I read Faulkner's novel Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] yesterday. I was led to read it because a friend had the quote "Between grief and nothing I will take grief" on his gchat status, which struck me as very personally relevant right now, so I asked him about it and found out that it was from Wild Palms. The book intrigued me even more because the more recent title (If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem) is a reference to Psalm 137, which I am newly familiar with this year thanks to observing Tisha B'Av for the first time.
**WARNING: BEGINNING OF SPOILERS**
So, the book is two stories interwoven, "Wild Palms" and "Old Man." In "Wild Palms," I was struck by the romantic relationship between the two protagonists. The basic thing is that the man, Wilbourne, falls in love with a married woman, Charlotte, and the two go off together, with the husband's bitter consent. Throughout the story, Wilbourne and Charlotte have conversations about the nature of marriage and love. Time after time, they uproot themselves from whatever life they are living, when they start feeling "too married." When Wilbourne feels bad about not always being able to support Charlotte (he has difficulty finding jobs because employers find out that he is "living in sin"), Charlotte reminds him that she didn't go off with him because she wanted another husband. The arrangement that they have is a fairly scathing comment on marriage--and, not incidentally, on capitalism. The two choose to live in very harsh conditions, because it seems that only under conditions of physical suffering and financial scarcity are they able to maintain some kind of authenticity of feeling. Every time they drift toward stability and comfort, they find themselves bound up in the pursuit of "respectability"--which seems to terrify them more than anything else.
Now, I suppose it would be possible to argue for all sorts of other interpretations, like that if they were rich they wouldn't mind financial comfort, that it's not the money that they mind but the hours of work; that the characters are actually caricatures and the reader is meant to read them as foolish rather than as offering a social commentary on what "respectability" means (or meant in that era).... But I don't find myself concluding either of those things. I think that it's true that they mind the hours of work, the hours spent apart, but that they mind even more the Sisyphean fight, and the temptation to fit in, to become "legible." And I think that they are not meant to be read as foolish, both because of how they are portrayed and based on similar themes found in the second story, "Old Man." I could spend more time defending my interpretation but I won't because this is not a paper I'm writing for school and that topic is not what interests me the most.
But I think if you take my interpretation for now, it's also interesting to note that in their arrangement, Charlotte is accorded a measure of dignity and independence that I think would not have been so likely within the context of a marriage. Charlotte and Wilbourne have some explicit conversations about her right to earn money within the context of their relationship, and how their joint refusal of "respectability" has changed the rules. Also, even though Wilbourne occasionally makes extreme choices about their joint future by "telling her how it's going to be" without really consulting her first (such as when he decides to go take the job in the mine), he actually is basing those choices on values that he learned explicitly from her (about love vs. marriage) -- values, it could be argued, that have developed out of her perspective as a woman who has previously experienced the effects of marriage on her independence and dignity.
I'm not saying Faulkner's a feminist or that there's nothing sexist going on in this book. But, I think that there's a profound critique there. This is a critique that is still relevant today (maybe more than ever, in the context of the same-sex marriage discourse), despite the fact that the stigma associated with unmarried heterosexual couples (at least the stigma for the male) has decreased drastically since the time in which the novel is set. The critique really makes visible the price of being "legible" through marriage--a price that differs for men and women but which is extreme for both. I would venture to say that the book essentially argues, in that aforementioned last line, that the price of "respectability" is worse than death. Yes, OK, when Wilbourne makes that comment about choosing grief rather than nothing, he's talking about his choice not to commit suicide rather than endure prison and life without Charlotte. But I think that the comment is about much more than that, because he would never have been in the situation of making that latter choice had he not gotten into the situation with Charlotte in the first place. I think I can also justify this interpretation in that the reference to grief versus nothingness harks back to references throughout the book that set up various types of numbness against feeling--"respectability" versus love, most particularly.
The other main thing that strikes me about both of the intertwining stories is a related point. Throughout both stories, Faulkner has his protagonists making choices that seem surprising (in that they are choices in favor of situations that would seem undesirable, such as financial instability, physical danger, stigma, and imprisonment) -- and yet choices that are obviously right for the characters. In "Old Man," the main character (the "tall convict") chooses to return to prison after almost losing his life multiple times and having many chances to escape, under cover of a hurricane that has left the Mississippi River flooded. In many ways, he, like the protagonists of "Wild Palms" has no ties, has no "purpose in life" to speak of--and it is possible to conclude from the novel that this condition produces a very particular kind of dignity.
Now, I think this is risky territory. All these characters are white characters against a segregated and racially dire political backdrop (we see people of color in the shadows multiple times in both stories, almost always referred to via racial epithets--including Poles and Italians, whom the characters explicitly struggle, against their impulses, to understand as white). These white protagonists consciously or unconsciously seek out harsh circumstances (the convict, for example, was convicted for attempting to rob a train, not because he wanted or needed the goods on the train, but because he was inspired to stage a particular type of robbery by reading paperback novels), and the novel seems to bear out the idea that such harsh circumstances make dignity possible in a way that comfort does not. Now, this is essentially "slumming," and likely reflects Faulkner's own anxieties about his racial privilege. And when viewed in that light, it seems like Faulkner glorifies characters who deal with this racial anxiety by finding some kind of escape, some kind of pretended escape from complicity. In today's terms, that would be easily glossed as "actions taken out of white guilt that actually do nothing to challenge the racial status quo and in fact are possible only through, despite attempting to conceal, racial privilege."
On the other hand, Faulkner is the novelist, not the characters, and the characters are characters, not people. Given this, I think that the characters' choices actually do offer a kind of critique. Even though the characters never become "race traitors"--far from it--the characters do seem to be able to find dignity only when they become outcasts, when they deal constantly with insecurity, when they live on the edge of death--and, not insignificantly, when they live in harsh conditions alongside people of color (Wilbourne and Charlotte in the mine and the tall convict in prison). Put another way, the system of white supremacy (combined with other aspects of "respectability" politics with all its capitalist and sexist aspects) makes dignity as impossible for whites as it does for people of color, unless whites refuse (at least to some degree) to benefit from it.
The characters find dignity not only by seeking out harsh circumstances, but also when they are removed from the context of "workaday" labor. There is a massive glorification of leisure (even the tall convict's panicked journey on the river could be considered leisure in a capitalist sense, I think) and of conscious embodiment, as pitted, explicitly, against a focus on accumulation for the future. This, I think, is not only a critique of capitalism but on some level a profoundly feminist critique as well. This is, again, encapsulated in the choices that the three protagonists make to remain outside the "respectable" world (although it is true that the tall convict really enjoys his time "free to work" before he surrenders -- however, he is an alligator hunter, which is not exactly factory work). It is also encapsulated in the choice of grief over nothing, which Wilbourne affirms after several passages about memory and how memory is meaningless without embodiment--passages that are tied textually to all those other passages about love instead of marriage, and, particularly, the essential role of sex in this "alternative" existence.
**END SPOILERS**
There's always more to say, but I'll stop there for now. In any case, not exactly what I expected from Faulkner! Whoa.
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