The Meeting of Love and Pain: A Life without Art
1977; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research
ResumoIn one of her earliest pieces of fiction, Mortgaged Heart, Carson McCullers tells story of a young student in New York during 1930s who watched a young man trying to provide for his pregnant wife. As story opens husband brings home regularly a quart of milk, then a pint and then a half pint and finally there is no milk at all. This story can almost be used as a parable to suggest what happened to its author's creative talent over a brief lifetime. When The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter appeared in 1940, Carson McCullers was widely acclaimed as one of most talented authors of her generation, but most commentators found less and less sustenance in novels and stories as they appeared. With possible exception of The Member of Wedding, later novels are usually thought to be much inferior to earlier ones. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter relates in convincing detail tragic fates of a dozen or so characters who are trying to live and maintain their human dignity in middle of a genuine Southern wasteland. In this first novel McCullers is able to control her abiding love of allegory so that allegorical level, even though it's very obviously there, can be stripped away without destroying completely realistic story, a pathetic tale of a small group of characters whose search for love, understanding, and compassion is thwarted by soul-crushing social and economic conditions they can neither understand nor control. Covering slightly more than a year--it opens in spring of 1938 and closes in late summer of 1939--the novel is set in a small Southern town, most of whose citizens are economically dependent upon a group of cotton mills owned by Northern capital. McCullers's opening description sets tone for pathetic tale to follow: town was in middle of deep South. The summers were long and months of winter cold were very few. Nearly always sky was glassy, brilliant azure and sun burned down riotously bright. Then light, chill rains of November would come, and perhaps later there would be frost and some short months of cold. The winters were changeable, but summers always were burning hot (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940], p. 6). During long summers there was no way to escape relentless heat, and anyone walking down main street of town could see in faces of workers at cotton mills the desperate look of hunger and of loneliness. In this drab environment man is estranged from man and family unity is a meaningless phrase. In this desolate land, which suggests Fitzgerald's valley of ashes, life is without meaning or purpose, and Carson McCullers's characters flounder around seeking some glimmer of hope or promise, some suggestion that human suffering might provide possibility for contentment, if not outright happiness. The plot of this story may contain most hopeless and confused maze of emotional involvements in modern literature. A deaf mute, John Singer, is emotionally attached to another mute, Antonapoulos. The reason for this attachment is not quite clear, though homosexuality is hinted at, because Antonapoulos is imbecilic, egocentric, revolting (his chief amusement apparently is urinating in street), a thief who steals from fruit stand where he works and goes into violent fits Of rage and abuse at Singer for no apparent reason. Although there is no plausible explanation for Singer's love of Antonapoulos, attachment is genuine enough to prevent Singer from returning affection he receives from all other principal characters in story: Jake Blount, an itinerant mill worker, who has found solution to most of world's problems in works of Karl Marx; Dr. Copeland, a scholarly black physician who has devoted most of his time and all of his resources to an attempt to solve black-white relations, only to find he has cut himself off from both races, even from members of his own family; Mick Kelly, a thirteen-year-old girl with a deep love of music, who gets no sympathy from her family (each member of which is completely lost in his own problems) and who tries to share her dreams with Singer; and Biff Brannon, owner of New York Cafe, who attempts to control his life with a kind of dispassionate detachment, who tries to live without making his existence dependent upon some other person or upon some cause or dream. …
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