History of Violence by Édouard Louis

Author:Édouard Louis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

INTERLUDE

It was in a novel by William Faulkner, Sanctuary, that I first found a case like mine, in which a person was unable to flee.

On page 65, Faulkner writes:

Temple backed from the room. In the hall she whirled and ran. She ran right off the porch, into the weeds, and sped on. She ran to the road and down it for fifty yards in the darkness, then without a break she whirled and ran back to the house and sprang onto the porch and crouched against the door just as someone came up the hall.

When I read it, I made this note:

“Today is Tuesday, November 11, 2014. I’ve just found and read this book by William Faulkner while writing the last pages of History of Violence. I’m stunned by my encounter with Temple Drake, by the parallels between us, by thoughts of hers that are exactly identical to my own. Here in the first part of the book, Faulkner is telling the story of a woman, Temple Drake, who after a car accident is taken with her male companion to a ruined house, not far away, inhabited by a small community of men and one woman. One of the men in this community has found her and her companion and has brought them to this frankly troubling house, lost in the woods and underbrush.”

From the beginning, the characters she meets in this house—small-time bootleggers—are presented as violent, unpredictable drunks.

They threaten one another, they fight, they curse, they drink, they threaten Temple, and the possibility of rape—which will take place—hangs over her.

Temple thinks of escaping now and then, although escape will be complicated without a car. She asks the woman who lives in the house to help her. The woman answers that Temple has to get away before it’s too late. She insists that Temple go, even though at times she seems to want to keep her there. Several times Temple could do it, she could conceivably get away. Her male companion does manage to leave, in the end, and his example points up the inertia of Temple Drake.

* * *

IN THE SCENE that I have just transcribed, Temple makes a run for it, and we breathe a sigh of relief, thinking that finally Faulkner will give us the escape scene we’ve been waiting for, for too long, but no sooner does she escape than she turns around “without a break,” as if in the grip of the situation, as if the first act of violence in this situation was to preclude the idea of an outside, to lock her inside the limits of the situation itself. In chronological terms, the first problem—for her, and for me, too—is not to have been forced into such-and-such behavior in this interaction, but to have been held within the frame of the interaction, within the scene imposed by the situation, that is, in the murky terrain of the bootleggers’ house. It is as if the violence of that enclosure, the geographical violence, came first

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