IN THE MIDDLE THIRTIES Faulkner wrote two novels that have yet to be adequately appreciated. Both Pylon and The Wild Palms seem to me works of real brilliance, but that has not been the usual opinion. No early Faulkner novels have been more consistently written off as failures by the critics than these two.
Most readers today have probably never read The Wild Palms in the form in which it was published and intended to be read. Since Malcolm Cowley some years ago characterized the two stories that make up The Wild Palms as “unrelated,”1 the novel has generally been reprinted as two separate works. More recently it has been reissued with both parts within the same set of covers, but without alternating chapters. Read separately, neither story has very much meaning. The separated parts have continued to sell in the drug stores and to be pretty much ignored by the critics.
Pylon and The Wild Palms have a good deal in common besides being written within a few years of each other, dealing with the contemporary period, and eschewing Yoknapatawpha. Both of them are directly concerned with describing and assessing certain distinctive features of the contemporary world: they are not simply laid in a setting of the present but are attempts to get at the very essence of what distinguishes the present from the past, our society from traditional society. They carry on from where Quentin left off in his attempt to understand and come to terms with the present world.
FAULKNER HAS said of Pylon that his intention was to write a book which would be the expression of pure speed and to people it with a new race, dedicated to speed. Like the majority of the critics, Faulkner “was disappointed in this book”:
I had expected, hoped that it would be a kind of new trend, a literature or blundering at self expression, not of a man, but of this whole new business of speed just to be moving fast.2
Pylon does convey, with terrifying vividness, a sense of great speed mechanically contrived and mechanically continued quite apart from ordinary or familiar human motivations and needs; but it does much more than that. It implicitly judges, by describing, a whole culture and civilization. If it does not accomplish what Faulkner had hoped to accomplish, it accomplishes something better. It is in effect, whatever Faulkner intended, a picture, not painted in oils but made with a camera with the lens in sharp focus, of our times, of the conditions that characterize contemporary urban-industrial mass society.
The imagery of the opening pages conveys the sense of a kind of nightmare world, intensely present, yet unreal. Natural objects are seen in “gargantuan irrelation” or disguised as something else. As Jiggs stands looking in the store window, admiring the boots, he sees them in an artificial light that is like “an unearthly day-colored substance,” palpable but unbelievable, falling on “drinking tools shaped like boots and barnyard fowls and the minute impedimenta for wear on ties and vestchains shaped like bits and spurs,” resembling “biologic specimens” held in the light as in a preservative. The lighting is indirect: it has no apparent source, and it is as unnatural as the objects and relations it reveals. The store window introduces us to a world in which both relationships and identities have been altered beyond casual recognition. The scene is what Eliseo Vivas would call the constitutive symbol of the novel.
After Jiggs (a man who looks like a horse, as the objects in the store window look like other objects) gets on the bus for the airport we learn that he is not from anywhere in particular, that the place he is “staying away from right now” is Kansas. “I got two kids there; I guess I still got the wife too.” Now the moving bus reveals a landscape as miragelike, hallucinatory, as the store window. The bus
ran now upon a flat plain of sawgrass and of cypress and oak stumps . . . a pocked desolation of some terrific and apparently purposeless reclamation across which the shell road ran ribbonblanched toward something low and dead ahead of it—something low, unnatural: a chimera quality which for the moment prevented one from comprehending that it has been built by man and for a purpose.
Earth and water appear to blend here, to lose all distinction, as the bus rushes toward the “chimerashape” of the airport which seems
to float lightly like the apocryphal turreted and battlemented cities in the colored Sunday sections, where beneath sill-less and floorless arches people with yellow and blue flesh pass and repass: myriad, purposeless, and free from gravity.
The airport building when they arrive looks “like a mammoth terminal for some species of machine of a yet unvisioned tomorrow, to which air earth and water will be as one.” The airplanes resemble insects and dead animals; the reporter who now appears looks like a walking corpse; and Jiggs’ legs move with “pistonlike thrusts.” The music of the band that starts playing is amplified through multiple loudspeakers, so that it is heard fractured, multiplied, and distorted. When the music stops a voice speaks through the amplifiers, “talking of creatures imbued with motion though not with life,” “the voice too almost as sourceless as light,” talking between “erupted snatched blares of ghostlike and ubiquitous sound” of the air-meet celebrating the opening of the airport, a voice impersonal, disembodied, mechanical, hired. The light in the airport building is like that in the store window:
The rotunda, filled with dusk, was lighted now, with a soft sourceless wash of no earthly color or substance and which cast no shadow . . .
The airport has been built on made land, on a part of the lake which has been filled in with rubbish from the city: it is a product wholly of man’s ingenuity, his mechanical triumphs. Its lights around the plaza look like “bloomed bloodless grapes on their cast stalks.” Dedicated to machines, it is dominated by the mechanical voice of the announcer, “inhuman, ubiquitous and beyond weariness or fatigue.” Here all ties with the past are cut and time and space have new names suited to their new dimensions: “. . . the first day of a meet is the one they call Monday.” The family of fliers that fascinates the reporter has no more permanent relation to place than to the traditional measurements of time. It has neither home to leave or return to nor purposeful destination: it follows the meets, living as best it can in makeshift pragmatic adjustment to the machines by which and for which it exists.
This is the brave new world of a thoroughly mechanized, traditionless, and “purposeless” culture. The reporter in the phone booth thinks of “love”—“of eternal electrodeitch and bottom-hope”—before he hears the voice of the operator:
“Deposit five cents for three minutes please,” the bland machinevoice chanted. The metal stalk sweatclutched, the guttapercha bloom cupping his breath back at him, he listened, fumbled, counting as the discreet clock and cling died into wirehum.
The cadaverous reporter who thinks of the physics and chemistry of love as he waits to report the achievements of man’s mastery of the physics and chemistry of flight is identified by Jiggs as Lazarus, a fitting reporter of the doings of a world beyond the dead or dying older world. He lives in a room vaguely bohemian, “filled with objects whose desiccated and fragile inutility” made the room seem “exhumed intact from one month to the next.” He has no father, or rather, a constant succession of new and unknown “fathers” as his mother remarries again and again. He is nearly anonymous: even Hagood, the editor, knows only his last name and the one initial he uses. Yet, because he is so close to nothing at all, being Lazarus who has died—many times—and come back, he has sympathy: “he stood there without impatience or design: patron (even if no guardian) saint of all waifs, all the homeless the desperate and the starved.” Ignored, beaten, laughed at, and robbed by the flying family, he is yet compelled to try to help them by an inseparable mixture of eros and agape, desiring the woman and pitying them all.
The days and nights through which he moves are blended and indistinguishable, like the landscape in which the distinction between earth and water has been eradicated. Only the time indicated by the watch on the pile of newspapers in the elevator, which he looks at every time he enters or leaves the building, has any significance for him; and this time has lost all connection with ordinary human purposes. In this new time-dimension life and death are almost as indistinguishable and scrambled as day and night have become for the reporter, like
the Franciana spring which emerges out of the Indian summer of fall almost, like a mistimed stage resurrection which takes the curtain even before rigor mortis has made its bow . . .
Time as he now experiences it is not connected with seasons and cycles, not divided and measured by rite and function, but abstract, alien, compulsive:
When the reporter entered the twin glass doors and the elevator cage clashed behind him this time, stooping to lift the facedown watch alone and look at it, he would contemplate the inexplicable and fading fury of the past twenty-four hours circled back to itself and become whole and intact and objective and already vanishing slowly like the damp print of a lifted glass on a bar.
Time for him has become motion, and motion itself, because unconnected with discernible human purposes, unreal: “now the room’s last long instant of illimitable unforgetting seemed to draw in quietly in a long immobility of fleeing.”
The reporter, who is compared in the book not only to Lazarus but to Prufrock, who thought himself a kind of Lazarus, sees the death of Roger Shumann in the lake as a “death by water” in terms that suggest both the fourth section of The Waste Land and the closing lines of “Prufrock.” It has been said that the relationship between the corpse-like reporter and Eliot’s Prufrock is obscure or non-existent, despite the explicit parallel enforced by the title of one of the chapters, “The Love Song of J. A. Prufrock.” But it seems to me that the parallels between the novel and the poem, especially the ending of the poem, are quite close. In the opening lines of the poem Prufrock has seen nature as dead, sick, alien—or “neutralized,” as I. A. Richards called it a little later in Science and Poetry. But in the last six lines his thoughts turn to a vision out of the past, his own past perhaps, his culture’s certainly. Now for a moment he sees nature not as alien but as created and purposive like man himself. The beauty and mystery of the natural world for man’s imagination is embodied in the vision of mermaids rising from the teeming depths of the sea. But in the last line Prufrock’s mind is once more and finally conquered by the contemporary world, which no longer believes in mermaids or gods in nature, which sees nature as essentially lifeless and meaningless. The sea, source of both life and death, now suggests only death: “Till human voices wake us and we drown.”
The “Death by Water” section of The Waste Land and the ending of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” are as relevant here as they were in Quentin’s death by water in The Sound and the Fury. In both scenes Faulkner has paralleled, and almost certainly been influenced by, Eliot’s contrast of a “scientific” (that is, materialistic and positivistic) view with the religious one that is identified equally with the pre-Christian fertility religions and with the rite of Christian baptism. In Pylon water has lost its ambivalence, its suggestion of both life and death, and has come to suggest death alone. The voices of modern reason rule out the hope of a resurrection. Tangled in the refuse of a scientific and technological civilization, Shumann’s body cannot be raised. We have already heard the “human voices” of the new age blaring through the loudspeakers, and we have found them both inhuman and meaningless, as measured by traditional or religious standards. No wonder the reporter sees Shumann’s death as he does.
But long before Shumann dies we have been reminded of the parallels between the novel and the poem. When the reporter first appears on the scene our view of him is influenced immediately by two allusions to Eliot’s poem, as he is called an “etherized patient” who looks as though he might have “escaped into the living world.” Later allusions keep us reminded of the parallel, so that we are not surprised when, after Shumann’s death, he thinks of the reasons why the body cannot be recovered, in terms that ironically echo Prufrock’s final vision. The inescapable voices of the amplifiers have prepared the reporter, and the reader, for the realization that the plane and the body in it have become inextricable from
a sunken mole composed of refuse from the city itself—shards of condemned paving and masses of fallen walls and even discarded automobile bodies—any and all the refuse of man’s twentieth century clotting into communities large enough to pay a mayor’s salary—dumped into the lake.
Like Prufrock too, he has a vision, as he waits in the cold and wind on the shore with the headlights of the parked cars piercing the darkness, of water blown by the wind, as the ending of the poem has it, “white and black,” water holding not “mermaids” but the body of Shumann. The brilliant artificial lights do not penetrate but only glare
down upon the disturbed and ceaseless dark water which seemed to surge and fall and fall and surge as though in travail of amazement and outrage.
The whole section describing the anguished hours the reporter spends by the shore is a nightmarish montage of black and white. Darkness and glare succeed each other and intermingle, interpenetrate, but the object beneath the water which gives purpose to the search remains hidden:
Now (the searchlight on the shore was black and only the one on the dredge stared as before downward into the water) the police boat lay to and there was not one of the small boats in sight and he saw that most of the cars were gone too . . . as he looked upward the dark seawall overhead came into abrupt sharp relief and then simultaneous with the recognition of the glow as floodlights he heard the displacing of air and saw the navigation lights of the transport as it slid, quite low, across the black angle and onto the field.
Having learned what is called “the taste not of despair but of Nothing,” the reporter knows, like Prufrock, “not only not to hope, not even to wait: just to endure.”
I have quoted so much because it seems to me that almost the whole value of Pylon lies in its quality as a kind of lyric poem, an evocation, largely through the imagery, of what cannot be said successfully in the abstract language of paraphrase. But what does it all come to, what meanings are here that analysis can handle without shattering?
What it comes to first of all is a magnificently vivid and sustained distillation of a world, not a world satirized by caricature as in Huxley’s Brave New World or created by the selection and projection of certain present political realities as in 1984, but a world we already know in all its aspects, though we may also know or remember another, an older, world too. Some of the features of the new world described by Faulkner in 1935 have since been described and measured and analyzed by sociologists; by David Riesman, for instance, in Faces in the Crowd and The Lonely Crowd. The loss of true community; the dwindling significance of the traditional family and home; the relaxing grip or embrace of institutions that embodied and supplied meaning and a sense of stability and permanence; the increasing mobility—rootlessness it might be called —of a people one fifth of whom moved to a new place of residence in a single recent year and an increasing fraction of whom have never known any “permanent” home at all but live always in trailers or motels—all these and other distinctive features of our time, of technological and cultural revolution, with their as yet unknown effects on human experience and personality, are stated in symbolic form in Pylon.
No one reading Riesman or Karl Mannheim could think of Pylon as simply fantasy.3 The symbolic distortions in it are not only revealing of their object: they partake of the quality of their object. Pylon shows us a world from which the reporter, despite his sympathy and interest, is effectively shut out. It pictures and holds up for our judgment a world in almost all essentials the opposite of that which Quentin mourned the loss of in The Sound and the Fury.
The most curious thing about Pylon, in view of Faulkner’s reputation as a simple Yoknapatawpha traditionalist, is the fact that the book passes conditional, limited judgments but no final, sweeping judgment on what it describes. Most of the conditions and outward features of the age which boasts that it has “annihilated space” it describes with obvious distaste—the ubiquitous venal mechanical voice, for instance, which could well be the voice of the TV in our living room. But the people of the new age, however different their manner and relationships may be from ours, from the known and familiar and approved, are presented with sympathy. The reporter speculates that perhaps “They aint human like us,” but Faulkner presents them as human:
Why don’t you let the guy rest? Let them all rest. They were trying to do what they had to do, with what they had to do it with, the same as all of us . . .
Though they live by a different code from the one the reporter, from beyond the grave of hope, recognizes as the traditional one, their code is perhaps not of their choice but a product of new conditions. There is at least one indication that the woman, if not her men, would like a different manner of existence: “And all I want is just a house, a room . . . where I can know that next Monday and the Monday after that . . . If these people seem cold, mechanical, dehumanized, so that even their sex life is isolated, mechanized, devoid of tenderness and unrelated to consequences, it is perhaps because they have taken on a protective coloration.4 Roger Shumann exercises the essential and distinguishing human prerogative at the moment of his death: he makes “a choice.” Choosing to guide his falling plane into the lake where its crash would kill no one but him, he gives the lie to the reporter’s earlier suspicion that he and his family are not “human.” Before the jumper and the woman and child leave the city the jumper attempts to pay their debt to the reporter and to arrange to have Shumann’s body, if discovered, sent back to the one place on earth with which it has any humanly meaningful connection.
When the woman leaves the little boy with the elder Shumanns, who may or may not be his grandparents, a final bit of conversation points up this whole matter of the way in which the flying family is treated.
“You are going to leave him like this?” Dr. Shumann said. “You are going to leave him asleep and go away?”
“Can you think of a better way?” she said.
“No, That’s true.”
We are likely at this point I think to feel that Dr. Shumann is agreeing too easily, that we can think of a better way, or several better ways, including the rather drastic but certainly not impossible one of Laverne’s so changing her way of life that she could care for her child and not abandon him, sleeping or otherwise. The reader, in other words, is likely to be less sympathetic with these people than Faulkner seems to be. Since it is not clear that they have honestly explored all the possibilities, we may doubt that they are doing only “what they had to do.” The question of the reality of choice is as relevant here as it was in the portraits of Popeye and Joe Christmas.
Here, as in Sanctuary and Light in August, pure compassion, love without any judgment, would assume that there has been no choice: and here, as potentially in those novels, charity overrides judgment, is seen as an alternative to it. This is the source of the noticeable ambivalence in the portrayal of the flying family. Creatures of a world despised and rejected, they themselves are pitied and accepted. They are finally pictured as victims, not agents.
The result is a certain ambiguity that cannot be wholly resolved by an analysis of the work that refuses to ignore any of the evidence. When the reporter, early in the book, looks at the bunting hung in the streets for Mardi gras, part of what he sees is described this way:
And here also the cryptic shield caught (i n r i) loops of bunting giving an appearance temporary and tentlike to [the] interminable long corridor of machine blush and gilded synthetic plaster . . .
That “i n r i,” the initials of the Latin words for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” a title mockingly given to Christ at his crucifixion, measures the distance between the scene being portrayed and the religious meaning of Lent, as Ash Wednesday follows Mardi gras or fat Tuesday. It measures too the distance between the new world of the fliers, in which “the Light of the World” has diminished to a “daycolored substance,” and the old, so that if we were to stop here in our reading we should believe we had found clarity of meaning in the work: straight-line decline into a kind of neopaganism and dehumanization in which human relationships have become merely fortuitous, mechanical, and man’s relation to nature and to God has been obscured or destroyed. But this meaning has been qualified or rendered somewhat ambiguous by the time we reach the end: the fliers are still “human,” despite the inhuman conditions of their lives.
As a result, Pylon is certainly ambiguous and perhaps ambivalent. It reads as though Faulkner, when he wrote it, was of two minds about his subject. The traditionalist in him, the Quentin, looked with horror on the loss of community and of a truly human image of man implicit in the mechanization of culture and of thought; but the Mr. Wiseman aspect, the critical reason, accepted the new world as inevitable, perhaps only strange, not terrible. Nevertheless, Pylon is both vividly and solidly created. To reject it completely as a work of art, as many have done, seems to me to imply that clarity of symbolic implication in a work of art is all-important. It is important, and Pylon falls short of the achievement of Faulkner’s very finest works. But since the imaginative richness of it never fails, even when judgment falters, it deserves and rewards our closest attention.
AS ORIGINALLY published, The Wild Palms consisted of ten chapters, five of them telling the story now called The Wild Palms and five telling the story of the convict in the flood, now called Old Man. Faulkner thought of the two stories as connected, complementary, properly making up one book, and arranged them so that we would read first a chapter in one, then a chapter in the other. As he has recently said in answer to an inquiry on this matter, he wrote the story of the convict to bring the story of the two lovers “back to pitch” by contrast with its “antithesis.”5
Faulkner has constantly experimented with the creation of new forms in his writing, and this was one more experiment—making a “novel” out of two separate and different stories, not connected in plot or overlapping in characters but arranged so that they had to be read together. The general view has been that the attempt was ill-judged, the experiment a failure. Whether that opinion is correct or not depends on a judgment of how close and significant the connections are between the two stories and of what new values emerge when we try to hold the two of them in mind at once. We may have to decide in the end that the work is a failure, but we shall not be in a position to judge it until we have undone recent critical and publishing history and put the parts back together again. If we had never tried to read The Sound and the Fury in the form in which it was published but only as four separately published short stories we should not know what aesthetic whole would emerge from those disjointed parts until we tried reading them as Faulkner arranged them.
The connections between the two stories are not literal but basically thematic, though these thematic connections are reflected in tone, setting, imagery, even in a sense in plot, when these are given their natural and inevitable symbolic extensions. Faulkner himself has said of The Wild Palms that it was his intention in the book to try to express “two types of love,”6 and we may take this as our starting point and see what happens when we explore the book with this in mind.
The doctor and his paramour give up everything for love, make it their only concern and their only basis of a continuing relationship, break all ties and connections and obligations, fleeing from family and society and work to keep their love pure, unmixed, unconnected. She leaves her husband and children, he gives up his career, for love. The convict does his duty toward the young woman with whom he is isolated in the boat, caring for her as best he can but refusing to become personally involved. Though he cares for the woman in his charge more effectively, in the end, than the doctor in the other story, his is a depersonalized, a grim and dogged and abstract charity. He does his duty to society and to the woman, but his only effort is to have done with it, get rid of his terrible responsibility, and get back to the prison.
The doctor and his lover eschew society to find the perfect freedom in which to hold and keep love. The convict seeks escape not from but to the prison, which offers security in an alien and hostile environment; he has no time for love. The doctor and his lover magnify personality, the convict minimizes it. The lyrics of many popular love songs express, on their own cultural level, the conviction and the effort of the doctor and the woman; Eric Fromm’s Escape From Freedom, offering a psychological analysis of the personal origins of totalitarian submergence of personality, is relevant to the convict’s story. Together, the two stories say that we make “romantic love” in our time, with all that it implies about freedom and personality, either all or nothing, that we either magnify it and make it bear more than it can bear or deny it entirely.
This I think is the most general thematic implication of the two stories when they are considered together. Far from being trivial or unworthy of consideration, this theme seems to me not only insightful but prophetic. It could be and has in fact been explored from different points of view by psychologists and sociologists. The crisis arising from changing patterns of marriage and family, we are told, arises in large part from the decay of the economic and other functions of the family unit, so that the family comes to exist solely for and because of the fragile tie of personal love and loyalty: love becomes the only reason for the existence of the group, as the doctor and his lover tried to make it. Hemingway’s love stories—A Farewell to Arms, for instance—have this ideal and this necessity (it is not only Hemingway who makes an ideal out of a necessity) at their very center: all other ties, functions, and group relationships are severed and denied to keep love pure, central, all in all. Frederick and Catherine go to Switzerland where they can be wholly free of everything but love. D. H. Lawrence and some popular interpretations of Freudianism in the recent past offer equally relevant illustrations of the same tendency in our culture.
On the other hand the explaining away of love in biological or other terms, the “reductionism” of those who, especially in the twenties and thirties, could believe that “love” was real only insofar as they could identify it with a glandular secretion, a chemical, is one of our ways of denying love. In another dimension the same denial of the personalistic values of love is made by the materialist ideologies and social patterns of half the world: freedom for the individual, without which love is meaningless, is minimized or destroyed, and love, along with all other “ideal” values, is explained as a mere by-product of economic and social “realities.” Thus “realism” and “scientific socialism” in our time agree in denying status to the values of “romantic love.”
If, as I have tried to suggest, there is a basis in present social and cultural trends for the thematic implication of The Wild Palms, which says that today we tend to make love all or nothing, then it remains to be seen how this theme is embodied in the novel with its two stories. This attempt to define and “justify” by reference to social conditions a theme most abstractly conceived, before any detailed examination of the novel, may seem an odd critical procedure—as it does to me. But it should be recalled that in the final analysis theme alone holds these two stories together, and that a failure to recognize this theme, or a denial of its significance, was responsible for taking the novel apart, denying its existence as a novel.
Early in the story of the doctor and the woman there is a passage that provides a clue to the rationale of their effort. The doctor thinks:
“It’s not the romance of illicit love which draws them, [women] not the passionate idea of two damned and doomed isolated forever against the world and God and the irrevocable which draws men; it’s because the idea of illicit love is a challenge to them, because they have an irresistible desire to . . . take the illicit love and make it respectable . ..
Despite his theories about the difference between men and women, it is not Charlotte but Wilbourne himself who feels the impulse to make their love “respectable,” to integrate it with the rest of normal existence. Charlotte will permit nothing to dilute the pure emotion, the unconnected experience, not even personal tenderness: her yellow eyes are “hard,” even when she looks at Wilbourne, her manner rough, self-absorbed, demanding. “There’s a part of her that doesn’t love anybody, anything,” Wilbourne finally realizes. “Why, she’s alone. Not lonely, alone.”
She grasped his hair again, hurting him again though now he knew she knew she was hurting him. “Listen; it’s got to be all honeymoon, always. Forever and ever, until one of us dies. It can’t be anything else. Either heaven, or hell: no comfortable safe peaceful purgatory between for you and me to wait in until good behavior or forbearance or shame or repentance overtakes us.”
“So it’s not me you believe in, put trust in; it’s love.” She looked at him. “Not just me; any man.”
“Yes. It’s love. They say love dies between two people. That’s wrong. It doesn’t die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you are not good enough, worthy enough.”
One of the reasons we cannot imagine any happy ending for A Farewell to Arms is that we cannot imagine Frederick and Catherine normally married, earning a living, rearing children. If Catherine had not died, presumably their love would have gone away, left them. Their love is pure as well as intense: it has no connections, no relevance to anything but itself. Similarly in The Wild Palms; their love will not leave them, as Charlotte says on another occasion, if they are “good enough, strong enough.” Love as she understands it is not essentially a product of, a reality to be found only in, personal relations, but something in the final analysis outside either of them. Her point of view is that which was once expressed in the conviction that “marriages are made in heaven” and which glorified “love at first sight.” She and Wilbourne fall in love, if not at first sight then literally at second sight, at their second meeting; and what happens after that is something she feels neither of them can do anything about.
She eventually wins Wilbourne around to something like her point of view, so that he comes to see society as the antagonist, the force that makes love impossible: “Because this Anno Domini 1938 has no place in it for love.” But he has ceased to be “vulnerable” to society’s expectations. They go to a deserted mine in Utah in the winter, where they hope to devote themselves entirely to love. But Wilbourne comes to believe that society is not the only antagonist: that hostility to love is embodied in the very nature of things, in the natural universe itself, trapping and defeating those who love —by pregnancy, infection, death. Charlotte dies of an abortion bungled by Wilbourne and he decides against suicide, decides to continue to cherish the memory of their love in prison: “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”
It is not easy to make parallel quotations from the story of the convict because he is not thoughtful or articulate. His motives must be judged largely from his actions, but the essential meaning his story embodies is clear enough; it may even be partially suggested by quotation:
He wanted so little. He wanted nothing for himself. He just wanted to get rid of the woman, the belly . . .
Charlotte too wanted, she thought, very little:
“I like bitching and making things with my hands. I don’t think that’s too much to be permitted to like, to want to have and keep.”
The convict wants only to be rid of “the woman, the belly”: responsibility for the continuance of life. Charlotte wants, and finally forces Wilbourne to perform, an abortion. Both “types of love” shed responsibility, deny or try to prevent consequences and connections. Both kinds are a flight, one into pure intensity of love experience, the other into a denial of personal relations. As the convict does his duty, thinking of his “responsibility” and his “honor,” he reminds us of the old doctor and his wife in the first chapter of Wilbourne’s story. Like them, he is “charitable” in the modern, depersonalized sense of the word, the sense that suggests money or effort given without any personal involvement with the recipient; but, like them again, his dutiful response lacks caritas or true compassion. Love romanticized, love avoided: both lead to death or imprisonment. So much, in bald and banal summary, we may say of the meaning that holds these two stories together, justifies their being considered as one work of art, and is created only by their interrelationships.
This theme is expressed, and qualified, enriched, in many aspects of the two stories but most clearly in the symbolic extensions of the settings. The river for the convict is alien (he has never seen it before; though he grew up within a few miles of it, he knows nothing of it), frustrating, seemingly malevolent: like the stormy sea in Stephen Crane’s story, “The Open Boat,” its maliciousness seems conscious, willful, directed at frustrating him. He knows the impulse of Crane’s correspondent to throw bricks at the temple. The river is the “alien universe,” a universe not created for man’s good or comfort, which the convict did not know existed until now. The same feeling is expressed in the doctor’s story by the wind in the wild palms. Wind, waste, wildness, desolation: the setting in both stories expresses, through flood or the tail end of a hurricane, the same lonely and precarious and doomed situation of man, tossed, swept, overwhelmed by forces hostile to the values man thinks he alone conceives and cherishes.
In the plots, too, though they are not literally connected, there are parallels. In both stories the characters endure terrible hardships and frustrations to be free—from love or for love. The convict paddles frenziedly and interminably to get
where there would be people, houses, something, anything he might reach and surrender his charge to and turn his back on her forever, on all pregnant and female life forever and return to that monastic existence of shotguns and shackles where he would be secure from it.
Wilbourne and Charlotte struggle to be free from society’s compulsions so that there may be nothing in their lives but love:
You are born submerged in anonymous lockstep with the teeming and anonymous myriads of your time and generation . . .
Only by breaking free of the lockstep, they feel, can they achieve the fullness of love.
In both stories the characters feel that they are trapped, controlled by circumstances, by fate. Though the doctor’s and Charlotte’s primary antagonist is society, it soon turns out, when they have shed all social obligations and concerns, that there is a more formidable antagonist behind society. Accident governs, frustrating human purposes in both stories. Wilbourne meets Charlotte by accident and accidentally finds the money that enables them to go away; he thinks of Charlotte’s pregnancy as an unlucky accident and her fatal sickness as another. This is the way the malignancy in things, symbolized for him in the sound of the wind in the palms, gets at you and destroys you. The convict felt the same way:
It seemed to him that he had accidentally been caught in a situation in which time and environment, not himself, was mesmerized; he was being toyed with by a current of water going nowhere . . .
Both men, like Jason before them, come to feel that time is the key to success in their fight with circumstance. The convict battles the waters with almost incredible endurance and courage to get where there are people before the baby is born; Wilbourne races against the time when their money will be gone, the time when it will be too late to do an abortion, the time when Charlotte will be dead. For the convict: “Time: that was his itch now, so his only chance was to stay ahead of it as long as he could and hope to reach something before it struck.” For Wilbourne, remembering Charlotte after her death: “the body, the broad thighs and the hands that liked bitching and making things. It seemed so little, so little to want, to ask. With all the old graveward-creeping, the old wrinkled withered defeat. . .”
Finally, it is not insignificant, trivial, as it has been suggested, that both plots end with the man in the state prison. Both men choose to go to prison, the convict when he was already free and would never have been searched for, having been listed as dead in the flood; the doctor after the means of suicide has been offered him. The one chooses prison to be free of entanglements, the other to keep love alive a little while longer by remembering. The convict expresses his reason for preferring prison to life outside in the final words of his story: “‘Women—!’ the tall convict said.” Wilbourne wonders about the possibility of survival after death but decides that it would, if it existed, not provide for survival of the kind of love to which he and Charlotte have dedicated themselves:
Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it wont be memory because it wont know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be.—Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grief.
The stories end in antithetical parallelism with a thematic implication that is clear enough. The image of imprisonment not endured but desired suggests a negative judgment of both men.
The atmosphere of the parallel stories is conspicuously similar. One image in the story of the convict, when they see a burning plantation house, epitomizes the atmosphere in both stories, in the integral novel: “Juxtaposed to nowhere and neighbored by nothing it stood, a clear steady pyre-like flame rigidly fleeing its own reflection, burning in the dusk above the watery desolation with a quality paradoxical, outrageous and bizarre.” The road on which the truck travels at first dips below the water “like a flat thin blade slipped obliquely into flesh by a delicate hand”: the death and frustration brought by the river appear before the river itself is seen.
The story of the doctor opens with Charlotte lying in the new beach chair on the beach all day long, listening to the unceasing wind and “watching the palm fronds clashing with their wild dry bitter sound against the bright glitter of the water.” Wilbourne, at night, “could hear the black wind again, risible, jeering, constant, inattentive, and it even seemed to him that he could hear the wild dry clashing of the palms in it.” Imagery of storm and flood, of wild palms and wild waste waters, creates the atmosphere and expresses a part of the theme in each story: “the smell and taste and sense of wet and boundless desolation.”
Once we have discerned some of the larger parallels between the two stories, we may be tempted to look for more specific ones, particularly in the two plots. If we look closely, we shall certainly find some, though where just perception leaves off and sheer ingenuity takes over in such a search is a question that each reader must answer for himself. Certainly there is a notable parallel between the doctor’s performing an abortion and the convict’s delivering a baby, and an antithesis between the doctor’s flight from society to the lake and later to the mine, and the convict’s search for signs of human habitation. And there are a good many other analogous incidents of the sort, though I must confess I find them in most cases of doubtful thematic significance.
But one final parallel, of clear symbolic import, must be mentioned. There is a striking similarity in the nature of the two men, the doctor and the convict. Both are portrayed as innocents, trapped, taken in, because of their ignorance and naivete. If only the convict had not believed the pulp magazines he would not have tried to rob the train. He was taken in by robbery made to seem both easy and romantic; his failure started the chain of circumstances that led to his choice of prison over freedom. If Wilbourne had not been forced by his poverty to lead so narrow and monastic a life in medical school, if he had had any experience at all with women, he might not have become the fool of love; he might
have discovered that love no more exists just at one spot and in one moment and in one body out of all the earth and all time and all the teeming breathed, than sunlight does.
Both are trapped by their lack of knowledge of the world.
The tones of the two stories are quite different. The story of the doctor is told throughout in a tone immediate, compelling, realistic. The antithetical story of the convict opens in a manner suggestive of the recital of a legend, a tale remote and possibly fabulous: “Once (it was in Mississippi, in May, in the flood year of 1927) there were two convicts.” The convict is referred to throughout simply as “the convict,” or, when he is with the other convicts, as “the tall convict.” One thinks of another realistic fable, The Red Badge of Courage. The effect is to counter-balance the immediacy with a kind of remoteness. The Wild Palms is written in counterpoint.
If this is so, it is not surprising that the deepest meaning of each story emerges only as it is thought of in connection with the other. Images of flight and search dominate the one work made from two stories. The convict’s struggle with and attempted flight from the river and the doctor’s wish to escape from the sound of the wind in the palms suggest two different modern reactions to the concept of man’s ultimate loneliness, the concept of the alien universe. He flees into romantic exaggeration both of personal emotion conceived as a wholly subjective value, and of freedom; or he flees into totalitarian security where there is no freedom and none of the agonizing responsibility which freedom entails.
The convict’s effort to achieve a situation in which he cannot be disillusioned again, hurt again, is one with the primitivistic tendencies of Hemingway’s stories, which, as Edmund Wilson said long ago, are true barometric indicators of the atmosphere of our times as well as, at their best, great works of art. The effort is essentially to reduce one’s hopes and expectations, that one may not be disappointed: to adjust to a hard, a shrunken and threatening reality. This is why Hemingway’s “aware” characters do not talk or think of “love” while they make love, or concern themselves with “ideal” values but fight and hunt and fish. They feel that they can cultivate well, “truly,” what is left to them only by shrinking the area of their concern. Their effort is the same as that of the inarticulate convict who seeks inward peace and control by turning away from what he cannot control.
The doctor and Charlotte take another way, very different yet like in that it involves a sloughing off of responsibilities. They want to “burn with a hard, gem-like flame” in love. The romantic search for intensity of experience finds its culmination in their story. There is no time, they think, for the lesser values—children, the prosaic. They too, like the convict, are in flight from man’s lonely and desperate situation in the world as he believes he has discovered it to be; but not only fleeing, searching too, searching for identity, integrity, real value.
There are perhaps reasons in the book why these themes—or any themes, any meanings—have not been recognized. I have tried to show that there are many connections between the two stories that have not generally been recognized, so that there is good reason for reading the work as Faulkner intended we should. But I shall not attempt to deny that there is a certain obscurity in the work as a whole.
Whatever obscurity there is here springs in the first place I think from a partial failure to achieve aesthetic distance in the chapters telling the doctor’s story. In the convict’s story the distance comes from the legendary tone more or less consistently maintained, but in the doctor’s story we sometimes feel that we are being asked to identify very closely, with only intermittent reservations, with the doctor and Charlotte. The reservations are there, as in the passage I have already quoted about what the doctor might have recognized about the nature of love if he had not been tricked by the poverty of his experience; but on the whole he and Charlotte are treated so sympathetically, so much from within their own point of view, that we tend to feel that they must be wholly “sympathetic characters.” That they are not, that however much we may sympathize with them in their suffering, we must hold to the judgment that their effort has been misguided, doomed from the start and calculated to bring just this kind of end to themselves and suffering to others, is finally but by no means consistently clear.
The opening in particular renders this meaning obscure. The contrast between the lovers and the older doctor and his wife from whom Wilbourne and Charlotte have rented the shore cottage is calculated to put the reader’s sympathy wholly on the side of the lovers. Perhaps Faulkner thought that he had to do this to overcome a conventional prejudgment against Charlotte and Wilbourne, the sort of judgment that would condemn them for their selfishness and their folly without ever examining their situation sympathetically to see what good reasons they might have for their actions. But if so, I think the hand of the artist faltered here, by overemphasis, perhaps because while the head drew back from the lovers’ way, the heart was with them. At any rate, the old doctor and his wife, who embody and represent society, convention, are so unattractive that we feel immediately that the lovers must be right if this is the only alternative, this puritanical fear of love and life, this utter conventionality, this “provincial protestant” hostility to everything but a grimly conceived duty. There is no love at all here, illicit or otherwise, personal commitment or true caritas, only a dour puritanism. When the doctor’s wife sends over the food to the lovers, the doctor knows that the action is an “uncompromising Christian deed performed not with sincerity or pity but through duty.”
We may feel in this opening chapter that the contrast is too sharp and somehow false, the alternatives not comprehensive or complex enough. We do not really need to choose, we feel, between the old doctor and his wife’s varicose-veined repression and the lovers’ wild doomed romance. Of course, as I have tried to show, the novel does not finally mean that we should. On the contrary, it means that we in fact falsely do. But meanwhile we may have been misled, thrown off the track of meaning. Backwoods puritanical protestantism bulks too large as the alternative to personal enjoyment and beauty. Faulkner’s Southern background occasionally works against him, as it usually works for him.
If we were really being asked to identify without significant reservations with Wilbourne and Charlotte, as the first chapter may make it seem, we should have to conclude that their story is intolerably romantic and sentimental. If there is a crucial weakness in the work it is here; and it springs, once again, from the difficulty Faulkner sometimes has in achieving distance from his characters. As Faulkner has said of the work, it was intended as
One story—the story of Charlotte Rittenmeyer and Harry Wilbourne, who sacrificed everything for love, and then lost that. I did not know it would be two separate stories until after I had started the book. When I reached the end of what is now the first section of The Wild Palms, I realized suddenly that something was missing, it needed emphasis, something to lift it like counterpoint in music. So I wrote on the Old Man story until The Wild Palms story rose back to pitch.7
The story of Charlotte and Harry could rise “back to pitch” only with the achievement of greater aesthetic distance, which is certainly lacking in the first chapter. But it may be doubted that Faulkner’s expedient was the best solution of this felt difficulty. The obscurity of the first chapter remains. Speculation may remove it, particularly if the speculation centers on what both internal and external evidence suggests is the intended meaning. But feeling continues to find it. We may conclude, I think, that only by making changes in the first chapter itself, not simply by writing a balancing chapter, could Faulkner have removed it. If one strand of a two-strand work is defective, the work as a whole must suffer.
To read The Wild Palms as it was written, then, is to discover sufficient unity to justify our speaking of it as one work, whether we want to call it one “novel” or not. But it is also to discover that the unity is primarily unity of theme, expressed chiefly, though not solely, through subtle parallels and contrasts that emerge from the imagery. The two distinct stories offer implied comments on each other; yet, since they never meet except at the end, there remains a sense in which we must say that the theme of the whole work is expressed without benefit of localized embodiment—except once and finally. Perhaps this means that the reader must here do part of the work which the novelist normally does for him. If so, the common opinion that the work as a whole is a failure is justified—provided we understand “failure” here to mean failure only by the highest standard of aesthetic achievement. This failure is more interesting, more alive, more rewarding in the whole complex experience we get from works of art, than most ordinary successes.
BOTH PYLON and The Wild Palms may profitably be thought of in connection with the work of Hemingway. In Pylon the fliers are like Hemingway’s tough, laconic, hard-boiled, unconventional heroes and heroines, with the significant difference that they are seen from a distance, through the eyes of the reporter, whose first response is amazement. They are not caricatured, but they are certainly judged: they are different from us. After a while we discover, with the reporter, that they are “human,” but we never see them as ideal. Faulkner’s vision of life is a more social vision than Hemingway’s. The negative judgment of the fliers, qualified but not cancelled by the sympathy felt for them, presupposes the importance of tradition and community. The fliers belong to no place, to no group except people like themselves who have cut all ties; in the sense that they measure time only by the demands of the air meets, they belong even to no time, no traditional, natural, seasonal, human time. They are man reduced to essentials, stripped of connections, without history. They are what many of Hemingway’s early characters would look like if the power of his art, and the integrity and completeness in its own terms of his vision, did not compel us to look at them differently.
The more social nature of Faulkner’s vision is as apparent in The Wild Palms as it is in Pylon. The doctor and Charlotte might be Frederick and Catherine, cutting all ties with a dishonest society, living two against the world, finding in love that which alone makes life worthwhile; they even try to find, in Utah, their clean cold place, their Switzerland. In contrast with the old doctor and his wife of the first chapter, they are Hemingway’s “aware” characters, their courage and honesty growing precisely from their sense of the danger, the loneliness of man’s situation, the lack of time for anything but the essential values. The sound of the wind in the wild palms reminds them, as the ants on the log reminded Frederick, that man is utterly lost unless he can create values in a world in which nothing is guaranteed except death. As we have seen, if the first chapter were all of the novel, something very like the Hemingway vision would take over and control the story, without the justification Hemingway gives it in his best work. But as we gain the perspective offered by the later chapters we come to see the doctor and Charlotte as heroic only in a misguided way, as “romantic” in a sense that carries overtones of negative judgment. They are finally no more idealized than is the convict, who, like a caricature of a Hemingway hero, chooses to give up much in order to be sure of something, to give up life and love in the threatening and apparently meaningless world so that he may enjoy his cigar and the quiet conversations in the evening in prison, “the cigar burning smoothly and richly in his clean steady hand, the smoke wreathing upward across his face saturnine, humorless, and calm.”
Both Pylon and The Wild Palms deal with the threat of meaninglessness, in society and in nature itself, and with ways of meeting the threat. What amounts finally to dehumanization is one way, but not a way Faulkner asks us to admire. The comments on the modern world implied in Pylon and The Wild Palms help us to become more aware of what is admirable in the past of Yoknapatawpha and why it is that in the world of Faulkner’s imagination there is finally no adequate substitute for “the old virtues.”