golfer and Luster do not talk with each other. Faulkner deploys the author-
golfer-caddie-audience channel to introduce the key word, and he deploys the
author-Luster-Benjy-audience channel to tell us that Benjy moans. The syn-
ergy among these two communications and Benjy’s naïve reporting prompts
the audience’s inference about the trigger. In this way, the communication
arising from the interaction of the three channels is greater than the sum
of the communication in each. In short, Faulkner’s communication depends
on characters, multiple channels, and synergy—all of which are absent from
Chatman’s model.
Again there is an ethical dimension to both the told and the telling. The
ethics of the told involve the way Luster’s treatment of Benjy is rooted in
taken-for-granted assumptions about their relationship. Luster takes it for
granted that he is Benjy’s superior and that he has the right to object to Benjy’s
moaning and to tell him to hush. He also assumes that he is within his rights
to call Benjy ungrateful—as if giving Benjy the cake obligated Benjy to behave
in a certain way. At the same time, Luster is neither mean nor nasty. He just
wants Benjy to be as little trouble as possible. The ethics of the telling arise
from the contrasts between Benjy’s narration and Faulkner’s communication.
Benjy is a naïve recorder/reporter, focused on the actions of others rather
than himself, and unable to fully comprehend them, as his underinterpreting
of the golf game and of Luster’s searching in the grass indicate. His external
focus has an appealing innocence that is set in relief by the sophisticated com-
munication from Faulkner. Because Faulkner makes Benjy appealing even as
he trusts his audience to make all those inferences, the ethics of his telling is
itself appealing.
More generally, the passage is a striking example of what I venture to call
the default ethics of the telling in literary narrative since modernism. This eth-
ics is based on reciprocity and trust: the author and the audience assume that
narrative communication is a shared enterprise, albeit one in which the author
takes the lead. More specifically, the audience assumes that attending carefully
to the author will result in a worthwhile reading experience. For his part, the
author assumes that the audience can be trusted to recognize the synergies, fill
in the gaps, and otherwise follow the art of mediated communication.
Lest we think that Faulkner is a high modernist outlier in his use of syn-
ergies, I turn to another, more recent example, a passage from Emma Dono-
ghue’s Room (2010). Donoghue’s narrator is a five-year-old boy named Jack,
whose mother has been kidnapped and locked for seven years in a one-room
shed by a man whom Jack and his mother call Old Nick. Old Nick frequently
shows up in the room and, in Jack’s words, “creaks the bed” with Jack’s mother.
Jack’s mother, whom he refers to only as Ma, has taught him that the whole
22 • CHAPTER 1