If the philosophical movement of postmodernism was, in its beginnings, apparently strictly directed against every kind of normative theory, then this initial reticence has since given way to a dramatically changed attitude. Writers like Derrida and Lyotard, at first primarily concerned with a radical perpetuation of the critique of reason, turn today to questions of ethics and justice to such a degree that commentators are already speaking of an ethical turn. The field of moral theory, which until recently had constituted for all representatives of poststructuralism a particularly salient example of modernity's compulsive universalism, has now become the true medium for the further development of postmodern theories. The change of attitude accompanying such a reorientation can be understood in part as a reaction to a critique that had been harbored for some time among philosophers and political theorists.

One version of the project of radical democracy, which has roots in Rousseau and Marx, has been expressed in the vision of a rational self-organization of society or a “rational collective identity.” Jürgen Habermas has aligned himself with this version in the past and, with some important qualifications, he continues to do so in his new book, Faktizität und Geltung. Two departures from his earlier position, however, particularly stand out: First, Habermas takes great pains to distance himself from the holistic or totalistic conception that often accompanies this version of democracy and in which society is regarded as a kind of macrosubject integrated via a central agency (the state) or organizing principle (labor). Second, the new book assigns to law and the legal community generally a more positive and prominent role in the legitimation process. The first shift results from Habermas's long engagement with Niklas Luhmann's systems theory; the second reflects an increased appreciation for Talcott Parson's identification of the “societal community” (and particularly law) as the primary institutional complex responsible for social integration in highly differentiated and pluralist societies. Consequently, it is no longer society as a whole - not even all governmental bodies - but rather the “association of free and equal consociates under law (Rechtsgenossen)” that becomes simultaneously the primary subject and object - source and target - of democratization. Radical democracy, in short, must practice an art of “intelligent self-restraint” that acknowledges the systemic divisions of modern and highly complex societies by realigning itself in a more creative manner with the liberal Rechtsstaat.

“Sometimes I think if I do one more treatment or screenplay” Faulkner complained in 1944, after a decade of intermittent screenwriting in Hollywood, “I lose whatever power I have as a writer” (Wilde 309). The myth of the artist corrupted by newly dominant commercial media like the movies and magazines has become the modern counterpart to the nineteenth century’s myth of the serious writer condemned to popular neglect (H. N. Smith 3-15). Rather than Hawthorne’s fury at the “damned mob of scribbling women” or Melville’s lapse into obscurity and eventual silence, the 1920s and 1930s produced legends about Faulkner and Fitzgerald squandering years hack writing in California’s Babylon.

Two reflections on the new market conditions for writing after World War I - one imaginative, the other theoretical - may help us understand what the mass media were to mean to Faulkner’s generation. In their 1991 film Barton Fink, Joel and Ethan Coen illustrate the destructive effect of Hollywood on the serious writers who sought to make fortunes there while preserving their artistic integrity. Barton Fink, launched by the triumph of his first Broadway play in 1941, agrees hesitantly to his agent’s offer of a lucrative screen writing contract with "Capital Pictures/7 A week of writer’s block on his first assignment drives Fink to consult another writer, who chances to be a famous Southern novelist - America’s greatest living novelist, according to Fink’s startled salutation of Bill Mayhew in the studio men’s room.

Faulkner’s “modernism” has often been the subject of spirited discussion about the author’s intrusion on, or complicity with, the monumental literature of the twentieth century. To think of Faulkner within the terms of “postmodernism,” then, necessarily involves an attempt to define the relation of modernism to postmodernism. This relation can only be seen coming in the wake of Faulkner’s fiction, as a kind of critical aftermath that allows us to see it as differentiated from the contexts in which it was written and by which it is constrained. In essence, discussing Faulkner in postmodernist terms means accepting the assumption that what makes his fiction powerful and timely is its capacity to resist, disrupt, or exceed both Modernism (with a capital “M”) and Faulkner’s own modernism - his intended response to the perceived literary, cultural, and historical contexts of his writing. Within the discussion of Faulkner and postmodernism, Faulkner stands not as the "author" or progenitor of texts but, to employ the famous metaphor articulated by Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!, as the unseen drop that falls into a pool of water, giving rise to a series of ripples that move outward to another connected pool: "let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space" (210).

What do we do and why when we think Faulkner? This is the personal (but never just personal) question I asked all of the contributors to ponder as they thought about their essays for this Companion. In responding to it, they have aligned their work, roughly, within one of two groups: “the texts in the world” or “the world in the texts.” The five essays that make up Part I explicitly press beyond the art of Faulkner’s texts in order to comment on the larger “world” those texts inhabit, envisaged here as contextual social activities and processes within which Faulkner’s practice may reveal its broader cultural dimensions. These essays sketch out a range of contexts - modernism, postmodernism, the “culture industry,” a canon of twentieth-century European novelists, the noncanonical practice of Latin American fiction of the same period - that permit us to consider Faulkner’s comparative identity. To put the matter differently, these first essays identify several of the current “theaters” in which Faulkner’s texts are most interestingly performed.

The three essays that constitute Part II operate otherwise, probing more deeply into the textual behavior of three of Faulkner’s canonical masterpieces -The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! These essays attend in detail to a discrete text’s formal moves, but they go beyond New Critical procedures in their insistent focus on "the world in the texts," especially the larger social problematics of race, gender, and subject formation. A fourth Faulknerian text - Go Down, Moses - receives sustained attention as well, in the essays of Patrick O'Donnell and Warwick Wadlington.

From Cleanth Brooks, the champion of the New Criticism, to the present New Historians, Faulkner’s Southernness has been a permanent and central concern of American criticism. Much has been written too about Joyce’s Irishness, but today it is certainly no longer a priority for Joyceans, and to dwell at length on Proust’s Frenchness would strike most Proustians as utterly incongruous. Admittedly, Faulkner’s fiction is more patently grounded in a specific geographic area and a specific historical experience than that of any of his contemporaries, yet some thought should perhaps be given to the troubling fact that, year after year, his novels are read with excitement by thousands of people all over the world, most of whom will never know another South than his - a world within words.

Faulkner was American and Southern, through and through; his literary ancestry can easily be traced back to Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Sherwood Anderson; his indebtedness to the popular traditions of Southern oratory and Southwestern humor has been established beyond dispute. Like all major American novelists, however, Faulkner is nonetheless a novelist of European descent. His many fathers include Cervantes, Scott, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Conrad, Mann, Joyce, and Proust, to mention only the novelists. Faulkner’s intertext is just as thick as that of any of his peers, and just as heedless of national and regional boundaries

Much has been written about Faulkner’s attitudes toward class and race and about his representations of these issues as the fundamental structures of his most successful fictions. Myra Jehlen, notably, argues for the determining role of the category of class in novels such as Saitohs, The Unvanquished, and especially The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!. Although she does not ignore the centrality of race, Jehlen claims that the reigning problematic in Faulkner’s account of Southern antebellum history is the internal class conflict between two sectors of white agrarian society - the lordly, cavalier plantation class versus the Jeffersonian, homesteading, working-class peasantry. In a deconstructive analysis of Absalom, Absalom! that raises questions of race and class in a related but divergent register, Richard C. Moreland shows how the various narrative strategies of Faulkner’s novel are intended to avert the recognition of this struggle between classes and to disregard the insistent presence of other narratives that underscore the additional pressures of race and gender in Sutpen’s story.

As a classic instance of this paradigmatic structure of revelation and aversion in Faulkner’s major works, Absalom, Absalom! reflects the ideologies of the historical era in which it was composed, the mid-Depression years of early-twentieth-century America. These ideologies underlie Faulkner’s connection with the issues of coloniality and postcoloniality that began to appear in much American, Latin American, and European literature of the immediate pre-World War II years.

As I write, we approach the hundredth anniversary of William Faulkner’s birth, and the turn of a century and a millennium. Considering the advances and promise of this past century, we may look forward to beginning a new era. Seeking lessons from this century’s failures, we may meditate on a period that has been, despite all its real advances, murderous on a scale beyond precedent and perhaps beyond comprehension. This century has witnessed, and continues to witness, the violent destruction of unnumbered millions of people and a ravaging of the earth we're only now beginning to reckon. At this point in a hundred years of awesome accomplishment and promise coupled with sickening destruction, it seems appropriate to ask some questions here about reading a famous literary record of this time.

What’s at stake in reading Faulkner? To whom does it matter? Why does it matter?

Or, why ask why? These questions may seem to be unnecessary or to answer themselves. On the one hand, it is well known that Faukner matters, and has mattered, to many readers. The preceding esssays in this volume testify to, even as they critically examine, Faulkner’s importance for an international reading public.

Nothing in William Faulkner’s large body of writings has received more critical attention than his fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury, which marks the conclusion of the author’s apprenticeship and the beginning of the so-called major period of his literary career. The novel’s stunning technical innovations partially account for this attention, particularly because the difficulty of reading and understanding this text is somehow compatible with being moved by it. Although a solid portion of the critical commentary has been devoted to explications of the experimental form of the novel, the real mystery of the text (and, I think, the reason we return to it again and again) resides in its power to move us. This power is characteristic of the writings Faulkner produced from the end of the 1920s to the early 1940s, that is, from The Sound and The Fury (1929) to Go Down, Moses (1942), writings in which Faulkner grappled with forces of major psychic and social significance.

As the commencement of this trajectory, The Sound and the Fury occupies an ambiguous place, and recent critics have accused it of being too private, too mired in the psychic realm, and too inarticulate about social forces that are more clearly revealed in his later works (cf. Sundquist 1983, Morris). John Matthews, however, has argued that the novel’s cautious articulation of these social forces reflects the "rhetoric of containment" that dominated modernist aesthetics and the New/Jim Crow South (Matthews 1987). Like Matthews, I shall argue here that the novel both flees the material and ideological conditions of its production and seeks to disclose them.

Since the 1970s, feminist literary critics have both expanded the American canon and called into question the masculinist values on which it is based. Expansion has led to the incorporation of many previously neglected female writers, from Stowe and Jacobs in the nineteenth century to Cather and Hurston in the twentieth. Meanwhile, the work of Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Jane Tompkins, among others, has served to reveal the (sometimes obsessive) misogyny at work in canonical male texts, as well as the masculinist bias of the canon makers themselves. Yet it has more recently become clear that a feminist criticism limited to rescuing important female writers and demystifying important male ones - what Elaine Showalter long ago called gynocriticism and feminist critique, respectively - cannot adequately address the questions raised by the work of certain already canonical American writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Faulkner. Their work presents an engagement with gender that is far too complex to be treated as merely symptomatic of the American canon’s masculinist bias. Just as Stein and Dickinson, arguably the only female writers with full canonical status in the United States before the feminist revision, have received reinvigorated critical attention from feminist critics who regard gender itself as a cultural construction, one that is - in the words of Frann Michel - "socially and historically variable/' as well as "internally contradictory" (5), a similar understanding of gender makes the work of even a Hawthorne, that infamous protester against a "damned mob of scribbling women," the site of renewed feminist analysis for critics such as Joel Pfister and Lauren Berlant.

In The Sound and the Fury, Quentin, reminding himself that while in the East he must “remember to think of [blacks[ as colored people not niggers” goes on to assert that a black person is “a form of behavior, a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among” (86). Although Quentin’s reflections have obviously been conditioned by his Southern background and are hardly intended to serve as any sort of universally applicable commentary both his concern with the language of racial designation and his judgment that race is a conceptual and behavioral issue as much as (or rather more than) a biological one are salient. Moreover, they thematically anticipate Faulkner’s most profound meditation on the topic, Light in August. It is striking - and may seem paradoxical - that the Faulkner novel most centrally concerned with an issue that suffused so much of his corpus contains not a single significant character who is identifiably African-American, but that absence only emphasizes the text’s predominant concern with race as a linguistic and social construct rather than a biological given, its focus more on the concept of race than on actual race relations. In the course of the novel, Faulkner not only provides a provocative consideration of the issues surrounding racial notions in the American South in the early part of the twentieth century - indeed, in Western culture generally, if one takes into account the novel’s connection with important theoretical and historical writings about race - but, while investigating the operations of the concept of blackness, he also manages to explore the role of language in the construction of subjectivity.

When I think Faulkner, I'm usually reading, writing, or teaching (and learning) about his work, or performing some combination of these three activities, and perhaps it is these activities that suggest the three things I think of Faulkner’s work as doing and enabling others to do, the things I think literature and other cultural work can do at its best. First, his work reflects or represents certain realities (as in much reading, especially of “readerly” texts). It never does so directly, but it often does urge readers' attentions on past a relatively transparent medium toward the apparently solid message, past questions of how we are seeing toward questions of what we are seeing, in ways that tend to reinforce or articulate (or rearticulate) what seems natural, what seems like common sense. However, Faulkner’s work, at other places and times in it, or in the reading, writing about, or teaching of it, also pointedly criticizes those same realities it represents, calling readers' attention back from what they see to how they see it, to the '"nature" of reality and to ''common sense" as constructions and questions for discussion (as in much writing, especially of "writerly" texts). And in still other ways, Faulkner’s work participates in the ongoing social construction of those realities insofar as readers, writers, teachers, and students more or less consciously respond to such questions of nature and common sense as important cultural works in progress, an ongoing process of social negotiation and change (as in much teaching and learning, for example).

As a dramatic performance, the character “T. S. Eliot” had one of the century's most successful runs. Formidably stylish, like Edith Evans's Lady Bracknell, it was exotic yet lifelike, as critics said when Olivier played Othello, and should have been extensively recorded on film. The grave voice and firm though melancholy gestures, head inclined a little to the side, were expert renditions of presence. Even the costume was capable of taking on small character-parts: as witness the heavily lapelled overcoat, the reliable shoes and umbrella, the wardrobe of identical three-piece suits ( “Nothing ever quite to excess,” his tailor is reported as saying). The Eliot costume, moreover, was animated by a range of interested parties, some of whom contributed anonymously to journals like the Times Literary Supplement, while others published poems in their own name with Faber and Faber, or signed letters under this or that nom de plume. Eliot the ventriloquist has been admired by plenty of commentators now, just as he himself admired artists able to carry off the difficult trick of vanishing into their own performance. Whether it was Nellie Wallace and Little Tich in the music-hall, offering “an inconceivable orgy of parody of the human race” (The Criterion 1.2: 193), or the Diaghilev Ballet's leading dancers (“Massine, the most completely unhuman, impersonal, abstract, belongs to the future stage,” he wrote in 1932: ibid., 1.4: 305), what he seems to have valued particularly is theater's power of removing both spectator and performer out of ordinary life.

In the course of a late lecture, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” Eliot recommended that readers of a poem should endeavor to grasp what the poem is aiming to be. Tentatively drawing on the language of philosophy, he suggested they should try to grasp its “entelechy” (PP [London], p. 110), a word which in Aristotle emphasizes purpose in contradistinction to cause. Eliot's recommendation offers a useful way to understand the relation of his early poems to those that follow, in terms of the end he thought they shared, and this end can be elucidated by means of a comparison with W. B. Yeats.

Take, for example, the well-known lines which close Yeats's “Among School Children,” describing the image of the chestnut tree and the impossibility of knowing the dancer from the dance. What equivalent ecstatic moment is there in Eliot to set alongside these lines, when all is felt as unity? The images of the Chinese jar in its stillness in Burnt Norton and of the ceremonious dancers in East Coker come immediately to mind, but there are a dozen possibilities to choose from, across the whole span of Eliot's career, from Four Quartets back to The Waste Land and “Gerontion” and before. It is difficult to settle on any one of them, and the difficulty is indeed the first fact to emerge from the comparison.

There are also many similar passages in Yeats which extend the meaning of what he wrote in “Among School Children.” For example, “Upon a Dying Lady” associates the dancing-place with a heavenly afterlife, the fourth stanza of “Byzantium” equates the dance with trance, and so on. But in Eliot the case is significantly different. Each of the possibilities is partial, haunting, suggestive. Altogether, they send the reader turning backward and forward, from one to another, and that is their nature; each set of lines needs another to complete its meaning, not just to add another dimension to a meaning which is already complete.