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William Faulkner: The
Sanctuary of Evil
Mario Vargas Llosa
Faulkner suốt
đời giữ cái nhìn tiêu cực của ông, với
Sanctuary, câu chuyện một cô gái
bị một tên liệt dương phá huỷ trinh tiết bằng một cái bắp ngô, bởi vì,
cả nửa thế kỷ,
sau những dòng tự kiểm hồi sách mới ra lò, trong lần nói chuyện tại Đại
học Virginia, [Vintage Books, New York, 1965], ông vẫn còn chê đứa con
hư hỏng của mình, coi đây là một câu chuyện "yếu" và được viết bởi
những tà ý [base intentions].
Nhưng đây là một đại tác phẩm của ông. Hai Lúa cứ liên tưởng tới Giáo
Đuờng Của Cái Ác, ở một xứ sở khác, ở đó, có những tên già, liệt dương
hay không liệt dương, lôi con nít vào khách sạn hãm hiếp, xong xuôi,
đuổi ra, quẳng cho cô bé hình như là một trăm đô thì phải, thí dụ như
một tay LQD nào đó.
Bởi vì, chỉ có thiên tài mới có thể kể một câu chuyện như thế, với
những sự kiện như thế, với những nhân vật như thế, bằng một cách kể mà
người đọc, không chỉ chấp nhận, gật gù, kể được, được đấy, mà còn như
bị quỉ sứ hớp hồn!
Như chính Faulkner đã từng
kể, ông viết Giáo Đường, bản
viết đầu, trong ba tuần lễ, năm 1929, liền sau Âm thanh và Cuồng nộ. Ý tưởng về cuốn sách, như
ông giải thích, trong lần in thứ nhì [1932], thứ tiểu thuyết ba xu, và
ông viết, chỉ vì một mục đích duy nhất, là tiền, [trước nó, thì chỉ vì
vui, for "pleasure"]. Phương pháp của ông, là, "bịa ra một câu chuyện
ghê rợn nhất mà tôi có thể tưởng tượng ra được", một điều gì một con
người miệt vườn, vùng Mississipi, có thể coi như là một chủ đề. Quá
sốc, khi đọc, tay biên tập bảo ông, hắn sẽ chẳng bao giờ xuất bản một
cuốn sách như thế, bởi vì, nếu xb, là cả hai thằng đều đi tù.
Bản viết thứ nhì cũng chẳng kém phần ghê rợn...
Được coi như, hiện đại hóa bi kịch Hy Lạp, viết lại tiểu thuyết gothic,
ám dụ thánh kinh, ẩn dụ chống lại công cuộc hiện đại hoá mang tính kỹ
nghệ nền văn hóa Miền Nam nước Mẽo vân vân và vân vân. Khi Faulkner
mang đứa con hư của mình trình làng văn Tây, André Malraux phán, đây
đúng là, "đưa tiểu thuyết trinh thám vô trong bi kịch Hy Lạp", và khi
Borges nói dỡn chơi, rằng những tiểu thuyết gia Bắc Mỹ đã biến "sự tàn
bạo thành đức hạnh", chắc chắn, ông ta có trong đầu lúc đó, cuốn Giáo
Đường của Faulkner.
Fiction does
not reproduce life; it denies it, putting in its place a conjuring
trick that pretends to replace it. But, in a way that is difficult to
establish, fiction also completes life, adding to human experience
something that men do not meet in their real lives, but only in those
imaginary lives that they live vicariously, through fiction.
The irrational depths that are also part of life are
beginning to reveal their secrets and, thanks to men like Freud, Jung
or Bataille, we are beginning to know the way (which is very difficult
to detect) that they influence human behaviour...
Giả tưởng không tái sản xuất
cuộc đời, nó chối từ cuộc đời, và, đặt ở đó, một trò ảo thuật, [một trò
mà con mắt, như Sartre đã từng chê
Sartoris của Faulkner], giả như là cuộc
đời. Nhưng, bằng một cách nào đó, thật khó xác định, giả tưởng cũng
hoàn tất cuộc đời, bằng cách thêm vào kinh nghiệm con người, một
điều gì con người chưa từng gặp, trong đời thực của họ, và nhờ giả
tưởng, mà họ được nếm mùi vị của nó.
Những vùng sâu phi lý, ngoại lý, cũng là một phần
của cuộc đời, nhờ những người như Freud, Jung, hay Bataille bắt đầu lộ
ra, và chúng ta bắt đầu hiểu, cung cách, đường hướng [thật khó tách
bạch hẳn ra được], chúng ảnh hưởng lên cách ứng xử của con người.
William
Faulkner: The Sanctuary of Evil
According to
his own testimony, Faulkner wrote the first version of Sanctuary
in three weeks in 1929, immediately after The Sound and the Fury. The
idea of the book, he explained in the second edition of the novel
(1932), had always seemed to him 'cheap' because he had conceived it
with the sole intention of making money (up to then, he had
only written for 'pleasure'). His method was 'to
invent the most horrific tale that I could imagine', something that
someone from the Mississippi
could take as a topical theme. Aghast at the text, his editor told him
that he would never publish such a book since, if he did so, both of
them would go to prison.
Then, while he was working in a power plant, Faulkner wrote As I Lay
Dying. When this book came out, he received the proofs of Sanctuary
which the editor had finally decided to publish. On rereading his work,
Faulkner decided that the novel was indeed unpresentable as it stood
and made many corrections and deletions, to such an extent that the
version which appeared in 1931 differed considerably from the original.
(A comparison of both texts can be found in Gerald Langford, Faulkner's
Revision of Sanctuary, University of Texas Press, 1972.)
The second version is no less 'horrific' than the first:
the main horrifying events of the story occur in both versions, with
the exception of the discreetly incestuous feelings between Horace and
Narcissa Benbow and Horace and his stepdaughter Little Belle, which are
much more explicit in the first version. The main difference is that
the centre of the first version was Horace Benbow, while in the new
one, Popeye and Temple
Drake
have grown and have relegated the honest and weak lawyer to a minor
role. With regard to structure, the original version was much clearer,
despite the temporal complexities, since Horace was the perspective
from which nearly all the story was narrated, while in the definitive
version the tale continually changes point of view, from chapter to
chapter, and sometimes even within a single paragraph.
Faulkner maintained his negative
opinion of Sanctuary throughout his life. A half century after that
self-critical prologue, in his Conversations at the University of Virginia (Vintage Books, New
York, 1965), he once again called his story - at least in its first
version - 'weak' and written with base intentions.
In fact, Sanctuary is one of his
masterpieces and deserves to be considered, after Light in August and
Absalom, Absalom, among the best novels of the Yoknapatawpha saga. What
is certain is that with its harrowing coarseness, its dizzying
depiction of cruelty and madness, and its gloomy pessimism, it is
scarcely tolerable. Precisely: only a genius could have told a story
with such events and characters in a way that would be not only
acceptable but even bewitching for the reader. This almost absurdly
ferocious story is remarkable for the extraordinary mastery with which
it is told, for its unnerving parable on the nature of evil, and for
those symbolic and metaphysical echoes which have so excited the
interpretative fantasy of the critics. For this is, without doubt, the
novel of Faulkner that has generated the most diverse and baroque
readings: it has been seen as the modernization of Greek tragedy, a
rewriting of the Gothic novel, a biblical allegory, a metaphor against
the industrial modernization of the culture of the South of the United States
etc. When he introduced the book to the French public in 1933, André
Malraux said that it represented 'the insertion of the detective novel
into Greek tragedy', and Borges was surely thinking of this novel when
he launched his famous boutade that North American novelists had turned
'brutality into a literary virtue'. Under the weight of so much
attributed philosophical and moral symbolism, the story of Sanctuary
tends to become diluted and disappear. And, in truth, every novel is
important for what it tells, not for what it suggests.
What is this story? In a couple of
sentences, it is the sinister adventure of Temple Drake, a pretty,
scatterbrained and wealthy girl of seventeen, the daughter of a judge,
who is deflowered with an ear of corn by an impotent and psychopathic
gangster - who is also a murderer. He then shuts her away in a
brothel in Memphis
where he forces her to make love in front of him with a small-time
hoodlum whom he has brought along and whom he later kills. Woven into
this story is another, somewhat less horrific: Lee Goodwin, a murderer,
an alcohol distiller and bootlegger who is tried for the death of a
mental defective, Tommy (who was killed by Popeye), condemned and
burned alive despite the efforts of Horace Benbow, a well-intentioned
lawyer, to save him. Benbow cannot make good triumph.
These horrors are a mere sampling of
the many that appear in the book, in which the reader encounters a
strangling, a lynching, various murders, a deliberate fire and a whole
raft of moral and social degradation. In the first version,
furthermore, the character endowed with a moral conscience, Horace, was
caught in the grip of a double incestuous passion. In the final version
this has been softened to the extent that it remains as scarcely a
murky trace in the emotional life of the lawyer.
In every novel it is the form - the
style in which it is written and the order in which it is told - which
determines the richness or poverty, the depth or triviality, of the
story. But in novelists like Faulkner, the form is something so
visible, so present in the narration that it appears at times to be a
protagonist, and acts like another flesh and blood
character, or else it appears as a fact, like the passions, crimes or
upheavals; of its story.
The effectiveness of Sanctuary's form stems above
all from what the narrator hides from the reader, putting the facts in
a different place in the chronology, or leaving them out altogether.
The yawning gap in the novel - the barbarous deflowering of Temple - is an
ominous silence,an expressive silence. Nothing is described, but from
that unexpressed savagery a poisonous atmosphere seeps out and spreads
to contaminate Memphis
and other places in the novel, turning them into a land of evil,
regions of ruin and horror, beyond all hope. There are many other
hidden pieces of information, some of which are revealed
retrospectively, after the effects that they cause - like the murder of
Tommy or Red or the impotence of Popeye - and others which remain in
the shadows, although we do learn something about them, enough to keep
us intrigued and for us to surmise that in this darkness something
murky and criminal is lurking, like the mysterious journeys and shady
affairs of Clarence Snopes and the adventures of Belle, the wife of
Horace.
But this
manipulation of the facts of the story, which are withheld momentarily
or completely from the reader, is more cunning than these examples
might indicate. It occurs at every stage, sometimes in every sentence.
The narrator never tells us everything and often throws us off the
scent: he reveals what a person does, but not what he thinks (Popeye's
private life, for example, is never revealed), or vice versa, with no
prior warning, he depicts actions and thoughts of unknown people, whose
identity he reveals later, in a surprising way, like a magician who
suddenly makes the vanished handkerchief reappear. In this way, the
story lights up and fades; certain scenes dazzle us with their
illumination while others, almost invisible in the shadows, can only be
glimpsed.
The
pace of the narrative time is also capricious and variable: it speeds
up and goes at the pace of the characters' dialogues, which the
narrator recounts almost without commentary - as for example in the
trial. In Chapter 13, the crater chapter, time is filmed in slow
motion, almost stops and the movements of the characters seem like the
rhythmic development of a Chinese shadow theatre. All the scenes of Temple Drake in the house of the old
Frenchman are theatrical, they move at a ceremonial pace which turns
actions into rites. In this tale, with some exceptions, the scenes are
juxtaposed rather than dissolving into each other.
All
this is extremely artificial, but it is not arbitrary. Or rather, it
does not seem arbitrary: it emerges as a necessary and authentic
reality. The world, these creatures, these dialogues, these silences
could not be otherwise. When a novelist succeeds in transmitting to the
reader that compelling, inexorable sensation that what is being
narrated in the novel could only happen in that way, be told in that
way, then he has triumphed completely.
Many of
the almost infinite number of interpretations of Sanctuary stem from
the unconscious desire of critics to come up with moral alibis which
allow them to redeem a world which is described in the novel as so
irrevocably negative. Here once more we come up against that perennial
view - which, it seems, literature will never be able to shake off —
that poems or fiction should have some kind of edifying function in
order to be acceptable to society.
The
humanity that appears in this story is almost without exception
execrable or, at the very least, wretched. Horace Benbow has some
altruism, which makes him try to save Goodwin and help Ruby, but this
is offset by his weakness and cowardice which condemn him to defeat
when he tries to face up to injustice. Ruby also shows some spark of
feeling and sympathy - she does at least try to help Temple - but this does not have any
useful outcome because she has been inhibited by all the blows and
setbacks and is now too cowed by suffering for her generous impulses to
be effective. Even the main victim, Temple, causes as much repugnance as
sympathy in us because she is as vacuous and stupid - and, potentially
as prone to evil - as her tormentors. The characters who do not kill,
bootleg, rape and traffic — like the pious Baptist ladies who have Ruby
thrown out of the hotel, or Narcissa Benbow - are hypocritical and
smug, consumed by prejudice and racism. Only the idiots like Tommy seem
less gifted than the rest of their fellow men in this world when it
comes to causing harm to others.
In this fictional reality, human evil is shown, above all, in and
through sex. As in the fiercest Puritans, an apocalyptic vision of
sexual life permeates all Faulkner's work, but in no other novel of the
Yoknapatawpha saga is it felt more forcibly. Sex does not enrich the
characters or make them happy, it does not aid communication or cement
solidarity, nor does it inspire or enhance existence. It is almost
always an experience that animalizes, degrades and often destroys the
characters, as is shown in the upheaval caused by Temple's presence in the Old
Frenchman's house.
The arrival of the blonde, pale girl, with her long legs and delicate
body, puts the four thugs - Popeye, Van, Tommy and Lee - into a state
of excitement and belligerence, like four mastiffs with a bitch on
heat. Whatever traces of dignity and decency that might still survive
within them vanish when faced with this adolescent who, despite her
fear and without really being conscious of what she is doing, provokes
them. Purely instinctive and animal feelings prevail over all other
feelings such as rationality and even the instinct for survival. In
order to placate this instinct, they are prepared to rape and to kill
each other. Once she is sullied and degraded by Popeye, Temple will adopt this condition and,
for her as well, sex will from then on be a transgression of the norm,
violence.
Is this animated nastiness really humanity? Are we like that? No. This
is the humanity that Faulkner has invented with such powers of
persuasion that he makes us believe, at least for the duration of the
absorbing reading of the novel, that it is not a fiction, but life
itself. In fact life is never what it is in fiction. It is sometimes
better, sometimes worse, but always more nuanced, diverse and
predictable than even the most successful literary fantasies can
suggest. Of course, real life is never as perfect, rounded, coherent
and intelligible as its literary representations. In these
representations, something has been added and cut, in accordance with
the 'demons' - those obsessions and deep pulsations that are at the
service of intelligence and reason, but are not necessarily controlled
or understood by these faculties - of the person who invents them and
bestows on them that illusory life that words can give.
Fiction
does not reproduce life; it denies it, putting in its place a
conjuring trick that pretends to replace it. But, in a way that is
difficult to establish, fiction also completes life, adding to human
experience something that men do not meet in their real lives, but only
in those imaginary lives that they live vicariously, through fiction.
The irrational depths
that are also part of life are beginning to reveal their secrets and,
thanks to men like Freud, Jung or Bataille, we are beginning to know
the way (which is very difficult to detect) that they influence human
behaviour. Before psychologists and psychoanalysts existed, even before
sorcerers and magicians took on the role, fiction helped men (without
their knowing it) to coexist and to come to terms wfth certain phantoms
that welled out of their innermost selves, complicating their lives,
filling them with impossible and destructive appetites. Fiction helped
people not to free themselves from these phantoms, which would be quite
difficult and perhaps counterproductive, but to live with them, to
establish a modus vivendi between the angels that the community would
like its members exclusively to be, and the demons that these members
must also be, no matter how developed the culture or how powerful the
religion of the society in which they are born. Fiction is also a form
of purgation. What in real life is, or must be, repressed in accordance
with the existing morality - often simply to ensure the survival of
life - finds in fiction a refuge, a right to exist, a freedom to
operate even in the most terrifying and horrific way.
In some way, what happened to Temple Drake in Yoknapatawpha County
according to the tortuous imagination of the most persuasive creator of
fiction in our time, saves the beautiful schoolgirls of flesh and blood
from being stained by that need for excess that makes up part of our
nature and saves us from being burned or hanged for fulfilling that
need.
London, December
1987
Mario Vargas Llosa
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