Listening After Benjy: Auditory Recalibration in The Sound and the Fury

Abstract

This essay argues that The Sound and the Fury does not merely represent contrasting modes of hearing but reorganizes the reader‘s auditory position through a discontinuous sequence of exposure to Benjy’s distributed, cross-modal auditory field and Quentin‘s auditory fixation. Building on recent scholarship on negative audition, auditory phenomenology, and listening as exposure, it develops the concept of sequential recalibration: the reorganization of readerly audition produced by the ordered encounter with differently structured modes of perception. The essay employs formal close reading of the novel’s first four sections, combined with phenomenological and narratological analysis. Benjy‘s distributed auditory field establishes an auditory horizon in which sound emerges through recurrence, bodily sensation, memory, and absence. Quentin’s subsequent fixation on clocks disrupts this horizon by concentrating attention on mechanical repetition and temporal pressure. Because Quentin‘s section retrospectively alters the interpretation of Benjy’s earlier cries and sensory associations, recalibration is recursive rather than progressive. The fourth section tests the ethical limits of this process through its racially mediated representation of communal listening. The essay concludes that narrative sequence can reorganize auditory attention without guaranteeing ethical recognition.