Faulkner and His Brothers

Faulkner and His Brothers Emilio Sauri Studies in American Fiction, Volume 40, Issue 2, Fall 2013, pp. 259-283 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/saf/summary/v040/40.2.sauri.html Access provided by Healey Library, UMass Boston (30 Jan 2014 00:42 GMT) Faulkner and His Brothers 259 Faulkner and His Brothers Emilio Sauri University of Massachusetts Boston I. “We are all brothers”1 I n an interview reported in the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de São Paulo in August 1954, William Faulkner notes, “in my view, race is one of this continent’s most pressing issues.” Treating North and South America as one continent, he continues, “There is no reason why, in a continent as rich as ours, there should be social or economic distinc- tions between men. In the end, we are all brothers.”2 Speaking in Brazil three months after Brown v. Board of Education, Faulkner here appears to reiterate the aims of what is perhaps the most significant movement of the postwar period in the United States: the civil rights movement. But while that movement was and remains a somewhat foreign phenomenon in the context of Brazil—and Latin America more generally—we should remember that as Faulkner spoke, the most significant development of the same period in Latin America, the Cuban Revolution, was in its initial stages. Indeed, a year earlier, on 26 July 1953, Fidel Castro led the attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. Similarly concerned with the elimination of social and economic “distinctions,” the successful revolution would, seven years later, affirm that “democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy” or “with discrimination against the Negro”; it would even protest “disturbances by the Ku Klux Klan,” and, echoing Faulkner, proclaim that “the peoples of the world are brothers.”3 Nevertheless, what Faulkner and the revolution mean by “brothers” is not the same, and as we will see, it is this distinction that affords a more complete understanding of the relationship between Faulkner’s modernism and the Latin American “boom” literatures of the 1960s. Many commentators have already discussed the debt that Latin American literature owes to Faulkner (as well as to other modernists like Virginia Woolf, Studies in American Fiction 40.2 (2013): 259–283 © 2014 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 260 Studies in American Fiction Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos), and his prominence as the great literary influence claimed by writers such as José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa has given rise to what Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn describe as “the standard Latin American account of William Faulkner.”4 In this account, Faulkner becomes “a focal author for writers of the region as a result of those writers’ (transferential) perception of historical and cultural affinities between the South and Latin America (most frequently, defeat in war, racial conflict, underdevelopment, and a generally difficult entrance into modernity), as well as a model for the writers’ positioning themselves visà-vis the cultural metropolis.”5 Yet, while many of the “boom” writers and their critics maintain that the discovery of Faulkner constitutes as much a foundational moment in the development of the modern Latin American novel as the advent of the revolution, recent criticism has tended to ignore the relationship between these two moments, and in particular the relationship between the aesthetic and political possibilities each entails.6 This essay thus proposes to demonstrate that although both Faulkner’s work and the revolution had been imagined as offering a means toward addressing and overcoming the impasses of Latin American underdevelopment, what these writers imagine in laying claim to a literary kinship with Faulkner is a social project with aims that would remain at odds with the political commitments of the revolution. To begin, brotherhood for Faulkner is defined by race, or rather, by the critique of racial difference. One need only recall Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in which the literal brotherhood of white Henry Sutpen and black Charles Bon functions as the engine of a plot designed to assert the importance of their common paternity and undermine the racial distinctions that social and institutional segregation had sought to preserve. In this way, Faulkner’s critique of Jim Crow involves an insistence on a form of intimacy characteristic of the family (to which both blacks and whites belong) as the exemplar of social relations. The family similarly emerges in the discourse of the Cuban Revolution as a figuration of social relations, but as a figuration of those social relations that socialism hopes to destroy. This is nowhere more apparent than in Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s well-known speech “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba” [“Socialism and Man in Cuba” (1965)]. Here Guevara notes that the “leaders of the revolution have children just beginning to talk, who are not learning how to name the father” and, in so doing, gestures toward a political commitment that makes brotherhood an escape from rather than an acknowledgment of the family.7 For Guevara, then, this breakdown in relationships based on ties of filiation signals the arrival of what he describes as the “new man” (218), the individual imbued with a political consciousness essential to the creation of communism in Cuba. Yet, although many of the “boom” writers conceived of their work as Faulkner and His Brothers 261 the literary embodiment of this new political consciousness—and although critics have more or less agreed with this self-assessment—the “boom” novel will repeat, revise, and innovatively extend Faulkner’s commitment to the primacy of the family against the revolution’s claim to its irrelevance. This is not to deny that in many of the Latin American works from the 1950s through the 1970s, the family functions, if not as a critique of capitalism embodied in Guevara’s “new man,” then as a critique of an older form of it. One might think of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), in which Juan Preciado travels to Comala in search of a father whose wealth and rise to power is revealed as the cause of the town’s destruction. But even here the family is invoked on behalf of a claim to property, and inheritance in general, so that Rulfo’s novel begins with Preciado recalling how his mother had urged him to “[d]emand what is ours. What he should have given me but never did.”8 What follows, nonetheless, is Preciado’s discovery of a past that is narrated by the dead, and that is both his as well as that of an entire town single-handedly destroyed by his father, Pedro Páramo. It is in this sense that inheritance is essential not simply to property relations, but also to an identity, to a culture, and most powerfully to a collective past. Given that the “boom” novel is no less invested in the creation of an identity—a continental identity that is sometimes racial, as it is in Faulkner, but more often cultural—it should come as no surprise that the family similarly emerges as the central plot device in novels such as La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) and Cien años de soledad (1967). Therefore, if, as Cohn has argued elsewhere, “Spanish American writers have been drawn much more to the sagas of the Compsons, Sutpens, and Sartorises than, say, the Snopes trilogy,” this is not only because “the former’s depiction of societies that continue to live by the code of the Old South, trapped in a past that history—and modernity—have left behind, resonated with their experience,” but also and perhaps more importantly because in novels such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and The Unvanquished (1937), the history of the region is presented as the drama of the family.9 It is this emphasis on the intimacies of the family and its logic of inheritance that Guevara’s text sees as irreconcilable with the political aims of the Cuban Revolution and the restructuring of property relations under socialism.10 And it is this same emphasis that will come to define a political project whose distinguishing feature will be the transformation of those structural inequalities constitutive of the global economy into questions of cultural difference and identity. We will return to this project later, but for the moment we might simply note how different the region’s literary history, and the “boom” novel in particular, would look if Faulkner’s Latin American readers had instead found more compelling The Hamlet, (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959)—a 262 Studies in American Fiction trilogy in which predatory economic relations have largely displaced questions of familial inheritance. We might even say that the image of the social found in novels such as The Death of Artemio Cruz and One Hundred Years of Solitude would have been much closer to something like the revolution’s vision of a world structured along economic (rather than cultural) differences; a world, in other words, in which familial relations—along with questions of identity—are rendered utterly irrelevant. Nevertheless, this is not what happened, and the political possibilities opened up by the Cuban Revolution would soon give way to the rise of military dictatorships (as early as 1964 in Brazil) and the breakdown of utopian projects throughout Latin America—a moment underwritten, moreover, by what has been described as the “neoliberal turn” of the 1970s.11 And as we will see, the new political and economic order ushered in by this turn and inherited by subsequent generations of Latin American writers would not have been possible without the conception of society at the heart of the “boom” novel of the 1960s—a conception grounded in intimacy rather than equality that will begin to explain and even complicate Faulkner’s presence in Latin America. For reasons that will become clear, however, any effort to understand the political implications underlying Faulkner’s relationship to the “boom” novel will first require an extended consideration of the centrality of the family in his fictions, as well as within the history of the U.S. South more generally. 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 Faulkner and His Brothers 263 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—1865–1900 (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 264 Studies in American Fiction 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. Further, we must remember that Faulkner’s novels of the 1930s—including Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom!, and The Unvanquished—were all written at a moment when staggering rates of unemployment and inflation resulting from the crisis of 1929 had exacerbated conditions of underdevelopment in the South. Rendering the South’s position as the nation’s poorest region all the more intolerable, the Great Depression did, in this sense, also bear witness to the failure of Dixonian progressivism. Therefore, despite the fact that Faulkner has been and continues to be widely read as the author who, as Ralph Ellison once put it, “fights out the moral problem which was repressed after the nineteenth century”—that is, the moral problem of race—we might complicate this reading by noting that race remains central to Faulkner’s work at a moment when the economic crisis had not only threatened to undermine the coherence of regional life itself, but also intensified the immiseration of the South.17 That the Great Depression had made the contradictions of regionalism and class more tangible (causing the vicissitudes of Dixon’s New South to become all the more conspicuous) might suggest that Faulkner’s interest in the family black and white throughout the 1930s is somewhat misplaced. Nonetheless, the question is not whether his interest in race represents a kind of displacement of those contradictions; to be sure, it does. Rather, the question is what this investment means within the context of the 1930s, a period characterized by both increasingly volatile labor relations and a widening of the economic gap between the industrial North and the underdeveloped South. As is well known, the “boom” writers would respond to a similar situation of underdevelopment decades later, alerting us to what the Brazilian critic Antonio Candido would describe in 1970 as a “catastrophic consciousness of backwardness, corresponding to the notion of ‘underdeveloped country.’“18 That Faulkner and his Latin American counterparts are similarly attuned to the problem of underdevelopment consequently offers one way of explaining the southern author’s reputation among writers like Fuentes and García Márquez, and it is perhaps not surprising that the more recent critical tendency Faulkner and His Brothers 265 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. To return to the familial drama in the South: in imagining the closeness between blacks and whites as the product of a plantation society torn asunder by the Civil War and Reconstruction, Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots recounts the demise of the protagonist’s family both as the welcome decay of the “old order” and, more significantly, as the destruction of the family black and white. And while it is the relationship between the white protagonist Charlie Gaston and his black childhood friend Dick that emerges as the principal figure of that intimacy, The Leopard’s Spots categorically rejects that bond and familiarity. For this reason, Dick’s eventual disappearance not only anticipates the eradication of the old order, but also allows Charlie to form a racially homogeneous white family with his adoptive parents, Reverend and Mrs. Durham, the novel’s most virulent racists. Dixon, then, harbors no nostalgia for the “Old South”—that is, for a society founded upon the institution of slavery and largely characterized by the intimacy between blacks and whites—and the dismantling of the plantation system that follows the Confederacy’s defeat here turns out to be a kind of foundational fiction in which the Civil War and Reconstruction are conceived as the white man’s “Revolution of Independence” (419) from “African Barbarism” (96). Having brought about the “complete alienation of the white and black races as compared with the old familiar trust of domestic life” (202), that “independence,” according to Dixon, would at last bring about both the apotheosis of Anglo-Saxon civilization and the unification of North and South. Charlie, nonetheless, will later attempt to save Dick from the lynch mob. He fails, but his failure counts in The Leopard’s Spots (and ultimately for Charlie) as a kind of success, for only through the lynch mob’s actions can he experience a moment that resembles a form of consciousness-raising. Through the uncontrollable actions of the mob, Charlie becomes aware that the divide between blacks and whites “was now impassable” (385). Rather than sentimentalize his boyhood relationship with Dick, however, Charlie decides that “sooner or later we must squarely face the fact that two such races, counting millions in numbers, cannot live together under a Democracy” (386). Identifying what it perceives as the impossibility of socially integrating black and white, Dixon’s novel 266 Studies in American Fiction poses a solution to this dilemma in the unequivocal repudiation of the bond between black boy and white boy; the repudiation, that is to say, of brotherhood. Not unlike The Leopard’s Spots, Faulkner’s novels of the 1930s will render the relationship between blacks and whites as a familial relation between characters, both figurative and literal, as well as contested and difficult. But whereas Dixon had sought to demonstrate the need to eradicate interracial relations as such, Faulkner signals the radical impossibility of either completely undoing or fully preserving this intimacy between the races, thereby giving rise to a problem whose solution is continuously frustrated by the narratives themselves. This becomes all the clearer in The Unvanquished, a novel that takes place during the Civil War and Reconstruction (a period that, as we have just seen, is foundational for Dixon), and in which the relationship between Bayard Sartoris and Ringo most powerfully dramatizes the hollowing out of Dixon’s “New America” (408) and white progressivism in the face of the Depression.20 At the same time, Bayard and Ringo are in many ways a version of Charlie and Dick, and The Unvanquished, like The Leopard’s Spots, follows the structure of a Bildungsroman in which the protagonist’s education similarly results in an adult epiphany regarding the childhood fantasies of brotherhood between black boy and white. In contrast to more canonical readings of The Unvanquished, then, we might say that Faulkner’s novel is structured primarily around the relationship between Bayard and Ringo.21 Recalling the fall of Vicksburg in 1863, Bayard’s narrative begins with the sweeping away the “living map” that the boys had constructed that summer in order to recreate the Civil War behind the family barn.22 The destruction of the map prefigures the Confederacy’s imminent defeat, precipitating a sense of apprehension among the members of the Sartoris family. More importantly, this apprehension is immediately followed by Bayard’s first description of his relationship with Ringo: 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. (7) Here 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 Faulkner and His Brothers 267 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, Grumby. Similarly, Uncle Buck McCaslin—who, rather than confront Bayard alone, asks both, “What you boys going to do now?” (158)—extends Bayard’s right to avenge his grandmother’s death to Ringo. The point, however, is not that Faulkner undoes the difference between black and white altogether by means of Bayard’s relationship to Ringo (in fact Uncle Buck shortly thereafter refers to Ringo as a “damn nigger horse thief” [159]); 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. Yet, in the novel’s closing chapter, Bayard complains that Ringo possesses “some outrageous assurance gained from too long and too close association with white people: the one whom he called Granny, the other with whom he had slept from the time we were born until Father rebuilt the house” (218). The Reconstruction of the South not only requires the Colonel to rebuild the Sartoris home, but also—as Bayard’s comments suggest—demands a reorganization of the familial structure.23 But if Faulkner’s narrative recalls the estrangement of blacks and whites that resulted from Reconstruction, there is an equally important sense in which Ringo’s continued presence among the Sartorises, as well as Bayard’s disapproval, attest to the persistence of the family black and white. For both Faulkner and Dixon, moreover, the destruction of the Old South also entailed the liquidation of an entire economic system defined by its dependency on black labor. As we have already seen, Dixon champions the demolition of the southern plantocracy as the event that led to the “complete alienation” of the races, thereby allowing for the achievement of a white national citizenry. To the extent, then, that Dixon understands the abolition of slavery in this way—as the foundation of a “New America”—the introduction of the free-labor market into the South emerges in The Leopard’s Spots as a means of preserving it, and—perhaps more importantly—of integrating the region into 268 Studies in American Fiction Northern industrial capital. The realization of this racially homogenous citizenry is thus imagined as being concomitant with the economic development of the South, as the simultaneity of this racial fantasy and economic vision is embodied in the white family itself. In this sense, the racial family, absolutely central to the novel of Jim Crow, is not simply symptomatic of those anxieties over miscegenation provoked by the enfranchisement of millions of emancipated slaves under Reconstruction; rather, it also functions as the very image of an industrializing South, in which the relationship between employer and employee constitutive of wage labor comes to displace the relationship between master and slave. And if the plantation system’s dependence on the servile labor of blacks had resulted in an intimacy between the races that Dixon condemns, it is the industrialist, General Daniel Worth—who encourages Charlie to devote his “powers to the South’s development” (283)—and his investment in “free labor” that safeguards the promise of white progressivism. Reconstruction in The Leopard’s Spots subsequently witnesses the displacement of the antebellum aristocrat by the Gilded Age industrial capitalist whose factory, Dixon suggests, is just as crucial as his commitment to whiteness. This is why Worth emerges as the hero of Dixon’s novel, and it is also why the slave driver turned robber baron Simon Legree is the novel’s villain. For what Legree embodies is the threat posed by an adherence to the principles of the free-labor market divested of any commitment to whiteness as such. Attempting to profit from the political enfranchisement of blacks under Reconstruction, the former slave driver and villain of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), reappears in Dixon’s novel as the villain of the Jim Crow novel. Following the failure of Reconstruction, Legree subsequently leaves the South to become “one of the most daring and successful of a group of robbers who preyed on the industries of the nation” (164), thereby representing the slave master who becomes “a modern master” (403) under the system of wage labor. Nonetheless, Dixon is in no way proposing a critique of that system, and believes that “free labor” is essential to the South’s development (as the figure of Worth implies). Rather, Legree, who employs hundreds of blacks as scabs in order to break strikes, impoverishing tens of thousands of white workers, bears a commitment to the free-labor market that is insufficiently racist. 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 Faulkner and His Brothers 269 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 270 Studies in American Fiction 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 Sutpen had “lost everything in the War like everybody else” (222), his “design” bears no commitment to the region—to what Bayard calls “blood and raising and background” (217). For this reason, Sutpen responds, “I am for my land. If every man of you would rehabilitate his own land, the country will take care of itself” (222); in so doing, he also signals an absolute rupture with a past Sartoris seeks to recover, but which nevertheless cannot represent a future (if only because Absalom, Absalom! had already dramatized the nonfulfillment of Sutpen’s ambition as his failure to found a white family; as Shreve notes, “he just wanted a grandson”).26 The 1930s ends in Faulkner’s work with the foundering of both Sartoris’s “dream” and Sutpen’s “design”—the destruction of both the backward-looking and forward-looking family that lays bare the failure of regional development in the South. 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 alike. Ab Snopes, for instance, betrays Bayard and Ringo’s grandmother, Rosa Millard, though his indifference to the communal codes of the South takes on an exceptionally pernicious form in Faulkner’s short story, “Barn Burning” (1938).28 The horse thief—who, according to Faulkner, “had gone to that war a private in the fine old European sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving fidelity to no man or army or flag” (25–26)—reemerges here not simply as a tenant farmer, but as a threat to the material existence of landowners like Major de Spain as well. Indeed, as Richard Godden has Faulkner and His Brothers 271 noted, barn burning “directs quasi-political resentment against an institutional structure associated with a seemingly unchangeable form of labor exploitation”; what appears to be a purely criminal act gains a political valence, but only insofar as it is understood as a crime perpetrated by a specific class—a class, in other words, whose standpoint remains unassimilable to the racial and economic vision of the New South and Old, at the same time as it trumps any notion of the familial.29 Thus, “Barn Burning,” and the Snopes family more generally, bear witness not to the replacement of one kind of brotherhood by another, but rather its destruction at the hands of the dispossessed tenantry. (And if, as we will see in a moment, one takes the aims of the Cuban Revolution seriously—as Faulkner’s short story does, albeit avant la lettre—then the Snopeses begin to look less like the entrepreneurial force that sweeps into Frenchman’s Bend and more like Guevara’s fatherless revolutionaries.)30 Yet, while Faulkner’s narrative produces an image of the social from which the family is evacuated, and in which the class difference between white people matters, he is nonetheless horrified by the nakedness of its emergence.31 Which is to say that what we get in “Barn Burning” is less a critique of “free labor” than the negative of what he would describe in 1954 as a world in which “we are all brothers.” But if from this perspective the Snopes family becomes indicative of what Leigh Anne Duck describes as Faulkner’s “totalizing view of inequality in which local struggles seem almost inevitably ineffectual” (38), the Cuban Revolution’s commitment to socialism, in contrast, will be defined largely by the effort to transform this “totalizing view” into an effective struggle. It is this same view of inequality, moreover, to which a writer like Fuentes responds in 1969 when, in reflecting on the origins of the “nueva novela hispanoamericana,” he writes, “[p]ressured by these contradictions, the dream of a ‘modern civilization’ suffocated by the encounter with North American capitalism and criollo oligarchies, the Latin American intellectual only sees the prospect of revolution.”32 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 272 Studies in American Fiction 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 complicates Faulkner’s presence in Latin America. On one hand, Faulkner’s insistence on the family as the exemplar of social relations finds any number of ready equivalents in Latin American literature—not least in the “boom” novel of the 1960s, but also as far back as the “foundational fictions” of the nineteenth century—where the family reemerges as the primary figuration of nation and region alike.33 On the other hand, the revolution questions this model of social relations because its aims, as suggested earlier, render any notion of inheritance—a notion that is no less central to the family than to property relations—absolutely irrelevant. From this perspective, those authors who remain equally invested in Faulkner’s vision and Cuban politics are committed to a contradiction. Nevertheless, the “boom” novel ultimately chooses blood over political ideology, identity rather than socialism, and the fact that this is as true for Fuentes as García Márquez—two writers who would eventually embrace opposing attitudes toward the revolution—suggests the degree to which an emphasis on the primacy of identity (whether national, regional, or more broadly cultural) comes to displace any conflict as such.34 This, then, is what it means for Cohn to say that “Spanish American writers have been drawn much more to the sagas of the Compsons, Sutpens, and Sartories than, say, the Snopes trilogy”; whereas the Snopeses are, like Guevara’s children of the revolution, a way of imagining the destruction of the family, novels like The Death of Artemio Cruz and One Hundred Years of Solitude remain most committed to recuperating it. And while 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” Faulkner and His Brothers 273 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” (278) and raised the “boy born in the Negro shacks” (283), though the scene nonetheless results in the revelation of the protagonist’s racial identity as the son of the dead white master, Atanasio Menchaca, and Lunero’s sister, Isabel Cruz, one of the “Indian and mulatto women, who . . . gave birth to fair-haired mestizos, mulattos with blue eyes and dark 274 Studies in American Fiction skin” (281). In turning back to the nineteenth century, The Death of Artemio Cruz conceives of the Mexican hacienda, like Dixon’s and Faulkner’s southern plantation, as the site for the production of those forms of intimacy constitutive of the multiracial family, as Cruz’s identity (here Latin American, though no less regional) is revealed to be the product of the very ties of filiation that his legacy of ruthless accumulation, in good Snopes fashion, obscures and cancels out. But if Cruz’s death and the inscriptions, “Havana, May 1960” and “Mexico, December 1961,” at the end of the novel announce the construction of a social order that the Mexican Revolution had failed to realize, but that the Cuban Revolution now promises to complete, the return to origins that concludes The Death of Artemio Cruz dramatizes the desire for a recovery of the family, and in this sense of an identity, whose revelation and recuperation is imagined as the mark of the revolution’s success. That this recuperation stands opposed to Guevara’s conception of the revolution— a conception which, as we have already seen, insists on the eradication of the family—is obvious enough, but it also gives us a clue to a more fundamental divergence between the “boom” novel’s characteristic investment in an identity on the model of family and Cuban socialism’s commitment to a political ideology. For unlike the commitment to any ideology, Cruz’s identity is, as the novel makes clear, a product of the family to which he belongs and, in this sense, his regardless of what he believes. Therefore, although Cruz’s grandmother Ludivinia is never told the “boy born in negro shacks” is her grandson, she nonetheless thinks, “Of course he’s mine . . . Blood answers blood without having to come near” (290); and while Ludivinia thinks “We have to have a reason for loving someone,” she also believes “The only reason is blood loved without reason” (288). But even if Ludivinia can love the grandson she will never meet simply because blood is “loved without reason,” the decision to ruthlessly preserve—as Cruz does—or fight against—as the revolution promises to—what Fuentes elsewhere calls “American capitalism and criollo oligarchies” demands reasons in a way that blood does not.39 Nevertheless, this mobilization of the familial drama will find any number of equivalents in the “boom” novel of the 1960s, and most notably in García Márquez’s family saga, One Hundred Years of Solitude. One need only recall the well-known scene in the novel that follows the mysterious death of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s brother, José Arcadio, a scene that in many ways literalizes this investment in questions of identity: A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed Faulkner and His Brothers 275 door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining room table, went along the porch with begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs.40 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. To begin, it will not have escaped notice that this scene also reproduces the well-known juxtaposition of the everyday and the extraordinary associated with “magical realism.” But if the modernist emphasis on formal experimentation here gives rise to effects that recall the work of avant-garde movements such as surrealism, its content is derived from a situation radically different from that of core societies. Needless to say, a number of authors themselves—not least García Márquez, but also Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar—had promoted the “boom” both as the apogee of Latin American literature and as heir to literary modernism, so that the antirealist tendencies indicative of a writer like Faulkner are taken up here with an eye to the construction of what these authors and their critics would describe as a “modern” literary tradition with Latin American characteristics. Thus, any appropriative gesture as such acquires a particular significance in the context of the 1960s. 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 276 Studies in American Fiction 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. Therefore, insofar as the difference between one identity and another (barring essentialism) is simply the difference between those positions individual and collective subjects occupy within wide-ranging networks of social relations—as, for example, a Latin American—then what “magical realism” allows readers to assume is a particular subject position. To be sure, writers like García Márquez had conceived this articulation of a Latin American identity as affording a kind of political subjectivity capable of being bootstrapped up to regional opposition to imperialism; from this perspective, what the revolution elicits from the novel—in contrast to Faulkner’s context—is the creation of solutions to the history of underdevelopment outside of the text itself.42 Hence, in citing 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 Faulkner and His Brothers 277 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. 2. “O problema mais importante do Continente é o de raças” [“The continent’s most pressing problem is the problem of race”], O Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil), 12 Aug. 1954; my translation. 3. Fidel Castro, “First Declaration of Havana” in The Declarations of Havana, ed. Tariq Ali (London: Verso, 2008), 79–85 at 82. 4. Perhaps the earliest and best known discussion of Faulkner’s influence in Latin American is James East Irby, “La influencia de William Faulkner en cuatro narradores hispano americanos” [“William Faulkner’s influence in four Latin American storytellers”], Master’s thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1956). For an historical overview of Faulkner’s reception in Latin America, 278 Studies in American Fiction see Tanya T. Fayen, In Search of the Latin American Faulkner (Lanham, MD: Univ. Press of America, 1995). See also Deborah Cohn, History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1999) and Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith, eds., Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2004). 5. Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn, “William Faulkner and Latin America,” in Look Away!, 303–307 at 304. 6. A notable exception is Neil Larsen’s “The ‘Boom’ Novel and the Cold War,” Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture, and Politics (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1995), 64–78; and Lawrence H. Schwarz, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1988). See also Deborah Cohn’s recent book, The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War (Nashbille: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 2012), which offers a fascinating account of the institutional politics in Latin America, Europe, and the United States linked to the publication, translation, and circulation of Latin American literature during the height of the cold war. Importantly, Cohn maintains that “in the Latin American literature of the Boom years, modernism was by no means antithetical to Marxism; rather, the writers’ style and content alike were imbued with the revolutionary politics and projects that were sweeping across the region” (35). This essay, nonetheless, aims to demonstrate something of the opposite: namely, that the “boom” novel’s appropriation of themes and techniques associated with modernism, and Faulkner in particular, was largely underwritten by a conception of social relations at odds with the conception underlying Cuban socialism and Marxism more generally. 7. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics and Revolution, ed. David Deutschmann (New York: Ocean Press, 2003), 212–228 at 226; translation modified. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 8. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 3; translation modified. 9. Deborah Cohn, “Faulkner and Spanish America: Then and Now,” in Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Robert W. Hamblin and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2003), 50–67 at 55. 10. Bruno Bosteels’s essay, “Can the New Man Speak” (Marx and Freud in Latin America [London: Verso, 2012], 97–127), suggests something similar in a reading of Guevara’s text and its relationship to Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film Memorias del subdesarrollo [Memories of Underdevelopment]. For Bosteels, “The violent language of eradication and sacrifice signals the extent to which the revolutionary process finds itself in permanent conflict with what we might call, in a dialectical inversion of Gutiérrez Alea’s title, the overdevelopment of memories—that is, the stubborn persistence of vestiges of the past within the revolutionary present” (100). Given that memory itself is no less a question of identity (especially when considered alongside the question of a collective past), we might say that the durability of the familial drama in the Latin American novels bears witness to something like this “overdevelopment of memories.” Faulkner and His Brothers 279 11. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006). For an account of the relationship between neoliberalism and the Latin American “boom” literatures, see Idelber Avelar, “Oedipus in Post-auratic Times: Modernization and Mourning in the Spanish American Boom,” in The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999) 22–38. 12. Jorge Luis Borges, “William Faulkner, The Unvanquished,” trans. Esther Allen, in Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 186. 13. See Walter Wadlington, “The Loving Case: Virginia’s Anti-Miscegenation Statue in Historical Perspective,” Virginia Law Review 52, no.7 (Nov. 1966): 1189–1223. Joel Williamson alerts us to the prevalence of such relations when he notes that “in almost every community in the slave South there existed at least one slave woman whose distinctly lighter-colored children testified to a falling from grace by one or more white men.” See Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 40. 14. For a discussion of the role that the multiracial family plays in Thomas Nelson Page’s Red Rock, see Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995) 16–23. The debt this essay owes to Michaels’s work, and his reading of Thomas Dixon’s Trilogy of Reconstruction in particular, will be apparent throughout. At the same time, if a novel like The Leopard’s Spots is underwritten, as Michaels demonstrates, by the attempt to eliminate social and political differences among whites “by transforming them into racial differences between whites and blacks” (20), this essay argues that the question of race is in Dixon’s novel rendered inextricable from the question of Southern economic development. 15. Wadlington, “The Loving Case,” 1195–96. 16. Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, repr. (1902; Ridgewood: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1967), 161. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 17. Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 24–44 at 43. 18. Antonio Candido, “Literature and Underdevelopment,” On Literature and Society, trans. Howard S. Becker (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995) 121. 19. This is the position, for example, Cohn assumes when she notes “a sense of identification with” the “experience of underdevelopment, poverty, and marginalization,” as well as “with the history of the white South” and “its subordination to and neocolonialism by the—by another—North” (“Faulkner and Spanish America,” 54). Similarly, Scott Romine reads Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots and Page’s Red Rock as postcolonial texts, in which a “ruptured history follows patterns of cultural trauma found worldwide” (178). And while Romine is right to note that although Dixon’s “usual explanations for the necessity of white supremacy recurs to an especially virulent brand of racist essentialism, he simultaneously portrays race and race relations as products of historical forces” (188), the point here will be to demonstrate how these historical forces are best understood not simply in terms of a “colonial or imperial encounter,” but in primarily economic terms. See Scott Romine, “Things Falling Apart,” Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies, ed. Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2004) 173–200. 280 Studies in American Fiction 20. Ted Atkinson argues that, “In the case of The Unvanquished, Faulkner taps into a popular project of cultural memory aimed at viewing the concerns of the Depression through the historical lens of the Civil War, focused specifically on the forces of destruction and reconstruction common to both events.” Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Culture Politics (Athens: The Univ. of Georgia Press, 2006), 222. But while Atkinson correctly identifies Faulkner’s novel as a response to the Depression, whereby “both familial and regional loss create analogues between the lost depicted in The Unvanquished and the historical context of its production” (229), his account excludes any consideration of the relationship between Bayard and Ringo—a relationship that is understood here as not only central to The Unvanquished, but also as the marker of Southern underdevelopment. 21. In his essay “Twentieth-Century Literature and the Black Mask of Humanity,” for example, Ellison includes a brief analysis of The Unvanquished, in which he juxtaposes the characters Loosh and Ringo. In contrast to Loosh—whose “villainy” consists of “desiring his freedom”—Ringo represents the “benign” Negro, “who uses his talent not to seek personal freedom but to remain the loyal and resourceful retainer” (41–2). See also Esther Alexander Terry, “‘For blood and kin and home’: Black Characterization in William Faulkner’s Sartoris Saga,” in Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The Sartoris Family, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Boston: C. K. Hall & Co., 1985), 303–317. 22. William Faulkner, The Unvanquished (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 7. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 23. Ringo himself bears witness to this change, when he tells Bayard, “We could bushwhack him. . . . Like we did Grumby that day. But I reckon that wouldn’t suit that white skin you walks around in” (218). But if Ringo sees the difference between what he and Bayard believe should be done as the difference between black and white skin, this is only possible after Reconstruction, once the Sartoris home has been rebuilt in such a way that the children, who had slept together, as Bayard explains, “from the time we were born,” identify an irreconcilable divide between them. And even though Ringo had actively participated in the task of avenging Rosa Millard’s murder, his desire to help Bayard avenge the Colonel’s murder is denied. Neither castigated nor rewarded for his determination to be included within the post-Reconstruction family, Ringo is gradually eclipsed by the conflict between “principle” and “blood and raising and background” (217) Bayard faces in deciding whether or not to kill B. J. Redmond. 24. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 190. 25. Richard Godden has demonstrated how Faulkner’s work bears witness to the (unsuccessful) repression of the South’s dependence on black labor, an account that has informed this essay in many ways. Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997). 26. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1991), 179. 27. As Richard Godden notes, this transition was set in motion by “an unintended revolution in rural labor relations,” whereby “the landowning class shifted its pattern of dependency from black labor to northern capital, while the tenantry, increasingly landless and welfare-dependent, waited on the Faulkner and His Brothers 281 pull of Northern employment needs to renew its Great Migration” (William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007], 2). Thus, if the 1940s bears witness to the whitening of the labor force and intensification of northern capital sought by progressives, this transformation followed not from concomitant investments in whiteness and regional development, but instead by the demands of the war economy—an economy, moreover, in which the Snopes will thrive. 28. William Faulkner, “Barn Burning,” in Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 3–25. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 29. Godden, William Faulkner, 15. Moreover, it is as if Faulkner were here imagining an encounter between Dixon’s Colonel Worth and the “poor white man” he seeks to employ in his mills, albeit from a perspective which, as we have already suggested, The Leopard’s Spots must exclude—the perspective, that is to say, of labor. Shortly after walking out of Major de Spain’s home, Abner asks his son, “Pretty and white, ain’t it?” and adds, “That’s sweat. Nigger sweat. Maybe it ain’t 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. 30. John T. Matthews (“Many Mansions: Faulkner’s Cold War Conflicts,” Global Faulkner, ed. Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie [Jackson, MI: U P of Mississippi, 2009]: 3–23) suggests as much in reading Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy as an extended commentary on the cold war conflict between capitalism and communism, in which Mink Snopes not only “serves as Faulkner’s study of Southern farm laborers’ underdeveloped capacity to reorganize agricultural capitalism through class pressure, whether as disadvantaged participants or as would-be revolutionaries” (8), but also “represents a global South’s agricultural proletariat, a Third World composite who awaits recognition and recompense” (11). 31. The real tragedy in “Barn Burning,” as is well known, turns out to be Sarty Snopes’s lack of filial piety and the betrayal of what Abner calls “your own blood” (9). That this betrayal provides a means toward maintaining the property rights of Southern landowners like de Spain in the face of tenant farmers like Abner Snopes suggests that for Faulkner the preservation of property relations is just as inimical to the family as the threat to those same relations. It is in this sense that preservation and threat are defined here not in opposition to each other, but rather against the family, yet only insofar as their aims are rendered indistinguishable, and therefore emptied of all political content. 32. Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana, 29; my translation. 33. The term “foundational fiction” is taken from Doris Sommer’s study of the nineteenth-century Latin American novel; see Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkley: Univ. of California 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 282 Studies in American Fiction 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 imprisonment of the writer Heberto Padilla in 1971; and indeed, it is this condemnation that would lead the Cuban critic, Roberto Fernández Retamar, to characterize Fuentes as “one of the most outstanding figures among the new Latin-American writers who have set out to elaborate in the cultural sphere a counterrevolutionary platform” (36). For an extended discussion of “el caso Padilla,” as well as Fernández Retamar’s response, see his “Caliban: Notes toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America” in Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999) 3–45. 35. As Harilaos Stecopoulos (Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898–1976 [Ithaca: Cornell U P, 2008) has suggested in his reading of Faulkner’s essay “On Fear: The South in Labor,” Faulkner himself alerts us to the ways in which the commitment to a particular ideology— anti-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” and its commitment to Latin Americanism gives Stecopoulos what Faulkner’s anti-communism fails to provide: the transformation of the distinction between political beliefs into the difference between cultural identities—what we belief into who we are. 36. Hosam Aboul-Ela, Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariategui Tradition (Pittsburg: Univ. of Pittsburg Press, 2007) 93 and 70. Faulkner and His Brothers 283 37. This fragmentation is mirrored, then, on the level of form in Fuentes’ non-linear narrative, periphrastic interior monologue, and incorporation of various perspectives produced by alternating between the first-, second-, and third-person point of view. But if Fuentes can be said to reproduce the technical virtuosity of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, the point here is that The Death of Artemio Cruz nonetheless stands in closer proximity to Faulkner’s modernism. 38. Maarten van Delden, Carlos Fuentes: Mexico and Modernity (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1998), 52. 39. We can see a similar insistence on the primacy of blood in José Martí’s “Nuestra América,” which, as Charles Hatfield (“The Limits of ‘Nuestra América,’” Revista Hispánica Moderna 63.2 [2010]: 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. 40. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Perennial Classics, 1998), 144. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 41. Gabriel García Márquez, El olor de la guayaba: conversaciones con Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (Mexico: Editorial Diana, 1993), 48; my translation. We should also remember that García Márquez’s comments here recall Alejo Carpentier’s discussion of the “real maravilloso” and the European’s inability to understand the same in the prologues to his El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of This World (1949)]. See Alejo Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997): 75–88. 42. Of course, the Cuban government’s own investment in state cultural institutions such as the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) and Casa de las Américas signals a similar dovetailing of political commitment and art, particularly of film and literature. 43. Fuentes, La nueva novela, 29. 44. Gerald Martin, “The Novel of a Continent: Latin America,” The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), 637 and 666. 45. See Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century: A Reader, ed. Patrick O’Meara, Howard D. Mehlinger, and Matthew Krain (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2000), 161–180. For an account of the ways in which this crisis is brought to bear on contemporary Latin American literature and Latin Americanist discourses alike see Emilio Sauri, “‘A la pinche modernidad’: Literary Form and the End of History in Roberto Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes,” MLN 125, no. 2 (Mar. 2010): 406–432.