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 Horace’s role in this fiction is of extraordinary importance because he leaves what appears to be a sanctuary (his withdrawn life with Belle, only Belle is really like Temple and the house is not a home nor does he have the comforts that come from the love of a good woman) and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 sanctuary for others. His negative knowledge, of course, is that there are no sanctuaries left, to be found, or to be achieved by purposeful human action.
Following the reversing logic of his own fiction, Faulkner has concluded the three main interrelated plot lines of this novel as follows: Popeye (Flem Snopes’s predecessor) who, with Temple, is the chief violator and destroyer in the fiction, is tried and hanged for a crime he did not even commit. Temple, who is the direct cause of three violent male deaths, and who, like Popeye and Anse in As I Lay Dying, is never held accountable or punished for them, is “saved” from the whorehouse (where she really belongs) and is taken to Europe for rest and recuperation. When we last see her, she is sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens, with her father, listening to music, yawning, making up her face. Horace Benbow’s last act after he returns home to Belle (direct from the disemboweling and burning of Goodwin, after ambiguous talk with the cab driver about how “we have to protect our girls”) is to call his stepdaughter, Little Belle, who is Temple’s age. She is away at a house party. It is a sad and ironic conversation. Little Belle is in the pre-Temple pattern; her Gowan is at her shoulder making wise cracks to Horace. “Little Belle’s voice was breathless, controlled, cool, discreet, detached” (SN 360). She’s having a good time. Horace, as usual, is well intentioned but inept. Little Belle will follow after her mother. The irony of the last sentence of the chapter falls on Horace, his house, little Belle, and the title of the fiction. “Lock the back door” Belle tells him. But that won’t do any good: there is no place to hide; nothing is inviolate and certainly no pretty young girl is safe, that night or the next.
The last word of the novel is “death;” the first is sanctuary. If there is any definition of the title that holds, it is the last word of the novel, understood, I think, as it is in Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider: oblivion, the black abyss, nothing, zero, the absolute negation of life. The circuit of the fiction is from sanctuary to death; the alternatives are Horace and Temple, who survive—the one older, abject and defeated, knowing only that it will happen again, that the irreversible sequence is Belle, Little Belle, Big Belle, Belle, knowing that it is not any longer the vanity of human wishes but the futility of human effort that prevails. Knowledge proves as useless here as the law, justice, truth, goodness and all of the other abstractions which have guided man in his attempts to humanize the word and create a culture. The other alternative, Temple, is younger, female, corrupt and perverted before she even gets to her teens, the fouled sanctuary, the holy of holies become the foul of foulness. We end with Temple, with an external image—a surface reality—that runs so counter to the absolute inner corruption and foulness, to the murderous last months of her life as to create, by this typical Faulknerian juxtaposition, a disparity and contradiction between outer and inner, appearance and reality so great as to produce again and again Darl’s helpless, hopeless, defeated laughter or Ben’s furious sound, the pure expression of “horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless.”
Temple is worse than Popeye, which is why, finally, Faulkner ends with Temple and why, we come to realize, it is not Temple who serves Popeye, but Popeye who serves and services that fouled Temple: Gowan, Tommy, Red, Goodwin, Popeye, even Horace—all feed the fires of her lust, her rapacity. She consumes them; but they do not destroy her, nor does her lust consume her, and her image remains the same. If there is a grammar of negative being to be found in Faulkner, it is embodied in Temple and Popeye, the indifferent destroyers and consumers (like Anse) of others in this fiction. Sanctuary is the most completely negative model of reality to be found anywhere in Faulkner. In some ways, all the rest of the dark fictions can be seen as working off of, away and up from this negative model. And in some ways, it is also the paradigmatic dark Faulknerian fiction because one feels very strongly the degree to which he is yearning and his creative imagination is yearning, throughout, for true sanctuary, for peace (for Faulkner’s was a profoundly gentle and peaceful imagination in many ways), but is creating, in a fury, helplessly because of the perception that inside the Temple is Popeye. The true power and potency of the redeeming godhead (sexual or spiritual) is gone, and in its place one finds only death, destruction, indifferent corruption, petty crime, voyeurism, impotence, simulacra, disembowelment, immolation, expulsion, drunkenness. And further, all of this is fathered and protected by the Judge, the Law, in a cruel and ironic deception. And outside the Temple, there is only Horace Benbow to come to one’s rescue—an inept, impotent, classical heritage reduced, now, to carrying home dripping shrimp and locking the back door for yet another corrupt female.
This fictional grammar of negative being gives us the deep case structure of ontological violation, the rape, corruption, and destruction of all generative being. Sanctuary is the reduction of ontological possibilities (sexual, spiritual, intellectual, legal, physical, moral, ethical) to the violators, the violations, and the violated. It is a hellish ontological grammar by means of which one can only conjugate everything to nothing. Addie Bundren is a familiar matrix of destruction who takes the essential being of each of her children into the coffin with her before they can lay her to rest in the ground. The other figure