Allegory, Culture Industry, and William Faulkner's Sanctuary

The idea of Art as a sanctuary from the emptying out of life is intrinsic to modernism.

Irving Howe, "The Idea of the Modern" (1967)

The deepest and most fundamental feature shared by all the modernisms is … hostility to the market itself.

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

That's what makes art so discouraging. … [I]t always shocks me to learn that art also depends on population, on the herd instinct as much as manufacturing automobiles.

William Faulkner, Mosquitoes (1927)

Torn Halves

Not long after Theodor W. Adorno characterized the great divide between mass culture and art, in a letter to Walter Benjamin, as "torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up," William Faulkner described the temporal split that divided his life and writing: "I can work at Hollywood 6 months, stay home 6."¹ Writing in a letter to Malcolm Cowley in 1944—the same year, incidentally, that saw Adorno's "culture industry" thesis elaborated in Dialectic of Enlightenment during his exile in Southern California with Max Horkheimer—Faulkner went on to report having grown "used to" the torn halves into which his time had been divided, with his "movie work locked off into another room."²

Apparently off the cuff, Faulkner's remark characterizing a commercial body of work as "locked off into another room" suggestively recalls the position that the young Temple Drake confronts midway through Sanctuary (1931), the novel that—to anticipate the major preoccupation of this article—stages Faulkner's entrance into the culture industry. As if to prefigure the product and condition of Faulkner's subsequent "movie work," Temple finds herself locked off in the room of a Memphis brothel that evokes not only southern gothic but also—between its cheap furniture, the growing horde of clothing and gifts, and the mirror that seems to reflect "ghosts of voluptuous gestures and dead lusts"—Hollywood dressing rooms and the phantasmagoric romance of mechanical projections floating across the silver screen toward which Sanctuary is ultimately directed.³

With the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, Hollywood entered the age of "talkies," signaling a growth market in screenwriting to which a number of novelists, including Faulkner, soon responded. Among the developments later registered in their theory of culture industry, Horkheimer and Adorno announce the dawn of novels written "with an eye to the film."⁴ One is tempted to view Sanctuary in this light: not only did it put Faulkner on Hollywood's radar, leading to his first screenwriting contract the following year; Sanctuary was also the first of his novels to be made into a film, Paramount's The Story of Temple Drake (1933). For all that, the matter is complicated, not least because the novel's graphic subject matter so thoroughly exceeded what was possible even in pre– Hays Code Hollywood, to say nothing of its essentially unfilmable psychic elements. Paramount's adaptation therefore required modification to the point of unrecognizability, though even the diluted morality tale that resulted was highly controversial, contributing to the implementation of Hollywood censorship guidelines the following year. Leading up to this in 1933, the Hollywood Reporter ran a story in which screenwriters announced a "war on filth" and made the recent trajectory of Faulkner's career exhibit A:

If you want a job today in pictures at big money, all you have to do is to write a dirty book. Look what has happened recently. One of the most revolting novels ever published is William Faulkner's "Sanctuary," but Paramount is making it under the "The Shame [sic] of Temple Drake," and another major company [MGM] has hired the author for its writing staff.⁵

But the market, evidently, had spoken.

An unlikely successor of the sentimental novel and in marked contrast to Faulkner's experimental novels, Sanctuary stands out as a sensational novel for the age of mass consumption (and literacy), one that nevertheless shares its measure of success with an earlier philistine novel of "sentimental gentility": to "triumph as a commodity."⁶ Apparently reversing the course signaled...