A Note on "The Idiot Boy" as a Probable
Source for The Sound and the Fury
Michael A. Fredrickson

 


      That William Faulkner was fascinated with the idiot is evident from the appearance of this figure in at least four of his novels.1 What is not so evident, however, is the source of his fascination. I propose to show that the idiot in The Sound and the Fury has probably been modelled on the protagonist of Wordsworth's ballad "The Idiot Boy" (1798). I came to reflect upon this indebtedness after noticing the coincidence of Benjy Compson's birth date (April 7th) with Wordsworth's. Upon comparing the section of the novel narrated by Benjy with "The Idiot Boy," I found similarities in characterization and theme that seem too close to be the result of coincidence.2
      The story of Johnny Foy, the idiot boy of Wordsworth's ballad, is simple and comic. Johnny's mother Betty, worried about the illness of her neighbor Susan Gale, sets Johnny on a pony and sends him to town for the doctor. She then returns to look after Susan and to await what she believes will be the triumphant return of Johnny with the doctor. Having departed at eight o'clock in the evening, Johnny has not returned by one o'clock in the morning. Forgetting Susan's illness, Betty sets off in search of her son. In her concern about his fate, she asks the doctor where the boy is, but forgets to send the doctor to ailing Susan. By three o'clock, her "thoughts . . . bent on deadly sin,"3 Betty contemplates suicide because of the loss of her son. 
      When Johnny suddenly appears, sitting "upright on a feeding horse" (1. 351), Betty almost upsets the horse in her haste to embrace the boy. As they proceed homeward, Susan - her illness having mysteriously disappeared - joins them. Betty asks Johnny to "tell [them] true" (1. 441) what has happened during the night, and the boy replies, "The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, / And the sun did shine so cold" (11. 450-451). 
      There are at least four close similarities between the Benjy section of the novel and Wordsworth's poem. First, both works use the figure of the idiot to represent the simple, unfettered consciousness whose experience is pure sensation without awareness. In a letter to John Wilson, written in June, 1808, Wordsworth defended his use of the idiot in the poem on the grounds that he wished to portray men 

who lead the simplest lives, and those most according to nature; men who have never known false refinements, wayward and artificial desires, false criticisms, effeminate habits of thinking and feeling, or who, having known these things, have outgrown them . . . ."4 Similarly, Faulkner portrays in the idiot Benjy a man who experiences only the "sound and the fury" and is unaware of abstractions and "false refinements" such as those his brother Quentin attempts to impose upon life. For example, although Benjy is profoundly affected by the physical change that he sense in his sister Candace, unlike Quentin he is entirely unconcerned about the abstract idea of her loss of virginity. 
      Second, because of their lack of awareness, the two idiots are incapable of interpreting experience. Johnny cannot distinguish between the sun and the moon, between the cocks and the owls, or - in other words - between day and night. When he does attempt to interpret his nocturnal experience, he blends it with his daytime routine. In like manner, Benjy believes that the fire he sees in the mirror exists within the mirror; for him it comes and goes in and out of the mirror.5 And Quentin IV's descent from her window is only a "shaking" to him (pp. 92-3). 
      Third, in both works the condition of the idiot is said to be timeless. The poem begins with the words, "'Tis eight o'clock," and proceeds with references to the steady progression of time. Betty Foy's anxiety for her son increases with each stroke of the clock, and by three o'clock she considers taking her own life out of grief. To reinforce the consciousness of time, Wordsworth has his narrator frequently remind us that it is night by mentioning the hoot of the owls and the light of the moon.6 And just before Johnny is asked how he has spent his evening, there is a concatenation of words and images that have been previously used to designate time:  Now Johnny all night long had heard 
The owls in tuneful concert strive; 
No doubt he too the moon had seen; 
For in the moonlight he had been 
From eight o'clock till five (11. 442-6; italics mine). 
But when Johnny answers his mother in the last stanza, he epitomizes his entire night's experience in two lines: "The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, / And the sun did shine so cold." By interpreting the owls as cocks and the moon as the sun, Johnny fuses night and day, denying as well as transcending the sense of time manifested by the narrator and the other characters. 
      Benjy's timeless condition in The Sound and the Fury has been widely recognized. In the appendix to The Portable Faulkner, Faulkner himself writes, "Now he [Beny] and TP could . . . follow timeless along the fence . . ." (p. 19; italics mine). Timelessness is one of the important themes in the novel. Although the section Benjy narrates subsemes about thirteen different periods of time, he makes no distinctions among them; he experiences them all as the immediate present, thus achieving a state of timelessness. As one critic has commented:  Lacking any sense of time, Benjy feels the reality of 1898 as closely as that of 1928, the death of his grandmother as sharply as Luster's "projecking" with his graveyard. Only through an ididot could the past be raised to a plane of equality with the present, and the two dissolved in a stream of chaotic impression.7       Fourth, in both works the idiot emerges triumphant. Johnny having replied to the questions of his mother, the narrator concludes the poem, "Thus answered Johnny in his glory, / And that was all his travel's story" (11. 452-3). Though the poem evinces great concern and anxiety about what happened to Johnny, about interpreting his experience, it give way at the end to Johnny's bald statement, and the idiot has the last word. Indeed, as John E. Jordan has remarked, "Johnny's 'glory' is in one sense poignantly real, and in another comically absurd."8 The entire poem moves toward the dramatic completion represented by Johnny's statement. Wordsworth himself noted, "The last stanza . . . was the foundation of the whole."9 Before reporting Johnny's answer, the narrator says, "And with the owls began my song, / And with the owls must end" (11. 435-6), heightening the dramatic force of Johnny's statement. The poem thus exalts the idiot over the other characters. 
      Similarly, Benjy, who begins the novel, ends it in his own "glory." Since he cannot tolerate any change in the established patterns of his experience, he begins to howl in an "unbelievable crescendo" (p. 335) when Luster breaks precedent by turning left instead of right at the monument that stands in the middle of the town square. Ironically, it is Jason, the Compson with the least feeling for Benjy, who arrives to reprimand and punish Luster for not turning right - that is, for not obeying Benjy's wishes (pp. 335-6). In the novel the idiot also has the last word insofar as Jason feels himself obliged to defer to him. The final tableau is, in effect, under Benjy's control. 
     There is no external evidence to suggest that Faulkner had Wordsworth's ballad in mind during the composition of the novel.10 As we have seen, however, there is sufficient internal evidence to suggest that, at least for the figure of the idiot and the theme of timelessness, the novel is indebted to the ballad. 
 
 

NOTES 

1. Cf. Benjy's appearances in The Mansion (New York: Random House, 1959), pp. 322, 328; those of Jim Bond in Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random House, 1936), pp. 214-216, 371, 376, 378; those of Isaac Snopes in The Hamlet (New York: Random House, 1940), pp. 86, 87, 98-100, 191, 193, 229 (pp. 188-213 are narrated from his point of view). 

2. For help in explicating the poem, I am indebted to Mr. W. Harley Henry, instructor in English at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota. 

3.William Wordsworth: Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Riverside Press, 1965), p. 65. Additional references to the poem are incorporated in the text of this essay. 

4. The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1787-1805), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), pp. 294-295. 

5. The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage Books, 1946), p. 80. All subsequent references involving the novel are to this edition. 

6. Cf. 11. 2, 3-6, 38, 80, 104, 106, 117-118, 143, 151, 174, 202-203, 215, 287-291, 349, 403, 432-436. 

7. Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study (New York: Random House, 1952), p. 111. 

8. "Wordsworth's Humor," PMLA, LXXIII (March, 1958), p. 89. 

9. Notes on the poems dictated by Wordsworth to Isabella Fenwick in 1843, in Stillinger, p. 507. (Cf. Footnote 3.) 

10. There is similar internal evidence to suggest that Sartoris, published six months before The Sound and the Fury, evinces the influence of another romantic poet - John Keats. Cf. Lawrance Thompson, Afterword to Sartoris (New York: Signet, 1964), pp. 304-316.