THESIS) - WILLIAM FAULKNER: TIME AND MITHOLOGY Manoel Ferreira Neto: THESIS

THESIS) - WILLIAM FAULKNER: TIME AND MITHOLOGY

Manoel Ferreira Neto: THESIS

I PART

One principle holds together Faulkner´s thirteen books of prose giving his work unity and giving it, at times, the significance that belongs to great myth, that principle is the Southern social-economic-ethical tradition which he possesses naturally as part of his sensibility. The trouble poses itself in approximately these terms: if we admit that the person is a totality we cannot hope do re-construct him by an addition or by an organization of the diverse tendencies which we have empirically discovered in him. On the contrary, in each inclination, in each tendency the person expresses himself completely in each of its atributes. The person expresses himself completly in facing his own face through his memories in which he tries to establish his values.

Perhaps there´s even a mutual reinforcement - this certainly was Proust´s idea. But then one must choose: destiny dissolves as soon as it´s comprehended and understood, as soon as it has been reduced to psychological causes which bear no relation to what one thinks destiny is while subjected to. Is it Destiny´s real only whilst it is endured - that is to say, while it is not known but only felt? Is man real only for as long as he establishes his values through his memories or through his own actions, decisions?

We have established that destiny, as it appears in all of his novels and short stories must not be likened to temporal determinism, to a supposedly needed chronological succession, for to be of such a nature, the past would have to retain in itself an ordered progression of presents and the present would have to be allowed its own reality, since destiny would not be complete without it. On other hands, the past would have in itself senses man hadn´t observed cause of some lackness of refleting existences meaning.

"So what I have been, I am; What I am, I shall be until that instant comes when I am not. And then I shall have never been. How does it go? Non fui. Seem. Non sum."

In the case of Faulkner, we have seen that the past is a whole receiving nothing from the present, that the very presence of the past disqualifies the present as such, and therefore eliminates or at least upsets chronological relationships. In his case, we have seen either that the past is a whole thoughtfulness from which Perfect Tenses move into among imperfectness, doubtless. Otherwise, whether we discuss on being one of the fundamental basis of establishing Faulkner´s style.

"... confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle - neck of the most recent decade of years."

Even the most remote past affects the present, not only series of temporally arranged causes, but by its immediate presence, its immediate images and of course its immediate doubtless caused by lackness of mind. Having been, it is. Its action, therefore, is not logical but psychological. In having been lost, which emotions had been felt and lost, and who I am now, what does establish this instant, this present.

"I don´t know who you are, but I don´t believe you are Robert Ingersoll. Perhaps I could not know it even if you were. Anyway, there is a certain integral consistency which, whether it be right or wrong, a man must cherish because it alone will ever permit him to die."

Surely, it´s the very needed to reveal the knowledge, in human beings, has moved in concepts, thoughts and words. The understanding is not an acumulative of pieces of knowledge. It´s an entering, direct and immediate one. It´s the result of the struggle for becoming free from knowledge just to open a space to the new one which is concerned to reality.

However, Faulkner is a traditional man in a Modern South. He is the Greatest artist the South has produced. All around him the antitraditional forces are at work and he lives among evidences of their past activity. The past is, indeed, a repository of values, a pantheon, a world to which we can turn for the great images of men who were "complete", at least in contrastt to Faulkner´s idea of modernity, with its abstraction and loveless violation of nature and man. He could not fail to be aware of them It´s not strange, then, that his hovels and short stories are, primarily, a series of related myths (or aspects of a single myth) built around the conflict between traditionalism modern word in which it is immersed. Otherwise while thing of studying and establishing Faulkner´s style is the very needed to think of how myth is constructed in function of aesthetics. But, as we have seen, the past may also be the source of doom. It is not merely the source of doom in the historical and moral consequences of the evil have wrought - specifically slavery.

"I have said all the time that this is not the good way. In the old days there were no quarters, no Negroes. A man´s time was his own then. He had time. Now he must spend most of it finding work for them who prefer sweating to do."

#RIODEJANEIRO#, 01 DE JANEIRO DE 2019)