Glissant's novel Malemort triggered in Chamoiseau a lasting fascination for this style of writing that was both negative and almost impenetrable in its language and narration, but paradoxically liberating in terms of what the novelistic form – a form that this article calls Antillean Modernism – can accomplish. Stylistically marked in its form by Faulkner and Joyce, Malemort's Modernism is at the same time Caribbean and planetary. The political and aesthetic stakes of Malemort cannot really be understood in isolation, and must be put in relation with its direct tributaries and other contemporaneous key works of Caribbean modernism. However, the notion of hierarchical influence must be rejected, and that of generations also further interrogated, in keeping with the non-linear history of the Caribbean, with its spiral temporalities and inherent multiplicity. Finally, this article will put forward that Malemort performs an apparently conflicting but truly fertile relationship between Antillean Modernism and key tenets of Adorno's aesthetic theory.