DRAFT – Please contact author before circulating “Breadfruit, time and again: Glissant reads Faulkner in the World Relation” Marisa Parham … [T]he role of the serious literary artist is to provide mythic prefigurations that are adequate to the complexities and possibilities of the circumstances in which we live. In other words, to the storyteller actuality is a combination of facts, figures, and legend. The goal of the serious storyteller is to fabricate a truly fictional legend, one that meets the so-called scientific tests of validity, reliability, and comprehensiveness. Is its applicability predictable? Are the storyteller’s anecdotes truly representative? Does his “once upon a time” instances and episodes imply time and again? I have found that in old Uncle Billy’s case they mostly do. – Albert Murray 1 … the river tells you at the same time that everything is different and yet nothing has changed… The river does not follow the rules of linear thought; here, one can step in the same water twice. – Faulkner, Mississippi Two-thirds of the way through Faulkner, Mississippi, his extended meditation on the prose oeuvre of the American writer William Faulkner, the famed Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant remarks on Faulkner’s notoriously “amused refusal to ‘correct the contradictions’” introduced into his texts through his constant revisiting of characters across novels that are themselves not necessarily set in proper temporal relation to one another. According to Glissant, these temporal contradictions are not in themselves problematic because such narrative recursivity is endemic to life in the Americas, as “the various ways of telling one single fact” constitute “the stream of consciousness that summarizes (or at least tries to) the circumstances of the country.” 2 Even as they bespeak place and are committed to a deep sense of site specificity, Faulkner’s novels are nonetheless mobile, for his temporal excursions work to release his texts from the burden of reproducing historical record— even as those same texts are not, in their testimony to the gravity of a “single fact,” released from the historical. In Glissant’s reading, Faulkner’s commitment to the past is evident not in some salvific return to an ideal, but is instead revealed in his constant re-engagement with time’s futures.