Citario. Derived from the Latin “citāre” (to quote) plus the suffix “-ārium” (repository), similar to “bestiary.” A 21st-century neologism, it emerged among Spanish-speaking scholars at Bookish & Co., with roots in ancient anthologies and florilegia. “Citario” is related to medieval books of commonplaces (such as Erasmus’s) and 19th-century proto-examples, such as “Familiar Quotations.” This “Citario Faulkner” celebrates the 128th birthday of the writer who, with his innovative prose and techniques, transformed modern narrative, giving voice to the South of America in a tapestry of memories and echoes.
Faulkner has given back to literature what it had to give up in order to come into being. He has reintroduced the tremor of the world in which we try to live into the elaborate, secondary image that we sometimes find between the covers of books. He has brought to paper, through words, in the order of meaning, the tumultuous, dark, absurd depth, the division and confusion that reside at the heart of our condition.
Pierre Bergounioux, “William Faulkner” (from La invención del presente, Shangrila, 2023)
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I know of two types of writers: the man whose central anxiety is verbal procedures; the man whose central anxiety is the passions and labors of man. The former is often denigrated with the label “Byzantine” and exalted with the name “pure artist.” The other, happier, knows the laudatory epithets “profound,” “human,” “deeply human,” and the flattering vituperation of “barbarian.” The former is Swinburne or Mallarmé; the latter, Céline or Theodore Dreiser. Others, exceptional ones, exercise the virtues and enjoyments of both categories. Victor Hugo notes that Shakespeare contains Góngora: we can observe that he also contains Dostoevsky… Among the great novelists, Joseph Conrad was perhaps the last to be equally interested in the procedures of the novel and the fate and character of people. The last, until the tremendous appearance of Faulkner.
Faulkner likes to expose the novel through the characters. The method is not entirely original—Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868) details the same crime ten times, through ten mouths and ten souls—but Faulkner infuses it with an intensity that is almost intolerable. There is infinite decay and black carnality in this book by Faulkner. The theater is the state of Mississippi: the heroes are men disintegrated by envy, alcohol, loneliness, and the erosion of hatred. Absalom, Absalom! is comparable to The Sound and the Fury. I know of no greater praise.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Absalom, Absalom!, by W.F.” (1937; collected in Miscelánea, Penguin Random House / DeBolsillo, 2015)
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The disagreement between the writer and the world as the origin of the novel is evident in authors as diverse and yet as similar as Faulkner and Musil. Man’s misfortune in Faulkner’s universe is his temporal nature. The man-world gap is deepened, it is true, by guilt, the guilt of ancestors that weighs on the living like an inescapable obsession. But the threat is, above all, temporality: “only when the clock stops can the time of life emerge.” Quentin, the last conscience of the Compson family, the last to represent the desire to endure, feels at the same time irresistibly drawn to death. Death and his sister, for whom he feels an incestuous love, are ultimately the same thing: to assume the destiny of the dead family, to be forever a Compson, precisely by choosing death, by breaking the clock before dying to interrupt the continuity of time and enter a world of inextinguishable symbols. Quentin’s suicide is the most desperate attempt to plunge into the origins, and Faulkner’s entire work is an effort to integrate something that has disintegrated from a traditional order which, although it had been cursed for being founded on injustice, carrying within itself the seeds of its own ruin, had nevertheless left man some leeway to define himself as a human being: that of the chivalrous codes and concepts of virtue and honor. Incest is damnation, hell, but a damnation through which something of the past is preserved, the honor of the family is rescued. Incestuous integration can rebuild something of the family nucleus that has almost dissolved and been lost. Quentin and Candace love each other because they long for childhood and the restoration of the family past, but their love cannot be realized and will never lead them to a mystical communion, as will happen with Musil’s incestuous couple. It is not the culmination of a radiant experience, but the punishment for an unwavering fidelity to a dead world. Everything that separated Faulkner from an ideal and longed-for order, that void that did not allow him to live in peace with the memory of his family and his race, is what compels him to write and build the mythical county of Yoknapatawpha on the void of the memory of the South.
Julieta Campos, “The Function of the Novel” (1973, collected in Novelists as Critics, Volume II, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1991)
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Faulkner’s degrees of obscurity invaded 20th-century literature, reinforcing and emphasizing two conditions, one superficial, the other inhuman (chiropteran, let’s say). They attracted so many writers (Gide, Queneau, Camus, Onetti, Borges) that often the nadir of our satisfaction consists in not discerning them, not differentiating them. The superficial one is thematic: lineages, clusters of braided and heroic prosopopoeias, virtuous rhetorical inflammation, and the South’s (Dixie) predilection for Athens and Rome, the reputation of those tribunes who mention military defeats by different names (Manassas for Antietam); the other, prosodic and rhythmic, obeys the writer’s auditory predisposition; for this reason, among others, it is chiropteran, due to the link between the ear (“nest or labyrinth of sound”) and rhetorical, discursive, verbal orientation.
Luis Chitarroni, “El Góngora del Mississippi” (The Góngora of Mississippi) (Pasado mañana, Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2020)
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In his famous commentary on The Sound and the Fury, written just one year after his fierce criticism of Sartoris, Sartre reflects on temporality in Faulkner and speaks, in this regard, of an “unspeakable present that is leaking everywhere,” shaken by the “abrupt invasions of the past,” by an incessant avalanche of “memories, obsessions, and in this regard, of an “unspeakable present that leaks everywhere,” shaken by the “abrupt invasions of the past,” by an incessant avalanche of “memories, monstrous and discontinuous obsessions, intermittences of the heart.” Faulkner’s style would reflect the uninterrupted shipwreck of consciousness in memory. In Sartre’s words: “Everything is then explained, and first of all the irrationality of time: since the present is the unexpected, the formless can only be determined by an excess of memories.” Sartre suggests that Faulkner’s novelistic technique should have been that of Proust (whom Faulkner greatly admired), but that he is prevented from doing so by his status as a “lost man” and by not being the heir to such a cultured and domineering tradition. Edmund Wilson qualifies and complicates this observation by stating that “Faulkner’s style has a noble and ancient lineage.” Although he imitated Anderson and Hemingway in his early days, Faulkner “does not belong to their school, but to the embellished post-Flaubertian group.”
Ignacio Echevarría, “Faulkner and Difficulty” (El nivel alcanzado, Penguin Random House-Debate, 2021)
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On the surface, William Faulkner deals with a specific and limited reality: that of families and men rooted in the history of a small county in the southern United States. Unconcerned with allegorical intent, Faulkner, like Melville, does not seek, a priori, to turn his characters and situations into emblems or models. But as he delves into them—as he paradoxically individualizes them, enriching their detail—he symbolically universalizes them. If the characters are unique and the situations are also unique, presence and language, in their poetic expression, reveal them—they catch them red-handed—in their common vocation: history, nature, love, passion, time. But Faulkner no longer places them in the linear time and illustrative space of the classic novel: his works occupy the circular time and empty space of tragedy. In this way, Faulkner brings Melville’s symbolic quest to its radical conclusion: if the symbol is the compass of the unknown, the unknown itself is tragedy, the terra ignota of the modern world. Faulkner lands on that land, devastated, depopulated, abandoned by the common demands of Christian revelation and philosophical reason. He arrives there tied, like Odysseus, like the protagonist of “The Old Man,” to the logs of the rafts in the tumultuous floods of the Mississippi: he will hear the song of the sirens, and the sirens will sing with the voice of Agamemnon’s choir: “The race is welded to misfortune.”
Carlos Fuentes, “The Novel as Tragedy: William Faulkner” (House with Two Doors, Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, Mexico, 1970)
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I believe that we, the new Latin American novelists, owe the greatest debt to Faulkner. It’s curious… People are attributing a permanent Faulkner influence to me, and now that I realize that it is the critics who have convinced me that I am influenced by Faulkner, I am willing to reject this influence, which is entirely probable. But what surprises me is the general phenomenon. I have just read 75 unpublished novels for the Primera Plana Sudamericana competition; 75 unpublished novels by Latin American writers, and it is strange to find one that is not influenced by Faulkner. Of course, it is more noticeable in them because they are beginners, it is more obvious, but Faulkner is present in all Latin American novels; And I think… that is, simplifying things too much and probably exaggerating, I think the big difference between the grandparents we were talking about a moment ago and us, the only thing that distinguishes them from us, is Faulkner; it was the only thing that happened between those two generations.
Gabriel García Márquez, “I was looking for the total novel…” (conversation with Mario Vargas Llosa, 1972,
collected in Novelists as Critics, Volume II)
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When he received the Nobel Prize in 1950, Faulkner initially resisted going to Sweden, but in the end he not only went, but also traveled throughout Europe and Asia on “State Department missions.” He did not enjoy the countless events to which he was invited. At a party given in his honor by Gallimard, his French publishers, it is recalled that after each question from a journalist, he would answer briefly and take a step back. Finally, step by step, he found himself against the wall, and only then did the journalists take pity on him or give up on him. He ended up taking refuge in the garden. Some people decided to go out to him, announcing that they were going to chat with Faulkner, but they soon returned to the living room with altered voices and some excuse: “It’s so cold out there.” Faulkner was taciturn, he loved silence, and after all, he had only been to the theater five times in his life: Hamlet three times, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Ben-Hur were all he had seen… He read Don Quixote every year.
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When asked who were the best American writers of his time, he said that they had all failed, but that the best failure was Thomas Wolfe, and the second best failure was William Faulkner. He said this and repeated it for many years, but we must not forget that Thomas Wolfe had been dead since 1938, that is, for almost all those years that William Faulkner was saying it and was alive.
Javier Marías, “William Faulkner on Horseback” (Written Lives, Random House Mondadori / DeBolsillo, 2007)
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Readers of William Faulkner’s fiction are familiar with its extraordinary variety. To take just three examples from his best work: could three novels, written by one author in less than fifteen years, differ more from each other than The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses? On a much smaller scale, the same variety is found in his nonfiction prose. Thus, major texts such as the essays “Mississippi,” “On Privacy,” and “On Fear,” and the prologue to Faulkner’s Anthology are small-scale masterpieces (and are astonishingly different from each other). Or let’s look at the speeches: the Nobel Prize speech and those given at Pine Manor and the Delta Council are probably the best, and again, they are very different. One can also learn a great deal about William Faulkner’s intelligence, his knowledge, his imagination, his talent, and his sense of humor by observing the differences between any of his speeches and the rest, not only in the variety of his interests and the strength of his convictions, but also in how aware he was of his specific audience and how he appeared before that audience. Even clearly minor texts, such as many of his letters to the editors of various newspapers, show the same variety, the same kind of differences.
James B. Meriwether, prologue to William Faulkner, Essays and Speeches (Capitán Swing Libros, Madrid, 2012)
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He is calm, he has written The Sound and the Fury, he is the great rhetorician, the elephant. He has invented a bulldozer-like prose in which God repeats himself relentlessly. The combustion of the prose is as flawless as that of a Lucky Strike.
Pierre Michon, Cuerpos del Rey (Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, 2006)
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Faulkner, who had logged several hours of flight as a pilot, came to his death after falling from Stonewall, a horse that resisted him. His stubbornness in wanting to tame it ended up costing him his life. He did not live to reach seventy.
Bennett Cerf, his editor at Random House, has recalled the distrust he felt in the gaze and behavior of the townspeople as soon as he set foot in Oxford to attend the novelist’s funeral. William Styron was with him. They did not answer his questions, they did not help him find an address. We were city folk, we were not welcome, he says. At Rowan Oak, the corpse lay in a corner, unattended. There were tables heavy with food, distractions. Estelle and Jill were in their rooms, sedated. A perfect Faulknerization.
It is likely Cerf did not realize it: he had arrived in Faulkner’s South, having crossed its subtle boundaries. They were now the others, the Yankees. They were the real-life Joanna Burdens. A world revealed in “the moist abjection of the hunting dogs,” as he had written in Mosquitoes. The spirit of a frontier still reigned.
Michael H. Miranda, “Faulknerization” (Cuba diluida, Editorial Hypermedia, 2021)
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Faulkner belongs to the tradition of the great “reactionary” writers of the 20th century, such as Borges, Pound, Mishima, and Céline, defined basically by anti-capitalism and, consequently, by anti-liberalism. These are writers who, from different positions and criteria, have resisted the process of commodification of society and defended pre-capitalist values and, in many cases, have been anti-democratic. It seems to me that Faulkner is the one who has best dramatized these conflicts in his work. In fact, he constructed a myth about lost values and the horror of money. The tension between the Sartoris and the Snopes defines, as we know, Faulkner’s great social saga (Flag in the Dust, Sanctuary, The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion). The defeated values of the South, the “archaic” and aristocratic perspective, are the basis for a very violent critique of the pragmatic morality of capitalism. In this regard, Faulkner is of interest to Marxists (in fact, in Argentina, The Hamlet was published by a publishing house close to the Communist Party). Many of the archaic elements of the “Latin American” novel (centrally García Márquez) inherited this perspective from Faulkner.
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I have always found what Faulkner says in the 1933 Introduction to The Sound and the Fury fundamental: “I wrote this book and learned to read.” The idea that writing changes the way we read and that a writer constructs tradition and builds his literary genealogy from his own work. The “objective” value of books does not matter: a writer’s canon has to do with what he writes (or what he wants to write). Faulkner’s network includes, say, the King James Version of the Bible, Conrad’s prose, certain moods of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joyce’s techniques, etc., but the only thing that allows these texts to be brought together and a plot (or tradition) to be constructed is Faulkner’s writing. The place from which Faulkner read culture (the Frenchified and peripheral context of the South) helped him define a position: he was out of place and saw everything from the outside and had nothing to do with the literary life of the East. He could read differently (“like a peasant,” as he himself said with very sophisticated irony) because he was in a different place. This combination of reading “like a writer” (and not like an intellectual) and reading “like a peasant” (and not like a man of letters) makes Faulkner an extraordinary reader. For example, everything he says about contemporary literature is very intelligent. (Joyce must be the most studied writer of the 20th century, but no one read him as well as William Faulkner.)
Ricardo Piglia, “On Faulkner” (Criticism and Fiction, Anagrama Publishing, 2001)
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Mario Vargas Llosa:
Faulkner is, I believe, the only, or at least the most striking, among modern writers to have created a body of work that, in its intensity, diversity, and depth, is comparable to that of Cervantes, Tolstoy, or Shakespeare. It is good to be able to see, in his case, thanks to his early work, the slow, uncertain trajectory of his talent, to note that it emerged amid stumbles and mistakes. His first masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, dates from 1929, when he was already a man of thirty-four, with an abundant bibliography—three novels, dozens of short stories, two books of poems—in which nothing seemed to foreshadow what was to come. All of that early, forgettable work, like the dreadful tragedies in verse written by the young Balzac, or the verbose lyrical novels of the young Flaubert, is retroactively charged with meaning. Later works turn those texts into preparation and a search, into asceticism, into adolescence, into the price to be paid, into an imagination that seeks itself and a discipline that is learned. These works, such as Mosquitoes, bore us but also lift our spirits because they make us believe something that, after all, may not be entirely false: that genius is not an innate disposition, a written destiny, but stubbornness, a prolonged effort.
“The Young Faulkner” (1980)
It is not surprising that, while an intimate resistance in the cultured circles of his country alienated Faulkner’s readers, his work was immediately and unanimously celebrated in Latin America. The reason was not only the spell cast by those turbulent lives in Yoknapatawpha County, nor the formal feats of fictions constructed like wasps’ nests. It was that, in the turbulence and complexity of the world “invented” by Faulkner, Latin American readers discovered, transfigured, our own reality, and learned that, as in Bayard Sartoris or Jenny du Pre, backwardness and the periphery also contain beauties and virtues that so-called civilization kills. He wrote in English, but he was one of us.
“Faulkner en Laberinto” (1981; both texts cited here appear in El fuego de la imaginación.
Obra periodística I, Penguin Random House-Alfaguara, 2022)
