¿Novela negra o leyenda negra? Violencia, responsabilidad y mito en <i>Santuario</i>

Abstract

The critical consensus understands William Faulkner’s work as a great textual construct configuring a very concrete mythical space: the South. However, the place of Sanctuary –his only incursion in hardboiled crime fiction, is still to determine. The specialized critics has detected in the novel some inherent elements in the “big narrative” of the Southern myth, but it has never explored systematically how the mechanisms of the hardboiled genre plait in Faulkner’s work mythical grid. We propose an analysis frame that explains the types of violence (physical violence and violentation) that articulate Sanctuary. That frame, at last, is used by the author to explain how Faulkner gets to add the structural pattern of crime fiction into the construction process of the Southern myth, proposing thus a very particular mythical dimension of the genre.