SOURCE: Mortimer, Gail L. “The Ironies of Transcendent Love in Faulkner's The Wild Palms.” Faulkner Journal 1, no. 2 (spring 1986): 30-42.

[In the following essay, Mortimer contends that Faulkner's narrative strategy in The Wild Palms causes the story to lose credibility as a love story.]

William Faulkner did not often write a fully developed love story. Fictionally, at least, the subject is not one he was comfortable with, nor was it particularly compatible with his more characteristic thematic concern with the vicissitudes of the South's decline. The Wild Palms, however, focuses on the love affair of two people, Charlotte Rittenmeyer and Harry Wilbourne, and their attempts to save their love from the pressures of convention and the mundane. In many ways the story resembles Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: both novels concern runaway lovers trying to flee “a world antagonistic to love”;¹ both women die as a result of pregnancy; both men are left tragically aware of what they have lost. But Faulkner's story is uniquely his own in that it conveys—along with the overtly tragic story of a “world well lost” for love—numerous signs of that love's disintegration from within. Faulkner's narrative presentation of his story, unlike Hemingway's, ultimately undermines its own credibility as a love story by its use of language and imagery that deny the very notion of transcendent love to be anything but illusory.

Basing his analysis on allusions in the novel to the ideas of Schopenhauer, Thomas McHaney writes that their consummation of the sexual act keeps the lovers bound to earthly things and destroys their love's spirituality (57-58). Panthea Reid Broughton expands on this view by suggesting that Charlotte and Harry are doomed not so much because of the presence of the physical, the fleshly, in their relationship, as because they insist that it be all there is. For them, the body alone must “supply love, meaning, even faith,” and in equating “love with the life of the body, they disregard the body's very needs” (40-41). The flesh, then, has its vengeance. Both critics note the erroneous thinking of the lovers, their improvidence and refusal simply to ignore the commonplace realities that they perceive as threats. At the level of plot, we see that Charlotte and Harry continually undermine their love by shortsighted decisions, but what is not evident in these analyses is the degree to which the text of the story itself—the language and images in which the story is conveyed—is subversive. For what Faulkner has created here is a pattern or substructure of Freudian meanings that establish the illusory nature of love as a psychological truth and not simply as a circumstance of plot.²

McHaney and Broughton reach different conclusions about the ending of the love story. For McHaney, Harry's final speech in jail is an affirmation of life, of memory, of love (175 ff). Broughton has come to see the ending as less positive because of the cynicism of the book's final chapter, in which the fate of the tall convict retrospectively insists that we view Harry's choices with some irony (35). What McHaney and Broughton share is the assumption that Charlotte's and Harry's beliefs about the meaning of their love for one another doom them, that they are undermined by cerebral or imaginative failures. Their different interpretations of the ending of the novel are both plausible precisely because the narrative itself is pervaded with ironies that continually subvert its own articulated “meanings.” Ostensibly celebrating the transcendent unity of two lovers, the story is told in language betraying an ambivalence toward the very possibility of romantic love. There is a continual tension caused by the disjunction between what Charlotte and Harry say about their love and what they do about it, but there is also a more subtle tension created by pervasive linguistic and imagistic ironies.

The novel is replete with literary and philosophic allusions, as McHaney has shown. Through allusion, paraphrase, and parody, Faulkner evokes themes and concepts found in such works as Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Dante's Divine Comedy, and earlier novels by Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson (McHaney xvi-xix). And while we cannot establish the precise degree of self-consciousness with which Faulkner used the Freudian images this essay considers, the extraordinary interweaving of levels of meaning established by McHaney suggests that Faulkner also knew that he was using essentially anal compulsive language to link the two stories that make up The Wild Palms.³ His creation of such artifacts as the “Bad Smell” is blatant, distracting, but it is also part of a coherent pattern of psychological meanings that parody the apparent transcendence of the lovers. Instead of a boundless and ethereal love, theirs is disclosed as fundamentally (pun intended) weak.

Charlotte and Harry's relationship begins almost mystically. Their first words acknowledging their feeling for one another assume it as an established fact: “What to do about it, Harry?” “I dont know. I never was in love before” (42). The narrative tells us nothing about the basis of this love; it seems to arise ex nihilo, to be merely posited. This is the first of several instances in the novel whose implausibility strains our willingness to believe in this as a genuine love story. We are told of the immediate affinity between Charlotte and Harry, but its basis remains permanently unexplored. We are told, as well, that they have no choice but to act on their feelings. After Harry, unbelievably, discovers a wallet of money in a trash can, Charlotte leaves her husband and children to be with him. The lovers move from place to place to avoid succumbing to what they see as society's pressures to make them conform to conventional behavior. They move whenever responsibilities or the predictability of jobs begin to make them take their security and one another for granted. Looking for situations in which they will not fall into routines, they make increasingly reckless decisions, but habit and comfortableness haunt them. They fall into “the routine even of sinning” (126); Harry realizes, “I had turned into a husband” (132). Through carelessness, Charlotte becomes pregnant. Harry eventually performs an abortion, but he bungles it, and shortly thereafter, Charlotte dies.

The plot of the story insists that romantic love cannot last in contemporary society (“There is no place for it in the world today. …” [136]); Charlotte and Harry believe that the purity of their love is the source of their doom, that society cannot allow it to survive and remain itself intact. External circumstances appear to conspire to keep them from simply remaining together. Yet the two themselves are culpable in their fate because their perceptions and preoccupations prove them ultimately very unlikely candidates for transcendence. Allusions in the novel to famous doomed lovers are transformed into parodies when we realize the nature of the limitations that keep these contemporary lovers from truly losing themselves in their passion.

In The Wild Palms, as in Faulkner's other novels, it is the male protagonist's perspective from which we understand what is taking place. Even when Charlotte articulates the meaning of the relationship, as she often does, we hear her through Harry and know only as much about her feelings as he is capable of observing. It is helpful in understanding the implications of Harry's feelings about Charlotte to consider the responses of other Faulknerian males who are involved with women. Charlotte's closeness evokes feelings in Harry that are characteristic of men in numerous other stories. Descriptions of his sexual feelings are pervaded with anxiety. Harry finds her looking at him with an “unwinking yellow stare in which he seemed to blunder and fumble like a moth, a rabbit caught in the glare of a torch; an envelopment almost like a liquid” (87). This is language of entrapment of engulfment, conveying uneasiness about feminine presence. On similar occasions in other novels, women encountered as sexual beings are consistently imagined as bodies of water, especially threatening bodies of water (“Old Man,” the companion story to “The Wild Palms,” is entirely about a flood raging out of control). Horace Benbow in Flags in the Dust sees his lover, Belle Mitchell, as “enveloping him like a rich and fatal drug, like a motionless and cloying sea in which he watched himself drown” (243). In The Town Gavin Stevens is immobilized when Eula Varner offers herself to him: “[She was] still not moving: just standing there facing me so that what I smelled was not even just woman but that terrible, that drowning envelopment” (95). Joe Christmas in Light in August begins to see himself in his sexual liaison with Joanna Burden “as from a distance, like a man being sucked down into a bottomless morass” (246). In The Sound and the Fury (in which Caddy Compson's threatening sexuality is continually expressed in terms of her identity with a river) Faulkner tells us that her brother Quentin loved death “as a lover loves and deliberately refrains from the waiting willing friendly tender incredible body of his beloved, until he can no longer bear not the refraining but the restraint and so flings, hurls himself, relinquishing, drowning” (411). All of these passages share the assumption that sexuality involves anxiety about engulfment, that the male experiences sexual closeness as threatening, that the boundaries of the self will be lost, blurred, or annihilated. Anticipating his death by drowning (in effect, a fusion with the river that he identifies with his sister), Quentin Compson thinks, “I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand” (SF 98). Such imagery pervades The Wild Palms and expresses the identity in Harry's own imagination between Charlotte and the ocean she loves: “Maybe I'm not embracing her but clinging to her because there is something in me that wont admit it cant swim or [sic] cant believe it can” (84). Charlotte's yellow eyes, “like a cat's,” continue to cause him to feel helpless: “he seemed to be drowning, volition and will, in the yellow stare” (39).

As do other Faulkner women, Charlotte remains essentially inscrutable to the men who know her. Harry muses often about her assumed feminine ability to assimilate even an illicit relationship into her life. He shares with other male characters an awe at women's ability to enter such an experience wholeheartedly, with a “serene confidence in their amorous destinies like that of birds in their wings” (54). Unlike men, they seem able to hurl themselves “full-winged … into untried and unsupportive space where no shore is visible (54, italics mine). It is Harry (like other males) who needs a sense of where the shore is, who, as we shall see, needs boundaries and ritual to make him feel secure.

Another man in the novel who is looking for a shore is, of course, the tall convict in “Old Man.” Most of his story consists of his struggle to survive a “yellow flood” (155), a “yellow turmoil” (158) that takes charge of his skiff with “catlike” touches (150), “a rolling expanse which, even if he could have seen, apparently had no boundaries” (159). All he wants is something solid to land on, something that is not water: “it was earth, it did not move … it did not accept you substanceless and enveloping and suffocating” (232). The convict's helplessness, like Harry's, is imaged in his never having learned to swim.⁴ His story, whose chapters are interlaced with those of the love story, is a frantic parody of the anxieties Harry experiences in the presence of the female. Harry even thinks of himself as sharing a brotherhood in this regard with Charlotte's husband: “it seemed to him that they both stood now, aligned, embattled and doomed and lost, before the entire female principle” (57). The convict sees himself as “doomed from the very start never to get rid of [the woman]” (168).

Confirmation that the flood and feminine sexuality are imaginatively linked⁵ throughout “The Wild Palms” and “Old Man” is found in descriptions of the sexual act itself, a moment (for male characters) of utter helplessness, a going beyond some ultimate boundary. Harry remembers the instant at which he lost his virginity: “You remember: the precipice, the dark precipice; all mankind before you went over it and lived,” (137). He recalls his experience:

… the terror in which you surrender volition, hope, all—the darkness, the falling, the thunder of solitude, the shock, the death, the moment when, stopped physically by the ponderable clay, you yet feel all your life rush out of you into the pervading immemorial blind receptive matrix, the hot fluid blind foundation—grave-womb or womb-grave, it's all one.

(138)

Similar language appears in “Old Man,” where, with comically exaggerated Freudian imagery,⁶ Faulkner depicts the convict as flailing at the waters with his “impotent paddle” (145): he is “the man falling from a cliff being told to catch onto something and save himself” (171); “… he paddling again now, violently, as a man hurries toward the precipice for which he knows at last he is doomed” (169).

The anxiety expressed in these two stories is an anxiety about female sexuality—mocked with zest and wit in the Freudian caricature of the convict's tale and subtly undermining the love between Harry and Charlotte. The fear is more focused than this, however; it is the woman as mother who is terrifying. The convict's tale once again reveals explicitly the nature of the anxiety. A pregnant woman, the compressed image of all that he cannot deal with, drops out of a tree into the convict's foundering little boat. As the story proceeds and the convict wryly contemplates his helplessness, the woman and the water become interchangeable occasions for his outrage. She soon loses all identity for him except as a “swelling and unmanageable body” that he tries not to look at: “it was not the woman at all but rather a separate demanding threatening inert yet living mass of which both he and she were equally victims” (154); she “had ceased to be a human being … and had become instead one single inert monstrous sentient womb” (162-63). Ultimately, he longs “for severance at any price, even that of drowning, from the burden [the woman and her newborn child] with which, unwitting and without choice, he had been doomed” (177). At the end of the novel, the convict tells his cellmates that he never attempted sex with the woman because “his whole being would seem to flee the very idea in a kind of savage and horrified revulsion” (335). He turns his head from her rather than watch her nurse her child. It is little wonder, then, that he is so eager to find “something, anything he might reach and surrender his charge to and turn his back on her forever, on all pregnant and female life forever” (153).

In “The Wild Palms” Harry is intrigued by Charlotte's willingness to leave her children to be with him; that a mother could do this is a source of wonder to him: “she had already and scarcely knowing him given up more than he would ever possess to relinquish” (217). Alone with her, Harry sees himself as “existing in a drowsy and foetus-like state, passive and almost unsentient in the womb of solitude and peace” (110). It is when Charlotte's role as a mother threatens to reassert itself—she becomes pregnant—and to intrude again into their relationship that the events are set in motion which lead to the couple's final tragedy. Harry's behavior when he learns that Charlotte is pregnant symbolizes the boundary confusion that is the ultimate threat from women. He leaves Charlotte alone in their cabin because he cannot breathe in the room with her and takes to walking through heavy snow, “among but mostly into the drifts which he had not yet learned to distinguish in time to avoid, wallowing and plunging …” (207).⁷

The nature of the anxiety overwhelming the two men in these stories having been posited, it is possible now to return to the beginning of the novel and see more clearly how Faulkner builds for Harry a personality that will respond to the promised boundlessness of romantic love by looking, instead, for control, security, and ritual. When we first encounter Harry, he is living a monastic existence as a medical student waging “a constant battle” to balance “his dwindling bank account against the turned pages of his text books” (32). Early passages establish him as someone dogged by confining circumstances and meticulously concerned with details. He is obsessed with the need to make his money last while he completes his studies. Aware that this is to be a love story, the reader may hope that Harry will be freed from such concerns, “carried away” by his love for Charlotte. Certainly, the language in which the lovers discuss their relationship implies this surpassing of everyday concerns. Harry tells himself, “I look upon love with the same boundless faith that it will clothe and feed me as the Mississippi or Louisiana countryman, converted last week at a camp-meeting revival, looks upon religion” (85). Charlotte insists that their relationship be all honeymoon, “heaven, or hell: no comfortable safe peaceful purgatory between” (83). But Faulkner does not show Harry as overcoming his cautious use of money, measurement, or time. Quite the contrary. Harry's behavior is quickly dominated by an increasingly ritualistic concern for detail. When he prepares to send the wallet full of money back to its owner, for example, Faulkner describes at length how he took “scissors and a bottle of paste and made a neat surgeon's packet of the wallet, copying the address neatly and clearly from one of the identification cards and putting it carefully away beneath the garments in his drawer” (52). The choices of adverbs and the repeated use of the word “and” in this passage help to express the ritualistic quality of the behavior, exaggerated because Harry is so tempted to keep the money that his preparations for returning it become elaborate, as a form of denial of the wish. From this moment in the novel onward, the narrator never lets the reader forget precisely how much of the twelve hundred and seventy-eight dollars is left. The novel itself compulsively brings this fact back to our attention. Harry pays for a hotel room, we are told, with “the sixth two dollars” that he was supposed to have sent to his sister in repayment of a debt (46); we learn the fate of each dollar that brings the lovers closer to a need to re-enter society. Debts, interest, the price of postage, railroad timetables, a cashier's check for ＄300 (for Charlotte's return to her family if she needs it), calendars, a list indicating how long their money and food will last—such artifacts permeate the story⁸ and represent concerns that are betraying the relationship from within.

In one of many moves away from places that have threatened them with feeling married, Charlotte and Harry spend time in the Wisconsin woods at the end of a summer season. They have the lake and woods to themselves, and their circumstances seem to be, at last, idyllic. Here, with nothing to interfere with their relationship, we expect them to find moments of peace, and here, instead, Harry's compulsion becomes most exacerbated. Even the language in which he talks about his happiness reveals his real preoccupations: “‘I'm happy now,’ Wilbourne said. ‘I know exactly where I am going. It's perfectly straight, between two rows of cans and sacks, fifty dollars' worth to a side’” (100). Harry becomes obsessed with the number of cans of food (representing the money spent to buy them as well as the time left before he and Charlotte will run out and have to return to the city) and can do nothing but brood about them, count them, or consciously avoid counting them:

he believed that he was worrying, not about the inevitable day on which their food would run out, but at the fact that he did not seem to worry about it … It became an obsession with him; he realised quite calmly that he had become secretly quietly and decently a little mad; he now thought constantly of the diminishing row of cans and sacks against which he was matching in inverse ratio the accumulating days, yet he would not go to the closet and look at them, count them … all he would have to do would be to glance at the row of cans on a shelf: he could count the cans and know exactly how many days more they would have left, he could take a pencil and mark the shelf itself off into days … But he would not even look into the closet.

(111-12)

So numbed is he by his obsessions that Harry cannot even taste the food he spends so much time contemplating: “I dont know whether it actually is not foul, or if it's something protective—that what I taste is not this at all but the forty or fifty cents it represents” (103-4).

Psychoanalytic thought has much to offer us in clarifying the meaning of this convergence of compulsive behavior, obsessive thinking, and an ambivalence toward the feminine. As I suggested earlier, we cannot be certain whether Faulkner had the psychoanalytic paradigm in mind as he wrote. It is evident, though, from even a general knowledge or observation of compulsion that its characteristic rigidity is the antithesis of states of mind we expect in those sharing that ethereal phenomenon, being in love. I suspect a quite deliberate use of the model, however, in part because of Faulkner's precise, if infrequent, use of such explicit terms as “obsession” and “masturbation” and in part because of the consistency and cogency with which the anal compulsive language of this novel links together the experiences of the many characters who are mirrors for one another (the unnamed doctor and Harry, Harry and the tall convict, the tall convict and the short convict, the pregnant woman and Charlotte).⁹ What seems evident is that for the modern reader, the psychoanalytic explanation serves as a valuable model through which to understand the tensions in the novel between the appearance of love and the reality of anxiety. The disclosure of a coherent set of perceptions (on the part of the characters), behaviors and images reveals Faulkner's essentially ironic vision of a set of circumstances that effectively render the idea of an enduring romantic love chimerical. Psychoanalysis can explain the nature of this coherence and uncover the ambivalence accounting for the conflicting languages of transcendence and anality in a single text.

In his classic description of compulsion neurosis, Otto Fenichel writes that the conflicts leading an individual to regress to the “analsadistic instinctual orientation of the compulsion neurotic” have usually originated in Oedipal anxieties (272-73). That is, one defense we have against the fear of incest aroused by the realization of our inordinate attraction to the mother is a feeling of repulsion that can lead to behavior guaranteeing (or meant to guarantee) that we do not act on the original impulse. The almost infinite series of substitutions of behaviors that assure us we are not acting on that incestuous love comprises the complex and paradoxical patterns of compulsive behavior.¹⁰ We quickly forget the original wish and (in the Freudian paradigm) substitute for it a preoccupation with counting, measuring, and brooding about such things as money, feces, and time, but at the heart of all of these substitutions is anxiety and ambivalence about the possibility of separation from the mother and her later psychic surrogates. Compulsive behavior, then, enacts the individual's deep ambivalence (intense love for the mother and fright at the implications of that love, i.e., separation or castration anxiety) by appearing self-contradictory. Instinctual urges to do or not do something are thus combined in irrational ways with anti-instinctual defenses against doing it. Behavior which is at one moment a defense against doing a forbidden act can quickly and perversely become a substitute enactment of it, which in turn needs to be punished or undone.

In The Wild Palms we see Harry and the tall convict responding with identical expressions of overwhelming anxiety to the closeness of the sexuality of the mother (Charlotte, the pregnant woman, the raging flood) and the threat of being overwhelmed, engulfed, or drowned by its presence. The convict simply tries to get away; Harry's anxiety, in contrast, cannot be acknowledged because he so wants to believe in the romantic notion of love he and Charlotte have created between them, and it is his anxiety, rather than the convict's, that is transformed narratively into compulsive preoccupations.

In a compulsive individual's regression to an anal orientation, energies once used to defend him against acting on Oedipal impulses are used, instead, to defend against anal-erotic impulses. Harry's behavior enacts this regression. Unable to acknowledge the degree of anxiety generated by his closeness to Charlotte, he becomes interested, instead, in the artifacts of their lives: the presence and absence of money, food, and time. One concern is a substitute for the other; both have as their objective a feeling of being in control. Much of Harry's behavior, we recall, consists of brooding and trying not to brood, counting and trying not to count external things that affect his relationship with Charlotte. (Control and lack of it are obviously prime concerns in the anal stage of psychic and physical development.) But while Harry seems to need to be in control in order to preserve the relationship, he actually needs to be in control as a defense against it. Faulkner suggests Harry's decided ambivalence about the affair by consistently portraying him as inept, as undermining his own apparent motives: attempting to paint, he discovers he is colorblind; trying to determine when winter will set in, he finds he has completely lost track of time; even his “losing” of jobs and his mishandling of Charlotte's abortion (more about which, later) reflect the self-contradictory nature of much compulsive behavior.

In considering the role of the anal compulsive orientation in the novel, we are not forced to posit a particular etiology for the character Harry, whose infancy is, after all, neither present nor implied. What is significant is that in a novel in which male protagonists are confronted with the immediacy of feminine sexuality, language expressing anxiety about the mother is coextensive with language expressing obsessive-compulsive perceptions. And this language is not limited to Harry alone: it pervades the narration. Faulkner himself emphasizes the Oedipal nature of Harry's anxiety by portraying Rat, Charlotte's husband, precisely in his roles as father (to Charlotte's children), husband, and brother (to Harry). Late in the novel Rat is made avenger—and forgiver—of Harry's Oedipal crime.

Charlotte's behavior and language also contribute to the compulsive orientation of the novel, for although she is depicted as free of the debilitating anxiety Harry experiences as a result of their closeness, her language and actions elucidate the perspective implied in Harry's rigid behavior. Although Charlotte insists that the day on which she and Harry will run out of money is not important and she seems unaware of the obsessive measuring that characterizes so much of Harry's thinking, she too discusses their love in terms of measurement—its cost, its worth: “… love and suffering are the same thing and … the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself” (48) and “what does it matter what it cost us, what we pay for it? or how? … Isn't it worth it, even if it all busts tomorrow and we have to spend the rest of our lives paying interest?” (87-88). Harry echoes her words in his despair as he tries to get pills that will end her pregnancy: “they must work, something must; it cant be this difficult, this much of a price” (208).

Charlotte's language is often explicitly anal, connoting the tense ambivalence between “holding on” and “letting go” that in an infant are assumed to accompany the anal stage of development.¹¹ She describes their love to Harry as being like the ocean in that “if you are not good enough, worthy enough … if you begin to make a bad smell in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die” (83). She loves the ocean: “… I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach and be dried away by the sun into a little foul smear …” (83). Comparable language in “Old Man” describes the violence of the convict's struggle with the water: it was “as though some forty hours' constipation of the elements, the firmament itself, were discharging in clapping and glaring salute …” (157); “the convict's native state, in a final paroxysm, regurgitated him onto the wild bosom of the Father of Waters” (158); he knew that when the water “was done with him it would spew him back into the comparatively safe world he had been snatched violently out of” (147).

Again, the paradoxical compulsive tendency to alternate between retaining things and irrationally squandering them (Fenichel 282) is seen in the interplay of Harry's caution with Charlotte's recklessness. While he counts, saves, and measures things, she pours their last whiskey onto a hearth (105), gives their last food (pork chops) to a cast iron dog (98), and wastes some of what little money they have left on a purposeless taxi ride (97)—all ostensibly in defiance of their “fate” but in fact helping to create it.

Harry's characteristic orderliness, a trait Fenichel describes as “a protective measure against dangerous instinctual demands” (284), is ultimately self-defeating. Systems of doing things—routines—are meant to protect a compulsive individual from committing some forbidden act. Yet in Harry and Charlotte's relationship, we see that the routine itself is soon experienced as the forbidden act, and thus the lovers find themselves in an endless flight both from routine and from spontaneity. This is typical of compulsive sequences, in which one behavior is substituted for another when the latter ceases to be an effective defense against an urge and becomes, instead, a symbolic enactment of it. Throughout his story, Harry alternately feels lost in time and trapped by it; both become occasions for severe anxiety. He struggles to forget time, then struggles to recapture it (by making a calendar, for example), then struggles to lose himself in it again.

Most conspicuous of all in conveying the anal compulsive dimensions of the story are Charlotte and Harry's roles as artists and their attitudes toward their “creations.” Charlotte is a sculptor who fashions a little figure a few inches tall that she calls the “Bad Smell” (95). She explains that it is an emblem of the sorts of things she and Harry could do that would destroy their love, make them unworthy of it; it is a warning, an objective correlative of their fears. It is also a bad product of the self, and by keeping it safe and being aware of it, Charlotte implies that she and Harry will retain what is good within themselves. It is significant that she gives the “Bad Smell” away to a stranger who visits them in their Wisconsin cabin, an act that proves to be premature.

Charlotte tells Harry that she values sculpture because it is “‘Not just something to tickle your taste buds for a second and then swallowed and maybe not even sticking to your entrails but just evacuated whole and flushed away into the damned old sewer, the Might-just-as-well-not-have-been’” (41). It is something “that you could be proud to show, that you could touch, hold, see the behind side of it and feel the fine solid weight” (47). When she stops making her little puppets, we are told that “it stopped as abruptly and inexplicably as it had begun” (89). Meanwhile, Harry writes for the confession magazines “stories which he wrote complete from the first capital to the last period in one sustained frenzied agonising rush …” (121) and then tries to sleep, “waiting for the smell and echo of his last batch of moron's pap to breathe out of him” (122). As should be evident by now, all of this excessively anal language reflects a concern both with the products and with the modalities of the anal compulsive orientation, with the created object (“something you could touch”), with how it is created (“stopped … abruptly,” “frenzied agonising rush,” “spewed”), and how it is disposed of: even the narrator describes the trash bin in which Harry finds the money as containing “the casual anonymous droppings of the anonymous who passed it during the twelve hours like the refuse of birds in flight” (50).

Ultimately, Harry, like many compulsive people, is as preoccupied with punishment as he is with his crime. His behavior becomes most ritualistic when he is in danger of losing something or has just lost it. While he delays telling Charlotte he has lost his job, he spends his days on a park bench, looking at the cashier's check that is her means of getting home: there was “something almost ceremonial about it, like the formal preparation by the addict of his opium pipe … while he invented a hundred ways to spend it … knowing that this was a form of masturbation” (94). Fenichel tells us that fears about the loss of fecal masses—and their later substitutes in compulsion neurotics: money, time, and such—are “archaic forerunners of the idea of castration” (276). That Faulkner should describe Harry's handling of the cashier's check in terms of masturbation suggests that for Harry masturbation represents the crime (again, a substitute for the Oedipal crime) just as the loss of the job is a punishment (a substitute castration in that it contributes to his impotence, his inability to control what is happening to them). Compulsion neurotics often see punishment both as a retaliation for a crime and, paradoxically, as a license to commit the crime again. The circle is a vicious one, as the individual may create substitute punishments for himself to put an end to doubts about when and how the “real” punishment will take place. Thus, some of the things Harry does can be seen as symbolic castrations, freeing him temporarily from both the possibility of committing the crime and from the fear of punishment (because, after all, he has already been punished). Only in this light can we understand Harry's decision, for example, to send Charlotte back to Chicago without him as a symbolic severing of himself from the possibility of committing incest and a symbolic castration/punishment for having done so. Assuming Harry's severe ambivalence also accounts for the paradoxical care and carelessness reflected in his response to Charlotte's pregnancy. Although he appears to be quite cautious, he is, in fact, improvident. His endless deliberations about the abortion cause him to wait so long that he ends by performing it hurriedly at the last moment, and his fumbling ineptitude, partly a consequence of the haste, causes her death. In view of compulsive motivations, the botched abortion is highly suspect. Charlotte's death is, after all, at his hands. Harry's clumsiness punishes both of them for their Oedipal crime. Rather too contentedly, he goes off to prison and is more serene there than we have ever seen him. In accepting his punishment, he is freed from the possibility the crime will take place again. The elaborate rationale he provides for accepting his sentence rather than the escape Rat offers him only thinly masks his sense of relief at being at last free of temptation. As the novel ends, both Harry and the tall convict embrace prison.

The language and imagery of anality so permeate Faulkner's love story that, once aware of it, the reader finds irony after irony in the text's surface insistence that this is a lovers' tragedy. How can we feel solemn, for example, about Harry's olfactory concerns? When he and Charlotte leave New Orleans together, he feels self-conscious, sure “that they must have disseminated an aura of unsanctity and disaster like a smell” (60). Charlotte expresses repeatedly her interest in looking at things (especially sculpture) “from the rear” (Abraham 390). The lovers are concerned about what they leave behind them, as when they move from “the apartment where they had lived for two months and left no mark other than the cigarette scars on the table. ‘Not even of loving,’ he said” (129). And so on. The very perceptions of the lovers seem dominated by compulsive meticulousness about the debris of their relationship and reinforce our sense that the notion of romantic transcendence is being subverted even as the story proceeds.

But while Harry spends much of his time in the novel performing what Freud called “‘secret scatologic rituals’” (Fenichel 274) to allay his anxiety about Charlotte, his constant brooding is counterpointed by the overtly Oedipal behavior of the tall convict in the companion story, “Old Man.” Harry's behavior reflects a regression to an anal compulsive orientation typical of compulsion neurotics; the convict's behavior, in sharp contrast, shows an openly aggressive confrontation of the forces that threaten him. His is the hostility of the Oedipal phase expressed rather than repressed. There is little time for the convict to brood about his situation because he is constantly struggling to survive. There are only glimpses of his terror, impressions of its causes, and expressions of his desire to be free. I mentioned earlier his flailing at the waters with his paddle. This paddle takes on a good deal of importance as an artifact in the story. Faced with the inexorable sexual presence of the female/mother—both the flood and the pregnant, then nursing woman—the convict laboriously and endlessly burns, whittles, and chips away at a tree trunk to make a new paddle that might save him: “for an instant in which he knew he was insane he thought of trying to saw it down with the flange of the bailing can” (234-5). The parodic conflict between potency and castration fears is evident, especially as the bailing can has just been used to sever the infant's umbilical cord.

All of the convict's energies are spent in searching for a way back to “that monastic existence of shotguns and shackles where he would be secure” from female life (153). He experiences increasing degrees of exasperation, powerfully conveyed in Faulkner's breathless prose, at the unreasonable presence of the female and the injustice of the role he has been asked to fill. He simply cannot believe, for example, that he has been forced to participate in the birth of her child, an event that he finds the apotheosis of her existence as the feminine and that leaves him enervated: “He felt the same outrageous affronting of a condition purely moral, the same raging impotence to find any answer to it … standing above her, spent suffocating and inarticulate …” (229).

Despite the continued presence of the woman, however, the convict discovers an interlude of peace. It occurs when he, she, and an old cajun share a cabin in a swamp. Daily the convict and the old man go out to hunt alligators. The convict wrestles them one to one, dazzling the local people with his courage. The encounters caricature the fighting of dragons to win the hands of fairy-tale damsels. As the narrator suggests, the convict's reading of adventure tales earlier in his life probably prepared him to see it this way: “who to say what Helen, what living Garbo, he had not dreamed of rescuing from what craggy pinnacle or dragoned keep” (149). In contrast to the obsessive inertia characterizing much of Harry's behavior in “The Wild Palms,” the convict's behavior in “Old Man” as he conquers each “sauric protagonist” (270) enacts an open battle with beings threatening castration, whether the beasts are seen as punishing fathers or devouring mothers. The potency he feels after each of these encounters provides a defense against the feminine threat he has fought throughout the story, and as if to emphasize the change, the woman and her child fade narratively into the background, temporarily harmless.

“Old Man” has been explored in specifically Freudian terms (its use of rebirth imagery, for example; Feaster 89-93). Here I want only to suggest that the events and artifacts in the convict's story, while they have some relevance for an independent reading that ignores “The Wild Palms,” are significantly clarified by juxtaposing them to the companion story and seeing them as elaborate, comic defenses against threats of engulfment and castration. Such phenomena as the paddle and the conquering of alligators have the effect of forestalling anxiety about the presence of women. Time and again, the convict's role is to enact parodies of strong or aggressive or chivalrous behavior vis-a-vis the feminine. When, at the end of the story, he returns gladly to the womb-like prison cell, grateful to be rid of women once and for all, even at the expense of a stupidly and cruelly lengthened prison term, we can fully empathize with his final epithet, the last words in the book: “Women, [shi]t!” And we can understand the juxtaposition here of language that compresses the idea of women with the excessive anality found throughout the novel. In his final expletive, the convict locates and articulates the nature of the anxiety that psychologically accounts for many of the paradoxes of this, Faulkner's major love story.

Notes

1. McHaney, P. 13; see also pp. xvi, 3-24, et passim. McHaney's is the fullest, soundest explication of the novel thus far. On the parallels to Hemingway's work, see Moses and Richardson.

2. I am not arguing that all love is based on the deflections of early desire this paper discusses or even that Faulkner necessarily thought so. Whatever his reasons, though, he has chosen to make his characters in this novel incapable of a genuinely transcendent love by suggesting ways in which it undermines its own potential. Thus, the word “transcendent” in my title is itself meant to be ironic, for no love so constituted could help but provide its own severest obstacles. We can only speculate about whether Faulkner may have been basing some of the parody on self-observation, on some sense in himself that he was his own worst enemy in love relationships. It is also plausible—given his caricature of so many elements in Hemingway's Farewell to Arms—that even this dimension of his love story was a conscious parody.

3. When discussed as separate entities, the two stories making up the novel are indicated as “The Wild Palms” and “Old Man.”

4. The language describing Harry's encounters with Charlotte and the convict's helplessness in the raging flood is often identical: “yellow,” “turmoil,” “catlike,” “drowning,” “doom,” “enveloping.”

   Women are behind the problems of all the men in the novel. The two convicts in “Old Man” are both in jail partly because of women: the tall convict shared his plan to rob a train with his sweetheart and feels he would not have gone through with it had it not been for telling her (338); the short convict chose a longer sentence rather than have to face the anger of the woman involved with him in his crime (27). Harry feels his years of virginity have left him unprepared for his relationship with Charlotte. See also FU, 173-74.

   These parallels reinforce the notion that the dilemmas of Harry and the tall convict are psychically equivalent. The anxieties described by the characters are identical, and their solutions are the same, both literally (going to prison) and psychologically (retreat, regression).

5. McHaney notes (141) that the river is described in androgynous terms. Actually, when Faulkner speaks of the river itself, the “Old Man,” the “Father of waters” he tends to use masculine images, such as that of a bucking stallion. When he speaks of the flood, however, he uses the imagery of engulfment and drowning that, for him, are feminine threats. It is precisely the flood which leaves the “Old Man” indistinguishable, and Faulkner makes much of the fact that its boundaries are not discernible because of the flood: “as if the water itself were in three strata, separate and distinct, the bland and unhurried surface … the rush and fury of the flood itself, and beneath this in turn the original stream” (62).

   See also Cumpiano, 191: “The life force embodied in the river and the woman are hated and feared.” For Cumpiano, it is the “life force” which the convict flees, and his return to prison is “a rejection of life itself” (193), an embracing of the Nirvana principle, “the downward movement of the organism toward quiescence” (190). Cumpiano does not seek a particular reason for the convict's “death drive,” and his explanation seems, as a result, rather unnecessarily abstract.

6. Faulkner uses similar “comic Freudianism” elsewhere; see McHaney, 43.

7. The anxiety Harry experiences in realizing that he has again lost track of time through his closeness to Charlotte suggests fright at the boundary confusion, the blurred sense of self and, hence, of control, that is the essential danger of closeness to women (in Faulkner's view).

8. McHaney recognizes (15) that Harry's concern with money “amounts to an obsession” and that he and Charlotte are very unlikely lovers. The Appendix to his book is entitled “Time and Money in The Wild Palms” and lists the numerous references to dates, numbers, and money that appear in the novel. He seems, indeed, to be on the verge of concluding, as I have, that the anal compulsive substructure is a significant dimension of meaning within the novel, but his analysis focuses, instead, on the philosophical and mythic aspects of the stories.

9. In a very different argument—but one equally based on Freudian paradigms—John Irwin establishes the importance of such doubling or mirroring elsewhere in Faulkner's writing. His study shows how Faulkner was able to exploit a number of the dimensions of the Oedipal conflict through thematic concerns such as generational conflicts among grandfathers, fathers, and sons, and through reenactments of the psychic preoccupations of such complex figures as Quentin Compson even within their roles as narrators. Irwin's work leaves no doubt that the overdetermined nature of psychic phenomena as Freud elaborated them were well understood by Faulkner and often explicitly reflected in his fiction.

10. Irwin's discussion of the repetition compulsion and its etiology (88-90) is especially helpful here.

11. Harry's feelings about sexual climax equate it with death. Letting go is terrifying to him because subjectively it seems to threaten an annihilation of the self against which there is no defense, a fate as inexorable as death: “‘grave-womb or womb-grave, it's all one,’” as Harry puts it (138).

Works Cited

Abraham, Karl. “Contributions to the Theory of the Anal Character.” Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, M.D. London: Hogarth Press, 1927.

Broughton, Panthea Reid. “The Wild Palms: Structure, Affect, and Meaning.” Unpublished essay; page references are to the typescript.

Cumpiano, Marion W. “The Motif of Return: Currents and Counter Currents in ‘Old Man’ by William Faulkner.” Southern Humanities Review 12 (Summer 1978), 185-93.

Faulkner, William. Flags in the Dust. New York: Random House, 1973.

———. Light in August. New York: Random House, Vintage, 1972.

———. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1967.

———. The Town. New York: Random House, 1957.

———. The Wild Palms. New York: Random House, Vintage, 1964.

Feaster, John. “Faulkner's Old Man: A Psychoanalytic Approach.” Modern Fiction Studies 13 (1967), 89-93.

Fenichel, Otto, M.D. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. New York: Norton, 1945.

Gwynn, Frederick L., and Joseph L. Blotner, eds. Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957-1958. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1959.

Irwin, John T. Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins U P, 1975.

McHaney, Thomas L. William Faulkner's The Wild Palms: A Study, Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1975.

Moses, W. R. “Water, Water Everywhere: Old Man and A Farewell to Arms.” Modern Fiction Studies 5 (1959), 172-74.

Richardson, H. Edward. “The ‘Hemingwaves’ in Faulkner's Wild Palms.” Modern Fiction Studies 4 (1959), 357-60.