ABSTRACT
Faulkner's invocations of the Bible seem to reflect a similar sentiment about the premodern text's relevance to modernity: it can be read as exemplifying a modernist understanding of recursive fragmentation through which multiple layers of signification may be glimpsed only partially and obscurely through one another in a palimpsest-like effect. Once that oversimplified narrative gets sufficiently qualified as to become at least partially muted, one more easily hears the double-voicing that Faulkner regularly creates in his invocations of the Bible. The overall effect suggests an intermingling of iconoclastic and traditional interpretations of the Bible. Faulkner's novels thereby suggest a sense of permeability between "modern" and "premodern". In various ways, the novels convey a nuanced, complex sense of textual and broader cultural traditions that does not accord with the temporal logic of modernity by which premodern authorities are inevitably and entirely superseded by secular modernity.
