William Faulkner's Ibero-American Novel Project: The Politics of Translation and the Cold War

Southern Quarterly, Winter 2004 by Cohn, Deborah

FAULKNER'S PRESENCE IN SPANISH AMERICAN LITERATURE has been felt both directly and indirectly over the years. Much has been written about his impact on the work of authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others, since he was first read by Spanish American authors in the 1930s.1 Much less has been written about Faulkner's efforts to influence the course of Latin American literature or about the geopolitical context in which these interventions took place. This essay will begin by presenting an overview of the Ibero-American Novel Project that he set up in 1961 at the University of Virginia. It will examine the Project's goals and mechanisms, and assess the extent to which these were influenced by contemporary Cold War politics. Finally, I will look to the contemporary literary context-the early years of the so-called "Boom," when Spanish American literature hit the international mainstream-for possible explanations of the Project's failure to accomplish its goals.

In 1950, when Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize, he initially refused to travel to Stockholm to pick up the award. The US ambassador to Sweden sent an urgent cable to John Foster Dulles expressing his concern at the situation; ultimately, Muna Lee, Southern poet and State Department official, was recruited to convince Faulkner to go to Stockholm and thus avoid international embarrassment for the US (Blotner 1347-48). The result was, of course, a great success, and from this moment until his death, Faulkner was persuaded numerous times by Lee and the State Department to serve as a goodwill ambassador for the US: over the years, he went on missions to Japan, the Philippines, Greece, Iceland, Latin America, and elsewhere. On these trips, he taught, spoke about his work, and commented on race relations in the US. On a number of occasions, he promoted the achievements of the US-cultural and otherwise (Lee once called him an eloquent "interpreter of democracy"2)-in nations where there was significant anti-Americanism, and often helped to lessen hostility towards the States.

In 1954, Faulkner traveled to an international writer's conference in Brazil, stopping in Peru and Venezuela on the way; he visited Venezuela again in 1961 as part of efforts to improve US-Venezuelan relations (see Blotner 1503-07 and 1777-87). In both cases (as with all his other travels) he was initially reluctant to go-due to his insecurities, his dislike of travel, not wanting to forego the foxhunting season, etc. Eventually, though, he was convinced by Lee's appeals to his patriotism and her belief that the trips would be "an important contribution to inter-American cultural relations."3 And so they were. As Lee wrote after Faulkner's first trip: "Here at Washington we are still a little dazed and dazzled by the extraordinary achievement of the Embassy at Lima in making a complete Public-Relations success of the brief visit of one of the world's most illustrious, most withdrawn, and least loquacious novelists, William Faulkner."4 She further gloated that, while the most recent issue of Newsweek (30 Aug. 1954) had just called Faulkner "the most reticent author in the world," Lima officials had had a "signal triumph . . . not only in leading William Faulkner to a press interview but making him speak."5

Even before the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Latin America had begun to experience a surge in leftist activism that brought it into conflict repeatedly with the US, which was, of course, firmly under the sway of Cold War politics at this point. The US had long supported repressive regimes and neocolonial enterprises such as the United Fruit Company in Latin America, and had toppled those regimes whose politics leaned too far to the left (as was the case in the UFC coup in Guatemala in 1954). The McCarran Walter Act of 1952, which was used to restrict visas on ideological grounds, and which prevented authors with socialist sympathies such as Fuentes, Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda, and others from entering the US, and, later, the Alliance for Progress generated much additional hostility in Latin America towards the US. Both of Faulkner's trips to the region were, in fact, couched-and urged-by State Department officials as public relations moves designed to offset criticism of the US in the local press and to improve the US's relationship with the Latin American nations, and its image in general. One official urged the Department to support Faulkner's trip to the 1954 International Writer's Congress in Sao Paulo, Brazil, marking the occasion of the quadricentennial of the city's founding, as a means of counterbalancing

the flood of adverse publicity which the Department received because of alleged indifference and non-support of the U.S. exhibits in the International Exhibition of Modern Art which was a pre-Quadricentennial event inaugurating the series of festivities. We are still receiving and answering letters of protest on that score. A further reason for officially sponsoring our Nobel Prize winner is the bitter criticism made of us in the Brazilian press when the Brazilian writer, Joao Lins de Rago [sic], was temporarily denied a U.S. visa because of alleged connections with political fellow travelers [due to the McCarran-Walter Act] and favorable reviews of his work in some leftist papers. Although hewas [sic] later given his visa, the incident coulded [sic] our cultural relations with Brazil to some extent.6