Word: faulkner
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...created a Latin American Yoknapatawpha in which grubby fact and mythological fantasy mingled into what can loosely be called magic realism. His new novel is a more circumscribed, grimmer and more obscure work. Its setting-mainly the presidential palace of a nameless South American country-shows a little less Faulkner and a little more Kafka. The Castle, with a high temperature-humidity index, comes to mind...
...Stanley Rose, the "flamboyant, self-styled con man," who ran a book shop frequented by many of the writers and who himself finally went straight, becoming a literary agent, is almost satisfying. And for a further depiction of the Hollywood scene, Dardis is wise enough to rely on Faulkner's observations rather than his own patchy reporting...
Both Fitzgerald and Faulkner, along with their less disillusioned colleague, Aldous Huxley, would have been surprised to learn that a few years after Faulkner made these remarks, two writers again turned toward Hollywood in search of the American ideal. Nathaniel West, slaving in a B-grade studio to reduce the images of silver screen gangster sagas to flicks like The Black Coin where a young hero, wearing a white sweater, is attacked regularly by four burly men in black, turned the ideal upside down. In The Day of the Locust America became a Hollywood burlesque...
...people think you are "discovering" the South? Patting us on the back because Faulkner rose a phoenix from our ashes? Because Carter plays the erudite Good Ole Boy? Because you have finally noticed the real bigots live up North? How dare you patronize...
...Connor died in 1964. In retrospect, that date looks like the end of a literary era. If so, was it because the modern Snopesian world of rootless mechanical men and heartless financiers had finally, as Faulkner was always predicting, done in the South? Or was it that creation flagged once deprived of one powerful, catalytic genius? Whatever the reason, Southern writing today, at the moment of what may be that region's first national triumph in over 100 years, seems stalled between the glorious past and an uncertain future. The past, in fact, has become a burden...