Literature of Mutants: Mechanical Elements in Sanctuary
Makoto OHNOThis essay is based on the paper read in October 2009 at the twelfth national conferenceof the William Faulkner Society of Japan.
1. Mechanical Elements as the Characteristics of Mutants
In Sanctuary, Popeye is compared to animals such as horses and cats. For example,
when Popeye approaches Temple in Miss Reba's brothel, he makes a “high whinnying
sound like a horse” (167). In Flags in the Dust, women are symbolized by flowers. In
Faulkner's works, human beings are often treated as lying on the same level as otheranimals and plants. In this, Faulkner has much in common with Darwin's evolutionism,
which stresses the continuity between human beings and other living things.
In Sanctuary, Faulkner even describes living things as being equal to inorganic
substances or machines. In the opening scene where Horace Benbow meets Popeye at aspring, Popeye is depicted as someone having “doll-like hands” (5) and “the face of a wax
doll” (5); his eyes “looked like rubber hands” (6). Behind Horace a bird sings
monotonously “as though it were worked by a clock” (5). 1 In Sanctuary, Faulknerpresents a mechanistic view in addition to evolutionary ideas of Darwin.
Michael Wainwright analyzes Faulkner's works in terms of the theory of evolution
and discusses the relationship between men and women according to Darwin's model ofcourtship strategy in animals. Furthermore, Wainwright emphasizes mechanical or
inorganic things―impersonal elements―in Sanctuary, such as Popeye's automobile
and gun, the corn-cob used by Popeye to rape Temple, and the mechanical piano in Miss
Reba's brothel. Wainwright calls the strategy in the relationship between Popeye andTemple “the mutant courtship strategy of impersonal gratification” (60; italics in theoriginal text).
Wainwright insists that Popeye's “biological inferiority” (60) leads him to taking
the mutant courtship strategy. Popeye is physically weak: he is a small man; he cannot
drink alcoholic beverages because his stomach is weak; he is impotent; when he was achild, he could not walk nor talk until about four years old (Sanctuary 319-23). His
physical weakness excludes him from “the standard biological and patriarchal
constructions of courtship” (Wainwright 60). Instead he seeks substitutes for his
physical strength in mechanical things such as cars and guns. It is Popeye's biologicalinferiority which makes him, as it were, a mechanical mutant.
12. An “Artistic” Popular Novel as a Mutant
Just as Popeye is a “mutant” character, Sanctuary may be regarded as a mutant
novel in the whole works of Faulkner. Sanctuary not only deals with rape and murder
but also includes a lot of elements concerning popular culture of the time such as female
students and cars. Sanctuary may be called a popular novel which is intended to attract
many readers, or, to “make money,” as the author confesses in his introduction to theModern Library edition of Sanctuary (337). But we must remember that Faulkner
revised the novel “trying to make out of it something which would not shame The Soundand the Fury and As I Lay Dying too much” (339). Sancturay is a new kind of an artistic
popular novel, a “mutant” which lies between the potboiler and the serious work.
When we think of an artistic work with elements concerning popular culture, wemust refer to hard-boiled detective stories. Hard-boiled detective story writers such as
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler intend to write artistic stories while they
depict violence and popular culture. Hammett has philosophical tendencies (he read
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason when he was young), and Chandler's works are often
praised as poetic.
Some critics point out that Faulkner was influenced by hard-boiled detective
stories when he revised the original version of Sanctuary.
For example, Jay Watson says that “Faulkner revised the Sanctuary galleys awayfrom what had been a Jamesian immersion in 〔Horace〕Benbow's consciousness, andtoward a tougher, leaner, hard-boiled prose, after the style of Hemingway andHammett” (54).
André Bleikasten also compares Santuary to hard-boiled detective stories:
Unlike The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, the published version ofSanctuary seldom delves into the inner recesses of individual minds andmakes no sustained attempt to conjure up the illusion of a “stream of
consciousness.”. . . As in Dashiell Hammett's novels, albeit lesssystematically, we find in Sanctuary a fierce and scrupulous concentration on
externals. (237)
When Bleikasten points out the similarity between the revised version of Sanctuary andhard-boiled detective stories, he pays attention to the “external” description of bodies as
opposed to the internal description of individual minds (237). As we have seen, Popeye’sbody is depicted with mechanical images. Bleikasten also says that Popeye is a hybrid
which lies “halfway between the organic and the inanimate” (243).
But here a question arises: Why does Faulkner, who is good at researching into the2inner minds of characters, concentrate on the mechanical, hard-boiled descriptions ofexternals in the revised version of Sanctuary? In Watson’s argument quoted above, thestyle of the revised version is considered “a tougher, leaner, hard-boiled prose.” Why
does Faulkner adopt what Watson calls “leaner” style in revising Sanctuary? To answer
these questions, we shall go on to consider mechanical elements of hard-boiled detective
stories.
3. Mechanical Elements of Hard-boiled Detective Stories
Sinda Gregory calls Hammett’s works the best examples of the “antidetective”
novel which stresses irony, paradox and contradictions:First of all, at the same time that his〔Hammett's〕books are almost
universally acclaimed as the best of American detective fiction, they are also
among the best examples of the antidetective novel. As Hammett maintained
the outword form and pattern of the hard-boiled story, he also infused it withirony, paradox, parody, and humor so that, like the Maltese falcon, all is not
as it seems. Thus, the black-and-white appeal of the detective story―adetective who pursues, a villain who eludes, a mystery created by evil anddissipated by good ― is present in Hammett's fiction with disquieting
contradictions that keep the reader slightly off balance. (12)Leslie Fiedler also pays attention to the irony in Hammett’s stories when hecompares Sanctuary to one of them: “Its final ironic plot twist, in which Popeye, who has
escaped hanging for murders he has actually committed is executed for one which hehas not, is so closely anticipated in one of Hammett's Continental Op stories, that it isdifficult to believe Faulkner had not read and remembered it” (86; sic).
According to Gregory, the classical detective story has the following threecharacteristics: “strict sense of rules and sporting behavior, emphasis on the supremacyof reason, and belief in the existing social order” (18). On the other hand, hard-boiled
fiction lacks rules and “there is no single answer in the hard-boiled story and no single
criminal” (Gregory 20). In other words, we can say that Hammett’s “antidetective
novels”—mutants among detective stories—are written with the background of chaotic
reality, which are full of ironies, paradoxes and contradictions in conflict with classicalreason and order.
In “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler admires realism in Hammett’s
works. He says that what Hammett writes is “made up out of real things” (988) and that“the realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost
rule cities” (991). In such a world, we cannot trust the police nor juries and judges
3because “law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing” (991).
Facing chaotic reality, the characters of the hard-boiled fiction lose their humanfeelings and become mechanical beings.
Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929) depicts a world of chaotic violence in a town called“Poisonville,” in which multiple forces such as the police and gangsters conflict witheach other. The Continental Op, the narrator, is not given a name in the novel. The
reader knows neither personal information about him nor what he thinks or feels in his
mind. The Continental Op is a mechanical being like a camera whose function isrecording the violent world. He has lost internal human feelings so that he can adapt tochaotic reality. The man without a name reminds us of the anonymous “reporter” inFaulkner’s Pyron.2
In the opening scene of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930), the face of SamuelSpade, the private detective of the novel, is described by repeatedly comparing featuresof his face to “V”:
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting V under the more
flexible V of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v.
His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by
thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, andhis pale brown hair grew down―from high flat temples―in a point on his
forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan. (3)In The Maltese Falcon, unlike in Red Harvest, Hammett uses the third-person
point of view, and the name of the private detective is known to the reader. But the
inner thoughts and feelings in Samuel Spade’s mind are not directly shown. Instead
Hammett depicts Spade’s body externally with the use of the mechanical symbol of “V”
or animal images of a wolf or a bear: “Spade grinned wolfishly, showing the edges ofteeth far back in his jaw” (10); “The smooth thickness of his arms, legs, and body, the sagof his big rounded shoulders, made his body like a bear’s” (12). In short, Spade’s innerhuman feelings are suppressed and he is depicted as a mechanical being or an animal.
Spade needs to be an impersonal man in order to adapt to the chaotic world of The

Maltese Falcon, where the characters conflict with each other to get the falcon, thesymbol of their desires. Mechanical ways of descriptions correspond to Spade’s
impersonal attitudes.
Raymond Chandler, another representative of the hard-boiled detective story
writers, is admired as a great stylist. Truman Capote likes his works and even calls him
a “poet” (96). Chandler’s poetic style is characterized by mechanical metaphors. William
Marling says that Chandler’s metaphors presuppose “laymen’s physics” (209). For
4example, Philip Marlowe’s brain is compared to a clock, and Lash Canino, a killer, to a
dynamo. With its mechanical metaphors, Chandler’s style greatly influenced post-war
Japanese science fiction writers such as Sakyo Komatu and Kazumasa Hirai.3
Mechanical characters and metaphors in hard-boiled detective stories appearedwith the background of mechanistic views which were becoming dominant in American
society in the early 20th century.
In 1913, the mass production of Model T Fords on assembly lines started. Henry
Ford was influenced by Frederick Winslow Taylor, an American engineer who proposed
the ideas of scientific management. For Taylor, efficiency was everything. He wanted totreat workers as parts of machines and confined human work to the mechanicaloperations of tightening screws on assembly lines. Ford embodied Taylor’s ideas in themass production of Model T Fords. In automation, workers were treated as parts ofmechanical processes and regarded as something similar to machines.
In 1948, Nobert Wiener, a mathematician at MIT, published Cybernetics: orControl and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, in which he propounded amechanistic view of humans and animals based on the modern theory of information.
Some thinkers criticize such mechanistic views, saying that mechanism leads toalienation of human beings. György Lukács points out that, when we become parts ofmechanical processes, we are alienated from the living world. On the other hand, themechanistic views of human beings provide new insights into the understanding of ourexistence and give rise to new kinds of art. For example, Henri Bergson says in Le rirethat mechanical movements of comedians make the audience laugh. “Our attitude,
behavior and body movements cause laughter in proportion to the resemblance of ourbody to simple machines” (22-23). Modern Times (1936), Charlie Chaplin’s comedy film,
also presents a new kind of humor by depicting how human beings are treated as partsof machines in the modern automation process.
Now, what are the artistic effects of the mechanization of human beings inFaulkner’s Sanctuary? In the next chapter, we will consider these effects as the“technology of perception.”
4. Sanctuary and the Technology of Perception
Faulkner is interested in the artistic effects caused by the manipulation ofperception. The first section of The Sound and the Fury describes the world perceived by
Benjy, an idiot. In this section, various events are divided into separate perceptual
images without temporal order. It is such an unusual world of perception that makes up
the first section of The Sound and the Fury.
5

In Sanctuary, the reader finds another kind of unusual perception. While theworld in the Benjy section is perceived by the idiot, the perceptual world in Sanctuary isdominated by Popeye, a hybrid of man and machine.
Let us consider the opening scene of Sanctuary, in which Horace Benbow, a lawyer,
meets Popeye at a spring. Horace represents law, words and psychology; the original
version of Sanctuary focuses on Horace’s internal mind. On the other hand, Popeye is asilent outlaw who is depicted externally in a hard-boiled way as “a man of under size,
his hands in his coat pockets, a cigarette slanted from his chin. His suit was black, witha tight, high-waisted coat” (4).
On meeting Popeye, Horace is drawn into the world of unusual perception. In the
opening scene at the spring, Horace sees “the broken and myriad reflection” of his own
drinking and “the shattered reflection” of Popeye’s straw hat (3). The broken or
shattered reflections mean distorted visual perception. In such a world of distorted
perception, Popeye is described with mechanical metaphors: His face has a queer,
bloodless color “as though seen by electric light, against the sunny silence” (4) and hehas “that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin” (4). Horace’s first encounter with
Popeye, who represents chaotic evil in contrast with law and order, is depicted throughhard-boiled external description and distorted visual perception. One of the mostimportant differences between the revised and original versions of Sanctuary is that, inthe revised version, the opening scene begins with the meeting of Horace and Popeye.4
Distorted perception also enhances fear and surprise in the scenes at Old
Frenchman Place. In these scenes, instead of the direct descriptions of objects, their“shadows” are emphasized. Temple is haunted and trapped by Popeye’s gaze and finallyraped by him with a corncob. After being raped, Temple falls into a semi-conscious stateof mind and her face looks “like a sleep-walker’s” (142). She becomes a mechanical being
and the parts of her body are compared to inorganic substances: “her mouth round andopen like a small empty cave” (144); “She looked about with dazed, glassy eyes” (145). Ina sense, she is violated by distorted perception and becomes a different kind of being.
Miss Reba’s brothel is “full of sounds” (163) of the mechanical piano and loveaffairs. These sounds make up the space of auditory perception. When Virgil Snopes andFonzo stay at the brothel, they hear these sounds at night and try to guess what is goingon inside the house: “ ‘She's got a big family, I reckon,’ Virgil said, his voice already dullwith sleep. ‘Family, hell,’ Fonzo said. ‘It's a party. Wish I was to it’ ”(204). They justlisten to the sounds but they do not see the inside of the other rooms. Their
misunderstanding is caused by distorted perception—in this case, perception without
the aid of vision. In this scene at the brothel, Faulkner deliberately uses distorted
6perception in order to stress the difference between imagination and reality.
Such a distorted world of perception involves the artificial manipulation ofperception. Let us refer to Henri Bergson’s view on movies in order to consider thetechnological aspect of perception. In chapter 4 of L’évolution créatrice (1907), Bergson
says that, in a movie, a series of motionless photographs are used to reconstruct motion.
For example, with the aid of numerous photographs, each of which represents amotionless posture of an instant, a movie can reconstitute the motion of an army
marching before us (304-5). Each photograph is made up of lifeless materials andrecords only a motionless picture of an instant, but we can project our own life onto
these lifeless pictures and give them vivid motion. Bergson insists that, in our daily
perception, a system similar to movies works within us and reconstructs motion out of
motionless fragments of an instant. “The system of our usual cognition is essentiallycinematographic,” Bergson says (L’évolution créatrice 305).
In Sanctuary, where living things are placed at the same level as things without
life, the above-mentioned system of reconstructing motion does not work. In Sanctuary,
we find no vivid motions, but the scenes are dominated by motionless states. For
example, Faulkner often uses the word “motionless” to depict Temple, who behaves likea sleep-walker: “Then he〔Popeye〕 gripped her by the back of the neck and she sat
motionless, her mouth round and open like a small empty cave” (144). Similarly, sounds
in Sanctuary are monotonous without melodious motion. At the opening scene of thenovel at the spring, a bird sings “three bars in monotonous repetition” (4) and singsagain “as though it were worked by a clock” (5). Instead of lively melodies, there aremechanical, monotonous sounds.
In Sanctuary, artificial manipulation of perception has violent characteristics.
Horace and Temple meet Popeye—their sudden, violent encounters with the mechanicalmutant lead them to the unusual space of perception. Violence in Sanctuary not onlymeans murder and rape but also the violent change of perception.
Most of us also experience violent transformation of perception in our daily life. It
is when we get drunk that we fall into unusual space of perception. In Sanctuary,
Gowan Stevens’ drinking habit leads to Temple’s encounter with Popeye. Gowan goes to
Frenchman’s Bend with Temple to get illegal alcohol and this is the beginning of a seriesof criminal incidents. In Old Frenchman Place, Gowan always drinks alcohol and gets
drunk. Transformed perception in Sanctuary is similar to that perceived by drunken
people. Faulkner himself suffered from heavy drinking and must have often
experienced transformation of perception.
Faulkner’s heavy drinking reminds us of Raymond Chandler, who is also an
7alcoholic. According to Tom Hiney’s biography about Chandler, the hard-boiled detective
story writer began to drink too much alcohol due to his shell shock in World War Ⅰ. “In
June 1918, Chandler was knocked unconscious when German shells bombarded his
battalion’s trench position” (Hiney 43). Then he was transferred back to Waddington in
England. “It was during his four months’ training in Waddington—‘a hell of a place tospend a Sunday’—that the shell-shocked Chandler discovered his taste for alcohol”(Hiney 43).
In Chandler’s novels, Philip Marlowe, the detective and narrator, experiencestransformation of perception such as illusion through the effects of alcohol or drugs. In
addition, Marlowe’s perception is often interrupted when he is knocked out by gangsters.
As Faulkner and Chandler suffered from heavy drinking, both of them must have
known the possibility of falling into different kinds of perception.
Ways of perception described in Sanctuary are different from those of ordinary
perception, but all of us have the possibility of experiencing such unusual perception. In

Sanctuary, the unusual perception is represented by the word “shadow.” The “shadow”
means something hidden in our daily life: the unconscious state of mind likesleepwalking; evil such as rape, murder, and lynchings.
In Sanctuary, Faulkner describes shadowy parts of our existence not by delving
into the inner recesses of the characters but by throwing the characters into theunusual world of perception produced by their encounters with Popeye, a mechanicalmutant. How we perceive the world shows what the world means to us, andtransformation of perception changes the meanings of the world. In Sanctuary, themutant Popeye calls into question identities (identities which are represented by the
proposition of “A man is a man”) and violently transforms the meanings of the world.5
Notes
1.

The phrase “[The bird sings] as though it were worked by a clock” (5) is not includedin the original version of Sanctuary. It is added to the text in the revised version,
which emphasizes a mechanistic view of living things.

2.

In Pylon, “mechanical violence[ of machines ]” (27) and the waste land of themodern world are depicted, and the pilots are regarded as things below humanity.
“Because they aint human like us; they couldn't turn those pylons like they do ifthey had human blood and senses . . .” (42). In addition, the Reporter who observes
the pilots is not given a name in the novel. He is treated as if he were a ghost with“his ghostlike quality of being beyond all mere restrictions of flesh and time” (174).
Modern technology regards humans as something belonging to the same level as
8machines or ghosts.
3.

Komatu says that he likes Chandler and that the hard-boiled style is essential toscience fiction (Komatu 232). Hirai wrote Cyborg Blues, a collection of hard-boiledscience fiction stories, whose narrator is a black cyborg police officer. The second
story of Cyborg Blues is a parody of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye: a beautiful
blond woman in The Long Goodbye is rewritten as an android in Cyborg Blues.

4.

In the original version of Sanctuary, the encounter of Horace with Popeye isdepicted in the middle of chapter two (20).

5.

Gender identity is also brought into question. When Temple recalls the rape scene,
she tells Horace that she tried to make herself look like a boy in order to escapefrom fear: “I was looking at my legs and I’d try to make like I was a boy” (227).
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