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

Miss Rosa´s interpretation epitomizes the traditional views with which Quentin has grow up. This "demonizing". this interpretation in terms of inflexible moral judgement, does not. To his mind, explain: the past remains incredible and unreal. Nor is he satisfied by his father´s view there´s no meaning at all in history, that the only proper response is to call it a mistery that we are "not meant to understand." Father is as close to nihilism here as he was in the "Sound and the Fury". Quentin is unable to choose between Miss Rosa´s belief that Southern history was God´s punishment of the South, and of herself in particular - precisely for what she is unable to image - and father´s denial of any intelligibility.

Master of colloquialism in dramatic scene though he is, Faulkner sometimes lays aside this power in order to put into a character´s mouth the fullest expression of the narrative´s meaning. The nature Bayard Sartoris, looking back to Civil War times, telling the story of his boyhood and youth in "The Unvanquished", opens, what is Faulkner´s most straight-forward narrative, and his only novel related throughout by one character in the first person, in this strain:

"Behind the smoke house that summer, Ringo and I had a living map. Although Vicksburg was just a handful of chips from the woodpile and the River a trench scraped into the packed earth with the point of a hoe, it (river, city, and terrain) lived, possessing even in miniature that ponderble though passive recaltrance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant of Victories and the most tragic of defeats ar ut noises of a moment."

At times it seems as though the author, after having created an unsophisticated character is elbowing him off the stage, as when the rustic Darl Bundren sees "the square squat shape of the coffin on the saw horses like a cubists bug", or as when in the short story, "All the Dead Place", the world was flier. John Sartoris is characterized as having a Vocabulary of "perhaps two words"and then is made to say.

"... I knew that if I busted in and dragged him out and bashed his head off. I´d not only be clinked for life for having infringed the articles of alliance by invading foreign properly without warrant or something."

Sartre observed in 1939 that he loved Faulkner´s but hated his metaphysics. Faulkner wrote, according to Sartre, as though man were completely without a future, possessed only of a past; but he should write as though man might have a future. The Glance was all backward in Faulkner; and human life (Sartre added, in an excellent image that could be illustrated from almost any page of Faulkner) appeared as a road watched despairingly as it flowed away, from the rear window of a moving car.

For the most part, however, the transcending of colloquial verisimilitude in the novels is a fairly controlled and consistent technique, the characters Faulkner most often endows with penetration and eloquence being philosophical spectators. Undoubtedly his chief concern, though, is with a lyrical encompassment of his narrative´s whole meaning rather than with the reticence of objective representation.

What Mr. Faulkner is after, in a sense, is a continuum. He wants a medium without stops or pauses, a medium which is always of the moment, and of which the passage from moment to moment is as fluid and undelectable as in the life itself which he is purpoting to give. It is all inside and underneath, or as seen from withing and below; the reader must therefore be steadily drawn in; he must be powerfully and unremittingly hipnotyzed inward and downward to that image-stream; and this suggests, perhaps, a reason not only for the length and elaborateness of the sentence structure for the repetitiveness as well.

Thus many of his characters speak with he tongues of themselves and of William Faulkner. As Quentin and his Haward roommate Shreve evolve the reconstruction of Thomas Sutpen´s story which constitutes the second half of "Absalom, Absalom!", Quentin thinks when Shreve talks, "He sounds just like father", and later, when Quentin has the floor, Share interrupts with "Don´t say it´s just me that sounds like your old man", which certainly shows that Faulkner realizes what he is doing. Actually he does make some differences among these voices: Miss Rosa rambles and ejaculates with erratic spensterish emotion, Mr. Compson is elaborately and sometimes parenthetically ironic, Quentin is most sensitively imaginative and melancholy, Shreve most detached and humorous. What they have in common is the scope and pitch of an almost lyrical style which Faulkner has arbitrarily fixed upon for an artistica instrument.

#RIODEJANEIRO#, 02 DE JANEIRO DE 2019#