the doctrine of predestination into the little boy. Joe silently endured the beatings, refusing to learn his catechism. This passage suggests that he has been penetrated by it nevertheless. Like a ghostly secret sharer, McEachern’s fatalistic teachings lodge inside Joe, cohabiting there unacknowledged, alongside Joanna’s Presbyterian gloom. Marked by both McEachern and Joanna, even as he thinks he shares none of their beliefs, Joe envisages the act he is about to do as already done. “I had to do it already in the past tense.” He is a Calvinist despite his repudiation of Calvinist doctrine. Faulkner arranges for us to recognize—as insight—a contradiction that his character lives as blindness.
Why would Faulkner present Christmas in this intricately recursive manner? What is Faulkner up to as he challenges our normal ways of reading events? Why does he refuse to supply the simpler temporal sequencing that is the bread and butter of narrative? As veteran readers of fiction, we not only anticipate such sequencing but virtually demand it. Faulkner’s great work does not provide it, and this is a major reason that he is difficult to read. The anticipated sequence is of course linear—a move from trouble seeded in the past to present complications arising from that trouble, and finally, satisfyingly, to later resolutions of what came before. A move of steadily increasing enlightenment, in the sense that usually the protago-nist—and always the narrator (and therefore the reader)—remains abreast of what is developing. Almost all novels supply that linearity—and the gradual illumination that accompanies it—in their ord
ering of materials. Why does Faulkner refuse to do so?
This entire book is an attempt to answer that question with the fullness it deserves. For now, let us consider the following. We do not in reality make sense of our lives by moving in that empowering way from past through present and into the future. As Kierkegaard noted, we live life forward, gropingly, even as we understand it backward, retrospectively. Or as Faulkner has Mr. Compson put it, “Its not even time until it was.” Only later, in looking back, do things already done become clear—often too late to intervene upon them. It is later that we find (impose) those demarcations that announce beginnings, middles, and endings in experience that has passed (been “excreted”).
But a “middle” is legible as a “middle” only if we know the beginning it follows and the ending it precedes. Until we know what comes before and after, a middle is—a muddle. Narrative fiction delights in muddles, but only to the extent that it satisfyingly turns them into middles. It then turns middles into precursors of endings. Narrative fiction exists to do this. Going from muddle to meaning—trouble to illumination—is how novels make sense of life. This is what it means to plot human behavior. You start off (if you are a novelist) with a compelling idea about how things will turn out (or have turned out: you might start with the end itself). This idea can be and often is revised while the narrative is being written, but for the narrative to reach a satisfying conclusion, it must reveal—to retrospective hindsight—a gathered sense of beginning, middle, and end. Such emergent coherence—of lives shown, at the end, to have taken on shape and meaning—is the province, precisely, of narrative. No human being starts off or continues that way, however. Because we are in life, not in narrative, the end—our end—cannot yet be known.
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