[In the following essay, O'Bryan-Knight finds similarities between Emily and Cuéllar in Mario Vargas Llosa's Los cachorros.]

At first glance the protagonists of William Faulkner's short story “A Rose for Emily” and Mario Vargas Llosa's novella Los cachorros appear to be exact opposites. The former is a mature woman from the semi-rural town of Jefferson, Mississippi, while the latter is a young man from a semi-urban environment, the Miraflores district of Lima. A quick comparison of the these characters' life stories yields no obvious points of intersection. Emily Grierson lives her youth under the watchful eye of her over-protective father. Following his death, she withdraws from the world and spends her remaining years shut away in the big house she inherited. Cuéllar, a talented and popular boy, seems destined for a golden future until the day he is cornered by his school's guard dog. Castrated in the attack, he never regains his early promise. Other than mutual misfortune, is there some stronger evidence of overlap between the texts that would warrant a comparative study? As this essay will demonstrate, there is indeed. Under closer observation, the Southern spinster and the Latin American eunuch actually have much in common. Both live at odds with their close-knit communities, and it is from these communities that we learn about their unhappy lives. An exploration of these similarities will prove fruitful for two reasons: It will give us a more precise understanding of the Faulknerian nature of Vargas Llosa's narrative. And, it will provide us with an opportunity to explore the particular efficacy of choric narration, an unusual yet powerful perspective from which to tell a story.

The existence of parallels between Faulkner and Vargas Llosa comes, of course, as no surprise. The frequent references to the North American author in the Peruvian's fiction and literary criticism attest to his familiarity with his predecessor's work.¹ Furthermore, Vargas Llosa has long acknowledged his literary debt to the man he deems “the paradigm of novelists.”² He has stated repeatedly that Faulkner was the first novelist he read with pencil and paper in hand, in an effort to master the U.S. writer's sophisticated narrative technique.³ He has even cautioned his own critics to note that this influence was not only technical but thematic as well:

Sería una gran mentira decir que mi deslumbramiento por Faulkner fue “técnico”. Nada de eso: su mundo perturbado y aventurero, trágico y fanático, en el que las más turbias perversiones del espíritu humano conviven con grandes arrebatos de generosidad y nobleza me sigue pareciendo uno de los más ricos y “verosímiles” creado jamás por un novelista.

[It would be a lie to say that I was impressed only by Faulkner's technique. Not at all. His disturbed and daring, tragic and fanatical world, in which the most convoluted perversions of the human spirit cohabit with great outbursts of generosity and nobility, continues to seem to me to be one of the richest and most verisimilar ever created by a novelist.]⁴

Oddly enough, despite this full disclosure of debt, Vargas Llosa's critics have, for the most part, glossed over this connection. Although commentators on the author's work often make passing mention of its “Faulknerian” character, very few have stopped to elaborate.⁵ Of these, the only critic to pursue the matter has been Mary Davis, who has examined parallels between the writers' literary criticism and novels.⁶ Because she does not consider their short fiction, however, Davis overlooks what appears to be the most concrete evidence of affinity between the two.

Vargas Llosa recalls that he first became acquainted with Faulkner's work while studying at the University of San Marcos and that he was transformed by this encounter; “Quizá lo más perdurable de mis años universitarios no fue lo que aprendí en las aulas, sino en las novelas y cuentos que relatan la saga de Yoknapatawpha County” [“Perhaps the most enduring memory of my college years was not what I learned in the classrooms, but in the novels and stories that tell the saga of Yoknapatawpha County”] (“El pais de las mil caras” 241). Apparently, it was at this time that he came across a Spanish translation of “A Rose for Emily,” arguably the best known of the Yoknapatawpha County stories.⁷ Although Vargas Llosa reiterates his aforementioned debt to Faulkner in his introduction to the volume which contains the definitive edition of Los cachorros, he has never suggested (nor denied) that “A Rose for Emily” served as a model for his novella. He claims, instead, that he based the story on a newspaper piece he had read some years before about an infant castrated by a dog in the Andes.⁸

While I do not doubt that the article provided the initial anecdote, it is also true that the structure and theme of the novella bear an unmistakable resemblance to those of Faulkner's story. The implication of this resemblance, however, is not immediately apparent. Is this a case of what Gustavo Pérez Firmat categorizes as “genetic” affinity that arises due to a causal connection between the texts?⁹ Or, is it a case of what he terms “appositional” affinity, that which arises independently of any causal connection and is due instead to similarities in the environments in which the texts were produced? The answer is both. As I have suggested, Vargas Llosa had the opportunity and the inclination to use Faulkner's short story as a model for his own. Yet, as I shall show, Los cachorros is by no means a slavish imitation of “A Rose for Emily.” In fact, with respect to the use of choric narration, Vargas Llosa clearly develops the technique much further than Faulkner. Thus, what began as influence developed into confluence as the Latin American author found in the work of his North American predecessor material useful for fashioning a powerful and original critique of his own society.

“A Rose for Emily” (1930) and Los cachorros [The Cubs] (1967) have never before been studied in concert, although each has garnered a considerable amount of critical commentary independently of the other. With respect to Faulkner's short story, commentators have generally searched the text for the cause of Emily's dementia. Over the years they have fingered a number of likely culprits, including her father, her pride, her aristocratic lineage, her attachment to the past, and the patriarchal culture of the Old South.¹⁰ Commentators on Vargas Llosa's novella have focused mainly on the symbolism of Cuéllar's castration and have suggested a number of possibilities.¹¹ His predicament has been read as symbolic of the effects of a parochial education, a bourgeois upbringing, a homosexual tendency, and an artistic inclination. What my interpretation will add to this already abundant critical corpus is a look at these fundamental works of short fiction in a new comparative context. That is, I will consider the Latin American narrative in the light of its counterpart from the United States, a work it reflects, complements, and develops.

As I begin my comparison, I wish to emphasize that in pointing out parallels between the texts, I am not arguing that they are mirror images of one another. To be sure, there are major differences between the two. With regard to technique, Faulkner's highly disjunctive time scheme has no connection with Vargas Llosa's chronologically ordered text.¹² Likewise, the rich linguistic dimension of the novella has no parallel in the standard dialect of Faulkner's story.¹³ With respect to theme, the issue of incest that is pertinent to “A Rose for Emily” is not found in Los cachorros, and the subject of castration that is so central to the novella is peripheral at best to the story.¹⁴ I will not dwell on these or other points of divergence between the two works because to do so would be beyond the scope of my study and needlessly repetitive of other critical efforts.

On the most basic structural level both works are divided into segments that relate a series of vignettes which, when pieced together, profile the lonely lives of their protagonists. More significant, however, the two feature protagonists who themselves are very much alike. Both Emily and Cuéllar suffer circumstances in their upbringings that inhibit their sexual maturation and result in disturbed behavior. Emily lives until the age of thirty in the shadow of her domineering father, who stands between her and any potential suitors that might come calling. The father-daughter bond is so tight that the townsfolk come to think of them as a “tableau”: “Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door” (437).¹⁵ Emily's refusal to part with her father's corpse for three days after his death makes clear the unnatural nature of her parental attachment and the damaging effect it has had on her psyche. It is not until the very end of the story, however, that we learn the full magnitude and hideous consequences of her emotional devastation. The extent to which Cuéllar has been crippled by his accident is not evident until the onset of adolescence, at which point it becomes clear that the castration has, in effect, severed his ties with his group. When his companions begin to show an interest in the opposite sex, he shows an unnatural desire to prolong boyhood. As the others are calling girls for dates, Cuéllar is calling them names and splattering them with foul-smelling liquids. Because he cannot mature sexually, he does not mature emotionally and is thus left behind by his peers.

Due to the circumstances of their youths, both of these characters have reason to mature into maladjusted, unhappy adults. Their plights are exacerbated, however, when each suffers a crisis of unrequited love. Emily is over thirty, past the age of marriage, when she takes up with the Yankee foreman Homer Barron. The townsfolk wonder how a Southern lady could think seriously about a Northern day laborer. Nevertheless, reserved and withdrawn Emily seems quite taken with the affable, gregarious Yankee. Despite his allure, Barron is indeed an inappropriate match for Emily, for he is a philanderer who courts with no intention of marriage. She, on the other hand, grows so attached to her companion that, when faced with the prospect of losing him, she resorts to murder. It is not difficult to infer a motivation for the crime or for subsequently keeping the body in a room “decked and furnished as for a bridal” (443). It is the deranged spinster's desperate attempt to preserve her romance. This severe sentimental crisis marks a turning point in Emily's life, since it definitively severs the possibility of normal interaction with the community. As the narrator observes, “From that point on her front door remained closed …” (441).

Cuéllar's sentimental crisis is similar to Emily's in that it occurs relatively late in life. The year after his high school graduation, long after his pals have paired off, Cuéllar finally falls in love with Teresa, a new girl in the group. Like Emily's Barron, Cuéllar's sweetheart takes his affections lightly. This becomes clear when the boys earnestly attempt to interview Teresa about her feelings for Cuéllar and she coyly deflects their questions: “… Teresita, ¿lo iba a aceptar? y ella … ¿a quién? y nosotros cómo a quién y ella … ¿Cuéllar?” [“Teresita, was she going to say yes? and she goes … who? and we go like what do you mean who? and she … Cuéllar?”] (138). Despite his sweetheart's coquettish character, Cuéllar is smitten. Love transforms the social deviant into a “muchacho modelo” [“exemplary young man”]. In the presence of his beloved he becomes a mature, courteous young fellow who is eager to discuss politics and plans for future study. The only thing that stands between Cuéllar and his complete reintegration into the group is that, after two months of fawning over her, he has still not asked Teresa to go steady. The group finds this hesitation unacceptable and chides him for it. Cuéllar justifies his inaction, explaining that, because of his physical condition, he could never marry Teresa and, because of the sincerity of his feelings toward her, “porque la quería” [“because he loved her”] (140), he would never think of leading her on. Shortly thereafter Teresa leaves him for another fellow. As in “A Rose for Emily,” this sentimental crisis marks a turning point in the protagonist's life. After losing Teresa, Cuéllar returns to his self-destructive behavior: “Entonces … volvió a las andadas” [“After that … he returned to his escapades”] (143), and from this point on his life is a downward spiral to an early death. It is important to reiterate that neither of the protagonists' emotional crises is directly responsible for their ultimate destruction; the seeds of disaster were sown long before in childhood. Their sentimental attachments only make matters worse by offering false hope.

While both Emily and Cuéllar are driven to their sorry ends largely by circumstances beyond their control—crippling childhoods followed by failure to find a mate—we must note that both also exhibit character traits that exacerbate their predicaments. To the townsfolk Emily appears arrogant and willful. They feel she flaunts her low regard for public opinion when she ignores the minister's advice and continues the affair with Barron. Likewise, they see her refusal to obey the laws that require that she pay taxes or tell the druggist why she needs poison as further evidence that she considers herself above the town's authority. Emily is willful enough not only to select an unsuitable mate but also to kill him when he does not conform to her wishes. Critics who have observed her strong character have come to conflicting conclusions. For Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, this indomitable pride is Emily's fatal flaw that ultimately brings about her madness.¹⁶ In a feminist reading of the story, Judith Fetterley lays the blame not on Emily's character but on the patriarchal system of the Old South that punishes a woman for being independent, assertive, and generally unladylike.¹⁷ Both interpretations agree, however, that Emily's dominant personality would naturally clash with the collective interests of the community of Jefferson.

Although his personality is the polar opposite of Emily's, Cuéllar also has a character trait that contributes to his downfall. Whereas she ignores public opinion, he is a slave to it, requiring the approval of his peers to affirm his own masculinity. Roland Forgues points out that this particular trait is apparent even before the accident.¹⁸ Though Cuéllar is somewhat small and fragile, and his talents more for study than sport, he wants desperately to be a member of the soccer team and trains intensively for an entire summer just to make the cut. When his friends praise his improvement on the field, he delights in the attention: “[S]e reía feliz, se soplaba las uñas y se las lustraba en la camiseta …” [“He laughed with joy, he blew on his fingernails and buffed them on his shirt …”] (110). This is a boy whose sense of self-worth is dependent on his peers' approval. He learns that he can win this approval by displaying virility, in this case athletic prowess. The castration, therefore, does not change Cuéllar's character so much as aggravate it. After the accident his antics seem calculated to prove his virility to the rest of the group: “Se hacía el loco para impresionar, pero también para ¿viste, viste? sacarle cachita a Lalo, tú no te atreviste y yo sí me atreví” [“He acted like a nut to show off, but also to—see that? see that?—to show up Lalo, you didn't take the dare, but I did”] (125). Just after losing Teresa, he performs an especially dangerous stunt—surfing on a blustery day when the rest of his friends do not dare venture into the churning waters. We can see in this reckless display of bravado a development which was foreshadowed prior to his being attacked by the dog. It is because he has always been unsure of his own virility that the emasculation proves so debilitating. A young man with a stronger self-image might have been less devastated by this particular deformity, but in Cuéllar's case the physical loss serves to cement the emotional insecurity. Thus, for Cuéllar, as well as Emily, it is the combination of character and circumstance that factor into the formula for disaster.

In addition to their opposite but complementary personalities, both protagonists have a common problem: they fear the natural passing of time and attempt to resist it by socially unacceptable means. When Emily reemerges after her illness following her father's death, her hair is cut short “making her look like a girl” (438) rather than a woman of thirty-some years. As Jefferson begins to modernize, she clings to the past. She refuses to accept free postal delivery when it comes to town or to pay municipal taxes when they are reinstated. Most telling of all, she poisons her beloved and places him in a mock bridal bed, where he lies frozen in time for over forty years. This ghastly yet poignant act demonstrates the desperate extent to which she is prepared to go to stop the flow of time. Like Emily, Cuéllar too clings to the past. He amuses himself with childhood diversions such as sports and movies, while the other boys are exploring the adolescent pastimes of girls and parties. Upon graduation from high school he refuses to take on adult responsibilities. While his friends pursue professional studies or work, he continues to be supported by his parents and to spend his time playing with young boys. Cuéllar's problem with time, like Emily's, drives him to murder. He kills himself, not surprisingly, in pursuit of juvenile pleasures: he crashes his sports car. On this point in particular our comparison of the two characters allows us to discern the peculiarities of each. It is entirely fitting that Emily should actively choose another as her victim while Cuéllar should passively turn on himself. The former, because of her willful nature, tries to make the world conform to her desires, while the latter, because of his insecurity, has himself removed from a world to which he cannot conform.

We must bear in mind, of course, that any assessment we may make of the personalities of the protagonists is based on hearsay. Since we see them only through the eyes of the narrators, they never get a chance to speak for themselves. One consequence of this perspective is that key events that occur away from the narrators' watchful eyes, such as the poisoning of Homer Barron or Cuéllar's final crash, cannot be recounted directly. These lacunae are unlike those found in the authors' novels in that they do not require the reader to struggle with ambiguities.¹⁹ We avoid confusion because the texts offer ample clues that allow us to fill in the gaps and thus account for the protagonists' often erratic behavior. For example, we can easily infer, as do the citizens of Jefferson, the method and motivation for Barron's murder since it was shortly after he declared that he was “not a marrying man” (440) that Emily was seen buying arsenic. Similarly, although we have only sparse, secondhand details of Cuéllar's accident, we can infer, along with his former friends, that it was a suicide that resulted from his inability to come to terms with his emasculation.

A second consequence of the perspective adopted in these two works is that it allows us to become well acquainted with the narrators themselves. Indeed, we get to know them even better than we know the outcasts of whom they speak. Like the protagonists, the narrators of “A Rose for Emily” and Los cachorros also have much in common. They pack their narratives with atmospheric details that indicate a keen sense of the place and time in which they speak. Both stand at the very centers of their respective communities and thus serve as foils for the extremely marginalized protagonists. From their secure vantage points, they observe and interpret the actions of the alienated in accordance with the views and values of the communities they represent. This collective perspective is captured and communicated to the reader through choric narration, that is, narration in the first person plural.

Choric narration is extremely rare in literature. Authors tend to favor the intimacy of the I or the distance afforded by the third person over the unwieldy we. If we pause to recall instances of this narrative point of view in literature, examples do not leap readily to mind. Nevertheless, we can find a few. Consider two widely known but rather imperfect instances: the opening of Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus”. In the first, the collective perspective of the former schoolmates of Charles Bovary is sustained for only a few pages. In the second, the communal perspective of the ship's crew is sustained throughout the novel, but inconsistently; Conrad slips frequently into third-person narration before finally concluding in the first person singular. In La casa verde, a novel published two years prior to Los cachorros, Vargas Llosa himself experiments with collective narration, but he does so indirectly.²⁰ Hispanic literature offers two good examples of communal protagonists—Lope de Vega's comedy Fuenteovejuna and García Márquez's novella Crónica de una muerte anunciada—but neither is actually narrated in the first person plural. In the play there is no narrator, and in the novella the narrator speaks in the first person singular and is clearly identified as a specific member of the community.

Because the first-person-plural point of view is so rare, it has largely escaped critical attention. Critics have focused on choral characters, those that stand apart from the action and provide the audience with a special perspective through which to view the other characters and events, but they have not considered the specific case of choral characters who also serve as basic narrators. That is, they have examined individuals or groups of individuals in novels who represent the point of view of the community, thereby providing norms by which to judge other characters. Often cited examples of this are Hardy's peasants and Faulkner's black women. These choral characters, however, do not tell the story but simply react to what has happened; thus, they differ from choral narrators. Narratologists go to great lengths to distinguish between first and third-person narrators (e.g., Stanzel), and between kinds of first-person narrators (e.g., Kayser), but ignore the distinction between singular and plural first-person narrators.²¹ The following, therefore, will serve to initiate a theoretical discussion of the rare, but nonetheless intriguing practice of choric narration that we find in both “A Rose for Emily” and Los cachorros.

In order to gain some critical perspective on the topic we must turn from narrative to drama and from the present to the ancient past. The practice of casting a collective in a narrative role in artistic representation originates, after all, in Greek drama. A review of how the classical chorus was used will provide us with a point of reference from which to evaluate the communal narrators of the contemporary works we are comparing.²²

The Greek chorus enjoyed a prominent position in the play; its arrival marked the start of the action and its exit the end. During the performance the chorus remained on stage either interpreting the action (through music, words, and dance) or reacting to it. In a given performance the functions of the chorus, therefore, were basically two: to dispense information (to narrate); and to play the part of groups (subjects, worshippers, etc.) who responded to the actions of the protagonists. This dual function allowed the chorus to be situated both inside the play, as a collective character, and outside the play, as the narrator. Because it could be situated outside the action like the viewing public, the chorus enjoyed a special rapport with the audience. When narrating, the Greek chorus often chanted in unison, but this was not always the case. At times, for the sake of clarity, the chorus-leader spoke for the group, and at other times individuals or sets of individuals within the chorus spoke separately to indicate the presence of subgroups within the collective. When reacting to the action, the chorus would draw upon its store of traditional morality in an effort to cope with and interpret events whose meaning was both difficult and unfamiliar. Dramatic tension would arise when the chorus' comprehension lagged behind the meaning implicit in the action.

My purpose here is not to argue that either Faulkner or Vargas Llosa attempts to revive the Greek choral convention in his work. I do believe, however, that their choral narrators share some of the characteristics of their classical predecessors. Like their ancient counterparts, these contemporary figures enjoy prominent places in their respective stories. They are on stage, so to speak, from beginning to end, never leaving us alone with the protagonists. Rather, they perpetually call attention to their presence as they describe and attempt to interpret the actions of the outcasts to the best of their limited abilities. Because their comprehension of the actions is often incomplete, the opportunity for dramatic tension arises, which, as we shall see, both Faulkner and Vargas Llosa exploit. Like their classical antecedents, these choral narrators have dual functions: they both tell the stories and play the roles of the collectives in those stories. Thus, they too are situated both inside and outside the stories they tell and thereby maintain a special relationship with the reader who also stands outside the story. In searching for similarities between the choral narrators and their classical antecedents, we cannot overlook the obvious differences. For example, the choral narrators of the works in question never deliver their lines in unison. Instead, individual members always speak for the group. Furthermore, their language is much reduced from the solemn, ritualized speech of the Greeks. These contemporary choruses do not chant, they chatter.

Faulkner introduces the narrator's collective perspective in the first sentence of his story, “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral …” and maintains it consistently to the last, “… we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair” (italics mine). While speaking for the group in the first person plural, the narrator occasionally offers views of subgroups in Jefferson, such as “a few of the ladies,” “the men,” “the older people,” or “the younger generation.” As Joseph Reed observes, these opinions do not express dissent but simply contribute to the larger voice of the community.²³ Such opinions also have the effect of emphasizing the anonymity of the speaker, who, because he is not aligned with either sex or generation, seems to speak for all.²⁴ It is fitting, therefore, that the only biographical information we have on this figure is that he is a citizen of Jefferson. Yet we can learn something more about this chorus-leader and the community he represents from the story he tells. Like his fellow citizens, he is an inveterate gossip whose favorite subject is Emily Grierson. Because the narrator's memoir is based on the gossip he has gathered, it has a distinctly oral tone. We get the impression that we are hearing rather than reading his accounts of what Emily purchases at the jeweler's and the druggist's. The extent to which the narrator is dependent on gossip for his tale is especially evident in his descriptions of the two calls citizens of Jefferson pay on Emily. He knows minute details of the aldermen's visit but knows nothing of the minister's, because the latter “would never divulge what happened during that interview” (440). We can learn as much about the narrator from what he reports as from what he does not report. For example, it is telling that the narrator never expresses any remorse for the way in which the town watched and whispered about Miss Emily. We can infer from the silence on this point that the narrator feels confident that he enjoys the support of the community and that, as a group, they have nothing to regret or hide.

From the narrator's comments we can also ascertain the people of Jefferson's ambivalence toward their eccentric. The very name by which they refer to her, “Miss,” has a double effect of demonstrating respect while at the same time emphasizing Emily's status as an unmarried woman and therefore something of an oddity. The townsfolk are in awe of Miss Emily's aristocratic lineage. The sole survivor of an old Confederate family, she is described as “a real lady.” As such, she has historical and cultural significance for the townsfolk, who regard her as a “tradition” that it is their “hereditary obligation” to preserve. At the same time, though, they resent her pedigree and describe Emily as one of the “high and mighty Griersons” (436), one of a family that “held themselves a little too high for what they really were.” Because they perceive her as aloof and arrogant, the townsfolk delight in watching her downfall. When she is still unmarried at thirty, they are “not pleased exactly, but vindicated.” When she is left penniless after her father's death, people are glad, because the icon has become “humanized.” Only at this point, when Emily is no longer perceived as their social superior, does their envy turn to pity. The townsfolk understand that Emily has been shortchanged by life and is thereby entitled to some of her odd behavior. They even rationalize her refusal to part with her dead father's corpse: “We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will” (437). The citizens of Jefferson are sympathetic enough toward Emily's solitude that they are actually glad to hear that she has found a suitor, even though they regard him as inappropriate. They are willing to indulge in her eccentricities because she is perceived as a relic of the town's Confederate past; their ambivalence toward this embodiment of the Old South is a reflection of their ambivalence about their own supposedly noble history. It is therefore fitting that, as time progresses and Jefferson begins to modernize, its inhabitants distance themselves more and more from Emily, the emblem of the past.

Although willing to accommodate a chaste spinster in their midst, the citizens of Jefferson will not tolerate a fallen woman. When they suspect that Emily has taken Barron as a lover, they are quick to repudiate her, agreeing callously that in this case “[suicide] would be the best thing” (440). The severity of this response is understandable if we consider that by her affair Emily has shattered not only her personal reputation but also an icon the townsfolk evidently value, that of the Southern Lady. As Diane Roberts explains, in a cherished myth of the Old South, the upper-class white woman is placed on a pedestal, where she is admired from below as a cool and silent statue of chastity and powerlessness.²⁵ This representation reflects a culture in which gender and class lines are clearly drawn and one that Faulkner exposes in “A Rose for Emily.” The author deconstructs this myth of the Confederate Lady by creating a willful woman who steps down from the pedestal and, in so doing, breaks out of the role to which she was assigned and upon which the Old South sustains itself. Small wonder this provokes a hostile reaction among the townsfolk of Jefferson.

Unlike the anonymous narrator of “A Rose for Emily,” the narrators of Los cachorros are identified. They are four boyhood friends from Miraflores who are indistinguishable except for their nicknames—Lalo, Choto, Chingolo, and Mañuco. As Roy Kerr observes, their salient feature is their unconditional acceptance of the culture of their class.²⁶ Because there are no clear speaker tags or punctuation marks to signal who is narrating, and because all four speakers express similar opinions, the various voices merge into one uniform chorus. Julio Ortega has pointed out that this blending of the voices coupled with the relaxed syntax and liberal use of onomatopoeia, conjunctions, and diminutives gives the impression that the memoir is not written but spoken in an adolescent dialect.²⁷ The oral quality of the narrative is vaguely reminiscent of Faulkner's story. There is, however, one major difference. Whereas the narrative perspective of “A Rose for Emily” is consistent in its use of the first person plural, Los cachorros alternates freely between first- and third-person plural. This alternation usually takes place within a single sentence and may be signaled by a switch in verb endings or pronouns from first person to third. Vargas Llosa introduces this vacillating point of view in the first sentence of the novella, “Todavía llevaban pantalón corto ese año, aún no fumábamos, entre los deportes preferían el fútbol y estábamos aprendiendo a correr olas …” [“They were still wearing short pants that year, we weren't smoking yet, of all the sports they liked football best and we were learning to ride the waves”] (107), and maintains it through the last, “… y comenzábamos a engordar y a tener canas … y aparecían ya en sus pieles algunas pequitas, ciertas arruguitas” [“… and we were starting to put on weight and go gray … and on their skin little age spots and wrinkles were beginning to appear”] (151). This skillful manipulation of deictics serves artistic purposes. José Miguel Oviedo describes these shifts in perspective as a narrative imitation of the movement of a cinematic camera.²⁸ Just as the camera changes visual angles, so the speaker switches narrative angles between the subject's internal apprehension of the world and external views of how the subject appears to the world. In other words, in a single sentence of Los cachorros we observe the group subjectively and objectively. A powerful consequence of this complex perspective for us as readers is that we are simultaneously made to identify with the members of the group and to pass judgment on the group as outsiders.

Although the subject of the group's reminiscences is ostensibly the eccentric Cuéllar, the narrators of Los cachorros end up telling us a great deal about themselves, about the youths they were and the adults they have become. At all times they have acted in accordance with the dictates of their class. The final sentence of the novella makes this point emphatically: “Eran hombres hechos y derechos ya y teníamos todos mujer, carro, hijos que estudiaban en el Champagnat, la Inmaculada o el Santa María, y se estaban construyendo una casita para el verano en Ancón, Santa Rosa o las playas del Sur” [“They were real men now, and we all had the wife, the car, and kids that studied in one prep school or another, and they were building a summer house in Ancón, Santa Rosa or the beaches in the south.”] Conformity is the defining characteristic of this affluent and uncaring community. This value placed on conformity explains the group's ambivalence toward its injured and eccentric member. Cuéllar is treated alternately with kindness and cruelty as the group's attitude toward him oscillates between sympathy and repudiation. In a show of solidarity the boys avenge their friend by torturing the dog that disfigured him. Shortly thereafter, however, they dub him with a nickname, “Pichulita” [“Dickie”]. Like the courtesy title that precedes Emily's name, this label has the dual effect of demonstrating Cuéllar's closeness with the community and at the same time calling attention to his abnormality.

The four friends understand that Cuéllar's disturbed behavior is due to extenuating circumstances, and for a time they are willing to endure his eccentricities: “[E]ra buena gente, un poco fregado a veces pero en su caso cualquiera, se le comprendía, se le perdonaba …” [“He was a good guy, a bit of a drag a times but in his shoes anyone would be, you could understand him, you could forgive him …”] (126). Yet, when Cuéllar begins to dress in gold chains and tight clothes and to keep the company of younger boys, they draw the line: “Ya está, decíamos, era fatal: maricón” [“That's it, we'd say, it was the kiss of death: fag.”] The words the young men use to repudiate Cuéllar reveal that their principal preoccupation is maintaining appearances:

Qué le quedaba, se comprendía, se le disculpaba pero, hermano, resulta cada día más difícil juntarse con él, en la calle lo miraban, lo silbaban y lo señalaban, y Choto a ti te importa mucho el qué dirán, y Mañuco lo rajaban y Lalo si nos ven mucho con él y Chingolo te confundirán.

(150)

What else could he do? You could understand that, you could forgive him, but man, it's getting harder and harder to hang out with him, in the street people would stare, they'd whistle and they'd point, and Choto you care about what people might think, and Mañuco they were talking about him and Lalo if they see us with him and Chingolo they'll think the same of you.

Echoing one another, in a chorus of renunciation each of the four rejects their troubled friend out of concern for how they will be seen by others. Whereas the group has been willing to accept a celibate in their midst, they will not admit someone they view as sexually perverse. Here the young men's reaction reminds us of that of the townsfolk of Jefferson. As in “A Rose for Emily,” it is a perceived sexual transgression that finally triggers the marginalized individual's expulsion from the community, and this expulsion reveals a great deal about the prejudices and values of that community: machismo reigns in Miraflores. When the young men reject Cuéllar, they act to preserve their own cultural icon—that of the virile, heterosexual man—at the expense of a deeply distressed friend.

As we have seen, there are a number of substantial parallels between the narrators of the works in question. In both cases they speak for their communities about their unusual members. Their ambivalence about these oddities turns to outright rejection when they suspect the protagonists of sexual transgressions that threaten the identity of their respective groups. The narrator of “A Rose for Emily” repudiates Emily when she refuses to play the part of the Confederate lady in the Old South. Similarly, the narrators of Los cachorros turn their backs on Cuéllar when he fails to live up to the model of the macho latino. Here the complementary character of the texts is hard to miss. The masculinized woman is as unwelcome in Jefferson as the feminized man in Miraflores. It is interesting to note that neither the story nor the novella resolves whether or not these sexual transgressions actually took place. Emily is seen riding with Barron, and Cuéllar is seen dressed suspiciously and in the company of young boys. The appearance of impropriety is all that is certain, and in each case this is enough to warrant expulsion from the community.

The preceding analysis of the narrators in the two works prepares us to discuss what is undoubtedly the most significant similarity between “A Rose for Emily” and Los cachorros: their common theme of the community's collective responsibility for individual suffering. To see how each articulates this theme, we must consider their conclusions. As we recall, the narrator of “A Rose for Emily” is so comfortable in his cocoon of consensus that he never once pauses to question his community's role in Emily's failed life. Even the horrible spectacle of Barron's desiccated corpse is not enough to trigger an examination of conscience on his part. At the very end of the story he continues to look outward instead of inward as he dwells on the macabre details of the bridal chamber. This scene is atrocious to be sure, but more intriguing than the disgusting details is the dramatic tension of the moment. What the narrator is totally oblivious to, and the sensitive reader is well aware of, is that Emily was, to a certain extent, forced to the desperate measure she took. Cut off from a community that had judged and condemned her, a community that viewed her misfortune as a source of entertainment, a community that required standards of behavior to which she neither could nor would conform, Emily was driven to madness and murder. Thus, in a sense, all of Jefferson had a hand in administering the arsenic. Similarly, in Los cachorros the narrators remain oblivious to their role in Cuéllar's destruction. They attend his funeral out of a sense of obligation but express no grief or remorse for having created conditions in which their former friend found it impossible to go on living. They do not realize that, by constantly encouraging Cuéllar to dissimulate rather than accept his condition, by requiring conformity to certain standards of masculinity from a person who could not conform, and by denying their approval to an individual who clearly craved it, the group created an unbearable situation for Cuéllar from which the only escape was death. Unable to recognize their instrumental role in their friend's tragedy, the four agree that Cuéllar must be to blame for what became of him: “Pobre, decíamos en el entierro, cuanto sufrió, que vida tuvo, pero este final es un hecho que se lo buscó” [“Poor guy, we were saying in the funeral, what a life, but this end, there's no denying it, he was asking for it”] (151).

In both works the central theme of society's collective responsibility for individual suffering is reinforced by the narrative point of view that requires readers to identify with the victimizers rather than the victimized. Because of the first-person-plural perspective, we never have direct access to the outcasts' mental anguish. Neither Emily nor Cuéllar speaks directly of the pain of an unfulfilled life. Neither describes how the cohesive community appears from the vantage point of the isolated member. Consequently, we never really feel sympathy for them. They appear, therefore, as psychologically abnormal characters who are of interest primarily as curiosities. Since we can never identify with such misfits, we are instead forced to regard them from the point of view of their victimizers, their communities. Furthermore, the first-person-plural point of view subtly incorporates us in these collectives. Who is that we that watches with perverse fascination as the misfits stray further and further from the fold? It is the citizens of Jefferson or the friends from Miraflores, to be sure, but it is we readers as well. We share the point of view of the collective that watches from a distance while gorging on gossip. Hence, we find ourselves aligned with the choral narrators, which positions us to share in the group's guilt. Perceptive critics have not overlooked this aspect of the texts. In reference to Faulkner's story, Joseph Reed observes that the community of readers cannot absolve itself of responsibility, and therefore the true horror we must feel upon seeing the corpse is not the horror of the decay but, rather, of our having helped it to come about (17). Concerning Los cachorros Mario Benedetti asserts that the chorus of narrators introduces the reader into the story as a participant and, therefore, as one more of those who ignore their own complicity in the tragedy:

En una suerte de nervioso y constante switch, el autor nos va entregando esa doble dimensión de la historia, quizá como el modo de recrear una responsabilidad colectiva, o también—y esto me parece más probable—como una manera de instalar a su lector en esa culpa tribal, de hacerle sentir de alguna manera un escozor de prójimo.

In a sort of nervous and constant switch, the author proceeds to show us this double dimension of the story, perhaps as a way of recreating a collective responsibility, or also—and this seems more probable to me—as a way of installing his reader in this tribal guilt, of making him share in some way the sting felt by his fellow man.²⁹

Although the narrators remain oblivious to the end, we as sensitive readers cannot walk away from these works unaffected by their powerful portrayal of society's failure to come to the rescue of its damaged members. The common message of these works is all the more memorable because it is presented through a perspective that not only requires us to lay the blame but, in so doing, to implicate ourselves. We many conclude, therefore, that here choric narration is a particularly effective technique for exposing collective culpability while at the same time engaging the reader deeply in the meaning of the text.

Before concluding, I would like to expand upon these final observations by pointing out that Vargas Llosa's use of an oscillating point of view is perhaps more effective in exploiting the potential of the first-person-plural perspective than Faulkner's use of a consistent point of view. In “A Rose for Emily” the author can manipulate the reader's ultimate response to the text only up to a certain point. Through the first-person-plural point of view and the titillating subject matter Faulkner cleverly draws us into the tale, but it is up to us to extricate ourselves at the end in order to grasp the message. As Reed cautions us, we must detach ourselves from the final scene by looking away from the bed and into our consciences, for it is only by withdrawing from the text in which we are intensely involved that we capture its central meaning. In Los cachorros, on the other hand, the author exercises a much greater control over the reader's final response thanks to the oscillating point of view. As the narrators shift from first person to third (from we/our/us to they/their/them) they demonstrate that the events of the novella can be viewed both subjectively and objectively thereby setting an example for the reader. Just as the narrators alternate between identifying with the community and distancing themselves from that community, so the reader has the dual experience of identifying with the narrators and viewing them objectively. And, as Benedetti observes, the narrators' dual perspective provides us with an indication of just how we are to respond the text: we are to experience humanity's shame.

In this essay we have compared two American tragedies from either side of the Rio Grande and have found profound parallels between the two.³⁰ In Los cachorros Vargas Llosa recreates in a Latin American context the central thematic concern of Faulkner's tale of the Old South. The Confederate spinster becomes a Latin eunuch, but the basic message remains the same. The theme of the community's collective responsibility for the alienation of the individual is an important one that bears repeating. Faulkner was not the first American writer to take us to task on this point, and Vargas Llosa will not be the last.

Notes

1. In addition to these references, which appear in both his fiction and nonfiction and are too frequent to enumerate, Vargas Llosa has written three essays on the U.S. writer. “El jóven Faulkner” and “Faulkner en laberinto” appear in Contra viento y marea I–II (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1986) and “El Santuario del mal” appears in La verdad de las mentiras (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990). In the second of these essays, Vargas Llosa ponders the phenomenon of Faulkner's appeal in Latin America and concludes that in the stories of Yoknapatawpha County Latin American readers discover elements of their own reality (“Faulkner en laberinto” 302).

2. Mario Vargas Llosa, A Writer's Reality, ed. Myron Lichtblau (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1990) 75.

3. Mario Vargas Llosa, “El país de las mil caras,” Contra viento y marea III (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990) 241.

4. Mary Davis, “La elección del fracaso: Vargas Llosa y William Faulkner,” Mario Vargas Llosa, ed. José Miguel Oviedo (Madrid: Taurus, 1981) 46.

5. For a comprehensive review of the importance of William Faulkner for Latin American authors in general see Deborah Cohn, “‘He was one of us’: The Reception of William Faulkner and the US South by Latin American Authors,” Comparative Literature Studies 34 (1997): 149–69.

6. In addition to the aforementioned essay see Mary Davis, “The Haunted Voice: Echoes of William Faulkner in García Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa,” World Literature Today 59 (1985): 531–35.

7. Written in 1929, “A Rose for Emily” first appeared in the Forum magazine in April 1930. A Spanish version of the story was included in a popular anthology of contemporary U.S. writers which was released in Chile in 1944. The story appeared again in a widely read translation of Faulkner's first collection of stories, These Thirteen (1931), which was published under the Spanish title Estos 13 by Losada in 1956. This publication information is provided in Robert Chapman, “The Spanish American Reception of U.S. Fiction 1920–40,” University of California Publications in Modern Philology 77 (1966): 142. Vargas Llosa has listed Estos trece among the Faulkner works that he discovered in college in his memoirs El pez en el agua (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1993) 283. To the best of my knowledge, however, he has never referred directly to “A Rose for Emily” in his writing.

8. Page numbers refer to Mario Vargas Llosa, Los jefes, Los cachorros (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1991) x. All translations of the novella are my own.

9. Gustavo Pérez Firmat, ed., introduction, Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (Durham: Duke UP, 1990) 3–4.

10. For a good collection of some of the earlier responses to the short story see M. Thomas Inge, ed., William Faulkner: “A Rose for Emily” (Columbus, OH: Merrill, 1970).

11. Eugenio Suárez-Galbán Guerra identifies this tendency and evaluates the various symbolic readings of the novella in his essay “La literatura es símbolo: Los cachorros de Vargas Llosa” in La ínsula sin nombre (Madrid: Editorial Orígenes, 1990) 95–100.

12. The complex chronology of “A Rose for Emily” has been the subject of more than a half-dozen studies. For a review of the topic see Gene Moore, “Of Time and Its Mathematical Progression: Problems of Chronology in Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily,” Studies in Short Fiction 29 (1992): 195–204.

13. For a comprehensive study of the use of language in the novella see Roslyn Frank, “El estilo de Los cachorros” Mario Vargas Llosa, ed. Jose Miguel Oviedo (Madrid: Taurus, 1981) 156–75.

14. For a concise discussion of the incest theme in Faulkner's story see Jack Scherting, “Emily Grierson's Oedipus Complex: Motif, Motive, and Meaning in Faulkner's ‘A Rose for Emily,’” Studies in Short Fiction 17 (1980): 397–405. A broader treatment of Freudian themes in the story can be found in Norman Holland, 5 Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale UP). For a study of the castration theme in Vargas Llosa's novella see Roland Forgues, “Lectura de Los cachorros, de Mario Vargas Llosa,” Mario Vargas Llosa, ed. José Miguel Oviedo (Madrid: Taurus, 1981) 176–92.

15. Page numbers refer to William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily,” The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin, 1967) 433–44.

16. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Fiction (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1943) 413.

17. Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978) 34–45.

18. Roland Forgues discusses Cuéllar's insecurity about his masculinity, an aspect of his personality that can be traced through the entire text, in “Lectura de Los cachorros, de Mario Vargas Llosa,” Mario Vargas Llosa, ed. José Miguel Oviedo (Madrid: Taurus, 1981) 176–92. I rely on Forgue's discussion for my own.

19. Faulkner and Vargas Llosa are both known for confounding their readers with novels in which important details are suppressed until well into the texts. A prime example of this practice is Faulkner's novel Sanctuary, in which the key event that initiates the action of the novel is not revealed until the final chapter. Likewise, it is not until near the end of Vargas Llosa's voluminous Conversación en La Catedral that we discover the solutions to a number of the mysteries in the novel.

20. According to Vargas Llosa, certain segments of La casa verde are narrated indirectly from the collective perspective of the residents of the Mangachería, a working-class neighborhood in Piura (Writer's Reality 76). That is, portions of Anselmo's story are focalized through the collective conscience of the mangaches. Because there is no narration in the first-person plural and because the collective perspective is sustained so briefly, this is not a good case for the study of choric narration.

21. Gérard Genette is the only theorist I have found who acknowledges the possibility of narration in the first-person plural. He does so in a brief footnote in which he refers to it as a variant on homodiegetic narration. See Narrative Discourse (New York: Cornell UP, 1980) 245n.

22. This summary of the functions of the chorus is based on Peter Arnott, “The Audience and the Chorus” in Public Performance in the Greek Theatre (London: Routledge, 1991) 5–43 and Rush Rehm, Greek Tragic Theatre (London: Routledge, 1992).

23. Joseph Reed Jr., Faulkner's Narrative (New Haven: Yale UP, 1973) 15.

24. From this point on, for the sake of simplicity, I will use masculine pronouns to refer to the narrator. This should not be construed as the assignation of a gender to the narrator, who, as I have pointed out, is clearly an anonymous figure who speaks for the town. Critics generally agree that the narrator's gender is undetermined. Fetterley, who states that the narrator is one of the patriarchs in the story, is an exception (39). On this particular point, however, the evidence is lacking, and her case is not convincing.

25. Diane Roberts, Faulkner and Southern Womanhood (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994) 10.

26. R. A. Kerr, “Choral Characters,” Mario Vargas Llosa: Critical Essays on Characterization (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1990) 106.

27. “Sobre Los cachorros,” Homenaje a Mario Vargas Llosa, comp. Helmy F. Giacoman (Long Island City, NY: Las Américas, 1972) 263–74. Ortega goes on to observe that this language reveals much about the psychology of the class. We know the group is terribly immature since they continue to speak in the adolescent dialect even in adulthood.

28. José Miguel Oviedo, “Los cachorros: fragmentos de una exploración total,” Homenaje a Mario Vargas Llosa, comp. Helmy F. Giacoman (Long Island City, NY: Las Américas, 1972) 354.

29. Mario Benedetti, Letras del continente mestizo, 2nd ed. (Montevideo: Arca, 1970) 274.

30. By emphasizing here the common American identity of the authors, I am positioning this study in the expanding field of inter-American literary relations. For further reading in this field see the essays collected in the aforementioned Gustavo Pérez Firmat, ed., Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? or Earl Fitz, Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1991). In his book Fitz examines ten themes germane to New World literatures, but he does not consider short narrative or the theme that has interested me in this essay, that of collective guilt for individual failure. This theme is recurrent in American literature. Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener” and García Márquez's Crónica de una muerte anunciada are two other key examples. Perhaps this essay will inspire a broader treatment of the topic.