"This style—let’s call it 'Faulknerian,' after its other Nobel-winning master—is heady and clause-dense."

"Long associated with the South, Faulkner’s great theme, it eddies and circles, with an often maddening indirection. The Faulknerian style’s weakest imitators simply view it as a license to slather adjectives and metaphors all over the page. Morrison, who hated seeing her fiction described as 'lyrical' or 'poetic,' had a deeper understanding of Faulkner’s stratagems. In her Paris Review interview (a must for any appreciator of Morrison’s genius), she delivers a brilliant dissection of Absalom, Absalom, a novel that fascinated her: Faulkner, she says, 'spends the entire book tracing race and you can’t find it. No one can see it, even the character who is black can’t see it. … Do you know how hard it is to withhold that kind of information but hinting, pointing all of the time? … So the structure is the argument.' The elliptical nature of Faulkner’s style epitomizes the paralyzed condition of Southern culture: Everything in it gestures toward the one thing it can’t bring itself to talk about. This paradox gives Faulkner’s fiction its power, but for any writer seeking to follow in his footsteps, it leads to a dead end."

From an article at Slate by Laura Miller that I clicked on because of the teaser "How Toni Morrison’s Revolutionary Novels Broke Open American Literature." I wondered what this "breaking open" consisted of. For these words to make sense it would need to be that many other writers followed along. The headline at the article is more modest "Toni Morrison Reshaped the Landscape of Literature/Her novels made moves that no other novelist, black or white, attempted." There's no revolution, no breaking open, no implication that other writers followed on, only that she did something alone. She reshaped, she didn't break. And it's not a military metaphor — revolution. It's a landscape. From front page to inside page, it seems we moved from masculine to feminine. Is that analogous to the difference between Faulkner and Morrison?

Let me read the thing I would not have read without that overheated teaser. Okay. I read it. There's no mention of other writers! I see no argument that Morrison reshaped the literary landscape (or led a revolution). All I'm seeing here is that Morrison put some things on the surface that Faulker "pushed below the surface."