Sarah Ann Wells
University of California-Berkeley
Sanctuary, the Market, and Debt
In Ricardo Piglia’s novel Respiración artificial (1981), the narrator tells us of an
unsuccessful novel he has written:
I could not but be attracted by the Faulknerian air of the story […] So I wrote a
novel based on that story, using the tone of The Wild Palms, or rather, using the
tone Faulkner acquires when translated by Borges, by which means the tale
sounded more or less like a parody of Onetti […] Some copies of the novel are
still to be found on the remainder tables of the Corrientes Street bookstores, and
now the only thing I like about that book is its title […] and the effect it produced
on the man to whom it was unintentionally dedicated.i
I open with Piglia’s metafictional passage because it addresses, in a highly ironic mode,
the truism of Faulkner’s importance to Latin American letters. Piglia invokes here two
early readers of Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges and Juan Carlos Onetti. Borges, however, is
also the figure for translation-as-apocrypha (he famously claimed that his mother, not he,
had translated The Wild Palms), as well as for the ironic “debt” of letters in the
periphery.ii To invoke Borges is to place the question of influence and origin into doubt;
when Borges reads the center, he reads ‘incorrectly,’ with brilliant results.iii In turn, in an
interview Piglia has described a Faulkner who sounds very much like this Borges:
The place from which Faulkner read culture (the Frenchified and peripheral
context of the South) helped him to define a position: he was out of place, and he
saw everything from outside, and he had nothing to do with the literary life of the
[North] East. He could read in a different way (“like a peasant [campesino],” he
said, with a very sophisticated irony) because he was in another place.iv
The “sophisticated” and ironic provincial, reading from the margins, in an
“undisciplined” fashion: Piglia’s Faulkner is Borges. In Respiración artificial, however,
Piglia’s narrator fails in his attempt at mimicry --- perhaps because his lacked irony.
Instead, in a kind of intellectual overproduction, the failed mimicry confronts the narrator
at the remainder tables on Corrientes, where (presumably) bad copies of Faulkner go to
die. These two excerpts from Piglia underscore the relationship between author, market,
and reading public, through a strategic irony of the periphery, one that I wish to keep in
mind.
While Faulkner had been taken up by Latin America writers as early as the 1930s,
the importance of Faulkner was not consolidated until the Boom in Latin American
letters of the 1960s and 1970s, and the subsequent ‘Boom’ in scholarly production,
especially in the U.S., which emphasized The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!,
As I Lay Dying, and the short story “A Rose for Emily.”v The emphasis on the Boom
writers --- including Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa --is understandable, given that these self-consciously crafted themselves as disciples of
Faulkner. Their lengthy, universalizing novels, for example, clearly express the kind of
world-making strategies Faulkner developed with Yoknapatawpha.vi This is the group of
writers that Jean Franco has deemed “the generation of parricides” (225); the killers of
the past-father (including Iberian letters and the regional novel) in order to inaugurate a
new literature. For this foundational gesture to succeed, as both Angel Rama and Idelber
Avelar have explored, discourses surrounding the boom have effaced its literary
predecessors, by declaring Latin American letters until their arrival a “barren” zone,
“undeveloped.”
My project invites a move away from taking at face value the words of Fuentes
and others when they write about the importance of Faulkner, and implicitly of
themselves, as writers somehow free from the imperatives of literature in a “backwards”
region. For modernism in Latin America did not begin with the Boom ---- unless we
hold to a very narrow definition of modernism. In fact, the anxiety of the autonomous
artist and the relationship between this anxiety and an imperative to stretch and twist
traditional forms of representation, an anxiety that plagued earlier writers such as Ruben
Dario and Jose Marti, Borges and Faulkner, is at the center of modernist production, and
it occupies the center in a particular way for writers who come from “off” economies,
those peripheral regions and nations where modernization and modernity can only be
spoken about in the plural.
In such a context, Lino Novás Calvo, a Cuban novelist and journalist, rendered
Sanctuary into Spanish only three years after its 1931 appearance in the United States.
Virtually nothing has been written about this first “contact,” probably because of the
current noncanonical status of both Novás Calvo and of Sanctuary itself.vii Taking this
translation as a kind of encounter, I propose that Sanctuary self-consciously highlights
the anxious relationship between literature and the market, a particularly acute problem
for writers in economies for which the professionalization of the writer has been
problematic. I argue that this is a problem of form, not just of themes (if it is even
possible to separate the two); Sanctuary is not just “about” illicit economies and
monstrous modernities, it also invokes these problems within its very structures. There is
much to be said about the way the novel des this, but I will focus here on perhaps the
most notorious of Faulkner’s paratexts, the Preface to the 1932 edition.
Santuario was published in 1934 by the editorial Espasa-Calpe, as part of a
collection entitled “Hechos sociales,” comprised of left-leaning, social realist, nonliterary works. While this might seem an odd place to locate Faulkner, it is worth noting
that The Hamlet, too, was published in Buenos Aires by a Marxist publisher. In his
Prologue to the translation of Sanctuary, Antonio Marichalar tries to justify Faulkner’s
novel as a kind of “distorted” social realism, or documentary: not a mirror, he states, but
a “deformed vision,” “an oblique reality,” “stained/dyed with irony.” The gap between
this reading and the hegemonic one that circulated in the U.S. is impressive. In Creating
Faulkner’s Reputation, Lawrence Schwartz shows a tendency within U.S. literary
criticism to read Faulkner as dramatically opposed to the “social fictions” of the 1930s.
According to this interpretation, Faulkner was all dark and unredeemed perversion to the
‘responsible’ fictions of, say, Steinbeck. Yet these early readers of Faulkner in Latin
America suggest a different concern, which we could call a productively “off” reading of
Faulkner. In this reading, Faulkner’s fiction calls for an examination of the strange
modes opened up in spaces of uneven modernity.viii
Published in the Modern Library’s 1932 edition of Sanctuary, the Preface
establishes a persona that suggests the novel’s continual reworking and simultaneous
critique of the tropes and forms of popular culture, above all pulp literature. Several
critics have taken Faulkner at his word when he insists in the Preface that Sanctuary
was—and can only be----a “cheap idea.” David Minter, for example, uses the Preface as
a biographical font, but it seems more convincing to read it as a paratext that self-fashions
a particular role for the author, one that is created vis-à-vis his relationship to the novel
itself.ix We might say, in this respect, that Faulkner is very Borges; his paratexts often
ironically stage an author-figure who is not equivalent to the author-subject. I would
argue that Faulkner invokes the “cheap idea,” the pulp genre that houses it, and the
cultural circuits that produce it, in order to implicate himself and the reader in the fraught
economies the novel both describes and enters into.x
Constructing himself as a laborer, Faulkner links his literary production to the
monotonous repetition of coal-shoveling. Although he is ostensibly describing the
creation of As I Lay Dying---the novel, along with The Sound and the Fury, that is
allotted the “disinterested” position in contrast to the market-driven inception of
Sanctuary---these descriptions frame Sanctuary and not the earlier novel. The intervals of
coal-shoveling and type-writing become linked to the bang-‘em’-out production of the
cheap idea. The “cheap” in the “cheap idea” refers simultaneously to two orders: the
economic and the symbolic. As such, cheap functions paradoxically: to be cheap is to
become rich, which is why the industry of the cinema, cited throughout the novel, is
simultaneously cheap and rich.xi On one hand, cheap invokes Faulkner’s desire to make
money: it culls images of the circulation of cheaply-printed texts that will hopefully (as
he says in the last line of the Preface), line his pockets. Simultaneously, cheap functions
as a self-criticism according to the logic of symbolic capital.
In the Preface the short, repetitive sentences suggest something of the novel’s
own formal qualities; as though the novel had inaugurated the author (rather than the
other way around), the Faulkner who emerges is a series of synecdoches: the gut and the
wallet. The “Good God, I cant publish this. We’d both be in jail,” ostensibly the
publisher’s initial response to Sanctuary, conjures up immediately the novel’s own
interest in underground economies. Inversely, the novel’s particular forms---its short
chapters (and attention span), its long pauses and abrupt returns to various narrative
threads, its strange bursts of comic relief in the form of stock, grotesque characters--evoke the stop-and-start of the night laborer. A narrative of drive and punishment
inscribed in the Preface also yokes it to the novel. The ‘hard-gutted’ young Faulkner
morphs into the “soft” one who is willing to sell to make money. He has “written [his]
guts into The Sound and the Fury,” which is identified with the ‘fitness’ of an earlier
period where he wrote without any thought of economic transactions. When the
publisher initially refused the manuscript as too sensational, Faulkner presents himself as
split.xii “So I told Faulkner, ‘You’re damned. You’ll have to work now and then for the
rest of your life.’” The antagonism towards the market and the attraction to it is here
ironically invoked: one Faulkner desires money, the other wants to distance himself. If
we compare this personae to that of the Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, we see
something of the bold contours of Faulkner’s claim. The South as spiritual vanguard, the
South as a space of leisure in contrast to the hyper-capitalism of the North, reads as a
fantasy in light of Faulkner’s laborer-writer, struggling to produce “the most horrific tale
I could imagine,” “What a person in Mississippi would believe to be the current trends.”
In the Preface Sanctuary is framed as something ephemeral, non-durable,
unessential: “I think I had forgotten about Sanctuary, just as you might forget about
anything made for an immediate purpose.” The “immediacy” constructing Sanctuary and
its author-personae is central, because the rush and pull of the market and the traffic in
illicit, nondurable ‘goods’ (alcohol and prostitution) is precisely what the novel grapples
with. Contemporary anti-kitsch and high modernist arguments both in the Europe and in
the U.S. feared this reproducibility, unrooted.xiii Such arguments failed to take into
account, as Fredric Jameson will later, the mutually determining status of mass culture
and modernism, something Faulkner is already hinting at. Thus, to be too new, too novel,
impermanent, all surface is a fear the novel points to both within and outside of its pages.
While Faulkner foregrounds labor in the coal-shoveling allusions, he
simultaneously stresses it in his narrative of the manuscript’s revision. “I had to pay for
the privilege of rewriting it,” he writes ironically. In contrast to such assertions of
Sanctuary’s rapid-fire temporality, however, Noel Polk has noted that the manuscript is
one of the most intensely edited of any of Faulkner’s works (294).xiv The revised version
is “economic and precise” (Polk 301-2; 304); Faulkner’s revision heightens, rather than
diminishes, the novel’s explicit relationship to the market, to consumption. Yet, while in
much of the novel, as in the Preface, short, cropped sentences reel off information, the
reader also must encounter traces of the original manuscript in the explicitly modernist
voice of Horace.xv As a consequence of their scarcity, these kinds of passages jut out
more, lending the text its peculiar, uneven texture. This texture, I would argue, is a
staging of the problems of modernities in the multiple. Writing for the market, a
remainder (Horace) persists, but it is Horace who seems ‘out of place,’ and Sanctuary’s
Preface hints at why.
The Preface registers an important anxiety: to write for the market is very
different than to merely be a successful writer.xvi The text is a tactile object that
circulates in spaces that both determine it and are determined by it, which is another way
of saying that the ephemerality of literature written for the market makes it historical in
spite of itself, never ‘timeless.’xvii In this sense, the Preface anticipates (after the fact)
the formal qualities of novel itself: through the use of chapter breaks to simultaneously
accumulate and frustrate the reader, its repetitive citation and saturation of clichés of the
underworld, its self-conscious borrowing from the texts of popular culture in order to
exhaust them.xviii In so doing, it is able to carve out a narrow space for itself that is neither
isolated from nor respectful of the market: it would seem to acknowledge the market as a
structuring and constitutive power but not as a limiting principle. Self-consciously, it
takes what it has been handed in the ways of tools in order to show their power but their
ultimately threadbare premises.xix
In her provocative article on Go Down, Moses Susan Willis has argued that
Faulkner’s ‘other’ “can only be the financial and industrial interests located in the
Northern metropolis” (85), noting that the kinds of transitions Faulkner grappled with in
his novels suggested an attention to what was taking place in the South during the time of
their inception and publication: the shift from periphery to semi-periphery, from producer
of primary products to producer of labor for the industrialized North (94-5). In this
sense, we could argue that the setting of Sanctuary converges with the context of its
production: it is, from with in and without, a struggle of how to articulate these changes
in literary language.xx
In the 1930s, Latin American intellectuals were also prompting a shift in the way
in which dependency was thought in their regions. This process was articulated through
different modes in different national and regional contexts, a difference that I have not
had sufficiently explored here; Novas Calvo’s Cuba, for example, a near-colony of the
U.S.; Borges’ Argentina, a competitor in the exporting of primary products.
Nevertheless, we might say that within Latin American intellectual production the issue
was not the transition from periphery to semi-periphery, but rather the emergence of a
discourse of “debt” or “lack” presupposed in the deviation from the center.xxi This stance
dovetailed, not coincidentally, with the pre-history of programs such as import
substitution, emphasizing the degree to which Latin America had been the producer of
primary products for the first world. It is at this point that Borges wrote his first reviews
of Faulkner’s novels, recognizing the Southern author as a fellow “criollo”; at this point
Novás Calvo renders Faulkner’s defamiliarizing prose to an even more “off” Spanish; at
this point novelists, including the Argentine Roberto Arlt and the Brazilian Graciliano
Ramos are writing modernist novels where the “Third World” author encounters the
“devaluation” of his own prose within the peripheral economies --- without having read
Faulkner. Perhaps it is here, then, where the field of Faulkner in Latin America can find
a new point of entry, one where influence matters principally in its ironic form, and
where authors negotiate with changing reading publics and markets before the possibility,
or impossibility, of literature becoming, as in Piglia’s novel, a “remainder.”
Bibliography
Avelar, Idelber. “Oedipus in Post-auratic Times: Modernization and Mourning in the
Spanish
American Boom.” The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the
Task of Mourning. Duke University Press: Durham, 1999. 22-38.
Bauer, Arnold J. Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture. Cambridge
University Press: New York, 2001.
Bloom, Clive. Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory. St. Martin’s Press: New
York, 1996.
Cándido, Antonio. “Literature and Underdevelopment.” The Latin American Cultural
Studies Reader. Duke University Press: Durham, 2004. 35-57.
Chapman, Arnold. The Spanish American Reception of United States Fiction 1920-1940.
University of California Press: Berkeley, 1966.
Cohn, Deborah. “’He was one of us’: The Reception of William Faulkner and the U.S.
South by Latin American Authors.” Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 34, No.
2, 1997. 149-169.
Delaney, Paul. Literature, Money and the Market. Palgrave: New York 2002.
Eagleton, Terry. “Capitalism, modernism and postmodernism.” In Modern Criticism
and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. Harlow, U.K.” 2000.
Faulkner, William. Sanctuary. Vintage: New York 1958.
---------Sanctuary: The Original Text. Ed. Noel Polk. Random House: New York, 1981.
Fayen, Tanya. In Search of the Latin American Faulkner. University Press of America:
Lanham, 1995.
Franco, Jean. The Modern Culture of Latin America: Society and the Artist. Pall Mall
Press: London, 1967.
Gutiérrez, Miguel. Faulkner en la novela latinoamericana. Editorial San Marcos: Lima,
1999.
Howe, Irving. William Faulkner: A Critical Study. 3rd edition, University of Chicago
Press: Chicago, 1975.
Irby, James East. “La influencia de William Faulkner en cuatro narradores hispano
americanos.” Dissertation, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico: Mexico,
D.F., 1956.
Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text 1 (1979). 130148.
Langford, Gerald. Faulkner’s Revision of Sanctuary: A Collation of the Unrevised
Galleys and the Published Book. University of Texas Press: Austin, 1972.
McCracken, Scott. Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction. Manchester University Press:
Manchester, 1988.
Minter, David. William Faulkner: His Life and His Work. Johns Hopkins University
Press: Baltimore, 1997.
Nolan, William F. The Black Mask Boys: Masters in the Hard-Boiled School of
Detective Fiction. William Morrow and Co.: New York, 1985.
O’Brien, Geoffrey. Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir. Da
Capo Press: New York, 1997.
Parker, Robert Dale. “Sanctuary and Bad Taste.” Études Faulknériennes I. Sanctuary.
Ed. Michel Gresset. Press Universitaries de Rennes, 1996.
Piglia, Ricardo. “Sobre Faulkner.” Crítica y ficción. Editorial Planeta: Buenos Aires,
2000. 133-142.
-------Artificial Respiration. Trans. Daniel Balderston. Duke University Press: Durham,
1994.
Rama, Angel. “El ‘Boom’ en perspectiva.” Más allá del boom. Literatura y mercado.
Marcha Editores: México, 1981. 51-110.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and
Recovery. Metropolitan Books: New York, 2003.
Schwartz, Lawrence. Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: the Politics of Modern Literary
Criticism. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1988.
Sundquist, Eric J. “Sanctuary: An American Gothic.” Faulkner: the House Divided.
Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1985. 44-60.
Willis, Susan. “Aesthetics of the Rural Slum: Contradictions and Dependency in ‘The
Bear.’” Social Text 1 (1979). 82-103.
Woodward, C. Vann. The Burden of Southern History. Vintage Books: New York,
1960.
Cf. Daniel Balderston’s translation, 13-14.
Cf Beatriz Sarlo, Borges: A Writer on the Edge.
iii Argentine Domingo F. Sarmiento’s misquoting of Fortoul in Facundo (as
famously analyzed by Piglia in his 1980 article in the journal Punto de vista),
Brazilian Oswald de Andrade’s modernist cannibal manifesto, and Puerto Rican
Coco Fusco’s contemporary performance art come immediately to mind, but this
stance has a history that dates back to the conquest, albeit with vastly
different intonations and effects depending on artist, context, etc.
iv “Sobre Faulkner,” 135 my emphasis.
v See, for example, Mark Frisch, William Faulkner: su influencia en la
literatura latinoamericana; also Deborah Cohn, “’He was one of us’: The
Reception of William Faulkner and the U.S. South by Latin American Authors.”
The first study on the importance of Faulkner in Latin America was James Irby’s
1956 dissertation, “La influencia de William Faulkner en cuatro narradores
hispano americanos.”
vi Several critics consider 1973, the year of Pinochet’s coup to overthrow the
leadership of the democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende,
to constitute the end of the Boom.
vii This was not always so, particularly in the case of Faulkner’s novel, which
actually was quite successful in financial terms. Early paperback versions of
his novels attempt to entice the reader with the phrase “By the author of
Sanctuary”---a marketing strategy one would be hard-pressed to find today. “A
reconstruction of accessibility would suggest that Sanctuary came to the
attention of a Spanish publishing house due to the attention it received in
U.S. critical reviews. The novel’s sensationalistic aspects, borrowed from
popular literature, guaranteed its sales and name recognition for Faulkner.
More importantly, its accessible sensationalism served to bring Faulkner’s
technical innovations into the critics’ studies. It forced a retrospective
analysis of the works that had preceded it: The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay
Dying” (Fayen 86)
viii .
For example, Marichalar defends potential critiques of Novás Calvo’s
translation of Sanctuary by stating that he “took care to conserve the ‘badly
written’” aspects of the original text In a sense, Marichalar’s own awkward and
interesting mixing of gothic imagery of shadows, the violence of hardboiled
fiction, and the naturalist topos of the organic body going to pieces
unintentionally reflects Faulkner’s own heady soup of genres/discourses, his
novel’s uneven textures, as I explore below.
ix CF, e.g., Minter 111.
x “Sanctuary’s bad taste is calculated, a kind of aesthetic slumming...More
broadly, Faulkner eagerly shares and helps produce his readers’ appetite for
the pleasures of bad taste, for the arch good taste of calculated bad taste,”
writes Robert Dale Parker (68)
xi A similar tension embodies the world popular, as in popular fiction--Sanctuary being the novel that had made Faulkner the most revenue until the
1950 awarding of the Nobel Prize. In Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction, Scott
McCracken notes the valence of the word, linked to texts (fiction and
periodicals) beginning in the twentieth century: “Yet the term has always been
contested, signifying on the one hand the authentic voice of the people and on
the other their ignorance, vulgarity and susceptibility to manipulation. This
conflict reflects not just two different versions of the same thing, but the
fact that in the mass societies of modernity to be popular is also to be
powerful and that power is fought for by political and economic interest
groups. Popular fiction, like other forms of popular culture, is subject to
that contest” (20).
xii It is in the modernist period where the anxieties about art and the market
come to be forcefully articulated by writers: “A cordon sanitarie around
i
ii
serious fiction effectively turned an aesthetic question into a moral one: the
question of the health of fiction” (Bloom 83). Citing Pound’s attempt “to
establish a modernist myth of economic innocence” (154), Paul Delaney has
examined now modernist culture fashioned an unlikely alliance with the market,
despite its anxious attempts to separate itself from this sphere, through its
dependence on the patronage of those who occupied what he calls rentier
culture: “Exclusiveness does not conflict with commodification; it may even be
the highest form of it” (149).
xiii “Now, ‘now’ lasted forever and history was at an end,” says Clive Bloom in
his analysis of pulp fiction, which came into its own at the same time (42).
xiv In his revisions, Faulkner made the newer version less focused on Horace’s
interiority, played up Popeye’s role, and ordered the narrative
chronologically, omitting the original text’s anachronisms. According to
Gerald Langford, Millgate was the first critic to suggest that the narrative
created in the 1932 Preface to explain the origin and production of Sanctuary
was not altogether accurate (5). Millgate noted that, while the Preface would
lead us to believe that Faulkner had excised more sensationalistic, “cheap”
moments, the galleys reveal that no such censuring occurred.
xv For example, “It was as though femininity were a current running through a
wire along which a certain number of identical bulbs were hung” (116). There
are several other such modernist ruptures in the novel.
xvi “Pulp is the child of capitalism and is tied to the appearance of the masses
and the urban...it is the embodiment of capitalism aestheticized, consumerized
and internalized” (Bloom 14, author’s emphasis).
xvii O’Brien dates the beginning of the hardboiled genre to 1922, with the
appearance of Hammett’s first story in Black Mask (62). In Faulkner’s time,
pulp magazines were generally phased out to make way for pulp novels (Nolan
31). Black Mask was founded by H.L. Mencken as a money-making venture to
bankroll his more serious modernist journal, The Smart Set (Nolan, 19-20). We
recognize the novel not only because of its invocation of forms familiar to its
social world (such as the Prohibition narrative), but also because of its
prescience: it anticipates the pulp novel and noir. (Roman Polanski’s
Chinatown, for example, evokes it in several ways.)
xviii This constant raising of interest (narrative as well as visual) only to
rechannel it to a much murkier space constitutes a pattern for the novel as a
whole, reflected in its constant “paroxysms” of jerky bodies and alcoholic
excess.
xix This critique is what would distinguish Sanctuary from later, post-modern
appeals to popular culture and the link between art and commodity in late
capitalism (as explored by Jameson and Eagleton. Cf Fredric Jameson,
“Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism; Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, modernism, postmodernism.”
Faulkner’s novel does not celebrate the surface as in Jameson’s definition of
postmodern art, but rather, as I suggest, struggles with a self-conscious
internalization of mass culture.
xx And, in negotiating this terrain, Sanctuary, especially in its Preface --and as “The Bear” will later on --- repeatedly circles around money as an
insufficient compensation that points out the peripheral status of its social
world. Willis writes, “For the semiperiphery, real authority can never be
achieved; it necessarily resides elsewhere. In its absence, money fills the
gap” (97).
xxi CF Antonio Candido’s classic essay, “Literature and Underdevelopment” (1969).