Faulkner's Revision of Sanctuary

Was Sanctuary really a “cheap idea,” as Faulkner himself called it, a book “deliberately conceived to make money”? The question has teased the reading public since its publication. Many readers have had their worst suspicions about Faulkner’s work confirmed by his statement, but most serious critics have discounted the disparagement, emphasizing instead Faulkner’s further statement that when the galley proofs arrived from his publisher, “I saw that it was so terrible that there were two things to do: tear it up or rewrite it. I thought again, ‘It might sell; maybe 10,000 of them will buy it.’ So I tore the galleys down and rewrote the book.”

Now that two sets of the original galleys are available for inspection, one can see just how Faulkner reworked the novel. In the collation provided here by Gerald Langford, using Faulkner’s own corrected galleys held by the University of Texas at Austin, the reader can reconstruct the first version for himself, noting the cancellations, the additions, and the rewritten passages. As Gerald Langford makes clear in his introductory analysis, neither of Faulkner’s statements is to be trusted. Through revision, Sanctuary became theatrically more effective but thematically less interesting than the original version. Particularly noteworthy is the experimental narrative method of the original version, which foreshadows the method of Absalom, Absalom! as opposed to the straightforward, easily accessible method to which Faulkner turned in the revised Sanctuary and Light in August.