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

 

Faulkner, as narrator, would seem to be intent on achieving a high degree of detachment. He neither invents nor permits the reader to look directly at the total cause-and-effect-sequence of events, as such.

The latest of Faulkner novels (under consideration here) demonstrates the grasp he has developed upon the devices of his style. "The Hamlet" is a sort of a prose fantasia; the various episodes employ colloquial tall stories, poetic description, folk humor, deliberate reflexive narration, swift cryptic drama, and even a grotesque allegory of Snopes in Hell Differing in tone from the elegac broading of "Light in August", or the exasperated volupity of "Pilon". the modulant intricacy and fusion of "Absalom. Absalom!, the reader directness of "The Unvanquished", or the eloquent turbulence of the wild Palms, the Hamlet seems an exttravaganza improvised more freely in a more detached mood, the author apparently delighting in the realizations of varied subject matters through the flexibilities of his multiform style.

This organic quality of Faulkner´s style, sustaining through essentially poetic devices an orquestration of meaning. makes it impossible to judge him adequately by brief quotation.

Yet side by side with the richly interpretative style there exists in almost all of his work a realistic colloquialism, expressing lively dialogue that any playwrite my envy, and even carrying over into sustained first person narrative the flavor of regionalism and the idiosyncrasies of character. In the colloquial vein Faulkner´s brilliance is unsurpassed in contemporary American fiction..

What distinguishes American writing is exactly the fact that we are stranger to each other and that each writer describes his own world to strangers livigin in the same land with himself.

Faulkner has fully mastered the central difficulty to retain verisimilitude while subjecting the prolix and monotonous row material of opst natural speech to an artistic pruning and pointed up, "Sanctuary", for instance, is full of excellent dialogue, sharply individualized.

Faulkner also can weave colloquial bits into the matrix of a more literary passage, with the enlarging effect of a controlled dissonance. Thus Quentin imagines Henry Sutpen and Charles Bom, at the end of the war, Charles determined to marry Judith, Henrby forbidding, and then into Quentin´s elaboration of the scene breaks the voice of his father, continuing the story, giving its denouement in the words vulgarly uttered by wash Jones:

"(It seemed to Quentin that he could actually see them. (...) They faced on another on the two gaunt horses, two men, young, not yet in the world, not yet breathed over long enough, to be ol but with old eyes, with unkempt hair and faces gaunt and weathered as if cast by some spartan and even niggard hand from bronze, in worn and patched gray weathered now to the color of dead leaves, the pistol lying tarnished broid of an officer, the other plain of cuff, the pistol lying yet across the saddle bow unaimed, the tow faces calm, the voices not enven raised:

Don´t you pass the shadow of this post, this branch, Charles;

and I´m going to pass it Henry) - and then wash Jones sitting that saddlelles mule before Miss Rosa´s Gate, shouting her name into the sunny and peaceful quiet of the street, saying, "Air you Rosie Coldfield? Then you better come on out you. Henry has done shot that durn French feller. Kilt him dead as a buf."

#RIODEJANEIRO#, 02 DE JANEIRO DE 2019#