(THESIS) - WILLIAM FAULKNER: TIME AND MYTHOLOGY Manoel Ferreira Neto: THESIS

XIII PART

One might say that in Faulkner´s world sanctuaries assume that their sacred character only through the profanation. Which despoils them forever. Temple´s waiting in the bootleggers house in prayer and contemplation as much as it is anguish. She might almost be preparing herself for a consecration:

"Tommy could hear a faint, steady, chatter of the sheiks inside the mottress where temple lay, her hands crossed on her breast and her legs straight and close and decorous, like an effigy and ancient toms."

In the prolonged instant which precedes the profanation the sanctuary awaits the act of the ravishes which will sanctify it forever.

However, a literary and personal tension arises, for William Faulkner the artist, out of the same conflict that is central in his work. This tension sets up his crucial problem as an artist, and his failures results from it. Insofar as he can sustain his inherent tradition, he is enabled to project the central conflict in the valid terms of myth. When, because of the opposition and his reacton to it. Mr. Faulkner writes as formal traditionalist rather than as vital traditionalist, he writes as formal traditionalist rather than as vital traditionalist, he writes allegory. Allegory might be defined, indeed, as formalized - and therefore dead - myth.

"The artist, the writer (he was to have said), must never had doubts about where he intends to go; the aim, the dream, must be that high to be worth that destination and the anguish of the effort to reach it. But he must have humility recording his competence to get there, about his craft and his craftsmanship in it."

Modernism, carrying it from birth its own impotence and luxury, doom, submits with masochistic pleasure to its own destruction for the one crime that it has not yet committed - Revolutionary destruction of order (the murder of the Alabama policeman, for which the innocent Popeye is executed).

Here Mt. Faukner´s theme is forced into allegory, not projected as myth. In this sense, the book is a "cheap idea" - as Mr. Faulkner himself calls it in his preface to the modern library edition. Its defects are those of allegory in general. The characters are distorted being more nearly grotesques than human beings, and they are not destroyed to scale.

When one possesses traditional values of conduct, he has naturally a kind of hierarquey or sympathy, depending upon the values, which makes him more or less sympathetic to characters in proportion as they are or are not traditional. Mr. Faulkner appears to maintain such a hierarchy in the greater past of his work, although he projects the characters of the Snopes world as clearly as he projects those of the Sartoris world, in his better books he is always seeing them and determining their proportionate stature from the Sartoris point of view.

Mr. Faulkner´s work may seem melodramatic. Melodrama differs from tragedy only in the amount of meaning that is subsistent in the patter of events. The significance of the work as myth depends then upon the willigness of the reader to recover the meaning of the tradition- even historically.

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#RIODEJANEIRO#, 03 DE JANEIRO DE 2019#