Newly translated study examines disability and character in Faulkner’s work
Available for the first time in English, “Inventing Benjy: William Faulkner's Most Splendid Creative Leap” provides an important framework through which to read characters such as Benjy Compson and Ike Snopes.
First published in French in 2009 as “L'Idiotie dan l'oeuvre de Faulkner,” this new translation and title takes into account how language and usage have changed in the past 15 years.
As Spill notes in the introduction to the new edition, her use of “idiocy” in the book “designates … a very singular way of being in the world”: “idiocy refers to the specific condition of they who sense and feel with the utmost intensity without being able to name or voice their sensations and feelings; of they who are irremediably anchored in a timeless present that, to their minds, keeps repeating itself.”
Through exhaustive scholarship review, close reading and literary analysis, Spill's work provides important insights into both Faulkner Studies and Disability Studies.
The book is divided into three sections: “Idiosyncrasies of an Idiocy: Disarticulation of Bodies, Disconnecting of Narratives”; “To the Roots of the World: Idiocy and Its Objects”; and “Trying to Say.” Benjy's narrative in “The Sound and the Fury” provides an important foundation throughout Spill's analysis, both in her close readings of Benjy's narrative, worldview and character, as well as his narrative's relationship to Faulkner's later oeuvre. For example, after a careful consideration of the grammatical structures of Benjy's narrative, drawing extensively on scholarship, Spill discusses the significance of Benjy's thoughts, which lack the associative nature of more traditional thought processes.
Spill describes how, “for Benjy, time unfolds like a succession of instances that appear in his consciousness according to the impressions that trigger them. Past or current, dreamed or real, they are all experienced with the intensity of the present.”
Given the centrality of the issue, question and problem of memory in Faulkner scholarship, Spill's subsequent analyses provide significant contributions to these continuing conversations. In his foreword to the new translations, scholar Taylor Hagood emphasizes the role that the original French text played in 2009 as “capturing the moment of transition from problematic modes of discussing Benjy to approaches thoroughly grounded in the precepts and cautions of disability studies.” He then notes that, “now, with the contours of Benjy's disability far more elucidated, returning to that vexed ‘idiot' concept works in new ways that can navigate the sweating-browed problematics of this term that Faulkner employed and which there is no getting around.”
Spill's extensive readings of myriad examples throughout Faulkner's work do, indeed, provide fertile ground for new considerations of these texts and characters.
I appreciate that Spill uses her painstakingly constructed analytic framework to expand her focus beyond Benjy and Ike to characters such as Rosa Coldfield in “Absalom! Absalom!”
Spill compares Rosa's tendency to avoid addressing issues directly to Benjy's
analytic lack, observing that, “Gaps, extreme concision, and things left unsaid are sometimes more eloquent than the proliferation of words” (198).
Spill's analysis takes great advantage of these gaps to create useful schema from which to consider these characters, particularly in their roles as inarticulate subjects observing objects. She then considers these schemas within the larger context of literary modernism, drawing important comparisons to work by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Gustave Flaubert. Taken together, they create important portraits of “a world in decline for which these idiot figures serve as an emblem.”
While Spill discusses the challenges of reading Faulkner in French translation and how differences in translations can occlude Faulkner's original meanings, it's important to keep in mind the parallel accomplishment of Arby Gharibian in translating this complex monograph.
Deftly contending with perspectives ranging from Aristotle, Kierkegaard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gharibian's translation is engaging and clear. The University Press of Mississippi is to be commended for bringing us this important contribution to Faulkner Studies.
— Monica Carol Miller is an associate professor of English at Middle Georgia State University. She is the author of Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion (LSU Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Tacky South (LSU Press, 2022).