Sanctuary by William Faulkner
Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Sanctuary is a story about risks, calculated and unforeseen. It centers around Horace Benbow, a lawyer in the American South (in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi) in the later part of the era of Prohibition (1920 to 1933 is the window for that, in case you, like I, were unsure) and his eventually failed attempt to prove a bootlegger innocent of a murder he didn't commit.
At the center of the case is Temple Drake, a debutante who happens into a situation at the bootlegger's farm where she is very much in the wrong place at the wrong time. Left to fend for herself by a drunken beau and spend the night at this rather unruly 'home', Temple tries and fails to prevent herself from being raped. A man, Tommy, is killed as he attempts to protect her. Popeye, one of the bootlegger's men, is responsible, but the bootlegger, Lee Goodwin, takes the blame.
Popeye kidnaps Temple, takes her to Memphis, and makes her his 'kept woman'/sex slave, and since he's impotent, he brings another man, Red, in to do the deed with Temple while he watches. Horace eventually finds Temple and gets the real story out of her, including some rather disgusting parts where the (as it turns out) impotent Popeye used a corn cob in place of his penis, but when the case comes to trial, Red is dead (killed by Popeye), Popeye is long gone, and for reasons unbeknownst to us, Temple points the finger at Goodwin.
In the end, the town is outraged over the incident, and Goodwin is found guilty and set to hang. Impatient for justice, a mob lights the jailhouse on fire and burns it down with Goodwin inside. Popeye is arrested on his way to visit his mother in Florida for killing a policeman (aka the one man he didn't actually murder in this story) and is hanged for the supposed crime. In the final scene, we see Temple strolling the streets of Paris with her father, seemingly unconcerned.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
Dear blobbers,
Once again, I feel as though I have taken quite some time to blob for you. But then again, Doris said, don't blob in a rush! So no rushing here, just a slow and steady pace.
I did not care for this book. I found it less confusing than other Faulkners, but also less lyrical, and less satisfying. I think this is the fourth Faulkner I've read. I'm not sure why I chose it for this second list, to be totally honest, but I finished it and so I will share my thoughts with you! As always, make your own decisions about where to devote your reading time, but I can't say I'd personally recommend you spend yours on this particular tome.
I would like to congratulate myself on understanding correctly what happened in the novel, despite Faulkner's best efforts to the contrary. I think this is the first Faulkner I read where my understanding of the events was actually the same as the internet's conception of the events. I really don't like writers that make you work that hard to assess what the words you read actually mean. I'm sure it's some amazing stylistic technique, and I'm just too uncultured to appreciate its brilliance, but I feel like the book should at Least meet you halfway. Now, here are my thoughts, in lighly alphabetical order.
On places you shouldn't be after dark
One that that I did really like about this book was the setting of the bootlegger's abandoned mansion/farm. It felt wonderfully creepy, and when several people started telling Temple and her beau, Gowan, that they shouldn't be there when dark fell, reminded me of The Haunting of Hill House and stories like The Fall of the House of Usher. Here are two lines I liked:
- A moment later, above a black, jagged mass of trees, the house lifted its stark square bulk against the failing sky.
- The gaunt ruin of the house rose against the sky, above the massed and matted cedars, lightless, desolate, and profound.
On prohibition, and how weird it seems to me now
I'm sure that as time passes, many things that made sense, or at least had clear origins, seem nonsensical to us in the present. Prohibition is one of those things to me. I'm not surprised we had antiquated and Puritanical alcohol laws, but the fact that we went so far as to ban it completely, and only for 13 years did so, seems positively wild to me. Faulkner was 23 to 36 during that time, so I suppose it's no wonder that it features so heavily in some of his works. Maybe it seemed wild to him, too. ;)
On punctuation, which is apparently only sometimes necessary (and maybe reeks of male white privilege?)
So, this wasn't my first Faulkner or anything, but I can't say that Ive ever come around to the way he writes. See how much that missing apostrophe bothers you?! I can barely stand to leave it in for dramatic effect! I understand the stream of consciousness technique, but I really fail to see how a dropped apostrophe here and there makes the work feel more like it fits that style. Honestly, it sort of feels lazy and careless to me, and I get that he was this epic, groundbreaking author and all, but would a woman or a writer of color get away with that and be lauded as GROUNDbreaking for violating basic rules of punctuation? I'll just leave you to marinate on that while you read this (obnoxious) example.
'You can get a better criminal lawyer than you are. She wont know it. She wont even care. Cant you see that she is just leading you on to get him out of jail for nothing? Dont you know that woman has got money hidden away somewhere? You're going back into town tomorrow, are you?' She turned, began to dissolve into the blackness. 'You wont leave before breakfast.' Faulkner's biography title: To Apostrophe, or Not to Apostrophe
On racism, misogyny, and anti-semiticism
It ALMOST goes without saying that when one is reading Faulkner, one must be prepared for a not insignificant amount of this delightful trio. And I know that we can't assign present-day expectations to figures of the past. But I CAN and WILL just go ahead and say that there's a LOT of these three things in this book, and I didn't feel like there was a ton of irony in the way Faulkner's characters expressed them.
On rapes, and in particular, missing when they happen in literature
To be clear, I do not in any way wish to downplay the intensity, the trauma, the deep emotional, physical, and psychological hurt of a rape. I will say, though, that apparently I am not terribly skilled at picking them up when they happen in famous works of literature. When this one happened, the wording was so oblique that I honestly thought that Temple had just narrowly AVOIDED being raped, when in fact it was the exact opposite. Perhaps this is once again due to the Puritanical nature of American writing, and the desire not to sensationalize the reader, but it sailed right over my head.
On sanctuary, schmanctuary
I'm really not sure where the sanctuary was in this book. I suppose you could argue that Horace gives sanctuary to the bootlegger's common law wife and her baby while he's in jail; or you could say that the bootlegger mansion is a kind of sanctuary from the strict Puritanical world; or you could say that Temple ultimately finds sanctuary in a kind of fictionalization of her experience; or that sanctuary is to be found in justice ultimately prevailing on Popeye? OR MAYBE you could just say that it wasn't really clear why the novel was named that, because it didn't feel like there was any sanctuary for Temple when she needed it.
On telling you things you need to know AFTER you needed to know them
Not much to say here, other than that Faulkner really likes to do this, and I really like to HATE when Faulkner does this. Like how I didn't really know what happened to Red, and then the next chapter was his funeral, and like halfway through that chapter Faulkner reveals that Red died. Oh, well isn't that HELPFUL information? I guess we're not on the 'need-to-know' list.
On Temple, who isn't the main character (but should be, imho)
I think one of the things that confused and upset me about this book was that even though it supposedly centers on Temple's experience, she isn't what I would call the main character. Horace Benbow, the lawyer, is the main character - the book opens with him and his story, and the action seems to end with him returning to the wife and stepdaughter he left temporarily. Sure, Temple is there, but she really just feels like a puppet whose strings Faulkner is pulling, and that left me feeling kind of icky, tbh. It felt like he wanted to write a story about rape and sensational creepy violation, but he didn't want to actually reckon with her full experience. I did like that we got to hear her rendition of the night's events, and I thought it was fascinating the way she kept distracting herself by believing she was going to, at any moment, turn into a boy and render herself protected. It made me feel both epically sad that being a woman made you that vulnerable in that time, and equally sad that women are still so vulnerable and unsafe in so many ways and places and spaces, especially if they identify as WOC, Trans, or Trans WOC.
Lines I Liked
- His back still shook with secret glee.
- You can feel people in a dark room: did you know that? You don't have to see them.
- The insects had fallen to a low monotonous pitch, everywhere, nowhere, spent, as though the sound were the chemical agony of a world left stark and dying above the tide-edge of the fluid in which it lived and breathed.
Referents and Reverberations
Horace has a sister named Narcissa, which of course made me think of Draco's mom, Narcissa Malfoy, in the HP series.
All the King's Men - In general, this novel reminded me a lot of that one, in the kind of languorous Southern space that it created and the evil underbelly we peel back.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - So, it reminded me of this book because it is another example of when a rape in literature went right over my head. I think in that one it was something about the flower or the blossom or the seed, and I was like, oh, ok, gardening, and then in the next chapter, she was pregnant, and I was like, WAIT, How?! Again. Rape is not a laughing matter, but apparently I am not that adept at spying it in the world of fiction.
Well blobbists, I hope that you are tucked in somewhere cozy tonight, and that you are able to enjoy some reading time, whatever book you've chosen to tackle. I'm off to The Good Earth, and hopefully I'll be back here in not quite so long a spell.
Keep safe! Keep faith! Good night.
