The corruption in looking: William Faulkner's 'Sanctuary' as a 'detect'ive novel. (Special Issue: William Faulkner)

From: The Mississippi Quarterly  | Date: June 22, 1994  | Author: Wilson, Andrew J.  

In William Faulkner's novel 'Sanctuary,' the author presents a world of voyeurs, in which characters' lives are to some extent lived vicariously through their witnessing the actions of others. To varying degrees, characters from all classes and walks of life are shown as watchers, either for personal gain or due to simple curiosity. When situations force them to look inward, a void becomes evident as Faulkner himself can find nothing inside most of the characters that explains their personal motives. Readers themselves are implicated due to Faulkner's unwillingness to explain the motives of his characters, leaving readers to draw their own voyeuristic conclusions while safely protected from actual human contact.
Unhappy swimming in the fervor of summer and/or the fertility of the country comprising Blithedale, Coverdale, the removed narrator of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, returns to the city. There, through a hotel window, Coverdale can more easily do what he does best: observe life rather than live it. Through the glass he beholds the "luxuriant" and "abundant" "pear and peach-trees," the buzzing sparrows and other birds. I He gapes at the posterior windows of the boarding house across the alley, and in them he views, among other things, a man dressing, children playing, a man and a woman kissing. In one special window he finds his foil: the ever-beflowered Zenobia, a woman who prefers living to looking, and who lives vivaciously, sexually. From a safe distance, Coverdale watches her and her company intently, at every opportunity, and through his engrossed watching the reader begins to see him as a character who allows the world's Zenobias to do his living for him. In fact, Coverdale is quite aware of and frank about his tendency to creep toward the periphery. He calls himself "a speculative man" who is hesitant "about plunging into this muddy tide of human activity and pastime. It suited me better . . . to linger on the brink, or hover in the air above it"(pp. 135-136). He is "impelled," he adds, "to live in other lives" (p. 148). Significantly, when Coverdale takes a brief respite from his hotel window, he fills the gap at the theater, still an onlooker, passively viewing an artistic microcosm of life.
The following paragraphs do not make up a study of influence. For some readers, such a project perhaps runs the risk of desecrating William Faulkner's legacy, for Faulkner flatly denied having been influenced by Hawthorne on the grounds that the latter, while a "master"(2) was not a "truly American" writer "produced and nurtured by a culture which was completely American."(3) To Faulkner's mind, Hawthorne "wrote in the tradition of European writers" (Meriwether and Millgate, p. 168). And yet, born from the pen of an Anglophile or not, Coverdale does serve as an illustrative platform from which to launch into a discussion of Faulkner's Sanctuary. I have called Coverdale a spectator; a juicier and perhaps more appropriate word for him is "voyeur." He experiences a kind of stimulation, sexual and otherwise, when peering down from his transcendental mast at those whose passions, whose lives, are bound round and round with ripe veins of pulsing blood. There is a like case in Sanctuary: Popeye, "moaning and slobbering"(4) looks on quite conspicuously while Temple Drake and Red, a hired stud, copulate in a whorehouse bed. This striking scene makes up the quintessential image of voyeurism in Sanctuary, in American literature even, and yet this scene is but one of several voyeuristic incidents in the novel.
My purpose in this essay is twofold: I try to uncover the extent to which Sanctuary is actually saturated with voyeurism, from beginning to end, and I try to approach at least some of the reasons Faulkner may have had for this emphasis on looking. Only occasionally does a reader of canonized writers like Faulkner come face to face with the licentious sort of perversion that can be found in Sanctuary. Consequently, after absorbing the shock of Popeye's behavior in the Memphis whorehouse, the reader may secretly experience something like enjoyment. But Faulkner, however entertaining, is also up to something quite serious in Sanctuary, it seems to me: something gravely revealing about the human heart, his ever-present and most significant subject.
In The Yoknapatawpha Country Cleanth Brooks points out that, among other things, Sanctuary is "something of a detective novel, in that the meaning of certain events is not revealed until the end, and the author builds suspense, complicates his plot, and presents his reader with sudden and surprising developments."(5) In casting Sanctuary as a sample of detective fiction, it is also worth noting that the book contains crimson sexuality, an illustration of the underworld, a mysterious homicide, an abduction, a courtroom scene, and most of all, a dangerous and virtually inscrutable rapist/ killer. Yet in a discussion having nothing at all to do with the portrait in Sanctuary of an American sleuth, Michael Millgate (probably unwittingly) offers a profound remark concerning the book's status as a detective novel: "Technically the novel is of considerable brilliance, and much of its strength derives from Faulkner's precise and economical presentation of specific and highly charged images, his vivid evocation of momentary sense-impressions."(6) The fact that the content of Sanctuary is soaked with the often shocking elements of pulp fiction -- the potboiler markings that made Faulkner himself, perhaps with tongue in cheek, call the book "cheap"(7) -- permits Sanctuary to claim its rightful place among the famous or infamous American detective stories. But Millgate is interested in the novel's form, which is indeed niggard, or, as he says, 'economical.' And it is the "economical" form of Sanctuary that makes it especially, strikingly "detective." In Sanctuary, Faulkner reveals only by persistently veiling a part of what he uncovers. That is, he rarely offers the reader a thorough illustration of any pertinent person or event. Rather, he provides glimpses, parts of the whole. He offers data as the typical eye sees, or `detects': sporadically, collecting mere bits of information about people, objects, events, all of which are seemingly chosen willy-nilly. Only occasionally does the typical human eye, in a typical moment, zoom in and thoroughly imbibe a person, thing, act in its entirety. Likewise, seldom does Faulkner wholly scrutinize a person, thing, act in Sanctuary. Even upon finishing the book the reader is without every parcel of the whole. It is never revealed, for instance, precisely why Temple commits perjury when she testifies against and thereby sacrifices Lee Goodwin at the trial and thus protects her rapist and the true killer, Popeye. It may simply be that Popeye's psychological grasp upon Temple causes her to point her finger at Goodwin so that Popeye can live. It may also be that Temple's powerful father comes to her before the trial and counsels her to implicate Goodwin, so that her sojourn in a Memphis brothel can remain a private affair. It may also be, as Lawrence Kubie argues, that Temple hates men: Temple's "career seem[s] to shape itself out of her hate of her father and her four stalwart brothers," and so "she sacrifices Goodwin, the potent man, to the furies of the mob and saves Popeye, her impotent malefactor."(8) In any case, as J. Douglas Canfield says, "Temple's motivation remains cryptic."(9) And so the reader, like the detective, must piece together the collected segments of the montage.
In this essay, then, I am not interested in the ways in which Sanctuary is an American counterpart to the work of Arthur Conan Doyle. I prefer to use the term "detective" in its more pure etymological sense, with an emphasis on the act of detecting or seeing. For undoubtedly, Sanctuary is a novel of seeing (but not touching), a story of eyes. The book begins with a portrait of Popeye, who for two solid hours stares across a spring at Horace Benbow, who stares back; they watch each other with something akin to fascination, saying little. Later, as Gowan Stevens and Temple emerge on a spring Sunday dawn from the Saturday-night Letter Club dance, there is more staring, as the couple is intently observed by three or four "town boys": "They watched Gowan slip his arm into hers, and the fleet revelation of flank and thigh as she got into his car" (p. 30). In fact, the watching in Sanctuary is relentless. Before they are sidetracked by Gowan's rather severe alcoholic thirst, Gowan and Temple are on their way to watch a baseball game. After Temple spends the night in Goodwin's barn, she defecates in the surrounding woods and is watched by an unidentified man (Goodwin, perhaps). Horrified, nearly berserk, over having been caught in such a private moment, Temple runs back to the barn, only to be watched again, by a rat: "For an instant they stared eye to eye, then its eyes glowed suddenly like two tiny electric bulbs and it leaped at her head as she sprang backward . . . (p. 98). Much later, the terrific, terrible double layer of watching takes place: Miss Reba's maid Minnie peers through the keyhole of a whorehouse bedroom door (which act echoes the peeping of Clarence Snopes, another "keyhole voyeur,"(10) while inside Popeye -- "making a kind of whinnying sound" (p. 273) -- gapes at Temple and Red, "nekkid as two snakes" (p. 273), in bed.
As Millgate notes, there is an "extraordinary emphasis throughout the novel on descriptions of the characters' eyes" (p. 12 1), an emphasis that serves to intensify all of the watching. The narrator immediately underscores Popeye's eyes, for instance, calling them "two knobs of soft black rubber" (p. 4). And Gowan quickly recognizes the hypnotic power of Popeye's noteworthy eyes after he openly but lamely objects to Popeye's rude demand: "Make your whore [Temple] lay off me, Jack" (p. 53). In response to Gowan's weak protest -- "I don't like that . . . ." (p. 53) -- the generally nonverbal Popeye simply "turn[s] his head and look[s] at Gowan" (p. 53). Popeye then turns his head coolly, wordlessly away, and from that point forward the suddenly frightened Gowan does what is in his rapidly fading power to mollify Temple's keen tongue, not Popeye's insulting vulgarity. Similarly, Temple's eyes are accentuated when she realizes, too late, that her bowel movement has been under supervision: in a frenzy, she runs to Ruby, Goodwin's common-law wife, screaming that she has been seen, and the narrator remarks upon her panicked eyes: "like holes burned with a cigar" (p. 97). Additionally, as the rat's eyes glow while peering at Temple in Goodwin's barn, Tommy's eyes also glow as he guards the door to the barn's crib, in which Temple is waiting fearfully for the awful "Something" to happen to her (p. 107): "Tommy's eyes glowed again, the pale irises appearing for an instant to spin on the pupils like tiny wheels . . . and again his eyes glowed with a diffident, groping, hungry fire . . ." (p. 105). Even minor characters like the old blind man on Goodwin's property, Ruby's baby, Dr. Quinn, and the comic Uncle Bud have eyes that are worth descriptive attention. The blind man's eyes are "two objects like dirty yellowish clay marbles" (p. 45). The eyes of Ruby's baby are generally closed, or partially closed, shielded by "lead-colored eyelids" (p. 59). Of Dr. Quinn's eyes, the narrator remarks, "Behind his glasses his eyes looked like little bicycle wheels at dizzy speed; a metallic hazel" (p. 157). And as Uncle Bud looks at three frosted tankards of beer, his eyes become "round cornflower[s]" (pp. 264-265). Finally, late in the novel -- after Temple tells Horace the story of herself, Popeye, and the corncob -- Horace is walking and mentally soliloquizing that the evil in the world is vast and virile, that it has a "logical pattern." And significantly, the mental picture of his dark thoughts takes the form of a pair of eyes: "the eyes of a dead child, and of other dead: the cooling indignation, the shocked despair fading, leaving two empty globes in which the motionless world lurked profoundly in miniature" (p. 232).
If only because of the pervasion of surveillances and illustrated eyes, then, Sanctuary is a detective or voyeuristic novel. Much more importantly, however, Sanctuary is voyeuristic because of the many incidents in which characters live, or extract a kind of sustenance, through the actions of other characters, and such removed behavior exists in more spaces than those occupied by the perverse Popeye. For instance, while not a voyeur in the very explicit manner of Popeye, Horace, too, is a man who lives a somewhat marginal detective life. Olga Vickery argues that, in some respects, the difference between Popeye and Horace is `overwhelming.' Popeye, Vickery explains, is "isolated . . . by his total indifference to all moral values," while Horace is "isolated by his dream of moral perfection."(11) Yet it is also possible to see the two men as unlikely doubles, corporeal echoes of one another, "from the moment that their images are reflected in the pool: both are impotent, both lust after a girl to whom they bear a semipaternal relationship, and both meet their fate with resignation, defeat for Horace and death for Popeye" (Kerr, p. 83). Even Vickery, who for the most part views the two as opposites, must admit that Popeye and Horace are, in some respects, alike. She calls them both "incomplete human beings . . . unintegrated into the human world" (p. 20). That is, they are both nonparticipants who, like Hawthorne's Coverdale, look more than they live. Below, then, I examine the damage that scopophilia wreaks upon both Popeye, the shining voyeur, and Horace, the subtle voyeur, and then, as I promise above, I propose some reasons for Faulkner's vigorous focus on detection in Sanctuary.
While this essay does not pretend to be a psychoanalytic study of the possible reason or reasons for a given individual's excessive predilection for looking, it is worth nothing what Sigmund Freud had to say on the subject of how one comes to practice something like Popeye's extreme form of voyeurism.(12) First, it is important to note that in one of his three essays on sexuality Freud concedes that there is no single, ever-present force driving a Popeye-like person's need to watch. It seems that Freud's investigation of voyeurism left him with no unequivocal answers when he says "my researches into the early years of normal people, as well as of neurotic patients, force me to the conclusion that scopophilia can also appear in children as a spontaneous manifestation."(13) In other words, a handful of diverse people with diverse backgrounds -- some brutal and some nurturing, some repressive and some liberal -- can all become voyeurs for no consistently prominent reason. Nevertheless, Freud does suggest that voyeurism is not always rooted in nothing, and one potential basis for scopophilia is really very commonsensical. In the same essay on sexuality Freud explains that once the attention of small children becomes drawn to their own genitals, typically via masturbation, they
usually take the further step without help from outside and develop a lively interest
in the genitals of their playmates. Since opportunities for satisfying curiosity of this
kind usually occur only in the course of satisfying the two kinds of need for excretion,
children of this kind turn into voyeurs, eager spectators of the processes of
micturition and defaecation. When repression of these inclinations sets in, the desire
to see other people's genitals (whether of their own or the opposite sex) persists
as a tormenting compulsion . . . (7: 192)
The reader of Sanctuary is provided with some background information on Popeye, but this information fails to reveal whether or not Popeye, as a young child, was able to satisfy his interest in both the genitals and the bowel movements of his playmates. Yet it is not unreasonable to assume that, if such an interest (or something akin to it) did indeed dwell within Popeye, it was never sated in any healthy manner, since his childhood, his whole life, seems to have been deviant and friendless. Furthermore, in an essay on dreams Freud suggests that one who extracts sexual pleasure from looking might owe his voyeuristic urge to a never-realized "infantile curiosity" in the sexual life of his parents (15: 225). The typical child, Freud says, naturally wonders "what really happens when one is married" (15: 225). For example, the child, encountering the sounds signifying sexual intercourse coming from the closed (and taboo) bedroom of his parents, might find himself wanting to look, to see what he can hear. And if the child is never offered the chance to satisfy his visual hunger, the repressed curiosity might surface later, in adulthood, as a perversity. Thus, this repressed desire to look upon the genital sex between a mother and a father might also be what brings forth a monstrous voyeuristic urge in Popeye. Indeed, Leslie Fiedler seems to implicate Freud when he labels Popeye "a terrible caricature of the child witness, not like Peter Pan, one who chooses not to grow up, but one who cannot."(14) Popeye "cannot," perhaps, because he was never able to vent his childish urge to "witness" properly, in childhood.
But as is the case with the first Freudian rationale for voyeurism sketched in the quotation above, the additional rationale concerning the child's repressed desire to see his parents engage in some form of physical intimacy can only be loosely applied to Popeye's behavior. Probably, Popeye, having been abandoned by his father and poorly nurtured by an invalid mother and a mad grandmother, never heard the sounds of parental, carnal love in his house. Thus, if the young Popeye was stricken with the desire to watch sexuality, his curiosity was not aroused by any colorful thoughts of his mother and father. Still, the fact that Popeye was from the start without an opportunity to witness any kind of loving union between two parental figures might be useful. The satisfaction that a child takes in observing any form of sexuality as it takes place between a mother and a father was never in the realm of possibility for Popeye, and yet the young Popeye (still human in spite of his malicious crimes in childhood and in adulthood) may have held what Freud contends is a natural desire in children to know "what really happens when one is married." In turn, this ultimately smothered curiosity, coupled with the many other unlucky circumstances of Popeye's early life, perhaps surfaces in his adult behavior in a terrifying form, a form described most vividly by Miss Reba in the presence of two other disgusted women after Red's funeral. In other words, when Popeye leans over the bed and watches Temple and Red engage in sexual intercourse, he might simply be `looking' for the parental love that was missing during his formative years, with Temple and Red thus serving as a kind of surrogate parental unit. In Miss Reba's whorehouse, Popeye might merely be trying to discover love, or what he believes is love.
Of course, another possible cause for Popeye's voyeurism is that congenital syphilis has apparently left him biologically impotent: ". . . he will never be a man, properly speaking," a doctor says of the five-year-old Popeye (p. 323). Thus, though Popeye's syphilis cannot explain everything, the source of his perversity might be part psychological and part physiological.(15) Presumably, some form of surveillance, or some use of a substitute member, is all that Popeye is capable of, sexually speaking. In the long run, however, though the omniscient narrator of Sanctuary provides the reader with more objective data than is offered in, say, Absalom, Absalom!, the most insightful reader, without more background information, can finally only speculate on what motivates Popeye.
In any case, consequences -- not motivations or causes -- appear to make up Faulkner's primary concern in Sanctuary. And I argue that the consequence, the effect that Popeye's voyeurism has for Popeye (and a few others in his human environment) is torturous and quite literally fatal. Olga Vickery explains that Popeye is "isolated": "From his birth," Vickery says, "he is alone" (p. 20). Undoubtedly, his voyeurism facilitates his entry into the profound isolation of his adulthood. As Hawthorne shows through Coverdale, to be a voyeur is to be either mildly or terribly apart from activity, from human society. And to be sure, Popeye the voyeur is severed from humanity: the corncob with which he violates Temple is a memorable symbol of his eternal disconnectedness. Yet, Popeye does not hate life, or the fact of being alive. Vickery seems to agree when she contends that the young Popeye does not murder various animals because the spectacle of healthy life nauseates him, but rather because he wants to live, and killing provides him with a twisted sense of vitality: when he kills, he "attempt[s] to gain a fleeting and illusory sense of life through the very act of destroying it" (p. 21). In fact, Vickery adds, "the mechanical violence of . . . [the] corncob" is not a defiant denial of flesh and human society but rather a "horrifying" and "futile protest against both his impotence and his isolation" (p. 21). Though cruel, then, Popeye is no robot who actually prefers his sterility and the aloneness that comes with it: he does not want to be a voyeur. True, he appears calm, even satisfied with himself, throughout most (if not all) of the novel. But when Temple emasculates him, her words do not fall into indifferent ears. Beneath Popeye's seemingly composed exterior lurks a terrific, painful sense of his own inadequacy. Consequently, when Temple relegates the pleasure he takes in watching to something from which only a man who is not a man could derive titillation, Popeye's equanimity begins to break down. "You're not even a man!" Temple tells him, "[Red] knows it. Who does know it if he dont?" (p. 244). Moments later, Temple harpoons Popeye with a brutal contrast between the latter's impotence and Red's status as a "real man": "Dont you wish you were Red? Dont you? Dont you wish you could do what he can do? Dont you wish he was the one watching us instead of you?" (p. 245). Again, Popeye is hopelessly aware of his own ineffectualness well before he meets Temple; she cannot tell him anything about his sexuality that he does not already know. It appears, though, that while he never tries to hide his sexual inability from Temple, Popeye cannot have the fact of his impotence burst through the phonic plane, especially via the mouth of the woman he loves (however grotesquely). As long as the fact of his impotence remains unvoiced, Popeye is willing to use Red as his sexual proxy. But Temple's unabashed exaltation of Red to the title of 'real man' makes Popeye feel too keenly his own deficiency. His voyeurism suddenly becomes both intolerable and fatal, for he responds to the verbal castration he receives from Temple by murdering Red. Now Red's sexual capacity is no longer the indirect avenue to satisfaction for the voyeur, but, rather, the signifier of the voyeur's sexual incapacity.
It is also possible that Popeye's voyeurism -- not his crimes nor his capture nor his hangman -- occasions the death of Popeye himself. In killing Red and afterward losing Temple to her elite family, Popeye, in effect, castrates himself and loses his lover, respectively. And with his substitutes out of reach, Popeye is, metaphorically, a pugilist without his hands, for the voyeur is suddenly without the sexual stand-ins from whom he formerly drew life. Put another way, without Red and especially without Temple, Popeye's "occupation's gone," and his inability to live outside of his "occupation," his inability to live directly rather than vicariously, causes his energy to sink fast.(16) If he were a mere automaton, he could simply replace one set of proxies with another. But again, while supplanting Red with another would likely elicit no emotional trauma in the seemingly heartless gangster, it appears that Popeye actually loves the magnetic Temple, despite his status as a pervert and, worse, a killer. Merely replacing her with another female delegate is therefore impossible. Without the beloved object of his voyeurism, then, the voyeur is dismembered and bleeding, and even before his somatic life is extinguished, he is in a sense a lifeless, utterly listless nothing. His terrible apathy reaches its zenith in his attitude toward his own survival. In a final twist of irony Popeye is arrested, tried, and convicted for a murder he did not commit. Significantly, however, he refuses to send for a lawyer, and during the trial, while his right to breathe is being scrutinized, Popeye yawns and "[rests] idle against the black cloth of his suit, in the waxy lifelessness of shape and size like the hand of a doll" (p. 327). True, if he is, in his way, in love with Temple, he is lifeless, perhaps, simply because she is gone and his heart is broken. But once more, his "waxy lifelessness" -- indeed his actual death -- could also be firmly linked to his voyeurism, for by the time of his farcical arrest, Popeye is a voyeur with nothing worthwhile to see, and so like the fighter without his fists he dies, first in spirit, then in body.
Turning to Horace Benbow, I am not intimating that he is actually stricken with Popeye's overt brand of scopophilia. Yet it is true that both men are "nonparticipants." Besides Olga Vickery and Elizabeth Kerr, Frederick Karl is yet another critic who notes the thread linking Popeye and Horace: "Common to both," Karl says, "is impotence."(17) Popeye's literal impotence -- the way in which it forbids his entry into human society, the way in which it keeps him on the periphery, watching -- needs no further explanation. Horace's impotence is also intriguing, however, not because his is also a biological impotence but because he suffers from a more general, behavioral impotence. Ineffectualness, which defines Popeye, also "[permeates] Horace's entire life" (Karl, p. 363). He too lives the life of a passive voyeur; to be sure, he is a more subtle type of voyeur, but a voyeur just the same, with all of the dubious title's sexual implications. In fact, Horace's voyeurism might be more problematical than Popeye's glowing scopophilia, because, as Vickery suggests, while Popeye hates and protests his involuntary separation from society in general, flesh in particular, "Horace wills his own isolation" (p. 21). That is, Horace is the literary descendent of Coverdale, Hawthorne's deliberate voyeur, who cannot tolerate Blithedale because the life there is too brisk and too close for comfort, and whose self-proclaimed task in the world is to "look on." Horace, too, is quite aware of his subtle scopophilia. And though he is not necessarily pleased with himself as an outsider, he is apparently resigned to his position as an observer on the edge of life: "I lack courage: that was left out of me," he tells Ruby with something like acceptance, but without dismay. "The machinery is all here, but it wont run" (p. 18). Vickery supports Horace's self-portrait (as well as the notion that he practices a kind of voyeurism) when she says that he "is all thought, sensitivity, and perception . . . without the ability to act effectively" (p. 20; emphasis mine). Thus, Horace essentially avoids the tactile sphere, choosing instead to live impalpably. While in Memphis, for example, he professes the virtue of honesty and justice to Temple with what Vickery calls "abstract verbiage" (p. 22); in contrast, Miss Reba, also addressing Temple, quickly brings the conversation back to the cold world of consequences: "They're going to hang [Goodwin] for something he never done .... And [Ruby] wont have nuttin, nobody. And you with diamonds, and her with that poor little kid" (pp. 223-224). Horace even demonstrates his separation from tangibility via his sexual interest in Little Belle; as Karl explains, the bulk of Horace's pedophilic desire for his wife's daughter dwells within his mind while very little of it dwells within his loins: "Horace," Karl says, "finds Little Belle an Edenic version of perfect sexuality because she is unattainable" (p. 364). Indeed, with regard to women, Horace has an undeniable penchant for the "unattainable"; his other infamous, never-realized love is his sister Narcissa. Horace, it appears, lusts after women whom he will never have to actually touch.
I do not suggest that Horace is finally a villain or even an unlikable character. He is, it seems to me, a decent man whose desire to help the Goodwins is authentic and whose scruples are not cheapened by his interest in the sex that the cash-poor Ruby offers him in order to "pay" him for his legal services. Horace's desire in this regard only reminds the reader that he is human. Nevertheless, Vickery's remark that he is all "perception" is rich: he is an intellectual who must watch others live in order to sustain his own being.(18) Yes, Horace's interest in the Goodwins' welfare is sincere, but as Goodwin's lawyer, Horace is also provided with the opportunity to "see" a world that differs enormously from his own tepid life with Belle. The Goodwin case, with all of its illicit, erotic baggage, gives Horace the perfect opportunity to be a voyeur in the guise of an aid: a spectator, albeit a legal one, of perversity at its best, or worst. Thus stimulated by the promising, succulent details attached to Tommy's murder, Horace happily takes the case. Finally, of course, his effort is ineffective, even counterproductive. Next to his sister Narcissa's traitorous meeting with District Attorney Eustace Graham, Horace's decision to put Ruby on the stand is perhaps what destroys Goodwin's chance for survival, given the suspicious nature of the Goodwin marriage. Goodwin himself tells Horace, after Ruby takes the stand: "Well, you've said you would kill me someday, but I didn't think you meant it" (p. 284). It is true, as Cleanth Brooks points out, that Horace the lawyer works diligently, and he follows all leads, "[demonstrating] a good deal of pertinacity, shrewdness, and vigor' (p. 117). His ultimate failure is therefore not due to a phlegmy attitude toward the business at hand, but his pertinancy, shrewdness, and vigor should be attributed not only to his desire to free an innocent man but also to his voyeuristic fascination with the underworld, the living world, that Goodwin and his people represent. When in staccato half-sentences Ruby offers to pay Horace with her body, Horace's external response reflects his cultured morality, his denial of base behavior: ". . . cant you see that perhaps a man might do something just because he knew it was right, necessary to the harmony of things that it be done?" (p. 290). Once again, this response is not farcical, for Horace does want to do the ethical thing. It is also true, however, that in merely being admitted to a place from which he can survey the sensual, dangerous chaos signified by the name Goodwin, Horace is paid in full: this, too, is why Ruby's money, or the lack thereof, means nothing to him.
Of course, the most savory favor that the Goodwin case does for Horace the voyeur comes in the form of Temple Drake. Horace and Temple's Memphis encounter, during which the girl frankly tells him about her rape, rewards Horace in two ways. First, as shocked as he is at the grotcsque brutality of the corncob incident, he is also captivated and/or aroused by the raciness therein, as so many voyeurs and nonvoyeurs alike are simultaneously revolted and enthralled by sexual violence. Horace's second and more important reward, however, has both a painful and a pleasing side, and it involves the connection between Temple and Little Belle, Horace's stepdaughter, for whom he harbors quasi-incestuous feelings.(19) After listening to Temple's account of her experience at the Old Frenchman place, Horace vomits because, Brooks says, he associates Temple with Little Belle, who is also a young and sexually blossoming "sweet girl" (p. 129). At this point, Brooks argues, Horace is nauseated by fear. He is reminded and afraid of Little Belle's potent sexuality. He is afraid and jealous of her young lovers. He is afraid of the fact that, as a ripening young woman, Little Belle could easily be subjected to the kind of evil that befalls Temple. But what is infinitely worse for Horace, Brooks says, is the possibility that Little Belle, his wife's "sweet girl," has within her "the [same] disposition to evil" that unmistakably lurks within Temple (p. 129). Horace acknowledges his stepdaughter's potential for lascivious vice earlier in the book, before he meets Temple, when he gazes at Little Belle's photographed image "with a kind of quiet horror and despair, at a face suddenly older in sin than he would ever be, a face more blurred than sweet, at eyes more secret than soft" (p. 175). And after speaking with Temple, Horace looks again at Little Belle's photograph, and her face is now even more sensual, even less childish: " . . . the small face seemed to swoon in a voluptuous languor, blurring still more, fading, leaving upon his eye a soft and fading aftermath of invitation and voluptuous promise and secret affirmation . . . " (p. 234). Thus does the meeting with Temple in the brothel intensify Horace's understanding that Little Belle's sexual affection is and will continue to be enjoyed by other men, and his understanding that Little Belle might become corrupted and then corrupt. And thus does the encounter with Temple bring Horace pain.
But again, the link between Temple and Little Belle is by no means wholly grievous for Horace: from the connection he extracts an ambiguous fear-delight. J. Douglas Canfield argues that upon listening to Temple's disclosure in Memphis, Horace discovers "that Popeye did to Temple no more than what he desires to do to Little Belle" (p. 8). In fact, the two young women, Temple and Little Belle, become fused as chapter 23 draws to a close. Half in disgust, yet half in orgasmic bliss, Horace envisions what Elizabeth Kerr calls "a composite Temple-Little Belle" (p. 90), and "She ... [is] bound naked on her back on a flat car moving at speed through a black tunnel . . ." (Faulkner, p. 234). Put another way, the composite female form in Horace's imagination is overwhelmed ("bound") and exposed ("naked"), and she is literally surrounded by the image of sexual penetration, as the railroad car to which she is fettered moves at a breakneck or violent rate through a black hole. In looking at and listening to the young Temple, then, Horace is able to reconstruct and then bathe in his incestuous or quasi-incestuous fantasy. Thus does the opportunity to "see" Temple bring Horace pleasure. Comparatively, Ruby's lack of currency is, again, of no import. He is paid, so to speak.
Horace the lawyer can taste little joy in the Mississippi air as Sanctuary concludes, however, for matters on the Goodwin front are considerably dark. Lee Goodwin is murdered. Ruby Goodwin is indelibly branded with a stained reputation, and she is without a lover, and her baby is without a father.20 Thus, though in the courthouse he is in his element -- the civilized, theoretical arena of truth and justice -- Horace's legal effort ends in failure. Earlier I argue that it is in Horace's nature to avoid the concrete world. In truth, Horace's character is not that simple, for as Goodwin's counselor he does try to enter the vestibule, at least, of the Goodwin orbit, the palpable world, though the guilty verdict is testimony to his powerlessness therein. It is true that he generally prefers to look at but not touch danger and vitality, but when he fails to alter tangibly the fate of a "real man" like Goodwin, he weeps (pp. 62-63; 307).
Above I use the words "reward" and "pleasure," as if Horace's voyeurism is, for Horace, finally satisfying. In fact, while Horace does derive scopophilic enjoyment from his position as a legal (legitimate) collector of several colorful particulars, his pleasure, like the pleasure Popeye experiences in the Memphis whorehouse, is only fleeting and ultimately frustrating. In the end, Horace's voyeurism affects him negatively-not fatally as with Popeye, but certainly destructively. Just as Coverdale leaves Blithedale for the more anonymous city, Horace leaves Memphis and Jefferson, danger and fertility. Conquered, he returns to Kinston, to a state of safety and sterility. But Horace, in his geographical shift from the Goodwin case back to Kinston, is like a child who visits a brightly lit carnival at night, only to wake the next morning to the smoldering ruins of a nuclear holocaust. For at last, Horace's voyeurism, the fruitful watching that he does in Memphis and in Jefferson, only serves to elevate the voyeur's understanding of his own impotence in the comparative nothingness of Kinston, where he finds Belle indifferently expecting his return. In other words, after "seeing" in Memphis and in Jefferson, Horace fully comprehends the emptiness native to his life with Belle, a life to which he is destined, it seems. In Kinston Horace can take some occasional pleasure in watching and fantasizing over Little Belle, but otherwise he must be satisfied with observing himself: the supreme performance of the deflated, defeated voyeur. This, for Horace, is a familiar activity, as he is quite accustomed to transcending his own body in order to watch himself carry a package of dripping shrimp to his wife. Fittingly, he associates the ego-voyeuristic experience with a kind of death:
"All the way home it drips and drips, until after a while I follow myself to the station
and stand aside and watch Horace Benbow take that box off the train and start
home with it, changing hands every hundred steps, and I following him, thinking
Here lies Horace Benbow in a fading series of small stinking spots on a Mississippi
sidewalk." (pp. 18-19)
A more developed thesis on scopophilia in Sanctuary could wrestle with several additional voyeurs: Clarence Snopes (the "keyhole voyeur"), for example, and also Miss Reba. As the peculiar madam of a brothel, the latter provides the opportunity for illicit sexuality while not (it seems) actually participating in the wildness. She is a businesswoman, yes, but the fact that she is surrounded by and yet not physically touched by carnal debauchery may also provide her with a parcel (or more) of erotic pleasure, pleasure that is taken in visually. Indeed, Sanctuary is so populated with voyeurs that the only significant non-voyeur in the book is, perhaps, Temple, who is interested in living both the "legitimate" life and the underground life, and who walks both avenues. I do not suggest that Temple is entirely pleased at the moment of her rape, or at being watched by Popeye as she copulates with Red. She waits for the "Something" to happen to her in the crib of Goodwin's barn with real terror. Furthermore, her stinging criticism of Popeye--" And you hanging over the bed, moaning and slobbering . . . ." (p. 244) -- suggests that she would prefer to have sex with Red in privacy. Nevertheless, before she is raped she does not run away from Goodwin's place as one wholly consumed by terror would in all likelihood do. Temple tells Ruby that she cannot persuade the drunk Gowan to take her away (p. 57). Yet, as Elizabeth Kerr suggests, it may also be that Temple is attracted to the danger of the Old Frenchman place, and this attraction may in fact be what renders her unable to "take effective flight" (p. 93). Olga Vickery agrees: 'It is not her fear of encountering greater evils or dangers but her fascination with the idea of violence that holds her immobile. For only by becoming the victim of violence can she participate in Ruby's world without losing her position in her own" (p. 18). Vickery adds:
Caught between her longing for the safety of her own world and her desire to share
in the "adventure" of this new one into which she has stumbled, Temple reaches
a state of semi-hysteria. . . . Time and again Temple is given the opportunity to
leave; time and again Ruby warns her to be quiet, to stop running, to stop impressing
her fear and desire on the men. But she persists, half-fascinated by the idea
of her own rape and half-dreading the actual experience. (pp. 17-18)
Albert Guerard argues that the danger-loving Temple is one of the "finest" personifications in the Faulkner canon of female depravity.21 Through Temple, Guerard contends, Faulkner leaves bare with a scalpel his alleged distaste for femininity. When placed beside the disassociation of voyeurs like Popeye and Horace, however, it seems more probable that the experimental Temple is one of Faulkner's many unlikely heroes -- she is partially depraved, perhaps, but she is also a rare sample of flesh and blood, caught in the midst of so many human ghosts.
Why the powerful emphasis on detection in Sanctuary? One answer involves the division in the book between two very different worlds: the (apparently) cultivated university world of Temple and Gowan stands in stark contrast to the under-world of Popeye and Goodwin. Among other things, Sanctuary is about the way in which the first world watches the second and vice-versa, each positioned at a safe distance from the other across an invisible, impassable field. All the while most members of both sides understand that an attempt to blend the two social classes is but one step above miscegenation in the wisdom of social propriety (as it stands in Faulkner's Mississippi). Significantly, Red, the one figure who possesses characteristics relevant to both sides (he is a gangster who looks "like a college boy" [p. 248]) receives a bullet through the forehead, and his violent death symbolizes the fact that a crossover or a fluid boundary between the two spheres is either dangerous or impossible. Of course, Ruby clearly acknowledges the cold truth when she urges the frightened yet coquettish Temple to "go away and never come back" to the Old Frenchman place" (p. 64). But one of the most colorful examples of the social schism in Sanctuary takes place even earlier, just after the town boys stare at Temple's "flank and thigh" as she gets into Gowan's car (p. 30). Doc, one of the "three or four" town boys, waves a feminine undergarment before his fellows, implying, it seems, that it once belonged to Temple, or someone like Temple. One of the other boys checks him, announcing what is more probable: "Doc got that step-in in Memphis. . . . Off a damn whore" (p. 31). But even if it were true that the undergarment once belonged to Temple or a girl/woman of Temple's social distinction, the underwear would still make up a mere piece of "the temple," one concrete signifier of the other world; in spite of Doc's proud ownership, the "step-in" is no key to the signified. The town boys can look at the other world, they can even hold an insignificant morsel of the whole, but they can never break through the sacred plane.
Irving Howe believes that in Sanctuary, "Faulkner is ... possessed by his hatred for the world of Popeye . . . "(22) believe, however, that Faulkner hates the bootleggers no more than he hates the thoughtless college crowd, of which Gowan, for instance, is a burlesque example. Indeed, Temple, another college student -- who at the very end of the novel is vacationing with her father at the Luxembourg Gardens, still enjoying the luxury of life -- destroys Popeye and Goodwin as much as or more than they destroy her. It seems to me, then, that Faulkner feels no hatred for any particular human class. Instead, he opposes the terrible fact that "the world of Popeye" and the world of Temple and Gowan cannot touch one another without birthing a myriad of violent difficulties. Sanctuary opens with Popeye and Horace -- polar opposites, socially speaking. Separated by a body of water, the two men study one another extensively, and thus begins Faulkner's critique of the way in which human beings from varying backgrounds watch each other in true voyeuristic fashion from a distance, rarely touching, thereby making the world a little colder.
It is a mistake, however, to assume that Faulkner's critique in Sanctuary is limited to the fracture between the social classes. Clearly, in his detective novel, or his novel of eyes, Faulkner is implicating the voyeuristic tendencies that too many real people practice in all of their human dealings, both outside of and within their respective castes. Popeye and Horace are finally hollow not only because they cannot connect with members of "the other world," but also because they cannot fully connect with anyone at all. Both men lead lives that are almost strictly visual, and in Sanctuary Faulkner reminds the reader that seeing is an individual or solitary act. That is, the dialectic in the performance of sight is one-sided, involving one pair of eyes and the object or objects upon which those eyes fix themselves.(21) Unlike listening, in other words, seeing requires no human community; in an act of pure sight, uninterrupted by the sound of a human voice or the touch of a human hand, the seer makes meaning alone.24 Thus is the bloody corncob an important symbol of voyeurism, though at first it appears to have no connection to the eyes and/or the act of unadulterated sight. Literally, the cob is the voyeur's substitute for flesh. Figuratively, as I suggested far above, it constitutes an image of disconnectedness, of sex void of feeling or affection, of one-sided sex, of aloneness. One who consistently uses his member as a tool with which to extract pleasure for himself, with no concern for his partner, is in effect consistently using his member as a kind of corncob, a mere extension. There is no sexual communication, no dialectic. He is alone in his pleasure, as the voyeur is alone in his individual act of seeing. The blood staining the corncob, then, is actually a natural, even necessary facet of the image, signifying the violence -- emotional or physical or both -- that is native to a disconnected or wholly self-interested sexual encounter. The image of the bloody corncob, an image reeking of brutal disassociation, strikingly enhances what I see as Faulkner's primary concern in the novel: the human being's tendency to watch and not hear or touch, to isolate himself -- sexually, socially, generally -- from flesh.
In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner scrutinizes a man with too much passion, so much that he has no speculative, transcendental capacity at all. Thomas Sutpen is described as an electric, inexorable machine working without a respite toward his repudiation of low birth, his creation of a dynasty. He lacks the understanding that the ingredients needed to deal successfully with other human beings are not simple, not constant, like those needed to bake a particular kind of pie or cake. In short, Sutpen wants balance: he lives, yet he lives without the reflective ability to see himself as others see him. In Sanctuary, however, Faulkner reminds us that a life too speculative, too removed, is not a life worth living either. Horace says that "there's a corruption about even looking upon evil" (p. 134). But, ironically, what is corrupt is not the evil, but the looking, or the fact that though there are many Sutpens who rarely if ever stop to consider the means to their end, there are just as many who only look, and never actually touch, who breathe and yet fail to live. In Sanctuary, Faulkner asks us to understand that Popeye and Horace (and Hawthorne's Coverdale, even) are not aliens, and not emblems. In one of the Virginia conferences, Faulkner suggests that Popeye, the shining voyeur, is very real, that we can perhaps recognize his presence within ourselves: he is merely "another lost human being. He became a symbol of evil in modern society only by coincidence but I was still writing about people, not about ideas, not about symbols" (Gwynn and Blotner, p. 74). Sanctuary is not a truly dark novel, an authentic horror story, then, until the reader acknowledges his own relation to the events therein, his own complicity in a voyeurism that keeps him too dispassionate: severed from human sound, and human touch. (1) Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedate Romance: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, ed. Seymour Gross and Rosalie Murphy (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 137-138. (2) Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds. Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957-1958 (New York: Vintage, 1965), p. 243. (3) James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate, eds., Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962 New York: Random, 1968), p. 168. (4) William Faulkner, Sanctuary (1931; New York: Vintage, 1987), p. 244. (5) Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 118. (6) Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 121. (7) William Faulkner, Introduction to the 1932 Modern Library issue of Sanctuary. (Provided in the Vintage Books edition, previously cited), p. 337. (8) Lawrence S. Kubie, "William Faulkner's Sanctuary: An Analysis," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Sanctuary"- A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J. Douglas Canfield (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1982), p. 27. Perhaps superfluous in the body of my essay, yet worth attention in a footnote, is Kubie's brief effort actually to enter and then give voice to Temple's mind. In discussing her possible hate for potent men, Kubie suggests:
It is almost as though she said, "To be a woman is worse than death or the same
as death. Therefore I will take my revenge upon all you men who are really men.
I will excite your desires, but I will not satisfy them. I will laugh in the face of your
yearnings. I will gloat over you and scorn you as you drink yourselves into impotence.
And finally I will be the instrument of your actual bodily destruction." (p. 27)
If Kubie's theory regarding Temple's perjury, the death blow for a "real man" like Goodwin (Sanctuary, p. 62) is correct, Temple's striking sexual excitement just before Red is murdered is suddenly terrifying: she is, perhaps, so insatiably aroused because she knows that Red, another "real man," is about to die. (9) J. Douglas Canfield, "Introduction," Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Sanctuary": A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 6. (10) Elizabeth M. Kerr, "Sanctuary: The Persecuted Maiden, or, Vice Triumphant," in William Faulkner's "Sanctuary": Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), p. 91. (11) Olga W. Vickery, "Crime and Punishment: Sanctuary," in Canfield, p. 20. (12) Freudian thinking is rarely irrelevant in a discussion of Faulkner's work, given the manner in which the latter's fiction is saturated with incest, a very Freudian subject, and given the more general fact that Freud and Faulkner were nearly contemporaries, breathing a similar intellectual air. (13) Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953-74), 7: 192. (14) Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 2nd ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1966), p. 346. (15) Actually, the only sensible theory about why Popeye is a voyeur must involve a mixture of several hypotheses. T. H. Adamowski seems to agree as he essentially argues that Popeye's syphilitic birth explains his character no more completely than the few Freudian ideas I provide above: "His syphilis is not the key to an understanding of Popeye. He may be a syphilitic but not all syphilitics are Popeye" ("Faulkner's Popeye: The `Other' as Self," in (16) Certain that his new wife, Desdemona, is unfaithful, Shakespeare's Othello, a lifelong soldier, bids goodbye to the business of military war so that he can direct all of his thoughts, all of his soldierly rage toward Desdemona's alleged infidelity. "Farewell," he cries to the many tools and trappings of glorious battle, "Othello's occupation's gone!" (3.3.363) (Arden Edition, London: Methuen, 1958). (17) Frederick Karl, William Faulkner: American Writer (New York: Ballantine, 1989), p. 363. (18) As a passive an/or ineffectual intellectual, and yet a finally decent man, Horace is reminiscent of Quentin Compson, who also suffers from a kind of impotence, and who, like Horace, has a mighty incestuous desire that goes unsated. A detailed comparative study of the two would make for a provocative essay, as Quentin, lying by his sister Caddy on the bank in The Sound and the Fury, does not "push" his knife or his penis into Caddy's body any harder than Horace "pushes" his desire for Narcissa or his mild obsession with Little Belle/Lolita. (19) I say "quasi-incestuous" merely because Little Belle is not tied to Horace by blood. (20) Until recently, I could not decide whether or not it is appropriate to attach the surname Goodwin to Ruby, given the fact that her marriage to Lee Goodwin is "unofficial," and so until now I have attempted to avoid the dilemma altogether. Cicanth Brooks, the keymaster to all details related to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, feels free to call her Ruby Lamar and Ruby Goodwin, and I trust his judgment. Consequently, I feel reasonably secure in calling the woman Ruby Goodwin, provided I qualify the title in a footnote. (21) "Albert J. Guerard, "Sanctuary and Faulkner's Misogyny," in Bloom, p. 69. (22) Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1962), p. 193. (23) Of course, it is true that two or more people can communicate using only their eyes -- a sort of nonverbal, visual communication involving visual expression. In Sanctuary, however, Faulkner is primarily concerned with passive detection, even surreptitious surveillance. These forms of observing make visual expression between two or more human beings difficult, even impossible. (24) Significantly, Absalom, Absalom', a novel of ears, contains less despair than Sanctuary. In Absalom, Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon form a community of speakers and listeners, and it is important that each boy takes his turn at speaking, then listening. Together the two Harvard students are able to extract some meaning from Thomas Sutpen's life out of the shards of information that have been passed down to Quentin by his father and Rosa Coldfield. Alone, the passionate Quentin, acutely sensitive to the burden of Southern history, could not have reached any worthwhile degree of objectivity or meaningful meaning. But in communion with another human being, Faulkner suggests, there is hope.