Abstract
Even while Faulkner was making a date with posterity by revolutionizing American literature with novels like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, he was working on other kinds of fiction: the rewrite of Sanctuary, the proofs of which he received in January 1931, and an impressive group of short stories, most notably the ones that appeared in a collection called These 13 that same year. For all his interest in continuing to experiment with multiple points of view and fragmentation, he was clearly committed to a range of fictional approaches. In this, his reluctance to imitate himself was as important as his desire to reach a larger audience. He continued to work at conveying how the world is processed by the aesthetic sensibility, while adding other ways of seeing and experiencing. The result was two novels, Sanctuary and Light in August, that took him beyond close-knit groups or single families, focussed on sex and violence, featured a clutch of strange characters whose reflective abilities are inextricably bound up with their incapacity to understand what has happened or is happening to them, and took Faulkner’s stylistic abilities and willingness to experiment with different modes of narration to new levels.
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Notes
Rebecca West, Review of Sanctuary, in Faulkner: The Critical Heritage, ed. John Earl Bassett (Boston and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 117.
Gerald Langford, Faulkner’s Revision of ‘sanctuary’: A Collation of the Unrevised Galleys and the Published Book (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1972), p. 22, calls this ‘a loose end that is vaguely irritating.’
Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 670.
Edmond Volpe, A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964), p. 168n, notes that Joe may be older by this point. See Singal, Making of a Modernist, p. 238, for a much more sympathetic view of this character: ‘by the final stage of life [Joe Christmas] verged on becoming a black Christ capable of showing the South a path to possible redemption through the integration of racial identities he had achieved within his own being.’
See David Williams, Faulkner’s Women: The Myth and the Muse (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977), p. 162; and Bleikasten, Ink of Melancholy, pp. 286–90.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 133, argues in this regard that ‘Faulkner’s style took the situation of memory itself as its formal precondition: the violent action or gesture in the past; a vision that fascinates and obsesses storytellers who cannot but commemorate it in the present and yet who must project it as a complete tableau — “motionless” as well as “furious”, “breathless” in the stillness of its agitation, and compelling “stupor” and “amazement” in the viewer.’
Laura Doyle, ‘The Body against Itself in Faulkner’s Phenomenology of Race’, American Literature, 73, 2 (2001), pp. 339–64, p. 361, reads the passage as ‘an uncloseable moment’, a ‘prayer, enmeshed in the tragic sublime of the body that provokes and escapes our names for it.’
‘Desire and Dismemberment: Faulkner and the Ideology of Penetration’ in Faulkner and Ideology, eds. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), pp. 129–71, p. 141. Claiming that ‘Ideology is about words, representations, naming’, Jones sees McLendon as ‘a victim of Southern ideology too’. By lashing out violently at his wife, just as Mayes does against his attackers, ‘in the register of gender, he fails to control both consent and coercion, ideology and force’, and we leave him naked and sweating, ‘pressed not against his wife (which within the ideology would be a sign of success) but, impotent, against a dusty screen on a dark porch’ (142–3). The pairing is a bold one, but it seems risky to equate the desperate violence of a man about to be murdered with that of someone turning on his wife for some imagined dereliction of duty. Calling both men victims of an ideology suggests a real equivalence, which may compel us to ignore the moral choices coded in the text.
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© 2008 David Rampton
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Rampton, D. (2008). Major Achievement II. In: William Faulkner. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230581975_4
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