THE BLIND MAN, THE IDIOT,AND THE PRIG: FAULKNER’S DISDAIN FOR THE READER1

GENE C. FANT, JR.

William Faulkner’s disdain for the reader surfaces in his narrative approach in three novels: Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom! Frustrated with the failure of contemporary critics and general readers to wrestle with his style, he asserts authorial power over his audience. Three particular characters come to symbolize, in part, the general reader. In Sanctuary, Faulkner undermines the senses, leading the reader to identify with the blind-deaf-mute, Pap Goodwin. In The Sound and the Fury, the reader’s demands for narrative order find a parallel in the idiot Benjy Compson. In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner depicts the overactive reader in the priggish Shreve McCannon, who reshapes the story. Each character pro- vides insight into the total dependence of the audience upon the narrator and the overall epistemological ramifications of narrative itself.

By 1928, William Faulkner was an experienced novelist, with Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitoes published and a third completed manuscript (which became Sartoris), under his authorial belt. His experiences as a novelist, however, frus- trated him as his sales lagged and his critical reception proved underwhelming. He felt underappreciated and misunderstood, as his own recollections give evidence.2 When Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary, the two major works of 1928–29, he made a step in his approach to writing that ele- vated his prose: he stopped writing for the “ideal” reader, regardless of the con- sequences. Up until that time, Faulkner had taken a fairly traditional approach to relating a story with fairly ordered plots and narrative points of view. With

1 I am deeply indebted to Noel Polk, Martina Sciolino, and Victor Taylor for their assistance in the early stages of this article. 2 In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of Sanctuary (1932), Faulkner wrote “I had been writing books for about five years, which got published and not bought” (Rpt. in Sanctuary (New York: Vintage, 1931. Corrected text. Ed. Noel Polk, 1987), 338. 156 Gene C. Fant, Jr. these two novels, however, he shifted his view of the ideal reader.3 First, in The Sound and the Fury, he wrote for himself. In the introduction to the 1932 Modern Library edition of Sanctuary, he commented, “I had just written my guts into The Sound and the Fury though I was not aware until the book was published that I had done so, because I had done it for pleasure. I believed then that I would never be published again. I had stopped thinking of myself in pub- lishing terms.” 4 As he wrote so passionately about the Compson family, he intentionally disregarded what critics and the broad readership might think. In Sanctuary, he claims to have gone to the other extreme, invoking the opposite strategy. In the introduction to Sanctuary, he observed: “I began to think of books in terms of possible money. I decided I might just as well make some of it myself. I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks. …” 5 His extensive re-workings of the novel 6 belie his flip- pant observation, but the grain of truth to the novel’s conceit does seem to focus on his new-found attitude toward the general reader. Concurrent with these new approaches to audience came an opportunity for Faulkner to explore epistemology, highlighting the narrator’s power over the nar- rative’s presentation. The general reader, then, became secondary to his interest

3 At the University of Virginia, a student asked if he wrote with a “particular reader in mind,” to which Faulkner replied, “No, I don’t. I wrote for years before it occurred to me that strangers might read the stuff, and I’ve never broken the habit. I still write it because it worries me so much I’ve got to get rid of it, and so I put in on paper” Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: U Virginia P, 1959; hereafter abbreviated FIU), 14. By this, he meant that he had to write; he had no other motive than that basic semi-selfish reason. He insisted elsewhere in that interview (FIU, 4) that he did not “know what the average reader gets from reading [The Sound and the Fury].” Faulkner also insisted that he wrote for pleasure, in an effort to please the reader. I think, though, that he meant for the pleasure of a reader like himself. See, as an example, Lion in the Garden: “I’m a story-teller. I’m telling a story, intro- ducing comic and tragic elements as I like. I’m telling a story—to be repeated and retold. I don’t claim to be truthful. Fiction is fiction—not truth; it’s make-believe. Thus I stack and lie at times, all for the purposes of the story—to entertain” (Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926–1962, ed. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate (New York: Random House, 1968), 277. See also page 280: “Let [the writer] remember that a novel is to create pleasure for the reader. The only mistake with any novel is if it fails to create pleasure. That it is not true is irrelevant: a novel is to be enjoyed. A book that fails to create enjoyment is not a good one.” 4 Rpt. in Sanctuary, 338. 5 Sanctuary, 338. 6 See Noel Polk’s Editor’s Note in the corrected text edition of Sanctuary for an overview of the novel’s convoluted publishing process, 335, ff.