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The Utopian Function of Affect in Carson McCullers’s <i>The Member of the Wedding</i> and <i>The Ballad of the Sad Café</i>

2009; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/slj.0.0037

1534-1461

Darren Millar,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Despite the prevalence of social themes in her fiction, Carson McCullers has not acquired a reputation as a writer with a progressive social vision. One reason for this view of McCullers's work is that her oblique approach to political matters of race, gender, and class has led many readers to view her work symbolically. A survey of McCullers criticism in the decades following the publication of her final novel would indicate that she exposes unhappiness that is spiritually, not historically, derived; that her works are allegorical depictions of loneliness and longing belonging to everyone; that her interest in socially and politically marginalized characters serves primarily to illustrate a universally tragic human condition. Changes to this critical approach to McCullers have been a long time coming. Since the 1970s, feminist critics like Elaine Ginsberg and Louise Westling have worked to recover the historical dimension of her work by foregrounding its exposure of gender roles, and now McCullers's cast of oddballs and freaks is often taken as a model of diversity and heterogeneity that is at least quasi-political in nature. The pall of tragedy, however, has for the most part remained. Only recently, with the 2003 publication of Sarah Gleeson-White's Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers, has a critic attempted to introduce a more affirmative view of McCullers, celebrating her menacing and ultimately transgressive vision, and its emancipatory and empowering (10). Given the heavy emotional tones of suffering and frustration that surround most of McCullers's characters, the relative lateness of this kind of appraisal is not surprising. Yet there are other elements in her work that suggest that tragedy is not her only mode of operation. True, her characters almost invariably suffer, and the worlds they inhabit are dim. But they are also frequently dreamers whose most consistent trait is the capacity to project themselves into some anticipated and variously imagined state of incipient togetherness. It matters little that the content of their respective visions often leaves them isolated or at odds with each other (as evinced in the explosive meeting between Jake Blount and Benedict Mady Copeland, Marxist visionaries both, at the end of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter). The presence of so many dreamers under one sky is a sign of untapped utopian potential which the failure of each individual only seems to emphasize. If McCullers's work traditionally has not been identified with hopeful affirmation it is only because the personal tragedies of her characters have clouded readers' perceptions of the utopian nature of her vision, a vision that is attuned to the social potential inherent in the collective, even while it seems to insist on the tragedy that besets individuals. The key to recognizing the utopian dimension of McCullers's fiction is to consider the conditions that impose limits and create possibilities in her characters' lives. In her fiction as well as in her expository writing, McCullers identifies these conditions with affective states. In a passage from her 1949 essay Loneliness... An American Malady, for example, she emphasizes how affect (in this case love) has the capacity to engender social as well as personal possibilities: Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the lyon, and there is a paradox about personal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: Who am I? Why am I? Where am I going?--and having cast out fear, can be honest and charitable. (Mortgaged 260) In what follows I am going explore the social extension of the we to which McCullers refers, especially in light of her comments about love opening new relations between the personality and the world. …