The starting point of this book is the monologue of Benjy Compson, the initial first-person narrator in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929)—an “idiot,” as Faulkner himself called him. The book first focuses on the striking recurrence of disabled characters in Faulkner’s fiction, identifying their idiosyncratic representations while questioning the reasons for this compelling narrative choice. Benjy’s monologue, told by a narrator who is both deaf and dumb and hopelessly condemned to stupor—a monologue “[t]old by an idiot, full of sound and fury, [s]ignifying nothing” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, V,5)—is then envisioned as an impossible discourse. It is, however, upon this paradoxical discourse, which mostly rests on the pre-eminence of sensory perception, that Faulkner sets the foundation of a sophisticated poetics of idiocy which encompasses some of the most striking forms and figures of his leap into modern(ist) writing. In that respect, this book thoroughly examines Benjy’s discourse as a vast experimental workshop in which things and words are exclusively modelled by the senses. In the process, the intertwined dynamics of perception and language are simultaneously dismantled and reinvented, while Faulkner’s writing acquires a dense phenomenological dimension. In other words, this study regards the author’s choice to place a disabled character at the center of perception as the inaugural and emblematic gesture of his writing.
https://academic.oup.com/mississippi-scholarship-online/book/58699