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  • France's Encounter with Faulkner
  • Frédérique Spill (bio)

"The writers that we read again, thinking, with a fast-beating heart, that we haven't read them enough, are rare. Faulkner is one of them: marvelous, bewitching, contagious, in a constant heaven of details."

(Sollers, Lumière de Faulkner/Light of Faulkner," 645; my trans.)

Faulkner has always been part of what the French consider their literary canon. From the start, he has ranked high on the top list of the favorite writers of French readers. A March 2009 entry of The Guardian's books blog marveled that "William Faulkner was the second most-cited author in a French magazine's poll asking French writers to name their favourite books." Faulkner's presence at that height is still unquestioned: ask any French reader who Faulkner is, they will know; they will know about him even though they may never have read him—or read a whole novel. The images that come up most frequently when French readers talk about Faulkner involve the "idiot" Benjy trying to tell his own story in the first person or the rotting corpse of that poor mother, taken along the bumpy roads of northern Mississippi.

Why is that? The Guardian's books blog assumes that the privileged bond between Faulkner and the French dates back to the 1940s, referring to French Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who supposedly maintained that "for young people in France, Faulkner is a god" (Faulkner and Cowley 35).1 Though Sartre's role in the invention of a French Faulkner was certainly decisive, his appropriation of Faulkner's work would not have [End Page 9] been possible without the astute foresight of earlier readers. It is, indeed, to Maurice-Edgar Coindreau that Faulkner's work owes its appearance in French bookstores in the 1930s and its entrance in France's then particularly vivid intellectual life and, some time later, in French academia.2 A passeur, ushering in and sharing whatever discoveries he made on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Coindreau undoubtedly is the instigator of a French Faulkner critical tradition, which has yet to show the first signs of fatigue. In the meantime, ever since Faulkner's work has been made available to French readers in French translations, it has influenced the creativeness of several generations of French writers, most of whom have forcefully acknowledged his legacy.

A few years before the French made their first encounter with Faulkner, Faulkner, then a writer in the making, traveled to France for the first time, following in the steps of other American writers that had already headed to the Old Continent. However, Faulkner chose not to enter their circle; instead, he developed a very personal and solitary bond with Paris. While focusing on France's reception and appropriation of Faulkner and on Faulkner's influence on France's academic and cultural life, this paper will also include a discussion of the impact his 1925 trip to France had on Faulkner's writing, thus highlighting what may be regarded as a reciprocal dynamic.

Faulkner's French Inventors3

France's attraction to Faulkner's work started earlier than Sartre's taking an interest in his work and publishing his groundbreaking essay on the treatment of time in Faulkner, whom he cunningly compared with Marcel Proust, suggesting that the latter's novelistic technique should have been Faulkner's, that it might have been Faulkner's, had Proust not been too eloquent, too fond of clarity and too intellectual to sacrifice "the appearances of chronology." France's privileged bond with Faulkner was, indeed, fostered by a few determining earlier encounters, the first of which occurred in the early 1930s. Faulkner was first brought to the French by professor Maurice-Edgard Coindreau, who taught French at Princeton University from 1922 to 1961. Not only was Coindreau one of the (then) few readers of Faulkner's early novels as they came out in the United States; he also convinced Gaston Gallimard, the founder of the prestigious Paris-based publishing house, that Faulkner was to be read by the French. Moreover, he offered his services as one of Faulkner's first translators into French. [End...

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