ESSAY) - FAULKNER´S STYLE - A LECTURE ON STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS

 

Faulkner´s digressive, violent lyricism is the resonance of that primitive, unhewn rock of humanity. Images and visions flow into one another, the fantastic mingles with the real, the abstract feeds on the blood of things, the senses fraternize in their joint sovereignity over the world, and objects assume personality.

The justification of all such practices is empirical; writing must not be judged by its minute correspondence to fact bit by its total effect; and to object against Faulkner´s style that men and women don´t really talk in such long sentences, with so full a vocabulary so fancifully employed, is a narrowly dogmatic.

Typical instances of Faulkner´s endowing his characters with precise diction and fluency may show that on the whole it is not an unacceptable convention. Thus willbourne´s full and finished sentence -

"We lived in an apartment that wasn´t bohemian, it wasn´t even a tabloid love-nest, it wasn´t even in that part of town but in a neighbor hood dedicated by both city ordinance and architecture to the second year of wedlock among the five-thousand a year bracked."

- though it is not stylistically roated in his manner as characterized upo to this point, is not inconsistent with his personality and sensibilities, and it does get on with the story.

It is interesting to note that Faulkner´s full style somewhat resembles older literary uses, such as the dramatic chorus, the prologue and epilogue, and the "dramatic personae" themselves in soliloquy and extend speech. The aim of any such device is not objective realism but revelation of theme, a revelation raised by the unstinted resourcefulness and power of its language to the highest ranges of imaginative ootlook. No wonder that with such a purpose Faulkner often comes closer than is common in these times to Shakespeare´s imperial and opulent use of words. If unfortunately his ambition has sometimes led Faulkner to perpetrate some rather clotted prose, perhaps these lapses may be judged charitably in the light of the great endeavor they but infrequently flow.

More particularly Faulkner´s full sentence structure springs from the elaborateness of his fancies ramifying in descriptive imagery. Thus edigor Haggod, perpetually beset by small annoyances and chronically irritated by them, drops himself wearily into his roadster´s low seat,

"... Whereupon without sound or warning the golf bag struck him across the head and shoulder with an apparently calculated and lurking viciousness, emitting a series of drry clicks though produced by the jaws of a beast domesticated though not lamed, half in fun and half in deadly seriouness, like a pet shark."

Another typical source of fullness in Faulkner´s sentences is a tendency to musing speculation, sometimes proceeding to the statement of alternative suggestions. Thus Miss Rosa speaks of wearing garments left behind by eloping aunt in "Kindness or haste or oversight", that doing its bit in a sentence well over three hundred words long. Such characteristic theorizing may run to the length os this postscript to a description of Flem Snopes:

"... a thick squat soft man of no establishable age between twenty and thirty, with a broad still face containing a tight seam of mouth stained slightly at the corners with tobacco, and eyes the color of stagnant water, and projecting from among the other features in startling and sudden paradox, a tiny predatory nose like the beak of a small hawk."

"It was as though the original nose had been left off by the original designer or craftsman and the unfinished job taken over by someone of a radically differente school or perhaps by some viciously manical humorist or perhaps by one who had only trime to clap into the center of the face a frantic and desperat warning."

#RIODEJANEIRO#, 02 DE JANEIRO DE 2019#