This connects my disability studies argument with Peter Lurie’shistorical materialist analysis of Benjy in
Vision’s Immanence
. Lurie sees the disabledcharacter as Faulkner’s Adornian symbol of resistance against the hegemony of thevisual focus of the cultural industry, highlighting Benjy’s synchronic multiple sensoryexperience of modernity as a privileged position, which is in direct contrast with whatis lost when one is immersed in a visually dominant presentist discourse. Such anapproach repudiates the ableist undercurrents that have characterized past scholarshipon the ‘idiot’ character and aims to establish the disabled point of view as productiveand rich, rather than subordinate and subhuman. Additionally, I argue that Benjy is infact not alone in being disabled, given all of the ‘problem white’ Compson family possesses a plethora of ‘inabilities’ that in the context of the 1920’s eugenicsmovement could have possibly been seen as grounds for classifying one as “feeble-minded” or distinctively ‘white trash.’ Such an argument opens up larger questionsregarding what constitutes disability, and whether, if at all, disabilities should be seenas deviating from the norm given their prevalence in society at large.