Major Achievement I

Abstract

Accounts of modernism often turn around a series of contradictory propositions. It has been described as a celebration of the unorthodox and as corrupt, canonized orthodoxy, an exploration of epistemological loss and the source of a new kind of knowledge, an illustration of how things fall apart and of how they fall together, the anatomizing of the destruction of the simple subject and the triumphant reassertion of that subject’s position in an indifferent or hostile world, a movement that reveals the bankruptcy of metanarratives and one that legitimizes their stultifying homogeneity, the precursor of postmodernism and something that simply subsumes it, a major aesthetic breakthrough and a decadent amusement for the leisure class, a word that designates the solitary work of some very different, very gifted creative artists and one that describes a communal enterprise in which a great deal of creative effort is turned over to the reader/spectator, and so on. Still, the idea that modernism represents something new in a new way retains its force, and its preoccupation with consciousness and introspection, openness and ambiguity, limited or multiple points of view, and complex temporal sequences are all rightfully emphasized as crucial for an understanding of it.¹ These are the sorts of issues raised by Faulkner’s best-known novels, the ones he published between 1929 and 1942.