Things to Keep in Mind While Reading Modernist Novels (especially Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!)
	Modernist novels have a different relation to knowledge than the more familiar and accessible experiences found in realist novels. In most novels, you read to find out what happens, and to participate in constructing a common edifice of meaning. You typically have a protagonist you identify with, settings that are accessible, and an authoritative narrator who helps you distinguish truth from illusion and misconception. In a full-fledged modernist novel, your task as a reader is to discover an uncommon edifice of meaning of your own construction. Or, more accurately, to reconstruct a narrative from the many possibilities that the text puts forward. This is a process that makes extraordinary demands on your attention as a reader, and requires that you attend carefully to the author's technique. "Repercussive" is an adjective that occurs again and again in this text. For Faulkner, the repercussive is more central than the original blow. What counts is not cause, but effect. Not action, but perception and memory. Not truth, but narrative. Faulkner's form highlights the logic of subtraction, simplification, and omission on which most narrative depend. Most narratives subtract multiple viewpoints, simplify motives, or omit contradictory information. Faulkner's by contrast, draws attention to narrative gaps, multiples perspectives, and complicates, rather than refines, the narrative structures that we often use to make sense of our lives. The way Faulkner repeats and repeats psychological motifs ground by a traumatic incident or fixed ideas makes his characters not so much two-dimensional as obsessive. This is why he's a modernist instead of a post-modernist: he believes in deep structures. Some representations, if not transcendent, have much more weight than others. If they are not determinative, they are at least definitive.