Four years after the publication of the first edition of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Wallace Stevens described a modern aesthetic form that necessarily worked against its own status as a (fixed) form1. “What will be [temporarily] sufficient” in “Modern Poetry” would replace, as the object of the mind, what is – or, perhaps more faithfully to the modernist vision, what was. The poetry of the movement of the mind in time would replace the poetry of permanent meaning. The fundamental difference between present and past, the breakdown of static forms and the necessity of temporal flow inform Stevens' aesthetics, which works towards a dynamic experience. over time, as a substitute for time-independent communication of truth. I think that understanding this (self-subversive) form has some important and complicated implications for reading Absalom, Absalom!, especially in terms of the relationship between historicity and orality in the novel, and its distinctive and relatively homogeneous prose style. . Ultimately in these themes lie the novel's fantasies about its form and its reader. The new aesthetic is defined in relation to the implicit old one which, due to a historical rupture ("Then the theater was changed/into something else"), no longer works. If Absalom, Absalom!, formally and thematically offers a substitute for a now inadequate “souvenir,” it may be necessary to begin its exploration with the souvenir itself: that is, the communication of positive historical truth in fixed form. Many critical interpretations of Absalom, Absalom! advance towards the common conclusion that the way narration works in the novel makes it impossible to pass meaning from one subject (narrator or author) to another... middle of the paper... Incredulous narration: Absalom, Absalom!" Reading for Plot: Design and Intention in Fiction. New York: Knopf, 1984. Rpt. in Modern Critical Interpretations: Absalom, Absalom ! The Correct Text. New York: Vintage, 1986. Guetti, James. “Absalom, Absalom!: The Extended Simile: A Study of Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner.” , John T. Faulkner's Language Game: Cornell, 1982. Porter, Carolyn. “William Faulkner: Historicized Innocence: The Participant Observer Situation in Emerson, James, Adams,” and Faulkner, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981. Cited as rpt in Bloom.Slatoff, Walter J. Quest for Failure: A Study of WIlliam Faulkner. Ithaca: Cornell, 1960.