Having demolished the once popular judgment of Sanctuary as simply a potboiler, a notion which stemmed usually from an incomplete reading of Faulkner's own comments, critics and scholars have for some years regularly accorded the book the serious consideration warranted by the author's honesty of intention.¹ Chiefly the tendency of the commentary has been to see the novel in some way as an attack on the modern world—an outpouring of indignation at the mechanization and dehumanization, the immorality and loss of spiritual values in the twentieth-century wasteland.² This rather overwhelming consensus of critical opinion is, surely, at least partly correct. The difficulty, however, is that such light-of-day analyses in terms of modern life do not adequately convey the vast sense of nightmare which exists in the novel, nor the consequent largeness of meaning and effect. For nightmare pervades Sanctuary, and its terror is ultimately like the terror before the question posed by Job, Oedipus, and Lear—but without the satisfactions of acceptance or heroism and without the compensation of spiritual growth through suffering the incomprehensible.³

That some such effect is to be expected is suggested by Faulkner's own comment on Sanctuary as "an exposition of the terror and the injustice which man must face."⁴ To be sure, the large and moving sense of terror may reflect, as Lawrence Kubie argues, the modern male's fear of sexual impotence.⁵ For that matter, it may even be rooted in modern, or ageless, feelings of guilt and a consequent expectation of punishment that sometimes results in the projection into the universe of an ubiquitously threatening and imminent doom. But the possible existence of such psychological roots does not invalidate the fact that the terror emanates also—and perhaps principally—from the dark vision of an irrational, nightmarish universe. Indeed, the two sources would be likely to merge and to reinforce each other.

Much of the feeling of Sanctuary is the result of what we may well call a technique of nightmare. Although the word "nightmare" is hardly an original one for the novel, how thoroughly it applies requires emphasis. Repeatedly the narrative evokes moments of dreamlike horror typical especially of a certain kind of nightmare: The dreamer is caught in impotent terror; paralyzed, deeply frightened, trying, yet unable, to act or to scream.⁶ And while they provide an appropriate atmosphere for the patterns of degenerate modernity, these many instances of paralysis-with-horror also contribute even more to a sense of cosmic nightmare; they accumulate to an experience of profound terror and powerlessness within and before the chaos and illogicality of the whole of existence.

This view is clarified and supported by the recurrent examples of nightmare imagery. And I do not refer here merely to what might be called modern variations on the conventions of the older Gothic novel—such matters as the moldering old ruin, the Frenchman's place, which duplicates the decaying medieval castle; the threat of a dark villain in Popeye's lean, lethal shadow extending over the house; or the figure of the half frightening and half protective retainer. Although such things contribute to the total tone, the chills inspired by these and similar conventional Gothic devices⁷ arise clearly out of make-believe. Almost like the shudders of children listening to tales of haunted houses, they are the fears of "let's pretend." The effects are not deeply disturbing, not genuinely nightmarish, and Faulkner leaves them behind rather early in the book. More deeply woven into its texture, however, are the dreamlike images and scenes in which the principals—and the readers—are caught in a clotting motion, in a paralysis, or near-paralysis, of helpless terror. In its sense of slow, strange motion, the world of Sanctuary resembles, in a way, Poe's world of drifting fog; slow, falling water; and dripping moonlight. But even Poe sometimes inspires only the Gothic "make-believe" shudder as compared to the sense of cold paralysis, entrapment and terror which permeates Sanctuary and becomes a feeling about existence itself.

Certainly the persistence of images and incidents of slow motion or of total pause in Faulkner—"frozen moments"⁸—has often been noted. But what needs emphasis is that they occur not only with varying degrees of frequency from novel to novel but in a wide variety of uses. For example, the stillness with motion experienced as Lena Grove waits for the Armstid wagon early in Light in August conveys chiefly ripeness and placidity—it is an essentially Edenic moment—whereas in Go Down, Moses Ike McCaslin's "frozen moments" often mark experiences of mystical exaltation, awe or insight, while the tableau of Jewel mastering his horse in As I Lay Dying is a concentration of sublimated love and fury. Sanctuary is particularly full of such episodes of dreamlike retarded motion or stasis; but, even more important, despite subtle differences of effect among them, they are almost all nightmarishly terrifying.

These moments of fear-infused stasis that convey the sense of impotence of nightmare begin on the first pages with that still and threatening two-hour pause, broken only by an occasional bird call or the sound from the highway, during which Horace squats before the danger of Popeye at the spring. They appear repeatedly in the experience of Temple Drake and, incidentally, help to create a degree of identification with her that is sometimes overlooked. Especially at the Frenchman's place, Temple seems almost constantly in motion that yet remains terrifyingly fixed; she seems constantly wheeling to flee from one room to another and back again, yet remains in one place, in the circle of the house, cowering in the circle of her fear: "Still running her bones turned to "Without ceasing to run she appeared to pause" (p. 56, ceasing appeared run pause" she and see p. 49), her face "fixed in that cringing grimace" of placating terror (p. 57). At one point she seems to stand still, helplessly watching "herself run out of her body, out of one slipper" (p. 109, and see p. 77). Other examples occur in the rigid tension of Temple as she cringes against the porch door (p. 76) or at the corner of the kitchen stove (p. 60), lies stiff on the bed as others muse in the darkness beyond (pp. 91, 94-5, and cf. pp. 81, 84), or thrashes impotently on the corn shuck mattress at Ruby's touch (p. 96). Especially as Temple retells it to Horace, that whole evening becomes a nightmare of strange pause in action and of active fantasizing without action. During the frenetic succession of transformations which Temple fantasizes as escapes from Popeye, she lies, seemingly without breathing, paralyzed—at one point she imagines herself dead in a coffin—even when her somehow impersonally frightened skin jerks before Popeye's cold moving touch. Popeye's whole visit in the darkness is an action shrouded, dreamlike, and, of course, incomplete. So too a sense of horrible, helpless lassitude pervades the atmosphere at Miss Reba's when Temple arrives. In the shuttered brothel into which light leaks with "a protracted weariness like a vitiated backwater beyond sunlight" (p. 172), Temple lies frightened, her blood seeping, and listens to the ticking of the clock or the watch, and the sounds outside her room are remote and strangely threatening as in nightmare. Even more pointedly applicable is the rape scene itself. The whole sequence is strange, dazed and still; action seems extremely remote, thus unreal; and sound appears suspended: "… it was as though sound and silence had become inverted" (pp. 121-122). Temple sits first in helpless paralysis, "her hands limp and palm-up on her lap" and, as the chapter closes, again lies "thrashing" in one place in the terrified impotence of motion which is non-motion.

The intense, choked horror of nightmare is also conveyed in the "silent" screams of the novel, in the stasis of Temple's long, unuttered "hopeless" cry as she rides with Popeye, "her mouth open and the half chewed mass of bread and meat lying upon her tongue" (p. 169) and in the scream which she finally utters in the rape scene, "like hot silent bubbles into the bright silence" (p. 122). The sense of stifled scream underlies almost all her experiences, until she begins to glory in her Memphis life—at which point she herself becomes part of the nightmare of others, particularly of Horace. And the soundless scream continues into the fiery tableau of Goodwin's lynching in which everything seems "soundless" and dreamlike, including the screams of a man burned by the oil from his exploding can (p. 355). In Faulkner only the castration of Joe Christmas in Light in August, with its background sound of the screaming siren like a searing iron upon raw nerves, may be said to evoke equally the feeling of intense paralyzed horror. Indeed it might not be very far wrong to describe the whole experience of agonized, stifled and unresolved terror in the novel as a kind of long soundless scream.

Even the courtroom scene subscribes to the dominant pattern. Once more Temple sits "hands… motionless, palm-up on her lap," "lax-ankled" in "motionless slippers" above a crowd in which the faces become "white and pallid as the floating bellies of dead fish" (p. 341). In a great gap of silence, Judge Drake's slow progress up the aisle is followed by the "slow gaping of the small white faces" to where Temple sits blank-eyed and immobile (p. 346). The whole scene is like the slow motion of bad dreams; and through it runs the fearful enormity of Temple's lies and the triumph of injustice. Before that enormity Horace himself seems paralyzed into impotence.

The complex of stasis or slow-motion and helpless honor which creates the effect of nightmare is also repeatedly conveyed in many smaller scenes and images. For example, it appears in little in the images of cigarette smoke drifting slowly past the viciousness of Popeye's face; in the picture of Ruby's sick child with "its curled hands above its head in the attitude of one crucified" (p. 160); in Temple's remembering the tableau of a group of co-eds poised threateningly about one frightened girl, "their eyes like knives" (p. 182); in Temple's encounter with the rat staring "eye to eye" (p. III) ; in the one-handed, empty-faced clock at Miss Reba's which Temple watches to the "faint rasping sounds" of window shades (p. 177); even in the image of the wheel of Gowan's car spinning in the suddenly ominous silence after the accident (p. 45) or in the gruesome slow motion of Red's corpse rolling out of its casket (p. 299).

For that matter, the ostensibly ordinary, like the half-masticated gob of sandwich in the middle of Temple's unuttered scream, functions to accent the nightmare. Outside the central dark dream of Sanctuary, men pitch coins in front of the courthouse yard and crowds move about the square, "people buying comfortable things to take home and eat at quiet tables" (p. 197). The "normalcy" of the lives of Belle and Narcissa, which has a kind of horror of its own, helps to sharpen the larger nightmare of which they are unconscious. The somewhat overextended episode of the barber apprentices wandering blindly on the edge of adult evil serves by contrast to point up the dream horror and yet provides a change of pace that helps ultimately to sustain the horror which might otherwise pall. Even the comedy of Red's macabre funeral is a sort of porter-at-the-gate interlude; for the humor, which appears at first sight a departure from the pattern, contains chilling overtones which actually return us to it.

Indeed, the very prevalence of this atmosphere helps partially to clarify what are sometimes regarded as perplexing illogicalities in Sanctuary: Why doesn't Temple just escape into the woods at Goodwin's? Why on the trip to Memphis doesn't she slip away from Popeye at the gas station? And why doesn't Horace question Temple at the trial? Although there are others, one answer lies in the nightmare pattern of the book. As in nightmare, helplessly caught in stasis, they cannot do otherwise. The very fact that they do not do these perhaps expected things actually contributes to the atmosphere of horrible dream. The pattern also helps to answer questions about the title. The sense of helpless exposure, without sanctuary, deepens its irony.

Although more evidence will shortly be offered, enough has perhaps already been said to support the view, first, that images and actions of a special kind of nightmare—of terror-stricken impotence, of dreamlike fearful paralysis or near paralysis—do pervade the novel and, secondly, that, for the most part, they do not carry much by way of special implication about the modern world. What is particularly modern about Temple rigid upon the chattering shucks of the mattress, about the visits in darkness, about the lynching scene, or, for that matter, about any of the sequences presented? Even in the extended dreamlike hiatus of Popeye and Horace at the spring, the emphasis on the ugliness of modern mechanization in the description of Popeye is a fringe effect in respect to the central impression of a chilling mesmerizing pause. The matter of the novel is recognizably modern, but it contributes chiefly as a sort of imagistic base—what Faulkner might well have called a "tool"¹⁰—to the major effect of nightmare.

It is not that the comment on modernity is not there, then, but that Faulkner does more. To make Horace, Popeye, and Temple simply the arid twentieth-century figures suggested by the word "wasteland" is to reduce the night-mare. If modern aridity is a part of the point, the special kind of horror in the book also goes beyond this effect and beyond any simple application to social evils of the modern world. Indeed, it is difficult in a way to apply this nightmare—this sense of terrorized impotence—to the view of the novel as a condemnation simply of modern social ills. In the recent past at least, the very modernity of these evils would have suggested not fearful paralysis, but potential for change. Emotionally, the book's kind of nightmare does not blend very directly with such ills as may after all be listed, analyzed, and presumably resolved with daylight clarity. It is rather to a universal, cosmic terror that the nightmare of Sanctuary is most essentially related.

This view is supported not only by the very recurrence of the images and actions already cited but also by further analysis of some of them and by a series of other examples of the nightmare pattern which are clearly cosmic in implication. And these are moments in the novel which always cry out for attention—moments which, because of the reverberations they set in motion, insist on their large symbolic significance.

Pregnant with such meaning is the heaven-tree outside the jail. Perhaps, as William Van O'Connor thoughtfully suggests, the tree reflects "the evil inherent in human nature,"¹¹ but it is much more likely that this is true of the jail than of the tree which is, after all, not made by man. (One thinks here also of Faulkner's jail in The Hamlet, the walls sweating with years of accumulated human injustice.) But whether the tree speaks of something in man or not, surely it evokes even more a feeling about the universe beyond man. In another novel its trumpet-shaped blooms might well connote not merely the final Judgment Day, as O'Connor says, but even the angelic trumpets of the heavenly hosts and thus a possibility of heavenly good. But here these portents of heavenly fulfillment make only a severely ironic cosmic comment. For the pulsating heaven-tree throws an ominous "splotched shadow" upon the bar-slotted wall behind which lie not only the guilty but the innocent. As in nightmare, the shadow of this heaven symbol "shuddered and pulsed monstrously in scarce any wind" (p. 148). The effect is all stasis and menace. Only an existential fear is inspired by the "heaven" blooms that fall and become dead, slippery smears on the sidewalk. Not cosmic justice and order, but chilling and dark cosmic threat are communicated by Faulkner's handling of the nightmarish heaven-tree.

In the image of the one-armed and therefore slowly moving clock in Temple's room at Miss Reba's, it is as though Faulkner were again pausing to emphasize. This blank-faced symbol, initially an image of quiet dying, of "moribund time" (p. 180), becomes increasingly a chilling reminder of the universal menace. In the night, it becomes the world paralyzed within the cosmic whirl, a "disc suspended in nothingness, the original chaos," and then a "crystal ball holding in its still and cryptic depths the ordered chaos of the intricate and shadowy world upon whose scarred flanks the old wounds whirl onward at dizzy speed into darkness lurking with new disasters" (p. 181). The central suggestion is that of impotent exposure to a huge and enveloping threat. Even the surrounding "nothingness" is not absence of threat but rather a frightening "original chaos." The imagery and diction are full of menace, not only in "chaos," but in "scarred flanks," "wounds," "darkness," "lurking," "disasters." The whirling, "dizzy speed" actually emphasizes the sense of impotence, for it suggests our helplessness, the impossibility of controlling the motion. In this passage, the "ordered chaos" found in the "cryptic depths" of a "shadowy world" offers no comfort. For any notion of real order is dissolved not only by the words "shadowy" and "cryptic" but by the image of the globe whirling without progress in a black universe of constantly "new disasters." Within the larger chaos, any global order is illusory, "shadowy"; and "ordered chaos" is, hopelessly, still chaos. The phrase is frightening in its ironic implications.

The globe reappears as a principal image in Horace Benbow's thought on his return from visiting Temple in the Memphis brothel, and, again, with other images, it helps to convey the terrifying stasis of nightmare in a cosmic dimension. To review the references briefly: In language which echoes significantly that quoted earlier, Horace wishes all the participants, including himself, dead, "cauterized out of the old and tragic flank of the world" (p. 265), and he thinks then "of the expression he had once seen in 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. 266). Like the clock in Temple's room at Miss Reba's, which is also described as "mirrorlike" (p. 180), the vast globe is reflected in the little. Horace also sees the past few days as "a dream filled with all the nightmare shapes it had taken him forty-three years to invent." And, consequently, as he walks toward the house, the insect sounds of the night seem "the chemical agony of a world left stark and dying above the tide-edge of the fluid in which it lived and breathed" (p. 267). In a landscape of nightmare, "The moon stood overhead, but without light; the earth lay beneam, without darkness." After he enters, he thinks of the night sounds as "the friction of the earth on its axis" which may decide "to turn on or to remain forever still: a motionless ball in cooling space, across which a thick smell of honeysuckle writhed like cold smoke" (p. 267).

The images in this interior monologue merge effects of frustrating stasis or near paralysis and of chill and horror on a cosmic scale. The circles of moon and earth stand or lie eerily static, and both microcosmic eye and macro-cosmic earth turn into cold, "motionless" globes; a world dying but fixed cannot reach the vanishing source of its life and turns into a "motionless ball." Where there is motion, it is impeded and slow. Rather like paralyzed action, it occurs only with nightmarish difficulty, with "friction" and by "writhing." A sense of strange cold in the spring night helps to create the growing shiver of fear: "Cooling indignation" suggests a series of images at the end of which the empty eyes and their reflected worlds turn completely cold; a chill surrounds the planet over which "cold smoke" moves and around which is only "cooling space." It is the cosmic bad dream. The nightmare which Horace has by his sheltered existence tried to deny for "forty-three years" has come alive. Just before he calls up the memory of the eyes of the dead, he thinks, at first sight somewhat cryptically, "Perhaps it is upon the instant that we realise, admit, that there is a logical pattern to evil, that we the …" (pp. 265-266). But in the context, the "logical pattern to evil" is simply the fact of the universal nightmare; when we recognize that everything is "evil," that this is the "logical pattern"—that is, the only pattern which logic permits us to discover and accept—then we must give up. And thus the position of Horace's fantasy at the end of this chapter also becomes explicable, for it is consistent that the sequence should end with his nightmare vision of a female, "bound" and impotent on the flat car, hurtled through a terrifying blackness and a stasis of roaring sound to strange peace as she swings "lazily" and distantly, indifferently, in the sky (p. 268). It is a symbolic moment, pinpointing much that has preceded, for she has passed through the dark nightmare of existence and, to use Horace's earlier phrasing, has been "cauterized out of the old and tragic flank of the world."

Even the old man, Goodwin's father, contributes to the sense of universal nightmare. Blind and deaf, slobbering over his food very much like Flaubert's old duc de Laverdiére in Madame Bovary, the older Goodwin epitomizes, from one point of view, the horror of human decay, the effects of Time. In this way of looking, he becomes man as impotent victim of the cosmic condition. But, with his yellow-clotted eyes and tapping stick that seem to pursue the cringing Temple (e.g., pp. 60, 104), he also performs a function rather like that of the old blind beggar with the running eye sockets and the clattering stick who haunts Emma Bovary.¹² In both novels, the individual character's sense of being pursued enlarges until the reader understands that the blind men symbolize a universal threat. Thus in the heavy silence immediately before the rape, Temple imagines first that she shrieks at the absent "old man with the yellow clots for eyes." But, as she lies helplessly "tossing and thrashing" in one place, she ends by screaming only to two blind and revolting orbs, "the two phlegm-clots above her" (p. 122). Suddenly the disembodied, unseeing and indifferent "clots" expand in dimension and implication; suddenly they also are like globes. They make cosmic this moment of agonizing dread and furious powerlessness. Sightless and disgusting, they offer a dreadful comment on the relationship of the cosmic to man.

In the climactic depiction of the inferno in which Goodwin burns, the paralyzed horror of dreams occurs again; and again the resonances are ultimately vast. At the center of the "circle" of humanity which Horace has entered, the huge flame blazes; "but from the central mass of fire there came no sound at all. It was now indistinguishable, the flames whirling in long and thunderous plumes from a white-hot mass …" (p. 355). Horace cannot hear Goodwin. He cannot hear the men. He cannot "hear the fire, though it still swirled upward unabated, as though it were living upon itself, and soundless: a voice of fury like in a dream, roaring silently out of a peaceful void" (p. 355).

"Like in a dream." The sequence is surely as clearly nightmarish as any. The sense of sound cut off, the strange and dreadful deafness of it all, evokes the suppressive effect of nightmare, as if a dreamer's scream can be neither uttered nor heard. The very silence of the auditory images—"thunderous," "voice of fury," and "roaring"—recreates the impossibilities of bad dreams and makes these ordinarily ominous sounds even more threatening. And, as in nightmare, the scene builds an effect of stasis in which powerlessness and enormous dread fuse. Indeed, the moment is one of tremendous and unusually portentous pause, again as though to mark it for significance. It is as if the world had stopped and the tableau of circle around burning center contained all existence. The bonfire becomes the mesmerizing conflagration at the heart of everything. Before it Horace stands immobilized and powerless. Images of the disembodied "voice of fury" (echo of a fearful but now impersonal Voice out of the whirlwind?) and of an ironically "peaceful void" also add huge dimensions to this nightmare. No vast Power intervenes in the barbarous immolation of Goodwin: there is only the frightening "voice" and vast emptiness. The peacefulness of the "void" is, in the context, ironically the equivalent of indifference; it is an extension of the fearful silence of the whole scene.

One generally ignored sequence epitomizes this major experience of paralyzed horror before the nightmare universe: In their fear Miss Reba's vicious poodles express in little the very heart of this feeling in the novel. In a dreamlike tension of "terrific silence," they crouch beneath Temple's bed, static in fright before the possibility of a senseless and murderous chaos—"the flatulent monotony of their sheltered lives snatched up without warning by an incomprehensible moment of terror and fear of bodily annihilation at the very hands [Miss Reba's] which symbolised by ordinary the licensed tranquility of their lives" (p. 186). Snarling and afraid, "crouching there in the dark against the wall" (p. 184) or "crouching against the wall under the bed in that rigid fury of terror and despair" (p. 190), they express, in their impotent fear before threatened annihilation by their ostensibly secure but now erratic universe, the essence of the human nightmare. Although this picture of the cringing animals appears at first sight a casual and unintegrated episode, it is perhaps no coincidence that it occurs at the very center of the book.

It is also striking that the experiences of both Temple and Horace reflect to a degree the symbolic pattern established by Miss Reba's poodles. Horace moves similarly from the secure, if blind, regularity of ordinary living to his exposure, in moments already described, to the night-mare of dark irrationality. Not only his expectation of order and justice in man and man's law, but also his comfortable belief in a just cosmic order is destroyed. Like the uninitiated and ineffectual Mrs. Compson in The Sound and the Fury, who exclaims that God would not permit her to be hurt because she is a lady, Horace some-what fatuously tries to comfort Ruby with the notion of a polite cosmic order. He tells her that, although God may be "foolish" occasionally, "at least He's a gentleman" (p. 337). It is not, however, very long after that Horace, seeing the signs of spring, thinks, "You'd almost think there was some purpose to it" (p. 350). Significantly, in our last view of Horace, he has retreated into the shell of his conventional home—beneath his bed, so to speak—and, upon Belle's repeated insistence, is about to "lock the back door" (pp. 358, 360), locking behind him the fearful universe. The paralysis inspired by nightmare becomes his permanent condition.

Temple too undergoes a passage from security to night-mare. And between the helpless animals and Temple crouching in a corner of the kitchen or against the porch door of the old mansion, cringing in the bedroom or in the loft, rigid and trembling on chattering shucks or tossing and thrashing beneath the yellow eyes, the parallel is particularly strong. The lines which describe the dogs frozen in fear are immediately and perhaps pointedly followed by a description of Temple "cringing" and "thrashing furiously" but helplessly before Popeye's advance (pp. 190-191). Her journey through the horror impresses the reader, however, a good deal more than it does Temple, whose ultimate response is rather clearly superficial.

The role of the third principal, Popeye, does not, of course, follow the some pattern. Edmond Volpe aptly describes that function when he calls him "a link between human and cosmic evil."¹³ Almost all the way through, Popeye is another aspect of the freezing menace of the nightmare. He is the gangsterism of the twenties raised to symbolic power. He thus resembles remarkably the gangster agents of a frighteningly accidental universe in Hemingway's "The Killers"—Faulkner may well have been influenced by the earlier story—and foreshadows, moreover, the cosmic chill evoked by Ionesco's killer in Tueur Sans Gages. But, as Volpe adds, in the last chapter Popeye is also seen as "victim of blind cruel fate."¹⁴ As the agent of nightmare becomes the human victim, he contributes significantly to the sense of cosmic irrationality. This is not to say that the author has made it easy for the reader to accept the switch of Popeye from one role to the other. He hasn't. Although thematically appropriate, the planting of Popeye in the world of men is too sudden, proportionately too brief, and (despite some earlier signs) too incompletely foreshadowed for the reader to accept. Technically, it fails.

Miss Reba's dogs also snap "viciously at one another" (p. 175), and in this they also seem almost to be commenting on the behavior of men within the nightmare world of the novel. Such a picture of men as vicious, snarling and even mad in their relationship emerges from the respectable cruelty of Narcissa, the calculating ruthlessness of Eustace Graham, the aggressive irrationality in the perverted lust of the mob even before the lynching, and the administration of justice in the trial and condemnation of Goodwin; it is reflected in Ruby's belief that Horace, like other men, must be helping her for what he can get out of it (pp. 330-331) and in the old mad woman's judgment that "the good folks live" in jail (p. 326). This complex of human viciousness, irrationality, and injustice becomes part of the total nightmare of the novel; it is itself terrifying and blends easily with the larger horror. And especially in the context of the greater fear, it becomes a most bitter comment on man. But it does not by itself produce that sense of deep horror and paralysis that suffuses the book. The purely human appears the lesser nightmare, a little culpable world within the devastatingly larger immensity.

To see Sanctuary, then, only as a criticism of modern society or even as an indignant satire on man's morality is, true as these views are, to miss much of Faulkner's vision. From the shudders of Gothic make-believe, the book moves into the pervasive horrors of authentic night-mare, that sense of clotting stasis, of cringing impotence and fear before threat, which finally dominates the novel. The paralyzed horror of ordinary nightmare, perhaps psycho-sexual in origin, expands and deepens here into the impotent terror before the nightmare of existence. As in great tragedy, the terror is not simply at the human but also at the cosmic condition; and if in Sanctuary Faulkner fails to offer the resolutions of great tragedy so that we never wake to real daylight, he also offers no pat solutions or forced redemptions. In later novels, he moves increasingly toward resolutions; and, significantly, images of the constellations begin then to wheel in seasonal order above men's little world. But the truth at this moment in the constant flux of Faulkner's development is the universal dream-horror of existence.

¹ That Faulkner did extensively revise the book to meet the demands of his artistic conscience is clear not only from his introduction to the 1932 Modern Library edition and repeated statements before audiences in Japan and Virginia, but from the researches of Linton Massey, "Notes on the Unrevised Galleys of Faulkner's Sanctuary," Studies in Bibliography, VII (1956), 195-208; James Meriwether, "Some Notes on the Text of Faulkner's Sanctuary," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, LV (Third Quarter, 1961), 192-206; Michael Millgate, '"A Fair Job': A Study of Faulkner's Sanctuary," A Review of English Literature, IV (October, 1963), 47-56, and The Achievement of William Faulkner (New York, 1966), pp. 113-117, 123.

² For discussions of Sanctuary as an attack on a mechanistic society or on modern immorality or explicitly as a Waste Land comment on modern life, see, for example, Wyndham Lewis, "William Faulkner: Moralist with a Corn Cob," Men Without Art (London, 1934), p. 63; George Marion O'Donnell, "Faulkner's Mythology," in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (East Lansing, 1960), pp. 88-89; Malcolm Cowley, The Portable Faulkner (New York, 1946), p. 15; William Van O'Connor, The Tangled Fire of William Faulkner (Minneapolis, 1954), pp. 58-62; Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study, rev. ed. (New York, 1962), pp. 193, 199; David L. Frazier, "Gothicism in Sanctuary: The Black Pall and the Crap Table," Modern Fiction Studies, II (Autumn, 1956), 114-124; Hyatt H. Waggoner, William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World (Lexington, 1959), pp. 91-100; Douglas Cole, "Faulkner's Sanctuary: Retreat from Responsibility," Western Humanities Review, XIV (Summer, 1960), 291-298; Peter Swiggart, The Art of Faulkner's Novels (Austin, 1962), pp. 29-31; Millgate, '"A Fair Job,'" pp. 54-62, and Achievement, p. 119; Lawrance Thompson, William Faulkner: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York, 1963), pp. 99-116; Olga Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge, 1964), pp. 103-114; Frederick J. Hoffman, William Faulkner, 2nd ed. (New York, 1966), p. 66; Melvin Backman, Faulkner: The Major Years (Bloomington, 1966), p. 177. Waggoner, by considering that the Waste Land mood may be related to the view that there is "no meaning in nature, outside of man" (p. 97), and Thompson, by seeing the society of Sanctuary as a perversion of divinely planned order, offer in their analyses a metaphysical dimension.

³ Critics who have noted, though for the most part the larger, cosmic implications of Faulkner's novel are André Malraux, "A Preface for Faulkner's Sanctuary," Yale French Studies, No. 10 (Autumn, 1952), 92-94; Rabi, "Faulkner and the Exiled Generation," in William Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (East Lansing, 1954), pp. 132-133; Maurice E. Coindreau, "William Faulkner in France," Yale French Studies, No. 10 (Autumn, 1952), 88-89; Karl E. Zink, "Flux and the Frozen Moment: The Imagery of Stasis in Faulkner's Prose," PMLA, LXXI (June, 1956), 289; John Longley, Jr., The Tragic Mask: A Study of Faulkner's Heroes (Chapel Hill, 1963), pp. 102-103; Jean Pouillon, "Time and Destiny in Faulkner," in Faulkner, ed. R. P. Warren (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), p. 79; Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven, 1963), pp. 127-138; and Edmond L. Volpe, A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner (New York, 1964), pp. 140-151, are primarily concerned with the novel as a discovery of the universal evil in man; Volpe, however, goes farther to see a "connection between human and cosmic evil" (p. 150).

⁴Faulkner at Nagano, ed. R. A. Jelliffe (Tokyo, 1956), p. 66. See also and

⁵ "William Faulkner's Sanctuary: An Analysis," Saturday Review, XI (October 20, 1934), 218, 224-226. See also

⁶ Ernest Jones (On the Nightmare, London, 1949, p. 20) concludes that two of the three chief characteristics of nightmare are "agonizing dread" and "conviction of helpless paralysis." (His third is a physical sensation of "weight at the chest," which would seem almost an aspect of the second.)

⁷ For other parallels to the Gothic novel, see David L. Frazier, "Gothicism in Sanctuary," cited above.

⁸ See, e.g., R.P. Warren, "William Faulkner" in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, p. 124. See also and

⁹Sanctuary, Modern Library edition (New York, 1932), p. 44. All references to Sanctuary in the text of this article are to this edition.

¹⁰ See, e.g., "William Faulkner" in Writers at Work, p. 132, and Faulkner in the University, pp. 17, 68.

¹¹Tangled Fire, p. 59.

¹² In Sanctuary the echoes of Flaubert's Madame Bovary are very strong and suggest that Faulkner was writing to a degree under its influence. Faulkner even refers directly to the black fluid that runs from Emma's mouth (p. 6), and the irony of the "four china nymphs" supporting the clock in the brothel (p. 177) parallels the irony of the simpering little bronze cupid on the clock in Emma and Leon's love nest.

¹³A Reader's Guide, p. 149.

¹⁴A Reader's Guide, p. 150.