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

III PART

The technique of interior monologues is replace by a precise, external realism. The author evokes the outer appearance of things with magnificent approximation; current reality glows unexectedly in colors a mere copyist of nature could never find because he sees only the smaller side of the world. A blossoming pear tree; a black staircase with its splash of light from a Grey window; old, unshapen Negro woman clutching a hotwater bottle "by the neck lie a dead hen." how alive these things are!

Faulkner often piles up words in a way that brings the charge prolixity. He has willbourne say of his life with Charlote in chicago.

"It has the mausoleum of love, it was the stinking catafalque of the dead corpse borne between the alfactoryless walking shapes of the immortal unsentient demand ancient meat."

Nevertheless, despite the blunders and despite the habits and the willful bad writing (and willful it obviously is), the style as a whole is extraordinarily effective; the reader does remain immersed, wants to remain immersed, and it is interesting to look onto the reason for this. And at once, if one considers these queer sentences not simply by themselves, as monsters of grammar or awkwardness, but in their relation to the book as a whole, one sees a functional reason and necessity for their being as they are. Obviously, we need to remain and remember it´s the very needed not to think as we are able to do it, that´s to say, we think about how Faulkner´s characters are, we need to think as they do. They parallel in a curious and perhaps inevitable way, and not without aesthetic justification, the whole elaborate method of deliberately meaning, of progressive and partial and delayed disclosery, which so often gives the characteristic shape to the novels themselves. It is a persistent offering ofobstacles, a calculated system of screens and obtrusions, of confusions and ambiguous interpolations and delays, with one express purpose; and that purpose is simply to keep the form - and the idea - fluid and unfinished, still in motion, as it were, and unknown, until the dropping into place of the very last syllable. Another purpose is simply to make one enters into his soul considering time.

However, those above word series, while conspicuous at times, may have a place in a style as minutely analytical as Faulkner´s. In their typical form they are not redundant, however elaborate, and sometimes their cumulative effect is undeniable - for example, the

"long still hot weary dead September afternoon..."

when Quentin listens to Miss Rosa´s story. Colonel Feinman, the wealthy exploiter of impecunious aviators, had as secretary

"a young man, in horn rim glasses..."

who spoke

"with a kind of silken insolense, like the pampered intelligent eunuchmountebank of an eastern despot..."

and there the amplification redounds to the significance of the whole scene. Quite often,, too, these series of words, while seemingly extravagant, are a remarkably compressed rendering, as in the phrase "pazzionate tragic ephemeral loves of adolescence.

But for the flexibility, the continuous beat of the phrase would grow monotonous - with its inversions and parentheses, and the dream like quality of its (again the sense of timlessness) often threatening to make the skill of its complex delivery too apparent, which would be fatal. But always at the right moment there comes pause the break of dialogue - and Faulkner´s dialogue surpasses itself - he added information when it´s needed. or the image in a new light subtly changing the texture or the posturing of a character, as sudden as the shock of the tragic mask.

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Notes

1 - Though to "look onto" has almost the same meaning of "to look into", in Faulkner´s style it´s better to say "look onto", have a view of somewhere.

2 - It´s needed to have the very glance at Faulkner´s great ontology as Sartre describes "Nothinglessness".

3 - Certainly, the structure of both language is different. But we do need do consider the idea of "Bad faith" in Sartre´s Existencial Psychoanalyse. On the other hand, Sartre has never worried about "Language". That´s why he has no conception of the future.

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Manoel Ferreira Neto.