B006JHRY9S EBOK (37 page)

“Hemophilic”: Faulkner suffered from—and tapped unforgettably in his work—the overwhelming of his defenses. Eventually he would realize that bodily distress was at the same time cultural distress. His hypersensitivity to the dynamics of “taking in” and “leaking out” made him a virtual seismographer of unnegotiable cultural encounters. Outrage—the signature event in his tragic work—is precisely the overwhelming of culturally inculcated boundaries. Outraged, invaded, one is no longer oneself. Like Freud, Faulkner seems to have known that only what hurts—what cuts
“across the devious, intricate channels of decorous ordering” (Absalom
, emphasis in the original)—is instructive. The lacerating wound carries the bad news that one’s defenses have been breached, one’s map of selfhood now in shambles. In a Southern culture fixated on mapping and maintaining differences between male and female, white and black, aristocrat and white trash, Faulkner reveals with extraordinary power the phenomenon of cultural hemorrhage: the collapse of identity-sustaining boundaries. What is
the invisible spectacle of such a collapse if not light-skinned Joe Christmas parading in Mottstown’s central square, waiting to be recognized as “black”? What is the miscegenation at the heart of both
Absalom
and
Go Down, Moses
—not to speak of Faulkner’s own ancestral shadow family—if not the transgression of sanctuaries meant to keep out the secretly desired but socially intolerable other?

Invisible to the eye but not to the nose: the idiot Benjy in
The Sound and the Fury
“sees” Caddy’s ruptured virginity with his nose—“he smell hit.” More broadly, the larger social armature of segregation itself was installed to quarantine a black difference impacting whites at the level of smell itself. In a white South obsessed with maintaining racial distinctions, smell becomes hypercharged. More primitive and disturbing than sight—which satisfyingly keeps others at a distance by identifying them as “out there”—smell does its work retroactively. Once you smell it, it is too late: the damage is done. The other has invaded you, is in your nostrils, your entire body—without warning. Your only recourse is a violent, virtually orgasmic expulsion of the intolerable. “Hemophilic”: Faulkner
matters
because he did not manage to keep his borders (at once personal and cultural) intact and stanch the bleeding, and because he somehow grasped what was at stake in such overwhelming. The troubled life and the troubling work are inseparable.

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem
is certainly centered on trouble. “You live
in
sin; you cant live on it.” You cannot make a life out of it; sin cannot be tamed—willed into familiar spatial or temporal order. The novel takes this core conviction all the way. At the level of plot, one could call both stories scorched-earth narratives, if they weren’t so saturated in liquid. Place as we know it—familiar, stabilizing—disappears in “Old Man.” The story deals in frantic motion on the water, with minor intervals alongside larger boats or interludes among incommunicable Cajun hunters. The expelled convict longs to return to the dry enclosure of Parchman prison: anything that will keep him away from the watery and unfathomable female world. In “Wild Palms,” place doesn’t so much disappear as take on kaleidoscopic motion. The narrative lurches from New Orleans to Chicago to Utah, then back to New Orleans and finally to a Mississippi prison. At the story’s end, Harry is set to spend the rest of his days in the same prison as the convict, sent there for having killed Charlotte with his botched abortion. Though offered escape, Harry has no interest in taking it. None of these settings is sustaining, provided with a stabilizing history, populated by others one might come to know. None is available for normal activities (getting a job, buying a house, marrying a spouse, raising a family). Fleetingly, other people and
places flash by in “Wild Palms,” like two-dimensional landscapes glimpsed on a speeding train. The train is the lovers’ sexual bond(age): it has room for only two figures—Charlotte and Harry—and it is at home nowhere.

Harry first meets Charlotte at a party she and her husband are giving (and to which he has not been invited). A page later, she has grabbed him by the arm, “ruthless and firm, drawing him after her” (IIF 520). Within the next two pages they have spoken, casually but portentously. Then, a page later—he has gone home and a couple of days later returned to the Rittenmeyers’ for dinner—she says it all: “What to—Do they call you Harry? What to do about it, Harry?” (523). A few hours together at most, but the die is cast, their
Liebestod
is launched. From this point on, unsmiling and lecturing him as needed, Charlotte directs the lovers’ moves. This involves systematically destroying all moorings, refusing all compromise, cutting all cords. Grasping his hair, striking his body, “rous[ing] him to listen with a hard wrestling movement” (557), hammering his belly, jabbing him with her “hard and painful elbow,” Charlotte conducts her lover undeviatingly into the fatal conflagration (“grave-wound, womb-grave, it’s all one”) that is their erotic union. Apparently, he needs to be directed. For her part, she knows from the beginning that it must be tragic: “love and suffering are the same thing and … the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself” (526).

“Do they call you Harry?” His name does not matter, just as no character in “Old Man” is granted a name. We are dealing with nameless liquids, not stable solids; only fixed entities have names that they fondly believe bestow reliable identity. The element in him to which she has all but chemically bonded is anonymous.
If I Forget Thee
reaches for the indescribable motions of “pitch darkness”—where the perquisites of identity lose their purchase, on the roiling water, in the heaving bed—and the awful release or inundation of liquid begins. “As though the clotting which is you had dissolved in the original, myriad motion”—so Faulkner described (in
As I Lay Dying)
this exposure to currents stronger than selfhood. But characters retained their names and identities in that novel—Darl and Jewel and Cash and Addie. With their names came both the richly textured turmoil of a family’s distress and the dark and abiding humor of siblings who have long lived in each other’s presence. Family drama and humor are absent from “Wild Palms” (there is dark humor aplenty in “Old Man,” albeit mainly at the convict’s expense).

Charlotte’s children are whisked out of the narrative after two brief mentions. When Harry reminds her of what she is about to abandon—her children—she replies, smoking, “I wasn’t thinking of them” (IIF 526).
More brutal yet, Harry has earlier identified them (at the party) as “two not particularly remarkable children” (522): as though they might be more text-worthy—and to be parented rather than orphaned—if they had been more “remarkable.” It is a quietly callous narrative moment, and one wonders if Faulkner has not—in wish-fulfillment fashion—imaginatively reversed his own heartbreaking dilemma: either Jill or Meta. Here it is different: forget the children, head pell-mell toward the “womb-grave,” indict everything else as defection. “I told you once,” Charlotte lectures Harry late in the narrative, “it isn’t love that dies, it’s the man and the woman, something in the man and the woman that dies, doesn’t deserve the chance any more to love” (643).

Love is figured as an appalling invasion. Not just that it is bound for destruction: Harry’s abortion knife will end Charlotte’s life as inevitably as the convict’s sharp tin can will cut the pregnant woman’s umbilical cord and let her baby live. More deranging than the fatal destination is the nightmarish journey. There is no foreplay here, no intimacy, no pleasure—no evidence that they even
like
being in each other’s company. The story insists on this searing condition as love, but it has equal title to be called torture. As in
Requiem for a Nun
later (1951), Faulkner is at his grimmest when he envisages erotic love. Scorched earth: there is no place they can stand, no place they can go, no activity other than intercourse they can engage in together. They have deliberately burned up possibility itself. Was this the underside of Faulkner’s doomed affair with Meta Carpenter? As though beneath her docility and charm, he found the iron of impossibility: they could not live in society, and they could not sustain a sanctuary outside it. Reduced thus, they had no choice but to consume each other—and then to swear solemnly not to forget the pain that went with consummation. “I know grief is the inevictable part of it, the thing that makes it cohere,” he had written her. In kindred fashion, ensconced in his prison cell and dedicated to the lifelong memory of what has been lost, Harry ends “Wild Palms” by claiming loyally, “Between grief and nothing I will take grief” (IIF 715). How powerfully this story testifies—more powerfully perhaps than Faulkner knows—to the destructiveness of illicit love, even as it insists that only illicit love is authentic.

It is well known that Faulkner had trouble writing this novel. His ingenious solution was to pursue each of the narratives until it petered out, and then to switch to the other until it, too, dried up, and then back again. Each story, divided into five subparts, is interwoven with the other; Faulkner’s novel remained faithful to its rhythm of conception. Critics ever since have
wondered about the aesthetic logic of
If I Forget Thee’s
narrative structure. I argued earlier that, fundamentally, the two narratives rehearse the same explosive materials. They intersect as point and counterpoint in a common dance of carnivalesque disaster.

Yet Faulkner’s difficulty in completing this book may be as telling as any unifying pattern implicit in its structure. As with
A Fable
later, something stubbornly lodged in the writer’s imagination was reluctant to keep plunging into these materials. Does the fact that, by contrast, he was able to write
As I Lay Dying
in two months testify not only to the earlier Faulkner’s creative fecundity but also to his grasp on the familial and regional interrelationships that propel that novel to its conclusion? He sometimes described
As I Lay Dying
as a “tour de force”—a narrative in which he exposed his characters to fire and flood—but the phrase is even more apt for “Old Man.” Family and region have dropped away: the narrative pits a single man existentially against the elements. “Old Man” lives mainly in the convict’s beleaguered (but not otherwise interesting) head, as it attends to his endlessly violent encounters. Fabulous though “Old Man” be, it is—by comparison with
As I Lay Dying
—perhaps overwritten. It cannot vary its slew of operatic scenes of vertiginous assault. “Not again!” the reader thinks, when yet another catastrophe careens upon the convict (and starts the blood flowing again from his nose). “Not again!”—as in “not another disastrous encounter!”—hardly characterizes the reader’s response to the emotional trials of the Bundren family. Put otherwise, Faulkner’s entry into the Bundren family’s astonishing projections and identifications (“My mother is a fish”) has little counterpart in this nonrelational narrative of disasters grimly engaged and survived.

As for the difficulty in completing “Wild Palms,” the reasons may not be far to seek. Faulkner’s chaotic emotional life is perhaps too implicated in these erotic materials. It is not for nothing that he pictures a pen thrust through a wall, an invisible piece of paper, and pitch darkness. Something in the writer wants to withdraw that pen even as it wants to extend it further. Finally, adult intercourse is—without exception—traumatic territory in Faulkner’s imaginary. It is one thing for Benjy and Quentin to anguish over their beloved Caddy. Their distress is bathed in the softened light of balked desire, not the scorched-earth glare of orgasmic consummation. (Caddy’s sexual release is narratively off-stage; so is her daughter Quentin’s, at novel’s end.) “The man called Harry” and the woman named Charlotte enact their love affair on-stage. Not that this novel is Lawrentian in its narrative of intercourse—Faulkner has no interest in body parts or the moment-by-moment
experience of coitus—but it remains dedicated to articulating his thinking about intercourse. Sexual release emerges as both devastating and sublime. It is as though Faulkner had to make fictionally coherent a realm of experience that remained for him beyond cohering.

A year later, at any rate, his fiction would return to Jefferson and Yokna-patawpha County—replete with that setting’s familiar space, linear time, and interrelated family histories. Rural humor, penetrating social analysis, and the texture of class relations would feature prominently in
The Hamlet
, making it one of his most admired—indeed, Balzacian—novels. (Readers who do not otherwise care for Faulkner often esteem
The Hamlet
.) But that novel would continue to explore, more briefly but no less forcefully than
If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem
, the madness of love. It was 1940, after all, and Meta Carpenter was still raging in his blood.

Faulkner was in his early forties when he put this book together, largely out of stories already published. He had been meditating Snopes materials ever since 1925, and
The Hamlet
expertly taps a Yoknapatawpha County mastered into its narrative possibilities. Unlike a world composed of two lovers in “Wild Palms,” Frenchman’s Bend (a village near Jefferson) in
The Hamlet
sports a generous cast of characters and a capacious setting and history. Uncle Will Varner seems to have been running the place forever. The novel opens on a challenge to his hegemony: the arrival of the first Snopes at the community’s social and financial hub, Varner’s country store. The skeletal plot for the entire trilogy involves the Snopeses’ economic takeover of the region, beginning in the opening scene. Flem Snopes—the major Snopes, though flanked by his truculent father Ab and an unending slew of bizarrely named cousins and nephews—competes silently, systematically, and successfully with the Varners for power. By the time of
The Mansion
(1959), Flem will have made his way into Jefferson and attained wealth, power, and respectability.