Sarah Gleeson-White, in a study on
the southern grotesque, argues against the common interpretation of it as
presenting a “gloomy vision of modernity” which acts as an allegory of the
human condition as “existential alienation and angst.” Her focus is specifically
on Carson McCullers, highlighting a quote from her The Vision Shared,
which sought to justify the grotesque school by claiming, of its authors, “I
seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive.” This demonstrates, Gleeson-White
suggests, rather than an alienated modernity, an affirmative and transformative
quality, and it is this we should be celebrating when reading the southern
grotesque.
In developing her argument,
Gleeson-White adopts and adapts Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualisation of the
grotesque which, she feels, comes closest to articulating the celebratory
nature of McCullers’ cry of “I am alive”. In doing so, she rejects as
incomplete those traditional interpretations, as expounded by the likes of
William Van O’Connor and Millichap and Fiedler, with their allusions to “dark
modernism” and “alienation, loneliness, a lack of human communication, and the
failure of love.”
She presents instead, McCullers’
explanation of the grotesque: “The technique is briefly this: a bold and
outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic with the humorous, the immense
with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of a man with a
materialistic detail.”
A key focus for Bakhtin and
McCullers is the body, in particular deformity and difference from conventional
perceptions of beauty, even normality. Physical freaks are, of course, a
signature of the grotesque, from Faulkner’s Benjy to O’Connor’s Hulga and
onwards. McCullers’ novels and stories, too, are peopled by freaks – giants or
dwarves, mutes, hunchbacks and cripples, self-mutilators, androgynous
men-women, and so on – but, Gleeson-White argues, and I would agree, McCullers
ultimately uses these characters as a reaction against convention and as an
exploration of humanity. She suggests that: “Her novels of resistance present
us with unsettled identities and so push the very boundaries of how we
understand human being.”
This idea of the transformative
nature of grotesque freakery is interesting. For all her brilliance as a
writer, for example, I cannot see it in Flannery O’Connor. Transformation, for
her, is bound to redemption, and her perspective on redemption is that of a
subject reconciling him or herself to the will of the master; her works are
flavoured, for me, by subjugation to the supernatural and not celebration or
understanding of the human.
Likewise, I look at the works of
Cormac McCarthy and try to discern how they might be described as affirmative
or transformative. Only his early works, of course, are considered to be truly
southern but I believe that typical southern transgressiveness suffuses his
later works, too. And, in his collection of freaks, from Lester Ballard and
Rinthy and Culla onwards through the seven feet albino judge to the morally
autistic Chigurh, he presents a set of characters who are outwith anything that
could be considered normal. But is he, in Bakhtinian terms, “[disclosing] the
potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of
life”? And, moreover, is he using his grotesquery to unnerve in order to
enlighten?
The answers to those questions would
appear to me to be yes and possibly no, and therein lies a difficulty. Yes,
McCarthy shows us a different world, most significantly in Blood Meridian
and The Road. This is what mankind is capable of, he is telling us in
the former, and because of that the latter he presents the road we may be
leading ourselves down. It is, then, a negative view, and what positives one
may take from his novels must generally be taken by this process of inversion:
don’t do that, or this may be the result. Such is the approach of organised
religion through the ages: behave, or else; believe, or de’il tak ye; belong,
or be cast adrift.
In this, then, we see echoes of
Hazel Motes and Tarwater, even of Captain Ahab; we see the human relegated
beneath the supernatural, and the result is obeisance to the godhead, whoever
or whatever that might be. Rather than transformative, then, it is reactionary:
it is promulgated on the maintenance of a primordial order rather than the
advancement of humanity. Hence the answer to the second question may be no:
McCarthy’s grotesquery does not wholly enlighten, but rather it can seem to
cast us backwards, to limit our freedom. McCarthy so constructs his characters
– indeed, they are often more archetypes than characters, with no psycho-social
histories or motivations – that they are unable to project forward.
It is all very well for McCarthy to
warn of the dangers to human society of our inwardness, our selfishness, our
self-destructive disregard for nature, because those are warnings we would do
well to heed, but in presenting only the binary oppositions of annihilation and
acceptance of a putative god, he is artificially defining the boundaries of the
debate. His grotesques are so designed, those characterless characters, that
they miss the true alternative, the human. They endure so much and experience
so little. And his words, all that rhetorical portentousness, serve only to
wrap a mystery around them that, in the end, overwhelms.
It is a grotesquery which doesn’t so
much say “I am alive” as “I can only die”.