(THESIS) - FAULKNER-S STYLE - A LECTURE ON STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS - Manoel Ferreira

II PART

Faulkner manifests his intent: To seek out the original substance of man, his very being before it takes form. This growth has been made largely without the aid of appreciative criticism, and in the face of some misunderstanding

With and abuse of the most dynamic qualities in his writing.

It is quite possible that Faulkner would have paid more attention to the critic´s valid objections if these had not been so frequently interlarded with misconception makes it necessary to defend the great innovators against the charge that their renunciation of traditional means implies on inability to use them.

With unjustified diffidence, Faulkner explains the strange technique of his novel as the result of a shortcoming. Supposedly he tries to the story, to tell it from different points of view because he thinks he has not yet told it right. But, in fact, with this technique he has reached a realism more total than that of Joyce or anybody else before him. Remembering a passage in "The Possessed" a "personage" simply comitted suicide to prove God doesn´texist we feel as our soul would not have been revealed, we do need to say something more. Even the realistic final chapter, which - according to the author´s dissatisfied self-commentary - is meant to "fill the gaps", is by no means an artistic resignation. His purpose is to resume the whole nightmare and recast it once more in a visible form. An so once more we must pass through the abyss, this time with a seeing eye, for until now we had only groped after our way through. The essence, not only of this book but of the Faulnerian narrative as a whole, lies in this double journey through Hell-namely, that we can overcome our fear not by avoiding it but by facing up to it.

Repetition of words, for instance, has often seemed an obvious fault. At times, however, Faulner´s repetitions may be a not unjustifiable by-product of his thematic composition. Some of his favorites in Absalom, Absalom! - not just Miss Rosa´s "demon", which may be charged off to her own mania, nor "indolent" applied to Bom, but such recurrent terms as effluvion, outrage, grim, indomitable, ruthless, fury, fatality - seem to intend to indicate faintly of the Tales whole significance and tone. Nor is the reinteration as frequent or as obvious here as in earlier books; perhaps Faulkner has been making an experiment over which he is increasingly gaining control.

Faulkner can "recount" in the conventional sense of the word - only incomparably much better than the go-called realists. He proves this very drastically in "The Sound and the Fury" with a stroke of suprise. Although at the outset it seems that Faulkner intends as mother of principle, to substitute the narrative law of descriptin and fixed characterization with his own law of a resounding raw material and a music of the subsconscious, he suddenly recants in the last chapter. Four times the story heaves to a star with a kind of tremendous effort. Yet only when it re-begins for the time does the narrator incedes to recapitulate the story for itself, a story which until now had been presented solely through the minds of its actors

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Notes

1 - "... to seek out the original substance..." While I had tried to write in an old language, I had a lot of troubles of using Phrasal Verbs. In Moderne Language, certainly we would use "seart out", but in Faulkner´s style we prefer to think of "time" and use "To seek out". "Search out is related to psychological dimension while "seek out" is related to the soul. Time comes to overcome the psychological dimension.

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Manoel Ferreira Neto.