After being laid up these past few days, time to lay out plans for the final two weeks of 2012 posts here

Sorry I've been mostly quiet these past few days.  Was subbing quite a bit last week, then I came down with a moderate case of bronchitis this weekend.  Got a steroid shot this morning and some other meds and feel much better already, enough to begin laying out plans for now through the end of the year.

I have a few reviews that I would like to write, books and cinema alike, before Christmas.  These are the reviews.  One and perhaps two of these will be written today:

The Hobbit (film)
Nick Mamatas, Bullettime
Goran Petrović, An Atlas Traced by the Sky
The Rabbi's Cat (film; US wide release in January – I received a screener DVD from people associated with the film)
Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
Nir Yaniv, The Love Machine & Other Contraptions
Kelly Barnhill, Iron Hearted Violet
Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

I may in addition be able to work in reviews of Sherman Alexie's Blasphemy, Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Feel Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There and Felix Gilman's The Rise of Ransom City, but these will depend on how much time I have for reading in the next few days.

After Christmas, I plan on writing a series of posts summing up notable 2012 releases of works in translation, works not yet available in English translation, speculative fiction, realist fiction, and perhaps collections, anthologies, and/or poetry collections.  I may in the next few days compromise a list of notable 2012 releases from all of these various forms and genres for those who might want a more personalized version of a periodical's Best of 2012, something with say 50 works from 2012, from which on the 31st I would post a Top 20-25 for 2012.

I see the English translation of Goran Petrović's An Atlas Traced by the Sky is now available

I placed an order a couple of weeks ago when I saw it on Amazon, but it was oddly labeled as being in Serbian, yet with an English-language cover, so I ordered it more thinking that I'd have the original text to go with the Spanish translation (which I enjoyed quite a bit) than I would be having the English translation.  Well, it turns out that it is indeed a Belgrade-published English translation (no idea if there'll be UK/US publication in the near future) and this is the blurb.  Tell me if this sounds interesting to you:

Have you ever wanted to own an atlas that would map out the relations between dreams and waking, between reality and imagination, between the past and the future?  Award winning writer Goran Petrović offers you precisely that in his authentic postmodernist style.  In their search for life's meaning and happiness, the cast of characters, living in a house with the sky as its roof, spend their days connecting the threads of this life with the myriad threads of other worlds.  They offer us maps which show the paths through birth and death, love and romance, the thoroughfare between joy and despair.  By combining their tale with a collection of ancient and future documents dealing with amulets, map-making, legends and mythology, the author guides the reader through a fantastic labyrinth toward the rather astounding outcome of self-awareness.  This is an atlas that will make you dream and, even more, it will show you where your dreams may ultimately lead.  Some of the best qualities of Serbian postmodernist prose in Pavić's manner can be found in this novel.

An Atlas Traced by the Sky is, paradoxically, a book which stylistically reminds us of many other books and authors (The Arabian Nights, The Decameron, Borges, Pavić, Ende), but which actually, in its rarity, in its baroque elegance and in the feast of imagination it contains, truly does not resemble a single one of those books or authors. – Mihajlo Pantić

 I will review this translation before year's end.  Unless the quality of the English translation is much poorer than that of the Spanish, I suspect it'll have a place in my year-end summary of 2012 releases.

William Faulkner, "The Tall Men"; "Adolescence"

Much has been made in previous Faulkner Friday entries on how Faulkner’s characters relate to their time and locale.  At times, this take risks suborning characterization too much to the demands of theme.  Yet whenever the individual characters are considered, from Addie to Emily to Joe to Quentin to Sam Fathers and so forth, there is a quality about them that makes them seem “real” outside of the constraints of the particular tale in which they appear.  A composite image forms of characters who have suffered, who have grieved, who have spat into the wind and dared to take another step when exhaustion threatened to end their existence right then and there.  Faulkner references this in his Nobel acceptance speech, where he said:

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Endurance in hope of fulfillment and justification drives many people to suffer not just the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but also the ebbs and flows of bounty.  Faulkner’s characters have known better times; they strive for their return, even if they know it may never happen again.  If this were all that Faulkner’s characters were about, however, they would be more archetypes or distortions than true dynamic representations of human people.  Sometimes, these qualities of hope and steadfastness are recognized within the characters (as that of McCallums in “The Tall Men” or the half-orphaned girl Juliet in “Adolescence”) or are seen in opposition through the views of their antagonists (such as the government official in “The Tall Men”).  Even when misunderstood or unrecognized by other characters, these qualities capture and hold our attention.

“The Tall Men” (1941) is set during the last years of the Great Depression, as the country readies itself for possible entry into World War II.  A government official, Pearson,  has been sent to Jefferson to arrest two of the McCallums for draft evasion.  As he travels into town, irked that a local marshal has already told the two men to expect to be arrested, this investigator muses about the local situation in language that might sound familiar to those who have ever heard someone rail against public welfare:

The investigator drew up behind the other car and switched off and blacked out his lights.  “These people,” he said.  Then he thought, But this doddering, tobacco-chewing old man is one of them, too, despite the honor and pride of his office, which should have made him different.  So he didn’t speak it aloud, removing the keys and getting out of the car, and then locking the car itself, rolling the windows up first, thinking, These people who lie about and conceal the ownership of land and property in order to hold relief jobs which they have no intention of performing, standing on their constitutional rights against having to work, who jeopardize the very job itself through petty and transparent subterfuge to acquire a free mattress which they intend to sell; who would relinquish even the job, if by so doing they could receive free food and a place, any rathole, in town to sleep in; who, as farmers, make false statements to get seed loans which they will later misuse, and then react in loud vituperative outrage and astonishment when caught at it.  And then, when at long last a suffering and threatened Government asks one thing of them in return, one thing simply, which is to put their names down on a selective-service list, they refuse to do it.

Over the course of “The Tall Men,” we see this presumptive opinion altered by Pearson’s encounter with the uncle and father of the two young McCallums.  Agricultural laborers and, in the case of the father, a World War I veteran, the elder McCallums talk of not taking anything from anyone but giving freely (in the form of service to land and country, whether it be that of their own father who walked across a thousand miles to join a Confederate regiment in Virginia or Buddy McCallum’s service in World War I) when asked.  Some of their attitudes, such as their refusal to accept crop subsidies and their circumvention of being rewarded for no service may seem quaint to modern readers, but it lies in direct opposition to the opinion expressed earlier by Pearson.  Pearson is forced to confront the truth that there are some who do not shirk duty as much as embrace it to such a degree that mere government directives pale in comparison.  As he prepares to leave the McCallum household, his preconceptions shattered, the local marshal who accompanied him drives this point home with this observation:

So the investigator put the bundle down on the brick coping and the marshal began to dig, skillfully and rapidly, still talking in that cheerful, interminable voice, “Yes, sir.  We done forgot about folks.  Life has done got cheap, and life ain’t cheap.  Life’s a pretty durn valuable thing.  I don’t mean just getting along from one WPA relief check to the next one, but honor and pride and discipline that make a man worth preserving, make him of any value.  That’s what we got to learn again.  Maybe it takes trouble, bad trouble, to teach it back to us; maybe it was the walking to Virginia because that’s where his ma come from, and losing a war and then walking back, that taught it to old Anse.  Anyway, he seems to learned it, and to learned it good enough to bequeath it to his boys.  Did you notice how all Buddy had to do was to tell them boys of his it was time to go, because the Government had sent them the word?  And how they told him good-by?  Growned men kissing one another without hiding and without shame.  Maybe that’s what I am trying to say.

Just as Pearson too readily judged the McCallums because of the letter of a law being broken, too quickly do we often look down upon those who fail to behave in the manner which we prescribe to them.  “The Tall Men” could have been set anywhere in the South (it has barely any connection beyond the Jefferson setting with the rest of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County stories) or any American rural area for that matter.  It is the character of the fictional personages that speak to us, reminding us of character traits that we too often dismiss from our fellow human beings.  There is a veracity to “The Tall Men” that makes it powerful without there being any great dramatic scene; the drama that unfolds is between humans who come to understand each other just a little bit more.
“Adolescence” is not on the par of “The Tall Men,” but this short tale, likely composed in the late 1920s or early 1930s, also is a character-driven tale.  Faulkner begins this tale by opening with the cruel fate of young Juliet Bunden’s mother, whose dreams and aspirations were slowly crushed by marriage to the shiftless Joe Bunden and the pains of childbirth in an age before modern prenatal treatment:

The first ten months of her married life – a time of unprecedented manual labor – failed to destroy her illusions; her mental life, projected forward about her expected child, supported her.  She had hoped for twins, to be called Romeo and Juliet, but she was forced to lavish her starved affections on Juliet alone.  Her husband condoned this choice of name with a tolerant guffaw.  Paternity rested but lightly upon him:  like the male of his kind, he regarded the inevitable arrival of children as one of the unavoidable inconveniences of marriage, like the risk of wetting the feet while fishing.

Juliet’s mother soon dies and when her father remarries, he sends her to live with his mother, who attempts to rear this headstrong girl, after she is sent away by her stepmother for open defiance and antipathy.   “Adolescence” traces the story of Juliet’s development, as she comes to fall in love with a boy, Lee, she meets one day, and whose changing body and moods come to reflect a deepening distrust of the patriarchal world in which she lives.  Her grandmother, and later her father, try to force her to accept the subordinate role that women had been forced into in Southern (and by extension, American) society.  When her grandmother dismisses Lee as a scion of a worthless local family, Juliet flies into a rage, screaming and cursing at her grandmother.  The two eventually come to blows over this years later, as Juliet turns fifteen, and she wants a cook to do the labor that her grandmother has enforced upon her.  As they argue, the core issue of Juliet’s refusal to accept societal conventions comes to the fore:

“Tech you!  Joe Bunden’ll do that a plenty when he comes, I promise ye.  And I bound ye the husband Joe’s picked for you’ll tech ye too; when he hears what folks say about you and that no ‘count Hollowell.”

“Husband?” repeated Juliet.  The other croaked into laughter.

“Husband, I tell ye.  But I hadn’t aimed to tell ye before every thing was ready, you’re so hard headed.  But I guess Joe’ll manage ye.  I sent word to Joe that I couldn’t manage you; and them folks of yourn dont want ye to home; so Joe’s went and found somebody to marry ye, though God knows where he found a feller’ll take ye.  But that’s Joe’s lookout, not mine:  I done what I could for ye.”

“Husband?” repeated Juliet idiotically.  “Do you think that you and Joe Bunden can both make me get married?  Much as I hate you, I’d rather be dead than go back home; and before I’d marry anybody I’ll kill you and Joe Bunden, too.  You cant make me!”

The story ends on an ambiguous note.  Her father turns up dead, shot by federal agents during a bootlegging run.  Juliet struggles to make sense of the world around her; she knows that she cannot continue as she is.  As the story closes, there is the hint of something momentous has happened, but with little resolution in sight.  “Adolescence” feels incomplete, as though there is more to Juliet’s young life to be explored, but perhaps that is part of the point that Faulkner makes, that of how all those storms and struggles of youth lead to something else, something that may or may not be for the better.  Yet even if this were the case, then perhaps Juliet Bunden’s struggles are worth considering all the more for their inconclusiveness than for what her fate might say?

There is much to consider (and perhaps, reconsider) in reading and re-reading this tale and that of “The Tall Men.”  Well-developed characters, just like people we have met in our lives, do not easily divulge their innermost secrets and motivations.  We change, we grow, we struggle to find a way to endure.  That lies at the heart of Faulkner’s Nobel speech and it certainly is an important part of his writings.  Empathy is a powerful force, if we could only grasp it fully, he seems to say in these tales.  It certainly is a quality that adds to these fictions.


Originally posted in March 2012 on Gogol's Overcoat as part of a weekly "Faulkner Friday."  Novels  reviewed from January-April will be reposted here on Fridays, while the short stories will appear on Wednesdays.

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories

And suddenly he dropped onto his forepaws and uttered a sound unfamiliar to him, a strange noise, completely different from his usual whimpering.  He uttered it once, then again and again, in a thin faltering descant.

But in vain did he apostrophize the insect in this new language, born of sudden inspiration, as a cockroach's understanding is not equal to such a tirade:  the insect continued on its journey to a corner of the room, with movements sanctified by an ageless ritual of the cockroach world.

The feeling of loathing had as yet no permanence or strength in the dog's soul.  The newly awakened joy of life transformed every sensation into a great joke, into gaiety.  Nimrod kept on barking, but the tone of it had changed imperceptibly, had become a parody of what it had been – an attempt to express the incredible wonder of that capital enterprise, life, so full of unexpected encounters, pleasures, and thrills. (p. 44)

Bruno Schulz perhaps is one of the most well-known of the overlooked writers of the early 20th century.  A near-contemporary of Kafka (both were Jewish writers who came of age during the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire:  Kafka in Bohemia, Schulz in Galicia), Schulz's stories and illustrations are not quite as famous as Kafka's, yet seventy years after his death on the infamous "Black Thursday" of November 1942 at the hands of a vengeful Nazi officer, Schulz's stories contain an unsettling and sometimes menacing quality to them that is at least the equal of the better-known Czech writer.  Schulz's stories vary from the whimsical to the disturbing, with sometimes only a paragraph or two to separate the twain.  In The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, virtually all of Schulz's extant writing (several works in progress, including an unfinished novel, The Messiah, were lost during World War II) is collected.

The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories contains the two collections Schulz had published during his lifetime, The Street of Crocodiles (the US title; in Polish, it was named after the story "Cinnamon Shops") and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.  The first collection, published in 1933, is a more dream-like look at Schulz's native city of Drohobycz (now a city in the western Ukraine known as Drohobych) that originally was a series of letters that he wrote to a close friend, Debora Vogel.  In these tales, quotidian life can take on a more surreal and sometimes even existentialist quality.  Consider the quote above, taken from the end of the story "Nimrod."  There is the Biblical reference to the mighty hunter, here cast as a dog.  There is a heightened sense of perception here, from a creature that has found its own sort of enlightenment, yet that quality is not necessarily one that conveys a universality of understanding, but rather something that cannot be conveyed adequately.  Here, Schulz is interested in the limits of expression, as we, like the dog Nimrod, are not quite capable of full communication with each other.  Like the cockroach, scurrying off to do its "ageless ritual of the cockroach world," we move in circumscribed patterns, the meaning of which is obscured to others and sometimes even to our selves.

This ritualization of the possibly absurd can be seen in the titular "The Street of Crocodiles", where the narrator recounts a visit to a merchant's store:

Tall dark salesgirls, each with a flaw in her beauty (appropriately for that district of remaindered goods), came and went, stood in the doorways watching to see whether the business entrusted to the experienced care of the salesman had reached a suitable point.  The salesman simpered and pranced around like a transvestite.  One wanted to lift up his receding chin or pinch his pale powdered cheek as with a stealthy meaningful look he discreetly pointed to the trademark on the material, a trademark of transparent symbolism (p. 66)

Like several of his stories, "The Street of Crocodiles" relies on movement to set up the unsettling observations that follow.  Here, the hustle and bustle of a store, here an outfitter's shop, in which "[t]he effeminate and corrupted youth, receptive to the client's most intimate stirrings, now put before him a selection of the most peculiar trademarks," is shown to be a microcosm of the world at large.  As Schulz pans out from this detailed scene of this store, which ultimately is a façade for a different sort of store, it becomes a metaphor for something quite different than what the reader might expect:

It is, as usual in that district, a gray day, and the whole scene seems at times like a photograph in an illustrated magazine, so gray, so one-dimensional are the houses, the people, and the vehicles.  Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.  At times one has the impression that it is only the small section immediately before us that falls into the expected pointillistic picture of a city thoroughfare, while on either side the improvised masquerade is already disintegrating and, unable to endure, crumbles behind us into plaster and sawdust, into the storeroom of an enormous empty theater.  The tenseness of an artificial pose, the assumed earnestness of a mask, an ironical pathos tremble on this façade. (p.67)

This “thinness” of reality is a motif that Schulz explores frequently in his fiction.  Beneath the hum-drum of an industrial society lurks another world, one in which all that activity is revealed to be a masquerade, a sometimes badly choreographed dance of characters from one crumbling cityscape to another.  There is little permanency to our lives; all seems to be on the brink of dissolution. This sense of dissolution is strongest in one of Schulz's most famous short stories, "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass."

The whole landscape, somber and grave, seemed almost imperceptibly to float, to shift slightly like a sky full of billowing, stealthily moving clouds.  The fluid strips and bands of forest seemed to rustle and grow with rustling like a tide that swells gradually toward the shore.  The rising white road wound itself dramatically through the darkness of that woody terrain.  I broke a twig from a roadside tree.  The leaves were dark, almost black.  It was a strangely charged blackness, deep and benevolent, like restful sleep.  All the different shades of gray in the landscape derived from that one color.  It was the color of a cloudy summer dusk in our part of the country, when the landscape has become saturated with water after a long period of rain and exudes a feeling of self-denial, a resigned and ultimate numbness that does not need the consolation of color.(p. 241)

The sanatorium toward which the narrator travels is in another country.  It is a place where his father has not yet died, where he is alive despite the shadow of that death in his own country casting a pall over him.   Here Schulz sets up a situation in which reality can be seen as malleable, where as the sanatorium caregiver says, “we reactivate time past, with all its possibilities, therefore also including the possibility of a recovery.”  This malleability, however, comes at a dreadful cost, as the narrator discovers to his chagrin as he ventures out from the sanatorium into the streets below.  There, life such as that of his father’s, is conditional upon the whims and beliefs of the beholder; the slightest doubt risked destroying everything.  Control is illusory, and virtues that might have otherwise been steadfastly held to have been abandoned here.

"Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass" is representative of Schulz's explorations of Fate and Death and how all of our rituals and gestures do little more than attempt to place the reins around a horse that has already escaped from the barn.  In the story "Father's Last Escape," he makes this point quite explicit:

Fate has a thousand wiles when it chooses to impose on us its incomprehensible whims.  A temporary blackout, a moment of inattention or blindness, is enough to insinuate an act between the Scylla and Charybdis of decision.  Afterward, with hindsight, we may endlessly ponder that act, explain our motives, try to discover our true intentions; but the act remains irrevocable. (p. 311)

Without rituals or other means to try to explain the inexplicable, we can feel lost, rudderless, adrift in a sea of seeming madness.  What Schulz does in his fictions is strip away those protective layers of semiotic gesture, leaving us raw and naked, exposed to a world that is as incomprehensible as it may be threatening to our sense of sanity.  While few of his characters succumb to insanity, there are few that are left unscathed by their exposure to the worlds that lurk beneath and around the constructed one that we have built to provide the semblance of order in a chaotic existence.  The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories haunts us not because of ghosts or "unnatural" phenomena but rather because of the sense that we get that perhaps we are the ghosts that flitter about in a world that is more "real" than we care to ever admit.

What are the worst reviews you've seen posted online in 2012?

Since December is the month where all sorts of year-end lists are compiled and readers are threatened with a deluge of them, I thought it would be amusing to do a sort of "anti-list" in which readers can submit in the comments section reviews that they've seen online this year that were very poorly-written/argued reviews. Reviews can be from this blog (my feelings will not be hurt; the squirrels', however, might be a different matter) or anywhere else, such as this gem posted recently on SF Signal.   Curious to see what reviews readers select as the worst they've read this year.  Oh, and any genre is accepted.  As long as the review is poorly-written, it will be considered regardless of the matter covered.

So...

Let's see what readers here have found to be god-awful this year, shall we?

An interesting passage from Bolaño's Estrella distante regarding Bruno Schulz

In prepping to write two reviews/commentaries on Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz's fiction, I read a reference to Roberto Bolaño writing about the experience of reading Schulz in his 1996 short novel, Estrella distante (Distant Star in English translation).  So I turned to the last chapter, where the reference was made, and discovered what might be a perfect opening for one of the essays.  The translation that follows is mine, as I only have the Spanish editions of Bolaño's fictions:

Abrí el libro, la Obra completa de Bruno Schulz traducida por Juan Carlos Vidal, e intenté leer.  Al cabo de varias páginas me di cuenta que no entendía nada.  Leía pero las palabras pasaban como escarabajos incomprensibles, atareados en un mundo enigmático.

***

Igual que yo, descubrí con alarma y apagué el cigarrillo e intenté fundirme entre las páginas de mi libro.  Las palabras de Bruno Schulz adquirieron por un instante una dimensión monstruosa, casi insoportable.  Sentí que los apagados ojos de Wieder me estaban escrutando y al mismo tiempo, en las páginas que daba vueltas (tal vez demasiado aprisa), los escarabajos que antes eran las letras se convertían en ojos, en los ojos de Bruno Schulz, y se abrían y se cerraban una y otra vez, unos ojos claros como el cielo, brillantes como el lomo del mar, que se abrían y parpadeaban, una y otra vez, en medio de la oscuridad total.  No, total no, en medio de una oscuridad lechosa, como en el interior de una nube negra. (pp. 151-152)

I opened the book, the Complete Works of Bruno Schulz translated by Juan Carlos Vidal, and I tried to read, At the end of a few pages I realized that I was not understanding anything.  I was reading but the words were passing by like incomprehensible beetles, busy in an enigmatic world.

***

Same as myself, I discovered with alarm and lit the cigarette and tried to lose myself in the pages of my book.  The words of Bruno Schulz acquired for a moment a monstrous dimension, almost unbearable.  I felt that the dull eyes of Wieder were scrutinizing me and at the same time, that in the pages that I was turning (perhaps too quickly), the letters that were before beetles had turned into eyes, into the eyes of Bruno Schulz, and they were opening and closing again and again, some eyes clear like the sky, shining like the sea's spine, which was opening and blinking, again and again, in the middle of total darkness.  No, not total, in the middle of a milky darkness, like the interior of a black cloud.

I shall be working on these essays for much of the day today, so hopefully one of them might be ready for posting either tonight or sometime Monday (the one I'll post here probably won't have this translated passage).  Let me know if this passage has piqued your interest any.

William Faulkner, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (The Wild Palms)

And the doctor wore a night shirt too, not pajamas, for the same reason that he smoked the pipe which he had never learned and knew that he would never learn to like, between the occasional cigar which clients gave him in the intervals of Sundays on which he smoked the three cigars which he felt he could buy for himself even though he owned the beach cottage as well as the one next door to it and the one, the residence with electricity and plastered walls, in the village four miles away.  Because he was now forty-eight years old and he had been sixteen and eighteen and twenty at the time when his father could tell him (and he believe it) that cigarettes and pajamas were for dudes and women.

***

Once (it was in Mississippi, in May, in the flood year 1927) there were two convicts.  One of them was about twenty-five, tall, lean, flat-stomached, with a sunburned face and Indian-black hair and pale, china-colored outraged eyes – an outrage directed not at the men who had foiled his crime, not even at the lawyers and judges who had sent him here, but at the writers, the uncorporeal names attached to the stories, the paper novels – the Diamond Dicks and Jesse Jameses and such – whom he believed had led him into his present predicament through their own ignorance and gullibility regarding the medium in which they dealt and took money for, in accepting information on which they placed the stamp of verisimilitude and authenticity (this so much the more criminal since there was no sworn notarised statement attached and hence so much the quicker would the information be accepted by one who expected the same unspoken good faith, demanding, asking, expecting no certification, which he extended along with the dime or fifteen cents to pay for it) and retailed for money and which on actual application proved to be impractical and (to the convict) criminally false; there would be times when he would halt his mule and plow in midfurrow (there is no walled penitentiary in Mississippi; it is a cotton plantation which the convicts work under the rifles and shotguns of guards and trusties) and muse with a kind of enraged impotence, fumbling among the rubbish left him by his one and only experience with courts and law, fumbling until the meaningless and verbose shibboleth took form at last (himself seeking justice at the same blind fount where he had met justice and been hurled back and down):  using the mails to defraud:  who felt that he had been defrauded by the third class mail system not of crass and stupid money which he did not particularly want anyway, but of liberty and honor and pride.

As much as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha stories are effective in creating a realistic setting with complex characters spitting into the winds of culture, family history, and fate, there is still the threat of narrative fatigue.  After a few stories on the Compsons, Snopes, Sam Fathers, or Doom, the reader already has a general idea what to expect from these characters when they are confronted with certain situations.  After 1929, Faulkner wrote very few non-Yoknapatawpha stories, but his 1939 novel, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (originally entitled The Wild Palms) stands out as perhaps one of his five most accomplished and moving novels.  If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem features two separate narratives, each connected only thematically by how the protagonist responds to moments of crisis.  Alternating chapters, “Wild Palms” and “Old Man,” tell the stories of a rich country doctor and a convict caught up in the aftermath of the 1927 Mississippi flood, as each battle against social conventions, desire, and fate.

The two quotes above underscore Faulkner’s use of parallel structure.  The doctor, Harry Wilbourne (itself a telling name), is trapped.  He becomes a country doctor, willy-nilly, just as he acceded to his father’s wishes and married the woman selected for him.  He is slotted into his father’s old role, with little say in the matter.  He doesn’t wear pajamas because his father disapproved of them.  He smokes cigars because that was expected of doctors in the 1930s.  His entire life is circumscribed by others’ expectations of what he, a doctor, ought to be, never mind what he himself might enjoy.  It is this growing frustration with his assigned social/occupational role that leads Henry to partake in the ultimate transgression for his social milieu, that of a clandestine affair and later flight from the village where he had lived virtually his entire life.

Contrast this with the convict described in the second quote.  He is younger, twenty-five at the time of the events of 1927, yet he too finds himself bound.  His binding is not that of a society expecting him to occupy a prestigious position against his will, but rather he is shaped by the pulp fiction dime novels that he reads.  This convict, for whom there is no name given in the “Old Man” chapters, rails against the deceptions that society has imposed upon its denizens through the dissemination of fictions that feature rogues and gentlemen thieves.  Condemned to serve fifteen years at Parchman State Penitentiary (itself a vast plantation worked by convicts under the watchful eyes – and guns – of guards) for armed robbery, this convict feels deprived of liberty, honor, and pride by the very institutions that instilled such notions into his young mind.

The alternating structure of the “Wild Palms” and “Old Man” chapters allows Faulkner to explore the different (and similar) paths Harry and the convict take in dealing with their crises.  For Henry, his love affair with Charlotte (herself a married woman) leads to a flight to the Gulf Coast, where both attempt to abscond not just from their spouses, but from the restrictions that their social class has imposed upon them.  It is as much a confining prison as that which the convict discovers at Parchman, where the freedom to choose how to live one’s life has largely been taken away by a society that expects total conformity to its rules and conventions.  Harry and Charlotte struggle to find happiness, feeling even from afar the scathing contempt born of their transgression.  Fear of further loss and agony over Charlotte’s pregnancy and what that might mean to even the shredded remnants of their reputations leads to a desperate attempt by Harry to abort Charlotte’s pregnancy.  Even though this ending, where the lovers cannot have full, “true” happiness due to their violation of social standards regarding the sanctity of marriage, risks having a cliched ending, Faulkner goes further and explores just how those implacable forces against we struggle can create something more than just a tragedy, something that is worth remembering even in grief and suffering because both are superior to nothingness.  The very last paragraph of “Wild Palms” states this eloquently:

So it wasn’t just memory.  Memory was just half of it, it wasn’t enough.  But it must be somewhere he thought.  There’s the waste.  Not just me.  At least I think I dont mean just me.  Hope I dont mean just me.  Let it be anyone thinking of, remembering, 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 defeated clinging not even to the defeat but just to an old habit; accepting the defeat even to be allowed to cling to the habit – the wheezing lungs, the troublesome guts incapable of pleasure.  But after all memory could live in the old wheezing entrails:  and now it did stand to his hand, incontrovertible and plain, serene, the palm clashing and murmuring dry and wild and faint and it the night but he could face it, thinking, Not could.  Will.  I want to.  So it is the old meat after all, no matter how old.  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 tall convict’s story in the “Old Man” chapters approach issues of freedom and love from a different angle.  This unnamed convict, identified by his height through these chapters, finds freedom of a more literal sort when during the Mississippi flood of 1927, the inmates of Parchman are evacuated and his skiff (where he had rescued a woman from a tree) is forced apart from the rest of the crew.  Whereas Harry and Charlotte’s flight is from extra-legal conventions that bind perhaps even harder than the legal restraints that the tall convict escapes, his situation becomes perilous due to the very real danger of being killed as a fugitive or bound to serve even more time if caught.  He and the woman (who is pregnant) go up and down the river, trying to find Parchman, only to spend weeks separated.  Traumatic events frequently bring people closer together and the tall convict and the woman do form a bond, even though he is bound and determined to return to finish his sentence.
There is a connection here between the flooded Mississippi (the “old man” of the story) and the streams of human lives that intersect it.  Outside of rare tumultuous times, both flow from point to point with nary a pause.  The convict’s struggles against the river, against this inexorable tide that pushes against his desire to return to his familiar penitential life, is seen in a telling passage near the end of the penultimate “Old Man” chapter:

The lake was behind him now; there was but one direction he could go.  When he saw the River again he knew it at once.  He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him.  But four weeks later it would look different from what it did now and did:  he (the old man) had recovered from his debauch, back in banks again, the Old Man, rimpling placidly toward the sea, brown and rich as chocolate between levees whose inner faces were wrinkled as though in a frozen and aghast amazement…

Yet for the tall convict, as for Harry and Charlotte, fate proves to be fickle and treacherous.  Although the tall convict turned himself in voluntarily, he discovers that he now has had an additional ten years added to his sentence for escaping, even despite his intent to return.  While he receives this stoically, accepting it as part of fate, it is the betrayal of his female companion that angers him most, as she quickly moves on from their shared bond and forges a new one, despite her initial agreement to wait out those ten years for him to be free.  Here, there is a bitterness that tinges the earlier resignation to fate, a sense that despite what the tall convict had stated throughout the narrative, that there is still a spark of resentment and perhaps even an eagerness to resist what fate has had in store for him.  It is a sobering way to close If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, yet the tall convict’s “Women, shit” comment provides a sense that this tragedy is not the end of his life; he will continue to endure.

In a 1958 Paris Review interview, Faulkner made the following remark:

“No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol — cross or crescent or whatever — that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach a man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral codes and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.”

This quote fits neatly with the characters of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem.  Harry, Charlotte, and the tall convict all try to go beyond what their natures/society have dictated them to be.  Although each fails, there is something to be said for that desire to strive to do his or her duty, whether it is to love and cherish or to remember grief in honor of that lost love.  It is tempting to label the two stories contained within If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem as tragedies; after all, they do hold up the ideal of humanity as greater than its quotidian actions and desires.  Yet there is more to it than the inevitable failure of those goals.  We see characters striving to change the equation, to rewrite the rules and conventions and to forge something different.  There is a nobleness in those deeds, which Harry and the convict will likely not forget, that brings Faulkner’s original title, “If I forget thee, Jerusalem,” full circle.  That reference to suffering and loss also contains the germ of hope, as this suffering and sorrow will come to bear new fruit.  Like Harry, between grief and nothing we choose to take grief.


Originally posted in April 2012 on Gogol's Overcoat as part of a weekly "Faulkner Friday."  Novels reviewed from January-April will be reposted here on Fridays, while the short stories will appear on Wednesdays.