Faulkner and His Brothers

II. Fables of the Reconstruction, or the Family Black and White

In a review published in 1938, Jorge Luis Borges writes, "Rivers of brown water, crumbling mansions, black slaves, battles on horseback, idle and cruel: the strange world of The Unvanquished is a blood relation of this America, here, and its history"; "it, too, is criollo," Borges adds, calling to mind a purity of blood ("limpieza de sangre") that had long defined the landowning classes of pure Spanish descent in Latin America. 12 Drawing our attention to a continuity of sorts between his Spanish America and the antebellum South,

Borges is one of the first writers to draw parallels between Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha and

Latin America, though he would not be the last. At the same time, if Borges's comments provide some indication of the ways in which Faulkner's regionalism and his concomitant interest in familial relations will be made to speak to the history of Latin America, there is an equally important sense in which the story of the Sartoris family does not;

and indeed, it is the impossibility of preserving this purity of blood that is central to The Unvanquished and Faulkner's work throughout the 1930s. Further, if Bayard Sartoris is not a criollo, it is because The Unvanquished is written in response to the turn-of-the-century novel of Jim Crow-a novel unequivocally hostile to a world where "we are all brothers." Thus, in novels like Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden-1865Burden- -1900Burden- (1902-part of his Trilogy of Reconstruction-we find a commitment to a purity of blood, which, like Jim Crow, seeks to segregate where segregation had not existed, and demands the eradication of what a number of southern writers imagined as the intimacy between blacks and whites characteristic of the antebellum South.

Before the Civil War, of course, this intimacy had been rendered literal by the sexual relations between black slaves and white masters that the plantation system had engendered. Although state laws had prohibited interracial sex and marriage since the seventeenth century, such laws had been broadly contravened under slavery, an institution underpinned by miscegenation as a means of sustaining the reproduction of servile labor. 13 Nevertheless, miscegenation emerges as a fundamental social problem once the liquidation of the southern slave economy had undercut its economic utility. After Reconstruction (1863-1877), this shift in race relations would consequently give rise not only to the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the constitutionality of state laws prohibiting interracial marriages in Pace v. State of Alabama (1883), but also to the novel of Jim Crow. In contrast to novels like Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock (1898), which evoked a nostalgia for the Old South and the intimacies of a plantation system that had transformed masters and slaves into members of the same family-that is, into members of what Walter Benn Michaels identifies as "the family black and white"-the novel of Jim Crow would condemn slavery as an abomination precisely because it had allowed for such familiarity between the races. 14 Thus, despite being a product of the "peculiar institution" itself, the familiarity embodied by the family black and white will be considered anathema only after slavery has been abolished and the southern plantation system has been dismantled. 15

What

Faulkner would later identify as "the continent's most pressing issue" has its origins, then, in this moment, as the question of race comes to occupy a more conspicuous place in U.S. politics once an individual's blackness is understood as being determined by a quantity of blood that is neither visible to the human eye nor legislated by a person's status as master or slave. Hence, the singular importance attributed to the family in the novel of Jim Crow: not unlike legal and institutional segregation, writers like Thomas Dixon would similarly insist on the consanguinity of individuals on either side of the racial divide. "Shall the future American be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto?" Dixon asks in The Leopard's Spots. 16 And insofar as the novel invokes figures like "the roving criminal Negro" (202), the specter of "Negro supremacy" (444), and fears of miscegenation, Dixon's unambiguous response indicates a commitment to segregation that seeks the absolute separation of the family black and white into the family black and the family white. For reasons we will return to in a moment, however, the racial family emerges not only as the figure for a white citizenry united by blood, but also and more importantly as a vindication of the free-labor market, which progressives like Dixon celebrated as facilitating the emergence of a "New South" liberated from its dependency on the bound labor of blacks and industrialized in the image of the North. But whereas Dixon's novel conceives the dissolution of all intimacy between the races as the marker of a new national unity in racial and economic terms alike, Faulkner will insist on the impossibility of undoing that intimacy. García Márquez, and it is perhaps not surprising that the more recent critical tendency had been to emphasize the similarities between the cultural and historical situations of Faulkner's South and the "boom" generation's Latin America. 19 But while the U.S. South and Latin America can be said to occupy similar positions within a world system whose history has been marked by both crisis and the unevenly developed flows of capital between center and periphery, this history, as we will see, takes on a unique trajectory within each of these situations that stamps the mobilization of a genre like the familial drama with an equally unique meaning. Ringo and I had been born in the same month and had both fed at the same breast and had slept together and had eaten together for so long that Ringo called Granny 'Granny' just like I did, until maybe he wasn't a nigger anymore or maybe I wasn't a white boy anymore, the two of us neither, not even people any longer. 7Here Bayard not only casts Ringo as a kind of brother, but also redefines the black boy's affiliation (as a slave) with the Sartoris family as a literal filiation (as a grandson). Of course, in order to make Ringo his brother, Bayard must first ignore their racial difference-so that they are "not even people any longer," and instead "the two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers riding above the hurricane" (7). But the first half of the novel will reproduce this complete indifference to race throughout, and this is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the episodes that follow the murder of their grandmother, Rosa Millard, in which Bayard and Ringo feel equally entitled to retribution, thereby evoking a mutual appreciation of a duty that requires them to find and kill her murderer, nor is it that Ringo's inclusion in the Sartoris family is facilitated by mere fiat of Bayard's imagination. Rather, the point is that this inclusion is wholly predicated on the existence of slavery, an economic system that had given rise to the family black and white.

Nevertheless, Ringo comes to occupy a somewhat ambiguous position within the Sartoris clan, as the intimacy that had ostensibly transformed the relationship between white masters and black slaves into the relationship between brothers vanishes altogether in the novel's concluding chapters. Having recalled earlier that "Father always said that Ringo was a little smarter than I was, but that didn't count with us, anymore than the difference in the color of our skins counted" (81), Bayard's narration attests to the Colonel's own initial indifference to the racial distinction between black and white. In contrast, Worth-who "does not allow a Negro to come inside the enclosure" of his mill (283), and who is dependent on the "poor white man"-remains equally committed to the free-labor market, but in such a way as to maintain the promise of a South both liberated from black labor and fully assimilated to the industrial North.

It is worth remembering that it is this commitment that Jason Compson reiterates in The Sound and the Fury, when he says, "What this country needs is white labor." 24 But whereas southern progressivism had conceived of the "free labor" of "poor white men" as a means toward preserving the "complete alienation of the white and black races" and as the economic foundation of the New South, Faulkner's brothers ultimately signal the failure of this vision. No doubt the breakdown of this economic project had become incontrovertible by the 1930s, in the face of a devastated southern economy that had sustained high indices of poverty throughout the same period. This exhaustion of the modernizing impulse that underlies the novel of Jim Crow, then, will similarly, but conversely, entail a racial fantasy in Faulkner. The (all white) racial family that embodies the desire for an industrialized South fully integrated into the national economy, and whose emergence would mark the realization of that desire, never materializes in Faulkner's novels of the 1930s, while the impossibility of its materializing-that is, of undoing the family black and white-comes to signify the impossibility of fulfilling that desire in The Unvanquished. Hence, Ringo's ambiguous position within the family lays bare the failure to exclude blacks from a labor force whose allegiance to whiteness was fundamental to the economic vision of the New South at the heart of the Jim Crow novel. 25 That Faulkner's brothers are best understood as figures for the hollowing-out or demystification of this vision, however, does not mean that the persistence of the family black and white in the novel should be confused with a desire to restore the Old South;

and as we will see, the desire to recuperate what is imagined as a lost past belongs more properly to image of the social at the heart of the "boom" novel. Nonetheless, insofar as that desire is presented in The Unvanquished as what is described as John Sartoris's "dream," it is ultimately treated as a form of pure nostalgia and, in this sense, an escape from history that derives its content from an older economic system (slavery). Having insisted on the separation of white and black brothers, the former Colonel is described several pages later as "thinking of the whole country which he is trying to raise by the bootstraps," for "all the people, black and white, the women and children back in the hills who dont [sic] even own shoes" (223, my emphasis). Yet this desire to "rehabilitate" (222) the region in the image of an antebellum society undone by the Civil War-in the image, that is to say, of the family black and white-already appears somewhat outdated, removed from the realities wrought on the South by Reconstruction. Recalling the man whom his father had killed, "a hill man who had been in the first infantry regiment when it voted Father out of command," Bayard remembers that "he had a wife and several children in a dirt-floored cabin in the hills, to whom Father the next day sent some money and she (the wife) walked into the house two days later while we were sitting at the dinner table and flung the money at Father's face" (221). Sartoris fails to make his vision compelling to the dead man's wife, one of the many women with children "back in the hills who dont have shoes," marking a difference that undermines his attempt to rescue the South because it persists in putting class before region. Yet, it is not only poor whites who resist the Colonel's vision, and this failure is rehearsed moments later in the encounter between Sartoris's "dream" and Thomas Sutpen's "design." Confronting Sutpen, who has refused to join his "night riders," Colonel Sartoris asks him, "Are you with us or not?" But while

III. Reconstruction of the Fables

It is in this sense that the economic crisis between the world wars is taken up in Faulkner's work as a crisis of representation that, in turn, marks the transition into a cultural and historical situation in which neither the (white) racist family of the New South nor the family black and white of the Old South functions as an adequate figure for the social.

Here, then, lie the origins of the Snopeses, a family in name only, whose hostility to the "blood and raising and background' of The Unvanquished is of a piece with a world in which familial relations have been made absolutely irrelevant (a hostility, which will, moreover, also allow someone like Flem Snopes to become a successful capitalist in a way that Sutpen never could). 27 To be sure, the Snopeses are the nightmare of racist progressives and landed elite Thus, while it is true that both Faulkner's fictions and the "boom" novel respond to the peculiar conditions endemic to the semi-periphery, and while both can be said to possess an awareness of the political and economic unevenness of local and global relations alike, it is just as true that the U.S. South of the 1930s is not the Latin America of the 1960s, and that the "lost cause" is not the Cuban Revolution.

In particular, the choice between "blood and raising and background" on the one hand, and barn burning on the other, would eventually be given a concrete historical content in Latin America, where the "quasi-political" desire that distinguishes Faulkner's poor tenantry finds a parallel in the properly political aims of the Cuban Revolution and its assault on private property. For although the revolution, as we have already seen, opposes a kind of fraternal feeling to "financial oligarchy" and "discrimination against the Negro," brotherhood is defined in this context not by blood, but rather by the commitment to a political ideology; that is, by the commitment to the restructuring of property relations and the elimination of global inequality. This is the same distinction that Guevara highlights when he conceives the eradication of familial relations as an indication of the revolution's success-a success embodied, as it were, by those children "who are not learning how to name the father." And whereas Faulkner is appalled by the displacement of familial intimacy and the revelation of class difference, the commitment to socialism embraces it. It is precisely this cleavage between blood and political ideology, then, that it may be true that a character like Flem Snopes is, in many ways, the embodiment of a commitment to liberal capitalism against which Cuban socialism will come to define its aims, for Faulkner and Guevara alike, this commitment to a political ideology entails a refusal of blood and, in this sense, of the very questions of identity that would prove to be central to the "boom" novel throughout the 1960s. 35 This is no less the case in a novel like The Death of Artemio Cruz, in which the protagonist's rise to power from soldier of the Mexican Revolution to ruthless tycoon will recall Faulkner's Snopeses in marked ways. Indeed, Cruz's success, first, as a smalltime speculator and later, as an industry magnate, will not only result in giving "life" to an "enormous, complex network" of businesses that serve the interests of domestic and foreign (particularly American) capital (81), but also involve treating his own family with the "indifference of a cold bureaucratic formality" (197) and "cold transaction" (263). Taking up what Hosam Aboul-Ela has described as an "ethic of looking forward without either sentimentality or any investment in the advancement of the community" that Flem Snopes' own "disregard for familial solidarity" exemplifies, Cruz, like Flem, is nothing less than a representative of a comprador class that "owns the means of production in a peripheral economy or occupies a prime location in trade relations but almost inevitably does not see its fortunes tied to its local context." 36 Accordingly, Fuentes' protagonist imagines that, in dying, he "will bequeath" the nation "their thieving leaders, their submissive unions, their new latifundia, their U.S. investments," and "their jailed workers" (269), and, for this reason, can be said to embody a betrayal of the Mexican Revolution, which, according to the novel, sought to redistribute wealth, as well as to legalize land reforms and the eight-hour work day (64). That betrayal is subsequently doubled throughout the narrative by Cruz's growing alienation from his own family, so that the dissolution of an intimacy characteristic of the family becomes, in this context, the sign of increasingly fragmented social relations within the nation. 37 But if Fuentes' novel will, in this way, call to mind that absence of communal and familial sentiment at the heart of the Snopes trilogy, The Death of Artemio Cruz is nonetheless underwritten by a desire that stands in closer proximity to the intimacies of Faulkner and his brothers of the 1930s.

For insofar as Fuentes' narrative is, as Maarten van Delden puts it, informed by a "utopian impulse," the "desire for restoration of a state of social and political wholeness" everywhere denied to Mexico and Latin America, this desire finds a kind of fulfillment in a return to origins that carries out the recuperation of not only the family, but of an identity as well; as plainly as we can see that Cruz has more than a little Snopes in him, it is just as clear that this family emerges in the concluding pages of the novel as the embodiment of this "social and political wholeness." 38 Here the novel dramatizes a primal scene of loss, which, culminating in the young Cruz's expulsion from the hacienda in Veracruz on which he was born, becomes the source of the protagonist's rage: "Rage because now he knew that life had enemies" and "because he would know separation" (278). Cruz experiences this "separation" as his parting from the mulatto Lunero, who "loved" It is as if José Arcadio's alienation from the rest of the family-returning to Macondo several years after having been, as he puts it, "Out there" (98), only to be exiled from the Buendía house for marrying his adoptive sister-requires García Márquez to produce this rather dramatic means of preserving the family. We might even say that the "trickle of blood" that finds its way back into the Buendía house embodies the very inescapability of familial relations, and as such, of a particular identity.

Yet, this investment in an identity on the model of the family also undergoes a radicalization of sorts on the level of form, where the political implication of the "boom" novel's commitment to the production of a Latin American identity can be clearly seen. No doubt García Márquez will suggest as much a decade and a half later when, in response to the comment that his European readers "often note the magic of the things you recount, but not the reality that inspires them," he explains that this is "because their rationalism prevents them from seeing that reality does not end in the price of tomatoes or of eggs." He continues: "One need only open the newspapers to know that among us extraordinary things occur every day. I know plain folk who have read One Hundred Years of Solitude with great pleasure and very carefully, but without being surprised, because in the end I'm not telling them anything that is all that different from the lives they live." 41 Although there are a number of reasons to be skeptical about García Márquez's comments, they do nonetheless gesture toward the theoretical underpinnings of an idealized form of "magical realism." For what appears to be nothing but the mere application of modernist techniques of estrangement turns out to be the attempt to produce an authentic representation of reality that draws a line between those readers who consider the novel's "magical" elements (walking dead, levitating priests) as "extraordinary" and those who regard these same elements as "quotidian." That this distinction corresponds to the difference between "Latin American" and "European" perspectives or positions, moreover, indicates that the interest in the relationship between reader and text is attended by the introduction of an entirely novel consideration: the identity of the reader.

In this way, magical realism transforms the literary text into a primary technology for the production of a particular identity-an identity, in other words, on the model of the family that would allow readers to count themselves among the Latin American "us" that García Márquez invokes here. the "triumph and example of the Cuban Revolution," Fuentes notes that "neither the writer's desire nor his pen produce revolution by themselves," which "obligates him to radicalize his work not only in the present, but toward the future and toward the past." 43 As we have already seen, it is in turning to the past that a novel like The Death of Artemio Cruz discovers an identity whose recuperation is imagined as part of this radicalization. At the same time, however, the difference between competing political ideologies such as socialism and capitalism is irreducible to the difference between identities; and as Guevara suggests, the political commitment to socialism itself renders identities as such irrelevant. Which is to say that even while the position a subject occupies within specific networks of social relations may inform the commitment to a given ideology, it in no way entails it. One need only remember that the anti-imperialist investment in a regional identity indicative of the "boom" was something both the socialist Left and procapitalist Right in Latin America could agree to celebrate throughout the 1960s because it left untouched the issue they would disagree on-the organization of society under capitalism. Yet, it is precisely this capacity to trump any form of ideological conflict that defines the emphasis on questions of identity, as Fuentes' Ludivinia suggests when she thinks the "only reason" we have "for loving someone" is "blood loved without reason." From this perspective, the "boom" novel turns the difference insisted on by the revolution-between socialism and capitalism-into the difference between cultures, rewriting the political aims of the revolution in strictly identitarian terms. This, then, is what it means to say that the writers of the "boom" chose Faulkner and his brothers over Che, and this is also what it would mean to begin to understand the "boom" itself as part of the literary prehistory of neoliberalism. As Gerald Martin has noted, the formal and thematic concerns of a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude had, by the 1970s, become "worldwide preoccupations," so much so that "the whole planet appeared to become Latin American." Nevertheless, what this Latin-Americanization of the globe points to is not simply the "boom" generation's "prescient anticipation of postmodernity and globalization," but rather the degree to which the ideological entrenchment of the free market as the ultimate horizon of human possibility (ethical, political, and economic) is itself the mark of the "boom" novel's success. 44 Which is to say that the recourse to the language of family and the effort to define Latin America primarily in terms of cultural difference at the heart of the "boom" novel are wholly consistent with the vision of a world in which there is no alternative to global capitalism. Thus, what the relationship between Faulkner and the "boom" points to is the enlargement of that vision and its role within the development of the contemporary world system whose more recent history has witnessed the end of the cold war and the so-called "end of ideology"-a moment that will later be described as marking the triumph of capitalism, but which is, in effect, a deepening of the crisis that is called neoliberalism. 45 Notes 1. I owe many thanks to Robert Newcomb for his many invaluable comments on an earlier version of this essay, and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. white enough yet to suit him. Maybe he wants to mix some white sweat with it" (18). Abner, who several pages earlier had described de Spain as the "man that aims to begin to-morrow owning" him "body and soul" (9), introduces a class dimension that gives the lie to the racial and economic image at the heart of Dixonian progressivism. Press, 1993). For Sommer, in fact, these nineteenth-century national romances form part of what she calls the "Boom's substantial pre-texts: a whole canon of great novels that elicited disingenuous dismissal by writers who anxiously claimed to be literary orphans at home, free to apprentice themselves abroad" (1). We might add that, from this perspective, the choice of Faulkner as a literary precursor is motivated not simply by the recognition of what Cohn and Smith describe as "historical and cultural affinities between the South and Latin America," but also-and perhaps more importantly-by the desire for a kind of modernization within the realm of the literary denied elsewhere on the terrain of the social and economic. As Margarita Saona observes, moreover, Latin American novels throughout the second-half of the twentieth century will give rise to various kinds of families that "respond to different historical circumstances: while a thick genealogical tree seeks to root the subject in the nation by means of blood ties, the denial of all familial ties and the creation of a community far removed from the family present a cosmopolitan aspiration that can be linked to the loss of a central role once played by intellectuals in the nation." Novelas familiares: figuraciones de la nación en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2003), 20; my translation. For this reason, the familial drama will take on various forms in the "boom" novel. 34. Although Fuentes, not unlike many of his "boom" contemporaries, had supported the revolution throughout the 1960s, he would eventually adopt a more critical attitude toward Cuban politics. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his condemnation of the Cuban government's im- Labor," Faulkner himself alerts us to the ways in which the commitment to a particular ideologyanti-Communism-renders all questions of racial identity and difference irrelevant. According to Stecopoulos, "Color loses its importance and becomes absurd . . . in the face of the Communist threat" (136). Stecopoulos claims that this demonstrates the extent to which a "need to assert and defend freedom neutralizes, indeed, supplants, race as a vital geopolitical issue" to suggest a kind of shortcoming in Faulkner's anti-communism (136), and it is precisely this insistence on, if not race then questions of identity more broadly, as a "vital geopolitical issue" that lies at the heart of the "boom" novel's commitment to Latin American identity. Indeed, we might say that the "boom" 193-202) has persuasively argued, "produces a concept of culture to take" the place of blood, but which nonetheless fails "to abandon race," so that "Martí's supposedly raceless concept of culture relies on the very concept of biological race which Martí denies" (193). We might say, then, that the "boom" novel's investment in an identity on the model of the family finds its origins in this concept of culture, a concept which, moreover, might begin to explain the centrality of Martí's mestizo to the portrayal of Cruz's biological family at the end of The Death of Artemio Cruz.

Gabriel García