Faulkner on the Mississippi: Popular Currents of Realism in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

In the late 1930s, William Faulkner drew on the course of recent history for a fictional representation of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927. Considered the worst natural disaster in US history at the time, the flood gave Faulkner the setting for “Old Man,” a harrowing yet comic tale of rescue and survival that joins another section, “The Wild Palms,” in a contrapuntal structure comprising his eleventh novel, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. It was originally published, despite the author’s protest against the title change, as The Wild Palms in 1939.¹ In 1937, the year Faulkner began writing the book, the 1927 flood was making something of a return engagement in the public consciousness, as the death and destruction caused by heavy inundation of the Ohio River Valley made for tragically obvious comparisons in major publications such as Life magazine (“America’s Worst Flood”). When Faulkner represented the Great Mississippi River Flood from the standpoint of the Great Depression, he was working in a climate of rejuvenated realism active in the popular imagination and influenced by the cultural politics of the Popular Front. This “realism for the masses,” as Chris Vials calls it, was visible in literature, film, popular music, and other media, as the culture industry remained attuned to the conditions of the Depression in the United States and abroad.

While global in scope and capable of transcending boundaries, the Popular Front nevertheless exerted influence differently within individual nation-states, depending on prevailing conditions. When it emerged under the aegis of the Communist International in 1935, the Popular Front mounted an urgent political strategy to counter the rapid rise of fascism in Europe with a broad-based coalition of communist organizations and those that leaned left or liberal and thus could qualify as “fellow travelers.” The abrupt and bold move to adopt a new inclusivity at the expense of the far more radical and doctrinaire approach favored in the first half of the decade betrayed a sense of urgency on the left. In the US, the impact of the Popular Front registered most forcefully on the cultural landscape. Michael Denning, in a sweeping revisionist history, supplies the “stylistic Popular Front” as a useful concept for gauging this influence. He cites John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, which appeared in the same year as If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and John Ford’s 1940 film adaptation as exemplary in that they reflect an eclectic mix of aesthetic and political elements: “Popular Front laborism,” technocratic New Deal statism, a conservative view of market fluctuations as products of natural history, and a strain of “racial populism” extolling the virtues of plain (white) folks experiencing displacement, dispossession, and migration while still holding out some measure of hope for gainful employment and stable roots somewhere down the road. In these and other texts, “rhetorics of ‘the people’” tempered the strident and radical tone of activists/artists earlier in the decade and thus yielded a brand of realism that was more palatable for mass consumption (265).

Work in this vein featured natural disaster metaphors deployed such that earthquakes, dust storms, and, most commonly, floods were stand-ins for the severity and unpredictability of the hard times. The presence of figurative floods, along with the literal ones that made the hard times even harder whenever and wherever they occurred, attests to the symbolic value of the relationship between ecological and economic disasters in Depression culture. Flood images and metaphors coursed through the discursive landscapes of social philosophy and political speeches, the visual rhetoric of documentary footage and photography, and storylines of prose, poetry, and music. Such figurations resonated with audiences longing to make sense of the destructive and seemingly random power of economic downturns and struggling to contend with the ebbs and flows of capitalism defined by free-market defenders as perfectly “natural.” “Old Man” aligns If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem with this pattern of cultural representation and makes the Mississippi River a point of entry for approaching Faulkner’s response to the legacies of realism enjoying new relevance and momentum...