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
agree with those critics who say that the South is a major source of inspiration for the writer. Elements of the culture of the South can be traced in all of Styron's works, as his novels are rooted in his southern soil, and the question here is how. Those critics who argue by saying that Styron is a universal writer also have the right to say so because I believe that Styron vocalizes general human concerns, general human needs that are expressed in a unique way from his pen, with his Southern background. So all in all my assumption is that Styron's books in their content are about these basic human conditions with general existential dilemmas of our 20th century living, however, his strong moral engagement, without implying that other writers outside the South cannot be morally engaged, links him to the very best traditions of the Southern Renascence in literature, and to Faulkner. In all his novels there are characters who are from the South with all the cultural implications of this word. Then he, like most Southern writers, is concerned with a very strong sense of time, place, belonging to a culture and the endurance of the human spirit. These parallels with Faulkner are not only contextual, but formal as well. On the one hand his link to 19th and the beginning of 20th century writers, like Dostoevsky, Melville, Conrad and Flaubert is obvious, i.e.: there is a story line in his novels, the stories are inhabited by distinguishable characters holding character traits, having basic human striving to come to terms with the world around them and to find a raison d'etre; his storyline is also similar to this traditional modernist way of writing, that is he wants to get from A to Z, he usually knows the beginning and the end, but he does not have a programmed plot. So the route between A and Z is not necessarily paved in alphabetical order and it makes it possible for Styron to use the stream of consciousness method, which is a link again to Faulkner too. However, what differentiates Styron from the rest of the writers is that in his novels characters keep on struggling even after realizing the futility of quest for meaning, and enduring all hardships and manage to survive, and in novels where there are not Southern characters like STHF, SC, it is the Southern characters who survive. In Faulkner the stories are inhabited by Southerners and they are doomed to die, whereas here there is a palpably strong implication of optimism in the form of a survival for Southerners. And here we are again back at 16