William Faulkner, the Old Testament Homer of the South

William Faulkner (Mississippi, USA, 1897-1962), one of the four or five most influential novelists of the 20th century, perhaps only comparable to Proust, Joyce and Kafka, enjoys a well-deserved fame as a muscular and magmatic prose writer, as a creator of structures in which the living and the dead coexist, and as a builder of primal and brutal characters who, in turn, are of a Shakespearean complexity and depth.

Reading ofIntruder in the dust, one of his late novels, published in 1948, just a year before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, reminds us that Faulkner could also be an exceptional inventor of plots. The story of this novel, published by the Golden Needle has been recovered in the translation made by Manuel de Pedrolo (revised and updated by Carles Miró and Núria Bendicho), is of an essential and expressive drama, between the southern fable, the police story and the classical Greek tragedy.

The protagonist, Lucas Beauchamp, is an old, poor, black farmer who has always lived with a lack of fear and a display of pride unbecoming of his race, a lack of fear and a pride that are perceived as inconceivable and intolerable within the small, closed-off, classist, and racist world of the county. The ghosts and wounds of the Civil War of a century earlier still weigh and fester. One day, Beauchamp is arrested and accused of having shot in the back a white man, a member of a sprawling, pedigreed, and dangerous family that lives on the fringes of everything and by its own rules. From this incident onward, and without neglecting the tricks (suspense, twists, plot twists) to create intrigue typical of the noir genre, Faulkner unfolds the core of the plot: Beauchamp, handcuffed to the bed of a policeman who has the extremely complicated and thankless duty of preventing the exhumation of the body of his alleged victim, can thus prove that he is not the culprit.

A lucid and magnanimous writer

Beyond his chaotically colossal stylistic virtuosity, which enables him to write long, torrential paragraphs in which the dregs of dirty realism wallow with all kinds of lyrical lightning bolts and existential reflections full of Homeric and Old Testament echoes, one of the great qualities of the most lucid of Faulkner the man is his literary intelligence, in which the laws and truths of imagination and language prevail, has little to do with worldly intelligence and the reasons for morality and politics. In this sense, the immeasurable talent of Faulkner the fictional storyteller allows him to cast off the obtuse straitjacket of prejudices—racial, social, ideological—that he had as a man, as a son of his time and land, and enables him to write with unprecedented freedom, complexity, and perspicacity.

Although it perhaps occupies a lower step than his most incontestable novels –While I was dying, Light of August, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!...–, Intruder in the dust It is pure Faulkner.