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The power of
Sanctuary
lodges in passages such as this. Critics have long contended that such focused hostility must be Faulkner’s own. Nowhere else in his fictional universe is a protagonist subjected to the physical abuse inflicted on Temple. As in the foregoing passage, her legs stop functioning as her own—“‘I’d look at my legs and I’d think how much I had done for them … and now they’d gotten me into this,’” she whines to Horace later (SAN 329). Popeye picks her up by the back of the neck repeatedly—the pressure making her eyes bulge—and that is the least of his aggressions. Faulkner cannot take his eye off what is being done to her at Frenchman’s Bend. Layer after layer, the sanctuaries that protect her identity are stripped away; the assault is at once bodily and psychic. “My father’s a judge,” she wails, as she seeks to smile, cringe, or fantasize her way back into security.
Her defenses ripped from her, her identity—as molded by “my father the Judge” and the protocols of Southern gentility—ends by collapsing on itself. She becomes, for the last third of the book, a denizen of the Memphis underworld, hooked on booze and riddled with lust, caught up in that other scene. She has traded Daddy for “Daddy” (Popeye), who—impotent himself—makes orgasmic, whinnying noises as he stands by her bed, watching her writhe in intercourse with his surrogate Red. Here is Temple waiting for Red: “she felt long shuddering waves of physical desire going over her, draining the color from her mouth, drawing her eyeballs back into her skull in a shuddering swoon” (343). Her shuddering eyeballs recall the rat’s glowing ones. Living creatures are here accessed as body parts propelled by instinct. They surge and glow. “She could tell all of them by the way they breathed” (234). The human world, if stripped of its sanctuaries and pressured sufficiently, transforms into a feral barnyard.

We may remember that Faulkner liked to describe
As I Lay Dying
in terms that suggest a wager with himself. “I took this family,” he said at the University of Virginia in 1957, “and subjected them to the two greatest catastrophes man can suffer—flood and fire, that’s all. That was simple
tour deforce”
(FIU 87).
Tour deforce: Sanctuary
joins
As I Lay Dying
as a sort of narrative experiment in how much pressure people can bear. In both novels, he submits the habits and pieties (the sanctuaries) of his central figures to an all-but-apocalyptic assault—flood and fire in the one, the underworld of Frenchman’s Bend and Memphis in the other—in order to discover what, under the impress of that assault, those figures will become. He exposes “the clotting which is you” to “the myriad original motion.” With almost inhuman detachment, he experiments with his materials, pushing them past the conditions that sustain their coherence. Fascinated, he keeps his eye on the “unclotting” that ensues.

It is a short step from “inhuman” and “fascinated” to “misogynistic,” and many readers—offended by the abuse inflicted on Temple—take that interpretive step. Some of the abuse supports such a reading. The novel indulges in recurrent sneers about Temple’s protectedness, her ignorance of everything outside her family’s world of genteel privilege. To that extent
Sanctuary
can be seen as committed to “teaching her a lesson.” Yet Temple learns no lesson; the book is darker than any pedagogic purpose can illuminate. The spectacle produced by these two tour de force novels may lack the heartbreaking emotional depth of
The Sound and the Fury
and
Absalom, Absalom!
That notwithstanding,
As I Lay Dying
and
Sanctuary
remain focused—comically, terrifyingly, unforgettably—on what happens when
the pressure mounted on identity ends by overwhelming identity itself. “It’s like there was a fellow in every man,” Cash thinks at the conclusion of
As I Lay Dying
, “that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment” (AILD 228). Temple reveals such sanity/insanity when the pressure on her reaches that point, as she is being raped:

“Then I said That wont do. I ought to be a man. So I was an old man, with a long white beard, and then the little black man got littler and littler and I was saying Now. You see now. I’m a man now. Then I thought about being a man, and as soon as I thought it, it happened. It made a kind of plopping sound, like blowing a little rubber tube wrong-side outward. It felt cold, like the inside of your mouth when you hold it open. I could feel it, and I lay right still to keep from laughing about how surprised he was going to be. I could feel the jerking going inside my knickers ahead of his hand and me lying there trying not to laugh about how surprised and mad he was going to be in a minute.” (331)

In this passage we encounter Temple’s traumatic wound itself; Faulkner makes it speak. The fantasy-narrative it speaks articulates and conceals the assault she has undergone. We see everything materially relevant—the corncob, the invaded body, the jerking flesh—but we see it fantastically reconfigured. That is, we see the crazily crossgendered scenario that her defenses have summoned into being for psychic survival. In
The Sound and the Fury
, Quentin imagined himself as Dalton Ames’s mother, withdrawing her husband’s penis before ejaculation, killing Ames before he lived. No less bizarrely, Temple has fantasized herself onto an impossible stage. Faulkner narrates less what is done to Temple than what she does with what is done to her. Her doing is psychic alone because there is no way of escaping Popeye except by fantasy. Popeye co-opts reality; she absents herself through fantasy. The poetry of this passage is the poetry of Temple’s outraged system of defenses. Inasmuch as the purpose of defenses is to forestall such outrage, Faulkner’s prose finds its way to Temple’s very core. With horror and astonishment, we hear her psyche speak. What it speaks is no feral barnyard, no release of animal instinct, but a kind of pain that only human beings, on the rack, are capable of.

I began this discussion of
Sanctuary
with “the faint furious uproar of the shucks,” and I shall end there. Brilliant as is Faulkner’s making Temple’s wound speak for itself, he is no less attentive to the psychic transfers that fill this novel. Characters obsessively watch others who may or may not know
they are being watched, a silent transfer moving across the gaze.
Sanctuary
opens on the edge of a spring in the woods—a mirroring body of water whose Narcissus echoes go all the way back to
The Marble Faun
. The self sees no alluring image of itself in that mirror, however. Instead, the bookish Horace—who is leaving his marriage and has stopped en route to get a drink of water—stares into the reflection of the criminal Popeye. Squatting, they silently “face one another across the spring, for two hours” (SAN 5). What is passing between them? Faulkner does not say, yet he launches
Sanctuary
on that note. He thus prepares us to envisage Horace—who by way of gender, morality, and education is Temple’s opposite—as, unspeakably, her secret sharer. Over two-thirds of the way through the novel, Horace finally comes upon Temple, holed up in a Memphis brothel. She has become corrupted by Popeye, sexually besotted with Red. Only now do we hear what has actually happened to her, as (in the passage just quoted) she tells Horace of her rape. Stunned, silent, he makes his way back to Jefferson. Once home, he picks up a photo of his stepdaughter, the sexually alluring Little Belle. Staring at it, entering her swooning gaze, he becomes enveloped in the voluptuous odor of honeysuckle. His entire physical economy buckles, unable to bear the contradictory impulses surging through him. He rushes to the bathroom and plunges toward the toilet bowl:

[he] leaned upon his braced arms while the shucks set up a terrific uproar beneath her thighs. Lying with her head lifted slightly … she watched something black and furious go roaring out of her pale body. She was bound naked on her back on a flat car moving at speed through a black tunnel, the blackness streaming in rigid threads overhead, a roar of iron wheels in her ears. The car shot bodily from the tunnel in a long upward slant … toward a crescendo…. Far beneath her she could hear the faint, furious uproar of the shucks. (333)

The corncob man. Nowhere in the novel do we get a more powerful image of the assault Temple undergoes. Drawing on that 1921 New York subway experience, Faulkner renders the bound, naked body of Temple as undergoing a subterranean ordeal at inhuman speed. The pervasive blackness suggests Popeye in his unchanging black suits, suggests evil and the underworld more broadly. The corn shucks are both all around her and far beneath her, faintly audible. She is both penetrated and detached, a sacrificial victim. Most tellingly, however, this passage does not begin with Temple at all. For three pages, the text has been following Horace, as he shakily makes his way home past midnight and picks up the photo of Little
Belle. Then it becomes hallucinatory, a nightmarish scene of unspeakable transfers. Horace becomes Temple, it is happening to him. More disturbing yet, Horace’s helpless attraction to his nubile stepdaughter transfers to his attraction to Temple (the two young women are the same age, and neither of them is innocent despite their pretence). His body erupts at the signs of his arousal. About to retch, he rushes to the toilet bowl—which now becomes the bed of “furious” shucks. Leaning on his braced arms over that uproar beneath her thighs, it is Horace who, aghast, seems to be both raping her and suffering her rape.

Faulkner called this book a cheap idea, a potboiler. His critics saw deeper and glimpsed Dostoevsky. Svidrigaylov in
Crime and Punishment
both protects and violates children. At the end of that novel, he dreams of doing the first and finds—in the dream—that he is doing the second. Abruptly awakened by what he has glimpsed in the nighttime theater of himself, he rises from bed, wanders to the seediest part of St. Petersburg, and commits suicide. Faulkner claimed not to have read Dostoevsky, but he said that about a number of writers he was familiar with. Secret sharers—the term is Conrad’s, a writer Faulkner never disowned—were his imaginative familiars. His great work penetrates beneath the sanctuaries of identity—those conceptual bulwarks within which we can claim that we are thus and so, and not otherwise. Exerting unbearable pressure, these novels come upon unspeakable transformations—as though, deep down, human being itself were shapeless plasma rather than fixed essence. The clotting that is you can unclot. At awful times it does unclot. The one who writes a misogynistic potboiler—a man who sees his difference from a woman as absolute, who abuses her and believes she deserves what she gets—is the corncob man. But the one who writes the nightmarish transferences that stalk our daytime identities is a genius. They are both Faulkner, and it took them both to write
Sanctuary
.

Light in August
is perhaps Faulkner’s most piercing narrative of race, and I shall attend to it in that light in the next chapter. Appearing in the fall of 1932, it is the fourth of the masterpieces he produced within a time frame of less than thirty-six months. By then, thanks to
Sanctuary
’s corncob, Faulkner had become notorious, and by then he had experienced his first bout of Hollywood glitz.
Light in August
points in two directions. It announces his newfound concern with his region’s most abiding
trouble—race relations—a concern he would return to repeatedly during the next sixteen years. It reprises, as well, the signature interests of his three previous novels: the unpreparedness of childhood and the assault of the present moment.

The sequencing of events in
Light in August
was not easy for Faulkner to get right, and the novel communicates to its reader a growing anxiety about what follows what, and why. It opens in the present tense, on the road. Pregnant Lena Grove, swollen and on the verge of labor, is walking toward Jefferson, catching wagon rides as she can. Actually, she is trying to find her departed lover, Lucas Burch, who left her about six months earlier, when certain bodily events revealed their meaning. Nothing in the book is easier to decode than her belly and the plight it announces. So every reader settles down, after the first thirty pages, to read the developing story of abandoned Lena Grove.

Chapter 2
, however, opens on “Byron Bunch knows this” (LA 421). The next twenty pages recount a pair of matters from the perspective of heretofore unannounced Byron. First, he recalls the earlier arrival in Jefferson of two strangers—one of them sinister and rootless (named Joe Christmas), the other loudmouthed and shiftless (named Joe Brown). They both took jobs at the sawmill where Byron works. Second, he recalls the arrival of Lena Grove at the sawmill on Saturday afternoon—just a day earlier—when he was the only one still at work. Byron’s interest in Lena becomes swiftly transparent to the reader. For her part, inquiring about Burch, she had been told of Bunch. She thought—hoped—that maybe it was a mispronunciation and that Bunch would turn out to be Burch; she headed to the mill to find him. We are entering a rural comedy of manners, and we now expect to get the rest of Bunch’s story.

Chapter 3
opens, instead, in the dark household of a man whom Bunch tends to visit a few times each week—a former preacher named Hightower. It dilates for the next fifteen pages on Hightower’s painful history in this town. He is not just a former minister but a defrocked one. His house is not just dark but is deliberately avoided by the community of Jefferson. With
chapter 4
we finally get a sequence we expect: twenty pages of conversation between Byron and Hightower, in Hightower’s house. They speak of Christmas and Brown, and of Lena and her quest for Burch. It is clear to them both that Joe Brown is the Lucas Burch she is seeking. It is clear to us as well that Byron is falling for this heavily pregnant woman, even as he feels the responsibility to join her to her fleeing and worthless lover.