Spheres to Circles

I just finished reading the “Benjy” section of The Sound and the Fury. It was probably the most confusing thing I have ever read, and yet, I could not bring myself to put it down. Something about the style of that first passage is absolutely mesmerizing and it took me a while to pin down what exactly that something is. At first I thought my fascination was akin to the human fascination with watching a car crash or inspecting a flesh wound, a sort of morbid desire to see some sort of catastrophic abnormality. After further contemplation, however, I decided that I was really captivated because despite its disjointed, fractured nature, it was one of the most incredibly involved pieces of literature I’ve come across. The stream of consciousness brings you so deeply into the novel that you can smell, hear, feel, taste and see everything that the narrator experiences. Obviously the style was an attempt to express how Benjy, a mental toddler, experiences the world because it so radically differs from the way that we experience life. The style itself is groundbreaking for writing but what is truly amazing is how he blurred the line between two art forms.

As a theatre major, I was surprised to see that in addition to writing novels and short stories Faulkner also wrote screenplays. It’s relatively rare to find someone who is able to write both a novel and a play, and to do them both well. Some fantastic writers are incapable of writing plays because it is an entirely different sphere of literature. Plays are another world because unlike a typical piece of prose, a play is not complete until it is on stage. A play must be heard, seen, felt and thoroughly experienced by an audience, something a book could never achieve. Faulkner somehow blurred the lines between novel and play. He took things that really should have been expressed visually, and audibly and put them into words on a page. Everything that occurred in the Benjy section makes much more sense if it is visualized as a blur of images in a movie “memory montage” as opposed to a chronological story in a book. The true genius of this section is in his transformation of art, he changed the reading experience because like great painters of the past, Faulkner took a three dimensional object and put it into a two dimensional form.