Faulkner and His Brothers (original) (raw)

Boston I. "We are all brothers" 1 I n an interview reported in the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de São Paulo in August 1954, William Faulkner notes, "in my view, race is one of this continent's most pressing issues." Treating North and South America as one continent, he continues, "There is no reason why, in a continent as rich as ours, there should be social or economic distinctions between men. In the end, we are all brothers." 2 Speaking in Brazil three months after Brown v. Board of Education, Faulkner here appears to reiterate the aims of what is perhaps the most significant movement of the postwar period in the United States: the civil rights movement. But while that movement was and remains a somewhat foreign phenomenon in the context of Brazil-and Latin America more generally-we should remember that as Faulkner spoke, the most significant development of the same period in Latin America, the Cuban Revolution, was in its initial stages. Indeed, a year earlier, on 26 July 1953, Fidel Castro led the attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. Similarly concerned with the elimination of social and economic "distinctions," the successful revolution would, seven years later, affirm that "democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy" or "with discrimination against the Negro"; it would even protest "disturbances by the Ku Klux Klan," and, echoing Faulkner, proclaim that "the peoples of the world are brothers." 3 Nevertheless, what Faulkner and the revolution mean by "brothers" is not the same, and as we will see, it is this distinction that affords a more complete understanding of the relationship between Faulkner's modernism and the Latin American "boom" literatures of the 1960s. Many commentators have already discussed the debt that Latin American literature owes to Faulkner (as well as to other modernists like Virginia Woolf,