Wanderers in Dialog: Extraterritorial Characters in Onetti’s and Faulkner’s Short Narrative

Abstract

The influence of William Faulkner’s literature in Latin-American writers has been centered in thematic aspects as in the concept of failure and the construction of mythical spaces. It is observed that most of the studies focused on the novels. The following essay reached the interpretation of two short stories, Juan Carlos Onetti’s “Jacob y el otro”, and William Faulkner’s “Hair”, as from Steiner’s Extraterritorial concept, which, although describes the experience of certain writers at the movement from one space to another, and from one language to another, it can be adapted to the process of marginality in culture’s terrains. The analysis used Genette’s narratology, in specifics narrator’s perspective and reiterative descriptions of the characters, linked to the configuration of the space. These in order to the similarities between the different forms of representation make sense.            This two short stories interpretation allowed pointing the correspondences between the narrative strategies of Uruguayan and American writers, focused in the heterogeneity of visions over the foreign characters, those who are placed as “strangers” and, for that, their definition from a unique perspective results impossible. This is evident in the narrators, who display an imprecise description of character’s physical and moral qualities. These imprecisions are presented through discursive modalities as “someone says” or “He told me”, etc. The link observed between the appropriation of spaces and the configuration of characters achieved the clarification of the social structures, which, in booth stories, do not tend to the inherent dynamics of the idea of progress, but to point the perpetuation of conservative cultural forms. Also, putting in dialog Onetti’s and Faulkner’s characters, clarified the links between the American South -closed and archaic- with some areas of Latin America, therefore, is possible to settle spatial and temporal correspondences founded in booth author’s short narrative.