World Famous Comics: Sanctuary: The Corrected Text
Sanctuary: The Corrected Text
By: William Faulkner Publisher: Vintage Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 336 Publication Date: December 06, 1993 Release Date: December 06, 1993 Studio: Vintage
Product Description: First published in 1931, this classic psychological melodrama has been viewed as more of a social document in his tragic legend of the South than mere story. From Popeye, a moonshining racketeer with no conscience and Temple Drake, beautiful, bored and vulnerable, to Harace Benbow, a lawyer of honor and decency wishing for more in his life, and Gowan Stevens, college student with a weakness for drink, Faulkner writes of changing social values and order. A sinister cast peppered with social outcasts and perverts perform abduction, murder, and mayhem in this harsh and brutal story of sensational and motiveless evil.
Students of Faulkner have found an allegorical interpretation of "Sanctuary" as a comment on the degradation of old South's social order by progressive modernism and materialistic exploitation. Popeye and his co-horts represent this hurling change that is corrupting the historic traditions of the South, symbolized by Horace Stevens, which are no longer able to protect the victimized Negro and poor white trash due to middle-class apathy and inbred violence.
Second best from Faulkner ^ Sanctuary is a good starter for introducing people to Faulkner. My all time favorite from Faulkner is Absolom,Absolom but this seems very difficult for people to follow. I grew up in the South, the story in Sanctuary could have truly happened 40 years ago in any community in the South. The title is misleading, none of the characters ever find sanctuary, there is no place within the book that could be called a sanctuary.
Tragic ^ It's almost hard to describe what this book is about, without giving away spoilers. Sanctuary starts off with a well-to-do man from the city stumbling across a ramshackle farmhouse where moonshine is being made. From there, the story spirals off to include Temple (a rich and popular teenage girl), Mrs. Goodwin (the moonshiner's common law wife), and Popeye (a deranged misfit). Their paths continue to cross as the book goes on; sometimes for good, sometimes for bad.
Faulkner is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. I've been slowly reading through his books after tackling all of Cormac McCarthy's work (the two authors are very similiar, in my opinion). One thing with Faulkner, I've found that it works best just to keep on reading even if encounter something that doesn't make sense. Chances are, it will come clear as the story goes on.
In the South ^ Much has been said about the writing of Faulkner. Specifically discussing "Sanctuary", one might suggest it to be dirty and perhaps gritty. Faulkner never intended it to be a nice heart-warming story. What the story lacks in niceties is compensated for in realism. Though most can not directly identify with the story, most would agree with the portrayal of southern life.
The story centers around the kidnapping of Temple Drake. Though it is not a kidnapping in the truest definition, Temple does find herself at the mercy of the feeble-minded Popeye. As bothersome as the crimes against Temple may be, readers will question why she chooses not to leave. The fascinating aspect of the story is this aspect of Temple's character sometimes referred to as Stockholm Syndrome. In this syndrome, the hostage develops loyalty to the hostage-take.
Justice is not distributed as some might expect. Even as justice seems apparent, the reader may find himself/herself angry. It would seem easy to just to toss this book aside and hate it. At the same time, there is something compelling about it in the same way people look at the traffic accident at the side of the road.
Horrible ^ Ok, so everyone has for years told me how great a writer William Faulkner was. So, I read As I Lay Dying- mediocre at best, and no real strengths at characterization are revealed. Instead, a bunch of yokel stereotypes. So, I mark that off as just one of those things. Then I read his Collected Stories. Atrocious! Nothing but stereotypes in every tale. The Southern grotesques are not as noxious as in, say, Flannery O'Connor, but the tales are all wooden, dull, and generally- a mess! So, I read Sanctuary, which comes with the preface that it was Faulkner's `deliberately commercial' novel, and the one that `broke him' to readers. So, I think if the high literature of As I Lay Dying, and his acclaimed short stories, is bad then, perhaps, the real gem lies in his `commercial' novel.
O for three! What this book was was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre before that film- except for the chainsaw, and not being set in Texas. This has got to be one of the worst books ever penned, and all the more egregious because, despite its being `commercial', it's still the province of a high fictionist! The characters are even more stereotyped than in As I Lay Dying, and the plot revolves around the kidnapping of a judge's daughter and a slew of murders. Now, for those of you wondering which Texas Chainsaw Massacre I was referring to, the 1974 Tobe Hooper original, or the 2003 remake with nymphet Jessica Biel, I can state it does not really matter, but let me choose the latter, since that film was merely a reason to show off the nubile Ms. Biel's fabulous form and healthy wet t shirted bosom....The title's meaning is multifarious, and rather obvious, since it's the one thing none of the cretins within the book get. So what? Mickey Spillane crafted much more interesting scenarios two decades later, and Mike Hammer would have jackbooted Popeye inside of a page of meeting him. In the end, no lessons are learned, Temple perdures, and the last page or so of the book ends very poetically. But, it's simply air spray freshener used on a litter box. The odor underneath still permeates.
I will have to read The Sound And The Fury, but I've given up on having any high expectations for it. Perhaps, that's the key, and I will be pleasantly surprised, although I doubt it will change my overall view of Faulkner as one of the most grotesquely overrated writers of all time. He constipates me with his plodding narratives, ridiculously stilted conversations, and outrageously thin plot machinations. I need an enema after all that, but sans that- pass the corn cob!
Mississippi Noir ^ I have read my fair share of Faulkner although I am hardly a devotee. My main positive reference to him is concerning his role in the screenwriting of one of my favorite films- "To Have or To Have Not" with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I have also, obliquely, run into his work as it relates to who should and who should not be in the modern American literary canon. Usually the criticism centers on his racism and sexism, and occasionally his alcoholism. Of course, if political correctness were the main criterion for good hard writing then we would mainly not be reading anything more provocative or edifying than the daily newspaper, if that.
So much for that though. Faulkner is hardly known as a master of the noir or 'potboiler' but here the genius of his sparse, functional writing (a trait that he shares with the Hemingway of "The Killers" and the key crime novelists of the 1930's Hammett, think "The Red Harvest", and Chandler, think "The Big Sleep") gives him entree into that literary genre. And he makes the most of it.
The plot revolves around a grotesque cast of characters who are riding out the Jazz Age in the backwaters of Mississippi and its Mecca in Memphis. Take one protected young college student, Temple Drake, looking to get her 'kicks'. Put her with a shabbily gentile frat boy looking for his kicks. Put them on the back roads of Prohibition America and trouble is all you can expect. Add in a bootlegger or two, a stone-crazy killer named Popeye with a little sexual problem and you are on your way.
That way is a little bumpy as Faulkner mixed up the plot, the motives of the characters and an unsure idea of what justice, Southern style, should look like in this situation in the eyes of his main positive character, Horace, the lawyer trying to do the right thing in a dead wrong situation which moreover is stacked against him. As always with Faulkner follow the dialogue, that will get you through even if you have to do some re-reading (as I have had to do). Interestingly, for a writer as steeped in Southern mores, Jim Crow and very vivid descriptions of the ways of the South in the post-Civil War era as Faulkner was there is very little of race in this one. The justice meted out here tells us one thing- it is best to be a judge's daughter or a Daughter of the Confederacy if you want a little of that precious commodity. All others watch out. Kudos to Faulkner, whether he wrote this for the cash or not, for taking on some very taboo subjects back in 1931 Mississippi. Does anyone really want to deny him his place in the American literary canon? Based on this effort I think not.
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