Heaven is eliminated; the old possibilities of a secular humanism are eliminated; gradually, everything is squeezed down into Hell; or, Hell is raised up, unchanged, and laid over the human world like a labyrinthine grid. The title, which starts us at one point, anticipating sanctuary, is progressively reversed in a brilliant exercise of negative imagination, until the root meaning of the term is canceled and the sanctuary available even to the fugitive and outlaw is gone because there is no holy of holies, nothing left that is sanctified, held sacred and inviolate, within the self, out in society, before or beyond man and society. It is as if even the ultimate sanctuary (something inviolate and pure in human affairs) has been violated and destroyed. No more completely and thoroughly negative fictional work exists in Faulkner. There is nowhere in Faulkner a purely negative work, for somewhere in even the most negative—As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary—there are wonderfully comic scenes which indicate the possibility of a whole other kind of world, order, vision, and style. These scenes are seldom ironic in a corrosive way; they are pure outbursts from a joyful comic perception of reality set into the context of and surrounded by, the usually otherwise unrelieved negative material. In Sanctuary they are all centered around the whorehouse, the ironic and comic sanctuary of the novel.
The central events of this fiction are related violent acts by Popeye, both of which can be said—finally—to have been caused by Temple. These acts are the corn cob “rape” of the “virgin” Temple in the corn crib where she has gone for “sanctuary,” and the murder of Tommy, her dim-witted but good-hearted protector. Once Temple (the eighteen-year-old daughter of a judge, the deflowered bloom of southern womanhood) has been brought into the situation (described later) by her drunk southern gentleman friend (Gowan—Gawain?—Stevens) and abandoned, she becomes, as Anse became in As I Lay Dying, the principal but never the sole causative factor or force in the sequence of events that Faulkner uses to negate the title.
Religion and sexuality as forces—usually negative—so often converge in Faulkner that one has to take Temple’s name seriously. Just in this central period alone, there are Addie and Whitfield: Temple, Popeye, and Red; Joanna Burden and Joe Christmas; Hightower and his wife. Already corrupt, or maybe just already desiring to be violated and corrupted, Temple is abandoned in a situation where she can become as corrupt as she wishes. Taken seriously, we have to understand her symbolically as the temple (the traditional location of the sanctuary) that wants to be corrupted and that in the reversed negative logic of the fiction, does not provide sanctuary and comfort or spread sanctity, beatitude, and the Word of God—but causes instead pestilence, destruction, violence, corruption, outrage. To describe what happens to Temple as a “rape” is rather inaccurate, for she has taunted and tempted the impotent Popeye with her sex until in an incredible compounded act of frustrated rage, he first shoots Tommy (an act of deflected impotent sexuality if ever there was one) and then deflowers and rapes Temple (which is what she has wanted all along) in the only way that is available to him—with another simulacrum (the gun first, then the corn cob—what a symbolic pair). These two acts of displaced sexuality and violence generate much of the rest of the fiction. To say that the Temple wants to be violated by the gangster is an understatement. The temple—so to speak in the purely symbolic formulaic terms this fiction encourages—seduces the criminal or gangster only to find that the gangster is sexually impotent and must act through mediators. The acting through mediators (the gun, the corn cob, the whorehouse, Red, the mob) is a basic principle of triangulation where, as one sees it so beautifully in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum; crime, evil, destruction, even simple pain and harm can all be inflicted through mediators without responsibility and guilt. Nobody in this fiction is ever punished for what he does; most often, he is punished and destroyed for what someone else does. The principle of mediation and triangulation work in another way, of course, in the person of Christ and in the office of the Church, to mediate between man and God and to take away guilt and evil by transfer to the other. That is, to guarantee sanctuary, especially in the final or eschatological sense. There is, in other words, malign and benign mediation and triangulation. What Faulkner has imagined here (as Claude-Edmonde Magny has pointed out) is a demonic inversion of benign/divine mediation: Temple is a whore, the temple is a whorehouse, the whorehouse is the only real (comic) sanctuary, Popeye is a petty antichrist, impotent, without the spermatic Word, his rod a gun, his penis a corn cob. All the generative sources are negated.
Once the opportunity is present, the corruption of Temple is complete. She is taken to her proper dwelling—the whorehouse—at once by Popeye. As in the case of Joanna Burden, there is a readiness for corruption and perversion in the female which only awaits the right circumstances. Between them, Temple and Popeye take care of nearly everybody in this fiction. Temple, for example, is, in the demonic triangulation of the novel, responsible for three deaths, all of males, and all sexually caused. Popeye shoots Tommy to get at Temple and to eliminate the witness. Red, the stud Popeye gets to do his screwing for him so that he can at least watch, is killed by Popeye after Temple taunts him once too often with Red’s potency and virility. Lee Goodwin (whose name is too obviously and cruelly punning to need commentary) is disemboweled and then burned at the stake by the mob for an act he tried to prevent (he was being tried for an act he never committed—the shooting of Tommy) solely on the basis of Temple’s perjured testimony. Temple’s giving of false testimony is arranged by her father, who is a Judge, in order, one supposes, to suppress the whorehouse episodes and save the family name. I am not trying to summarize the events here, but to assemble actions and events which negate that title. The law has always been a sanctuary; here the very integrity of the law is violated by the agencies which should administer, protect, and uphold it: the courts, lawyers, the judge; and the perjury comes from the sanctuary itself. And Justice, which should be directly related to the Law and administered with great caution and discretion by responsible people, is, in an action repeated over and over in Faulkner, taken over by the mob and administrated violently and wrongly so that an innocent person is outrageously victimized. What the action of the mob does is force, again, the central displaced irony of the fiction: which is that Temple could ever be raped at all. Only Horace Benbow has the proper response to Temple: after his return from the whorehouse interview, Horace finally vomits, not at what happened to Temple—the mob fixes on the lurid detail of the blood-stained corn cob and upon the abstraction of the young girl so violated—but out of a profound, delayed revulsion at her corruption and perversion. The polluted Temple is what makes him sick.
Horace Benbow is one of Faulkner’s earliest fictional lawyers, the most persistent and fully developed one being Gavin Stevens. It is Gavin Stevens who is the central lawyer figure in Requiem for a Nun, the work that redeems Sanctuary. Horace Benbow has a previous fictional existence (In Flags in the Dust and Sartoris) where he is taken from his sister Narcissa by that man-eating sexual female Belle; and in a manner that is softer, more traditionally erotic than Temple’s, is slowly corrupted to her needs. When Sanctuary begins, Horace Benbow is trying to save himself from Belle and become socially functional again as a lawyer. The plight of Ruby, her sick child, and Lee Goodwin moves Horace Benbow to action. It is part of the demonic logic of this fiction to turn back the thrust of this effort at justice, and to have what is a noble, lifesaving and just action result in its opposites (violent death for Goodwin, total failure for Horace, expulsion for Ruby) and to have Horace give up his desire for divorce and return to life with Belle—a sanctuary only in the most extreme ironic sense of that term. Horace’s role in this fiction is of extraordinary importance because he leaves what appears to be a sanctuary (his withdrawn life with Belle, only Belle is really like Temple and the house is not a home nor does he have the comforts that come from the love of a good woman) and re-enters the ongoing life of society in a decisive, productive, and worthwhile way. His efforts are all related to the title: he attempts to provide a sanctuary for the needy mother and sick child, only to have his motives and actions misunderstood and countered by the very elements of society which should approve of them; he attempts to provide the sanctuary of the law and justice for the innocent, falsely arrested Lee Goodwin, only to have his own witness and the only witness who knows the truth perjure herself, corrupting the law itself, perverting justice, and causing what is the most violent and terrible act of negation and destruction in the fiction. Defeated (again) Horace returns to his false sanctuary, his principal gains having been the negative knowledge he acquires in the course of his efforts to free himself and provide
