Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2001. [Vol. 7.] Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 27)

Studies - László Dányi: The Eccentric Against the Mainstream: William Styron, 75

which, in most of his novel, has the role of a starting and firm base point for the characters, not necessarily for Styron, rather than a life long time link to the land as place, or physical terrain. It is more like a spiritual terrain of the land which is not necessarily the Tidewater region, but in a more extended form the South itself. Even in his collection of short stories entitled A Tidewater Morning the reader might think that the stories will take him to that region which is partly true, but in other novels the characters leave this area and they act against it and for it as a spiritual terrain with its distinct cultural patterns. For Styron as a writer, the South is the background, and his novels are rooted in that place, but he manages to look back upon the South from a vantage point which is not necessarily in the South as a homogeneous physical and spiritual terrain. The existence of this vantage point allows him a certain detachment from the South, which does not mean that he is isolated from it. In other words in his literary career he leaves the Faulknerian notion of the regional South, and this shift in perspective allows him to view the South, the same land that Faulkner belongs to, from another new angle. And it gives its uniqueness to Styron's writing, because he belongs "neither to the Deep South sunk in its archaic doom nor to the Yankee blend of purposefulness and inferiority complex" (Kretzoi 121). So the long list of the appreciation of Styron's works shows that the author's works have proven to be the targets for exploring Freudian aspects, existential perspectives, Bakhtinian textual questions, narrative devices, the time technique and Southern cultural elements. From the abovementioned it is unavoidable to conclude that the Souther cultural elements appear in Styron's works with such weight that they are iconological creations of the Southern consciousness. The existence and the presentation and representation of icons related to the South, and their transformations and manifestations in Styron's works prove that Styron, by recollecting, recuperating and modifying but not rejecting the Faulknerian mode of writing, managed to preserve Faulkner's and the South's legacy for posterity by creating his own iconology of the South. Styron identifies and explores the major distinctive cultural parameters and patterns of the American South as they are represented 18