The incomparable suspense in Faulkner's writing denies the foundational power of the Story. By this very denial, it establishes another dimension, a poetics that is not narrative but creates a relationship between what is narrated and what is unsayable. When Faulkner says he is a "a failed poet," we understand he is aware of having already explored the other dimension where writing--hesitant, swelling, and unfurling over itself--raises, in turn, impossible poetic encounters: between the ambiguous and the obvious; between the unknown and cursed knowledge; between memory and doubt; between the times when everything goes smoothly and the times that shatter you into chaos; between the death that grants mercy and the death that we savagely defy.

—Edouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi