of communication (author-narrator-audience and author-character-audience),
that these channels will interact with each other, and that the second channel
is also inseparable from story.
Furthermore, the interaction between the channels may be additive, as it is
in the passage from Eddie Coyle, or it may be synergistic. Consider the initial
communication in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hit-
ting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the
fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag
out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the
table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the
fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence
and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Lus-
ter was hunting in the grass.
“Here, caddie.” He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the
fence and watched them going away.
“Listen at you now.” Luster said. “Aint you something, thirty three years
old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that
cake. Hush up that moaning.” (3)Among many other things, Faulkner communicates here that the trigger
for Benjy’s moaning is the word caddie. (I acknowledge the point that this
communication is clearer on a second reading of the novel, but that point
does not affect the comparison between Chatman’s structuralist model and
my rhetorical one.) The best Chatman’s linear one-channel model can do with
this communication that exceeds anything in the minds of characters or nar-
rator would be something like this: the golfer’s and Luster’s lines of dialogue
are embedded within Benjy’s narration, and this embedding allows Benjy
to unknowingly transmit the information about the cause of his moaning.
Again, however, this account radically understates the role of the dialogue,
and, even more significantly, it obscures our view of Faulkner’s remarkable
construction of interactive effects among Benjy’s narration, the golfer’s call,
and Luster’s dialogue.
Here’s a better account: Faulkner employs not one but three channels of
communication, and he sets up a synergy among those channels to disclose the
trigger for Benjy’s moaning. In addition to the author-narrator-audience chan-
nel identified by Chatman, Faulkner uses two author-character-character-audi-
ence channels that are functionally independent of that first channel and of
each other, since Benjy does not alter or comment on the dialogue, and the
AUTHORS, RESOURCES, AUDIENCES • 21