Word: convicted
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Moral. Had Faulkner been content to let The Wild Palms rest with the convict's story, the book might have become a classic of involuntary adventure. It is a pulsing, racing story, a kind of hysterical Huckleberry Finn, its humor at once grotesque and shrewd, its moral at once grim and humane. The convict, with his thoughtless courage, his exasperation at the titanic forces unleashed against him, is Faulkner's most original and attractive character. And the whole book is conceived in the grand manner. Faulkner makes you feel the terrible fragility of man's levees, boats...
...convict, woman and baby are rescued, get mixed up with Chinese muskrat hunters from the Louisiana swamps, are turned loose, drift to the house of a kind-hearted French-speaking Cajun alligator hunter, somewhere near the Gulf. When the convict sees his first alligator, and understands that it is to be killed, he thinks, "Well, maybe a mule standing in a lot looks big to a man that never walked up to one with a halter before." With that he jumps overboard, catches the alligator around the neck, stabs it. The convict becomes a local hero...
That chapter closes when engineers blow up the levee to save New Orleans, and the convict, the woman and the baby have to move on again. Six weeks from the time he had been washed away, the convict gets back to the place where his journey began. "Yonder's your boat, and here's the woman," he tells the deputy sheriff. "But I never did find that bastard on the cotton house." The deputy and the warden repeating "Them convicts," slap another ten years on his sentence for trying to escape...
When Faulkner finished the convict's story, however, he felt that it was incomplete. He therefore wrote another novel and inserted the chapters between chapters of the convict's tale. This second novel tells of a young New Orleans doctor who runs off with another man's wife. When she becomes pregnant he performs an abortion, as a result of which she dies and he is jailed for life...
This story reverses that of the convict-the doctor, too, is trying to erect barriers against nature-and the sick, squalid, miserable sequence of events he goes through contrasts with the nightmarish but still exhilarating adventures of the convict. It does not come off: the doctor and his mistress are not credible characters, the prose is turgid and confusing. But not even careless writing can weaken the cumulative effect of Faulkner's imaginative fertility, the boldness and originality of his themes...