"The Megaphone's Bellowing and Bodiless Profanity": if I forget thee, Jerusalem and the culture of cacophony.

Smith, Phil

We have radio in the place of God's voice.

--William Faulkner, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (115)

In the riot of metropolitan mass culture and electrical communication that characterizes the early media age (roughly 1910 to 1939) we also find a quickly corresponding articulation of the dislocation and disorientation that these new modes of expression had unleashed. To the artists and writers of this period, there was too often a sense of living in the midst of an escalating visual and aural cacophony, a noise that they were quick to point out was engendering a destabilizing effect in both life and art. A warning as to the power and permanence of these effects permeates the poet Vachel Lindsay's second treatise on film, The Progress and Poetry of the Movies (1925). Here Lindsay's recognition of an increasingly nonverbal, visually oriented culture--what he terms the "hieroglyphic mood" (182)--is prescient in its foreboding. Already, this is a world in which "the magazine stand becomes more and more of a riot of hieroglyphics, rather than a headquarters of printed matter in the old sense, good or bad" This is a shift not without its risks: as Lindsay warns, "if we do not have some kind of continence and direction in this matter of speeded-up hieroglyphics, the brain of Man becomes in this modern hour a circus gone wrong, a Ringling circus, a gigantic spectacle" (183).

Lindsay was scarcely alone in his worry as to the effect of the new media forms. The great modernist poets were more proudly definite as to their detrimental effects, evident in T. S. Eliot's often cited remark in 1922 that "With the decay of the musichall, with the encroachment of the cheap and rapid-breeding cinema, the lower classes will tend to drop into the same state of protoplasm as the bourgeoisie" (qtd. in Rhode 32). W. B. Yeats was characteristically more succinct but no less dismissive, proclaiming in 1926, "the newspaper is the roar of the machine" (313). However, it was not simply a visual onslaught that was appearing as an encroachment upon higher sensibilities but one that was, as the 1930s progressed, also increasingly aural as well, the escalating din of radio throughout that decade such that by early 1940 Ezra Pound--previously steadfast in his avoidance of all modern media--felt compelled to respond:

Blasted friends left a goddam radio here yester. Gift. God damn destructive and dispersive devil of an invention. But got to be faced. Drammer has got to face it, not only face cinema. Anybody who can survive may strengthen inner life, but a mass of apes and worms will be still further rejuiced to passivity. (qtd. in Heymann 92)

So by the time of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem's publication in 1939 the idea of the world becoming simply too noisy is a contemporaneous rubric, one found in Yeats's invocation in the same year as to the necessity of solitude and quiet to the contemplative state that artistic activity requires, as he longingly describes Michelangelo in the act of painting the Sistine Chapel: "Like a long-legged fly upon the stream/His mind moves upon silence" ("Long-legged Fly" lines 29-30).

But the modern cityscape offered no such artist's refuge and more recent criticism has confirmed this contemporaneous sense of bombardment and dislocation. Referencing Georg Simmel's iconic 1904 essay, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," Ben Singer further emphasizes the congruence between the metropolis and the modernism of the early twentieth century: Modernity implied a phenomenal world--a specifically urban one--that was markedly quicker, more chaotic, fragmented, and disorienting than in previous phases of human culture. Amid the unprecedented turbulence of the big city's traffic, noise, billboards, street signs, jostling crowds, window displays, and advertisements, the individual faced a new intensity of sensory stimulation. (72-73)

The problem of course for artists and writers was not only how to find some quiet in which to work, but also how best to represent or replicate the "new intensity of sensory stimulation" found in this new urban world within their Old World art forms. In the early 1910s, the poet Pound had struggled with the related question of how to best capture the on-rushing of faces witnessed in a Paris metro station: "I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy" (qtd. in Ruthven 152); it would take him a further two years to compose the twenty word poem "In a Station of the Metro." (1) Writers in particular were not only struggling with how to represent the city, but also with how to compete with a new medium that seemed by nature much more capable of capturing the urban crowds and chaos: cinema. As Singer also observes, film's "rapid tempo and high-impact audiovisual fragmentation paralleled the shocks and sensory intensities of modern life" (91). This world with its shocks and intensities and the related formal question as to how to verbally concoct a similar sense of "rapid tempo" and "audiovisual fragmentation" is an aesthetic dilemma that William Faulkner will first attempt to engage directly in 1935's Pylon, directly engage in the sense of evoking a stylistic simulacra of the city experience through a scattershot linguistic, narrative, and typographical style. This is a novel nominally about an air show and the reporter who covers it, but also one really more concerned with articulating a "yet unvisioned tomorrow," presumably an especially pressing task given the phrase's repeated mention so close in the text (786, 791). Yet, as the novel makes clear, tomorrow is already rapidly being envisioned in the "garblement which was the city" (918). Here in the urban phantasmagoria everything is mixed up in a manner similar to the reporter's experience of flying: a sensation of "terrific motion--not speed and not progress--just blind furious motion" (923). As indicated by the discussion above, this sentiment may be fairly emblematic of its time; what is striking in Pylon is the way in which the novel attempts to envision tomorrow by interpolating and addressing, not only the increasingly recognized film tropes, but also the less regarded and less addressed forms of mass culture then reaching a crescendo: the tabloid press, cartoons, newsreels, loudspeakers, factory made food, and factory made hats, all converging in the meta-mix-up of the metropolis.

Ultimately, this notion of being mixed up may also extend to a feeling of the novel's inconsistency, but whatever Pylons virtues or faults (and this is a contentious point in Faulkner criticism) the book does succeed in setting in motion themes and devices the author will more fully explore in Jerusalem. Here in the later novel, Faulkner will fully address, interpolate, and replicate the "garblement" of the city and all its attendant media forms--the mass press, the movies, radio, newsreels, and the animated cartoons, reveling in the disorientation these forms create. On the one hand, Faulkner is as equally concerned as Pound about the "destructive and dispersive" effects of the new media forms, but on the other, he is quite fascinated with the new formal devices they may afford. These contradictory elements reach an apotheosis in Jerusalem, a novel in which there is a constant infusion of moving pictures and moving perspectives, of city scenarios and mass culture as a whole, seen in its tumult of references to a "Detectives' Gazette" (22) and "picture shows" (140), to a "coca cola sign" (230) and a "Klieg light" (251), to "Hollywood magazines" (176) and "cod liver oil advertisements" (93) and even--in a now more clearly envisioned tomorrow--the quite futuristic "robot-like saleswomen" (102) who may serve a "chromium-finished office girl" (108). And of course formally reflecting the notion of a cosmopolitan sensory overload, the novel has embedded in its contrapuntal structure of two alternating quasi-independent but related stories the notion of the metropolitan-like mass culure mix-up. (2)

The novel's crescendo of convergence is emblematic of the fact that the modern world was indeed becoming inescapably cacophonous, and this noise of the times is foregrounded in Jerusalem; in terms of the novel as a whole, an increasingly fragmented and media-distracted world is in evidence, one in which the manifestations of noise are all too pervasive. Here the pressing presence of these sonic assaults informs both the form and content of the book specifically with regard to (a) the buzz or chatter between the two independent but related stories that comprise the book's bipartite structure including their introduction of new narrative voices (in particular those then novel ones stemming from radio, newsreels, and film) and (b) the novel's reflexive aspect, a motif of cacophony within the stories found in the book's portrayal of both amplified and mechanically conveyed media sounds and some equally incomprehensible human-generated ones. These traits in turn are subsumed within the book's uber-motif of the noise engendered by the new cultures of mass media and publicity, cultures perhaps first commandeered for promotional purposes by the film industry but by the late 1930s ones involuntarily grafted onto literary production as well. This is indeed a world where, as the eventual fate of both male protagonists--Harry Wilbourne and the tall convict--makes clear, peace and solitude may only be found within the walls of a jail cell, perhaps the last place in a cacophonous culture where it is still possible that a "mind moves upon silence."

First to the two-part nature of the novel: the book has an alternating structure, one story looking to the past in an almost biblical parable about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the other looking forward to the emerging world of mass culture and bohemianism founded in 1937 America. The first two sections of Faulkner's novel introduce, in an alternating sequence, two contrapuntal stories that comprise the book as a whole, a sequence that will continue throughout the book. Perhaps fittingly, given the novel's propensity toward chronological disruption of narrative, the story set later chronologically is the first section to appear. "The Wild Palms" begins in 1937 and introduces the two protagonists Harry Wilbourne and Charlotte Rittenmeyer. Beyond this individual story's establishing narrative, however, what is also being set up in this section is the structural idea of boundaries and division, presaging the bipartite nature of the book as a whole. In the sixth line of "Wild Palms" the reader is alerted to the fact that the story is set at a "beach cottage"; however, as the text then emphasizes through the qualifying phrase "even though," this is not a typical cottage, but rather, in an architectural foreshadowing of the novel's structure, one comprised "of two stories" (3). This notion of the doubled edifice is later echoed, albeit in a slightly altered form, in Harry's ultimate destination--the jail--which also "was of two storeys" (258). A similar effect of doubling and division is found in the doctor's initial viewing of Charlotte, as "he watched the woman through the screen of oleander bushes which separated the two lots" (5). Later, the doctor walks "across his own somewhat sheltered yard and through the dividing oleander hedge and so into the full sweep of the unimpeded sea-wind which thrashed among the unseen palms" (13). "Two stories"--"through the screen"--"the dividing oleander hedge": in this division between the tame and the wild, a neat coming attraction is provided of both this major motif of the two alternating stories as well as the reader's subsequent crossing back and forth between them.

This leads into the second story, "Old Man." The actual narrative setting here is at first more easily discernible than that of the preceding story: it is Mississippi in 1927 and a convict (who will remain unnamed throughout the story) is in jail for "fifteen years" for "attempted train robbery" (21). The instigating force for this attempt is his belief in the celebrity myths the mass media was already propagating: "the Diamond Dicks and Jesse Jameses and such" found in "the stories, the paper novels" (20) and "the paperbacks ... [and] pamphlets," the convict taking both his inspiration and his actual "plans" for the robbery from the world of pulp fiction as he "followed his printed (and false) authority to the letter" (21). Like a hack writer (a figure that, in the form of Harry Wilbourne, will be more directly addressed in the novel's other story), the tall convict has assembled his material for his failed performance of self from a collage of already mediated second-rate fiction manufactured by what the text terms, with Faulkner's usual acerbic bitterness toward writers of this sort, "shades who had written about shades" (22). What is also relevant here is the way that the convict's life, both past and present, has been mediated by and through "media," a word that had only recently (the 1920s) attained its current meaning. This motif continues in the second part of this section, reaching a secondary level as the other Parchman convicts find out about the potential flood and what it might mean for them from newspapers, or more precisely, in an echo of Lindsay's "hieroglyphic mood," their headlines--"those black staccato slashes of ink which, it would almost seem, even the illiterate should be able to read" (JER 25). (3) Tellingly, the metropolitan newsstand culture has permeated even this remote and removed rural prison; this is a world in which mass culture is becoming increasingly pervasive and influential among both the high and the low, and perhaps as not only a punishment for the crime of robbery, but also as an atonement for his sin of bad reading habits, this convict along with his fellow prisoners will now face that most biblical of catastrophes: the flood.

As both stories progress, all roads and rivers (and there will be many) lead to the same place: prison or death, a world which is, to use one of Faulkner's favorite words, "desiccated": dried up or dried out, as in the milk-less breast. As noted earlier, these two parts are presented in an alternating, contrapuntal sequence; what the direct or indirect connection between them might be is still a source of debate and initially a source of confusion, one not aided by the author's early contradictory statements on the matter. (4) By the late 1950s, buoyed by some further external authorial prompting, the idea of a deliberate attempt at a contrapuntal effect had been solidified and institutionalized. Accordingly, there followed a multitude of readings as to the cause and effects of this structural division, the two-part structure seemingly doubling the number of articles one might expect on this subject. W. T. Jewkes's 1961 "Counterpoint in Faulkner's The Wild Palms? may be seen as a foundational article in the discussion. Playing off the author's Paris Review "counterpoint" statement, Jewkes discusses the earlier efforts of Cowley, Irving Howe, and W. R. Moses on the matter of the division, before embarking on a mostly thematic comparison of the two sections that he sees as united in the sense that "the author manages, chapter for chapter, to make the plot and the central thematic issues of the one story echo and complement the particular emphases and details of the other story" (40).

Jewkes introduces one other key observation regarding the effect of the novel's overall structure, one still couched in the language of music: for Jewkes, the effect of the alternating chapters is "also musical in the sense that only Ch. 1 of WP is free from the influence of OM; after that, the OM chapters not only complement and criticize the preceding chapters, they also foreshadow certain developments and resonances in the succeeding chapters of WP" (47-48). A few examples of this foreshadowing--again thematically related--are given before Jewkes concludes this one-page section with the observation that "In such ways, the stories echo and re-echo against each other, building up a remarkable architecture of sonority" (48). Perhaps 1961 is too early, in terms of poststructural literary theory, reading effects, or Lacanian mirror stages, to expect a further investigation of this quite brilliant point, but here it can be used as a basis for an investigation of the way in which the novel uses the technique of "echo and re-echo" as central to the swirling cacophony found both within and between the two stories that comprise the book as a whole, a fully realized verbal parallel of film's ability to represent the "barrage of impressions, shocks, and jolts" that were then being mobilized to characterize urban life (Singer 73). II There was a man with a megaphone; it was a dancing contest and they did not even know it; the music crashed and ceased, the lights flared on, the air was filled by the bellowing megaphone and the winning couple moved forward. --"The Wild Palms" (181)

Whatever the author's intentions, one effect of the bifurcated structure within the novel is immediately and intuitively palpable even to a casual reader. The two stories together create a bookend effect or perhaps more aptly a hall of mirrors, an effect replicated within the novel, as in the bar where Harry meets the journalist McCord in which there is found "the gleaming pyramids of glasses, mirror-repeated, the mirror aping the antic jackets of the barmen" (104). The image of a world that is "mirror-repeated" is an apt reflection of the self-enclosed, looping world of media-fed media with which the novel is so obsessed, a world that is, in turn, reflected in the book's bipartite structure. The alternating stories can be seen as creating an isolation chamber or oscillating feedback loop that then seals off any extensions of the temporal and chronological world outside of the book: to the convict of 1927, there is no glowing or absolving future, no rectification of the conditions that brought him to his overwrought sentence; in fact, as the story of Charlotte and Harry ten years later confirms, things will only get worse and end up in the same place: prison and death. Charlotte is dead, and in both stories the male protagonists are left languishing in "the State Penitentiary at Parchman [Farm]" (270). In a complementary manner, even the notion of a glorious, pre-Depression past preceding Harry's and Charlotte's misadventures is intuitively dispelled by the convict's tale: there are no retroactive sources of strength on which to draw. As Harry notes in his defense of his pulp fiction practices to McCord, "if Venus returned [today] she would be a soiled man in a subway lavatory with a palm full of French postcards" (115). The past, far or near, is already debased and the convict's predicament provides a parallel proof; cumulatively, the two stories suggest that the world the characters inhabit has always been and will always be this way--diluted, degraded, and desiccated.

It is not, however, only a world of reflected and mediated images that is presented within each of the novel's two stories; it is also, to echo Jewkes's note on the thematic structure, a book of echoed and reechoed sounds, between the stories in terms of images and motifs and also in the complementary narrative focalizations found in each. In a world of multiple and conflictive voices, authors attempting to portray or verbally replicate this world may themselves be tempted to use multiple voices in order to be heard above the fray. If this idea of an oral multiplicity--one designed to hold an audience despite its decreasing attention span and the growing competition for market share--is, by 1937, already a contemporaneous rubric in mass culture and within Jerusalem, there may be another contemporaneous media parallel at play here: the idea not simply of competing voices, but also of deliberately contrasting ones as seen, for example, in Depression radio advertising:

When the 1929 crash came, the grip of the advertiser on the networks began to tighten.... Sales talk became still brisker and brasher and highly supercharged. To save their audiences from becoming punch-drunk under this kind of attack, some networks began to limit the number of words which could be spoken in a minute. A contrasting technique was to hire a voice which was lush, leisured, plummy, and avuncular, seemingly steeped in worldly wisdom. (Turner 270)

This idea of the aural and oral confusion and bipolar attraction engendered by a competing multitude of voices is both a thematic and structural foundation of Jerusalem. So who are the narrators in the novel? In truth, it is difficult to tell fully. There are two distinct voices who move and weave throughout each of the stories and between the stories, a constant shifting from the ostensibly limited omniscient viewpoint of Harry in "Wild Palms" to the strident omniscient voice in "Old Man." In each story, however, both voices are interrupted by a secondary self-identifying subnarrator, the two like Quentin and Shreve in Absalom, Absalom! becoming "First, two of them, then four; now two again" (AA 275). (5) The continuum here with the increasingly destabilized narration that one finds in the chronological sequence of Faulkner's novels from The Sound and the Fury (1929) to Jerusalem is striking as in this last novel there is a further decay in the authority of the overall narrator figure, a decay that may be presaged in the earlier Absalom, Absalom!--Daniel Singal has noted that in this novel it takes both Quentin and Shreve--"the two of them creating between them" (AA 243)--to do justice to the tale of Thomas Sutpen and that by the end of the novel "the two have merged, making possible a moment of supreme vision" (Singal 218). In Jerusalem, the very structure dictates there can be no merger, but rather a constant chatter of transmission-like "cross-talk" between the overall narrators of the two stories, compounded by the shifting narrational perspective within each. Accordingly, the echo chamber effect of the bipartite structure can also be seen in the contrasting styles of narrativizing found within the two sections: these narrators sometimes shout from afar, and sometimes whisper intimately, offering a combination of an excitable play-by-play man and suave radio announcer, like twin masters of ceremonies.

But this decision to split and amplify the voices is both solution and problem; amplification--whether in film, fiction, or general public speaking--leads to more noise, and progressively increasing noise leads, inevitably, to incomprehensibility, like apartment neighbors engaged in an escalating music war. Likewise within Jerusalem's stories, echoing the narrational buzzing--the crosstalk effect created by these dual tales--there is a constant motif of cacophony. Occasionally the noise originates from a natural source such as the constant rush of the river in "Old Man" in which the "convict was hearing again that sound which he had heard twice before and would never forget--that sound of deliberate and irresistible and monstrously disturbed water," but more often, particularly in "Wild Palms," the sounds are artificially amplified, distorted, and disruptive ones (199). Mirroring these nonhuman noises, throughout the novel as a whole there is a barrage and assault of strange voices and their attendant incomprehensibility. Sometimes this is manifested in the device, which spans the two stories, of foreign languages: the miner Poles of "Wild Palms" are described as having "blind birdlike incomprehensible voices" as "they huddled, jabbering in that harsh incomprehensible tongue," sounds that have a residual effect on Harry's consciousness (162, 167). Even as he escapes into the solitude of the mine, "it still seemed to him that he could hear the voices, the blind birds, the echoes of that frenzied and incomprehensible human speech" (174). Similarly, the Cajuns of "Old Man" have a similar bewildering effect upon the tall convict: "'That's the way they talked,' the tall one said. 'Gobble-gobble, whang, caw-caw-to-to.'--and he sat there and watched them gobbling at one another" (201). In fact, there is only one lexicon that is now definitive and universal. Referring to the Cajuns, a fellow convict asks of the tall one: "'Halvers?... How could you make a business agreement with a man you couldn't even talk to?' 'I never had to talk to him,' the tall one said. 'Money aint got but one language'" (213).

The Esperanto of money aside, frenzy and incomprehensibility are omnipresent and not limited to foreign tongues. This is a world of involuntary "hearing but not listening" and even though ostensibly in English, it is the amplified voices that exacerbate this confusion (106): the loudspeaker, the radio, and, most strikingly, the "man with a megaphone," the last, as noted, appearing in both stories ("Wild Palms" 181; "Old Man" 199). His double placement only twenty pages apart would seem to ensure a dual recognition on the part of the reader and this synchronous appearance of this figure is a further glimpse of the counterpoint engineered between the two stories. In terms of the actual narratives, in "Old Man," this character is the captain of a riverboat full of refugees from a flood; within "Wild Palms" he is the emcee of a Depression era dance marathon. In both stories though "the man with a megaphone" is presented as a figure of hectoring authority within scenes of chaos and confusion. What is also important in these scenes is their centralizing of the disembodied, mechanically exaggerated voice as the signifier of that authority; now a voice needs to be amplified to be heard, to compete and command in this world in which "the air was filled by the bellowing megaphone" (181) and in which "the megaphone's bellowing and bodiless profanity" (200) has now come to dominate, a solitary, sonically assisted sound that will drown out the multitude of the mere "human voices" that surround it (199). (6)

The mechanism of the megaphone is particularly resonant with this discussion as what is paramount in the new cacophony of voices is amplification, especially now the electrically aided kind: as Harry drinks with the journalist McCord in a Chicago train station, "There was a loudspeaker in the bar too, synchronised too; at this moment a voice cavernous and sourceless roared deliberately, a sentence in which could be distinguished a word now and then" (114). Amplification is also of course the first stage of broadcasting and electric recording and this amplified sound is related to another kind of public address system, a contemporaneous barrage of verbal cacophony now fully infiltrated into the public consciousness through a then relatively recent development: the talking picture. Thomas Doherty has encapsulated the frantic verbal milieu engendered by the coming of both radio and talking pictures: For radio and screen wits, quick and dull alike, filling the dead air became the main objective and shooting off wisecracks the ammunition with the highest caliber. On radio, talk was the coin of the realm, cheaper than music, so the aural medium nourished the verbal shenanigans of solo monologists, comedy duos, and babbling ensembles. On screen, talkers worked in junior partnership with images as voice-over narration. Competing against what was before the eye, they had to speak up boldly to get attention. (174)

As Doherty implies, the early days of sound cinema sometimes seem an attempt to make up for the thirty years of silence that preceded it! Faulkner himself also seems to have had a conflicted relationship with sound film that went beyond his later battles with studio heads. Indeed, despite Faulkner later becoming a screenwriter, the early days of talkies with their attendant verbal overkill do not seem to have impressed the author much. Anthony Buttitta recounts a 1931 visit with him: "We went into a movie, at his suggestion. Bill listened five minutes and said, 'Let's go outside. Too much talking. I want to talk'" (15). (7)

Aware of the hypnotic and disorienting effect and power engendered by this multitude of electrically recorded and broadcast voices and sounds, in an extended passage of "Wild Palms" Faulkner centralizes a parade of these aural impositions. As Harry and McCord sit in the Chicago train station bar, Faulkner emphasizes the intrusiveness and hallucinatory effect of a nearby loudspeaker: as if the listener (so enormous was the voice) were suspended in space watching the globy earth spin slowly out of its cradling cloud-wisps in fragmentary glimpses the evocative strange divisions of the sphere, spinning them on into fog and cloud again before vision and comprehension could quite grasp them. (114)

Here not only are the imagery and perspective conspicuously reminiscent of another electrical sonic medium--the rotating globe in the RKO Radio Pictures film logo that opened their early sound films, but there follows a further address or acknowledgment of the other half of RKO's fusion of sound and vision--radio. Harry's following statement makes the global/broadcast relation more succinct: "We have radio in the place of God's voice" (115). This is a world in which "God's voice" or the overarching narrator or indeed any kind of unified and harmonious speaker is overthrown and banished. In the bipartite structure of the novel, one may find printed fiction's mirroring of someone trying to keep up with multiple serials at the cinema or switching the dials back and forth between two favorite radio shows broadcast simultaneously on competing networks, trying to follow the dual stories during the commercial breaks in each, while having to keep track of the overall flow of both. Indeed, the book as a whole can be seen as an attempt at a verbal replication of the contemporaneous aural media barrage, a constant cycling between two "programs already in progress." This is fitting as this novel can be seen as the apotheosis of Faulkner's decade-long experiment in multiple narrative voices; here the structure of having two quasi-independent stories fully rives the narrative voices, as opposed to merely partitioning them by section as the author had done in The Sound and the Fury a decade earlier. In Faulkner's choices of multiple voices for this novel, both the "Radio" and the "Pictures" proudly proclaimed in RKO's early talkies logo are now addressed: as the cinematic device of different point of view shots had already established, even within the silent era, the idea of multiple narrational perspectives in fiction as a new perceptual given, so too may the experience of the radio airwaves' raft of contrasting voices have served to instigate the tonal disparities within each "network" of Jerusalem as a whole. In a split screen, multistation world, one camera and one voice, especially a static one, is by the late 1930s no longer enough. As Julian Murphet has observed, during the high avant-garde era in the metropolis of modernism, according to Raymond Williams' first law of abstraction, the first casualty of the discourse network created by sustained immigration, and the resultant reflexive mediality of all the means of communication, is obviously the notion of any universal Tongue speaking transparently to all. (152)

In a related manner, echoing the structure of Jerusalem itself, there is correspondingly manifest in its narrative and narrators an unrelenting fragmented and mixed-up world, a fitting replication of the urbanized media milieu. III The decks were crowded and packed with men women and children sitting or standing beside and among a homely conglomeration of hurried furniture, who looked mournfully and silently down into the skiff while the convict and the man with a megaphone in the pilot house talked to each other in alternate puny shouts and roars above the chuffing of the reversed engines. --"Old Man" (199)

Amplification, echoes, incomprehensibility, distraction, disruption: these are the new realities of the early media age, and it is with these kinds of formal pressures from multiple new forms and technology that fiction was compelled to participate in the era of the full blown media assault. There may be found in the epigraph above a fittingly parallel depiction of two voices of unequal aural magnitude battling in competition for the same dumbstruck audience (while underneath them all, the noise of the machines drones on). Sound versus sound overtop sound; what was being eliminated by the culture of cacophony was any notion of pause or reflection, and likewise, in those then new voices of newsreels, narrative film, and radio that appeared in the same decade as Faulkner's book there is implicit the fear of "dead air." This created in turn in fiction a reaction to these forces, forces to which poetry would also respond (albeit in different ways). That the "air" must be filled is paramount; what could no longer be tolerated was silence, and the continuous rush of the "thinking" and the "thought" (to cite Faulkner's frequent if puzzling division between the two) displayed in Jerusalem's continual quality of "echo and re-echo" may be seen as part of Faulkner's testament to a media-mediated world. Central in this construction is the way in which, like the man with a megaphone, the book continually transforms and amplifies itself, confounding a sequential reading and offering a defensive disruption pattern and self-protective distancing from both readers and critics in the process.

This is why the contrapuntal structure of Jerusalem is so important within the larger context of the rapid rise of mass culture and its attendant assimilation of the avant-garde, the two-part structure here taking on the form of necessity, the compulsion toward disrupting conventional reading and narrative as a structural resonance of the thematic concerns of the novel as a whole: a book so despondent about a standardized world is here itself nonstandardized in its form. As an accompanying effect, the bipartite structure also provides an apt reflection of both an author and an epoch steeped in binaries. The point here is not only which binary is prevalent at what point in the book, but also that the decade in which Faulkner is writing his novel was by its close, by nature, involved in an incessant parade of them. This condition also reinforces an aesthetic reason for the novel's intensified strategy of deliberate alternation and disruption: it is another weapon in the growing battle between art and the rapidly increasing and codified industry structures that surround it, structures that were increasingly demanding simplicity and linearity, whether in film or in fiction. These increasing formal pressures from a media-based culture were another noise with which writers were having to contend in the early media age, in particular the attendant bellowing and baying of market forces that were more and more impinging on all manner of cultural production. The question was now as to where literature would fit into the new institutions and culture of the mass market, the new culture factories of both high and low. As Sherwood Anderson had opined a decade earlier, "The successful men of the arts talked of the market and little else. Writers even went into bookstores to see what kind of books were selling well in order to know what kind of books to write," an accusation that leads him to question, "Were the great publishing houses of the city and the magazines but factories and were the writers and picture makers who worked for them but factory hands now?" (367, 369). (8)

As these statements of Anderson indicate, a hostile reaction on the part of modernist writers to the pressures from mass culture was already endemic by the 1920s. As discussed above, this bitterness is indeed found throughout Jerusalem--as, for example, in the opening section of "Old Man" with its excoriation of the tall convict's reading practices that lead directly to his crime, but, on the other hand, the author's attitude within this novel toward high modernism and the avant-garde may not, by this point, be much more sympathetic, as all now seem encased within the mechanisms of the culture industry. A telling example of this converging of disdain is found in Harry's visit to a Bohemian party in New Orleans given by what appears to be a wealthy but slumming painter (31-36). It is here that Harry first directly encounters modern art, modern artists, and Charlotte (who is of course inextricably tied to both). Upon entering the party, Harry finds a house in which "the walls [were] completely covered with unframed paintings" (32). It is Harry's mediated exposure to the paintings, however, that Faulkner next emphasized: "He had seen photographs and reproductions of such in magazines before, at which he had looked completely without curiosity because it was completely without belief, as a yokel might look at a drawing of a dinosaur." But any hopes that Harry's direct physical engagement with the work may reverse the above mixture of stupefaction and doubt are quickly dashed, his personal proximity to the paintings only intensifying his initially dismissive reaction as "now the yokel was looking at the monster itself and Wilbourne stood before the paintings in complete absorption. It was not at what they portrayed, the method or the coloring; they meant nothing to him" (33). Here the shock of the new, already diluted by its media representations, is clearly fading further, both the works' content ("what they portrayed") and formal considerations ("the method or the coloring") quickly dismissed in the same sentence.

For Harry, as for many confronting these new artworks of the twentieth century, they ultimately "meant nothing to him." The related point is that, by the time of Harry's impromptu gallery going (1937), not only was the avant-garde already in the process of being reduced to simply another tent in the commercial carnival's freak show division (as perhaps befits the likes of what Harry has classified as "the monster itself"), but so too was this carnival becoming more comfortable with appropriating the methods of the avant-garde to further advance its agenda of entertainment, distraction, and diversion. In other words, although Pylon and Jerusalem may borrow heavily from mass culture as part of a peremptory avant-garde strategy to confront it, throughout the 1930s this relation of high and low is no longer a one-way process but rather an increasingly dynamic one. (9)

For Faulkner the answer as to what to strive for may relate to an attempt to further occupy that space still in between these two rapidly converging poles of high and low, to exacerbate this tension as a way to preserve an artistic autonomy from both. As Peter Lurie asserts, this author's "work throughout the thirties shows an inevitable and forceful link between the two modes of modern cultural life, high and low" (220). Lurie's assessment of Faulkner's bipartite practice may be extended to the larger aesthetic tension of this decade, as by the 1930s, artists were increasingly having to consider that to ignore the material or forms of mass culture or to simply make an occasional, dilettantish nod toward them were no longer sufficient strategies with which to confront this "monster"; instead, there was now evolving an accelerated and never-ending loop between high and low with which the writer, like the visual artist, must by nature, albeit often perilously, engage. As Lurie also suggests, this new dynamic may reach critical mass in this novel: "perhaps above all, [in] If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, Faulkner demonstrated his deeply conflicted sense of his position as a writer. Aware of the workings of the culture industry, [he] occup[ied] a position, grudgingly but pragmatically, both within those workings and outside them" (178-79).

If it is in this novel that Faulkner's contrapuntal career structure--traipsing back and forth between the fiction and his scriptwriting, a kind of traipsing reflected in the novel's two-part structure--is most in evidence (and perhaps in the process serving to exacerbate his conflict), it is also this kind of crossing over that affords him the ability to address in this book more holistically the state of the nation's high and low aesthetic and which, as will be suggested below, may also simultaneously serve to provide him with a way out of his conflict. (10) If Jerusalem can be seen in its totality as a series of constantly alternating currents between high and low culture--an alternation that creates a series of loops both within and between the two stories--this is because for Faulkner the question is no longer simply a matter of salon modernism versus mass culture. What is more perilous now is the increasingly sophisticated packaging and distribution of cultural material, the strangulation of the artistic impulse at the source of its engagement with the audience. This applies to high and low culture as both are increasingly subsumed within the industry structures--be they those of book publishers or of film studios--the "Hollywood which is no longer in Hollywood but is stippled by a billion feet of burning colored gas across the fact of the American earth" (JER 176)--that were increasingly constricting the culture of Faulkner's time. These structures are responsible for the vicious circle that is both the cause and effect of bad art, as in the description of Wilbourne's churning out of confession stories--this "moron's pap" (103) in the "moronic fable[s]" (104) created by a writer's "moron pandering" (107). The repetitive effect engendered by these phrases' proximity is another disturbing yet galvanizing sound in itself and a neat formal reiteration of both the growing desire for satiation through exploitative spectacle and the attendant attention deficit inherent in the mass audience this desire engenders, traits that may in turn be poisonously feeding back into the writer. The real horror in Jerusalem, that is, may lie not in Harry's manufacturing for money his "moronic fable[s]," but in his subsequent admission that he "had come to really like to write them, even apart from the money" (112). It is this kind of insidious, internalized erosion of aesthetic judgment concomitant in the vicious downward spiral of diminishing expectations between writer and audience that exemplifies the new dangers facing artistic production as a whole. For although there can perhaps still be art despite the market, it is the culture industry and the consumerist bent that it has wrought in both creator and reader that is so castigated in the novel, these institutional mechanisms and pressures that, for Faulkner, as for Anderson, are seen as causing a breakdown between the creation and reception of serious work, given an increasingly fragmented, volatile, and distracted audience and the market pressures to attempt to placate or conform to them.

The result of this dynamic is more and more a world of initially resounding but subsequently diminishing echoes, whether of "second hand invitations" (38), second hand art, or second hand love, all now codified and standardized like "one of those stereotyped birthday greetings which the telegraph company sends to any distance within the boundaries of the United States for twenty-five cents" (30). This double negative effect creates a vague, mediated world, one of style over substance, exemplified in the description of Charlotte's Christmas presents for the children she has left living with their father: Two days before Christmas when she entered the bar she carried a parcel. It contained Christmas gifts for her children.... They had no work bench now and no skylight. She unwrapped and rewrapped them on the bed ... she sitting on the edge of it surrounded by holly-stippled paper and the fatuous fragile red-and-green cord and gummed labels, the two gifts she had chosen reasonably costly but unremarkable, she looking at them with a sort of grim bemusement above the hands otherwise and at nearly every other human action unhesitating and swift. (106)

It is no mistake that in the description above the narrator, like Charlotte, spends much time on the wrapping and the packaging of the gifts, but despite their being "reasonably costly" the presents themselves are conspicuously and continuously ignored: in this nascent period of mass marketing, it is the wrapping, the packaging that determines the effect, whether of presents or of poets; as Charlotte pointedly remarks to Harry regarding the gifts, "Anything, any bauble will do. Presents don't mean anything to them until they get big enough to calculate what it probably cost" (106). It is fitting that this remark relates to one of the book's more singular motifs--the corruption of Christmas, an event referenced by name nine times in "Wild Palms" before being ultimately written off as simply "the apotheosis of the bourgeoisie" (110). Charlotte's statement is also an emblematic one in a story with a character such as Harry so obsessed with counting, numbers, and money. Here is the movement toward a culture that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, whether manifested in Christmas gifts or in literature; as Anderson had earlier warned and as Jerusalem makes clear, by the 1930s, the pulverizing forces of the mass market and the writer's relation to it are already leading toward the world of Chip Kidd cover designs, of big box bookstores and Frankfurt book fairs, of Amazon's "Meet the Authors" blog, and today's de rigueur writers' publicity tours. (11)

Even at the time of the novel's publication, however, the rising preeminence of presentation over present, of packaging over product, is manifest: as Charlotte's gifts will be judged--by both recipient and reader--by the wrapping, so too is the audience becoming more and more inclined toward judging the film by its trailer, the book by its cover, and the author by his or her public persona and speaking, men and women now with microphones and not megaphones flooding the airwaves as media-amplified celebrities by virtue of the already well-oiled publicity mechanisms of the Hollywood star system (at first newspapers and magazines, later newsreels and radio) that were quickly being extrapolated to the other "higher" art forms. (12)

Given the growing perception of writing as commercial commodity and writers as public property, it is not surprising that Jerusalem includes a satirical invocation of by then celebrity author Ernest Hemingway as found in the journalist McCord's drunken imperative: "Set, ye armourous sons, in a sea of hemingwaves" (82). Waves is an especially apt choice of pun in a book so rife with references to broadcasting through loudspeakers and radio. In this light, it is also fitting that the then nascent industry of literary tourism rears its head in the same section of "Wild Palms" as Harry complains of the sons of London brokers and Mid-land shoe-peg knights and South African senators come to look at Chicago because they had read Whitman and Masters and Sandburg in Oxford or Cambridge--members of that race ... without tact for exploration and armed with note books and cameras and sponge bags. (101)

This consumerist, touristic, and dilettantish dipping into the works of the past is presented as yet another horrific spectacle in a novel rife with them; despite Faulkner's avowal that Jerusalem is a story of "one of two types of love," this is most often a novel of seething hatred and scattershot unleashing of loathing as to the effects of the mass culture machine on literature. In this confluence of media, marketing, and celebrity necessitated by the culture industries, it was difficult for Faulkner to see where the art itself would fit in. A condition of continual imposition by disembodied sonic distractions--the "wirehum" (JER 7; P 824, 825, 826) and the subsequent "moron pandering" it engenders--has, by the 1930s, begun in earnest. While the man with the megaphone's voice may be amplified, it will be increasingly difficult to hear with all the other megaphones that surround it; high or low or in between, all are becoming part of the noise. IV They moved about the floor, bumped and shoved, and bumping and shoving, somnambulistic and sometimes in step, during each short phase of hysterical music. --"The Wild Palms" (181)

It is this ongoing sensory onslaught surrounding Jerusalem, however, that serves to reinforce the power of the novel's own cacophonous nature. Coming as it does at the end of what W. H. Auden called "a low dishonest decade" and arriving in the year of that most definitely envisioned metropolitan tomorrow (the corporate and commercially based cosmopolitan utopia of the New York World's Fair), it is perhaps tempting to see Jerusalem as both a sad farewell to the high modernist aesthetic and a defeatist admission as to the increasing futility of trying to extend the avant-garde epoch ("September 1, 1939" line 5). But ultimately the novel offers an answer to the decaying artistic conditions that it articulates by also articulating the beginnings of what will replace them, a then germinal aesthetic that is presciently encapsulated in Charlotte's bizarre sculptures--her cartoon composites and prototypical mash-ups with their haphazard cross between the commercial and the avant-garde such as "Mrs O'Leary with Nero's face and the cow with a ukelele, Kit Carson with legs like Nijinsky and no face" (74).

For it is the novel's similar incessant anachronic assemblage of artistic components both high and low, together with its ineluctable fragmentation of narrative and its attendant use of the loop effect (both within the two stories and within the novel as a whole) that suggests the novel is moving towards something new: perhaps a nascent postmodernism. A postmodernist approach will provide the additional means by which to continue the attack on those forces of the culture industry the author finds so stultifying and stupefying, as most of all it is Faulkner's proximity of engagement with these forces necessitated by his own two-storied, upstairs and downstairs writing practice--the fiction, the films, but also the interplay between them--that so relates to this emerging aesthetic. As Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik have suggested, there is in postmodernism often two conflicting forces: "a desire to declare one's contempt for the forms of mass society coupled with the fixed belief that nothing existed outside them" and a strategy or contradictory conflation that the authors note "found an oracle and a dogma in the works of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard" (392). In other words, by the time that postmodernism is finally formulated, it is fully apparent that for artists the only way to answer noise is with louder noise, to shout above the crowd if wanting to be heard, a concept condensed by the art world in that same decade to the palatable and commercially useful phrase "positive antagonism," i.e., the use of the forms of mass culture to further the critique of it. (13)

It is this strategy that provides one last, later cross-disciplinary parallel with Faulkner's novel: that of 1970s punk. In a presentation at the 2010 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference, I extemporaneously referred to the punk sensibility of some Faulkner, citing the loud, angry, and jarring nature of Jerusalem as an example. This was a deeply felt remark (although admittedly perhaps not a considered one at the time), for integral to this novel are three interrelated components that were also essential to the punk idiom. The first two of course are an acerbic and accusatory social critique couched in a confrontational and aggressive formal delivery. But there is a third less discussed aspect of punk which is also shared with the book: a simultaneous lamenting of the desiccation and diminution of its own medium (popular music and printed fiction respectively) and a visceral castigation of the industrial mechanisms surrounding the medium that were seen as responsible for this condition, ripostes that were often made within the confines of the form and industrial mechanisms that brought about these conditions in the first place. Two such musical diatribes are the Sex Pistols's "E.M.I" (about the titular record company's dropping of the band due to political and media pressure) and the Clash's "Complete Control" (about CBS's attempts to market the band against their wishes, which was then of course released on CBS).

What punk was particularly furious with was what it saw as the ossifying and atrophying of its own sacred form, the anthemic 45 RPM pop song single, and it is punk's dedication to preserving the integrity of the song against those seeking to corrupt it that may be especially relevant here. In If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem's biblically alluding title, there is not only a lament for a lost land, but also equally important, an affirmation of the need to protect the soul of the songs of that land. As Richard Godden has noted about the title's allusion, "Psalm 137 addresses those held in Babylonian captivity by masters who 'required of [them] a song ... one of the songs of Zion' (verse 3). They, however, protest their inability to 'sing the Lord's song in a strange land' (verse 4)" (194). Godden sees in the novel's title a concordance with the sense of geographical and artistic exile that Faulkner's 1930s Hollywood screenwriting practices entailed, as in the novel's title an "astute homonym forms, whereby Jerusalem liaises with Mississippi and Hollywood goes to Babylon" (194). But in addition to the self-referential aspect Godden identifies in Faulkner's title, in Psalm 137's focus both on the notion of exile and on the subsequent refusal by the captives to degrade their songs, there may be found a more universal resonance: that any capitulation to a captor-commanded performance shall constitute the forgetting, rather than the remembering, of one's own Jerusalem.

By the close of the 1930s, in the large-scale social and emotional diasporas engendered by the Great Depression, there was a multitude of contemporaneous Jerusalems from which one may be involuntarily exiled. Accordingly, whether Babylon was then to be found in Burbank or Biloxi, in Chicago or the bayou, the necessity of trying to preserve the integrity of one's culture and sense of self within a "strange land" of displacement and enslavement (the same situations literally represented by the enforced wanderings endured by Harry and the tall convict respectively) is so central to the novel one can fully understand the author's rage when "During copy-editing at the publishers, apparently, Faulkner's title was removed by editorial fiat and replaced by what had been the subtitle designating the main plot of the book" (McHaney xiii). The original title's replacement by the more generic and misrepresentative The Wild Palms provides an eerily post facto justification of the author's loathing toward the culture industry seen in his book, but it is the visceral power of this loathing that also infuses the novel with its ultimately positive and still antagonistic radiance. In contrast to "the megaphone's bellowing and bodiless profanity" found within its pages, rising out of Jerusalem as a whole is that most corporeal and human of sounds: a cri de coeur against the standardizing and corrupting forces of an increasingly mesmeric media culture emanating from the metropolis.

Emily Carr University

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Sherwood. A Story Teller's Story. 1924. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005.

Auden, W. H. "September 1, 1939." 1939. Poetry of the Thirties. Ed. Robin Skelton. London: Penguin, 2000. 280-82.

Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond. New Haven: Yale UP, 1978.

Buttitta, Anthony. "A Memoir of Faulkner in the Early Days of His Fame." Inge 15-17.

Cowley, Malcolm. The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944-1962. New York: Viking, 1966.

--. "Mississippi Flood: Editor's Note." The Portable Faulkner. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Viking, 1967. 479-80.

Doherty, Thomas. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934. New York: Columbia UP, 1999.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! 1936. The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

--. If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms]. 1939. The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage International, 1995.

--. Mythical Latin-American Kingdom Story. Faulkner's MGM Screenplays. Ed. Bruce F. Kawin. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1982. 449-543.

--. Pylon. 1935. William Faulkner: Novels 1930-1935. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1985. 775-992.

--. Sanctuary. 1931. The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage International, 1993.

Godden, Richard. Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South's Long Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Heymann, C. David. Ezra Pound: The Last Rower. New York: Viking, 1976.

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. New York: Pantheon, 1994.

Inge, M. Thomas, ed. Conversations with William Faulkner. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999.

Jewkes, W. T. "Counterpoint in Faulkner's The Wild Palms" Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 2.1 (1961): 39-53.

Jones, Anne Goodwyn. "A Loving Gentleman and the Corncob Man: Faulkner, Gender, Sexuality, and The Reivers." A Companion to William Faulkner. Ed. Richard C. Moreland. Malden: Blackwell, 2007. 46-64.

Lindsay, Vachel. The Progress and Poetry of the Movies: A Second Book of Film Criticism. 1925. Ed. Myron Lounsbury. London: Scarecrow, 1995.

Lurie, Peter. Vision's Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.

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

Murphet, Julian. Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-garde. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.

Pound, Ezra. "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley." 1920. Personce: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1971. 185-204.

Rascoe, Lavon. "An Interview with William Faulkner." Inge 66-72.

Rhode, Eric. A History of the Cinema from Its Origins to 1970. New York: Hill, 1976.

Ruthven, K. K. A Guide to Ezra Pound's Personae (1926). Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.

Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney. New York: Simon, 1968.

Singal, Daniel J. William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997.

Singer, Ben. "Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism." Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 72-99.

Turner, E. S. The Shocking History of Advertising. London: Penguin, 1965.

Varnedoe, Kirk, and Adam Gopnik. High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990.

Yeats, W. B. The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. New York: Collier, 1965.

--. "Long-legged Fly." Selected Poems and Four Plays of William Butler Yeats. Ed. M. L. Rosenthal. New York: Scribner's, 1996. 207-08.

(1) Pound eventually settles on two techniques as a way out of his representational dilemma: juxtaposition ("a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another") and extreme condensation: "I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it.... Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence" (qtd. in Ruthven 153). It can be added that the bipartite structure of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (which will be discussed in detail below) also manifests this idea of "one idea set on top of another" and, given the book's contrapuntal structure alternately beneath it as well, extends the process of juxtaposition to the next formal level.

(2) If consciously formulated aesthetic theories of juxtaposition were then circulating in the avant-garde, more financially oriented but equally contrapuntal formats were also emerging in mass culture. The first example would be the 78 RPM record that appeared in the late 1920s replacing the cylinder as a medium for recorded music. Although at this point the idea of an A and B side was not yet strictly codified, it was already common practice to put quite different sounding songs on the two sides of the disc in the hopes that one of the styles would lead to a hit. The second, and perhaps even more pertinent, development was the instigation in the mid-1930s of the double feature movie bill, which Richard Schickel notes "was introduced in these days as an additional method of luring the penny-wise, hour-foolish out of their homes (and away from that popular new appliance, the radio)" (134). The double feature format began to further codify an A and B relation, in this case the designated feature status of each movie, and the sequential showing of two films would naturally create some more unconscious but no less interesting juxtapositions in their alternating currents.

(3) Faulkner had a characteristic bipartite use of this potent form, as a fiction writer castigating it in both Pylon and Jerusalem, but as a screenwriter fully inclined to use this visually seductive and narratively effective format (which was already a Hollywood staple). His script for the unmade Mythical Latin-American Kingdom Story (1933) has Faulkner's blocking directions specify that the characters "walk through DOUBLE EXPOSURE of news paper headlines" which then "turn to personal column" before transforming back to headlines (MGM Screenplays 455).

(4) Faulkner's initial comments on the novel's alternating structure suggested the format was a deliberate strategy, telling an interviewer in 1939, "[I] wrote one story and thought it was good but not enough. So [I] wrote another and slipped the chapters of the two in between each other like shuffling a deck of cards, only not so haphazardly. I played them against each other.... Contrapuntally" (qtd. in Brooks 206). However, his later comments on this matter had their own contrapuntal quality, the author sometimes dismissing any inherent relation between the two stories as in a 1947 interview:

Q. What reason did you have for arranging the chapters of The Wild Palms [the novel] as you did?

A. It was merely a technical device to bring out the story I was telling, which was one of two types of love. I did send both stories to the publisher separately, and they were rejected because they were too short. So I alternated the chapters of them. (Roscoe 67)

Faulkner was somewhat more forthcoming or at least less dismissive of a later interviewer, telling the Paris Review in 1956, in what is now a standard reference in Faulkner criticism, "When I reached the end of what is now the first section of The Wild Palms ... I realized suddenly that something was missing, it needed emphasis, something to lift it like counterpoint in music. So I wrote on the 'Old Man' story until 'The Wild Palms' story rose back to pitch" (qtd. in Cowley, Portable Faulkner 480). Rather curiously, Malcolm Cowley includes the comment cited above in his brief preface to a section of the revised (1966) The Portable Faulkner--curious because this canonical volume includes only the "Old Man" portions of the novel; immediately after quoting the author's remarks regarding the interplay of the two parts, Cowley sets forth his rationale for the selection: "The second story, however, is more effective than the first, and I think that it gains by standing alone, as in the present volume," manifesting his editorial belief that the stories are "completely separate" (480). It is somehow deliciously fitting that the "Wild Palms" sections--which, as will be discussed below, deal so tellingly with the effect of the culture industry on artists and writers--are in effect themselves bowdlerized from The Portable Faulkner, the volume that served to reestablish and resuscitate Faulkner's pre-Nobel Prize reputation.

(5) Witness the strange occasional intrusion of the second person voice--at the time of the story's writing already a staple of radio advertising and drama and newsreel voiceover forms--into the narrative consciousness of "Wild Palms," interjections that also uncannily presage what will be a foundational aspect of film noir voiceovers in the 1940s and beyond. For example, this subspeaker slips out of Harry's consciousness as a note from Charlotte is described as looking as if written in "a big sprawling untrained hand such as you associate at first glance with a man until you realize an instant later it is profoundly feminine" and later, describing bachelor food that "some can actually produce though, you would have said at first glance, nor McCord" (69, 88; emphasis mine). Within the text these kinds of statements are neither enclosed in quotation marks as dialogue nor encased in italics (as Harry's thoughts usually are). This kind of external direct address of course breaks the fourth wall inherent in the limited omniscient form to instead directly address the reader in an informal almost cloying manner, replicating this standardized ploy for audience identification then so prevalent on radio dramas and in advertising or newsreel voiceovers.

(6) These qualities of "bellowing" and "bodiless" would also be a logical outgrowth of the surrounding aural culture. The din of disembodied amplification is not restricted to voices, however; in the modernist concern with the noisy, mechanized modern world, the convergence of machinery and music is seen as particularly appalling; cf. Pound's lament in 1920 as to how "The pianola 'replaces'/Sappho's barbitos" ("Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" lines 35-36). This idea of music also becoming part of the noise, particularly when from mechanical or recorded sources as opposed to live and natural sounds, is a motif that also occurs consistently in Faulkner's work, even in the earlier novels. For example, musical references and commentaries thereon abound in Sanctuary (1929), especially with regard to recorded or mechanically replicated music increasingly becoming, due to the radio and phonograph, an incessant and intrusive everyday soundtrack. In the novel, a sharp distinction seems to be drawn between music from sources such as "competitive radios and phonographs in the doors of drug- and music-stores" (112), "a mechanical piano" (158), and "a remote blaring of victrola or radio music"--music described by Benbow's consciousness as "Obscene, facile"(202)--and those from direct human sources such as the gospel songs and the "spirituals" sung live by the Greek like chorus in front of the jail (115). Vocal amplification itself will be vilified in Pylon with regard to the airport loudspeaker that pops up throughout the book and through which "the amplified voice still spoke, profound and effortless, as though it were the voice of the steel-and-chromium mausoleum itself," another motif of Jerusalem that is presaged in this earlier novel (793). One other equally ominous aural presence that is introduced in Pylon to reappear in the later book is that of "wirehum" (P 824, 825, 826; JER 7), a term apparently invented by Faulkner and one describing a monotonous, electronically generated drone capable of inducing an involuntary hypnotic reverie in its listener: as a result of an intermittent telephone line on which the voice is replaced by a buzzing, the editor in Pylon falls into transfixion as "he too heard only dead wirehum, as if the other end of it extended beyond atmosphere, into cold space; as though he listened now to the profound sound of infinity, of void itself filled with the cold unceasing murmur of aeonwary and unflagging stars" (825). In Jerusalem, a similar effect of disorientation and displacement is engendered by the distorted loudspeaker at the bar in which Harry and McCord meet (as will be discussed below).

(7) Yes, too much talking: by the 1930s, there were, besides the diegetic voices of film, other distinctly new voices already well formed, chattering and competing: the newsreel narrator, the film voiceover, and, in this era of rapidly evolving radio vocal styles, not only that of the announcer, but also those already highly stylized narrative voices of radio dramas and advertising. These voices can be seen as encapsulated in the increasingly ubiquitous master of ceremonies, whether on air--the live hotel ballroom big band broadcasts --or in person at a dance marathon or a prize fight. The central pronouncing figure of this period is indeed like "the man with a megaphone," one well disposed to using the new bully pulpit in his bellowing.

(8) Anderson's lament can be seen as a writer's early visceral reaction to the feeling of being little more than a "factory hand" in the standardized and standardizing cultural plants that were then forming. A short time later Clement Greenberg in the 1930s would more theoretically codify "The Plight of Culture" and Adorno/Horkheimer in the following decade would further articulate the mechanisms of the forces responsible for this plight in their essay, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." It should be added here, however, that what these self-professed "serious" writers like Anderson or guardian critics of the temple such as Adorno and Horkheimer did not see in their rather imperious indictments of mass culture as a whole is that its forms--films, magazines, radio, and later cartoons, newsreels, comic strips, and comic books--which they saw as driving the process of standardization would also provide the means by which to address it, both within the new forms themselves and in the stylistic and formal devices they would lend to high culture. Although it can be suggested that a more balanced approach to this question comes only with the benefit of hindsight, it is worth referring to Gilbert Seldes's 1920s celebration of Krazy Kat or Sergei Eisenstein's 1940s treatise on Walt Disney for the contemporaneous countervailing view contained in their more sympathetic and ultimately more accurate assessment of the social and artistic potential of mass culture.

(9) One example of this cross pollination can be found in Eric Hobsbawm's discussion of the interplay between the photography and the newsreels/photojournalism of this same decade: In the hands of the avant-garde Left "documentary film" became a self-conscious movement, but in the 1930s even the hard-headed professionals of the news and magazine business claimed a higher intellectual and creative status by upgrading some movie newsreels, usually undemanding space fillers, into the more grandiose 'March of Time' documentaries, and borrowing the technical innovations of the avant-garde photographers as pioneered in the communist AIZ of the 1920s to create a golden age of the picture magazine: Life in the USA, Picture Post in Britain, Vu in France. (192)

This process of course invigorated the forms doing the "borrowing" but had a less salubrious effect on those doing the lending: with the works of the avant-garde now being integrated into mass culture or mass culture simply co-opting or absconding at will with the formal inventions of the avant-garde--where to next? The path was far from clear. For as early as the 1920s, a growing sense of futility was permeating the ethos of modernist art-making, both the commercial and the avant-garde quickly becoming seen as equal, if not yet fully concomitant, dead ends. In a 1924 plaint, Sherwood Anderson provides but one example of this double-sided despair: "story-tellers striving wearily to 'make' the Saturday Evening Post or to be revolutionists in the arts. Artists everywhere striving for what?" (187). Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920) of course exhibits a similar sense of frustration with regard to this sense of being shot by both sides.

(10) One may consider that across the book's two stories Faulkner seems to oscillate between the two modes or genres of high and low and that, correspondingly, critics have offered differing views as to which of the stories may constitute the high mode and which one the low (as evidenced by the multiple and sometimes contradictory readings of this particular dynamic found in Faulkner criticism). Perhaps the parallel point engendered by the totality of these alternating categorizations is that this oscillation in Jerusalem is in itself so difficult to pin down that its ultimate effect is simply to engender a further confusion or convergence between these two modes, no matter which of the book's stories may be considered to relate to which mode in any particular reading.

(11) This growing conflation of the writer and the writing entailed by the movement toward the author as public figure and celebrity was a condition that would clearly come to trouble Faulkner--presenting him with another unwelcome noise from the media machine. Having experienced his own early brush with notoriety--Anne Goodwyn Jones cites "the public nickname that came to identify Faulkner after the publication of his shocking 1931 novel Sanctuary: the 'corncob man'"--the creeping confluence of artist, art, and audience does seem to have become increasingly onerous to Faulkner, especially with regard to its predilection toward the exposure of a writer's life or the desire for supplementary documentation of their work (46). As Malcolm Cowley has noted, "Among the writers of his time, Faulkner was altogether exceptional in the value that he placed on his privacy" (Faulkner-Cowley File 71).

(12) What magazines, newsreels, and radio were setting in motion in terms of the convergence between private author and public persona (a convergence fully engendered by the growing public thirst for celebrity), television would of course consolidate, the example of Robert Frost's 1957 appearance on Meet the Press providing a case study of the further fusion of writer and celebrity.

(13) There is a similar double edge to Jerusalem, i.e., an acknowledgement of the suffocating impulses attendant to the sublimation of literature by mass culture, but also a simultaneous interpolation by Faulkner of these mass culture forms within what may have been by then but another mass market medium (and as the University of Mississippi Writers Page on Faulkner notes, this did turn out to be his best-selling novel of the decade, supplanting the previous champion Sanctuary). In other words, in the case of Jerusalem a process of "positive antagonism" can be seen at work in its recovery of the literary through its assimilation, integration, and inversion of mass culture tropes and forms as a means by which to re-establish the potency of printed fiction within a growing culture of cacophony.