[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
character, a view mostly based on the fact, according to Hee Kang, that
unlike her mother, Eula, she does not live up to the patriarchal femi-
nine ideal of sacrifice and silence. 37 Thus, Linda represents for Hee Kang
the new, radical woman who somehow embodies Faulkner s own chang-
ing sense of history and, with it, the need to write beyond the disempow-
ered and marginalized women seen so abundantly in his earlier work. 38
And yet, critics seem to have paid only marginal attention to Linda s in-
volvement in the Spanish Civil War, which is the cause of her deafness, a
physical disability that has been interpreted variously, but always in lo-
cal terms, that is, within the universe of Yoknapatawpha and its conflicts.
I can t but wonder why Faulkner decided to have her involved in the frat-
ricidal conflict in Spain, and what Linda s deafness may mean in that light.
Inevitably, one is again reminded of Ernest Hemingway, who served, like
Linda, as an ambulance driver and sustained severe physical injuries in
WWI. Faulkner began The Mansion in 1956 and interrupted work on the
book early in 1957 to become writer in residence at the University of Vir-
ginia. When he was asked there by a student whether he thought Heming-
way s For Whom the Bell Tolls was a didactic novel, Faulkner replied, in
what no doubt constitutes an appraisal of the novel as much as a valuable
hint at his own work in progress: Every writer is in a way writing one
story. . . . there is one thing in man s condition that seems to him the most
moving, the most tragic, and this time Hemingway was writing the story
which still seemed to him moving and tragic, which all writers have never
told well enough to please him. This one was brought about into urgency
by the condition of Spain at that time. . . . He was not really writing pri-
marily about the Spanish Civil War, but he was writing about the human
condition which to him was moving and tragic in terms of that war. 39
Faulkner knew well Hemingway s vital literary testimony of the par-
ticipation of American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. Reading The
Mansion alongside For Whom the Bell Tolls is an interesting exercise pos-
tulated by the text itself, since it mentions Ernest Hemingway at least
twice: in the first case, he is alluded to by Charles Mallison, who wishes to
112 manuel broncano
see if the Paris of Hemingway and the Paris of Scott Fitzgerald . . . had
vanished completely or not ;40 in the second case, he is invoked by Linda
Snopes, in one of the rare occasions when she refers to the war in Spain
and to the people who fought in it, the people like Kohl. She told about
Ernest Hemingway and Malraux, and about a Russian, a poet that was go-
ing to be better than Pushkin only he got himself killed. 41 For Whom the
Bell Tolls provides us with the information about the reality of the war that
is missing in The Mansion. Faulkner s novel is a reenactment of his lifelong
conversation with Hemingway that reveals his perception of literature as
a dialogic discourse. Faulkner s Barton Kohl evokes Hemingway s Robert
Jordan quite vividly: one an instructor of Spanish in Montana, the other a
Jewish sculptor in Greenwich Village, both give up their lives in pursuit of
their ideals, while they attempt to prevent the advance of fascism in Eu-
rope. The reader is invited to reimagine Barton s and Linda s war experi-
ence through Hemingway s Robert Jordan and the group of Republican
partisans that he joins behind the fascist lines in order to bomb a strate-
gic bridge. Despite his absence from the narrative we only get to know
him through allusions Barton Kohl acquires a rich symbolic dimension.
The fact that he is a Jew fighting against Spanish fascism endows him with
a historical significance that goes back to that Spain of the Renaissance, a
place where racial intolerance dictated the expulsion of the Jewish people
from what had been their homeland for many centuries, probably the first
instance of ethnic purging in modern Europe. It seems as if Barton Kohl
was engaged in an immemorial battle against a time-old enemy, whose
latest representative was Franco, in a heroic but futile attempt to make
amends with history.
7.
It is little wonder, then, that Faulkner has found in Spain an eager reader-
ship, especially among writers who were in need of new models to ac-
count for the reality of contemporary Spain beyond the narrow confines
of social realism. Maria-Helena Bravo has thoroughly documented Faulk-
ner s Spanish reception, in a seminal study that proves beyond doubt the
profound impact exerted by the Southern author on Spanish literature.42
Faulkner was known and appreciated in Spain already in the 1930s, espe-
cially after the translation of Sanctuary in 1934 by Lino Novás Calvo. Even
though it may not have been as enthusiastic as in France, the reception
of Faulkner in Spain was surprisingly early and gave way to a number of
critical appraisals that match the French response in their intuition of the
radical innovation that his literature represents. The Spain that emerged
in the aftermath of the Civil War, however, had been depleted of its best
Reading Faulkner in Spain, Reading Spain in Faulkner 113
minds, either through exile or death, and those intellectuals and artists
who remained were forced to pledge allegiance to the fascist regime. In
those bleak years of the early nineteen forties, Faulkner was the subject
of censorship, although for religious rather than political reasons, accord-
ing to the Spanish writer Pedro Lorenzo.43 Most of Faulkner s novels en-
tered Spain through Argentinean translations, at a time when Argentina
was one of the few countries that kept commercial and diplomatic rela-
tions with the Spanish government. Such may have been in fact the origin
of the translation of As I Lay Dying44 that Juan Benet found by chance in
the bookstore with which I opened my essay. Gradually, a young genera-
tion of writers discovered Faulkner and learned from him new techniques
to cope with a country torn apart by war and shunned by the international
scene, as well as a new language whose opaque indeterminacy no doubt
helped to evade the scrutinizing yet rather unsophisticated gaze of offi-
cial censorship. Among them, Juan Benet stands out as probably the most
Faulknerian of all, and his Return to Región,45 in the superb translation
by Gregory Rabassa, is an excellent initiation for those readers and schol-
ars interested in the ways Spanish writers have reinterpreted the South-
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]