Inventing Benjy
William Faulkner’s Most Splendid Creative Leap

Frédérique Spill (Author), Arby Gharibian (Translated by), Taylor Hagood (Foreword by)

9781496849007

Hardback, published 15 February 2024

277 pages
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.9 cm, 0.272 kg

With great authority and lucidity, Inventing Benjy shows brilliantly how Faulkner adopted the conceit of ‘idiocy’ for his innovative, contrarian, and revolutionary modernist project." - John T. Matthews, editor of William Faulkner in Context

Inventing Benjy: William Faulkner’s Most Splendid Creative Leap is a groundbreaking work at the intersection of Faulkner studies and disability studies. Originally published in 2009 by Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle as L’Idiotie dans l’œuvre de Faulkner, this translation brings the book to English-language readers for the first time. Author Frédérique Spill begins with a sustained look at the monologue of Benjy Compson, the initial first-person narrator in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Spill questions the reasons for this narrative choice, bringing readers to consider Benjy’s monologue, which is told by a narrator who is deaf and cognitively disabled, as an impossible discourse. This paradoxical discourse, which relies mostly on senses and sensory perception, sets the foundation of a sophisticated poetics of idiocy. Using this form of writing, Faulkner shaped perspective from a disabled character, revealing a certain depth to characters that were previously only portrayed on a shallow level. This style encompasses some of the most striking forms and figures of his leap into modern(ist) writing. In that respect, Inventing Benjy thoroughly examines Benjy’s discourse as an experimental workshop in which objects and words are exclusively modelled by the senses.

This study regards Faulkner’s decision to place a disabled character at the center of perception as the inaugural and emblematic gesture of his writing. Closely examining excerpts from Faulkner’s novels and a few short stories, Spill emphasizes how the corporal, temporal, sensorial, and narrative figures of "idiocy" are reflected throughout Faulkner’s work. These writing choices underlie some of his most compelling inventions and certainly contribute to his unmistakable writing style. In the process, Faulkner’s writing takes on a phenomenological dimension, simultaneously dismantling and reinventing the intertwined dynamics of perception and language.

• Foreword by Taylor Hagood
• Introduction to the Translated Edition
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Idiosyncrasies of an Idiocy: Disarticulation of Bodies, Disconnecting of Narratives
• Chapter 1. Is the Idiot a Monster?
• Chapter 2. The Flabby Flesh and Flaccid Bodies of Idiots
• Chapter 3. Inarticulate Voice and Story
• Chapter 4. Faulknerian Idiotisms: The Mechanisms of Repetition
• Chapter 5. States of a World in Disintegration
• Part II: To the Roots of the World: Idiocy and Its Objects
• Chapter 6. Idiots Have Blue Eyes
• Chapter 7. The Idiot Gaze and Its Representations
• Chapter 8. Idiocy’
  s Fetish Objects: Substitutive Fixations and Logic
• Chapter 9. The Exacerbation of Sensation
• Chapter 10. Idiocy, Alcohol, and Other Illicit Substances: "A Derangement of All the Senses"
• Part III: "Trying to Say"
• Chapter 11. The Fury of Origins, the Ringing of Sound
• Chapter 12. The Aesthetics of Idiocy: Writing and Aphasia
• Chapter 13. The Disorders of Predication and the Order of a World: The Idiot Idiom
• Chapter 14. Trying to Read Faulkner
• Conclusion: Fiction of Origin and the Origin of Fiction
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index