'Fluid Currency': Money and Art in Faulkner's If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

• Published in: Modernism/modernity (Baltimore, Md.) Vol. 20; no. 4; pp. 729 - 746
• Main Author: Golden, Mason
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.11.2013
• Subjects: Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903-1969); Aiken, Conrad (1889-1973); American literature; Bible; Currency; Faulkner, William (1897-1962); Hands; Novels; Writers; Writing; Jerusalem Israel; Israel
• ISSN: 1071-6068; 1080-6601; 1080-6601
• DOI: 10.1353/mod.2013.0111

Faulkner's intended title, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, taken from the lament in Psalm 137 of the King James Bible, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cun- ning," although it is hardly explanatory, may nonetheless have cued early readers to the significant interrelatedness of the two narratives.2 But whereas the editors at Random House had rea- 730 son to suspect that the high-minded Biblical allusion might turn some readers away, anything wild was likely to grab attention and perhaps generate sales. From the time of his major breakthrough with The Sound and the Fury in 1929 until the publication of The Wild Palms ten years later, William Faulkner seems to have sought something of a double life as a writer, driven on one hand by the market- oriented writing of short stories and screenplays and on the other hand by what John T. Matthew's refers to as the "private economy" that governed the writing of novels like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying (1931).5 Faulkner's partitioning of his more experimental, modernist work-that by which he believed he "would stand or fall" as a writer6-and the writing he produced for market in order to support himself may explain in part his overwhelming productivity between 1929 and 1939.7 But it also speaks of Faulkner's investment in a particular kind of status.