Revisiting Foundational Fictions in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Carlos Fuentes’s “Sons of the Conquistador”

In William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! and Carlos Fuentes’s short story “Sons of the Conquistador”, personal and national destinies collide as the authors write their own critical versions of foundational fictions. The stories explore the relationships between brothers, and between fathers and sons against the background of the growth of two multiracial regions: the American South around the time of the Civil War and Mexico at the beginning of Spanish colonization. Both works feature a type of founding father: Hernán Cortés, who conquered Mexico, and the self-made planter Thomas Sutpen. As in racial romances, the authors reflect on miscegenation and mestizaje, but choose to focus on two sets of half-brothers: a biracial elder son and a younger white heir, the son of a different mother. Faulkner’s multiple narrative voices intertwine the taboo of incest with that of racial mixing, producing a multi-layered novel where the perspective of incestuous miscegenation causes the downfall of the Sutpens, but where incest also allows for an evocation of interracial love. Fuentes, who felt a kinship between his Mexico and Faulkner’s South, chose to retain both the strong erotic tones and the dialogic form of Absalom, Absalom! in a simpler narrative structure. If Faulkner and Fuentes’s depictions of racial mixing eventually diverge, they both revisit the history of their country to explore the complexity of interpersonal relationships and the possibility of living in a multiracial nation. Glissant’s concept of creolization eventually provides an alternative reading to the pessimism that concludes both stories.