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
writing, but his writing, LDD , also had an impact on Faulkner's The Mansion (Cologne-Brookes 227). Not only was the writer marked as a Faulkner follower, but he was also regarded as being akin to almost everyone except himself: "In his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), Styron seems strikingly derivative. He had read his Fitzgerald, his Warren, his Wolfe. Above all, he had read Faulkner, and so strong was that influence that on first reading it very nearly swamps the novel" (Lawson 479-480). Most of the comparisons with the Southern literary mode have raised the issue of the relationship between imitation and originality, or tradition and innovation. For example, Styron's Sophie's Choice has been criticized for thematic weaknesses (Durham 449), and Richard Pearce also argues based on the aforementioned premises when he writes that Styron's heroes cannot reach the core of the problem in their search for meaning (Pearce 285). These critics tend to see the novels as either too general or too specific and they tend to ignore the shift from the particular to the universal. The labels of parochialism, provincialism, regionalism, topicality, universality and cosmopolitanism have all been used and abused related to Styron's works. When esteeming LDD, Lewis A Lawson argues that " [o]n the personal level, it is certainly a Southern novel, but like any good Southern novel it is universal" (480), others like the Ten Black Writers who responded to Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner in the 1960s disparage the author's novel for the same reason. The analysis of the motifs and the dimensions dominating the novels proves that the conventional requisites of particularity and universality convey new and different meanings. The novelty of Styron criticism has been to combine the regional and parochial Southern influences with the recognition of a "desire for a more complete literature to arise out of the South. That completeness, in this instance, relies on breaking away from the confines of the South" (Metress 309). Recent criticism broadens the scope of observation from the contemporary ideas of existentialism to the French "nouveau roman", and it focuses on the universal implications and dimensions of Styron's themes. The critics who are convinced that Styron's Southern commitment can be extended to universal aesthetic concerns 13
