The Presence of Faulkner in the Writings of Garcia Marquez

Abstract

Porter-whose region had experienced the tragedy and defeat of the Civil War, thereby creating a need for a reexamination of values and systems that had been taken for granted. As a result of this reexamination, Fuentes feels that for years the most original American writing has come from the South, 1 a region with which Spanish American novelists can readily identify themselves and their particular social and political systems. Not until the present decade has there been a political trauma or a military defeat of national proportions to serve as a stimulus to the present generation of novelists in the United States.William Faulkner's introduction to the Spanish-speaking world began in 1933 in Spain, but he already had been discovered and hailed in France,where Maurice Edgar Coindreau was to laud him in French, English, and Spanish. In later years, Jean-Paul Sartre was to follow suit. The first critical study of Faulkner in Spanish was published by Lino Novas Calvo, a Galician who had been reared in Cuba and who had worked in New York before his return to Spain. There he associated himself with various literary journals, among them the Revista de Occidente, in which his study of Faulkner made its landmark appearance.2 Inasmuch as Faulkner had already published seven volumes, all of which were totally ignored in the Spanishspeaking world, Novas Calvo chided his audience for its "pecado capital " and began an introduction of Faulkner based on the idea of his Puritanism (an idea he most likely took from Coindreau), his portrayal of disintegrating Southern feudalism, and the complicated web of social, psychological, and racial conflict evident in his writings. A harmony of technique and Ian-L. Carlos Fuentes expresses these ideas in an interview wilh Chriswpher Sharp in W [Wom en 's Wear Daily (New York )