Faulkner’s “modernism” has often been the subject of spirited discussion about the author’s intrusion on, or complicity with, the monumental literature of the twentieth century. To think of Faulkner within the terms of “postmodernism,” then, necessarily involves an attempt to define the relation of modernism to postmodernism. This relation can only be seen coming in the wake of Faulkner’s fiction, as a kind of critical aftermath that allows us to see it as differentiated from the contexts in which it was written and by which it is constrained. In essence, discussing Faulkner in postmodernist terms means accepting the assumption that what makes his fiction powerful and timely is its capacity to resist, disrupt, or exceed both Modernism (with a capital “M”) and Faulkner’s own modernism - his intended response to the perceived literary, cultural, and historical contexts of his writing. Within the discussion of Faulkner and postmodernism, Faulkner stands not as the "author" or progenitor of texts but, to employ the famous metaphor articulated by Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!, as the unseen drop that falls into a pool of water, giving rise to a series of ripples that move outward to another connected pool: "let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space" (210).

state organization in latin america since 1930

The literature potentially relevant to this topic is vast, but sprawling and unmanageable. Oscar Oszlak ’The Historical Formation of the State in Latin America: some theoretical and methodological guidelines for its study’, Latin American Research Review 16, 2(1981): 3—32 is a useful start, but deals only with the nineteenth century, as does his monograph La Formación del Estado Argentino (Buenos Aires, 1990). The same is true of Jose Murilo de Carvalho, ’Political Elites and State-building: the case of nineteenthcentury Brazil", Comparative Studies in Society and History 24 (1982): 378—99 and Fernando Uricoechea, The Patrimonial Foundations of the Brazilian Bureaucratic State (Berkeley, Cal., 1980). The main arguments of Claudio Veliz, The Centralist Tradition of Latin America (Princeton, N.J., 1980) remain unpersuasive. Tulio Halperin-Donghi, The Aftermath of Revolution in Latin America (New York, 1973) is a useful antidote. See also Horst Pietschmann, El Estado y su Evolucion al Principio de la Colonizacion Espanola de America (Mexico, D.F., 1989); A. Annino et al., America Latina: dallo stato coloniale allo stato nazione (1750-1940), 2 vols., (Milan, 1987); Oscar Oszlak, Ensayos sobre la Formacidn Histdrica del Estado en America Latina (San Jose, Costa Rica, 1981); and Arnaldo Cordova ’Los Origines del Estado en America Latina’ Cuaderno 32, Facultad de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales, UNAM, Mexico, D.F., 1977. For paired comparisons of nineteenth-century Latin American state-building see Helgio Trindade, ’A Construc.ao do Estado Nacional na Argentina e no Brasil (1810—1900): esbogo de uma analise comparativa’, Dados 28, 1 (1985); and Fernando Uricoechea, ’Formaçāo e Expansao do Estado Burocrático — Patrimonial na Colombia e no Brasil’, Estudos CEBRAP, 21 (1977).

An important feature of Latin American economic development historically has been the interaction between external and domestic economic structures. Links between the Latin American economies and the world markets increased in importance during the international trade boom towards the end of the nineteenth century when a production structure based on raw materials for export (and imports of manufactures) was consolidated. After the end of the Second World War, the region's development efforts were directed to transforming the structure of production and reducing external dependence. Import substitution industrialization (ISI) produced some positive results. The regional economy expanded rapidly. From 1950 to 1981 gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an average annual rate of 5.3 per cent. However, while average income per capita increased at an annual rate of 2.6 per cent, vast inequalities in the distribution of the benefits of economic growth persisted throughout the region – between social groups, between urban and rural areas, between regions within countries and between countries. At the same time, new forms of dependency on the international economy emerged. ISI and the diversification of consumption patterns in the 1950s and 1960s gave rise to the adoption of increasingly complex imported technologies, capital intensive as well as highly dependent upon imported inputs. Also, the 1960s saw a significant inflow of direct foreign investment concentrated in the production of manufactured import substitutes, benefiting from high levels of effective protection. Given the sizeable import content of these industries and high profit rates, the net savings of foreign currency were sometimes negligible or even negative.

The period from the 1930s to the 1980s was marked by far-reaching changes in agrarian structures throughout Latin America. Indeed, it could be argued that the magnitude of change was greater during this half century than in the preceding four centuries. Agricultural production increased dramatically but, by 1990, in almost all Latin American countries, agriculture had become a less important contributor to the gross national product than industry. The social and political significance of agriculture altered sharply. In the 1930s most people in Latin America made their living from the land. Land ownership was still the key to political and economic power at the regional and national level. Many presidents and key political figures were members of the landed elite. By the 1980s those working directly in agriculture were only a quarter of the total labour force. Urban interests and occupations based on industry and services (which included a wide range of financial and administrative services) had become politically dominant.

Crucial changes in the process of agricultural production accompanied this shift in the economic, political and social significance of agriculture and landholding. In the 1930s agricultural production, though usually market-orientated, was largely decentralized. Cropping practices and the organization of agricultural inputs varied from region to region, depending upon ecology, the availability of labour and the nature of the market. This had given rise to a diversity of agrarian structures that generated distinctive regional identities. By the early 1980s agricultural production had become increasingly centralized through the state or large-scale agribusinesses, usually linked to international marketing and financial institutions.

WASHINTON IRVING

In The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819) Washington Irving established for decades the norms defining American local narratives, that is, small-scale pieces with regional subject matter. The basic modes of writing in Irving's work, as in the English periodicals of his time and in American periodicals for decades, were the sketch and the tale. The sketch, as its name suggests, is like a picture. Nothing happens in the sketch, except for the verbal action of displaying to the reader something that the narrating voice considers of interest. In the tale something does happen, often something rather remarkable. The sketch highlights the first-person narrative, as of the “Crayon” figure; the tale, in contrast, presents a third-person narration or else gives the narrative to another voice than that of the sponsoring narrator. Irving's voice echoed British tradition in periodical writing, and much of his subject matter resembled the colorful regionalism in Walter Scott's full-length romances. A sketch was, in effect, a descriptive chapter torn from its narrative context. By the same process, during the 1830s and 1840s, while George Bancroft and James Fenimore Cooper continued their writing, national narrative was being fragmented into local scenes by periodical writers following Irving.

Irving's most famous tales from The Sketch Book display a problematic relation between local and national. “Rip Van Winkle” notoriously passes over the founding American national events during Rip's protracted slumber, and the tale itself is attributed to Diedrich Knickerbocker, Irving's fictional antiquarian historian of Dutch New York.

NATIONAL NARRATIVE IN 1851

The Compromise of 1850 had displaced politics and opened a possibility for the literary narratives of Hawthorne and Melville, but in the years before the Civil War, American national narrative still flourished. Volumes 4 through 7 of Bancroft's History of the United States appeared from 1852 through 1860, and in 1851 Moby-Dick made far less of an impact than did two works that had adapted national narrative to establish careers for their authors which would outshine Melville's through the rest of the century: Harriet Beecher Stowe began serial publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the Washington abolitionist journal the National Era, and Francis Parkman published The History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac. Like Moby-Dick, both these works are on a large scale. They range broadly over the geography of North America, and they encompass a wide range of human experience, including shocking extremities of horror. Like Moby-Dick, too, they present problems that arise from the multiracial character of the United States, from its colonial past into the present. Their commitment to national narrative, as opposed to the subordination of national to literary narrative in Moby-Dick, may be gauged most readily through their narrative technique. They establish no fictional intermediary like Ishmael; rather, they encourage readers to identify the narrating presence with the author, who in each case holds a clear ideological position on issues of major national consequence.

In the early months of 1837 the Transcendentalists began to think of themselves as something more than a group of young clergy eager to escape the circumspection of traditional Unitarian associations for regions of freer speech. The manifestos of 1836 had given the writers a collective visibility. Now, as conservatives began writing angry reviews and warning against the errors of the “new school” of philosophy and religion, the members of Hedge's Club suddenly found themselves elevated to the dignity of rebels.

Bronson Alcott was the most savagely assaulted, but by the end of January Emerson too found himself the target of conservative scorn. In the January 1837 issue of the Christian Examiner a young Harvard tutor named Francis Bowen made a review of Nature the occasion for an attack upon the arrogance and obscurantism of the whole Transcendentalist school. As a reviewer of Nature itself Bowen was perceptive; he noticed that Emerson's love of Saxonisms and deliberate bathos were a kind of protest against “forced dignity and unnatural elevation,” and he declared himself bewildered by the sudden change of direction in the second half of the book, when Emerson suddenly aims a “back blow” at the universe he was teaching us to admire and love.

Yet Bowen's praise for the “beautiful writing and sound philosophy” he found in the book quickly changed to blame when he considered a doctrine in Nature that he found dangerous: its worship of intuition as the sole trustworthy guide in matters of the spirit. Bowen agrees that mathematical axioms must be grasped intúitively, but he cannot leap with Emerson to the conclusion that intuition can grasp “the most abstruse and elevated propositions respecting the being and destiny of man.”

What do we do and why when we think Faulkner? This is the personal (but never just personal) question I asked all of the contributors to ponder as they thought about their essays for this Companion. In responding to it, they have aligned their work, roughly, within one of two groups: “the texts in the world” or “the world in the texts.” The five essays that make up Part I explicitly press beyond the art of Faulkner’s texts in order to comment on the larger “world” those texts inhabit, envisaged here as contextual social activities and processes within which Faulkner’s practice may reveal its broader cultural dimensions. These essays sketch out a range of contexts - modernism, postmodernism, the “culture industry,”a canon of twentieth-century European novelists, the noncanonical practice of Latin American fiction of the same period - that permit us to consider Faulkner’s comparative identity. To put the matter differently, these first essays identify several of the current “theaters”in which Faulkner’s texts are most interestingly performed.

The three essays that constitute Part II operate otherwise, probing more deeply into the textual behavior of three of Faulkner’s canonical masterpieces -The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! These essays attend in detail to a discrete text’s formal moves, but they go beyond New Critical procedures in their insistent focus on "the world in the texts," especially the larger social problematics of race, gender, and subject formation. A fourth Faulknerian text - Go Down, Moses - receives sustained attention as well, in the essays of Patrick O'Donnell and Warwick Wadlington.

The upheaval in the world economic and political order associated with the 1929 Depression inaugurated an intensely turbulent period in the politics of Latin America in which modern armies—that is to say, armies organized and equipped in imitation of the most prestigious European models and staffed by professional career officers—made their irreversible appearance on the political scene. Between February and December 1930, the military were involved in the overthrow of governments in no fewer than six, widely differing Latin American nations—Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Peru and Guatemala. The same year also saw four unsuccessful attempts to seize power by force in other Latin American countries. Over the following two years, Ecuador and El Salvador in 1931, and Chile in 1932, joined the list of countries in which military-provoked political shifts and unscheduled changes of the executive had taken place.

The diversity of situations—indeed, the heterogeneity of Latin American societies and political systems—does not, however permit easy generalizations. A continent-wide approach must, in the logic of the comparative method itself, be corrected by appropriate attention to nuances, reservations and exceptions. Tendencies seemingly at work in most countries pass others by, and even where they are present may lead to different, even contradictory results. Thus Venezuela, under the iron hand of the ‘patriarch’ Juan Vicente Gómez, remained untouched by the political crisis which shook the continent, and seems to have entered the twentieth century only on the dictator’s death in 1935. In neighbouring Colombia, institutional stability also survived and was consolidated under Liberal hegemony, due in part to the so-called revolution en marcha (1934–8), a broad reformist programme within a framework of liberal democracy in which the military played no role.

INTRODUCTION

Political mobilization and social violence have been recurrent phenomena in rural Latin America in the twentieth century. The enormous diversity in these phenomena represents a major challenge for anyone attempting to analyse them from a single perspective or with the purpose of drawing generalizations. However, it is possible to find a common framework for analysis if we accept that for all its heterogeneity rural unrest has taken place in the context of several great, inter-related processes of societal transformation, an essential ingredient of which has been conflict among contending social actors.

First, the hacienda (or latifundio) system and the peasant community ceased to be the dominant organizing forms of agricultural production. The hacienda owners — in so far as they survived as a class — largely lost their political hegemony. At the local level, this meant that they lost much of their capacity to exert social and political pressure (‘extra-economic coercion’) over peasants and workers. The persisting peasantries were no longer ‘tied to the land’. They gained in influence because of their alliances with the new political elites; but their importance steadily decreased vis-à-vis that of the emerging middle classes and the urban and rural proletariat.

Second, the capitalization of agriculture, which was a result of the increasing integration of the countryside with large urban markets and international channels of distribution, took a wide variety of forms, resulting in the emergence of new types of large and medium-sized farms and ranches but also in the transformation of the traditional family (peasant) unit.

From Cleanth Brooks, the champion of the New Criticism, to the present New Historians, Faulkner’s Southernness has been a permanent and central concern of American criticism. Much has been written too about Joyce’s Irishness, but today it is certainly no longer a priority for Joyceans, and to dwell at length on Proust’s Frenchness would strike most Proustians as utterly incongruous. Admittedly, Faulkner’s fiction is more patently grounded in a specific geographic area and a specific historical experience than that of any of his contemporaries, yet some thought should perhaps be given to the troubling fact that, year after year, his novels are read with excitement by thousands of people all over the world, most of whom will never know another South than his - a world within words.

Faulkner was American and Southern, through and through; his literary ancestry can easily be traced back to Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Sherwood Anderson; his indebtedness to the popular traditions of Southern oratory and Southwestern humor has been established beyond dispute. Like all major American novelists, however, Faulkner is nonetheless a novelist of European descent. His many fathers include Cervantes, Scott, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Conrad, Mann, Joyce, and Proust, to mention only the novelists. Faulkner’s intertext is just as thick as that of any of his peers, and just as heedless of national and regional boundaries

The simplest way of writing the history of the Left in Latin America would be to restrict analysis to Communist and Socialist parties. These parties shared common ideological assumptions drawn from Marxism, and common political practices influenced by Leninism. If there was broad agreement about ends, however, the parties of the orthodox Marxist Left profoundly disagreed about means. This led to conflict and division. Between, and indeed within, the parties of the Left there was fierce, and often unresolved, debate over how power was to be attained, the extent to which liberal democratic rights should be respected, and the way that economy, society and the political system should be organized. In other words, there neither was, nor is, one united Left. Relations between the many groups, parties and movements that have claimed to be the true Left have frequently been hostile, even violently so. Competition between them has sometimes been more intense than with the parties of the Right. If the story of the Left is in part a story of heroic and patient struggle against terrible odds, it is also in part a story of sectarianism and personal rivalries, and of petty mindedness. It is nevertheless a story central to the political development of most Latin American countries in the twentieth century.

Defining the Left solely in terms of parties of Marxist inspiration and structure is, as will be argued, incomplete. None the less, the starting point for any historical discussion of the Left in Latin America has to be the Communist parties of the various republics.

Much has been written about Faulkner’s attitudes toward class and race and about his representations of these issues as the fundamental structures of his most successful fictions. Myra Jehlen, notably, argues for the determining role of the category of class in novels such as Saitohs, The Unvanquished, and especially The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!. Although she does not ignore the centrality of race, Jehlen claims that the reigning problematic in Faulkner’s account of Southern antebellum history is the internal class conflict between two sectors of white agrarian society - the lordly, cavalier plantation class versus the Jeffersonian, homesteading, working-class peasantry. In a deconstructive analysis of Absalom, Absalom! that raises questions of race and class in a related but divergent register, Richard C. Moreland shows how the various narrative strategies of Faulkner’s novel are intended to avert the recognition of this struggle between classes and to disregard the insistent presence of other narratives that underscore the additional pressures of race and gender in Sutpen’s story.

As a classic instance of this paradigmatic structure of revelation and aversion in Faulkner’s major works, Absalom, Absalom! reflects the ideologies of the historical era in which it was composed, the mid-Depression years of early-twentieth-century America. These ideologies underlie Faulkner’s connection with the issues of coloniality and postcoloniality that began to appear in much American, Latin American, and European literature of the immediate pre-World War II years.

In 1879, Hinmaton Yalakit (Thunder Rolling in the Heights), a Nez Perce leader known to whites as Chief Joseph, delivered an oration in Washington, D.C. His words summed up an escalating history of betrayals by settlers and government officials:

American Indians would wait in vain. Chief Joseph's oration, one of many such protests, which form a powerful genre of resistance literature, looked both backward and forward from the historical midpoint in the long process of Indian Removal and the destruction of tribal integrity that was a consequence of the Euro-American conquest of the West.

Toward the end of the 1820s the philosophical synthesis that had supported Unitarianism throughout its period of expansion began to show signs of strain. Unresolved contradictions within it – the tension between sensationalism and idealism in its epistemology, the mingled attitude of desire and fear that marked its dealings with German biblical criticism – began to trouble new generations of students. Writings of the English and German Romantics kept arriving on American shores and finding enthusiasts among the young, despite their elders' contempt for the bathos of Wordsworth, the licentiousness of Goethe, the obscurity of Kant and of Coleridge. Reformers were beginning to demand that the churches leave their careful doctrine of individual self-culture and do something about the scandal of urban poverty or the greater scandal of slavery. By the end of the 1820s the discontents among the younger Unitarians had begun to find public expression.

The first sign of the trouble that would later be labeled “Transcendentalism” came with an attack on two fronts: on the philosophy of John Locke and on the educational system at Harvard. The two things were naturally allied in the minds of the young men who had been subjected to them simultaneously, and the connection was reinforced by the fact that Harvard's heavy reliance on drill seemed perfectly tailored to Locke's view of the mind's structure. If the mind is an empty tablet and if all ideas come from sensation and reflection, then memorization ought to be the foundation of all learning and recitation the proper medium for its display.