Flood: The Excesses of Geography, Gender, and Capitalism in Faulkner's If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

Overshadowed by his four masterpieces of the late 1920s and 1930s (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!), Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (first published as The Wild Palms in 1939) has never garnered the sustained critical attention bestowed upon these Depression-era heavyweights. ¹ However, the novel has recently begun to attract scholars, as if we’d caught up with Faulkner at last. ² One of the features of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem that deserves a closer look is its odd double narrative, in which Faulkner crystallizes the central themes of his earlier major works and raises the stakes of his representations of an anguished South. As in the earlier novels, modernist preoccupations are central: the slippery relationships among memory, history, and myth; the agonizing yet aesthetically energizing task of constructing a narrative of history and self in a world where objectivity is clearly impossible and the grounds of subjectivity are always in question; and the problem, given cultural and psychological anxieties about race, gender, and sexuality, of articulating an embodied identity. Alongside other modernist writers, Faulkner was grappling with these philosophical, psychological, sociopolitical, and aesthetic issues, as well as with a growing sense of the underlying radical flux of experience itself. Throughout his work, this terrifying yet fascinating flux is represented in gendered terms—as an excessive fluidity associated with the feminine. In If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, in particular, Faulkner explores his culture’s fear of radical fluidity in ways that connect women’s bodies (as powerful sites of origin, seduction, and contamination) to both a radically feminized landscape and a dangerously volatile free-market economy. I will argue that every aspect of early-twentieth-century American culture some might wish to consider stable—gender, geography, the logic of capitalism—proves, in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, to be a source of profound chaos.

I do not mean to suggest a simple or “natural” equation of female and fluidity. Although critical theorists from Plato to Irigiray have characterized solidity as masculine and fluidity as feminine, I am interested less in how Faulkner’s representation of an unmoored landscape echoes this perceived gender division than in how his novel raises questions about the grounding of this conception of gender in the natural. Thus, my aim here echoes Judith Butler’s stated mission in Gender Trouble: “Indeed, the purpose here more generally is to trace the ways in which gender fables establish and circulate the misnomer of natural facts.” ³ In If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, Faulkner, too, calls into question the very idea of “the natural” as a viable category, exploring the ways in which fears of a seemingly natural feminine fluidity bleed into cultural anxieties about the unforgiving vicissitudes of a constitutively fluid free-market capitalism, an economy whose essential unpredictability would become most evident in the 1920s and 1930s. ⁴

Fluid Aesthetics

Readers of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem first encounter fluidity in the odd terrain of the novel’s structure. As its critical history and contested title attest, Jerusalem is a divided work, whose split structure is generally considered a failure. Irving Howe has explained that most critics consider the alternation of the “The Wild Palms” and “Old Man” sections unnecessary and an undeniable artistic failure. Howe notes that Malcolm Cowley, for example, felt free to publish “Old Man” separately in The Portable Faulkner, reasoning that its extraction from the “The Wild Palms” narrative came at no price. Howe himself remains a bit more measured in his own critique: “Probably of little use to anyone but himself, Faulkner’s device of alternating sections of the two stories may be judged a tour de force that partly succeeds.” ⁵

The more than partial success of Faulkner’s strategy stems, it seems to me, from the ways in which the two narratives...