Representing the Best in American Culture: William Faulkner's Reputation in Iceland 1930-1960

By Haukur Ingvarsson

Icelandic Edition Forthcoming from Sögufélag (2021)

This monograph investigates William Faulkner’s reputation as an author – how it emerged and how it evolved within the Icelandic cultural arena, from the time of its first mention in an Icelandic newspaper on May 8^th, 1933 until Kristján Karlsson’s seventh and final translation of a short story by Faulkner appeared in print in 1960. The broader aim of the research is to study the interplay of the Icelandic literary system and foreign literary systems at a turbulent time in Icelandic history, when the country’s position in relation to the outer world underwent dramatic changes. Within the time period of this study, Iceland became a Republic after severing its remaining constitutional ties with Denmark. Its status as an isolated, unarmed country was transformed by the British occupation and US military presence during the Second World War; and it formally abandoned its neutrality policy in favour of Western alignment in the post-war period, reflecting its strategic location and subsequent military importance during the Cold War.

The book is divided into two main parts, which both deal with contacts between the Icelandic literary system and the outside world. Part One, entitled “The Scandinavian Countries as an Intermediary,” investigates the ways in which the Scandinavian countries were the Icelanders’ most important cultural window to the outside world in the period from 1933 to 1945. In this period, Faulkner’s novels reached Iceland through Scandinavian translations, along with writings about the author by Scandinavian intellectuals. Part Two focuses on the period from July 7^th, 1941 when the Americans took over the occupation of Iceland from the British to the end of the 1950s. In this period, Icelandic translations of Faulkner’s works started to appear in print and the author’s name assumed an important status in the Icelandic literary system. The US government began to contribute extensively to cultural activities in Iceland, for example by operating libraries in Reykjavik and in Akureyri, which carried American books, newspapers and magazines. Another element of these government-sponsored cultural activities were mutual visits of Icelandic and American artists and scholars between the two countries. These activities and Faulkner’s visit to Iceland in 1955 explain the title of Part Two, “Direct Contact.”

This research contributes to the extensive body of criticism devoted to Faulkner and his works worldwide. It is also the first extensive attempt to highlight the function of Faulkner’s name and the reception of his works in Iceland. While Icelandic and foreign scholars have written about his visit to Iceland in the context of the Cultural Cold War, those studies have been limited to a narrow timeframe and scope of political influence, and do not shed light on the way his works and image initially reached Iceland and how their reception evolved.

The book is structured chronologically, and each individual chapter is dedicated to a specific theme which Faulkner scholars have studied, based on e.g. his life, works, image, reception or publishing history. This conceptual framework highlights certain elements or turning points in Faulkner’s reception history in Iceland, which are reflected in chapter titles. Part One focuses on for example “Movies”, “Libraries”, “The Author’s Presence” and “Modernity”. Part Two focuses for example “The Second World War”, “The Portable Faulkner”, “Images of the Author”, “The Cultural Cold War” and “Patronage”.

Both parts of the thesis contain close textual analyses representing particular turning points in the advancement of Faulkner and his works in Iceland. The first chapter focuses on Guðmundur G. Hagalín’s essay “Um nútíðarbókmentir Bandaríkjamanna” (“On American Modern Literature”, 1934) and Guðmundur Daníelsson’s novel trilogy Af jörðu ertu kominn (From Dust Thou Art, 1941–1944) and investigates the extent of Faulkner’s influence on the latter, acknowledged by Daníelsson himself. The trilogy is discussed in the context of recent scholarly studies exploring why Faulkner’s works have particularly appealed to authors from regions that were struggling economically and culturally, either within their home countries or in the face of a foreign power.

An analysis of the writings of Hagalín and Daníelsson illustrates the function and relevance of foreign language literature in the Icelandic literary system in the 1930s and the early 1940s. This function has been largely overlooked in research on Icelandic literary history. The library catalogues, inspected as a part of this study, show that Icelanders were quite up to date on any new publications in Denmark Norway and Sweden. Norwegian translations of the works of William Faulkner resulted in his presence in Iceland. The Icelandic literary system was in close contact with the Scandinavian literary systems in the 1930s, and many books and magazines that reached Iceland had been published previously in Scandinavia. Icelandic libraries held an extensive selection of contemporary literature in the Scandinavian languages, including American literature, which played an important role in the development of the Icelandic literary system.

Part Two of the thesis focuses on the writings of Kristján Karlsson, who was among the Icelanders receiving their university education in the United States during and afther the Second World War. He graduated with a BA degree in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 1945 and with an MA degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University in New York in 1947. While he was in New York, New Criticism and the New York Intellectuals had begun to revolutionise American literary life. Among other things, the two groups heralded a revision of US literary history which involved a break with the emphasis on the social fiction of authors from the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, the emphasis was on a close reading of texts and an analysis of formal elements, usually without considering the authors’ lives, or historical and social backgrounds. Karlsson brought the ideas championed by the New Critics and New York Intellectuals to Iceland and introduced them in his essay “Amerískar nýbókmenntir” (“New American Literature”, 1948). His translation of Faulkner’s short story “That Evening Sun“ (“Sú aftansól“, 1948) must also be considered in this context, and is analysed accordingly. This analysis ties in with the chapter on Daníelsson’s trilogy, which maps the different power positions of the characters in the short story based on their age, race, class, gender and place of residence. Other Icelandic translations of Faulkner’s short stories are also considered to demonstrate the many different functions of Faulkner’s name and status as an author in the Icelandic literary system in the 1950s.

In the period of 1948–1955, six additional Icelandic translations of short stories by Faulkner were published in magazines. Their paratexts show that the Icelandic authors Thor Vilhjálmsson and Guðmundur G. Hagalín both wanted to take credit for having introduced Faulkner in Iceland, which says something about his importance as an author. However, the connection of Faulkner’s name to his texts is not always strong. This is due in part to the complexity of Faulkner’s image as an author of movie scripts, crime stories, pulp fiction and modernist works.

Alongside a discussion of translations of Faulkner’s short stories, in the later part of the book, the resesearch explores Icelandic literary discourse and cultural activities as part of Icelandic right-wing politics and within the context of the official and unofficial US cultural activities of the Americans in Iceland and elsewhere in Europe. Previous scholarship has paid scant attention to the participation of Icelandic intellectuals in the international work that was often clandestinely organised by the CIA, in particular, and the US government, in general. Faulkner’s visit to Iceland in 1955 almost coincided with a broad-based alliance of Icelandic right-wing intellectuals to establish the publishing company Almenna bókmenntafélagið, AB. The operation of AB was modelled on the international activities of the anti-communist organisation, Congress of Cultural Freedom, which promoted modernism as a response to the social realism of the Soviet Union. Faulkner was AB’s flagship of sorts during its first years of operation, and in 1956, the company published a book of six short stories by Faulkner, translated by Kristján Karlsson, with an introduction by the translator. AB and magazines like Félagsbréf AB and Stefnir are examined in the context of the discourse of Cold War Modernism. The study of the US cultural activities in Iceland is mostly based on previously unexplored original sources from the National Archives in Maryland and the International Association for Cultural Freedom Records 1941–1978 in the University of Chicago Library.

Transl. Vera Júlíusdóttir