The Grotesque in Southern literature

 

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”.

 

Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers

 

Clock Without Hands is set in the early 1950s in a small town in Georgia and features four principal characters. JT Malone is a forty year old pharmacist diagnosed with leukaemia and given twelve to sixteen months to live. Judge Fox Clane is a redneck judge with diabetes who is lame following a stroke and lives a life of quiet melancholy, mourning his dead wife and son. His grandson, Jester is a young boy gradually becoming aware of racial prejudice and the tensions in his community. And Sherman Pew is a black boy hired by the Judge to act as his amanuensis and to give him his daily insulin injections. There is an undercurrent of homoerotic desire in Jester for Sherman, but Sherman is increasingly fuelled by indignation at the treatment of blacks in the racist society in which they live. Jester’s father, the judge’s son, committed suicide many years before in circumstances we discover, later, which link him tragically to Sherman. Sherman’s father, we find out late in the novel, was hanged for a crime he probably didn’t commit. This is a novel, then, with a lot of backstory. The narrative meanders along for 180 or so pages before exploding – literally so, with a firebombed house – into life near its conclusion. Even now, though, there are no histrionics. Carson McCullers doesn’t do melodrama: she doesn’t need to.

This, McCullers’s last novel, is certainly her least effective. That isn’t to say it is bad, but it is not a great work, like The Member of the Wedding or The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The McCullers trademarks are here: loneliness, disconnection, a skewed, black humour. But something is missing. There isn’t quite the heart that is in those earlier novels, the beautiful beating promise of human potential. I’m wary of saying there are no characters here who grab our sympathy the way that Frankie or Mick do, because it’s not that: I consistently argue against criticism of novels on the basis that characters should be likeable. And yet I found myself waiting for and wanting a Frankie to enter the narrative, somebody to anchor it in human emotion. Perhaps it is a sense of hope that is missing here. JT Malone, the nearest character to the central Frankie/Mick role in Clock Without Hands, is too passive. Jester, who could fulfil the role, is not well enough drawn. Sherman, who might have fitted the bill best of all, finally falls into caricature. He could be a cousin of Dr Copeland in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, wrapped up in himself and his situation, but he does not ring true in the way that the doctor does.

The judge is the most complex character in the novel. In lesser hands he could have been a caricature of the old south, a reactionary stubbornly clinging to the old ways and the old morality. And indeed, the judge is that. He has a history in the Ku Klux Klan; he has an insane passion to pass a Bill in Congress decreeing that old Confederacy currency (which he possesses by the million) be declared legal tender; his response to the events at the conclusion of the novel is chilling. And yet there is more to him than this. His devotion to Sherman, the young black boy, comes close to paternal affection. His view of black people – racist to the core – is imbued with a wrong-headed but nonetheless genuine intention to do them good. He is a man to be pitied. He is still mourning the death of Miss Missy, his wife who died of breast cancer, and his son, who committed suicide after the death of his wife in childbirth. He is an unhappy man, and his passions and cares and concerns feel genuine. It is possible to be simultaneously repelled by and sorry for someone, and in the judge Carson McCullers has created just such an individual.

But it isn’t enough to carry the novel.

I think the biggest disappointment about Clock Without Hands is its evocation of mood. Mood is everything in McCullers. She creates worlds, little sad, hopeful places which draw you in, make you want to be a part of them, even while warning you of their incipient dangers. The mixture of melancholia and hope she conjures is miraculous. But somehow, in Clock Without Hands, it does not come off. I don’t know whether the principal reason is the subject matter, the racism of the south just before desegregation, the casual violence and thoughtless hatred which occurred during that difficult period. While there is a timeless quality to the loneliness of Frankie and Mick in The Member of the Wedding and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter the drama of Clock Without Hands now feels dated. It cannot beguile in the same way as her earlier works.

Writing the Grotesque

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 William Faulkner’s Benjy to Flannery 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 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 in 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 in Flannery O'Connor's novel, 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".

The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

Frankie Adams is an “unjoined person.” Part of her craves connection, part of her is attracted by disconnection. She is contrary: sometimes sweet, sometimes bad-tempered; sometimes practical sometimes ethereal. She is an innocent, a twelve-year-old still baffled by the adult world and simultaneously drawn to and repelled by it. She is deeply in love with her brother and his soon-to-be bride and the focus of the book is her implacable but doomed resolve that, after the wedding, the three of them will drive off together into the wilderness. 

Read on a simple level, The Member of the Wedding is a gentle, beautiful, witty and sad story of adolescent confusion. Even read on this level it is a great work. But it goes deeper than this, of course. Otherwise we would be left with a novel presenting only the cliched oxymorons of teenage angst, that life can be bitter and sweet, funny and sad. That isn’t to decry such works – they have a power of their own – but Carson McCullers’s perception of human nature goes far beyond such truisms. Her disconnection is a cry for love, and her love is fractured by disconnection.

In The Member of the Wedding, she presents us with three fragile human beings: the gangly outsider Frankie; her black, four-times-married maid, Berenice and her first cousin, six-year-old John Henry. The interplay between them is remarkable. These ordinary people, none of them eloquent in the ways of human love, nonetheless manage to reveal extraordinary truths. Each has been born into a fixed identity, into a role that society expects of them – Berenice already to service; Frankie, in time, to marriage and children; and John Henry, even later, to a lifetime in the workplace of men. But each of these characters, in their own way, eschews convention.

The pre-war certainties of gender and race give way here to an understanding, simply, of people as people. John Henry reckons people should be “half boy and half girl”; Frankie wants them to change back and forward between sexes; Berenice imagines a world where everyone is light brown with blue eyes and black hair. Theirs are worlds of fairness and goodness. They even begin to criticise the Creator and each, in turn, assumes the role of “Holy Lord God” and decrees a better world. John Henry’s is “a mixture of delicious and freak”; Berenice’s contains no war, “[n]o stiff corpses hanging from the Europe trees and no Jews murdered anywhere”; Frankie’s is “the best of the three worlds”, in which she builds on Berenice’s basic concept, but adding “an aeroplane and a motor-cycle to each person, a world club with certificates and badges, and a better law of gravity”.

Their conversations around the kitchen table are perfectly judged. They are slightly stylised, so that some of the subject matter, when considered rationally, would be beyond at least the two children but, even so, the fictive dream holds: their visions of a better world are lucid and appealing and we remain in thrall to these three uncommon sages.

This is no, Eden, however. McCullers is no Pangloss and the imagined worlds of her characters are ultimately revealed not to be El Dorado. Although wildly humorous and broadly uplifting, The Member of the Wedding is explicit in its depiction of the disconnection of modern life. The experiences of its characters make this clear.

The central character is Frankie, our free-spirited, lonely, happy/unhappy, bored/engaged young tomboy. Her mother died giving birth to her and her father is remote and uncomprehending of his daughter. Frankie feels herself an outsider and dreams of escape. The novel begins:

It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.

She has dreams, and as the novel begins those dreams coalesce around her fantasy of accompanying her brother and his fiancee on their imminent honeymoon and beyond. She will, literally, become a “member of the wedding” and the three of them will head afterwards into the wilderness of Alaska and eventually they will make “thousands of friends, thousands and thousands and thousands of friends.” They will be, she concludes, “members of the whole world”. Thus, we have escape and flight, those essentials of freedom; but we also have family connection, the assertion of familial bonds more loving than those attaching Frankie to her father; and, more than that, we have a strong sense of human connection, a promise of companionship among the entire human family. The confusion wrought by her childhood alienation is thus, in Frankie’s eyes, brought to a perfect resolution: freedom, with control; escape, with ties; family, with community; private, with public. In Frankie’s adolescent mind, such contradictions offer entirely practicable solutions to the intractable problems of loneliness and hope and fear.

But Frankie’s entrance into adulthood is not, as we readers quickly intuit, going to be so easy. The day of the wedding is, naturally, a disaster. The bride manqué is spurned. But even before this, Frankie’s lessons are harsh. Styling herself F. Jasmine to separate her grown-up self from the childish Frankie she has come to hate, she goes into town and enters a bar. Here, she is mistaken by a soldier for a much older girl and, unable to refuse, goes with him to his room, where he attempts to seduce her. F. Jasmine is so innocent she doesn’t even realise what is happening, only later making a connection between this and an earlier experience, when she witnessed the lodger and his wife in their room, as the lodger appeared to be having some form of fit. Growing up, then, is not an idyllic rite of passage, and those who dismiss The Member of the Wedding in such terms are not doing it justice.

Accompanying Frankie through much of the narrative are Berenice and John Henry. Berenice, old (“I bet you are forty years old,” says Frankie) and wise, represents the adulthood to which Frankie aspires, and John Henry, her young cousin, the childhood from which she is retreating. The truth, of course, is more complicated than that: at various times the woman retains the sense of a child, and the boy reveals the insight of a man. But, in this way, the three form a unique bond. At one point, one of the most beautiful in the novel, they each burst into tears at precisely the same moment: “suddenly it started, though why and how they did not know; the three of them began to cry... and though their reasons were three different reasons, yet they started at the same instant as though they had agreed together.” It is one of the most arresting scenes I’ve read in a long time, a middle-aged black woman, a tomboy half-girl, half-woman and an infant boy, sitting round a table, crying. It is inexplicably moving.

Berenice is lost in the past. She has married four times, but the latter three occasions are to men whom she married only because, in different ways, they reminded her of her true love, her first husband Ludie, who died of pneumonia the same year that Frankie was born. She married him when she was thirteen – that is when she was only a year older than Frankie is now. Thus, while Frankie is straining to embrace the future and move into adulthood, Berenice’s emotional development has stalled completely: an adult, dismissive of Frankie’s childish whims, she is nonetheless stuck in the past, holding to memories of younger, happier times, and is as confounded by visions of the future as the confused child.

The final member of the triumvirate is John Henry West. How difficult is it to write convincingly of a six-year-old main character? Cormac McCarthy tried and failed in The Crossing: in the early drafts Boyd Parham is only seven, but by the time of the published draft he has aged to fourteen. But John Henry West is a living, breathing boy. In a way, in some emotional or spiritual sense, he is the eldest of the three, wise beyond his years, calm and sensible, except when he is covering the walls of the kitchen with “queer, child drawings” or picturing the freaks from the Chattahoochee Exposition who so excite his interest. His heartbreaking fate represents the end of childhood and, no matter how much we always want to break that bond at the time, age and experience and weariness usually return us, at one time or another, to a sense of nostalgia for those lost days. John Henry reminds us that we cannot.

So what is The Member of the Wedding about? For McCullers, it is about belonging. She writes:

I to think the idea of wanting to belong haunts every child. And not only children. I think it is the primary question: ‘Who am I? What am I? Or, where do I belong? and where can I belong?’ But childhood or adolescence is a time of crisis, and such questions are more haunting, more immediate, then.

It is that, and it’s more than that. Belonging is a basic human desire but it brings with it, too, a sense of need. And it requires love, and faith, and trust. The necessity of love and the difficulty of love – whether that is romantic love or familial love or societal love – that is what this novel addresses. That something so necessary and so beautiful can be, at the same time, so painful is what makes love such a difficult emotion to manage. And that is why our human connections are always so fragile.

The saddest, most beautiful reflection of this sad and beautiful book is that, throughout, Frankie is connected. All along, she is indeed part of a marriage of three – a marriage between her and Berenice and John Henry. But, as it transpires, this marriage is as illusory as the one in Frankie’s imagination, and it fractures into tragedy. The triumph of The Member of the Wedding is that, through this tragedy, a sense of hope remains.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

I suspect if I’d read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter twenty-five years ago I’d have become the bore in the corner telling everyone how they just have to read this book. Perhaps I’ll make up for lost time now. There are very few books I’ve finished and immediately wanted to start reading all over again. Tess of the D’Urbervilles was the first. The Tin Drum was second. One Hundred Years of Solitude next. That may be about it. And now The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Carson McCullers was twenty-three when she wrote this book. I don’t know how she did it. At twenty-three I had come nowhere close to understanding myself, let alone the rest of humanity. At twenty-three McCullers created a living world of living people, lonely and sad human beings, disconnected, wanting, longing, failing, falling prey to a world for which they were ill-equipped. Human beings who failed and were failed.

The novel focuses on five central characters, essentially

archetypes who represent humanity and its problems. In Dr Copeland we have the embodiment of the civil rights movement and the struggle against racism; in Mick, a thirteen-year-old girl, we see the travails of young  (especially poor) women growing up in a male-dominated world; in Jake we have the communist conscience, the struggle of the worker against the system; Singer, the deaf-mute, is the eternal outsider, searching for companionship; and Biff, keeping his cafe open throughout the night even though it is uneconomic to do so, because he can think of nothing else to do and because nobody else is doing it, is slowly ageing, watching his life disappear into sameness and disappointment. If this sounds contrived, writing by numbers, a character for every ‘issue’, then don’t be fooled. This may be the basic structure of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, but it is far from rigid, and the episodic plot, in which each of the characters interact in turn, falling in and out of the action, feels beautifully organic. It is a masterclass in marshalling your resources.

In particular, a significant strength of the novel is the way that McCullers uses voice to develop character. The narrative is presented in third person but takes the perspective of each of the major characters in turn. Thus, we see the development of the five principals from each other’s perspective. For example, when we begin to discern the otherworldliness of Singer, it is Biff who tells us that Jake and Mick have both turned him into a ‘sort of home-made God’ because his muteness allows them to project their idealised visions of goodness onto him. Or, of Doctor Copeland, we learn from his daughter, Portia, that he ‘done lost God and turned his back to religion’ and all his troubles stem from that loss. Explaining her approach, McCullers wrote:

There are five different styles of writing - one for each of the main characters who is treated subjectively and an objective, legendary style for the mute. The object of each of these methods of writing is to come as close as possible to the inner psychic rhythms of the character from whose point of view it is written.

This explanation also reveals another of the great strengths of the novel, the way it melds realism and mythicism. Ihab Hassan sees this as a problem with the text, suggesting that McCullers fails to successfully integrate ‘social man’ and ‘individual man’, that is, outer reality (history) and inner reality (psychology). I cannot agree. The structure of the novel is controlled perfectly and there is a clear progression from the characters and their internal preoccupations to the dangers of the wider world (the novel is set in 1939, in the lead-up to the Second World War, and culminates in a race riot). The key to this structural cohesion is the character of Singer, the mute. He is both real and unreal, occupying an important place in the lives of the other characters but existing, himself, in a kind of alternative reality where he and his mute friend, Antonapoulos, consigned early in the novel to an asylum, can continue to live in harmony. The ‘home-made God’, as Biff describes him, is much treasured by the other characters, though he himself is completely unaware of this. And in the novel’s final part, after Singer’s death, their reactions to that death help to solidify their beliefs. Each of them acts, makes a statement in the real world, sees their interaction with that real world develop. Thus, a strong element of realism in the novel is manifested through the subtle use of McCullers’ ‘legendary style’.

Oliver Evans, writing in 1962, notes that ‘[i]t is impossible to understand Mrs. McCullers' work unless one realizes that she conceives of fiction chiefly as parable. The reader who concerns himself exclusively with the realistic level of her stories will never fully appreciate them.’ Evans goes on to suggest that narrative is always secondary to allegory in McCullers’ work, describing her as a ‘didactic writer’ whose goal is to teach truths about human nature rather than to entertain. Again, I disagree. There are moments when the novel does slip into didacticism, such as when the Jewish boy, Harry Minowitz lectures Mick on Nazi Germany or some of Jake’s more laboured political pronouncements, but to describe the overall allegorical tone as didactic does McCullers a disservice. Evans is correct, however, to stress that a literal reading of McCullers in realist vein is unlikely to be rewarding.

Such an approach – and this is where I think Hassan’s analysis falls down, underestimates the depth of the central theme. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a novel about human love. It is about our aspirations and our needs, the concomitants of fruitful, fulfilled lives, the potential for happiness, the danger of despair. It is, therefore, intensely personal: the novel explores these individuals’ lives, what it is that makes them who they are. Yet it does so against a realist backdrop in which Dr Copeland suffers vicious racism; in which, surrounded by friends, Singer fails to find friendship; in which Jake rails helplessly at the downtrodden workers who cannot or will not help themselves; where Mick finds her dreams tempered by harsh economic reality; and where Biff, that lonely seeker of companionship, continues his fruitless quest. People close to these characters die; others are abused horribly. The world turns and history proceeds in violence. And these people, these poor symbols of humanity, are inextricably bound to it. Alienation and isolation afflict them. Through it all, their preoccupation is to find love.

All of this may sound as though the novel presents a hopeless world, but far from it. There is much despair for the characters here, but their plight shows a path for us. Connection, communication, this is the key. Thus, the tragedy of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is demonstrated by each of the characters’ desperate search for communication, human empathy. They all want somebody to know. But ultimately each is incapable of knowing anyone else. Each is sloughed in their own travails and, when opportunities arise, they fail to take them. Thus, Dr Copeland and Jake come close to agreement on the need for action against the increasing racist tendency, but end up repelling one another and parting acrimoniously. Earlier, Copeland even manages to alienate his own family, from whom he is already largely estranged but who, through his daughter, Portia, attempt a reconciliation with him; it fails because Copeland proves quite incapable of hiding his disappointment at his children’s meek acceptance of racism. Meanwhile, Singer remains oblivious of the wellspring of goodwill that surrounds him. Mick’s attempts to help her young brother backfire. On the only occasion when all five main characters are present together, in Singer’s room, there is only an awkward silence. They all want to communicate, to express themselves, to share the human experience with others, but they lack the wherewithal to achieve it. How may they - we - attain fulfillment?

McCullers’ remedy, one suspects, is religious, and there are strong religious resonances throughout The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. However, whether one takes a religious or secular view, the predicament remains as she describes it – the disconnection of the individual from society, the difficulty of achieving community.

In this vein, many critics have argued that Singer is a Christ-figure. Jan Whitt, for example, suggest that the remaining characters ‘seek to work out their own salvation’ through communicating with the mute Singer who becomes, as a result, a ‘paralyzed Christ figure, so restricted by the expectations of others that he is fictionalized by them.’ There is certainly a strong argument for Singer-as-Christ. People are drawn to him, they see in him whatever it is that they aspire to in the name of goodness. They see him as a conduit to fulfillment. And this is the great irony of the novel. It is the mute man who can show the others how to communicate, how to achieve their aspirations. But, of course, they fail. They sit in silence, mistrusting one another, resentful that they cannot be alone with Singer. And this, it seems to me, is a powerful message: communication with one’s saviour, whoever or whatever that may be, should not come at the expense of your fellow humanity. For a so-called religious novel that seems to me a radical call to humanist faith.

Therefore, it seems too simplistic to consider this to be a religious novel. It is certainly spiritual, in as much as it presents a quest for understanding, but too much remains unresolved for it to seriously be claimed by those of a religious persuasion to be a religious novel. In this, it appears to mirror McCullers’ own relationship with religion. Much like Herman Melville, she was drawn to religion and aspired to belief, but found such belief troublesome. Writing about The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers described its themes as a ‘unifying principle or God.’ Note that this is a principle or God, not of God. A search for godness is not the same thing as a search for God. And godness, in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, will ultimately be found in humanity.

Christ – goodness – is in each of us and all of us, humanity as a collective, and it is our failing that we cannot see it. We fail to reach out to one another and, in so doing, we fail ourselves and we fail each other. This is what The Heart is a Lonely Hunter reminds us.

Now, you just have to read this book...