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Art and Madness
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19038 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1991 |
2,892 Words |
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Melvin J. Friedman
Melvin J. Friedman, professor of comparative literature at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is the founding editor of
Contemporary Literature and Comparative Literature Studies. He
is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, his most
recent title being Joycean Occasions (1991). |
DARKNESS VISIBLE
A Memoir of Madness
William Styron
New York: Random House, 1990
84 pp., $15.95
William Styron seems always to have understood his place in American literature, at least from the time he published his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, in 1951. From the beginning he confronted the most complex and controversial themes, with no trace of compromise. The Bible, Greek tragedy, the plays of Shakespeare, Mozart's operas, the philosophy of Kierkegaard, and other central texts of Western culture enlarge the frames of his novels and carry their experiences beyond the quotidian.
Styron's broad and far-ranging sympathies have helped make him an author of international scope and consequence, clearly of Nobel laureate stature. He has taken seriously throughout his career the words of Faulkner's Nobel Prize address:
The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these
things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting
his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and
hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice
which have been the glory of his past.
Indeed, Lie Down in Darkness is a most Faulknerian novel; The Sound and the Fury, especially as many critics have pointed out, appears to have informed Styron's earliest moments as a novelist. One might easily suggest that The Sound and the Fury stands in somewhat the same relationship to Lie Down in Darkness as The Odyssey to Joyce's Ulysses, offering something of a literary scaffolding. Just as Joyce seemed to be acknowledging his lifelong fondness for Homer in using the Odyssey parallel, so Styron was staking out his position as a Southern writer (he was born in Newport News, Virginia), Faulkner style, when he persistently and creatively echoed The Sound and The Fury. The fifty-page interior monologue of the heroine, Peyton Loftis, which Lie Down in Darkness gradually builds toward, ends in suicide just as Quentin Compson's long monologue does in Faulkner's novel. The other parallels are too numerous to mention here.
In the more modest novella The Long March (1953), Styron was able
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