Faulkner

"...frustrated Tchaikovsky, spread thin, over stale white bread"... have to wonder how you get from a mob burning down the local jail to Luxembourg Garden, tap tap tap.... and how is he ever going to wrap up this mess? A segue into a lengthy portrayal of race and class in a potent recounting of evil doing, a reckless evening's fun that slides into murder...To me it is something worse than reactive violence when death comes as an extension of social carelessness, opportunism or mindless mob justice. I read this book because it resonated along the lines of Von Trier's films Mandelay and Dogtown, where Grace's presence has a disturbing effect on the local population. In Dogtown, a sort of Our Town, the inhabitants start off happily enough and then gradually go 'off' like bad cheese. In Faulkner's piece, Sanctuary, the pervasive presence of social decay, the smell of death and very bad things are present from beginning to end. In both pieces, there is distance in the telling. The tone barely changes as the narrator describes the sheer dress or a bloodied corn cob. The voice seems to float over the images of rape in Mandelay and Dogtown. I hardly care about the girl. A bad thing happened, yet, it seemed that the process of getting there was more intriguing that the act itself. Both are rescued by Daddy and the characters seem to do just as well as they had before they were so ill used, so I wonder what the point was? Both girls were inserted by men into communities of lower social status. Both were held against their will and taken down, and both emerged, protected in some way by their wealth. What does it mean?