Precarious Sanctuaries: Protection and Exposure in Faulkner's Fiction

PRECARIOUS SANCTUARIES: PROTECTION AND EXPOSURE IN FAULKNER'S FICTION Philip M. Weinstein* Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the "truth" one could still barely endure—or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified. (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil) "Breathing is a sight-draft dated yesterday," says Will Varner in The Hamlet, and for many of Faulkner's characters that draft is being "collected."1 Speechless outrage, rigid immobility, "an expression at once fatalistic and of a child's astonished disappointment" (The Sound and the Fury, p. 331), tend to characterize their encounters with brute reality. Faulkner's people—particularly his men—are not born into the world so much as catapulted into it. They hardly cease to be amazed at the otherness of their surroundings and the impossibility of fulfilling their needs. A chasm between self and not-self is an implicit assumption of Faulkner's narratives, and the wide variety of patterns—dreams, codes, designs, edifices—that his characters construct or draw upon represent their attempt to domesticate their space, to make sense of their lives. Before order came chaos, a world alien to human need. Since the encounter with chaos is both unbearable and inescapable, the work of Faulkner exhibits a rich array of palliative forms, of fictions that bridge that factual chasm. These fictions, in their common function of orienting and validating a self in a world-not-oneself, are sanctuaries .2 A sanctuary is literally a consecrated place, one devoted to the keeping of sacred things, and it is also a place of refuge and protection, 'Philip M. Weinstein is an Associate Professor of English at Swarthmore College. His publications include Henry James and the Requirements of the Imagination, published by Harvard in 1971, as well as articles in Harvard English Studies, Dickens Studies, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Comparative Literature Studies. He is currenüy at work on a book exploring the transition from Victorianism to Modernism in the English novel. 174Philip M. Weinstein of immunity. In Faulkner the idea of sanctuary assumes a range of meanings, from escapism (Horace's vases in Sartoris, Hightower's reveries in Light in August) to transcendent affirmation (the "Grecian Um" ofchangeless "heart's truth" in Go Down, Moses). In his later fiction Faulkner tends to cast a more benign eye on sanctuaries, on the customs, pieties, and values by which an individual endures and even prevails. Will Varner's precarious "sight-draft dated yesterday," collectible on sight, mellows into Mink Snopes's reliable pact with Old Marster, valid for life. More predictable than the cosmic joker-God who seems to preside in the early fiction, Old Marster emanates from the earth itself. He wears down his creatures but does not cheat them. In the major fiction before Go Down, Moses, the protagonists are less secure in their dealings with the world outside. The power of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying lies almost wholly in Faulkner's unrelenting exposure of the exigent psyche to the forces that assail it. With the exception of Mosquitoes, the unbearably assaulted self L· at the center of the novels prior to Light in August. The fictionality of fictions, the false haven they propose, is everywhere emphasized . As Mr. Compson says to Quentin, "it's nature is hurting you not Caddy" (p. 143). Nature will not stay curried, will not accept the human meaning of virginity. Exploding the fictions superimposed on it, nature rampages through Caddy, emotionally paralyzes Quentin, leaves Benjy witless—in that suggestive phrase, a natural. Nature as unbridled energy explodes manmade sanctuaries, and probably the two sequences in Faulkner's work that most memorably subject man to the torrent he neither sought nor can avoid are the flood scenes in "Old Man" and As I Lay Dying. Indeed, As I Lay Dying expresses, with grotesque concentration, the forces that conspire in Faulkner's world...