FAULKNER IN LABERINTO

A quarrel has broken out in the bar but it spills immediately on to the street. I hear the noise and go out to investigate. A man in his under pants is being punched and stoned by three or' four individuals. He must have started the fight since on' of the attackers has a cut face and is bleeding profusely. In the midst of the dust, the cursing and the blows, a child is creaming and trying to clutch on to the legs of the bleeding man. When the man being attacked decides to run away and all the onlookers go back into their cabins to continue getting drunk, the child’s wailing persists, like an out of tune drizzle falling on the palm-leaved roofs and wooden walls of the houses of Laberinto.
    It is impossible not to think of Faulkner. This is the heart of Amazonia, far away, of course, from the Mississippi. The language, the races, the traditions, the religion and the customs are different. But the citizens of Yoknapatawpha County and those of this settlement in the department of Madre de Dios, by the bank of the wide river of the same name, which gold fever has transformed in a short space of time into a sort of ragged millionaire, have a lot of things in common: violence, heat, greed, an untamable nature which seems to reflect instincts that people do not try to keep in check; in short, life as an adventure in which the grotesque, the sublime and the tragic are enmeshed as inextricably as branches of trees in a wood.
    On the plane from Lima to Puerto Maldonado and in my lodgings in this place (here, by the light of a rancid candle), I have been reading “Intruder in the Dust”, Faulkner’s third novel, his first masterpiece and the beginning of the saga. Its complete version was only published in 1973. The novel published in 1929 entitled Sartoris had been stripped of a quarter of' its pages and reordered by Ben Wasson, Faulkner's literary agent. Eleven publishing houses rejected the manuscript, considering it confused, and the house that finally plucked up the courage to publish it did so on condition that these cuts and amendments -which were supposed to simplify the story - were made. Today, we can lament the dominant standards of taste in narrative at the end of the 1920s, which were so poor that the readers of eleven publishing houses could not recognize what they had in front of their eyes: a masterpiece that would change in a profound way the very nature of modern fiction.
    But it is easy to make this type of a posteriori criticism. The novelty was, in fact, too great and, furthermore, New York was as far away in time and space from Jefferson, the land of the mythical characters - Bayard, John Sartoris, Jenny du Pres and the pig, Byron Snopes - as Lima is from Laberinto. Faulkner's America is underdeveloped and primitive, filled with rough and uncultured, prejudiced and gallant people, capable of extraordinary meanness and nobility, but incapable of breaking free of their visceral provincialism which makes them, from the moment they are born until their death, men of the periphery, wild and old-fashioned, pre-industrial, branded by a history of Wicked exploitation, bloody racism, chivalric elegance, pioneer daring and lost wars. The world out of which Faulkner fashions his universe is not that of New York, Boston, Chicago or Philadelphia. He held up a mirror in which the America of ultra-modern machines and financial conglomerates, of specialized universities and cities bristling with skyscrapers and of intellectuals bewitched like T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound - by the spiritual refinement of Europe, did not like to see itself. In this America, the novels of Faulkner took time to be accepted: they represented a past and a present that it wanted to forget at all costs. It was only when Paris discovered Faulkner and authors like Malraux and Sartre proclaimed his genius to the four winds that the southern novelist gained the right to citizenship in his own country. His country then accepted him for reasons similar to those of the French, as a brilliant, exotic product.
    Faulkner's world was really not his alone. It was ours. There is no better way of illustrating this than by coming to this lost settlement in the jungle of Madre de Dios which, because of the bends and swirls in the river that runs through it, has been baptized with the beautiful name of Laberinto. The population that give it personality and color do not live here in these couple of dozen huts choked by vegetation but, as in Jefferson, they are scattered around it. They are searching and panning for gold, just as the inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha grew cotton and reared horses. But on Sundays they all come to town to do their business, stock up with provisions and enjoy themselves (which means getting drunk).
    People from the sierra who scarcely speak Spanish and who are stunned by a heat which they have never experienced in their homes in Cuzco or Puno, which they have left to become miners; young from Miraflores in Lima who have exchanged surfboards and motor racing for the heavy boots of the explorers; foreigners thirsty for adventure and instant wealth; hardened prostitutes who have come from brothels of Lima to work as 'visitors' in the camps, where they charge by account and, in their free time also try their luck scratching in the gravel banks for the precious metal; sweaty policemen overwhelmed by the size of their responsibilities, which are too much for them: if they could read, or took time to read, these men and women in Laberinto would feel very much at home in the novels of Faulkner and would be amazed to know that someone who had never been here, who had no way of knowing that on day fate would propel them all here and make them share so many hopes and difficulties, had been able to describe so well the exuberance of their life and their souls.
    This is Faulkner's world. People are known by their names and industrial civilization, that impersonal society in which people communicates through things, is still far off. It is true that here everything is elemental and archaic and that lack of comfort, dirt and brute force predominate. But at the same time, nothing here seems predetermined: everything to be done is being done and one has the exhilarating impression that with a bit of luck and a great deal of courage and resilience any man or woman can magically change his or her life. There is that warm, immediate, healthy contact with natural elements - that air, that water, that earth, that fire which people in the city do not know - and the feeling that the food one eats, like the hut in which one lives, is produced by one's own hands.
    Violence is always simmering beneath the surface and breaks out at any pretext. But at least it is an open, physical, natural violence that has a certain minimal dignity, like the violence between animals, which attack and kill each other obeying the first rule of life: the law of survival. It is not the disguised; city, civilized violence, institutionalized in laws, codes and systems, against which there is no defence since it does not have a body or a face. Here it has a name and features, it is individualized and, however horrible it might appear, it is still human.
    It is not strange that at the time when the cultured media of his own country strongly resisted Faulkner's work, depriving him of readers, here in Latin America his work was immediately and unanimously proclaimed. The reason for this can be found not only in the enchantment of these turbulent lives of Yoknapatawpha County or in the formal accomplishment of these fictions built like beehives. It was that in the turbulence and complexity of the world 'invented' by Faulkner, we readers in Latin America discovered, transfigured, our own reality and we learned that, as in Bayard Sartoris or Jenny du Pres, that backwardness and marginality also contain beauty and virtues that so called civilization kills. He wrote in English, but he was one of our own.

Lima, April 1981

Vargas Llosa