Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1991. British and American Philologycal Studies (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 20)

László Dányi: Universal implications of William Styton's Southern Heritage

25 involved in the horrors. The distorted world foreshadowed by the apocalyptic vision of the Bible came true and Styron's Sophie became involved in the "blackness of darkness". Cataclysms force the individual to understand what is unbelievable and unbearable for human consciousness. The individual has to take on the inexorable weight of the world and face the tragedies of mankind and he feels how meaningless and hopeless his life is when he realizes how the full scope to act is limited. He is not able to take an active part in forming the world around. "The four novels of William Styron reflect a world that is at its core a prison. This imprisonment is the basic condition of mankind, and from it there is no escape. What each of the protagonists in the novels must do is come to a recognition of the fact of his bondage and come to some accord with that fact: he must find a raison d'etre even within the confines of that bondage."^ Styron opens up a new dimension in his fifth novel, SC. Sophie strongly believes that she can compose a new self of "the scattered pieces of her life."^ And Sophie's hope is realized in Stingo's resurrection. This rebirth has a purgative quality for Sophie's guilt-stricken mind. Styron's novelty lies in the correlation of the Southern literary mode and the very slight implication of optimism reflected from the mirror of cataclysms. He extended the Southern literary imagination into a new generation and this was the only possible way how he could make the Southern myth alive. The fusion of motifs with the Southern myth eniargens our horizons and new imaginative structures are "generated both encountered and questioned the world's ugly presentness."^ 7