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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 pub­ lication 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 readers 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, how­ ever, 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 “us­ ing 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 opac­ ity 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 sa­