Idiot’s Desire In The Sound And The Fury

The Sound and the Fury(1929)is the fourth novel by William Faulkner,winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.The novel tells the story of the Compson family’s tragedy in the face of the transition from the declining Old South to the modern era.Massive social changes altered the social landscape of the American South and dismantled the traditional values of the South,causing inability of people to project their desires onto those they love,and resulting in their emotional detachment.Faulkner’s works implied his emotional concern for humanity.Humanistic concern for the marginalized groups is one of the themes of Faulkner’s works.It is noteworthy that the desire of the intellectually retarded Benjy in The Sound and the Fury has not attracted enough attention from the academic community,so it is worthy of in-depth study.Focusing on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of desire,the thesis approaches the image of the idiot of Benjy in The Sound and the Fury from three perspectives:the territorialization of idiot’s desire in family,the deterritorialization of idiot’s desire,and the reterritorialization of idiot’s desire by the social forces.Additionally,the thesis reveals the idiot’s existential dilemma and his efforts to escape from it,evoking humanistic concern for the marginal groups.The first chapter conducts an analytical investigation to the territorialization of idiot’s desire and existential dilemma in familial space,starting from analysis of the Compson family’s indifferent attitude toward the idiot and Benjy’s loss of Caddy.According to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire,desire arises spontaneously and actively.Within the familial territory,Benjy’s desire has nowhere to project as his family members deem him to be a disaster and disgrace to the family.At the same time,the co-existence of black and white in the Compson family makes the members,except the idiot,subject to the dichotomy of black and white.His inherent idiocy naturally gives him the inferior identity to the rational white people who treat the idiot in the same way of treating the black.Benjy thus acquires the biased dual identity of a"black" idiot,which also contributes to his territorialized desire.In addition to the indifference and the underlying ableism of deeming Benjy as an inferior "black"white,the subsequent departure of Caddy interferes with Benjy’s expression of desire.Her departure makes Benjy lose the opportunity of claiming love from anyone,and the desiring connection between Benjy and Caddy is thus broken and disconnected.Consequently,the indifference of his family and Caddy’s departure deprive the possibility for Benjy of expressing his desire,which leads to his silence and territorialized desire in familial space.The second chapter probes into the deterritorialization of idiot’s desire in order to escape his family’s suppression of desire.In terms of the feasible approaches,Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of becoming offers the possibility for the interpretation of idiot’s desire to realize its deterritorialization.In order to better complete the experiment of the idiot’s narrative,Faulkner creates a deterritorialized path for Benjy to become"Other"."Becoming-animal" and "becoming-child" allow Benjy to escape the dilemma of surviving as a human being and an adult.Moreover,the constant flashbacks and jumps in time make Benjy a temporal and spatial nomad who can find a brief refuge in the past and in a mobilized space.Faulkner’s technique of stream-of-consciousness helps better depict Benjy’s deconstruction of the temporal and spatial confinement by transforming him into a nomad,deterritorializing his long-repressed desire as an idiot who is considered to be guarded all the time,and enabling Benjy to gain temporary freedom spiritually.The last chapter examines the reterritorialization of idiot’s desire in capitalist society,which predicts the predeterminate failure of Benjy’s deterritorialization struggles.Starting from a critique of capitalism,Deleuze and Guattari emancipate the flux of desire from the Oedipalized family to the historical and social level.Although Benjy makes a series of efforts to break the barriers of family’s territorialization of desire,the campaign for the deterritorialization of his desire is doomed to fail.One of the reasons is that capitalist society,with the compliance of eugenicist theories,began to pursue the promotion of human genes in order to achieve rapid economic and social development and to reduce socio-economic pressure.With the oxymoronic concept of a sexualized disabled body,eugenicists began to make agitation about the dangers of people with disabilities and the mentally retarded for society,conducting compulsory sterilization of those people,which contributes to Benjy’s castration eventually.Under the impact of the long existed notion of madness as Other of reason,segregating the"socially unfit" is another way to reterritorialize idiots’ desire and prevent them from having negative impact on social security.Benjy’s being castrated and confined in asylum led to the reterritorialization of his desire by capitalist society before he could escape from his family.To sum up,this paper examines the desire of the idiot Benjy via Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire,aiming to explore the unremitting efforts of the schizoid subject to deterritorialize his desire though he suffers repeatedly from the territorialization by the family and reterritorialization by society.By amplifying the process of desire production and development,Faulkner has unmasked the idiot’s miseries under the joint forces of familial territorialization and social reterritorialization of desire,which advocates the destruction of the weak force of idiot’s deterritorialization in practice.The idiot’s desire ideology proposed in the novel also provides ideas for the humanistic concerns for the marginal groups,leading us to reflect upon the binary system of reason and idiocy so as to reconstruct the relationships between human beings.