Wild Palms (Hardcover)

Faulkner's characters don't sit around and examine their navel. They just Do. Yes act on their passions they Do. His characters are not beautiful people. They have scars, injuries, poverty, depraved morals, injustices, suffering upon suffering. What makes the Wild Palms beautiful is the passion of people living life right on the bone.

A married woman is planning on abandoning her husband and two kids and running away with another man. The other man asks her what about her two kids. On page 41, she answers, "I know the answer to that and I know that I cant change that answer and I dont think I can change me because the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself." No Catholic saint-mystic ever said it better. Pretty good for a crazy Protestant drunk.

You hear talk about stream-of consciousness with James Joyce and Jack Kerouac and so on. This guy Faulkner captures the way our minds think and our mouths talk more realistically than anybody.

Of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor said, "Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track when the Dixie Limited is roaring down."

Something about this book reminds me of the Stephen King material set in the south, the Southern-ness of it and the same kind of characters.

The omniscient author technique is frowned on in serious, modern literature. I don't knw if this aesthetic rule post-dates Faulkner, but he uses it to no ill effect. There's very little difference between when a character is speaking and Faulkner is speaking. It gives the effect of us reading the characters thoughts rather than Faulkner telling us what they are. It works perfectly.

Few to none of the characters in any of the standard, best-seller type books have any inner life. When most of the authors try it, they are quite pathetic at it. I suppose that's because the authors have no inner life themselves. Faulkner does not show us the inner life of any of his characters either. However, as Faulker presents his characters, the reader induces their inner drives from their actions. It works very, very well. Stephen King's characters are like this also.

Stephen King by the way is very steeped in American literary tradition. Essentially, he's New England gothic. He is to Nathaniel Hawthorne what the Frankenstein, the monster, is to Dr. Frankenstein. King is clothed in Hawthorne, bathed in Faulkner and inebriated with Poe. To look at the connection further, I suggest you read the short stories of Hawthorne.

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Very few novels on the world stage are composed of two completely separate stories. THE WILD PALMS consists of 1) a love story in 1938, taking place in New Orleans, Chicago, Wisconsin, Utah, San Antonio, and the Mississippi Gulf coast, and 2) the story of one man (a prisoner) and his mighty ordeal during the Mississippi River floods of 1927. Parchman State Prison in Mississippi is the sole physical point that joins the two tales, otherwise separate in time, place, class, and impulse. But Faulkner's genius is such that the reader soon understands that the theme of both stories is the same. Faulkner's novels often focus on Fate, how the individual is caught in mysterious, giant webs of 'outrageous fortune' beyond comprehension, helpless to oppose the powerful, hidden currents. The present volume is no exception. "You are born submerged in anonymous lockstep"--the main character of story #1 muses on page 54--"with the seeming anonymous myriads of your time and generation; you get out of step once, falter once, and you are trampled to death." In the first case, Wilbourne and Charlotte deviate from the usual path for love's sake, strive mightily to maintain and cherish that love, and pay an inevitable price. In the second, a convict is caught in a flood in a tiny boat when sent to save two people. He rescues one, but is swept away. He completes his mission, returning both boat and rescued woman, despite incredible hardships, only to face a certain ironic destiny. In both cases, other lives or other destinies constantly present themselves, but the protagonists refuse to alter their selected course. It is the antithesis to the Hollywood message that "you can be whatever you want in life, you just have to want it badly enough". Faulkner plumps for Destiny. A person might be, he says on page 266, "...no more than the water bug upon the surface of the pond, the plumbless and lurking depths of which he would never know..." one's only contact with such depths being when Fate is blindly accepted and played out to the bitter end. The forces of Nature, symbolized by the wild clashing of the palm fronds in the winds off the Gulf of Mexico, always outweigh the strength of human beings. The palms clash in the wind at the beginning and at the very end as well. Faulkner concludes that bearing grief, living with it, is better than suicide, better than obliterating the agonies of remembrance with a pill or bullet. Memory, however, bitter and painful, is better than nothingness. The two main characters end in prison, a most un-optimistic metaphor for life. A most powerful novel, a novel that speaks from the crocodile-haunted deeps of every person's psyche.

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