SOURCE: DeShong, Scott. “Towards an Ethics of Reading Faulkner's Sanctuary.” Journal of Narrative Technique 25, no. 3 (fall 1995): 238-57.

[In the following essay, DeShong attempts to provide a framework for reading Sanctuary “for human and humane value.”]

In this reading of William Faulkner's Sanctuary, I will interrogate the idea of character in narrative and examine a problematic relationship between character and ethics. In doing so, I will gesture toward an ethics of reading that might avoid manipulation of the reader, of the text, and of what in a reading experience the reader takes to be substantive human feeling. I can make this gesture only by approaching ethics through close attention to the narrative text. I dispense with an introductory framework of theoretical argument because I mean to move toward an ethics of reading, not to delineate such an ethics: indeed, the latter would transgress ethics itself, insofar as ethics is the continually incomplete task of humanely considering the other. From this standpoint, ethics involves the always incomplete work of empathy (which is distinguishable from sympathy in that empathy implies no correlation between determinable subjectivities). I am influenced by the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, who argues that we must base ethics on our attention to what he describes as the infinite concreteness of the human other—the full dimensions, which cannot be totalized, of the other's experience.¹ Faulkner's narratives, particularly the more involute ones, are known for their ability to problematize their own structures and movements, and it is through such problematics that we may work toward concrete humanity that escapes and exceeds the contours of narrative and of character. I have chosen Sanctuary because it confronts us with the suffering of the other and with various kinds of violence done to the other; I approach the ethics of reading through a novel that has garnered, for such confrontations, much derogatory criticism.² My main purpose is to provoke and engage questions concerning how we can read for human and humane value, questions we must pursue for the sake of our self-awareness and sense of purpose in literary criticism.

WRITING AND READING BEYOND CHARACTER

In his discussion of Sanctuary as an American Gothic text, Eric Sundquist notes the novel's

fascination with flat, blurred, or metonymic characterization—in fact, its denial that it deals with characters at all, but rather deals throughout in things, in allegories of modernism, in the style of a cartoon.

(54)

I do not find this point fully applicable to the novel, since we can develop ways of reading character in the narrative, of reading in the text character and of cultural ethos (terms implicated with each other at least since Aristotle was first translated into English). But I agree with Sundquist's gist that Faulkner's writing in Sanctuary tends to rub out character. Humanity in the text emerges in a sort of fascination for reading, to cite André Malraux's and Michel Gresset's depictions of Sanctuary: the fascination is a “bewitching” (etymologically), a mystery, involving a confrontation of humanity which appears to lack determinate contours or nature. Insofar as we may take the material of a text itself to be something human, Faulkner's description of writing (referring here to The Wild Palms) suggests that the human is not fully apprehensible in terms of contours or nature:

To me, it was written just as if I had sat on the one side of a wall and the paper was on the other and my hand with the pen thrust through the wall and writing not only on invisible paper but in pitch darkness too, so that I could not even know if the pen still wrote on paper or not.

(Selected Letters 106)

Faulkner depicts textuality with imagery of darkness and illegibility, rendering an appropriate context for approaching humanity that is weak in contours, that is difficult to naturalize.

Many critics have noted a darkness and a richness in Faulkner's writing which to an extent are due to his diegetic narrative style.³ As he blends focalizations and points of view, and shifts among them, he confounds attempts to locate objective positions or to draw reliable assimilations of narrative elements, i.e., he confounds attempts to illuminate or clarify narrative truth. Begun just after he had written The Sound and the Fury and only finally revised after As I Lay Dying had been published, Sanctuary belongs to Faulkner's early experiments with slippages of narrative and voice (Karl 351-52). For instance, the night scenes in the novel at the derelict Old Frenchman Place shift among focalizations without consolidating in a central point of view (chapters II and VII-IX). Amid the darkness of the later grouping of these scenes, the shifting and the male characters' blending, drunken voices are key in developing disorientation and fear for Temple Drake, the seventeen-year-old whom Popeye—an impotent gangster—eventually rapes with a corn cob and then abducts. We get fairly coherent images of her surroundings at first, but as the day wanes and the men begin drinking, the narrative draws more and more upon horror story conventions of fragmented, nonsubjective voice and point of view. Temple's vulnerability is only partly due to specific threats, such as Van's repeated advances: her fear emerges largely as an effect of a lack of reliable contours of character and event. Ruby Goodwin, the only other woman present, becomes her stay against disorientation, remaining with her until daylight (65); once the two separate, Temple again suffers events that occur without clear delineations.⁴ As I will discuss further below, Temple is the novel's primary sufferer and also the character through whom we most recognize a weakness of human and narrative contours. Indeed, the weakness of contours foregrounds the amorphous substance of her suffering.

While Temple exemplifies being lost in the cracks of narrative and voice, Horace Benbow's rambling speech and thought emphasize the cracks, beginning with his drunken discourse in the first of the dark scenes. His compulsive, semi-analytical language, which sounds “crazy” to Ruby (9-10), sets a tone that persists into the collage of voices in the later group of dark scenes, when he is not present. It is especially in his rambling that in Sanctuary we read the familiar Faulknerian layers of voice, more than we see scenes: our reading is emphatically reading, and we become literally an audience insofar as we hear the text as voice-over or as voices in our heads. The tone of Horace's early language persists in his later thoughts, through which it tends to dominate the narrative, and his rambling sometimes emerges in the third-person narrating voice when he is not present. Horace's idiom is refined, the sentences clear and the diction precise: just as he writes, he speaks neatly. But as depicted in the letter to his wife that would state his reasons for divorce—a letter “written neatly and illegibly over”—his language does not attain coherent logic, but rather emerges disordered and illegible (207). Horace's voice is a good example of what Frederick R. Karl calls Faulkner's technique of writing “aslant” or “hitting off-key,” creating “the sense of place which is not quite place, the sense of time which is not quite time” (354; 365).

Coming early in the narrative—that is, in the published version, as opposed to the early full manuscript—the dark scenes help set the main characters in relation to each other as the reader develops relations with them. Horace and Temple first come into proximity, for the reader, by both partaking of the disordered discourse of these early scenes. The result, as indeed obtains between most characters in the novel, is an indistinct relationship, but one that is nevertheless tangible. André Bleikasten notes that “characters' words, thoughts, and feelings” are less the focus for reading than “the intricate web of signs written into the novel through [the characters'] postures, gestures, and positions”—signs that have “no fixed meaning.” We have a largely corporeal diegesis that disrupts the notion of character or of mind as comprehensive of the human person, therein also disrupting intersubjective communication. “The physical has ceased to gesture toward the meta-physical, just as it has ceased to reflect the psychological,” Bleikasten notes: Faulkner's moments of human textuality appear signs emphatically, with “no depths awaiting beneath the surfaces” and no order by which moments of human nature may fall into objective relation with one another (“Terror” 18-19). As we fail to comprehend contours of human character, we find “the body in its opaque inertia and the contingency of its being-in-the-world” (27-28).

Throughout Sanctuary, imagery of the body brings to reading a sense of palpable and opaque humanity. Bleikasten notes, for example, a preponderance of imagery of mouths. There are fewer uses of mouths than of eyes, as we would expect, but a relatively high number considering the common predominance of the imagery of eyes in fiction. (As I will discuss later concerning Temple, key images of eyes in Sanctuary are of opaque ones; also, with Popeye's name, the novel presents the eye as a physical organ, signifying both a missing eye and leering vision, vision not of a self-possessed eye but of an organ strained in fascination.) The emphasis on Temple's mouth is notable, on the mouth of the sufferer who cannot use it to communicate: images of her mouth emphasize its carnality and its bluntly cosmeticized presence. The emphasis on the mouth presents “the organ of dumbfounded amazement rather than articulate speech,” in Bleikasten's terms (“Terror” 24): the mouth does not bring the logocentric, metaphysical presence of character. As “one of the body's gates” (23), but not a supposedly transparent one like the eye, the mouth—“the hole made flesh” (25)—becomes a metaphor for human being which opens up, which is desirous, and the extent of which is unfathomable. Bleikasten continues:

This, then, is what the mouth finally comes down to: a yawning gap, an unfillable hole, the orifice of nothingness. In Sanctuary the organ of human need and greed turns into an organ of destruction and death, and death, conversely, appears as a voracious, all-engulfing mouth.

(26)

I cite Bleikasten's remarks mainly to extend for reading the imagery of the mouth—that is, to emphasize vocal diegesis over the purview of the eye, to find in the mouth a metaphor that supplements the metaphysics of vision and of the supposedly transparent dimensions of character. (Mouth imagery similarly extends to reading in the common figure of “devouring” a text.) The palpability and the inexhaustible openness of human affect come together in the image of the mouth, an image which does not order the richness of humanity that it presents, revealing human contour or nature, but which rather presents human existence as an opaque and dangerous locus of expression and absorption. That is, the fleshiness of the mouth is an internal, disruptive supplement of the supposedly transcendent logic of human speaking and seeing. Baffling as the mouth, Faulkner's narrative voice inhabits and swamps the locus of vision, emerging there as a darkness and richness that opens reading to material language. There is no closure for this language: as it presents palpable humanity to reading, it reveals at the same time the impossibility of full apprehension of humanity.

ETHOS AS REGULATION

While Faulkner's text resists metaphysics of vision and character at the level of narration, it has some narrative contours, nevertheless. And for almost all readers' habits of reading, it will have characters. We need not, and practically cannot, discard the use of character as a heuristic, or for that matter discard any particular narrative categories (one of which is the reader). Indeed, it is mainly through a reading of emergent character that we can examine the ways reading deals with, and commonly naturalizes, humanity. In the narrative of Sanctuary, the voice of Horace—even with its incoherence—is a distinct moment of character insofar as it is a discernible locus of ethos, and it is also a discourse that itself plays out and problematizes strategies of establishing character. Through Horace as a character and as a force that exerts a will to character, we may examine how ethics as it relates to character becomes a regulatory discourse, but also a discourse that must deal with and suffer from internal problems and passions. In examining relations between character and the concreteness of the other, we find concrete desires and fears within character that are part of its structure, so that the contradictions involved in these matters of affect destabilize the structure of character.

Horace represents the ethos of a cultural order in his heritage of old Southern aristocracy, in his British education, and in his proprietorship of the distinguished law practice left by his father. When the innocent Lee Goodwin, the bootlegger in charge of the Old Frenchman Place, is indicted for shooting Tommy (Goodwin's lackey, killed by Popeye incidentally to the assault on Temple), Horace takes up his legal defense “for the sake of its being right,” adding that it is “necessary to the harmony of things that it be done” (219) so as to uphold “law, justice, civilization” (105). The particular civilization for which Horace stands, however, exhibits a stark, cold ethos that he disclaims. His sister Narcissa best exemplifies this ethos, which mainly entails the society's will to maintain the order of civilization. Maintaining order means securing Goodwin's conviction, regardless of whether he has committed the crime, as discipline against the Prohibition-era liquor trade and as a reinforcement of class distinctions. Narcissa's foremost interest, however, is in keeping Horace, who has recently estranged himself from his wife, from embarrassing the family through divorce and/or involvement with Goodwin's wife, Ruby. The novel repeatedly emphasizes Narcissa's firmness in maintaining order, especially in the way her “cold, unbending voice” addresses Horace (144-45). She even secures his and Goodwin's defeat in the murder case by turning over the results of Horace's investigations to the prosecuting attorney (210).⁵

Distinguishing himself from the ethos of Narcissa and the town, Horace upbraids the townspeople for their “odorous and omnipotent sanctity” (145). His own moralistic character, in turn, depends upon his ability to regulate his own and others' concrete feelings, which he tries to achieve mainly through abstraction and idealization. Horace emphasizes his personal ethos particularly to resist the lure of sex: his self-fortifying remark, “you cannot haggle, traffic, with putrefaction,” is a pronouncement on sexuality (as well as on the bootlegging industry, 103). Indeed, he feels repulsion for his wife, whose sexuality he represents by the odor of the dripping shrimp he has customarily carried home for her dinner (11-12); throughout the novel, Horace shows repulsion concerning concrete sensations, mainly tactile and olfactory ones (Vickery 113-14). But he is deeply absorbed by the sexuality of his teenage stepdaughter, Little Belle, whose photograph he fawns upon when he is alone. His desire for her brings him to associate female sexuality with spring, as the “green snared promise of unease” (8). Also, innuendoes from Miss Jenny Sartoris help depict an undercurrent of passion in him, particularly a desire for Ruby which—fully self-regulated, without hope for consummation—helps drive his decision to defend Goodwin (87; 96).

Horace's conflicted relationship with his own emotions implicates him, beyond the cold ethos of Narcissa, in the more complex ethos of the townsmen who ultimately lynch Goodwin—who, in attacking Goodwin, exercise regulation of sexual energy. Sex becomes an explicit issue for the men with the revelation of Temple's molestation, at the end of the murder trial (when she arrives as a witness, sent by Popeye to lie that it was Goodwin who assaulted her). The townsmen act largely from their own desires, as is revealed in the remark that they protect their women because they “might need them ourselves” (236). A good demonstration of René Girard's theory of the scapegoat, the lynching of Goodwin is the townsmen's way of dealing with their own excessive or aberrant desires, subliminally working out their passions in the name of their ethos (they simultaneously work with their desire for liquor, sacrificing a bootlegger). When the prosecutor holds aloft in the courtroom the bloody corn cob with which Temple has been raped, it incites rage in the jury and the gallery that obscures the various technicalities of the murder trial (225). Reacting from their own misregulated desires, the townsmen seize the indicated perpetrator and inhabit the roles of “good men, these fathers and husbands,” in the prosecuting attorney's words. They take up, for Temple, pathos and moral rage: the prosecutor has told her they will “right your wrong for you” (226). The ritual immolation of Goodwin draws on the conflicted and opaque energies of its perpetrators, as the bonfire that kills him is “unabated, as if it were living upon itself” (234).

The tension and confusion of Horace's own desires persist for him until the end of the trial, when they resolve—if perhaps temporarily—once his legal case fails, and he succumbs both to the townsmen's involute ethos and Narcissa's more overt ethos of keeping one's house in order. His attempt to consolidate his own character first yields to the ethos of Narcissa, with whom he leaves the courthouse, as he knows she will return him in defeat to the marriage he has tried to abandon (231). Then, when the lynching obliterates the usefulness of suffering for Goodwin, in the same moment as it seals Horace's failure (obviating legal appeal), Horace succumbs to the apocalyptic moment that sublimates his and the townsmen's desires, succumbing to a peace past the catastrophe. The fire for him is “soundless: a voice of fury like in a dream, roaring silently out of a peaceful void” (234).

Moreover, the moralism Horace tries to articulate before this entails a desire for transcendence that itself brutally manages the human other as well as Horace's own passions. Toward a more cerebral resolution than he will find in the burning of Goodwin, Horace conjures narratives that tend toward apocalypse (etymologically “unconcealing”). As he travels by train in search of Temple and key information for his case, there emerges his perception of “bodies sprawled half into the aisle as though in the aftermath of a sudden and violent destruction, with dropped heads, open-mouthed, their throats turned profoundly upward as though waiting the stroke of knives.” The sense of immanent obliteration becomes more intense when he dozes and then wakes “among unshaven puffy faces washed lightly over as though with the paling ultimate stain of a holocaust” (132-33). Such visions, in the context of what Horace considers his moral duty, point to a metaphysical desire for annihilation of concrete humanity, including his own. Foreshadowing his swooning before Goodwin's burning body, these visions expand upon Horace's personal pathos and entail his acceptance of a broad sacrifice of living humanity, for the sake of abstract ethos.

A further example of Horace's desire to regulate humanity is his attempt to achieve resolution in the evocation of a death chamber, as a way of coming to terms with the possibility of “a logical pattern of evil,” after he has finally met Temple and witnessed her suffering. He offers that it would be better for all concerned with the trial to be dead; he recalls a “cooling” of “indignation” and a “fading” of “despair” in the eyes of the dead he has seen, moments that for him seem to follow recognition of a logic of evil. The chamber is for him a place wherein one may grasp a cathartic “single blotting instant between the indignation and the surprise” and perhaps see that the “only solution” is to have one's own being “cauterized out of the old and tragic flank of the world.” Horace views this scenario with himself being put to death along with all the others. But he distances himself from them as he continues to muse on obliteration, reflecting “we're all isolated” and following with images of personal rest that evoke solitude (175-76). Horace seeks a distance that would ease the difficulty of his fears and desires. And for the sake of purified ethical human being—for a coldness like Narcissa's—the moralist appears willing to obliterate his own and the others' concrete humanity.

FACING THE OTHER

Although we can read in Horace a manipulative regulation of humanity, through him we may also find Sanctuary's richest example of a confrontation of the concreteness of the other. During much of the novel, he seeks Temple as the key to his case, as his witness and as the narrative element that will put his world in order. He does not know that in seeking her, he approaches the site where the events that concern him have taken place, her body being the focal area near which the murder of Tommy has occurred and also the precise locus of the crime that will displace the murder's significance, both in the court's judgment of Goodwin and the townsmen's punishment of him (Horace has no sense, as he seeks her, that the sex crime has happened). In Tommy's absence, Temple is the crime's locus of violence, suffering, and pain, which become available for Horace's apprehension even though the crime remains vague in Temple's recapitulation to him at Miss Reba's brothel, where Popeye has sequestered her. Listening to the disordered chorus of Temple's memories, Horace unexpectedly confronts suffering that stands witness to both his own suffering—mainly, his suffering at the will of others (including Popeye, who has kept him prisoner also, 2-4)—and his own passion for a young woman, which involves his control of the concrete humanity of an other (in one instance, indeed, he physically restrains Little Belle, 9-10). In the witnessing that takes place between Horace and Temple, the narrative gestures toward concrete human experience and emphasizes that it cannot be naturalized. Examining this confrontation will lead us, finally, to consider how we face Popeye, including how Horace faces him in the opening of the published novel.

As the victim of greater or lesser sequestration by virtually everyone into whose company she comes, Temple is Sanctuary's prime example of managed humanity. But she does not express herself as such, nor does she seek to put her condition or any events to instrumental use. No one (except perhaps Popeye) can reconstruct the narrative of the crimes perpetrated on her, and for their sufferer the events are scarcely retrievable in logical form. Temple's diegesis at Reba's shifts temporally at random and does not keep a focus, except in loosely edging forward on the topic of her wish to change into a man (and thus perhaps to gain masculine character and the power that might come with it). Horace recognizes the narrative's shifting—“as if she were making it up”—without, of course, noting its similarity with his own rambling mode of relation. From his proximity to her body and voice, he gains little of what we could call knowledge; we see only how he responds to having apprehended what he can of her pathos. What we and Horace find legible in the interview is the pathos of a narrative without clear action, Temple's or any one else's: pathos seeps in her discourse and her presence, in detachment from any logic of cause, effect, or cure (171-75).⁶

Temple's alterity is palpable for Horace as he confronts her: she differs from the young women with “cold, blank eyes” whom he has observed on the college campus and the train (135). Her eyes are described as “all pupil” and “quite black,” earlier (22; 38), and Horace meets her “black, belligerent stare” in his first look at her face (170). The dark eyes remain a salient feature at the trial, where “her eyes, the two spots of rouge and her mouth, were like five meaningless objects in a small heart-shaped dish” (227). Tommy's and Ruby's views of Temple's eyes as “holes” support the depiction of them as black, if we read the holes not as transparencies but as openings onto an unreflecting abyss (53; 128). In the resistance of these eyes, Horace confronts what he does not expect, given his previous remarks on her as “a little fool girl” (130). Like Little Belle, whose presence for him in the “dead cardboard” of the photograph is “inscrutable,” Temple confronts him with the opacity of his object of desire (131). Other textual connections between the two women include the “whisper” of Little Belle's “curious small flesh” and of her “little white dress” (131-32), recalling the “whispering” of Temple's bleeding after the rape (118). There is also the play on Temple's name—an allusion to private, sacred space—as Horace perceives that Little Belle's image in the photo is always “contemplating something” (132). In Horace's confrontation of Temple, the stuff of his desire intervenes on the possibility of establishing a transcendent ethos under which to manage or judge the other. When the confrontation sinks in for him later in the chapter, the pathetic “Temple” turns the sacred space of contemplation for him into a space of his own unmanageable pain.

As Horace enters her room at Reba's, Temple is an unmoving “ridge” under the covers of her bed (169-70). He thinks he is on the verge of comprehension (a reader might think the plot is about to turn, as well), but the prone, pathetic sufferer looms indistinctly, lacking determined contours that could help determine narrative. Physically and figurally, she is an inassimilable ridge of tissue, a scar of pathos, both hers and Horace's. His main engagement with this pathos emerges after the interview, after he has left Reba's and ridden all the way home: it is very much a moment of Horace reading Temple. On the train, he contemplates the distancing judgment of the death chamber, while a cup of coffee he has drunk comes to “lay like a hot ball on his stomach,” a tangible representation of “all the nightmare shapes it had taken him forty-three years to invent” (176). Once home, having maintained some abstraction from his own and Temple's suffering, he stares at Little Belle's photo, as the odor of honeysuckle—the repugnant signifier of illicit sex for Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury—fills the room, “almost palpable enough to be seen,”

and 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 like a scent itself.

(177)

Momentarily, the honeysuckle hovers like the pathos of Temple, but not quite at the point of pressure, not quite asserting the incomprehensible suffering of the sequestered woman. Then Horace's gaze comes up short, upon pathos overdetermined as the palpability of Temple and his own desire:

Then he knew what that sensation in his stomach meant. He put the photograph down hurriedly and went to the bathroom. He opened the door running and fumbled at the light. But he had not time to find it and he gave over and plunged forward and struck the lavatory and leaned upon his braced arms while the shucks set up a terrific uproar beneath her thighs. Lying with her head lifted slightly, her chin depressed like a figure lifted down from a crucifix, 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, the darkness overhead now shredded with parallel attenuations of living fire, toward a crescendo like a held breath, an interval in which she would swing faintly and lazily in nothingness filled with pale, myriad points of light. Far beneath her she could hear the faint, furious uproar of the shucks.

(177)

At the same time as it implicates Horace, the passage—through him—is as close as the novel comes to representing Popeye's rape of Temple.⁷

Horace's transference with Temple occurs in an imagistic context like that of the nights at the Old Frenchman Place, of vision slipping into blackness as sensations of sound, motion, pressure, speed, and heat predominate in the imagery. The metonymic sequence of figures depicts the vertigo of trying to apprehend the concrete other and portrays a correlative loss of vision and logic. In the passage's figural conflation of moments of concrete humanity, the concreteness emerges not determinable as either proper to or other than the putative subject. The image of expulsion that signifies Horace's vomiting the “nightmare shapes” of his psychic life is the very image of the woman's body expelling the blackness that becomes the surrounding world, in a birthing of the very world that binds, oppresses, and terrorizes her. Insofar as Horace apprehends for himself—as himself—the being of the “female flesh” which he imagines at a distance throughout the novel, we see the sufferer birth the world in which she suffers in the same textual instance as the moralist expels the world on which he would pronounce judgment, a world he has complicity in creating and in which he profoundly suffers as well. As the managerial desire, which casts the other as object, and the concrete humanity of the other actually conflate in Horace's apprehension, his complicity in the management of the other comes in force: he reels in vertigo once he encounters the concreteness of the other. In other words, as the will to objectification not only objectifies, but confronts, and then itself becomes, the object—such that subjective desire comes to think the very position of the object—the violence of differentiation implodes the logic of differentiation, and the concreteness of the sufferer calls forth with all its weight. This moment persists only if reading dwells on it, however; the thread of the narrative returns Horace, the next day, to the task of trying to comprehend human life from the province of abstract and cleansing justice, forgetting the bothersome implications of the substantially dark gaze of the suffering other.

THE PATHOS OF THE PERPETRATOR

The reader's confrontation of the concreteness of Temple involves the kind of darkness and illegibility I have noted in Faulkner's remarks about writing. The imagery of blackness for Temple's eyes, like that for Horace's vomiting, resonates with other moments of human opacity in Sanctuary, such as Horace's early perception of Popeye's odor: to him, Popeye “smells like that black stuff that ran out of Bovary's mouth” (4). Bleikasten writes of this allusion to Flaubert as “a reduplication of the book within the book: black stuff, fallen on a white page” (“Terror” 29).⁸ Besides the density suggested in the olfactory image, the allusion suggests a certain tactility in the resistance ink presents to the eye, resembling the resistance we may seek in approaching, as readers, palpable humanity. As Faulkner's narrative puts narrative structures and categories into question, it allows such a tactile reading of the human, promoting access to human feeling that subtends naturalizations of character in narrative—feeling that may emerge unexpectedly, disruptively, even violently for reading. In such reading, we of course cannot take Popeye lightly. Attending to the other entails recognition of the palpable existence of the perpetrator, as well as that of the victim. (Indeed, as we have seen, ethical positions represented in the text—ones with which reading can become implicated—may themselves be implicated in perpetration as well as in victimhood.)

With Popeye, Faulkner demonstrates how we may see character as a patchwork through which the substance of human experience leaks. The patchwork shows particularly in the segments of the final chapter that cover his childhood. Faulkner added this material in a major revision of the original manuscript; its purpose appears to be one of filling in the details of Popeye's behavioral development, so that we might better understand his character. Almost universally, however, readers have recognized that this narrative material leaves Popeye opaque as ever, that further descriptions of his background and social context do not help shape or clarify his character. For example, the childhood “disease” the chapter indicates he inherited from his father—probably syphilis—explains little (except in perhaps alluding to a source of Popeye's impotence), mainly helping promote a sense that he suffers many events of his life (243). Popeye remains largely a matter of image, of indeed powerful and terrifying imagery, and his own desires, apprehensions, and suffering begin to emerge though our apprehension of him as image.⁹

Although we could argue that Popeye is simply inhuman, we may certainly read him as humanity that lacks character, a lack Faulkner depicts in various ways. Popeye lacks a proper given name, having only a nickname, moreover lacking a surname as a marker of the ethos of family, culture, or class (170).¹⁰ In the first pages, his face appears a “bloodless color,” and “his skin had a dead, dark pallor,” while the detail of his eyes' being like “rubber knobs” is given three times (1-3). Later, he is like “a doll” (246). Although he has a “delicate hooked profile” (191), and “his nose [is] faintly aquiline,” he has “no chin at all. His face just went away, like the face of a wax doll set too near a hot fire and forgotten” (2-3). He gives an impression of “that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin” (1), an image Faulkner uses elsewhere to describe the Snopeses. In the opening of Sanctuary, Horace sees that “one side of [Popeye's] face squinted against the smoke like a mask carved into two simultaneous expressions”; whether or not we doubt Faulkner's grammar in the line (if not, “one side” is itself carved into the two expressions), the result is a depiction of a face incommensurate with itself. This visage of doubling and self-contradiction emerges “watching” Horace from across the spring where he has been drinking: Horace first sees the face, where he should find his own, emerging amid the “broken and myriad reflection of his own drinking” (1-2). From the fragments of a narcissistic face that is expected to cohere as a whole, there emerges a face divided, shadowed in smoke, not yielding to a determining interpretation. (This mirror of a doubling suggests an incommensurability in the moralist's face as well as the face of the impenetrable other.)¹¹

Among images that can yield for us the substantive human affect of Popeye is the corn cob he uses to violate Temple. It is not an image pertinent only to him, however: around the cob is a constellation of desire, fear, rage, pain, and a host of other feelings that implicate practically everyone in the novel. Yet all these moments lead to Popeye indirectly, even though no one who sees the cob at the trial, except Temple, can associate it with his perpetration of the rape (besides Popeye himself, if he is present, perhaps as the one who keeps Temple's attention “fixed on something at the back of the room” as she testifies, 226). For all onlookers as the cob is held up in the courtroom, the image signifies excesses and opacities of feeling, material not fully captured in what delineations we (or they) have of characters and events. To repeat, the rage of the townsmen is charged by the image of the cob, an image of their own sexual energy at the same time as it is an image of perverse substitution of that energy. This rage is itself anonymous and amorphous: in developing rage toward the bonfire, Faulkner does not articulate it in terms of any individual's actions. The cob also becomes a signifier of Goodwin's demise and of Horace's failure, therein involving a variety of associations. To all eyes, of course, it represents the pathos of Temple: held aloft by the prosecuting attorney, the cob exhibits in its length and circumference her body as it was contorted in the moment of invasion. As an image of her concrete suffering, it involves abuse and manipulation that she continues to suffer, abuse that proliferates as nearly everyone seizes on her pathos as an object of his or her own various emotions.

With the possible exceptions of Temple and Popeye himself, only the reader can sense the pathos of Popeye in this complex image. The cob figurally marks the exteriority of Popeye, the extent of his phallic presence: it marks the threshold of his presence for us, the means we have for gaining access to him. As such and as an image of horrific violence, it is an object that in an intense and conflicted way embodies the problem of objectification which obtains for any being with whom we might have empathy, the problem of thinking the position of the object. The image, indeed, looms closer to us than Popeye gets in his actions, which largely yield only a bad character that we can hold at a distance, that we might judge as having contours different from what we may prefer to imagine are the contours of natural human character. (I allude to Charles William Reed's summary of a key aspect of Levinas's ethics: “The other person is closer to me than is knowledge or ontology” [80].) This imagistic representation of Popeye's substantive passions will strike various moments of a reader's own passions and resonate with or against them (indeed helping constitute them) in reading. For instance, the bloody cob as a phallic substitute presents Popeye's desire as the trace of virility he suffers for not having, the pathos of which inhabits the very sign of violation, the sign of Temple's pathos. Thus, various moments of human substance emerge in an image that for various readers will render various responses knotted together, inextricable from which is the affect of Popeye.

We do have narrative portrayals of Popeye's emotions, although the text withholds indications of their value for him, particularly any sense of pleasure. For instance, we have his “whimpering” and “whinnying” during manual sex with Temple at Reba's and his “moaning and slobbering over the bed” as Temple has sex with Red (126; 184). Popeye's desire is desire which, unnatural as it may appear, does not appear to have determining causes or contours (although it is only ostensibly more opaque than desire marked male in other instances of the novel—the desire of Red, Horace, the townsmen, or the men at the Old Frenchman Place). In short, Popeye indeed dwells and operates at the level of the image. His affect, itself imagistic, manipulates imagery and thereby drives events. We find Popeye's pathos, among other affective moments, working through the corn cob to manipulate the townsmen, the justice system, the social elite represented by Judge Drake and Narcissa, and indeed our reading of the narrative. In the imagery associated with Popeye, we are made to face the pathos and vulnerability of multiple others, to include our own and that of the criminal perpetrator.

Reading human substance at the level of the image, we meet Popeye on his own terms, which is to say we meet him as we must meet human beings if we are to attend ethically to their otherness. Concerning Popeye, we must confront his opaque and seemingly inhuman presence, a pre-articulate locus of human substance, which presents dimensions of feeling we must be willing to engage if we are to engage any human other. His concrete pathos represents as well as Temple's pathos the difficulty at the heart of ethics. Such imagistic pathos keeps ethics working indefinitely in substantial human territory, beyond the limited focus of humanistic ethics and in excess of the reductiveness of the concept of character. Reading Sanctuary, we may approach humanity that exceeds any attempt to reduce humanity for determinate versions of ethics. We may move beyond the reach of practices that conscript the human to abstract naturalization, moving toward an incomplete and potentially abusive task that we must engage if we are to make any claim for humane reading or criticism. What Faulkner's self-problematizing narrative offers us is the possibility of an empathic approach to an infinite concreteness in material humanity.

Notes

1. Readers familiar with deconstruction or post-structural ethics will no doubt recognize the theoretical moves in my essay. But I hope all readers will be able to follow my working-through of Faulkner's narrative so as to gain access to the problems with character and ethics on which I focus. For more on Levinas's ethics, see especially the first section of Totality and Infinity. For a development of his ethics as a method of reading and a discussion of his influence on deconstruction, see Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. See Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics, for an extended consideration of the implications of Levinas's work for reading narrative. See also John D. Caputo, Against Ethics, who rejects what he sees as Levinas's stretching of the term “ethics” from its traditional, largely determinate meaning. Developing an alternative focus on the term “obligation,” Caputo underscores the incompleteness of ethics that I have cited.

2. Faulkner himself trivialized Sanctuary, for instance, by calling it “a cheap shocker” in the introduction of the 1932 edition, when its reputation was beginning to make him infamous. See Frederick R. Karl for evidence that Faulkner was merely striking a pose (351-75); see also O. B. Emerson, Faulkner's Early Literary Reputation in America.

3. My discussion of Faulkner's diegesis supplements other studies of his techniques, such as studies by Warren Beck and Hugh M. Ruppersburg; see also Lothar Hönnighausen, ed., Faulkner's Discourse. In a discussion of the elliptical quality of Sanctuary's narrative elements, John T. Matthews concludes—as I do—that a sense of palpable though inassimilable humanity is an effect of ellipsis in the novel (265).

4. The connection between Temple and Ruby, along with other features of the novel, may prompt a gender analysis concerning the text's figurations of otherness and the body. There has been much attention to gender in Sanctuary and there remains much to say, indeed concerning how gender figures in reading. But the complexity of the matter exceeds the province of my essay, primarily since the function of the concept of gender in textual criticism is undergoing widespread scrutiny. Because many terms in Faulkner's text, my secondary sources, and my commentary will for some readers articulate points of gender, I open myself to the charge that I naturalize the implications of such terms (and it would be no use to claim that the terms deal only with psychical or philosophical categories). Thus, my essay admits a criticism whose interests lie with the discourse of gender, as well as one that would take the presuppositions of binary gender to task. See Frann Michel, “William Faulkner as a Lesbian Author,” for a suggestive opening of problems of gender in Faulkner's work.

5. Horace, Narcissa, and other characters in Sanctuary emerge in other of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha narratives. For a discussion of Narcissa that explores her sexuality and emotions, see Ron Buchanan; see also Faulkner's treatment of her in “There Was a Queen.” See Flags in the Dust or its variant, Sartoris, for strong suggestions of Horace's infatuation with his sister, and see Sanctuary: The Original Text—Noel Polk's edition of the manuscript Faulkner first prepared for publication—for textual variants that involve the relationship between the siblings. In “Horace Benbow and the Myth of Narcissa,” John T. Irwin details their relationship and relates it to various implications of incest in Faulkner's fiction.

6. Many readings of Temple tend to naturalize her by imposing on her a character that largely determines what she undergoes; see, for example, Leslie A. Fiedler (311-15), Albert J. Guerard (120-35), and Robert R. Moore.

7. Homer B. Pettey calls this moment Horace's “own primal scene” (81), serving the larger point that “the primal scene of Sanctuary is the reader's interpretation.” Implicating both Horace's and the reader's perspectives, Pettey concludes that “rape is Faulkner's master trope for the process of interpretation in Sanctuary” (83).

8. Bleikasten further discusses the allusion to the “black stuff” by analyzing its emergence in Sanctuary: The Original Text, where Horace not only alludes to it while accompanying Popeye (25) but also later, when he reflects on Popeye while ruminating on his own mother (60). Bleikasten writes that the maternal body becomes an “assemblage” of the women in Horace's life, and it “disgorges,” or delivers, Popeye (“Terror” 28). See also Bleikasten, “‘Cet affreux goût d'encre’: Emma Bovary's Ghost in Sanctuary.”

9. T. H. Adamowski, among others, somewhat overstates the dearth of Popeye's thought: it is not the case that a lack of thinking renders Popeye inhuman. Popeye certainly thinks as he muses over Goodwin's management of the house and—ironically for a liquor profiteer—the others' right to drink. And indeed, Popeye's “Goofy house” is a sympathetic line (67). Faulkner's own remarks give us varying angles on Popeye, as he claims that he is “all allegory” (Lion in the Garden 53) and alternatively calls him “another lost human being” (Faulkner in the University 74).

10. Requiem for a Nun identifies Popeye's surname as “Vitelli” (125).

11. In The Ink of Melancholy, Bleikasten writes that Popeye and Horace belong to different genres in the novel, Popeye's flatness being inconsistent with the “psychological” characterization of Horace (256); my reading weakens this generic distinction. As another moment of doubling in this scene, the two have corresponding bulges in their pockets: Popeye has a gun, Horace a book. At the level of imagery, the two bulges seem equal in power, the book as severe as the gun: to risk hyperbole, the text represents what one might hope to be a power in reading.

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