Borrowed Books: Bodies and the Materials of Writing in The Sound and the Fury

I wish publishing was advanced enough,” William Faulkner wrote to his friend Ben Wasson in the summer of 1929, “to use colored ink” in the publication of The Sound and the Fury, “as I argued with you and Hal in the speak-easy that day” (“To Ben Wasson” 44). Faulkner wanted the opening section of the novel printed as “a continuous whole” so that “the reader’s eye” would see the “unbroken-surfaced confusion” of Benjy’s thoughts, yet he also wanted to mark the “subjective” transitions “in Ben’s mind” from one topic to another (44). While italics and line breaks could be used to indicate these shifts, Faulkner argued that this “presents a most dull and poorly articulated picture to my eye” (44). Given the cost of color typesetting at that time, however, Faulkner wrote that he would “just have to save the idea until publishing grows up to it,” and the novel was published by Cape and Smith using only black ink (45). Faulkner later hoped to issue a special edition of the novel “using different color inks,” and he “underlined [a] copy” of the novel “in different color crayons” for the publisher to use as a guide (“To Malcolm Cowley” 207). The project, however, never came to fruition, and his marked copy was lost.¹

Over the past decade, some of the most exciting work in literary studies has dealt with the materials of writing. As Bill Brown argues, such attention to the materiality of representation “expand[s] the ways of locating physical detail in a sign system, which is how we make matter mean” (“Introduction” 25). Rather than submit to what Leah Price calls “a commonsense Cartesianism [that] teaches us to filter out the look, the feel, [and] the smell of the printed page” (12), Brown challenges us to engage with the “dialectical drama of opacity and transparency, physical support and cognitive transport, representation as object and as act” (“Introduction” 26).² In certain situations, the material text itself can be the basis of this transport and even rapture. “The wearing of sacred or magical texts,” writes Rowan Watson, “has a long history” (483). During the Renaissance, “an individual might carry . . . a series of pieces of parchment . . . round the neck” in the hope of finding “love” even if the wearer “could not read the writing”; “[t]he opening words of St. John’s Gospel” were also “especially popular” (Rowan Watson 483–84). In this instance, the logos becomes transposed from word or mind to material script. To one degree or another, all writers must concern themselves with the physical aspect of the text. From clay tablets to vellum, paper to computer screens, texts are presented in an inescapably material manner. Even the flattest of flat screens has some depth. While images can be projected onto a wall, or into a room in the manner of a hologram, the realization of these images always takes a spatial form. To put it somewhat differently, a novel, for example, may be available online, but the ones and zeros of its code must be stored somewhere—often saved and backed up in the network of energy-intensive server farms that constitute the cloud. Even the word text, so often used in opposition to book, scroll, or other material form, “derives . . . from the Latin texere, ‘to weave’” and is likely connected “with the Vedic ‘tāṣṭi,’ to ‘fashion by carpentry’” (McKenzie 13–14).

Faulkner was particularly attuned to the physicality of the text. Over and against the idea of himself as “a literary man,” he presented himself “as a craftsman” (Faulkner in the University 23, 12). In the many speeches, interviews, and lectures he gave after winning the Nobel Prize in literature, Faulkner talked about his writing in terms of carpentry. “[T]he writer has three sources,” he said at the University of Virginia, “imagination, observation, and experience.... [H]e uses his material from the three sources as the carpenter reaches into his lumber room and finds a board” (Faulkner in the University 103). In her essay “The Elizabethan Lumber...