Faulkner’s The Wild Palms

With The Wild Palms (1939), William Faulkner critiques commercial literature through the treatment of pulp-fiction themes with high modernist literary style. Through experimental prose, metafictional uses of pulp literature, and complex, non-traditional representations of gender, Faulkner complicates the experience of suspense traditionally associated with the sex, crime and violence featured in the novel. On the part of Faulkner’s various publishers and his translator, famous writer and critic Jorge Luis Borges, there has been a concerted effort to reformulate and repackage The Wild Palms as a thriller. Las palmeras salvajes (1940) diverges from the English in manners suggesting a conscious attempt to reconstruct suspense in both the prose and the storyline –most strikingly through the exchange of fictional dialogue between the novel’s female and male protagonists