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From Arrigunaga to Yoknapatawpha: Ramiro Pinilla and William Faulkner

2016; Wiley; Volume: 58; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/criq.12296

1467-8705

David Bartholomae,

Spanish Culture and Identity

In 1961, Ramiro Pinilla published Las ciegas hormigas (‘The Blind Ants’), winner of the 1960 Premio Nadal, one of Spain's oldest and most prestigious literary awards. The announcement was made in early January, 1961, and it was for Pinilla, as one reviewer noted, like winning ‘el gordo’, the fat one, Spain's big-purse Christmas lottery.1 As the novel opens, a British cargo ship has run aground in bad weather on the rocky shoals off Arrigunaga, a beach below the village of Algorta on the northern, Basque coast of Spain. The villagers, who are facing a hard winter, steal coal from the ship. This is dangerous work. The seas are high and the winds and rain are torrential. The coal must be hauled up over the cliffs that separate the village from the beach. There are old scores to settle within families and between families – and all fear the presence of the Guardia Civil, Franco's police force. The novel offers the struggle of one family, the family of Sabas Jáuregui, to represent the struggle of the Basque people after the Spanish Civil War. Algorta was a fishing and farming village to the north of Bilbao, where the Nervión river empties into the Bay of Biscay. Its people and its traditions were under severe challenge. The area was a centre of resistance against the fascists, and, under the dictator, faced severe repression. And the river was now lined with blast furnaces, the altos hornos or tall ovens producing steel for post-war Europe. Industrialisation brought workers from all corners of Spain; the river and the harbour became clogged with traffic and waste. The new history of the region threatened the old orders and patterns of life. The genius of the novel is its intense concentration, locating the forces of history in the struggles of a single family in a local community sharply defined and easily recognisable to Spanish readers. More than one reviewer referred to it as ‘epic’. And, in trying to describe this novel, more than one reviewer mentioned Faulkner. Pinilla was quick to encourage this reading. When asked about his favourite authors, he mentioned only US writers – Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Caldwell. Throughout his career, he would frequently acknowledge his particular debt to Faulkner and to As I Lay Dying. (He hadn't, he said, yet read Hemingway.2) In an interview with Revista Gran Vía, one of many where he echoed Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech, he said, ‘I live among these people. I know how they think, what they do, how they live. And I believe in them. Their lives are harsh … I will always believe in the dignity of the human spirit to overcome all that is dark and tragic’ (Cobo Lozano). The prize brought national recognition. Until that moment, Pinilla was largely unknown, and the press coverage made much of this fact. (The second prize in the competition went to Gonzalo Torrente Malvido, the son of one of Spain's leading literary figures in the 1960s, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester.) The Premio Planeta was awarded at a gala event, 1,300 people at the Hotel Ritz in Barcelona. Pinilla was not there. He was, they wrote, at home in Algorta, on the hills above Arrigunaga, the setting for his novel. In the morning after the prize was announced, they said, Pinilla was up early and back at his job with the gas company in Bilbao; in the afternoons, he would enter the offices of a small publisher, Fher, writing the text for illustrated books and for cromos, trading cards for children's albums. (Fher's product list in the 1960s ranged from Superman to Mary Poppins to El Cid.) According to the reviewers, Pinilla was, like the characters in his novel, an ordinary man. He did not travel in literary circles. He was not an intellectual. He did not sport a beard (like the existentialists); his clothes were not ‘from Saint Germain de Paris’.3 He was 38; he had three children; he served two years as a mechanic on the big ships coming in and out of the port of Bilbao, a job he hated (and left) because it kept him from his family. He commuted to two jobs in Bilbao and struggled to make ends meet; he worked in his garden; he kept chickens; he loved to fish and to walk the cliffs along the Bay of Biscay. So, how to account for this serious, important, and compelling novel? Pinilla did, in fact, work for the gas company, and he did not see himself as an intellectual. He gave himself freely to the newspaper accounts of who he was and where he came from – a simple man who lived in a village to the north of Bilbao. In the late fifties, he began to build a house in Algorta, where he had summered as a child. He named this house ‘Walden’ (having found a companion spirit in Thoreau), and the move from Bilbao to the cliffs above Arrigunaga was for him a kind of declaration of independence. By this time, however, Pinilla was already a published writer. He had been writing and publishing detective novels, all (or most) under pseudonyms. (It has been difficult to establish a complete bibliography of his early work.) And, although he was in many ways opposed to organised religion, he had written stories and biographies on commission for the Church. Pinilla wrote regularly and he wrote for publication; he was not a newcomer. None of the earlier work, however, would have predicted a novel like Las ciegas hormigas. The critics rightly admired its complexity and intensity. They referred to its (or its author's) ‘profound moral sensibility’, one rooted in sharply rendered experience and offering more than the standard argument or stock literary gesture (Vázquez Zamora). Pinilla's politics were always on the left. He was, in the 1960s, a member of Spain's Communist Party. In general, however, he felt that all political parties quickly become religions, barriers to individual thought and personal freedom. An ‘epic novel’, by universalising struggle, gave him a way to speak on behalf of both the essential and the specific. In the Prologue to the 2010 edition of Las ciegas hormigas, Pinilla said that this novel was, in fact, his ‘first cry of freedom’, a cry of freedom from within and against the historical context of fascism, Franco, and the dictatorship.4 The most distinctive feature of this novel, however, is that it was written from multiple points of view, in the manner of, say, The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying. Pinilla was looking for a way to disappear behind the story, to be, he said, ‘invisible’, to let the story tell itself.5 He needed to move readers, to invite them into close engagement with the historical moment, here the period after the Civil War, but he could not (or would not) provide a single, controlling narrative presence. As Pinilla said over and over in interviews, what was important to him as a writer was to let the story come from its characters, to leave room for a reader's independent judgement. No single person, the author included, should command the scene. After the surprising success of Las ciegas hormigas, for the next two decades, until 2004, Pinilla wrote regularly but published very little – or, what he did publish received little national attention. This history is complicated and difficult. As a leftist, but not a Basque nationalist, Pinilla was oddly positioned in relation to cultural politics. The mainstream press was conservative in its values; the more experimental press in the Basque country was promoting a literature in Euskara, the Basque language. And Pinilla's relationship with his publisher, Destino, was fraught and contentious. Destino had full control of the rights to the novel and seemed to have little interest in consultation or cooperation – or sales. With a friend, and as a statement, Pinilla developed his own small press in Algorta, Libropueblo, designed as an argument against standard editorial practices, against the high price of books, and against the commercialisation of literary culture. Libropueblo's business plan was to promote local authors, to provide workshops and a space for writers to meet and talk – and to sell books at cost from a table in public plazas in the village. There was no plan for broader distribution. Pinilla also edited a magazine devoted to local arts and politics, La Galea. In 2000, the offices were fire-bombed and destroyed by ETA, the terrorist wing of the most radical of the Basque nationalist political parties. Some of Pinilla's work, then, was self-published, with limited circulation, including two collections of stories set in Algorta. Others were published with small presses in Madrid and Barcelona. By the early 2000s, however, Pinilla had completed a manuscript of about 3,000 typewritten pages, a huge novel with a cast of over fifty characters that told the history of the Basque country through the extended story of (now) two extended families living above the beach at Arrigunaga. It took the saga that was begun with Las ciegas hormigas and expanded it to cover the period from 1889 to 1961, from the restoration of the monarchy, through the Spanish Republic and the Civil War, to the era of Franco and the development of Basque nationalism. Like Las ciegas hormigas, the new novel was epic in its narrative ambition, and it was told from multiple points of view. Pinilla struggled to find a publisher for this project until he signed a contract with Tusquets, another Barcelona publishing house, and the editors at Tusquets turned the manuscript into three volumes, all published under the general title Verdes valles, colinas rojas. The individual novels were: La tierra convulsa (2004, ‘The Earth Trembles’), Los cuerpos desnudos (2005, ‘The Naked Bodies’), and Las cenizas del hierro (2005, ‘The Ashes of Iron’). In total, they number over 2,100 pages. Verdes valles, colinas rojas won multiple awards (Premio Nacional de la Critica, 2005; Premio Euskadi de Literatura en Castellano, 2005; Premio Nacional de Narrativa, 2006) and established Pinilla's reputation as one of the most important writers of his generation in Spain. The title Verdes valles, colinas rojas refers to a central thematic division between the green valleys of the old rural order, located on one side, the Arrigunaga side of the Nervion river, and the red cliffs on the other side, on the left bank of the Nervion – red for the iron ore mined in the mountains, leaving rust in the soil and the streams, and red for the fires of the blast furnaces. The narrative is divided between representatives of two families, the Altubes and the Baskardos, who stand for the competing ways of life in this area: rural and urban; traditional and industrial; wood and steel. And running through this fundamental division are the intertwined, ideological threads that, for Pinilla, define the political history of the Basque country: the church and the monarchy, democracy and dictatorship, nationalism and other varieties of resistance, from the union movement to communism to terrorism.6 I first came to Algorta with my family in 1982, when I was a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universidad de Deusto, in Bilbao. We've come back regularly ever since, just about every six years (for a year) on a sabbatical cycle. I'm writing this essay from our flat, near Arrigunaga, where I walk or bike several times each week. And I first met Pinilla in the spring of 2010. He was reading from Las ciegas hormigas and taking questions from the audience in a local bookstore, all part of a celebration in honour of the new edition by Tusquets. I spoke with him after and he signed the copy I have next to me on my desk. While I came to Las ciegas hormigas as someone who knew (and loved) Algorta, I came without the usual credentials. I teach composition, writing, at the University of Pittsburgh. I'm not a scholar of Spanish language and literature, nor am I a Faulkner specialist. Long ago I wrote a dissertation on Thomas Hardy, an author often used in comparison with Pinilla. Like Pinilla, Hardy set his novels in a specific, local area, one he called Wessex, in the south of England. But I have spent most of my career teaching writing to first-year college students, which means I have thought long and hard about how to most usefully engage students with written sources. My concern is to prepare students to work with and from assigned readings, to do more than copy, summarise, paraphrase, or quote. The problem with an undergraduate education in the US, I think, is imagining how a novice can do meaningful work in the presence of experts – how they can have something to say in the presence of other very powerful and persuasive speakers, how they might get a word in edgewise, how they might use the work of someone else (Edward Said, Adrienne Rich, John Berger) to enable and inspire work of their own, work that can legitimately be said to be original, innovative, memorable, theirs. Pinilla appealed to me initially as a writer who brought me familiar scenes and local history; I came to see his work as an important point of reference to both my teaching and my interest in writers and the work of writing. In August, 2014, my wife and I spent an afternoon with Pinilla in his study in ‘Walden’, his house in Algorta. He was open and gracious and generous with his time and attention. We were interviewing him with an article in mind, one that might include a translation of a section from Las ciegas hormigas. It seemed to us then, as it seems to us now, odd that his work has not been translated into English. We intended to follow up in the summer of 2015, but, sadly, he passed away soon after we left. We spoke at length about Faulkner. Pinilla was, he said, attracted to the passion and the sense of the ‘primitive’ in Faulkner, to his attention to the land and to place. He was drawn to the edginess and the darkness in Faulkner (acidez y sombra). Before his encounter with As I Lay Dying, he had been writing regularly, biographies and genre novels, one about every two years, all located in the area, but the writing was never what he had hoped for. He said that As I Lay Dying opened for him un hueco, a gap or entryway, a working space that allowed him to do something he had not done before. After finishing the novel, Pinilla said to himself, ‘I can do that.’ Faulkner, he said, became for him a neighbour, a teacher (maestro), a colleague and companion, un semejante. In the 1950s, I discovered Faulkner and became familiar with the literature of North America, and this at a time when Spain was not encouraging cultural exchange. Nevertheless, there was a new American library in Bilbao and I had the luck to get to know its books. Among its authors, the one who made the greatest impression on me was Faulkner, and I was fascinated, above all else, by the sense he gave as a writer of not having, himself, said anything. I came to dislike the feeling, as a reader, that an author was trying to put something in my head, and Faulkner, with his distant language, sometimes prolific and sometimes torturous, gave the impression that he didn't care if anyone understood what he had written, that he was writing only for himself. It bothers me when a novel just ends and everything is wrapped up – period, end of subject. To finish one novel and then begin another, a new one, just doesn't seem to me to be a serious undertaking. … I always dreamed of doing something in the manner of Faulkner because his style squared with my way of being in the world and with how I understood story telling.7 Pinilla first encountered Faulkner in La Casa Americana in Bilbao. Founded in the early 1950s (most likely in 1951), Bilbao's Casa Americana was one of seven such centres in Spain. The others were in Barcelona, Cádiz, Madrid, Valencia, Sevilla and Zaragoza. And there were similar centres throughout the world, including South America. They were managed by the USIA (the United States Information Agency), a branch of the US State Department. They were part of a post-war/Cold War project to promote American interests throughout the world by providing occasions for an exchange of ideas and cultural values. The programmes sponsored by Casa Americana were not simply focused on American art and culture, however; the organisers also brokered meetings between engineers, architects, physicians, corporate executives, and politicians. In 1960, the director of the Casa Americana, Abraham Hopman, spoke with Joseph Barr, the mayor of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, about formalising the relationship between these two great, smoky, industrial cities.8 And there were obvious links between the US-sponsored initiatives to establish good will and mutual understanding and NATO's desire for military bases on the Iberian Peninsula. US national interests were at stake; these were what justified the investment of resources. Still, the libraries served local interests and local readers like Pinilla by providing an ‘American’ space in a Spanish city, whatever that might have meant at the time, and by featuring materials that might otherwise not have cleared Franco-era censorship. The Casa Americana in Bilbao contained a library of books, magazines, and newspapers, and it sponsored a regular series of lectures, readings, screenings, performances, and colloquia. According to one report, it had as many as 5,000 members, and the library served up to 10,000 readers each month. In 1952, its programmes in Bilbao (and at the other Spanish centres), were augmented by US-sponsored ‘Institutes for North American Studies’. The Casa Americana was closed in 1961, although its library and schedule of cultural events were continued through the offices of the US Consulate in Bilbao until 1996. It is tempting to say that Pinilla stumbled on Faulkner, but the encounter was not simply the product of chance. In the 1950s and 1960s, Faulkner was much promoted by the US State Department through its various programmes. His books were front and centre in libraries like Bilbao's Casa Americana. And he was often sent abroad on tour – to read, to attend conferences, to be interviewed by the press and on radio and television. Faulkner was, as Catherine Kodat said, ‘one of American's first Cold War cultural celebrities’.9 I don't think any other living North American could have affected the minds and hearts of Venezuelans as he did during his two weeks here … The most hardened press elements, the politically unsympathetic, all fell before his charm and his unwavering integrity. Even if nothing else of cultural note happens to us, we will be able to feed upon the effects of his visit for a long time to come.10 It should be said that Faulkner was not always a willing participant in cultural exchange. He had to be prodded and cajoled in order to agree to these trips. He resisted the position of official spokesman, and his drinking episodes on the road became part of the mythology that trailed him throughout his career. For US scholars, teachers, and reviewers, his role in relation to the State Department was critical fodder for both the right (who saw him as promoting un-American values) and the left, for whom he was the unwitting pawn of US imperialism. His form of literary modernism was promoted (by, it was said, ‘New York intellectuals’) as valuable because it was abstract and difficult to parse, resistant to statement or summary, something that stood in stark contrast to Soviet-style realism, and yet could be said, in its difficulty, to promote both freedom of thought and freedom of expression. (This account is not far from what Pinilla said he valued most in Faulkner's prose – its argument on behalf of freedom.) in a perverse yet entirely unremarkable sense, the years of the Cold War were the good old days for American artists and intellectuals – the days when … ‘the CIA was the NEA …’. Imagine if you will, if you can, a time when the work of abstract expressionists and twelve-tone composers was considered vital to national security, a time when the establishment of the pax Americana required the funding and nourishment of a noncommunist left with high-modernist tastes in arts and letters. It is hard to tamp down a sense of nostalgia.11 However he was being marketed by the State Department, and whether he did or did not fully serve its ends, Faulkner's work came to be deeply important to an impressive list of Latin American writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Juan Carlos Onetti, Juan Rulfo, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Faulkner's novels, some argue, enabled a break with more restrictive, European forms of realism and helped to shape the role of the novel in the Latin American ‘Boom’. There are many dangers in trying to generalise the Spanish-speaking world in the 1960s. The struggles for political and cultural freedom were not the same in Spain and, say, Colombia. But it was clearly the right time for Pinilla and García Márquez to be reading Faulkner. It was also the case that Pinilla had Spanish authors (some of them also attentive readers of Faulkner) whom he could have taken as models – Juan Benet, for example, in Volverás a Región, and Elena Quiroga, in Algo pasa en la calle. We know that Pinilla was reading Valle-Inclán's El ruedo ibérico in the early 1960s. He mentions this in more than one interview, but he mentions it in passing and makes very little of the connection. El ruedo ibérico was another massive project. The first novel in the series, La corte de los milagros, was published in 1927. The original plan was for three trilogies, nine novels in all, covering the period in Spanish history from 1833 to 1898, between the reign of Isabel II and the end of the Spanish-American war. Valle-Inclán only completed the first three novels, but he remains a major figure in Spanish modernism, and the novels offered important experiments in narrative, particularly in relation to point of view. Valle-Inclán wanted to recount history from the point of view of the people, construed broadly, rather than from the point of view of privileged individuals. Pinilla, in other words, could have worked from (and referenced) Spanish writers, both modernists and his own contemporaries. But he didn't. He chose to reference American rather than Spanish or European literature as a source of inspiration. The American connection meant something to him; it deserves our attention as readers. The point I have been making is that Faulkner's novels didn't just happen to be circulating in translation in Bilbao and Cartagena. They were there by design. And when Pinilla encountered Faulkner's As I Lay Dying in the Casa Americana in Bilbao, the timing was perfect. He was ready for such a book; in that sense, he was the State Department's target audience. In his life and in his writing, Pinilla was looking to define a freedom that he came to associate with ‘America’, a freedom that was Emersonian, individual rather than derived, lived rather than argued, more a course of action than an affiliation with political parties. (Remember: Pinilla named his house ‘Walden’. The name remains today, carved into the stone wall that encloses his garden.) And for Pinilla in the 1960s, this notion of freedom adhered to certain American cultural products, in books and movies – and in popular as well as high culture.12 One of Pinilla's first publications was a police novel, Misterio de la pensión florrie (1944) which was published under the pseudonym ‘Romo P. Girca’. It was inspired by Seven Keys to Baldpate, a pulp novel written by the US author Earl Derr Biggers (and first published in 1913). Seven Keys was made into a Broadway play by George M. Cohan; it became the source for several Hollywood films (in 1917, 1929, 1935, and 1947). Biggers would become the author of the Charlie Chan mysteries.13 Pinilla didn't read his way to Faulkner, at least not as the story of influence is usually told in literary histories. Las ciegas hormigas was not the product of broad or focused reading; it was not the result of a thorough study of the traditions of the genre, whether American or European. And when Pinilla encountered Mientras agonizo in the Casa Americana in Bilbao, that meeting was as much the legacy of Cold War cultural politics as an instance of literary inheritance. So where (or how) as readers might we understand the work of an author in such a setting? Around 1950 or ’51 another event happened that influenced my literary tendencies. My mother asked me to accompany her to Aracataca, where I was born, and to sell the house where I spent my first years. When I got there it was at first quite shocking because I was now twenty-two and hadn't been there since the age of eight. Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn't really looking at the village, but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the houses, the people, and the memories. I'm not sure whether I had already read Faulkner or not, but I know now that only a technique like Faulkner's could have enabled me to write down what I was seeing. The atmosphere, the decadence, the heat in the village were roughly the same as what I had felt in Faulkner. It was a banana-plantation region inhabited by a lot of Americans from the fruit companies which gave it the same sort of atmosphere I had found in the writers of the Deep South. Critics have spoken of the literary influence of Faulkner, but I see it as a coincidence: I had simply found material that had to be dealt with in the same way that Faulkner had treated similar material.14 García Márquez, like Pinilla, was one of Faulkner's most interesting and insightful early readers. (Leaf Storm, first published in 1955, like Las ciegas hormigas, is often linked to As I Lay Dying.) Both writers were drawn to Faulkner's approach to land and people, to place and point of view, to Faulkner's way of attending to and recognising the extraordinary in the local, the epic in ordinary people and in their lives. It is interesting to think of Pinilla, in the late fifties, early sixties, reading Faulkner (in translation) as partner to those US readers who were learning to read Faulkner through the writing and teaching of Cleanth Brooks, one of Faulkner's most important early US critics and champions. From William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963) to William Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (1978) and William Faulkner: First Encounters (1983), Brooks was determined to teach readers how best to deal with the most confusing and compelling elements in Faulkner's novels. The relation between the two truths is rarely a simple one. It is not a simple one in Faulkner's novels. Faulkner critics are prone to confuse matters by saying that since the fiction is good, the ‘facts’ must be correct, or that since the facts are incorrect, the fiction is bound to be poor. Faulkner's novels and stories, properly read, can doubtless tell us a great deal about the South, but Faulkner is primarily an artist. His reader will have to respect the mode of fiction and not transgress its limitations if he is to understand from it the facts about the South – that is, he must be able to sense what is typical and what is exceptional, what is normal and what is an aberration. He can scarcely make these discriminations unless he is prepared to see what Faulkner is doing with his ‘facts.’16 And, Brooks argued, it was equally misleading to focus on 'symbols’ and to lose a sense of connection to the particulars of the American South (‘a responsible context with its own network of interrelations’ and not a ‘grab bag out of which particular symbols can be drawn’). This would be ‘a grotesque parody of anything like an adequate, careful reading’.17 (Much of the Spanish scholarship on Pinilla's novels, I should add, has been to similarly document and attest to the ‘real’ history, sociology, and geography that underlie his fictions.) If the plot of [As I Lay Dying] is very simple, the technique of presentation is not. Nothing is told by the author in his own person and on his own authority. Instead, the novel is broken into fifty-nine segments, each assigned to a character in the novel. We are not told to whom the character is addressing his comments. Sometimes, in fact, he simply seems to be talking to himself. Naturally, Faulkner is careful to have each person speak in character, but, since few of the people who figure in As I Lay Dying are very literate, Faulkner often endows them with a vocabulary that they do not in reality possess. This is a literary convention that the reader has to accept, and that acceptance, once made, pays handsome dividends. We are thus enabled to penetrate much more deeply into the complexities of their minds than we could otherwise, for we must remember that Faulkner has in this novel denied himself the privileges of an omniscient author.18 And, he concludes, ‘Faulkner's technique of presentation bears directly on an important theme in this novel: the ultimate isolation of every human being from the rest of humanity’.19 The point of this comparison is not to suggest that Pinilla read Cleanth Brooks. He most certainly did not; he didn't work that way. What I hope to suggest is that Pinilla's novel can and should be read as a serious critical reading (and reworking) of As I Lay Dying, a reading and reworking whose product is a work of fiction. Pinilla said that he would often begin a writing day by reading from As I Lay Dying, reading for the rhythm and the music of Faulkner's sentences. This would launch him toward sentences of his own. I've often wondered just what that might mean – or what it was that Pinilla might have heard and then carried with him to his own prose. Pinilla was, after all, reading Faulkner in translation, and what falls out in a translation is exactly what a native speaker would hear as the rhythm and music in Faulkn