A New Take on Benji

Benjy’s Red-Letter Days‘The Sound and the Fury’ in 14 Colors

By RANDY BOYAGODA

Published: September 14, 2012

What happens when you add colored ink to the previous black-and-white type of a William Faulkner classic? Could the technology somehow compromise the reader’s experience, or do multiple inks actually make for a greater novel? Is this what Faulkner had in mind — and does it matter?


William Faulkner“The Sound and the Fury” in any color typeface tells the story of the Compsons, a once-aristocratic Mississippi family whose decline into despair, tragedy and chaos Faulkner imbued with an array of broader cultural, historical and philosophical resonances. But the book, originally published in 1929, has always been best known for its innovations in storytelling, particularly for the sudden, fragmentary and vertiginous shifts in time and place that govern the section narrated by Benjy Compson, a mentally retarded mute.



Faulkner readily acknowledged the difficulty of what he’d written. In fact, he himself first proposed using different-colored inks as a way to make Benjy’s section more accessible, with distinct shades assigned to its crisscrossed time-settings. But he had to accept that in the world of 1920s publishing, this just wasn’t possible. “I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up to it,” he swaggered in an editorial exchange.



Last month, the industry finally caught up. Bound in vermilion goatskin and limited to 1,480 copies, an opulent new edition of THE SOUND AND THE FURY (Folio Society, $345) is intended for collectors and well-heeled Faulkner lovers — and it has already sold out. With multicolored printing far more plausible today, however, and publishers always looking for new ways to revive interest in (meaning, sales of) a classic, this edition could herald a future, mass-market counterpart. If so, it would no doubt be sold as the fulfillment of Faulkner’s original vision for the novel.



The writing in “The Sound and the Fury” isn’t difficult for the sake of difficulty, nor is its meaning confined to the story of one spectacularly dysfunctional Southern brood. Instead, the novel both reveals and embodies the jagged, individual experiences of modernity’s ironic provision for us all: an intense awareness of the particulars of each our own time and place, shot through with fearful unknowing about how these particulars fit together, about if they even can, or should, and why. Nowhere is this gyre of awareness and unknowing more apparent than in Benjy’s section. His monologue covers 28 years of mundane and tragic living, lighting upon his grandmother’s funeral, his sister’s wedding, his brother’s suicide, and his own wintry pasture walks and desperate runs along iron fences. Benjy’s hearing, smelling or seeing something in one setting sends him elsewhere, or looping back and forth between two times in the same place, a sensory-driven shuttling that occurs from paragraph to paragraph, sometimes even midsentence.



The colored inks, 14 in total, as determined by two leading Faulkner scholars, are an arresting visual statement of Faulkner’s daring technique and a helpful navigator for Benjy’s fractured, far-flung storytelling. In these ways, the scheme makes for an undeniable improvement. But the visual statement is finally too arresting, the navigation too helpful. Benjy’s interiority is disorienting and exhilarating to experience in standard black ink precisely because this neutral printing perfectly conveys the “unbroken-surfaced confusion of an idiot which is outwardly a dynamic and logical coherence” — Faulkner’s own description of his ambitions for Benjy’s section. Whereas in relieving the crucial tension between confusion and coherence, the colored inks make safe the novel’s most provocative claim: that we might recognize our own struggles, to understand the pieces and people of our lives and be understood by them, in the voice and efforts of a 33-year-old mute idiot man-child who, in his words, is always “trying to say.”



But what if Faulkner was actually wrong in wanting Benjy’s section read in different colors? To suggest this, I know, is to commit literary heresy. We like to venerate authorial intentions, especially when they’re the frustrated or ignored intentions of great writers, and when this, in turn, justifies a new edition of a classic that claims steadfast fidelity to those intentions. This premise governed the 2001 “Restored Edition” of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” which prints the deleted passages and undoes the editorial modifications — like changing the demagogue politician Willie Stark’s name back to Willie Talos — that he had to accept in advance of its 1946 publication, and also the 2004 version of Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel,” which is pointedly subtitled “The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement.” In reprinting the poems as Plath left them upon her desk at her death, this edition reflects plans that Ted Hughes bypassed when he arranged for their original publication in 1965. Likewise, the 2007 version of James Agee’s novel “A Death in the Family” is tagged “A Restoration of the Author’s Text”; its editor polemically advocates for this edition over its 1957 predecessor, which was published only after major editorial changes were made independent of the author, who had died two years earlier.



These new editions aren’t self-evidently more successful versions of long-heralded works. Instead, they afford publishers, editors, scholars and critics the prospect of delivering restorative literary justice while providing readers an intimate exposure to great writers’ first plans and frustrated hopes for their eventual masterpieces. Such reputed restorations inevitably work from a selective, static set of intentions on the now-distant writer’s part. Just how much significance should we accord an idea Faulkner brought up over drinks in a New York speakeasy and then mentioned a few times afterward before dropping it? How certain can we be that Plath’s last manuscript version of her poems was her “original selection”? Latter-day “restorations” are, in fact, less authentic restorations than painstaking, sincere contrivances that ultimately belong more to their latter-day contrivers than to their original authors. And in working according to their own singular depiction of a writer’s designs, they elide a basic truth about great books: Many come into being through a dynamic, heated, sometimes even hostile series of exchanges between author and editor, where the author isn’t always obviously right; T. S. Eliot’s original title for “The Waste Land” was “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” until his editor Ezra Pound persuaded him otherwise.



An author’s own reconsiderations can be just as important, as evidenced by the recent publication of a new edition of “A Farewell to Arms,” which includes 47 alternative endings. Hemingway would, I expect, be horrified by this gross display of the draft work he put into achieving the novel’s famously lean, clean, cold finish. With no pretense of restorative literary justice here, what is the value of this new book, other than providing an uptick in public interest to benefit Hemingway’s publisher and estate? For readers, there’s little other than the opportunity to confirm that Hemingway chose the best possible ending from among his drafts.



Indeed, by his own account, Faulkner rewrote and reworked “The Sound and the Fury” more extensively than he did any of his other novels. And as Faulkner’s correspondence and Joseph Blotner’s authoritative biography both attest, much of this was spurred by early editorial debates and also because colored inks weren’t then available. In other words, had colored inks originally been possible, Faulkner very likely would have made different decisions in revising Benjy’s section. Perhaps the novel would not have become quite what it was, and remains: an audaciously modern expression of the universal human effort of “trying to say.”