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Article Dans Une Revue The Faulkner Journal Année : 2019

No “Great Truths of the Heart”: The Postmodern Hopelessness of Sanctuary

No “Great Truths of the Heart”: Le désespoir postmoderne dans Sanctuaire

Résumé

When Ihab Hassan spoke at the Yoknapatawpha conference on Faulkner and postmodernism in 1999, he chose to expand on what he called, using a Faulknerian word, postmodernism’s lack of “spirit.” By spirit, Faulkner referred to the “great truths of the heart” that he listed during his often-quoted Nobel prize speech and in several of his novels. Postmodernism is notoriously hard to define and characterize, but one of its most striking recurring features is its willingness to delve into the uncomfortable and the disturbing, as well as the ensuing impression of absurdity and general hopelessness. At the 1999 conference, while reluctant to call Faulkner a postmodernist, Hassan—who had been attempting to differentiate modern from postmodern literature since 1971—invited postmodernist writers to take inspiration from Faulkner’s spirit, from his pragmatic belief in man. But what happened to that spirit in Sanctuary—arguably Faulkner’s darkest novel with its long list of crimes, from rape, to murder, to lynching? If postmodernism is characterized for Hassan by its “spiritual privations” (19), could Sanctuary possibly be Faulkner’s most postmodern work? This article argues that Faulkner’s modernist practices fail in the face of the cold commercial logic that pervades Sanctuary, a novel written at a time when Faulkner had begun “to think of books in terms of possible money” (Faulkner, Essays 177). Such logic rests on a general blurring of boundaries, such as between the commodity and its image, the market and the media, economics and culture. It is in Faulkner’s embrace of indeterminacy and hopelessness, in his refusal to portray an alternative to them, that the true “cheap idea” (Faulkner, Essays 176) of the novel may lie.

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hal-04145873 , version 1 (29-06-2023)

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Astrid Maes. No “Great Truths of the Heart”: The Postmodern Hopelessness of Sanctuary. The Faulkner Journal, 2019, 33 (1), pp.93-110. ⟨10.1353/fau.2019.0016⟩. ⟨hal-04145873⟩
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