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ANQ: A Quarterly Journal

of Short Articles, Notes and
Reviews
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Macondo in Yoknapatawpha:
The Exquisite Privilege of
Reading William Faulkner's
Novels
E. Ernesto Delgado
Published online: 24 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: E. Ernesto Delgado (1997) Macondo in Yoknapatawpha: The

Exquisite Privilege of Reading William Faulkner's Novels, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of
Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 10:2, 33-35, DOI: 10.1080/08957699709602275

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08957699709602275

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 Spring 1997, Vol. 10, No. 2 33

in Argentina as English authors were. I discovered it late, therefore, when

I began to study literature in English. We had four courses in English liter-
ature to one in U.S., and that was combined with history. The professor I
took it from was not particularly interested in literature and taught rather
boring authors such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen
Bryant, and Washington Irving. Later, while I was studying English litera-
ture in England, I started reading American novelists like James and
Fitzgerald, and American poets, and I started asking myself where I had
been all that time. American literature came to me like a revelation, or an
injection of vitality. I started reading, and then teaching, only American
authors. Eventually this led me to graduate studies in American literature
in the United States and, back in Argentina, to teaching it at the Universi-
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ty of Buenos Aires and to translating U.S. authors into Spanish. I am proud

to say that I have modestly contributed to the diffusion of American litera-
ture and culture in my country, as a teacher and translator, and also as exec-
utive director of the Fulbright Commission in Buenos Aires for twenty-two
years. In all three capacities my job has been one and the same: trying to
make Argentines know and appreciate North Americans and their culture,
and vice versa.

ROLAND0 COSTA PICAZO

Argenrina

Macondo in Yoknapatawpha: The Exquisite

Privilege of Reading William Faulkner’s Novels
It is almost impossible to deny that contemporary Latin American novel-
ists owe a great deal to North American literature. For me, this is particu-
larly true every time I read those authors who have become part of what
several critics (especially North American) call the “New Latin American
Novel” or simply the Boom. Writers of this so-called “new novel,” like
Garcia MBrquez, Carlos Fuentes, or Vargas Llosa, have always expressed
the primary importance of certain novelists like John Dos Passos, William
Faulkner, or Ernest Hemingway. The works of these North American writ-
ers configure the foundations of the literary background of the aforemen-
tioned Latin American novelists. Because of this fact, most Latin Ameri-
cans have had the chance to eagerly read North American novelists that
only a privileged few could read thirty years ago. Discovering William
Faulkner’s novels was one of the most exciting experiences of reading that
 34 ANQ

I have ever had. Along with Marguerite Yourcenar and Lawrence Durrell,
Faulkner will be one of those ghosts with whom I will live the rest of my
life. His novels will haunt me whenever I write.
I do not know if my colleagues will agree with me. My generation (if we
can call it a generation) is that of the Postboom, which is characterized by
its reaction against the aesthetic bases of what was distinctive to the writ-
ers of the “new novel.” It means experimentation, the use of complex tech-
niques to express this sometimes incomprehensible reality, interior mono-
logues, multiple visions, inner time scales, etc. Now is the time for revising
those principles; the time for more “accessible” and story-oriented works:
the time, in other words, for turning back to our provincial colloquialism.
Of course, for those searchers of literary treasures, this is also the moment
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for new voices to arise with no debts to such immortal novelists as those of
the “new novel.” Then, it is not surprising that many of the new generation
of Latin American writers sometimes deny the gentleness and pleasure of
reading Faulkner because of its complexity and the fact that this “new
novel” has shown unquestionable signs of Faulkner’s influences.
I will always consider Faulkner one of the most important founders of
our contemporary narrative. It is impossible to consider the existence of
our greatest new novelists without his influence. Even the presence of the
movement poorly named the Postboom is inconceivable without Faulkner.
He taught us a way to see reality without denying the beauty of its tragedy.
And because his world focuses on the South at the beginning of this cen-
tury, he taught us important experiences about the American people, which
even today are impossible to deny. The essence of what happened to Joe
Christmas many years ago in the novel Light in August probably does not
differ too much from what happens today to many outsiders who still live
with the ghosts of racism and intolerance. There are substantial differences,
of course. Faulkner only wrote about the images of desperation and soli-
tude that his stories could embody in tormented characters like Joe Christ-
mas, Quentin Compson, or Charles Bon. These images were his own daz-
zling metaphors of the South during those troubled times.
Perhaps, it was in this way that I got in touch with a little piece of North
American reality for the very first time. Probably, most North Americans
discovered Garcia Mkquez’s magical realism in the same manner too, for
they both are experiences of reading that give us our first approach to an
unknown reality. However, although worthy, both experiences can be deceit-
ful. Faulkner’s literary reality and Garcia Mkquez’s magical reality do not
always reflect the real world, for we know that fiction does not refer to our
immediacy in terms of truth. The creation of fiction implies a complex
process in which the novelist never surrenders to reality as it has been given
to him. The fiction writer imagines and fills the gap between historic events
and what could have happened with his own experiences. Sometimes these
experiences refer to his environment directly; sometimes they do not. There
 Spring 1997, Vol. 10, No. 2 35

are also cases in which, as in poetry, the novelist’s subject is not a fact but a
metaphor. Both Faulkner and Garcia Mivquez work with these conceptions
of reality, and if one does not make the distinction between these ideas, one
will probably misunderstand the nature of their fiction.
Misinterpreting literary reality is the reason many readers of Garcia
M6rquez are disappointed when visiting Latin America (especially the
non-Caribbean countries); they do not find the incredible fairy tales found
in Garcia Mivquez’s literature. Not in Lima, nor in Bogota, nor in Buenos
Aires will one find individuals flying on carpets, gypsies vanishing into the
air after exhibiting inconceivable animals in their circuses, or women with
eight feet still paying the price for having betrayed their grandmother. That
is pure fantasy. That is not a real world but the splendorous metaphor of
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certain Latin American values and thoughts that Garcia Mivquez could put
into words when creating his fictions. Garcia M6rquez’s Macondo is like
the image of the South present in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. We know
what is real and what is not; we know that today’s South is not like that of
Faulkner’s nightmares, in the same way we know Latin America is not that
of Garcia Mivquez’s fantasies. But we also must admit that what they say
is true. Macondo is somewhat like Latin America in the same sense that
Yoknapatawpha is somewhat like the South. By reading Faulkner’s and
Garcia Marquez’s novels one can feel those places.
This was the experience I encountered when I went to the United States,
expecting to find the mythical South that Faulkner depicted in his novels.
Perhaps it was not the South of the Ku Klux Klan he wrote about in Light
in August, not even that of Thomas Sutpen’s resentments against Bon’s
blood in Absalom, Absalom! What I found was the essence of the South. If
I wanted tofeef that South, Faulkner made me feel it by reading his books.
Maybe Shreve McCannon, Quentin Compson’s inquisitive Harvard room-
mate who never visited the South, felt this after learning about Quentin’s
world, in which he was a tragic witness.
Like most Latin American readers, I will probably never forget Faulkner’s
novels. It seems to me almost impossible to recover from the impact of such
magnificent images of the human condition. Perhaps this is the reason myth
and tragedy, as depicted in his novels, will be present in my writing like spir-
its of someone who has never died and is still lurking in the darkness. It is
also unthinkable to ignore Faulkner’s exuberant prose, sometimes very sim-
ilar to the way Spanish speakers like to construct their sentences when writ-
ing. We Latin American writers cannot deny the heritage of Faulkner’s teach-
ing, for he not only showed us the mastery of telling stories, but also the
pleasure of reading them as if we were reading a beautiful poem. And this, I
think, is an exquisite privilege that very few writers offer.

E. ERNEST0 DELGADO
Peru