As I write, we approach the hundredth anniversary of William Faulkner’s birth, and the turn of a century and a millennium. Considering the advances and promise of this past century, we may look forward to beginning a new era. Seeking lessons from this century’s failures, we may meditate on a period that has been, despite all its real advances, murderous on a scale beyond precedent and perhaps beyond comprehension. This century has witnessed, and continues to witness, the violent destruction of unnumbered millions of people and a ravaging of the earth we're only now beginning to reckon. At this point in a hundred years of awesome accomplishment and promise coupled with sickening destruction, it seems appropriate to ask some questions here about reading a famous literary record of this time.

What’s at stake in reading Faulkner? To whom does it matter? Why does it matter?

Or, why ask why? These questions may seem to be unnecessary or to answer themselves. On the one hand, it is well known that Faukner matters, and has mattered, to many readers. The preceding esssays in this volume testify to, even as they critically examine, Faulkner’s importance for an international reading public.

In the spring of 1836, the year that Perry Miller would call the “Annus Mirabilis” of the Transcendentalist movement, the American Unitarian Association issued a small pamphlet entitled Christianity as a Purely Internal Principle. Its author was a forty-year-old minister named Convers Francis (1795–1863), a genial man whom O. B. Frothingham called “a liberal scholar, in the best sense of the phrase; learned without pedantry; open to the light from every quarter; an enormous reader of books; a great student of German philosophy and divinity, as few at that time were.” Francis had occupied the pulpit at Watertown, Massachusetts, since 1819, preaching a liberal Christianity that emphasized the human element in the Bible and publishing reviews in the Christian Examiner in which he affirmed his belief that the human soul was “a particle of the divine mind.” In Christianity as a Purely Internal Principle Francis argues that Christianity's distinction lies in its having been “the first and only system, which professed to build its kingdom wholly within the soul of man.” All attempts to derive religious feeling from something outward — whether the rituals of the Catholic church or the emotional conversion experiences of the evangelicals — are false to the spirit of Christianity's founder, who asked “for no province but the affections, principles, and motives of man, for no throne but his heart.”

Francis's pamphlet, an eloquent expression of Unitarian piety, contained nothing radical, though its emphasis on Christianity as an inward principle of spiritual enlargement made it dear to the younger people whom he served as friend and mentor. Francis's slight reputation for daring came from his willingness to entertain ideas bolder than his own.

Let us begin our consideration of the 1850s by returning to F. O. Matthiessen's classic 1941 study, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Matthiessen commences by observing “how great a number of our past masterpieces were produced in one extraordinarily concentrated moment of literary expression” in the first half of the 1850s. For Matthiessen the literary masters of this American renaissance are Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman. Noting that “the half-decade of 1850–55” saw the appearance of Representative Men (1850), The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), Walden (1854), and Leaves of Grass (1855), he goes on to declare, “You might search all the rest of American literature without being able to collect a group of books equal to these in imaginative vitality.”

In 1940, a year before American Renaissance, Fred Lewis Pattee published a quite different account of American literature in the years just before the Civil War, called The Feminine Fifties. Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman play a part in Pattee's version of midcentury American literature, but it is a notably subordinate part. Far more important are such writers as Susan B. Warner, Anna Warner, Timothy Shay Arthur, Fanny Fern (the pen name of Sara Payson Willis), Caroline Lee Hentz, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Ann Sophia Stephens, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., Ik Marvel (Donald Grant Mitchell), Grace Greenwood (Sara Jane Clarke), and Fanny Forrester (Emily Chubbuck). What distinguishes Pattee's 1850s from Matthiessen's is his emphasis on writers who were widely popular and commercially successful in a decade when Melville was losing the audience he had won briefly in the late 1840s, when Thoreau and Whitman attracted only very limited circles of readers, and when even Hawthorne's novels fell far short of best-seller status.

Local narratives partake of place; personal narratives arise from and depend on displacement: Pacific voyages, overland journeys to the frontier, slaves' escapes, or even a displacement as small as Thoreau's within Concord. This displacement is physical, but it also defines the fundamental rhetorical situation of the narratives: their intelligibility and force depend on the difference between the world that the reader knows, and reads within, and the world that the narrator has experienced. Etymologically, the Latin word from which “narrative” derives is closely related to the adjective gnarus, “knowing.” The relation of narrative to individual life-knowledge is sharper in this kind of narrative than in any of the others studied here. In the terminology of classical oratory, the “narration” was the plain and manifest setting forth of the facts of the case. Such an emphasis on plainness and focus on externals typify these narratives. They pay much less attention to the shifting nuances of personal, and especially interpersonal, feeling, than would be expected in a novel.

As reports of activity on the margins of national life, these personal narratives are more like the genre of captivity narrative stemming from Mary Rowlandson's account of her life among the Indians (1682) than they resemble the narratives of inner religious experience, which Jonathan Edwards's “personal narrative,” dating from around 1740, exemplifies. For the more privileged white authors, personal narratives characteristically have the circular shape of descent and return – a touching of ground, even a humiliation before the return to the elevation of ordinary civilized life; for slave narrators, the more usual pattern is that of an ascent to freedom.

INTRODUCTION

Latin America has often been viewed as a continent where in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the formal architecture of democracy has been a thinly veiled facade for civilian and military tyrants who have imposed their will on conservative and backward peoples. Such a view of the origins and development of democracy is partial and misleading. The struggle to consolidate representative regimes, accept the legitimacy of opposition, expand citizenship, and affirm the rule of law has been a continuous and uneven process—on both sides of the Atlantic—for two centuries. The central, but often elusive, guiding principle has been the concept of popular sovereignty, the notion that legitimate government is generated by a free citizenry and is accountable to it for its policies and actions. In Latin America, as in Europe and North America, the quest for these liberal ideals has been a permanent aspiration, if often challenged by political disorder, civil war, human rights abuses, dictatorship and, in the twentieth century, alternative visions for organizing the political community, including fascism and Marxism.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, most of the major countries of Latin America had managed to establish at least ‘oligarchical democracies’, that is to say, regimes, in which presidents and national assemblies derived from open, if not fully fair, political competition for the support of limited electorates, according to prescribed constitutional rules and which were largely comparable to the restricted representative regimes in Europe of the same period. Argentina (from 1916) and Uruguay (from 1918) were democracies with universal male suffrage.

Religious controversy and the publishing of periodicals absorbed much of the Transcendentalists' energy during the early 1840s. But larger movements caught their attention as well. The various reform movements sweeping the country seemed to offer support to the theory that a new age was indeed at hand, an age when the mountainous obstructions of inherited evil would be forced to yield to the pure force of spirit. Life would learn to conform itself to the idea in the mind; a new church and state would flow outward from the wellsprings of regenerate souls. In an 1839 lecture, “Literature” (from a series entitled “The Present Age”), Emerson had predicted that the genius of the time would soon “write the annals of a changed world and record the descent of principles into practice, of love into Government, of love into Trade. It will describe the new heroic life of man, the now unbelieved possibility of simple living, and of clean and noble relations with men.”

The sense that great things were taking place or were about to take place in the world often made Emerson at once hopeful and chagrined. He wrote to his young friend Caroline Sturgis in October 1840 that he felt that he and his friends were “the pets & cossets of the gracious Heaven, have never known a rough duty, have never wrestled with a rude doubt, never once been called to anything that deserved the name of an action. … I am daily getting ashamed of my life.”

Nothing in William Faulkner’s large body of writings has received more critical attention than his fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury, which marks the conclusion of the author’s apprenticeship and the beginning of the so-called major period of his literary career. The novel’s stunning technical innovations partially account for this attention, particularly because the difficulty of reading and understanding this text is somehow compatible with being moved by it. Although a solid portion of the critical commentary has been devoted to explications of the experimental form of the novel, the real mystery of the text (and, I think, the reason we return to it again and again) resides in its power to move us. This power is characteristic of the writings Faulkner produced from the end of the 1920s to the early 1940s, that is, from The Sound and The Fury (1929) to Go Down, Moses (1942), writings in which Faulkner grappled with forces of major psychic and social significance.

As the commencement of this trajectory, The Sound and the Fury occupies an ambiguous place, and recent critics have accused it of being too private, too mired in the psychic realm, and too inarticulate about social forces that are more clearly revealed in his later works (cf. Sundquist 1983, Morris). John Matthews, however, has argued that the novel’s cautious articulation of these social forces reflects the "rhetoric of containment" that dominated modernist aesthetics and the New/Jim Crow South (Matthews 1987). Like Matthews, I shall argue here that the novel both flees the material and ideological conditions of its production and seeks to disclose them.

Since the 1970s, feminist literary critics have both expanded the American canon and called into question the masculinist values on which it is based. Expansion has led to the incorporation of many previously neglected female writers, from Stowe and Jacobs in the nineteenth century to Cather and Hurston in the twentieth. Meanwhile, the work of Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Jane Tompkins, among others, has served to reveal the (sometimes obsessive) misogyny at work in canonical male texts, as well as the masculinist bias of the canon makers themselves. Yet it has more recently become clear that a feminist criticism limited to rescuing important female writers and demystifying important male ones - what Elaine Showalter long ago called gynocriticism and feminist critique, respectively - cannot adequately address the questions raised by the work of certain already canonical American writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Faulkner. Their work presents an engagement with gender that is far too complex to be treated as merely symptomatic of the American canon’s masculinist bias. Just as Stein and Dickinson, arguably the only female writers with full canonical status in the United States before the feminist revision, have received reinvigorated critical attention from feminist critics who regard gender itself as a cultural construction, one that is - in the words of Frann Michel - "socially and historically variable/' as well as "internally contradictory" (5), a similar understanding of gender makes the work of even a Hawthorne, that infamous protester against a "damned mob of scribbling women," the site of renewed feminist analysis for critics such as Joel Pfister and Lauren Berlant.

This chapter analyses the changes in urban social structure, and especially the changes in occupation structure, in Latin America from the 1930s to the 1980s that resulted from the coming together of three processes: rapid urbanization; industrialization in its different stages; and the growing importance in the Latin American economies of the service sector, both traditional services and modern services linked to the growth of government bureaucracy and to twentieth-century business practices (technical, financial, administrative). In developed countries similar processes produced a convergence of social structures: the expansion of the middle classes, the consolidation of an industrial working-class, and improvements in the general welfare of the population. In the case of Latin America, there has been a greater heterogeneity in patterns of stratification. The dependence of the region on foreign technology and, increasingly, on external finance, combined with its role in the world economy as a supplier of primary and, hence, rurally based commodities, resulted in an uneven modernization, both between countries and between regions of the same country. This chapter will emphasize these differences and the need to pay attention to the specific situation of each country.

In terms of social stratification, there was in Latin America a contradictory relationship between urban growth, economic development and modernization. The cities multiplied and concentrated economic resources. Industrial growth stimulated the increase in levels of education, the proletarianization of the labour force and also the expansion of the non-manual sectors. On the other hand, this same urban growth brought with it a marked polarization of the social structure, both in terms of income and in labour conditions as shown by the persistence of non-waged forms of labour (self-employed workers, unpaid family workers) and highly skewed income distributions.

Introduction

The development of science as an organized activity in Latin America has rarely been smooth or lineal. Rather it has been replete with false starts, with periods of consolidation followed by periods of fragmentation and reverse, often for political reasons. Moreover, the considerable national variation both in the organization of science and the level of achievement of different disciplines makes any homogeneous synthesis problematical at best. This chapter treats the history of selected scientific disciplines — biology, biomedicine, psychoanalysis, physical and exact sciences, and geology — in Latin America in the twentieth century. Because of substantial gaps in the secondary literature coverage must necessarily be incomplete. The chapter focusses on the formative years of these sciences, primarily before the Second World War but with some attention of developments during the two decades after the war. Science in the second half of the twentieth century is then treated in a more general sociological mode, reflecting the bias of the secondary literature, which is supplemented by materials from the author's own collection of internal documentation of scientific institutions. Here we will follow the institutionalization of science, the emergence of a scientific ethos and changing relationships between scientists, government and society. If this leaves us with an imperfect view, we are content at least to advance some working hypotheses and provide an armature for future research.

An important chronological break came in 1939 when Spanish refugee scientists, joining other specific, mainly Jewish, refugees from Nazism, began acting as catalysts of an institutional transformation whose first phase was completed in the 1950s when substantial numbers of young scientists trained mainly in the United States began to make their presence felt.

For Latin American women the twentieth century has brought significant changes in legal status, education, participation in the labour force, citizenship and political participation. Such changes have not been linear and progressive. Gradual shifts rather than sudden movements have characterized the process of change. Innovations have been met with resistance from individuals of both genders, or from socio-economic groups upholding traditional patterns of behaviour and cultural attitudes. Yet, on balance, there has been an important transformation. That such transformation has neither resulted in equality between the sexes nor resolved the inequalities between women of different economic or ethnic background does not lessen its historical significance.

Regional and national political factors, and economic and ethnic disparities, make generalizations regarding all women in the whole continent somewhat difficult. The opportunities for education, the access to better jobs and health care have been greater in capital cities than in the hinterlands; in certain countries legal and social forms of female subordination have persisted longer than in others. Yet, patterns which apply to the majority of women are still clearly perceivable when seen from the perspective of history. Similarities and differences, as well as the main threads of women’s history, are best appreciated in three areas of activities: labour, education and social and political movements. These reflect the tensions between change and tradition, the contrasts created by social, ethnic and national differences. Overall, these themes also reflect the complexities of gender experiences, and are intimately interconnected with each other, even if for the sake of analysis they are dealt with separately.

In The Sound and the Fury, Quentin, reminding himself that while in the East he must “remember to think of [blacks[ as colored people not niggers” goes on to assert that a black person is “a form of behavior, a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among” (86). Although Quentin’s reflections have obviously been conditioned by his Southern background and are hardly intended to serve as any sort of universally applicable commentary both his concern with the language of racial designation and his judgment that race is a conceptual and behavioral issue as much as (or rather more than) a biological one are salient. Moreover, they thematically anticipate Faulkner’s most profound meditation on the topic, Light in August. It is striking - and may seem paradoxical - that the Faulkner novel most centrally concerned with an issue that suffused so much of his corpus contains not a single significant character who is identifiably African-American, but that absence only emphasizes the text’s predominant concern with race as a linguistic and social construct rather than a biological given, its focus more on the concept of race than on actual race relations. In the course of the novel, Faulkner not only provides a provocative consideration of the issues surrounding racial notions in the American South in the early part of the twentieth century - indeed, in Western culture generally, if one takes into account the novel’s connection with important theoretical and historical writings about race - but, while investigating the operations of the concept of blackness, he also manages to explore the role of language in the construction of subjectivity.