A great anti-racist novel by William Faulkner

Intruder in the dust It is not usually included among the handful of masterpieces of William Faulkner (1897-1962) However, upon closer inspection, it is an excellent novel with great literary strength. We could even consider it a very suitable title for readers who want to delve into the author's universe for the first time. It is also one of his works with the most evident anti-racist commitment. This is a noteworthy fact, especially considering that it was published in 1948, several decades before the civil rights movement took center stage in the United States.

The first thing that will surprise the new reader of Faulkner is his prose. Sinuous, serpentine, brimming with semantic richness, with a powerful structure, flowing like a river that doesn't yearn for its delta, dense, hypnotic, and challenging. After Proust's, it is one of the most characteristic of contemporary literature. A period that sails impetuously and, suddenly, anchors itself in lines of dialogue that capture the informal tone of colloquial language.

Obviously, Faulkner is true to his style, but we won't find here the techniques that characterize titles like The Sound and the Fury either Absalom, AbsalomThe inflammatory rhetoric, the tangled syntax, the dislocated punctuation, the interrupted sentences, the confusion of points of view... It seems as if the author, without abdicating the essentials of his stylistic principles, did not want to distract the reader from the central theme of the story.

The central theme is this: Lucas Beauchamp, an elderly Black man from the mythical Yoknapatawpha County (which is to say, the melting pot of all the human and social landscapes of the South), is accused of shooting a white man in the back. He is an unusual protagonist because he is a Black man who refuses to kneel: "stubborn, arrogant, sullen, independent (and also insolent)." In a society so excitable and uncompromising on racial issues, Lucas faces the strict application of the infamous and inexorable Lynch Law. Only a miracle can save him from lynching, but unexpectedly, one may occur: a white teenager, his uncle, and a septuagenarian woman search for the evidence that proves Lucas's innocence. Their ordeal is the narrative engine of the story.

Unacceptable discrimination

The translation of the original is the one that was done Manuel de PedroloUpdated by Carles Miró and Núria Bendicho. The result is more than acceptable, especially considering that Faulkner is not an easy author to adapt. His proverbial digressions, in any case, do not hinder the narrative at all, which unfolds as the detective story it truly is. The author simply wants to demonstrate that even in his time, racial discrimination in the world's largest democracy was unacceptable: "We find ourselves in the same position as Germany in 1933, when they only had the alternative of being Nazis or Jews, or of the Russians of today (who are also us or not just Europeans), who have no other option and we must do it alone without help, interference or (thank you very much) advice from anyone, since only we can do it if Lucas's equality is to be anything more than a prisoner of itself behind the impregnable barricade of the direct heirs of the victory of 1861-1865."

Only the South can save the South: a debatable theory, but a giant leap forward given the beliefs of many of its citizens, convinced that a Black person might no longer be a slave, but should in no way enter the same bar, the same bathroom, the same hospital, or the same school as a white person. And now, of course, those who were left destitute niggers We call them immigrants...