FRIDAY TYRANT – DON’T FORGET ABOUT SANCTUARY

You can’t believe I’m bringing up Faulkner. Me neither. But instead of talking about the normie titles in the Faulkner canon, have you ever read Sanctuary? I’m sure a lot of you have and that’s good, because no professor ever forces that one on you in school, so that means you either hunted it out yourself or you have good friends who set you up with it. Good for you. There’s this one character, Popeye–he’s a rapist, and he is who I always imagine when Lou Reed sings about his man with the straw hat all dressed in black. I know that we’re talking about two separate Americas here, but still, I made that connection somewhere and I can’t help myself from associating the two. And what if Lou Reed actually was thinking of Popeye when he was writing that song? It’s possible.

Faulkner always distanced himself from Sanctuary because he thought he was selling out by writing something so marketable. He claimed Sanctuary was written with the controversy intended so he could sell some books and make some money. It did its job. It sold well and ended up being his breakthrough novel. The American reading audience might have never turned to his earlier works (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, etc.) if he hadn’t gotten their attention with Sanctuary first. In a way, I think it’s his best book because it doesn’t get too transcendent, yet all of the poetry is still there. I mean, As I Lay Dying is an enjoyable read, as well as being fucking beautiful. But The Sound and the Fury? It’s great and all, and has some of the best writing ever written in it but, shit, it’s pretty hard to wrap your mind around without like twenty pre-req reads before even cracking the fucker. Sanctuary, on the other hand, is totally approachable. And the writing, I think, can hold its own with any of Faulkner’s other books. Plus, it’s a page-turner. It really is.

The thing that made the book so controversial at the time was the rape scene. With a corncob. Popeye (Lou Reed’s drug dealer) rapes a young southern lady named Temple Drake. With a corncob. The corncob isn’t mentioned in the actual rape scene because there isn’t an actual rape scene. This was the 30s, and Faulkner needed to sell books so he had to walk the thin line of what kind of controversy was allowed back then. In fact, the mention of any corncob at all was removed for the film adaptation, The Story of Temple Drake. Though we are denied the act itself, there’s a pretty intense lead-in to the scene. I’m not like, condoning rape or anything, but here it is:

He turned and looked at her. He waggled the pistol slightly and put it back in his coat, then he walked toward her. Moving, he made no sound at all; the released door yawned and clapped against the jamb, but it made no sound either; it was as though sound and silence had become inverted. She could hear silence in a thick rustling as he moved toward her through it, thrusting it aside, and she began to say Something is going to happen to me. She was saying it to the old man with the yellow clots for eyes. “Something is going to happen to me!” she screamed at him, sitting in his chair in the sunlight, his hands crossed on the top of the stick. “I told you it was!” she screamed, voiding the words like hot silent bubbles into the bright silence about them until he turned his head and the two phlegm-clots above her where she lay tossing and thrashing on the rough, sunny boards. “I told you! I told you the whole time!”

Fuck. Phlegm-clots? Gross. As shitty as raping anyone is, and as creepily as he is described, Faulkner somehow creates in Popeye one of those lovable literary rapists. You know what I mean. There are so many examples of lovable rapists in literature (what in the fuck is wrong with me?). The cosmic justice of Yoknapatawpha County rears its head later on in the book though when Popeye is arrested and hanged for a crime of which he was innocent. Faulkner makes everyone pay in one way or another. Here’s the scene where they hang Popeye. After reading this you can’t tell me you don’t love him:

Popeye began to jerk his neck forward in little jerks. “Psssst!” he said, the sound cutting sharp into the drone of the minister’s voice; “pssssst!” The sheriff looked at him; he quit jerking his neck and stood rigid, as though he had an egg balanced on his head. “Fix my hair, Jack,” he said.

“Sure,” the sheriff said. “I’ll fix it for you;” springing the trap.

So, next time anyone mentions Go Down On Me, Moses or Absalom, Whatevs! to you at some terrible literary party that you should have left like twenty minutes ago, throw Sanctuary in their face (read it first though). If you’re in the right company, mention that a girl gets raped with a corncob in it (people seem to be drawn to colorful things like that). This can go two ways–it will either turn out to be a great conversation piece that causes a bond to form between you and another person who has also read it and who also loves it and you two will really hit it off and end up talking all night and you’ll be thinking, “Hey, this party isn’t all that bad after all. These guys are pretty cool.” Or, whoever you’re talking to will look at you like you’re a fucking psycho who just crossed the party-etiquette line by like a mile and will then walk away from you. But you’ll be freed up to leave the party then, so either way you’re gold. There’s a famous story about Faulkner being all shit-faced at a party after the book’s release when some uptown bitch said to him, “Mr. Faulkner, I hear that writers always insert themselves in their books through one of the characters. Which character from Sanctuary are you?”

To which Faulkner replied, “I was the corncob.”