Cultural and Literary Hybridity: Faulkner and Borges

Ben Cravens Cultural and Literary Hybridity: Faulkner and Borges What determines literary greatness, i.e. canonized literature that continues to be studied? Should there be such labels as Eastern and Western literature? Currently, the American University features a variety of multicultural approaches that challenge the stale notion of preserving the golden era of literary greatness, before women, minorities, and other previously overshadowed voices could be heard. One may think it odd to compare William Faulkner and Luis Jorge Borges—they’re from different countries, their cultures totally alien to one another, right? And Borges’ trippy mathematically laden sci-fi-meets-Schopenhauer would never be compared to Faulkner’s complex character study and innovative prose—wrong. Borges greatly respected Faulkner’s work, as both artists were deeply introspective thinkers—both were fascinated by the human condition and the insatiable will to discover our place in the world. Using literary hybridity, i.e. merging genres and challenging linear narratives, both writers were able to (eventually) achieve worldwide prestige. Faulkner was arguably the most influential representative of the Southern Renaissance, his characters often riddled with raw emotional turmoil and conflicted feelings of redemption. Borges set the foundation of what is known today as “Magic Realism”—both writers were masters of their craft, and although their identities are tied to their homelands, their work is undoubtedly universal, proving that the marginalization of cultures (the South as peripheral to the North and S. America, peripheral to the United States) cannot impede the driving will of the collective human conscious—in this case, innovative artistic expression. In Eleni Kefala’s book, Peripheral (Post) Modernity, she posits the rational notion that the process of cultural formation in … “peripheral” countries [such as Borges’ home country, Argentina] proves that creolization and hybridization lie at the heart of every culture, whether “central” or “peripheral,” thus calling into question modernity’s geopolitics of culture” (1). Kefala compares Argentina and Greece in terms of “political, socio-economic, and cultural trajectories in (post)modernity” (1). Kefala’s insights prove useful when considering William Faulkner’s status as a Southerner growing up less than forty years after Reconstruction ended in 1877, during WWI, and maturing as an artist at a time when a cultural renaissance was emerging that would ultimately question the idealized depiction of the South held by proponents of the Lost Cause—those who viewed the South as noble and chivalrous; that Southerners were destitute victims of Northern aggression, destroying their pastoral way of life. The southern states ante-bellum, clearly during the Civil War, during Reconstruction, and continuing well into the 20th century, were culturally peripheral to the north, where industry was booming—vast amounts being a product of forced labor (the practice of slavery never truly dying), which was the capital for capitalism as we know it. Racial tension was at its height across the nation in a period coined by historian Rayford Logan as “the nadir of race relations,” precisely the time in which Faulkner began to write. Due to the peripheral and “backward” notions of the South as intellectually deficient, overtly dogmatic, etc., which persist today, Faulkner had to assert his right as an artist, doing so in a profound way—According to Ellison’s essay “The Black Mask of Humanity,” “it was shocking for some to discover that for all his concern for the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man” by working with the South as it existed in the 1920’s and 30’s, transforming the Southerner’s conflicted sense of socio-cultural identity into literary masterpieces that explore universal states of being and questioning, of being trapped in the peripheral, the interstices of society, placed in a liminal mode of non-being, and searching for meaning and love in a pitiless world, with which all of humanity hopefully can identify—a monumental ambition which defies a generically homogenized identity for the world’s people. Certainly the southern and northern states of America, being so close in proximity, were connected politically, socially, and culturally, though the status of artist had to be fought for and won by Faulkner (and his fellow Southern writers), making him a peripheral artist in a marginalized homeland. The cultural critic and satirist H.L. Mencken’s essay “The Sahara of the Bozart” labelled the South as intellectually barren, as Mencken believed that provincialism cannot be associated with intellectual acuity. Faulkner, as well as other major writers of the Southern Renaissance: Katherine Anne Porter, Tennessee Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, and others, applied a social function to art, indirectly responding to Mencken via their art in a profound manner. The way in which Faulkner, and the Southern Renaissance as a whole, revolutionized Southern literature parallels the fundamental nature of Borges’ syncretic approach to his writing. Borges merges the essay with fantasy, “producing a space between” and “blurring the lines of…genres, traditions, essay and fiction, Argentine and European traditions,” which relates to “Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the “interstices” whose major characteristic is ambiguity and amphisemia or simply undecidability” (74). The psychological state of Faulkner’s tragic heroes, such as the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Joe Christmas in Light in August (1932), are indeed in a tragic state of “undecidability,” Christmas himself being a paradigm of ambiguity. Faulkner’s oeuvre challenge the Magnolia Myth that plagues any form of authenticity or certainty concerning Southern identity, just as Borges challenges reality itself, placing a mirror not before nature, but before art itself, exposing the representation of existence as a dizzying enterprise, i.e. based upon arbitrary principles of language and subjective perception in a world (the natural world) that cares not for literary excellence. Borges’ syncretic approach is evident in his collection of stories and essays entitled Labyrinths (1962), especially his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a form of literary criticism that utilizes humor, fantasy, and irony in a way that questions static narratives and the difficulty of creating and shaping meaning in a text. In “Pierre,” Borges presents Pierre Menard, a fictional French writer of the 20th century that wishes not to copy Cervantes’ original text, Don Quixote, but to reinvent the work line by line, emulating the 17th century Spanish and transcending a mere translation of the masterpiece. Hence, “Pierre Menard” questions the nature of authorship by focusing on the act of interpretation—the interpreter of a text holds the power, thus confirming the living nature of a text. Also in Labyrinths, “The Library of Babel” questions not the discursive conservancy of a text, but rather the unreliability of language to form definitive ideals/thoughts in a world devoid of any meaning other than what humans perceive as logical. In the library, which represents the universe, hexagonal rooms--running adjacent to one another for eternity—contain books that each contain only 22 letters, the period, comma, and the space, yet the books contain everything that has and will be written or even divined. Borges comes to the point of his philosophic inquiry when his narrator states that: (A number n of the possible languages employ the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol "library" possesses the correct definition "everlasting, ubiquitous system of hexagonal galleries," while a library – the thing – is a loaf of bread or a pyramid or something else, and the six words that define it themselves have other definitions. You who read me – are you certain you understand my language?) (13) Borges challenges not only our ability to communicate meaning via words, but the meaning that an author may intend for his/her text; how can we as readers of Borges’, or any other author’s words, believe what we are reading? Cannot someone from a different socio-cultural background read the same work—any work—and have a vastly different interpretation? Faulkner, as the most distinguished of the Southern Renaissance writers, certainly challenged his readers as much as Borges, shunning linear narrative with his surgical use of stream of consciousness and free indirect discourse, though he did not use fantastical themes in his novels. Rather, his syncretic approach was inspired in part by Classical mythology, only in a manner that differed from Borges, who freely borrowed from Classical Eastern and Western philosophy and mysticism. ` Faulkner used a similar form of literary hybridity as Borges by using the image of the marble faun, which was the title of a collection of poems published in 1924, inspired in part by Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860). Taylor Hagwood’s essay, “Negotiating the Marble Bonds of Whiteness” provides an intriguing and layered interpretation of Faulkner’s use of the faun, asserting that it is an image of whiteness that functions as a trope of hybridity: a hybrid body that at least partially if not completely subsumes the Other in its whiteness...a white but creolized body whose amalgamated makeup is hidden but nonetheless encodes the dynamics arising from the juxtaposition and interaction of groups of oppressors and oppressed who must negotiate the hegemony of imperial impulse. (3-4) There was not much choice for Faulkner’s black characters to “negotiate the hegemony of imperial impulse,” and yet, as Kefala states (mentioned above), creolization and hybridity lies at the heart of every culture, prompting whites to do the impossible: view black people as inextricably linked with the rest of humanity in the universal struggle for meaning and self-awareness in a pitilessly chaotic world. The faun’s negative connotations are due to Christian iconography of the Middle Ages, which transformed the Dionysian god, Pan into Satan, appropriating many philosophically layered symbols into metaphors for the inherent wickedness of a world without the Judeo-Christian god. Images of half beast and half man in Classical mythology generally symbolize the primordially base, Dionysian nature of mankind split with the rational Apollonian essence of being—similar to Borges, Faulkner enjoys toying with conceptions of identity, god and man, rational and irrational, and the precarious nature of time and space, all amalgamated into a distorted sense of perception which affects all of humanity similarly. Both Borges and Faulkner re-appropriated Classic mythological symbols in order to question the nature of humanity. Interestingly, both Borges and Faulkner did not receive vast recognition until late in their literary careers, in 1960 and 1949, respectively. Both artists received their renowned acclaim due to awards won: for Faulkner, the Nobel Prize in Literature and Borges, the first Formentor prize, shared with Samuel Beckett. Clearly Borges and Faulkner were both the driving forces behind their relative literary compatriots—Borges among his fellow “surrealists” and Faulkner, the pioneer of the Southern Renaissance. Borges’ phantasmagoric use of imagery interlaced with logical and philosophical conundrums essentially creates the genre of Magic Realism, rapidly spreading amongst Latin American writers; and Faulkner’s meticulous form and poetic mastery of translating the anguished perils and inherent potential of the human heart remains uncontested. Faulkner and Borges are now world renowned artists, proving Foucault’s point in his essay “What is an Author,” which essentially states that literary interpretation exceeds the boundaries of the author as an individual. Hence, an author is more of a socio-historical process involving a complex web of discursive factors. Always a voracious reader, Borges was intrigued by Faulkner, even translating the latter’s 1939 novel, The Wild Palms in 1940, introducing Faulkner’s works to eager South Americans who were intrigued. Regarding the translation process, Borges provides a convincing example of when “re-creating the original” is aesthetically called for: “the Latin sentence about science, ‘Ars longa, vita brevis’” was translated by Chaucer into English as “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,” rather than, “Art long, life short”—“by working in the words ‘to learn’ he gave the line a kind of wistful music not to be found in the original” (105). Literary improvisation is the impetus through which all systems of stagnant traditions are challenged and re-formed, constantly molded into something new using various building blocks from an amalgam of worldly interpretations, for authorship does not entail creating that which has not been thought, but simply providing a fresh perspective on that which we as readers think that we indefinitely know—all is relative. Borges also mentions “playing by ear” when he translates rather than following a strict set of rules, which proved to be difficult with the translation of Wild Palms, as he was as faithful as possible to the complex “Faulknerian” style—“people told me the sentences were too involved” (Borges on Writing 136). Borges’ decision to faithfully translate Faulkner’s poetic mastery of the English language into Spanish illustrates a powerful example of the harmonious merging of cultural expression via the demanding art of translation. To conclude, I posit that Borges and Faulkner were both “outside authors,” meaning both intellectuals focused intently on finding their own voice among their socio-cultural influences in order to address the innate hindrances and possibilities which the human condition encapsulates. It is not surprising that Borges was attracted to Faulkner’s powerfully unique style, proving awkward to translate, which is perhaps why he stopped at Wild Palms, choosing not to translate more popular works such as The Sound and the Fury or Light in August. Borges’ will was the driving force behind the culmination of his knowledge and wisdom regarding writers throughout the world, and his translation of The Wild Palms was the key to merging literary worlds, stitching the interstitial divide of the prescribed literary canon, and harmonizing syncretic approaches to literary hybridity, culminating in the creolization of cultures—a process which helps to deconstruct puerile notions of literary nationalism. Works Consulted “Borges on Writing.” Eds. di Giovanni, Norman Thomas, Daniel Halpern, and Frank Macshane. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1973. Print. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Ed. David Minter. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994. Print. Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1932. Print. Foucault, Michael. "What Is An Author?" Screen 20.1 (1979): 13-33. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 8 Apr. 2015. Irby, James E and Donald A. Yates, eds. Labyrinths: Selected Short Stories and Other Writings. New Directions: New York, 1964. Print. Kefala, Eleni. Peripheral (Post) Modernity: The Syncretist Aesthetics of Borges, Piglia, Kalokyris, and Kyriakidis. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Print. Watson, Jay, Ed. Faulkner and Whiteness. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Print. 8