Despite all the stereotypes and characterizations carried by modernism and its literary masters, any form of overwhelming optimism is rarely cited among the accusations. Often summarized as a movement conceived in the aftermath of the horrors of the First World War, modernist literature rarely betrays much optimism in its descriptions of the abject disillusionment of a postwar landscape. It may therefore seem incongruous to anyone with the slightest familiarity with the tenets of literary modernism to accuse the author of one of its most canonical texts of presenting – in that very text – an optimistic worldview. But that remains precisely the intention of this article: to say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get the original essay This is of course not an entirely unprecedented position, one perhaps best represented by Stuart Gilbert in his assertion according to which "it is important for those who see in Joyce's philosophy nothing but empty pessimism, a gospel of denial, that Ulysses ends with a triple anthem of affirmation" (qtd. in Harris 388) . Also basing the argument on Molly's famous "Yes," this article offers for comparison the interior monologue of another modernist matriarch, William Faulkner's Addie Bundren. Although the monologues and their respective speakers have much in common, Molly's is ultimately one of acceptance, while Addie maintains an impenetrable rejection. The reading suggests a parallel between the Lacanian world of the symbolic and the post-war world of the modernists, both representing worlds based on separation, difference and a departure from a previous state of perceived unity. Identifying the essential division between Molly and Addie as their respective acceptance and rejection of the Lacanian order, each woman is presented as the vehicle for her author's worldview. While Addie's caustic rejection of the symbolic world propels As I Lay Dying to an abject and absurd conclusion, condemning the Bundren and the Faulknerian world to degrade ever further into the grotesque, Molly's resurgent melodic assertion signals her willing acceptance not only of the symbolic order. , but also of the inevitable absurdity of the modern world. Through Molly's "Yes," Joyce affirms that even in a world of post-war disillusionment, life can still be accepted, celebrated, and acknowledged. Critics have long noted similarities between these two powerful modernist forces—Faulkner, called "the epitome of Southern modernism," and Joyce, often referred to with similar epithets generally not requiring a second qualifying adjective (Koch 55). However, critics who attempt to take advantage of these similarities are often faced with the task of first tackling a significant obstacle placed by Faulkner himself: his own repeated denial of these similarities. Craig Werner notes that in 1932, Faulkner told Henry Nash Smith that he "had not read Ulysses when he wrote The Sound and the Fury" (242). Faulkner seems to have carried these protests to his deathbed. Asked about Ulysses in an interview with Vida Markovic in 1962, just months before his death, Faulkner replied simply: "It's interesting, but I probably didn't like it, because I never went back to it." We return to the books we love” (465). Despite Faulkner's best attempts to discourage comparisons with Joyce, his denunciations ultimately carry little weight in the face of overwhelming evidence of Joyce's influence on his work. Between the common use of stream-of-consciousness narrative techniques and thededication of both writers to regional representation – it can be said that Faulkner, in his faithful portrayal of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, did for the American South what Joyce did for Dublin – the undeniable similarities between the two writers drive Craig Werner confidently asserts that Faulkner "not only knew Joyce's works, but he adapted Joycean techniques to his own voice" (242). Werner goes on to present Faulkner, through his use of these Joycean techniques, as a solution to the problematic “realist-romantic dichotomy” of American fiction (243). Werner argues that Faulkner, particularly in his later fiction, succeeded “as Joyce had done twenty years earlier in Ulysses, in reconciling the realistic and romantic modes” (257). This article, however, seeks to dispute this assertion, citing Faulkner's As I Lay Dying as, ultimately, a failure in achieving the realistic and romantic balance of Ulysses. While Joyce's transcendence of the realist-romantic dilemma that afflicts American literature "supports his vision of the possibility of human equilibrium in a hostile environment", Faulkner neither mixes nor transcends the realist and the romantic in As I Lay Dying , instead leaving them alone. mingle in a disturbing and ironic cacophony in which the modern world seems almost uninhabitable. Aware of but unable to accept the postwar world that Ulysses so skillfully transcends, Faulkner must instead make it grotesque, a strange caricature of himself. Despite significant differences in length, As I Lay Dying and Ulysses are in some ways modern retellings of Homer's work. Odyssey. However, while both quest stories pay homage to the epic, Joyce illustrates the ways in which Homer can be reshaped for the modern world, while Faulkner ultimately highlights the ways in which it cannot be reshaped. If Ulysses is the Odyssey rewritten for the 20th century, As I Lay Dying is its grotesque inversion, asserting that the heroic epic has no place in the modern world. Although a number of parallels arise between the two quest stories, none are perhaps obvious. better representative of the body of work than the one drawn between the novel's respective matriarchs, Molly Bloom and Addie Bundren. Both women function as unsung heroes – or anti-heroes – of their stories, silently directing the action around them. While Addie's death instigates the comically futile series of misadventures that befall the Bundrens on their journey to Jefferson, Molly's infidelity is – even if unintentionally – the force behind much of Addie's odyssey. a day of Bloom through Dublin. Both women appear as tired and overstretched matriarchs of their families, who - bearing the immense burden of providing all the motivation behind the plot of their stories while each has only one opportunity to express their own points of view – are ultimately no less put forward by their own creators. Molly and Addie, "the women who motivate action while remaining still themselves", each tell only a single chapter of their respective stories, during which time managing to define the ultimate worldview represented by each novel ( Werner 252). Both dissatisfied wives and mothers, Molly and Addie discuss marital and sexual discontent at length. Addie's cavalier and dismissive recollection of Anse's proposal recalls Molly's memory of "the day I tricked him [Leopold] into proposing to me", with both women seeming to suggest that they played a role more active in this decision than passive and nervous husbands. they accepted a probable recall (Joyce 18.1573). While Molly ultimately makes her decision basedfrom the rather flippant conclusion: "As well him as anyone else," Addie shows a similar indifference with the brief and emotionless: "And so I took Anse" (Joyce 18.1604; Faulkner 98). In terms of sexual dissatisfaction, Molly's discussion is considerably more egregious, with her multiple obtuse sexual references obscured only by the occasional inscrutability of her meandering stream-of-consciousness narrative style. Although Addie's thoughts on sexuality are perhaps more nuanced than Molly's, touching on similar notions of dissatisfaction, Addie's reference to being "raped by Anse during the night" reflects the Molly's summary of marital relations as "mere ruin for every woman and no satisfaction in love." it pretends to love him until he comes” (Faulkner 99; Joyce 18.98). Likewise, Molly and Addy specifically refer to a dissatisfaction with the inherent vacancy of female sexuality dictated by the female sexual organ itself. As Molly openly questions her body, asking "what is [sic] the idea that makes us like this with a big hole in the middle of us?" ", Addie's reference is vague and elusive: "The shape of my body where I was a The virgin has the shape of a "" – referring to her vagina only as a physical space in the text (Joyce 18.151 ; Faulkner 100). If comparing these passages leads to an important conclusion for feminist criticism – both women identifying femininity and female sexuality as something inherently lacking, ultimately defined by absence – it is here that the psychoanalytic implications of their stories differ. Addie’s inability to verbally represent her body aligns her sexual dissatisfaction with her linguistic dissatisfaction, expressed in her earlier assertion that “words are worthless; words never match what they are trying to say” (Faulkner 99). Addie’s denunciation of language evokes a rejection of the Lacanian world of the symbolic, which Molly’s “yes” – both a sexual and verbal affirmation – clearly rejects. The Lacanian significance of Addie's narration is perhaps best explained by Doreen Fowler in "Matricide and the Mother's". Vengeance." Fowler's reading argues for Addie's hatred of language as a rejection of the Lacanian theory that "for a child to acquire language, to enter the realm of the symbolic, he must become aware of difference” and must therefore end “the imagined dyadic relationship with the mother in which they find themselves whole” (Fowler 317). Thus, as Fowler summarizes, “Addie hates language because it is based on separation. and difference” (320), Fowler further explains Addie’s fate by asserting that “there is no woman except by the nature of words” (qtd. in Fowler 320). As a result, Addie dislikes the institution that symbolically necessitates her death, condemning language and the word as simply "a form, a container... a meaningful form, profoundly devoid of life, like an empty door frame" (Faulkner , p. 100). While Addie struggles in vain against the Lacanian Symbolic, Molly accepts it if not completely transcends it. Beginning and ending with the word “yes,” Molly willingly frames and defines her narrative with the linguistic sign of affirmation, thereby signaling her unqualified and ultimately quasi-orgasmic acceptance of the symbolic order. Furthermore, Molly's absolute acceptance of the symbolic in conjunction with the visual formlessness of her narration seems to transcend order completely. By rejecting the traditional prose form and refusing to conform to even normal sentence and paragraph breaks, theMolly's thoughts appear as an almost entirely uninterrupted and formless wall of text. In this way, Molly's relationship with the symbolic seems to present a triumphant counterargument to Addie's condemnation of language as "a meaningful form profoundly devoid of life." Molly transcends the boundaries of the symbolic, ultimately managing to convey meaning even in the absence of form. Where Addie can only see an empty door frame, Molly evokes the opposite, conveying a deeply formless meaning. Thus, while Molly successfully transitions from the world of the imaginary to the world of the symbolic, Addie remains caught in the opposition between the two, reflecting Craig Werner's understanding of Joyce's transcendent union between realistic and romantic conflict which continues to torment the American novel. While Joyce defines modernism as a harmonious blend of realism and romanticism, “deriving its power from its refusal to attempt to separate them,” Faulkner, like Addie, remains stuck between the two (Werner 245). In the same vein, Benjamin Koch also sees Faulkner paralyzed between two worlds. While Werner focuses on the realist-romantic dichotomy in the American novel, Koch describes the Faulknerian dilemma in terms of the modern and the Victorian, explaining that Faulkner "leans heavily in a modernist direction, but does not want to completely renounce his more Victorian musings." » (63). Thus, this article also presents Faulkner in a conflict between the modern and the pre-modern, parallel to that between the symbolic and the Lacanian imagination. In his overview of Lacan, Robert Dale Parker summarizes the distinction between the two domains by explaining: “While in the imagination there is neither difference nor absence, in the symbolic difference and absence reign” (139). . This description also illustrates the difference between the modernists' perception of the world before and after the war. After the fall of the perceived unity and wholeness of the previous era – the imagination – modernists had to face a world in which difference and absence reigned. Thus, through Addie's rejection of the symbolic, Faulkner signals her rejection of the horrible vestiges of the postwar world. Meanwhile, Molly's radiant, singing acceptance of the symbolic signals Joyce's acceptance of postwar life, finding value even in a seemingly meaningless world. Struggling with Addie's attempted rejection of the symbolic, the remaining Bundren repeatedly attempt and fail to replace her, leaving in their wake, a grotesque collection of inadequate replacements – bananas, false teeth, a dead fish. Through Addie, Faulkner condemns the Bundrens and the modern world to an ironic and unsatisfying conclusion. As Fowler summarizes, “the Bundren attempt in vain to fill the void at the center of their being, substitute after substitute, metaphor after metaphor” (328). Molly, too, complains of a void at the center of her being, “this big hole in the middle of us.” However, his attempts to “butcher him” are ultimately not in vain, since the novel ends triumphantly with the reverberations of his orgasmic affirmation. For Faulkner, the linguistic assertion is ironic and distorted, Molly's "yes" rendered grotesque and given to the voice of a madman. Darl's cacophonous "yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes" echoes in jarring discord as the novel descends toward its absurd conclusion (Faulkner 146). Faulkner's perverse appropriation, however, can do little to diminish the resounding glory of the triumphant conclusion to which Molly's "yes" brings Odysseus. Although she is no less aware of the abject state of the modern world than Faulkner, Joyce ultimately asserts the value of life, even in the face of :.