The Essential Faulkner Read Online Free

legend into a period that he regards as one of moral confusion and social decay. He is continually seeking in them for violent images to convey his sense of outrage.
Sanctuary
is the most violent of all his novels; it has been the most popular and is by no means the least important (in spite of Faulkner’s comment that it was “a cheap idea … deliberately conceived to make money”). The story of Popeye andTemple Drake has more meaning than appears on a first hasty reading—the only reading that early critics were willing to grant it. Popeye himself is one of several characters in Faulkner’s novels who represent the mechanical civilization that has invaded and conquered the South. He is always described in mechanical terms: his eyes “looked like rubber knobs”; his face “just went awry, like the face of a wax doll set too near a hot fire and forgotten”; his tight suit and stiff hat were “all angles, like a modernistic lampshade”; and in general he had “that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin.” Popeye was the son of a professional strikebreaker, from whom he had inherited syphilis; he was the grandson of a pyromaniac, and he had spent most of his childhood in an institution. He was the man “who made money and had nothing he could do with it, spend it for, since he knew that alcohol would kill him like poison, who had no friends and had never known a woman”—in other words, he was a compendium of all the hateful qualities that Faulkner assigns to finance capitalism.
Sanctuary
is not a connected allegory, as George Marion O’Donnell condemned it for being 4 —he was the first critic to approach it seriously—but neither is it a mere accumulation of pointless horrors. It is an example of the Freudian method turned backward, being full of sexual nightmares that are in reality social symbols. It is somehow connected in the author’s mind with what he regards as the rape and corruption of the South.
    In his novels dealing with the present—I am speaking of those written before 1945—Faulkner makes it clear that the descendants of the old ruling caste have the wish but not the courage or the strength to prevent this new disaster. They are defeated by Popeye (like Horace Benbow), or they run away from him (like Gowan Stevens,who had been to college at Virginia and learned how to drink like a gentleman, but not to fight for his principles), or they are robbed and replaced in their positions of influence by the Snopeses (like old Bayard Sartoris, the president of the bank), or they drug themselves with eloquence and alcohol (like Quentin Compson’s father), or they retire into the illusion of being inviolable Southern ladies (like Mrs. Compson, who says, “It can’t be simply to flout and hurt me. Whoever God is, He would not permit that. I’m a lady.”), or they dwell so much on the past that they are incapable of facing the present (like Reverend Hightower of
Light in August
), or they run from danger to danger (like young Bayard Sartoris) frantically seeking their own destruction. Faulkner’s novels are full of well-meaning and even admirable persons, not only the grandsons of the cotton aristocracy, but also pine-hill farmers and storekeepers and sewing-machine agents and Negro cooks and sharecroppers; but they are almost all of them defeated by circumstances and they carry with them a sense of their own doom.
    They also carry, whether heroes or villains, a curious sense of submission to their fate. “There is not one of Faulkner’s characters,” says André Gide in his dialogue on “The New American Novelists,” “who properly speaking has a soul”; and I think he means that not one of them, in the early novels, exercises the faculty of conscious choice between good and evil. They are haunted, obsessed, driven forward by some inner necessity. Like Miss Rosa Coldfield in
Absalom, Absalom!
they exist in “that dream state in which you run without moving from a terror in which you