William Faulkner, ‘The South,’ and the Creation of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

Abstract

In If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, Faulkner appears to have become inter ested in crafting a novel out of disparate materials. His love affair with a woman in Hollywood figured prominently in the making of the love story titled “Wild Palms.” Shaping this story based on his own suffering. Faulkner turned his pain into art. As a counterpoint to the doomed couple, a young tall convict with no name emerged in his imagination. “Old Man” concerns the tall hillbilly convict, adrift in a small boat with a preg nant woman on a flood-swollen river. Faulkner`s vexing attitude toward his financial success as a writer and the cultural representations of the national crisis of the Great Depression are entangled in these two juxta posed stories. Though he coupled a tale of man in society and one of man in nature, Faulkner does not urge us to read the book as two separate novellas instead of as one novel. The interweaving of the two parts con stantly reminds us that two different worlds contrapuntally parallel. Despite the heavy ironies derived from the reading of these contrasting stories, it is indubitable that “Old Man” serves primarily to parody the tragic theme of its companion piece. For some readers, If I Forget remains a flawed work, but I would rather contend that it is, in many ways, a fasci nating novel. Although it cannot be a perfect success in a new experiment of storytelling, If I Forget proves, at least, one of Faulkner`s innovative experiments as a unified work comprised of two discrete stories.