Beyond Diagnosis: Rethinking Benjy Compson Through the Lens of Disability Studies

Abstract

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) since its publication has claimed sustained critical attention not only for its narrative complexity, but also for the fundamental challenge it poses to conventional modes of representing human consciousness. The opening section of the novel, narrated by a thirty-three year old man, Benjy Comson, invites critical intervention from multiple theoretical stances. Benjy’s cognitive and intellectual difference situates him at the intersection of modernist aesthetics, Southern gothic convention, and over the recent decades- a disability studies premises. The emergence of disability studies as a scholarly field, has helped reorient the conversations around characters like Benjy Compson. Disability studies scholars introduce new frameworks for understanding cognitive difference, and demand for a more ethical and nuanced critical engagement with disability representation in literary and cultural productions.

Nevertheless, scrutinising a text published in 1929 from a disability studies perspective has its own methodological complexities, that this paper seeks to explore. One of the central concerns in this paper is to examine the historicization of Faulkner’s linguistic and representational choices, and simultaneously avoiding the anachronistic imposition of diagnostic categories, whether from the early twentieth century or from the present times. While on one hand, the paper acknowledges the inherent fluidity of the disability terminology across time, it also investigates Faulkner’s conscious use of certain vocabulary to depict cognitive difference. Finally, this paper seeks to give the much awaited critical attention that the character of Benjy Compson deserves, not only by  questioning the critical inclination that diminishes Benjy Compson’s distinct subjectivity, but also by validating Benjy Compson as a character with a profound and deeply human interiority of his own.