LITERARY ALCHEMY AND ELEMENTAL WORDSMITHERY:

LINKING THE SUBLIME AND THE GROTESQUE IN

CARSON MCCULLERS’S THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER

By

Stacy L. Gardner

A Thesis submitted to the

Faculty of the Graduate Studies Division of

Ohio Dominican University

Columbus, Ohio

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH

October 2016 ii

CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

LITERARY ALCHEMY AND ELEMENTAL WORDSMITHERY:

LINKING THE SUBLIME AND THE GROTESQUE IN

CARSON MCCULLERS’S THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER

By

Stacy L. Gardner

Thesis Approved by:

iii

CONTENTS

CERTFICATION PAGE ………………………………………………………………………ii

CONTENTS……………………………………………………………………………………iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………iv

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………...1

CHAPTER 1 – EXAMINING SELECT THEORIES OF THE GROTESQUE AND THE

SUBLIME...... 9

1.2 – VICTOR HUGO’S THEORIES...... 11

1.3 – THOMAS MANN’S THEORIES...... 23

CHAPTER 2 – REVEALING BILDUNGSROMAN...... 28

CHAPTER 3 – CONSIDERING THE OTHER...... 48

CHAPTER 4 – EXPLORING THE HUMAN CONDITION...... 65

CONCLUSION – LONELY HUNTERS AND A BEAUTIFUL SUICIDE...... 83

WORKS CITED...... 90

WORKS CONSULTED...... 96

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to express my gratitude to the graduate faculty of the Master of Arts in English program at Ohio Dominican University. The faculty’s approach towards this internet-based program made this experience much more manageable for me, as I was initially apprehensive about this approach to learning and interacting. Now, I cannot see earning this degree without this approach, given where I am in my life’s path. I am extremely grateful to both Professor

Glazier and Dr. Brick for their direction, advice, and insight, which proved necessary to outline and to structure my vision, while I meandered through the grotesque and sublime and its links.

I owe immense gratitude to my husband Eric for his unwavering support, his jokes, and his consistent belief in my abilities and me. His unconditional encouragement and love provides a foundation for our family and for me, while it creates a partnership where possibility, too, can be our companion. I want to thank my son Riley, who spent many nights under our dining room table reading to me, looking over my shoulder asking me about my reading material, listening to the class lectures, and watching other student videos; his endless questions inspire my quest for continued learning. I am thankful that he understood why Mommy had to miss so many practices and games “to complete her papers.” I am forever beholden to my daughter Finnessa for being my inspiration to want so hard to educate myself and for me to exemplify the importance and value of an educated single mother in this society and to prove that anything is possible with perseverance, love, and a fateful alignment of the stars. I am honored to have such a family.

1

INTRODUCTION

I am a man; nothing human can be alien to me. --Latin poet Terence, Heuton Timoroumenos

Carson’s heart was often lonely and it was a tireless hunter for those to whom she would offer it, but it was a heart that was graced with light that eclipsed its shadows. --Tennessee Williams, “Some Words Before”

Carson McCullers always had a type that interested her—the freak, the outcast, the nonconformist, the stranger, the black person, the disabled, the asexual, the gay person—those who exemplify the Other. McCullers’s fascination with the Other became apparent in middle childhood, when the traveling carnivals visited her hometown, Columbus, Georgia, every year, and the spectacles who performed and those who sat before her would render her transfixed.

Biographer Virginia Spencer Carr reports how McCullers, called Lula in her childhood, often visited these shows to view “with terror and fascination the midway freaks” from whom she

“craved eye contact” because McCullers perceived “intuitively their abject loneliness and felt a kinship” with these individuals (Lonely 1), who either chose to display themselves or whose parents permitted them to exhibit their congenital, sometimes considered grotesque, conditions for money. McCullers possessed an “intense desire” and initiated considerable “effort to relate to others” because in relating to other people, she became “increasingly aware that one’s physical aberration was but an exaggerated symbol of what she considered everyman’s ‘caught’ condition of spiritual isolation and sense of aloneness” (1), suggesting these people with physical differences were destined for solitude, loneliness, or misunderstanding and implying people are not born into conditions of loneliness and isolation—rather they “catch” such conditions in the same manner as one catches a cold or an infection spreads. What happens when these aberrations manifest outside physical appearance and become psychological or conditional and 2 embody human reality—and eventually become the norm? Modernism and McCullers happen.

McCullers’s interest in things atypical inspired a heightened awareness of her eventual utilization of literary devices including symbols, Bildungsroman, characterization, conflicts, tragedy, and alterity, while this interest also contributed to a cognizance of the human need for communion, love, and companionship and the desperate, sometimes tragic conditions such absences create; but her compassion and perceptions magnify a remarkable acumen for characters and conditions both grotesque and sublime. This affinity and flourishing empathy for the Other imprinted upon her a sublime interest in things many people considered grotesque, but

McCullers’s sister Margarita G. Smith believes this imprint began earlier than her middle childhood; it began as a byproduct of McCullers’s own experiences as a sickly child with a delicate disposition.

Smith mentions how, in early childhood, McCullers suffered bouts of ill health that were sometimes lengthy and painful, leaving her periodically bedridden (xv), amid her mother’s adamant and continued proclamations that her daughter “was different from everyone else”

(Carr, Lonely 14). Their mother claimed she received “secret prenatal signs that her child would be precocious and eventually achieve greatness as an artist” (3), further encouraging McCullers’s heir apparency and personal burden to do well at something artistic and increasing her tendencies toward addiction and vacillating “self-estrangement and isolation” (14). After her mother paid for lessons with a local well-known piano teacher, the piano and music became McCullers’s companions, leading to a ravenous hunger to practice and to play well enough to afford her mother’s prophesied fame (25). When McCullers was fifteen and found herself hospitalized for yet another extended illness (28), she started to consider writing as her path to prominence because it grew into something she did well and produced voraciously, and the act of writing 3 furnished her control over fate, conditions, and character attributes, although she had an appetite for more. Individuality, polarity, and the desire to seek also enticed her, but within the act of seeking, she discovered humans mostly fear what they do not know because fear obstructs and expands hypothetically, perplexingly, and contagiously; ultimately, fear corrupts. She regards fear as “the primary source of evil” in human development and the human response to other people (“Loneliness” 260), since people often elect against managing, converting, or mastering their fears. Fearful people create oppressive, caustic conditions, and such conditions affect people—Others—including McCullers, yet she strove to capture the conditions, the effects, the people, and their fear, conveying simultaneously mythic and modern dimensions in her writing.

McCullers epitomized an Other seeking an imagined love she could not locate, trying to be the self she could not be, via a passive-aggressive pathway riddled with liquor to indulge, to harm, and to soothe; with her choice to leave Georgia to feel and to escape then return to feel and to heal only to depart again because she felt smothered; and with her writing to redeem, liberate, and cloak herself in the literary skins and bodies of characters she crafted. Her body proved an ultimate source of discomfort—her aberration—and represented a frightening reminder of “her constant closeness to death” (Smith xi), supplying her with the grotesque realization that her next blinding headache or bout of pleurisy might result in another debilitating cerebral stroke, which could prevent her from writing or end her life. Even with these maladies and her required convalescence for improved health, the “self-destructive aspect of her nature became more apparent” to her friends (Carr, Lonely 290); her insatiable appetite for cigarettes, sherry, bourbon, whiskey, and wine never ceased because “she needed a certain amount of alcohol in her system to function creatively” and to produce in the manner which plagued other writers of the time including William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Parker, and her friend 4

Tennessee Williams (Carr, Lonely 143). Through her writing process, McCullers became

“all the characters in her work” (Smith xi), meandering through landscapes and depositing a raw, explicit, and timeless realism necessary for the creation of conditions amassed from her own experiences, from her observations of the lives of others, and from those she improvised because they were the necessary ingredients at the time. From where did these improvisations originate?

Although in “The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing” McCullers explained how her

“imagination is truer than the reality” and “main asset is intuition” because she claimed “too many facts impede[d]” development of her characters, she produced relatable characters living in conditions of verisimilitude that readers know, identify with, or have experienced in their own lives (276). She understood and described the importance of illumination to her creative process:

“The focus comes at random moments which no one can understand, least of all the author. For me, they usually follow great effort. To me, these illuminations are the grace of labor” (275); she held true to her “conception of” characters (276), as their images and dispositions streamed

“from [a] subconscious need for communication, for self-expression” (277), uniting her with her creations and developing a culmination of and a schema for her characters. McCullers, too, employs the value and necessity of unpleasant “details [that] provoke more ideas than any generality could furnish” (276), suggesting that many readers have an insatiable hunger for morbidity, tragedy, and drama because details evoke and induce readers’ own grotesque and sublime interests and needs for “the elemental confrontation with life and death” (Fromm,

Revolution ch. 4). Her regard for detail enhanced her preference for and employment of grotesque characters, sometimes in the form of Others, meaning she could focus on impactful, haunting themes and experiences, after tapping into the modern sublime to emphasize the chaotic forces within those characters and the same themes and experiences. 5

To further delineate her process, McCullers proclaimed that a writer’s work represents an aggregate of one’s “personality” and “the region in which [s]he was born” (“Flowering” 281), highlighting two fundamental ingredients that likewise qualify both as hosting characteristics of the grotesque and the sublime interchangeably. She distinguished “the cheapness of human life in the South” as a condign parallel between the grotesque and the sublime within the “Gothic school of Southern writing,” yet she defines love as “the main generator of all good writing,” even as she immerses her characters in seemingly fruitless quests to discover it (281). It is unclear whether her motivation was to identify where love is absent for others or whether she wrote to unearth love for herself, but her recognition that her words and the words she read meant different things to people afforded her a sense that one’s access to love represented an unavoidable conspiracy. Was this her realization that everyone depicts the Other when seeking love and companionship or is this her confession that love eludes everyone because it represents a figment of imaginary creation and does not exist? Does the human condition become the only reliable companion of the Other because their characteristics qualify as and epitomize both grotesque and sublime?

Despite numerous theories over the last few centuries and ample scholarship exploring the sublime and the grotesque as independent elements in literature, scholars seem to have ignored linking these two elements in their analyses of and critical responses to the modern novel. Little scholarship exists to decipher and to support why together the grotesque and the sublime are essential characteristics of both the modern novel and McCullers’s The Heart Is a

Lonely Hunter (1940), but are they necessary in tandem to illuminate the human condition and personify the Other? Do all the characters, the Others, and human conditions in the modern novel require a grotesque or sublime characterization? In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers 6 cultivates these four qualities to create the perfect amalgam of timeless despair and loneliness amidst the struggle to survive. The Other, like the sublime and the grotesque, highlights simultaneously the oppositions and the similarities in people only to suggest that people become the Other when this examination occurs, while the human condition, like the sublime and the grotesque, yields many definitions, theories, and differences, but as these conditions materialize, they significantly affect one’s responses to stimuli and to people and provoke readers to consider why humans are the way they are and why they behave in the ways they do.

What does a twenty-something know and reveal about the human condition and the

Other? In his brief review of McCullers’s debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Edward D.

McDonald identifies the novel as “veritably a miracle, a miracle of compassion and pity and irony…. [Her] genius is ageless—and here one faces nothing less,” indicating the irrelevance of

McCullers’s age in her mastery of characterizing the Other and describing the human condition

(4). For Dayton Kohler, McCullers represents a “born writer” who paints the world and its people “with fidelity and rich complexity” using “the broadest social picture” in a most objective fashion, but in doing so, she restricts her own emotional responses and instead projects them into her characters (2, 6). Walter Allen positions McCullers in the company of William Faulkner as

“the most remarkable novelist in the South”; Allen proclaims her “genius is at least as strange as

Faulkner’s,” but he regards her expression as hosting “lucidity and precision, [with] a classical simplicity.” He acknowledges her tortured vision, but he believes, “There is nothing tortured or odd in the texture of her prose; and the raw material of her art is the world as commonly observed,” meaning her style of writing conveys concrete observations and experiences of

Southern Americans while maintaining a necessary empathic detachment (132). Like

McDonald, Allen, and Kohler, Richard Wright opines McCullers knew myriad and understood 7 the depths of the human condition because of her approach toward character development: “Miss

McCullers’s picture of loneliness, death, accident, insanity, fear, mob violence, and terror is perhaps the most desolate that has so far come from the South. Her quality of despair is unique and individual” (3), revealing she understood such extremes well enough to factor them into her writing and to construct conditions and people, specifically forms of the Other, from the seeds of her own vulnerability, experience, and isolation and an intensity of her own physical and personal landscape, as she captures human suffering with poetic ease and specificity like James

Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne did before her.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter shares the distinction with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of

Darkness (1899) and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) of not only incorporating the characteristics of the sublime and the grotesque into characterizations to highlight characters’ strengths, weaknesses, and flaws, but McCullers integrates the grotesque and the sublime into her novel’s structure to create conditions that overshadow, haunt, and influence her characters’ actions and inactions; this technique further propounds the human condition and the Other as linking the sublime and the grotesque within McCullers’s novel. She skillfully and purposefully associates and aligns the grotesque and the sublime, while she simultaneously juxtaposes aspects of modernism, creating a pessimistic female Bildungsroman for Mick Kelly and exposing the unpredictability, perplexity, and fright of adolescence. Within the context of connecting the sublime and the grotesque, she employs various narrative techniques to highlight how truth, decay, chiaroscuro, nature, idealism, and connectedness affect and depict her Others, thereby illuminating the hopelessness they emote and further reinforcing the power and influence of the human condition. She also wields darkness, conflicts, and tragedies found within the human condition to eliminate, to deny, and to destroy any semblance of hope and to allude to the 8 fruitless pursuit of love for her characters and readers alike.

In order to establish these links and continue a discussion regarding their use in tandem,

Chapter 1 will examine and explicate the theories of Victor Hugo and Thomas Mann, two writers who see purpose in the unification of the grotesque and the sublime in modern literature. The chapter will evaluate what a few theorists express about Hugo’s and Mann’s theories, will connect these theories in terms of the characters, landscapes, and situations in McCullers’s The

Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and will interpret relationships found within the theories to establish perimeters in which McCullers places the Others and to identify what exactly the grotesque and the sublime access, predicate, and delineate for her characters and readers. Chapter 2 focuses on the novel’s female Other Mick Kelly and the unpredictability of her adolescence and employs

Hugo’s and Mann’s theories on the grotesque and the sublime to inspect Kelly’s experiences and to chronicle her Bildungsroman, exposing a pessimistic and fractured mood that not only affects readers and characters but further unites the grotesque and the sublime through McCullers’s promotion of the modern notion that life seems full of despair and loneliness. Chapter 3 will briefly define the Other and identify some of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter’s male characters who most exemplify the Other—John Singer, Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, and Jake Blount— and analyze their relationships with one another and support the idea that Other unifies the grotesque and the sublime. Chapter 4 presents four applicable, modern theories of the human condition and explicates similar conditions found in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. These theories parse the scope, the qualities, and the effects of the human condition and the ways the characters manage these conditions. This analysis further supports the belief that the grotesque, the sublime, and the Other represent literary elemental dependents, and they do not exist without the literary connective tissue of the human condition casting shadows on them all. 9

CHAPTER 1

EXAMINING SELECT THEORIES OF THE GROTESQUE AND THE SUBLIME

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. . . . the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood. --Sherwood Anderson

The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state. --Victor Hugo

Besides revealing insights into her own character choices and explaining her writing style and application of several literary devices in a few of her own novels, in “The Flowering Dream:

Notes on Writing,” Carson McCullers shares her thoughts on and responses to several influential writers including Anne Frank, William Faulkner, Gustave Flaubert, and Friedrich Nietzsche, authors whose material affected her emotionally or physically. Blended in this stream-of- consciousness article for Esquire are tidbits about her interest in concrete details exposing both the sublimity and the grotesquery of everyday life—the “human things even if they aren’t wholesome”—implying for her, such things represent humanity’s challenge to exist amongst the age-old struggles between good and evil, austerity and indulgence, and humility and narcissism.

She contends such details “provoke more ideas than any generality could furnish” and are

“soberly” inspirational raw material for her imagination and crucial components in her creative process. She identifies her source for such information including what people were wearing when they died and what a suspected murderess ate for breakfast as “the New York Daily News” because “the New York Times never reports” such morbid material (“Flowering” 276); this minutiae support the human voyeuristic instinct and atmospheric fascination with grotesque circumstances, leaving people in a state of awe, or sublimity, as they aim to not only personify the dead and but also consider how and under what conditions they lived, making them relatable, 10 significant, and not an Other—at least for a moment.

McCullers’s interest in the grotesque and the sublime did not awaken within the dense population of New York City or serve as an epiphany while writing The Heart Is a Lonely

Hunter; her interest began, rooted itself, and flourished in the region where she was born and arose as a retort to the varied human conditions she observed, experienced, and aimed to understand. The grotesque and the sublime reside within the Southern landscape “where the presence of death is as palpable as the smell of honeysuckle” (Yaeger, ch. 5, sec. 2). As a result of such irony, McCullers constructs a reciprocal relationship between the sublime and the grotesque due largely to the minimal value placed on “human life in the South” (“Flowering”

281), and to “the thing [life] itself, the material detail [of life and humanity] has an exaggerated value” because “life is plentiful; children are born and they die, or if they do not die, they live and struggle,” making sustained, lifelong hardships the reward for surviving childhood and adolescence and exposing the bleak outlook channeled via modernity (McCullers, “Russian”

254). She delineates connectedness between Southern writing, characters, and experiences to novels authored by the Russian realists Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky because of their amalgamation of similar qualities, content, and literary devices and the accuracy in which they portray “the painful substance of life” (258)—what McCullers did well, as she aimed “with a gloomy vision of modernity” to depict “the soul of man” as “aimless and loveless” and meandering through life seeking a cause or a direction (Gleeson-White, “Revisiting” 108). It is important to note McCullers’s connection between Russian and American Southern writers specifically because not only does she address the macrocosmic amoral nature, the struggle of human beings, the condemnation and treatment of the Other, and the complacency of conformity, but she determines the grotesque and the sublime exist elsewhere outside of her imagination. 11

The grotesque and the sublime appear extrinsically separate because each functions independently without regard for the other device, yet they both inherently affect people as abstract concepts of reality, personality, and condition; however, they also represent concurrent, symbiotic counterparts within tragedy, drama, and the human condition—and people’s definitions of both, while indistinct and oblique, lack verbal certainty and consistency, resulting from the varied ingredients of perception, experience, feelings, connotations, and theories. The grotesque and the sublime coexist as parts of a whole readers discover in modern novels and are reminiscent of what they would find in William Shakespeare and in Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Norse mythology, since that literature provides infrastructures to develop conditions for characters to thrive, fail, abate, die, or just exist as they were meant to exist.

To understand how the grotesque and the sublime function together to expose the human condition and to personify the Other and why they are essential devices in the modern novel The

Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, an examination of some of their theories becomes necessary. This chapter will specifically examine Victor Hugo’s theories first before briefly considering Thomas

Mann’s position, since they both envision and articulate corresponding and imperative relationships between the grotesque and the sublime in various forms of literature. While demonstrating how these theories apply to characters, situations, and landscapes within Lonely

Hunter, the chapter will also examine how a few modern theorists defend and question Hugo’s and Mann’s theories and positions.

1.2 Victor Hugo’s Theories on the Grotesque and the Sublime

With the publication of Victor Hugo’s (1802-1885) drama Cromwell in 1827, Hugo penned a lengthy, intricate “Preface to Cromwell” where he advocates the current interest in the 12 grotesque and the sublime, two concepts of which he presumes readers carry some knowledge, and with this “Preface to Cromwell,” Hugo gestures that the classical theater may be drastically altered with a masterful juxtaposition of the grotesque and the sublime and so might the author’s intent when developing a play or other forms of literature. With humbleness and vulnerability, he forthrightly exposes the reasons why an author might include a preface in a work before soliciting readers and critics, using a hypnotic yet mildly intellectual and informative lesson, masquerading as a form of storytelling that garners continued reading; in other words, this preface in its form has widespread appeal—and for good reason. W. D. Howarth justifies the appeal and “the impact of” Hugo’s “style” because he enriches the form with his “imagination” and “rhetorical devices” including his “predilection for forceful antithesis” balanced by the agency of “bold, provocative imagery” (136). Notably, Hugo elucidates the modern interdependent, creationary relationship between the grotesque and the sublime, since he imagines “the modern muse” seeing “things in a higher and broader light” (6), meaning he identifies modernity as inspiring evolutionary thinking and expanding the classical tradition as established by the prominent epic poet Homer and dramatists Aristophanes and Aeschylus.

Hugo begins what Howarth believes to be a “precocious . . . if not genius” talent in his

“Preface to Cromwell” by chronicling poetry in its many forms and specific literary genres and simultaneously reassures readers of what they do know (122), as he teaches them information they lack. Hugo asserts that once Christianity “became firmly established... [people were] thrown into confusion” because it “fashioned melancholy” (5), defined as the “sublimest tone” (Baker

171), and melancholy caused humans to withdraw into themselves “in [the] presence of these imposing vicissitudes” or human conditions, while they contemplated “the bitter disillusionments of life” because their choices, struggles, and class structures plagued them. Hugo designates 13

“melancholy and meditation” as both “demons of analysis and controversy,” since the human tendency can be to contemplate so much so that nothing happens and opportunities pass (5). The contemplation becomes the spoil in the same way melancholy does—they both spoil responses, perseverance, and actions, and for this, grotesquery spreads. Melancholy affords and integrates the frights of the grotesque and the contemplation of the sublime to create memorable and complex characters, art, and literature.

In Lonely Hunter, McCullers distributes Hugo’s “demons,” melancholy and meditation, evenly amongst her major and minor characters; no one is safe from her nearly debilitating dose of tragedy, turmoil, impairment, disillusionment, or deliberation. The absence of his deaf-mute friend Spiros Antonapoulos, whose cousin commits him to an insane asylum, impacts John

Singer, a major character, in such a way he can no longer inhabit the space they previously shared; he removes himself from their small two-room apartment after having lived there for ten years and begins renting a room in the Kelly family’s house. To symbolize his loss, Singer selects a room for himself to occupy—alone—denoting the downsizing of his heart and feelings, although in this new space, the other major characters Mick Kelly, Dr. Benedict Copeland, and

Jake Blount become dependent on his kindness and companionship, as they project individual, providential characteristics onto his character because he is mute, so he cannot repudiate or verbally distort their projections. They conceptualize, personify, and assemble him based on unfulfilled portions of their own personalities, needs, and relationships, embodying a grotesque assignment of attributes onto the most sublime object of their adoration.

For the minor character George “Bubber” Kelly, Mick’s younger brother, a freak accident and Mick’s immediate and severe style of reproach—her parents rely on her to parent him— forever alter his personality and evolves into what Pamela Thurschwell designates as “one of the 14 tragedies of the book” (105). Bubber handles a rifle his friend Spareribs brings to the Kelly house and fancies himself more gallant and impressive when he possesses it. The narrator alludes to the sublime, illusory power holding a gun instills in these children who want something they can control because their poverty makes them feel helpless: “All the smaller kids loved to handle that rifle. Every few minutes Bubber would haul the gun up to his shoulder.

He took aim and made a loud pow sound.” When Spareribs warns him not to “monkey with the trigger” because he had previously loaded the gun (McCullers, Heart 162), this foreshadows an irreversible calamity. Bubber, Spareribs, and Mick are sitting on the porch, when suddenly, Baby

Wilson, café owner Biff Brannon’s four-year-old niece, appears within their collective sight, as she descends the steps of her house and strolls down the sidewalk dressed like a pink fairy, what

Leslie A. Fiedler depicts as “[t]he image of the golden girl child” that McCullers within moments actively engages another child to harm and to mutilate (333). Bubber notices Baby’s beauty and her pink costume instantly and covets it, but Baby ignores and rejects his solicitations. McCullers employs the narrator to temporarily slow time, a sublime action, by providing details in anticipation of the violence eventually perpetrated against Baby, before she utilizes Baby’s condescending, dismissive response as part of a cause-and-effect relationship, which results in

Bubber shooting Baby in the head.

After Bubber fires the gun and realizes he has harmed Baby, he runs and hides. When

Mick locates him, her punitive and disparaging riposte and cruel plan “to make him learn” by lying to him about Baby’s demise establish his future proclivity toward isolation and solitude because he withdraws himself from situations to avoid any further harm to others or himself

(McCullers, Heart 168). McCullers engineers what Joseph R. Millichap refers to as a “complex system” of the ordering of events and the correlation of a “cyclical” pattern of “action,” resulting 15 in a greater potential for “its disintegration” of scene and character relationships and generating a sublime “progression of time . . . to demonstrate the connection of the personal and social worlds” she has developed. McCullers’s employment of details within the narrative builds “a complicated pattern” of chaos, disillusionment, reaction, and horror, exploiting time to purpose an increasingly grotesque scene where a child shoots another child he knows, causing the characters, their actions, and their reactions to become “part of inexorable historical movements” of the novel’s mechanism of temporal sublimity (Millichap 14).

Both of these scenes illustrate, like nature, the grotesque and the sublime are not only

“connected” and integral to modern forms of literature, but they have no age, gender, or class requirements or cause for concern about anything human or societal, since they represent abstract notions and labels given by people and artists, which according to Hugo, “correct God” because

“a mutilated nature will be more beautiful for the mutilation” (6). In The Impersonal Sublime,

Suzanne Guerlac determines the sublime, in an act of mutilation, “participate[s] in the deformation associated” with the grotesque, recognizing the privilege of the association and yielding what she describes as “the initial opposition between dark and light, added together to compose a totality, gives way to a second, implied, opposition between incompleteness/totality, light/clair-obscur, or tragedy/drama,” all of which are present and are identifiable in McCullers’s

Lonely Hunter (Guerlac 16). McCullers crafts characters with mutilated spirits (Others) living in a Southern landscape scarred by its traitorous, incendiary past, where their bodies and spirits “are caught in a daily, formulaic round of hostility, tension, and emergency: in crises that are ongoing

[and] habitual” (Yaeger, ch. 5, sec. 2).

When describing the grotesque, Hugo ennobles it as “an element of art” and envisions it and the sublime as components of “modern genius,” each as complex, ancient elements, so 16

“inexhaustible” in their “creations” and fruit, furnishing plentiful fodder for readers to visualize or recognize something reflective of themselves (6). He recalls the significance of Greek literature to the unification of the grotesque and the sublime, naming its Tritons, Satyrs, and

Cyclops because they inspired curiosity, fascination, and fear, but he also notes timidity and privacy as qualities of the grotesque with a “veil of grandeur or of divinity” as well as “beautiful

. . . gentle, beneficent”, inferring the grotesque is indeed sublime in its presentation, costume, manipulation, and display. Hugo posits the grotesque has not only affixed itself to antiquity and the Middle Ages, but it is found everywhere in modern times, and it serves “as a means of contrast with the sublime” to be “the richest source that nature can offer art,” inspiring artists and writers with its richness and sustenance (7); he warns of coupling the sublime only with the sublime because doing so “scarcely presents a contrast” and oversaturates artists’ minds, so that they hunger for something outside the sublime realm, although he never specifically cautions of an oversaturation of the grotesque (8).

This predilection of the grotesque over the sublime affirms people prefer what they know and have “an eager thirst for [the] novelty” of the grotesque, and people become familiar with the struggle—oddly some even relish it—involved within the human condition; perceiving the sublime frightens them, although they hunger for the feeling it bestows, but he envisions the pendulum shifting back to the sublime in due time and stresses the importance of

“the balance between the two principles” identifiable in Shakespeare’s works (9). Hugo justifies the contact between the grotesque and the sublime, since the relationship produces a modern sublime rich with “something purer, grander, more sublime” and a modern grotesque that establishes “a halting-place, . . . a starting-point whence one rises toward the beautiful with a fresher and keener perception,” affirming an elevated state of consciousness in their recognition 17 and alliance (8). He expounds that even churches, like the manners, laws, and arts, are replete with images of the grotesque and the sublime, and religion “is attended by all varieties of superstition—the sublime attended by all forms of the grotesque,” indicating the significance and presence of both abstractness and tangibility to human beliefs and human condition (9).

Hugo credits drama with illustrating “all things are connected and follow one another as in real life” and with assuming its role between tragedy and comedy because drama seems most representative of the true nature of humanity and the human condition, and drama, “this twofold agent” of connection and imitation, manifests its elemental components—the grotesque representing “the human beast” and the sublime denoting “the soul.” He alludes to other important components of drama—the personal meditation “upon existence” and tumult of the writers and the poets—because he acknowledges the struggle between the beast and the soul as they navigate the human condition. He observes how the grotesque exemplifies “one of the supreme beauties” of drama, but he does not deny the influence of the sublime, where specific character types emerge, reflective of this combination, and are identifiable in Lonely Hunter: whole grotesques as demonstrated by Jake Blount (Hugo 12), terror-impregnated grotesques as characterized in Dr. Benedict Copeland and Bubber Kelly (12), sublime-filled grotesques as signified by Mick Kelly and Biff Brannon (25), and refined, messianic grotesques as represented by John Singer (12).

The detail McCullers includes in the descriptions of her grotesques exposes an enriched, multi-dimensional transparency of what causes and influences these people and the Southern landscape to be both grotesque and sublime in the first place, and she expresses how her characters specifically reflect her own “view of the conscience of the South” where “the human heart is a lonely hunter—but the search for us Southerners is more anguished. There is a special 18 guilt in us . . . a consciousness of guilt not fully knowable or communicable.” Given she was raised in Georgia and lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, as a young adult, McCullers further expounds on her characters as though she knew them in her own life: “Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged . . . because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just—when all along we knew that it wasn’t,” positing the long-term effects and consequences of adherence to this contrived social system meant to harm and to subordinate (Carr, Understanding 17).

Hugo aptly notes the grotesque’s own diversity within character development when it sometimes “injects laughter, sometimes horror” into a work (12), but locating “laughter” in

Lonely Hunter poses a challenge, since McCullers utilizes the term “laughter” exactly ten times.

She positions “laughter” conveniently during escalating, potentially violent situations where Jake

Blount is present (Heart 23, 67, 286); when Blount discusses Communists and his hatred of the country and government with Singer, and Blount becomes more “maniacal,” “fierce,” and

“ravenous” with his word choices (156-57); as a response to Dr. Copeland’s attempts to educate his black house guests about the history of black people in the United States (192); to reveal the response of a group of people who witness a blindfolded Biff fart because he thought he was momentarily alone (237); when Jake is present at Dr. Copeland’s house, and Highboy and Willie use Portia’s red lipstick to draw a boundary on a jar from which they share a drink (293); and during Dr. Copeland’s momentary recollection of his wife Daisy’s sweet laughter and “beautiful color of dark honey” skin (330). McCullers sprinkles “laugh” in its noun form, past and present verb tenses, and gerund and infinitive forms 54 other times throughout the novel to offer some semblance of humor in the name of the grotesque and as a common response when something makes people uncomfortable. 19

Hugo recognizes the validity of the grotesque and the sublime on their own but warns sometimes in tragedy, they “will go each its own way, leaving the real between them,” suggesting the elements, when separate, loose their potential for authenticity and move toward a fantastical, almost artificial place (12). This statement also indicates that the separation of both elements leaves people divided from their souls, more flawed, as if they exist in some purgatory filled with perpetual unbalance and discord, only to be remedied and soothed by the reunification of the grotesque and the sublime. Arguably, this explanation applies to Lonely Hunter because

McCullers fills the novel with a plethora of flawed characters, who seem unable to love, return love, connect, and communicate, but what she does is weave them within the basket of the

Southern landscape, where one familiar with history and literature expects cacophony, repression, and poverty for working-class people. As her characters meander through the human condition wielding either the grotesque or the sublime actions, sometimes both, they damage themselves and others, sometimes inadvertently or intentionally; the realness denotes the damage each has done to the other and to themselves. At least with the unification of the grotesque and the sublime, the damage seems manageable and mendable. Hugo classifies the grotesque as playing “the part of the human,” while the sublime “represents the soul” (8), meaning they are components of something less fractious but whole because they are united, and the sublime directs a magnificence of awe, achievement, and discovery, whereas the grotesque conducts a magnificence of fright, complacence, and uniformity.

By employing paradox, Hugo also address the significance of “the harmony of contraries” in the grotesque and the sublime because “everything that exists in nature exists in art” (11), symbolizing exactly what McCullers portrays in Lonely Hunter—her life in the South cast in art form, and the act of presenting grotesquery becomes sublime indeed because 20

McCullers “hardly let characters speak unless they are Southern” (“Flowering” 279). Although

Hugo specifies “the opposing principles” as forever parallel and “face to face in life” (11),

Guerlac attributes “the conflicting positions” as unstable and perplexing ones because they are rooted in the duplicative nature of the grotesque (found in light and darkness, soul and body, and the intellect and the beast); she proclaims the grotesque “can attack from within” and induce the

“inner tension” and generate prodigy of the sublime (18), displaying an imbalance and exposing one element over the other as more prominent and fruitful. McCullers directs this thinking within the minds of her major characters like Jake Blount and Dr. Copeland, since they appear prone to their visceral grotesquery guiding their external responses to stimuli, divulging their own “attack[s] from within” (18). Hugo reports the perfection in the mixture of the grotesque and the sublime to foreshadow terrible circumstances or to remedy disaster, when the grotesque

“mingle[s] its shrill voice with the most sublime . . . music of the soul” (12); McCullers conjoins the grotesque and sublime when she slows time through ample, dimensional descriptions similar to when one examines the disturbed contents of a shaken snow globe until the last particle of glitter finds its place.

McCullers furnishes readers with descriptions of local color to simultaneously distract and prepare them, who might be thankful for a dose of her sublime before an episode of her grotesque, and this approach compels readers to orbit and suspend their interests in the characters for what happens next. Examples of this appear in the moments before Bubber shoots Baby

Wilson; prior to John Singer shooting himself in the chest hours after discovering that

Antonopoulos has died; when the narrator recalls the “murderous darkness” in Dr. Copeland following his disagreement with Jake Blount before his family transports him to Grandpapa’s

(his wife’s father) farm for convalescence (Heart 333); as the narrator describes the violent brawl 21 through what Jake Blount witnesses that results in the death of Lancy Davis, Dr. Copeland’s essay winner; and when Harry Minowitz and Mick Kelly ride their bikes into the country about fifteen miles from where they live, resulting in their first and only sexual encounter together and projecting them into premature adulthood (267).

Guerlac pinpoints what Hugo does in “Preface to Cromwell” to connect the grotesque and the sublime to create something more complete and more representative of the human condition, “a framework of totality” (187)—he veers from plays to focus on the developing novel form—and through a coalition of grotesque and sublime produces “the Hugolian sublime” generating “an economy of supplementarity that is both depicted” through “representation and performed textually” and is exhibited through a novel’s “narrative structure” (33), and in doing so, Guerlac challenges Hugo’s unification of the grotesque and the sublime in modern literature because she believes such unity “disrupts the stability of the opposition [between them] and its role in the constitution of dialectical unity” (187), inferring the opposition serves to enrich and strengthen conflict and tragedy as well as the link between the grotesque and the sublime, but what Guerlac does not ponder is the possibility that such a “totality” of characteristics of the sublime and the grotesque can and do occur in people, their personalities, or landscapes as evidenced by the characters in Lonely Hunter. One might argue the landscape catalyzes a need for such wholeness to assuage the agricultural and economic disparities, and the affiliation serves a medicinal purpose because oppression becomes a cancer and posts a human cost. Even though

Guerlac notes Hugo’s “totality” in his vision of unifying the grotesque and the sublime, Philip

Thomson’s brief evaluation of Hugo’s vision differs from Guerlac in that he highlights the grotesque as “not just an artistic mode or category but [it] exists in nature and in the world around us,” making it “realistic” in its presentation thereby evoking a sense of awe, or the 22 sublime, when discovered within the human condition or within nature (17). Unfortunately,

Thomson devotes less than one line to the sublime in his discussion—the focus of his book is strictly the grotesque.

To further prove her discontent with Hugo’s approach, Guerlac traces the “temporal dynamic that complicates totalization [of the grotesque and the sublime], [creating] the figuration of the opposition grotesque/sublime by tableau of clair-obscur” and undermines the purpose of unification in the first place, without regard for the temporal dynamic within the context of the

Southern landscape or effective narration (187). In Lonely Hunter, McCullers equips the narrator with the element of temporal dynamics and supplies an almost theoretical, physics-based linear, and completely sublime analysis of characters and surroundings before tragedy and disillusion strike by placing the reader in the center and on the periphery of the scene simultaneously for the purpose of connecting them to the experience of the Other and immersing them in a sublime and grotesque experience; McCullers applies this method of temporal suspension or layering to her advantage to prepare readers for an outcome and by flipping the hegemonic notion of time—instead of running out of time—she suspends and lifts it and filters everything through it, leaving readers waxing ethereal and alterity.

Even though Guerlac further supports her assertion by describing this thematic representation of “temporal complication” where “the grotesque drops out” and “a tension of limits remains” (187), she fails to consider the application of Hugo’s theory to the twentieth century genres of modern literature, where authors like McCullers, Kate Chopin, Ambrose

Bierce, and Virginia Woolf might purpose temporal complication as a mechanism of the sublime and grotesque distortion to match or reflect their characters or alongside local color, grotesque characters, and tragedy, or within the human condition to conduct a discourse on modernity, a 23 moment in time “marked by the emergence of a unified subject [of the grotesque and the sublime] . . . endowed with agency” (Waugh 365). In Lonely Hunter, McCullers unifies the grotesque and the sublime, so Mick Kelly can self-harm before she experiences a separation from her hunger for music and loses her virginity to a boy who abandons her; the other characters develop an admiration for Singer, the man who cannot hear them and who eventually kills himself because the one person he values and loves dies; Dr. Copeland spirals within his own frustrations with members of the black and white communities and suffers because he has so intellectualized his truths, people have difficulty understanding them or him; Blount hungers for and seeks a place where he might be able to physically release his pain on others or participate in a revolt by poorly paid workers, and his mental instability outlines a man who represents both a physical, metaphorical representation and the fractured, damaged condition of the Southern landscape.

1.3 Thomas Mann’s Theories on the Grotesque and the Sublime

Victor Hugo is not the only writer who promotes a reciprocal relationship between the sublime and the grotesque; Thomas Mann (1875-1955), a German writer who experienced exile from Germany in the 1930s, briefly writes about the connection between the elements in “Joseph

Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent,’” an essay in Past Matters and Other Papers (1933). Mann indicates how some people of one place fall “in love with the life forms of another one,” where they “deliberate[ly] and definite[ly]” emigrate into that new place “as though nature had made a mistake and human intelligence corrected it,” and he addresses this common historical practice in literature and in culture, specifically focusing on Joseph Conrad, but the argument applies to

Carson McCullers and Lonely Hunter as well (231). Ironically, even though McCullers was born 24 in Columbus, Georgia, she emigrated first to New York City and then briefly to Europe, she populates Lonely Hunter with Southerners, specifically Mick Kelly, who dreams of being older and outside of Georgia or living in a different time under alternate circumstances. This fondness for “the life forms” of another place reveals an appreciation and interest in Otherness, albeit of self or other people. Mann declares such appreciation produces a “healthy reverence for the natural” landscape of another place (232), as interests motivate them toward understanding their

“preoccupation” with Otherness, but what happens when authors leave their homelands or states by choice to live elsewhere and then they write about the places and the people they left?

McCullers embraces what she knows—from a distance because it has forever stained her—and elects through her characterizations and choices of setting not to deny her affiliation with the

South or its people.

At first, Mann seems more interested in discussing the different regions of the Eurasian continent, before he moves toward Joseph Conrad and The Secret Agent, where he holds that

Conrad’s “very deepest and most personal experience has been the sea” and entertains Conrad’s ability to write stories with “tragic human outcome[s]” (234, 235). After acknowledging the colossal narrative expertise of Dostoyevsky and the shadow he casts over so many other writers,

Mann, like Hugo, exhorts that “time changes all things,” implying the transitional ability of this temporal sublime construct within the tenets and limitations of modernism, as if time and not people or cultures really have the ability to change themselves and conditions; he evokes the human journey to the present from “the Byzantine-Christian East to the Centre . . . to that . . . which is of the humanistic and liberal West” pasts. Mann adds that even though the nineteenth century saw immense “growth with the extreme of subtlety,” suggesting the rapid fluidity of change and a quick need for adaptation, but one cannot ignore the increasing propensity toward 25 implementing a refined technique that “borders on the morbid and the barbaric,” alluding to the juxtaposition of the grotesque and the sublime as a response to such extensive growth and change (238).

Hugo claims that people’s “aspirations” for “a purer, brighter, healthier, . . . more Greek humanity” instead of the “monumental gloom” of the present exposes modesty, idealism, and arrogance in people, while he recognizes the ambiguous level of aspirations (239), positing the potent influence of thoughts, desires, and aspirations and the possibility of aspirations becoming dangerous and incendiary, as they do for Jake Blount, who seems inundated with thoughts about leading worker revolts, revolutions, and violence against those in charge or who pay the low wages; Dr. Copeland hopes that he can intellectually influence others with his education, reserved mannerisms, and use of formal speech to impress upon members of the black community that education and planned reproduction will inspire an equal societal position and elevate them from their current subordinate status; and John Singer’s focus becomes his reunification with his long-time friend and partner Antonapoulos, so he can return to the comforts he found in their dependent routines and this uneven companionship, but Singer’s myopic devotion prevents him from creating another more reciprocal relationship.

When Mann finally explicates The Secret Agent, his interest in the grotesque materializes; he cites an armless man with a hook, houses near collapse and rattling after cars pass, an erratic mechanical piano beginning a tune and stopping abruptly, the condition of a murdered man, whose head was awkwardly bent as if examining “his [own] left breast,” and the vomiting police officer who discovered the corpse (240). Mann, again like Hugo, notes how the grotesque’s widespread employment in modern literature reveals a lack of definitive delineation of the modes of comedy and tragedy and comic and tragic categories and instead reconciles life 26 and the human condition as simultaneously exhibiting qualities of both modes or categories, resulting in the grotesque appearing in “its most genuine style” when coupled with the sublime and as “the only guise in which the sublime may appear” (240-41). Unlike Hugo, Mann paints the “world like a slaughter-house” where “the weak are carried to be extinguished” because the challenge of living becomes so insurmountable, divided, and competitive, leaving the strong to somehow manage the insufferable task of avoiding the weak label and tapping into a destructive, apathetic side of themselves to succeed (241-42). To the contrary, are the living weak and the dead strong because they escape a declining civilization? Do the strong grow incensed and fickle because trying becomes futile and routine? This brutal outlook of the world seems analogous with modernism.

Mann interprets the grotesque as exhibiting a “genuine anti-bourgeois style” in its employment (241); McCullers juxtaposes this style with complex economic conditions applicable to the time and bestows each upon most of the white major characters in Lonely

Hunter except Biff Brannon, who owns the New York Café, and Dr. Copeland, because of his title, yet his skin color shuffles him into this anti-style, subjecting him to racial depravation because of his Otherness. In “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” Flannery

O’Connor dismisses Mann’s interpretation of the grotesque; instead, she argues that the role of

“the general reader . . . connect[s] the grotesque somehow with the sentimental” and by doing so, readers “associate it with the writer’s compassion” for the subject (815), but O’Connor assumes readers and writers are thinking about the same things, equally empowering readers and writers, but she says nothing of the sublime or of its application. William Van O’Connor’s argument focuses on both elements and on what Mann’s ideas lack; he contends Mann never supports his assertion that a link exists between the grotesque and the sublime—he just says it and presumes 27 others will accept it (342). Furthermore, Mann disappoints Van O’Connor because he does not illustrate his points with specific examples where joining the grotesque and the sublime worked in literature.

Van O’Connor highlights what Mann does do: Mann briefly notes the broken nature of comedy and tragedy within the grotesque, and he traces the division as a reaction to conformity, capitalism, and “bland surfaces of bourgeois customs and habits” and indicates the sublime sometimes covertly “lurks behind [the] weirdly distorted images of the grotesque” as portrayed in and illustrated by characterization, highlighting how people witness, react toward, and experience the images, while the sublime manages the processing of such images (qtd. in Van

O’Connor 342). What seems curious is Mann’s use of the verb “lurks”; such a verb signifies personification and also implies the grotesque remains unaware of the sublime’s presence existing behind it and involves a necessary subordination of the grotesque to the sublime. “Lurk” presumes the sublime possesses a presence of mind, making it aware of its position within its relationship with the grotesque and portraying a sinister parasitic relationship between the elements. Such images and characterizations imply the sublime reasons like humans do, which seems compelling and a bit frightening.

28

CHAPTER 2

REVEALING BILDUNGSROMAN IN THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER

Youth is, so to speak, modernity’s “essence,” the sign of the world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than the past. --Franco Moretti

Applying Hugo’s and Mann’s theories to Mick Kelly’s progression from childhood into adolescence culminates in an American female Bildungsroman laden with dreams, dichotomy, disappointments, the age-old Southern ideal, and both a confusion about and a “reverence for womanhood” (qtd. in Westling 9), yet it warrants analysis of the juxtaposition of the grotesque and the sublime by acknowledging how McCullers depicts Mick Kelly, the most innocent, least tainted of the major characters and who Harold Bloom refers to as McCullers’s “absolute achievement at representing a personality” (434). Due to their ages, none of the major adult male characters are eligible for an examination using Bildungsroman, and for this reason McCullers magnifies the human condition of a white, young Southern female adolescent, because given

Mick Kelly’s gender, McCullers knew the societal limitations, as she reconciled Kelly’s potential

(and her own) within such perimeters. Pamela Thurschwell notes the relevance of “the adolescent, rather than the child” or an adult in “Western literature’s most influential narrative of development” because authors like McCullers must rely on “the choices encountered by a young person on the verge of adulthood” to develop their plotlines and intensify their characterizations

(106). To further categorize Bildungsroman by gender, Annis Pratt describes a female

Bildungsroman as demonstrating “how society provides women [and adolescent girls] with models for ‘growing down’ instead of ‘growing up’” (qtd. in Lazzaro-Weis 17), meaning societal limitations take precedence and propose an ease and a reward exist within conformity and conditioning females for submission as well incorporate the sublime and the grotesque as 29 components and conditions of those rewards.

According to Sarah Gleeson-White, McCullers emerges initially as especially “alert to the power femininity holds in the Southern imagination” and utilizes Kelly to reject such femininity, but she also knew well the restrictions of a Southern, patriarchal society and its

“binds on womanhood” and limitations geared toward developing girls, so Gleeson-White articulates the effects such a society might have on a female Other, who does not so easily conform (“Peculiarly” 55). In addition, McCullers understood that in American literature written before the 1930s, women and girls “have been traditionally depicted” as having little need for

“knowledge of the world” (Ginsberg 27), and as Virginia Woolf advocates, women must eliminate “the angel in the house” or “the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been ‘killed’ into art” by men and women who acquiesce and buy into the idealism (qtd. in

Gilbert and Gubar 17), and the best way McCullers might rid the world of angels was to create a

Southern tomboy with a male name and an epicene cropped haircut, who became the grotesque

“figure of resistance” as a result (Gleeson-White, “Revisiting” 111), and who like McCullers was conflicted about her sexual identity. Leslie A. Fiedler categorizes Kelly as the “rebel against femininity” (333), while her androgynous, tomboy appearance “transmits itself as a message” or an instrument of gender neutrality and a rejection of patriarchal social norms for women

(Guerlac 48), immediately casting her as a grotesque Other.

As a grotesque Other, Kelly emerges as “signifier” and mitigates the negative response of her sisters and Portia, who adhere to the ideals for women, and their response “signifies itself as signified [and] prompts a contagious [mutant] repetition of the signifier,” resulting in a replication of self, as exhibited and embraced by Kelly. As a signifier, Kelly becomes “a perfect symbol” of adolescence and Bildungsroman, and as the “subject of signification,” she distances 30 herself from other people to find solace in both her inner room and outer room (48). As an adolescent signifier, she “outreaches the signified” (Guerlac 66), setting her own bar of

Otherness in an attempt to “outreach” the landscape and manage herself where patriarchal limitations do not exist. Louise Westling reinforces Guerlac’s usage of “outreach” with her categorization of “the sentimental façade” of the Southern landscape proving to be “a dishonest basis for a girl’s identity” as she transitions into a woman, whereby tilling “dishonest grounds for relations with men” and cultivating falsification in the voyeuristic framing around Baby Wilson, a frame McCullers violently shatters (Westling 27).

In addition to Gleeson-White’s analysis of Southern femininity, Ginsberg maintains females who sought knowledge and who became “self-sufficient ‘adult’ individuals” were more often than not “portrayed as outcasts” (27), immediately casting them into Otherness and as grotesques because they desire to provide and establish lives for themselves outside the traditional structure of gender roles and responsibilities. Equipped with this collective burden girls and women carry from the present and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, McCullers sought to execute her “own indigenous vision” through her unique character creation Mick Kelly

(“Vision” 263), and by employing Kelly, McCullers disrupts the classical genre of

Bildungsroman, which according to Carol Lazzaro-Weis many times serves “to make people

[(readers and characters)] feel at home with their prejudices and less likely to change” themselves and their minds throughout their moral, psychological, or intellectual development

(24). To contrast her previous notion, Lazzaro-Weis optimistically elucidates a Bildungsroman

“does have the power to force the reader to reflect upon how his/her ideas concerning the typical, that is the real, have changed, and how these ideas continually challenge limits” (32); instead, by way of offering Kelly’s inner thoughts and insights and trustworthy, impartial narration, 31

McCullers shares freely Kelly’s fears and journey towards self-awareness, and in constructing

Kelly as the object, she becomes the object of Otherness, so Kelly “undergo[es] a process of alienation in order to achieve self-consciousness” and endures “indeterminacy . . ., which is the representation of conscious human self-formation,” simultaneously revealing aspects of modernism and posing the question—is it possible “to become anything” within the grotesque and the sublime, Otherness, or the human condition (26, 29)?

As a tomboy, thirteen-year-old Mick Kelly functions to illustrate that “any growing thing must go through awkward stages” of physical, emotional, and sexual development in order to navigate the human condition (McCullers, “Vision” 264). McCullers assigns to Kelly an adroitness to help her navigate and manage her experiences and the challenges in her life, but she also bestows a “tormented intensity” to Kelly’s personality (Bloom 434); Kelly compartmentalizes her experiences and the things she likes and dreams into an inside room and an outside room: “School and the family and things that happened every day were in the outside room. . . . Foreign countries and plans and music were in the inside room. The songs she thought about were there. And the symphony. . . . The inside room was a very private place” (McCullers,

Heart 163). This bifurcated approach acts as a point of concern because McCullers only chronicles what happens during the time between spring 1938 to August 1939; readers have no idea how long Kelly has been visiting the inside room when the outside room fails to comfort her. Her “rooms” help frame things that are important to her, but the inside room projects her outside of Georgia, so she might “widen her world, physically and culturally” and experience what she imagines other places might offer that Georgia does not, affording a contrast of learned ideals and social mores of the Southern female (Ginsberg 35). Joanna Frye attests that one implements such an approach to categorize various personas assigned by others and either 32 claimed or rejected by the developing adolescent experiencing Bildungsroman: female teenagers and “women need to play multiple roles as part of the strategy to subvert the self imposed upon them from outside and to move toward the development of an autonomous female identity” (qtd. in Lazzaro-Weis 18). In Kelly’s case, her inside and outside rooms exemplify her strategy to remain “autonomous,” unaffected, and detached. Neither the narrator nor Kelly ever divulges what precipitated this coping behavior, leaving a sense of uncertainty for readers, where they are left to ponder and assign their own impressions of this enigma, as it also demands readers accept

Kelly as she represents herself through her dialogue and actions and as the narrator describes her.

This method of coping for Kelly allows her to handle her discontent and dreams and acknowledge the poverty that has plagued her family from the onset of the Great Depression in

1929, embodying most of her life. Already, she exhibits excitability, anxiety, and suspicion in minor situations: “Prove! You got that word on the brain. Prove and trick. Everything is either a trick or it’s got to be proved. I can’t stand you, George Kelly. I hate you”; she threatens violence when dealing with her siblings and those who are younger than she is: “You better leave my things alone. If I ever caught you meddling in my private box I’d bust your head against the side of the wall. I would. I’d stomp on your brains” (McCullers, Heart 314). To make matters worse, she self-harms: “She thought a long time [about the fact that her family could not afford a radio and how she was subjected to listen to the discordant noises of her family’s boarders instead] and [so she] kept hitting her thighs with her fists” (52). This lengthier example appears more worrisome and disturbing and indicative of Kelly’s continuing frustration with her own poverty, adolescence, and loneliness:

The radio and the lights in the house were turned off. The night was very dark.

Mick began hitting her thigh with her fists. She pounded the same muscle with all 33

of her strength until the tears came down her face. But she could not feel this hard

enough. The rocks under the bush were sharp. She grabbed a handful of them and

began scraping them up and down on the same spot until her hand was bloody.

Then she fell back to the ground . . . with the fiery hurt in her leg she felt better.

She was limp on the wet grass, and after a while her breath came slow and easy

again. (119)

Though Thurschwell insists Kelly’s acts of self-harm “might provide” some temporary “illusion of control—the deliberate unjoining of one’s body” from the current circumstances to claim an improved condition that negates the one previous (115), this scene typifies the grotesque because it demonstrates Kelly’s violent, tragic response to music she loved and sought being silenced by the radio owner, who unknowingly interrupts the connectedness she felt with the composer and the notes and within her momentary escape: “Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen”

(McCullers, The Heart 118-19).

Since Kelly sits under a bush outside of another family’s home, where they can afford a radio, she locates something in nature to inflict harm on herself; she selects sharp rocks and rubs them until she bleeds, foreshadowing turmoil, trauma, and grotesquery of her own puberty and the onset of life-altering menses, but McCullers employs innuendo in this scene to analogize and to portend an even more jolting image of a future sexual encounter and implied masochism due to Kelly’s own tendency to self-harm. Returning to Thurschwell’s comment above about “the deliberate unjoining of one’s body,” this scene clearly exemplifies an act of disembodying the self, something not foreign to both white and black Southern women as a way to respond to trauma and white ideals of femininity. Gleeson-White connects this process to what Anne 34

Goodwyn Jones explains as men “dividing women into categories” to maintain control over them

(qtd. in “Peculiarly” 47). Gleeson-White contends that because “the Southern white woman’s value was invested in [notions of purity and whiteness] of her body,” this caused her “at the same time [to be] dis-embodied” and “tortured” because a woman whose mind is fractured promises distance from things that might distract or interest her (47). Kelly portrays an anomaly to this thinking, because after a seemingly orgasmic ending to her own violence and pain, she conducts her return to a comforting place with the help of “bright stars,” “the smell of warm cedars,” the quiet night, and a cleansing dose of synesthesia (McCullers, Heart 119), indicating she needs a dose of something sublime to mitigate her own grotesque response, so she begins again. Yaeger regards such an “endpoint” and reorganization of self as “grotesque” because the whole process outlines an “unreadable mystery” of Kelly’s own sometimes “random violence” she perpetrates upon her own “flesh” (ch. 8, sec. 2).

McCullers engages metaphor to equate the “world” with a “symphony” because of all its infinite components, supplying an aesthetically auditory image of music notes and instruments producing euphonic sounds, but given Kelly’s motivation to self-harm after the music ends, it begs the question what motivates her to harm herself? Is this her way to forcibly extricate herself from her outside room back to her inside room? Does she regulate her phantasmic reality and return to her own melancholic reality? As McCullers extends the metaphor, it yields a more chilling association—the Holocaust and its grotesquery. By this time, the Holocaust had been happening for six years when the novel was published, and as the narrator’s lines describe the condition of the world while Kelly listens to the symphony, McCullers’s word choice here generates an image of Jews marching into crematoriums: “The second part was black-colored—a slow march. Not sad, but like the whole world was dead and black and there was no use thinking 35 back how it was before” (Heart 118). McCullers subtlety irradiates the Otherness of the victims in the death camps via a grotesque image of people acquiescing to the inevitable while simultaneously being embedded into the sublime world of classical music.

McCullers’s obvious employment of the color “black” appears intentional because of the endless Southern oppression of and on-going racism toward black people, but it also symbolizes a void, a “blackness” created by Southern white indigence masquerading as Otherness, where poor Southern whites feel excluded from the fruits, or “march,” of capitalism. For Kelly, her

“before” equates her now, where for many other and older Southern whites, “before” translates into when the South defied and split from the Union. Her “before” and her now depict the far reaching tentacles of poverty, her parents’ inability to earn enough to provide for their six children, the resounding oppression of the working class, and living without things that might relieve the spirit and the soul. At the same time, the scene appears sublime because the narrator posits how it was as if time could not be measured when the music played; instead McCullers tells time by way of Kelly’s actions of grasping her legs tightly with her arms while seated and

“biting her salty knee very hard” (118), assigning her an appearance like a sundial and generating the illusory feeling of five minutes lasting half the night. She dreams more people might appreciate music in the manner she does, yet she imprints upon herself a bite much like the shape of a clock on the joint which bends to move her forward, foreshadowing the bite of poverty interrupting her dreams of music, fame, and having “M.K. written in red on her handkerchiefs and underclothes” (35). Her response qualifies her “emotional state” as indicative of both melancholy and optimism (Baker 170); she bites herself because she feels and becomes something primitive and carnivorous when she hears the music, as she aims to consume herself to eliminate her pain. The music transports her from the place she is currently because it might 36 be better for her to “cope with the unknown” because it “would increase the likelihood” of her survival or rebirth, presenting the most positive outcome for any one of the protagonists in the book (170).

Paul Velde views the origin of such a response—where Kelly “is coming from”—as

“more relevant,” “highly kinetic,” and as “emotionally responded to at the instinctual level” because it provides insight into and induces readers to speculate about the root of her behavior, since McCullers never specifically discloses the cause(s). With her back touching the wet earth,

Kelly concomitantly annexes and converts her violence into contemplation and restores herself with a temporary calm under the blanket and comfort of the dark sky. Velde classifies such an annexation, or self-management, as sublime because of her swift conversion of her pain and frustration, an act of “eradication of the past” under “new coordinates” of her thoughts and her pain, into an ecstasy of silence and controlled breaths, facilitating a rebirth into the same unfortunate, unescapable conditions as before. Velde defines the transformation as “in effect where [s]he is coming from” or as “designer ethnicity” cut from her “baggage.” However, in this momentary transformation within her own adolescent development, her “programmatic reshaping of the self, with [her] mind and soul shifting” to a momentary and temporary place of peace and serenity, Kelly cannot currently alter the condition of her poverty (228).

As the narrator details it, Kelly’s response to the music mirrors the symphony’s crescendo: “Then the music rose up angry and with excitement underneath” (McCullers, Heart

118). She imitates what she hears in the music, since it serves as a mentor she trusts and because it appears clear that the music nourishes Kelly as it harms her, but it also feeds something insatiable inside Kelly because the music “left only this bad hurt in her, and a blankness. She could not remember any of the symphony, not even the last few notes” (119); she binges on the 37 pleasures of and the feelings created in her by music, but the act of listening eventually purges the sounds, so she is left feeling paradoxically restorative emptiness, simultaneously producing a state of Otherness in herself and where the sublime and the grotesque blend yet distort the drive that sent her there to seek sustenance from music. She hungers to be the person who appreciates the music and who holds the knowledge behind the intended placement of every note, but she also charges the music with the impossible task of erasing her past and her pain metaphorically and the collective past of the South. McCullers deposits this collective burden on Kelly because it seems possibility has not abandoned her.

Another crucial incident within Kelly’s Bildungsroman involves her developing interaction at her party and her first sexual encounter with Harry Minowitz, a neighborhood boy two years older than Kelly, who herself was thirteen. She knew Minowitz, an only child, all her life because he lived next door to the Kelly house with his mother, so each has some intimate knowledge of the other. The narrator, and not Kelly, identifies the moment Kelly notices him with an interest different than before and quickly remarks that this interest has nothing to do with his clothes or body type but everything to do with what is happening above his neck on his countenance. Kelly notices his eyes—he is not wearing his glasses—but instead of describing an eye color or exotic eye shape, the narrator notes how she observes the worsening condition of his eyes and how his inquisitive hands interact with them: “A red, droppy sty had come out on one of his eyes and he had to cock his head sideways like a bird in order to see. His long, thin hands kept touching around his sty as though it hurt him” (McCullers, Heart 110). Kelly recognizes his vulnerability evidenced by the infection on his eye because he still bravely came to her party with this condition and blurred vision. The gross condition of his eye symbolizes a skewed perception of the world, but when coupled with his Jewish identity, it further alludes to his 38 inability and helplessness to protect the Jews in Europe from their fate.

Kelly’s attraction to Minowitz arose from this bacterial infection and inflammation on his eye, his agent of sight and insight into his soul, and this momentary ocular deformity signifies the manipulation and distortion of sight and truth as experienced by every single character in

Lonely Hunter. The narrator’s description of Minowitz, a timid, smaller-than-normal Cyclops bumping into people, and his infected, dripping eye connote an uncleanliness, a disorganization, or ambiguity of vision and path, which are indicative of modernism, but the eye in its current grotesque condition also exhibits what Hugo declares as “an element of art” in its creation (6).

McCullers employs the narrator to convert Minowitz with a simile into a bird, but she fails to associate him with any specific type of bird directly, as though he is not worthy of such an assignment, yet she does slyly interject “cock” as her cacophonous and albeit sexual verb choice prior to mentioning “a bird” (Heart 110), highlighting some foreknowledge of the sexual encounter between the “cock” Minowitz and Kelly. However, McCullers plants a therianthropic clue portending Minowitz’s impulsive decision to “fly” elsewhere following his sexual encounter with Kelly, revealing they really were too young to interact sexually in the first place. In addition, the eye qualifies as sublime because it is the channel through which perception occurs and the path that begets awe and transmits it to the brain, the fundamental origin of it, and by applying Hugo’s logic, the sublime becomes “the reverse of” the grotesque, and McCullers serves as Hugo’s “modern muse” who exposes “things in a higher and broader light” because many of her characters have difficulty seeing or enjoying “light” in anything, including themselves (6).

Minowitz’s interest in Kelly emanated from his announcement that he would make “this prom” with her, even though she observes him pretend to read something from a blank card, 39 before they walk together outside in the darkness. These two teenagers seem awkward even in darkness but find comfort in their cumulative awkwardness; Kelly was taller than Minowitz and extremely thin at “five feet six inches tall and a hundred and three pounds,” but when discussing her height, he expresses how he once “saw a lady at the fair who was eight and a half feet tall” but reassures her that she probably would not “grow that big” (McCullers, Heart 111), magnifying a discomfort he has because he is the shorter of the two. Sarah Gleeson-White emphasizes how “young girls are particularly amenable to an exploration of the grotesque” by readers and particularly through Minowitz’s obscured vision “since historically women [and girls] have been perceived as freakish lesser men—Adam’s rib—and their bodies culturally represented as abjected and amorphous” (“Revisiting” 111).

While Meg Armstrong labels the body as representing the “sensual signs of the sublime” and as instigating discomfort because it serves as “a site of extreme ambivalence” and transformation (214), Gleeson-White classifies Kelly’s changing adolescent body by the tropes of “unfinishedness” or of “incompleteness” in its current condition of chemical and hormonal commotion and dystopia (Strange 26), as the body is in a perpetual stage of Otherness to itself— through its development and changes—“the grotesque site” of “becoming” or transforming into something adult (12, 27). Furthermore, Gleeson-White professes, “All adolescents are liminal and so unfinished, they embody this form of continuous” evolution (27), conversion, and identification somewhere “between masculine and feminine gender identification” (“Revisiting”

111). As a result, Kelly and Minowitz exemplify Others and grotesques because they discuss their own changes and their ongoing gender-spliced metamorphoses, but Kelly’s observations are blurred by her poverty and by her own changing idealism and not skewed by an infected eye.

As the novel progresses through part two, Kelly recollects her physical interactions with 40

Minowitz, when they would wrestle one another, before she again determines, “He was very changed” (McCullers, Heart 248), but she never reveals exactly what interests her, possibly because it eludes her; maybe she grew attracted, like dark matter to dark matter, to his internal strife regarding his atypical interest in fascism and his wanting to kill Hitler (247). Her acknowledgement leads Kelly into increasing her engagement, interaction, and conversations with Minowitz, before they decide to go swimming a great distance away from their neighborhood. After they agree to go swimming, the narrator reveals Kelly identifies Minowitz as being “handsome,” “a very good-looking fellow,” and as being a “real good” friend, but instead of thinking about her music or writing a symphony in her head, her interest in Minowitz leads the tomboy into considering what clothes she might borrow from her more Southern lady- like adherent sister Hazel—“blue necklace and . . . the silk dress” to solicit reciprocal interest

(267)—speculating her awareness of the power of her own sexuality and attraction. In an effort to explain what Kelly is experiencing in the moment when she decides to disregard “those silly boy’s clothes” and instead dress up her curveless boyish body (42), Gleeson-White reports how

Kelly as “the female adolescent is perhaps more grotesque than her adult counterpart [even though she is placing herself in a dress to portray herself as older and more attractive] for not only is she female, but she is in that liminal state between childhood and adulthood,” where for the second notable time, she grows concerned about how people see her in clothing that frames her for viewing and appeal (“Revisiting” 111).

On the day they depart using borrowed bicycles, the weather affords a combination of warm winds and hot sun, a sublime natural mixture for chaos and a metaphor for adolescence, but the narrator immediately shifts readers to the surroundings away from their neighborhood by reporting the presence of a “red clay road,” “bright and green” fields, and “the sharp smell of 41 pine trees . . . in the air,” which supports Mann’s interest with the natural landscape of another place and how Kelly and Minowitz leave to spend time elsewhere alone and where adults and their peers cannot see them. The narrator utilizes nature as foreplay prior to the sexual encounter because these two teens are both virgins and do not understand exactly what is about to happen, but nature continues to influence and intoxicate them: “The warm wind blew into their faces”

(McCullers, Heart 268). They ride for several miles before they stop at a store for beverages, but instead of their original choice of chocolate Nehi, they locate beer and both order one. As they drink, the narrator describes more features within nature they both see across from where they sit: “A big empty field of grass, and beyond that a fringe of pine woods. The trees were every color of green . . . ,” signifying their verdancy and foreshadowing the empty future between them before it begins (270). Then, McCullers slows the temporal dynamic again—this time with silence-laced, poetic details and a focus on awe-inspiring qualities of nature almost specifically:

The woods were very quiet. Slick pine needles covered the ground. Within a few

minutes they had reached the creek. The water was brown and swift. Cool. There

was no sound except the water and a breeze singing high up in the pine trees. It

was like the deep, quiet woods made them timid, and they walked softly along the

bank beside the creek. (270)

Unfortunately, Kelly and Minowitz ignore that timidity, and he dismisses through laughter and

“a long Indian whoop that echoed back at them” the moment she finds beauty in the nature around them: “Don’t it look pretty” (271). McCullers punctuates this statement with a period and not a question mark, hinting Kelly meant this observation for herself and not to be part of a conversation between them. Had she been alone in this moment, she likely would have experienced an externalization of her inside room. 42

When the two finally swim, Kelly grows embarrassed because she cannot swim, so she elects to lie about it; her tale to Minowitz includes how she “busted” her “head open” and how

“there was blood all in the water” and “where all this blood in the water was coming from”

(271). Her choice to dramatize the lie with the goriness of streaming, flowing “blood” and a

“busted” head intensifies the premature, pending loss of her virginity, which Kelly “understands as a visible marker of her [violent and injurious] entry to womanhood” (Gleeson-White, Strange

16). They play like children for approximately two hours before Kelly inquires whether

Minowitz has “ever swam naked?”; before allowing him to answer the question, the narrator interrupts the dialogue with more McCullers’s strategically placed quiet before depicting

Minotwitz’s body in an increasingly grotesque way reminiscent of a cold, female corpse shouldering a toy, wind-up chattering skull or in a way that favored both of their physical bodies, as if they were a unified being: “The woods was very quiet and for a minute he did not answer.

He was cold. His titties had turned hard and purple. His lips were purple and his teeth chattered”

(McCullers, Heart 273). Oddly, she morphs an adjective generally reserved for phallic descriptions with a slang term for a girl’s or woman’s breasts. Kelly responds with a dare, so they both disrobe, and McCullers again inserts the temporal dynamic to make a minute feel like a half hour because she prepares readers for sexual intercourse between two teenagers. Instead of

McCullers employing the narrator to inject nature into the teens’ foreplay like she did before, the teens assume responsibility for invoking it: Minowitz and Kelly exchange thoughts on aesthetically pleasing aspects like birds, beaches, the ocean, snow, and blizzards (most of which they have never seen) before “they both turned [their bodies] at the same time” to face one another (274).

Unfortunately, the encounter takes a grotesque and disturbing turn because McCullers 43 equates the sex act between Minowitz and Kelly as metaphorically disembodying and decapitating Kelly, while Minowitz experiences an orgasm: “She felt him trembling and her fists were tight enough to crack. ‘Oh, God,’ he kept saying over and over. It was like her head was broke off from her body and thrown away. And her eyes looked up straight into the blinding sun while she counted something in her mind. And this was the way. This was how it was” (274);

Kelly’s symphonies did not comfort her—instead, she relied on numbers. Gleeson-White defines the loss of Kelly’s virginity as a “traumatic” disconnect that produces a “dis-ease[d]” spirit for which the consequences are hidden to her in the moment but not so hard to imagine for readers (Strange 16), before she suggestively applies Hélène Cixous’s assertion “decapitation is the female equivalent of male castration: ‘. . . the backlash . . . on women of this castration anxiety is its displacement [and implement] as decapitation, execution, of woman, as loss of head’” (qtd. in Gleeson-White, Strange 16), representing a steep, grotesque price to pay for low self-esteem and a rite of passage within a Bildungsroman.

Likewise, this interaction acts as Kelly’s “slaughter-house” of self assuming Mann’s tragic assertion that the world destroys the weak (241), yet Kelly has been preserving herself through disembodiment for some time and likely will continue to do so. Minowitz, however, attempts to intellectualize what happened between them and biblically interprets a punishment for “adultery [because what they did] is a terrible sin,” even though neither one is married

(McCullers, Heart 275); instantly, he thinks they should marry to reconcile their collective sin, but his face frightens Kelly because she never saw such an incendiary combination of emotions displayed before on Minowitz: “His nose quivered and his bottom lip was mottled and bloody where he had bitten it. His eyes were bright and wet and scowling. His face was whiter than any face she could remember” (275-76). Given Mann’s claim that the sublime “lurks behind . . . the 44 grotesque” (qtd. in Van O’Connor 342), unspoken words and the impression his mother’s reaction might have on him overwhelm Minowitz, and oddly, a reaction that has not happened yet; he expects her to respond with extreme disappointment because he believes she will “read this [act of betrayal and loss of his virginity] in my eyes,” so he rationalizes his flight and abandons his birthplace, the place of his first sexual encounter, and any further relationship with

Kelly. As a result of his own guilt, he announces to her that he will be leaving, but she deems herself “a grown person now, whether she wanted to be or not,” so she moves to process and accept what happened, while Minowitz’s flight purports his own decapitation from his previous intellectual, seemingly wiser sensibilities, thereby, actively castrating himself from Kelly, his future, and a mother who loves him (McCullers, Heart 276).

After the loss of her virginity, Kelly no longer visits her inside room and does not long for solitude; the reverse happens, and she hungers “to be around somebody all of the time” and fills her mind with the compulsion to count and figure numbers (305), otherwise “this terrible afraidness came in her” where it did not exist before (306); her music seems inaccessible now, while the absence of money haunts her and she witnesses her father’s loss of interest in finding employment. The sublime of summer heat and longevity exact Kelly toward the comfort of her own creativity when her music resurfaces and reflects the fluidity of her own adolescence, requiring her to respond, act, and convert music for the piano and the violin from her person into the tangible location of a notebook: “Always music was in her mind” (314). Yet in this creative state, Kelly worries Portia because “she walk around and don’t say a word. She not even greedy like she used to be. She getting to be a regular lady these days” (315). As soon as Kelly’s interest returns to music, alluding to Hugo’s statement about the pendulum shift back to the sublime, her sister Hazel announces that Woolworth’s is hiring. While her brother Bill and Hazel announce 45 that no one under sixteen should work and someone her age working would be a mistake, her father alleges, “We don’t want Mick to take on too much responsibility at her age. Let her get her growth out. Her growth through with, anyway” (316), and her mother adds that even if they lose the house, she would rather not have Kelly working. Her family ignores the amount of responsibility they have heaved on her for years by allowing strangers to live in the family home and by making her care for her brothers Bubber and Ralph both inside and outside of the home.

McCullers casts Mrs. Kelly as a less significant female character than Portia is to Kelly, and such casting displaces her from being an involved mother figure and more like a boarder in Kelly’s outside room, projecting the grotesque distortion of the family unit and leaving Kelly to maneuver puberty, her feelings, and her future alone.

As the novel concludes, Kelly disconnects from her previous inclination toward writing music and playing the piano to help financially support her family and appears lost to her own creativity, consumed by “figuring with [the] decimals” of their poverty (312), so she might procure and purchase items for her family and might highlight the grotesque cost some are forced to pay because the human condition demands it. The narrator solemnly reveals Kelly

“now [has] no music” because she “was shut out” of her inside room, since “the store took all her energy and time” and she “was too tense”; with an increasingly woeful tone, the narrator expounds how the job at Woolworth’s consumes Kelly, who once sought sources for and solace in music, but now “she was always tired” (353). The posthumous reward of John Singer’s radio eases this consequence somewhat, but she assumes financial responsibility for its cost because it reminds her of the man who did not speak; ironically, now she pays to hear the music she once was inspired to create. To escape and recharge, she sleeps instead of walking the neighborhood, creating music, crafting instruments, or dreaming of snow or Italy; this job solidifies the loss of 46 her access to her own inner room, where her dreams and interests appear inaccessible now: her previous artistic and brave self seem lost to her.

With this new purpose guiding Kelly, the Bildungsroman continues without her previous talents, but she conditionally plans for them to return if she can save two dollars every week:

“And maybe one of these days she might be able to set aside a little for a secondhand piano”

(353). Unfortunately, it becomes very likely she will spend the two dollars elsewhere and not on herself. McCullers affords readers a final feisty moment with Kelly, reminding them of her introduction, as she imagines men coming to repossess the piano: “[S]he would meet them at the front door. And fight. She would knock down both the two men so they would have shiners and broken noses and would be passed out on the hall floor.” Quickly, Kelly summons herself with a frown and the pathology of resolve and inaction because this “was the way things were,” and the narrator reports how Kelly “was mad all the time” because she felt “cheated,” yet she refuses to blame anyone: “Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on” (354). She soon might realize how her selfless choice to help her family deprives her of something so hopeful and significant—some unfair and archetypal consequence of her selflessness—and unfolds the cruelty and tragedy of modernism and poverty.

Nevertheless, the narrator speculates hope still exists for Kelly in the form of musically inspired repetition using “O.K.” twice, “some good” three times, and “and it was too” four times

(354), which begs the question why the sudden tonal shift from defeat to possibility? Has the narrator discarded the previous empathic detachment to convince readers that things will function for Kelly or is Kelly meandering through her own melancholy to reach a place where prospect becomes a suitable outcome? Does McCullers purpose Hugo’s proclamations on melancholy to juxtapose the tones of “solemn and pensive” with “dreamy” and “still inspired” to 47 unify the grotesque and the sublime (Hugo 10)? Does McCullers adhere to Mann’s assertion that

“time changes all things” because she would rather avoid having written a Bildungsroman with a

“tragic human outcome” (Mann 238, 235)? Does Hugo’s forlorn observation “the present kills the future” indicate the brutality found in modernism and insinuate that Kelly’s decision to work and quit school determines her fate (Hugo 24)?

48

CHAPTER 3

CONSIDERING THE OTHER: LINKING THE GROTESQUE AND THE SUBLIME

The I is always in the field of the Other. --Jacques Lacan

Otherness is due less to the difference of the Other than to the point of view and the discourse of the person who perceives the Other as such. --Jean-François Staszak

To consider the Other and Otherness in the context of Carson McCullers seems auspiciously apropos and cathartic, and in the context of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, a therapeutic exercise in Aristotelian ethos and pathos and in discourse regarding the tenets of modernism. As a young girl, McCullers spent a significant portion of her childhood confined to her bedroom due to various illnesses, so her fascination with Others emerged from many hours of solitude and alienation, thus imprinting upon her an interest in Otherness because of her own questionable health and an early understanding of how situations and experiences affect people.

Providing insight into her developing literary self, McCullers in “How I Began to Write” recalls how she discovered Eugene O’Neill’s books in her family’s library, and she began “writing a three-acter [sic] about revenge and incest—the curtain rose on a graveyard and, after scenes of assorted misery, fell on a catafalque. The cast consisted of a blind man, several idiots, and a mean old woman of one hundred years,” a captivating amalgamation of characters involved in mayhem, plotting, and dysfunction (250).

The characters in her three-act play alone constitute the Other and Otherness because they do not account for McCullers’s own experience as a precocious, female teenager, who possesses sight and does not have a mental disability, proving she had at an early age a prolific capacity for empathy and imagining characteristics that constitute the Other and the grotesque and the sublime, but her abilities extend beyond these characterizations to the settings as well. 49

The settings of the cemetery and of where people elevate a dead loved one, alluding to the tomb in Romeo and Juliet, confirm an early interest in intending the sublime and the grotesque to work in conjunction with her written characters, living in conditions indicative of their flaws but also illustrating the futility of being and the range of tragedy. Writing about motifs found in Oedipus the King and Hamlet—revenge and incest—depicts McCullers as acquiring a profound, astute understanding of the human condition and what becomes necessary in the juxtaposition of the elements the grotesque and the sublime to facilitate a literary reflection of what is, what was, and what may be.

The Other/Otherness

As far back as Plato’s conversations with the Stranger and vanished civilizations recorded images of people and animals on rocks in the Mojave Desert, the Other and Otherness originated as concepts of antithesis and as a dichotomic lexis within human understanding of the self and the One that is not self. The human brain defines and objectifies the Other and assigns Otherness, while it compares those observed characteristics or differences of the Other to the self and attempts to navigate a greater understanding, synthesis, or rejection of such concepts. The Other exists because humans elect opposition, dissonance, or distance, creating Otherness through their actions and elections, because sometimes, people cannot coexist, choose warfare, or enact enslavement. The self exists, because the Other subsists. Anyone who is not the self assumes the identity of the Other, and dichotomy begins. Since humans possess the tendency to judge and to compartmentalize, the Other and Otherness present—to the self—as a member of a different community, race, nationality, religion, social class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, political party or ideology, or as the opposite gender or disabled. All of these categories distinguish the Other 50 and the self in definitive, analogous, or ambiguous ways—based on individual or group influences, perceptions, and applications.

Many theorists including Nicolas of Cusa, Jacques Lacan, Simone de Beauvoir, and

Gabriel Marcel construe the Other and Otherness respectively in terms of the human relationship with God; of the ego and alter-ego and what is real, imaginary, or emblematic; of patriarchal treatment and marginalization of women; and of assimilation, constellations, and just being.

While one can apply any of these theories to analyze Lonely Hunter, Jean-François Staszak’s explication of the Other and Otherness recognizes the role and the significance of the person ascribing characteristics of variance to another, while he cautions readers of unequal authority and circumstances (categorical Others) of the sometimes unavoidable consequences of those in power versus those who exercise less power.

In his definition of Otherness, Staszak defines Otherness as “the result of a discursive process by which a dominant in-group (‘Us,’ the Self) constructs one or many dominated out- groups (‘Them,’ Other) by stigmatizing a difference—real or imagined—presented as a negation of identity and thus [attributing] a motive for potential discrimination,” control, segregation, or elimination. In addition, Staszak acknowledges the possibility for the Others to cease existing as

Others, when they “succeed in conferring upon themselves a positive, autonomous identity” and request “discursive legitimacy and a policy to establish norms” for themselves, but in the process, as they cease existing as Others, Staszak asserts that they construct and devalue “their own out-groups,” resulting in a new cycle of stigmatization of Others by those assigned

Otherness originally (2). Staszak warns that even though overcoming Otherness may seem like a possibility, reasonable, and logical, the real authority occurs in imposition and emanates from those holding economic, political, and social power, making the possibility of shedding 51

Otherness minimal and nearly impossible (3).

Staszak comments how throughout American history, the powerful and wealthy employ segregation to constrain groups, including Blacks, Native Americans, and the Irish, to ghettos, reservations, or sections of land used to convey and to evoke Otherness because of its location, appearance, or distance from more picturesque, affluent landscapes, notably, where the wealthy and powerful reside. He notes the grotesque effects of poverty, concentration, fixity, and exclusion, as they produce unfavorable human conditions and conduct and catalyze “the development of visible [and ontological] misery and a specific culture [of suffering]. These serve a posteriori as justification for the stigmatization and isolation of the incriminated group[s] and confirm the dominant group’s sense of superiority,” producing necessary rationale for continued objectification, persecution, disenfranchisement, and maltreatment of the Other (5). McCullers effectively uproots such rationale and presents her characters John Singer, Dr. Benedict Mady

Copeland, and Jake Blount with verisimilitude, narrative impartiality, and empathic detachment, causing readers to not only conceive of and contemplate her characters’ Otherness but to expose the ontological captivity imposed by such a label like Otherness.

Richard Wright praises McCullers’s remarkable pellucidity, writing style, and her

“astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle

Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race” (2), implying

McCullers rejects the marginal limitations and predictability of objectification and sublimely purposes and inverts the Other and Otherness to render her characters’ Otherness agreeable and sympathetic to readers. Judith Giblin James professes that for McCullers “individuals are always more important … than institutions” (5), so in utilizing third-person omniscient narration,

McCullers avoids pontification and an arrogant self-righteousness, which might offend engaged, 52 white readers, and assigns inner and external voices, so readers hear directly from the Others who they are not—Singer, Copeland, and Blount—creating the insight necessary to respond sympathetically to these characters in much the same way many readers responded to Harriet

Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin almost ninety years earlier; these characters hunger for readers to listen and hear their plights as they suffer through silence, Jim Crow, depression, loneliness, and alcoholism in an unnamed town in Georgia, which might serve as any town in

America. As a woman or a de Beauvoirian-defined Other herself, McCullers appreciates the significance and power of voice, so with Lonely Hunter, she temporarily silences the resounding, powerful Southern societal and racial norms and launches the victims into the literary forefront where they unknowingly offer their testimony, while she simultaneously places a veil of alienation over these same Others, leading them to believe that they are each alone and no one hears them.

However, do McCullers’s characterizations and presentations of Singer, Copeland, and

Blount admit one’s conscious need to categorize? Do her characterizations address or consider her own judgements with a balance of niceties or did the characters sublimely present themselves this way to her as she wrote about them? Maybe this is why every character in the story qualifies as an Other, since to McCullers, she aimed to not only create an opus of Otherness but to illustrate how Otherness emerges as a method of survival in the grotesque and sublime conditions within the Georgia landscape of Lonely Hunter. McCullers herself articulates these

“characters cannot be described adequately without the events which happen to them being involved”; then, she acknowledges the role, the strength, and the response of each character in most of their circumstances: “Nearly all of the happenings in the book spring directly from the characters. During the space of this book, each person is shown in his strongest and most typical 53 actions,” suggesting her characters cannot exist without their circumstances (McCullers,

“Author’s” 126). In Wunderkind, Judith Giblin James indicates how she believes McCullers outfits her characters—she inserts “a symbolic layer of character distortion calculated for its extremity [so it] takes precedence over realistic evocations of place or social interaction,” exposing systemic symptoms and consequences of the human condition and offering literary significance to such distortions but not completely discounting the role of locations or character interchange (5).

The initial chapter of Lonely Hunter introduces the relationship and daily interactions between two mutes John Singer and Spiro Antonapoulos, who have been close companions for ten years (McCullers 6). McCullers immediately follows her intentional ambiguity about the setting with specifics about these characters’ appearances, mannerisms, and behaviors, supporting Judith Giblin James’s assertion about McCullers’s interest in people more so than places:

In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. Early every

morning they would come out from the house where they lived and walk arm in

arm down the street to work. The two friends were very different. The one who

always steered the way was an obese and dreamy Greek. In the summer he would

come out wearing a yellow or green polo shirt stuffed sloppily into his trousers in

front and hanging loose behind. When it was colder, he wore over this a shapeless

gray sweater. His face was round and oily, with half-closed eyelids and lips that

curved in a gentle, stupid smile. The other mute was tall. His eyes had a quick,

intelligent expression. He was always immaculate and very soberly dressed. (3)

To mention “mutes” seven words into the first chapter indicates an innovative beginning that not 54 only depicts the subjectivity of modernism, but it also allows readers access to both an aesthetic and sublime experience between two people only few have encountered in their own lives. Then to introduce their differences in order to characterize them immediately positions the novel as one that might explore polarity and its ramifications. McCullers’s employment of “mutes” signifies how voices and words appear irrelevant because no one in the story seems to listen— except Singer ironically and he does not read lips well—and because people of authority rarely hear what the Other says. To describe Singer and Antonapoulos, she must differentiate between them with pointed adjectives like “different,” “obese,” “dreamy,” “shapeless,” “round,” “oily,”

“half-closed,” “gentle,” “stupid,” “tall,” “quick,” “intelligent,” and “immaculate” (3), implying the narrator may actually have one character she prefers over the other (Singer) and positioning sublime and grotesque descriptors at the beginning of the novel to establish a tone readers might expect in future pages, as McCullers reveals details about characters.

McCullers introduces Singer and Antonapoulos calmly with what appears initially as wisdom, offering them no special treatment in her presentation; she stages them as characters participating in a dysfunctional relationship, emphasizing their actions and interactions, and aiming to treat their disabilities as the norm and inconsequential, all the while making

Antonapoulos behave more grotesquely than Singer ever does using descriptions that establish him as slightly perverted, uncontrollable, and animalistic. She draws attention to Antonapoulos’s

“fat hand” groping fruit (4); how he “loved to eat more than anything else in the world” (4); how he “lick[ed] over each one of his teeth with his tongue” (5); his preference for “the white pieces

[of a chess set] and [how he] would not play if the black men were given to him” (5); his “huge buttocks would sag down over his plump little feet when he kneeled” (7); his increasing thievery of trivial items (7); his public urination (8); and his incarcerations (9). While she attempts to 55 distance Singer from any sort of similar grotesque caricature, she does portray him as an enabler, who seems fearful of being alone and is utterly attracted to a man who illustrates such a caricature: Singer “looked in another direction” when Antonapoulos stole food from his place of employment (4); always handled the chores in their living space (5); hid “a bottle of something” to inspire Antonapoulos to play chess (5); always “paid for what he [Antonapoulos] took” (7); and would “pay bail for his friend” after his increasingly unruly public behavior.

McCullers’s emphasis on actions so early in the novel elevates Singer’s enabling above

Antonapoulos’s grotesquery, although their lack of voices and hearing serves to initially amplify their Otherness. As an author, she confers an unconventional voice of signing, interaction, and response on them, employing her own form of sign language, a form that might interest Jacques

Derrida, Hélène Cixous, or Charles S. Peirce. Unfortunately, Singer’s signs and interest in signing to Antonapoulos vary immensely from Antonapoulos; Antonapoulos responds to

Singer’s devotion with little reciprocity or appreciation, yet he remains interested only in fulfilling his primitive needs of eating, sleeping, and drinking with “the same vague, fumbling signs,” positing polarity as a standard readers should expect from other characters and situations in the novel (4).

The fact that McCullers begins her first novel with insight into the lives of mutes clearly demonstrates her affinity for people who might personify Otherness. Her choices to begin this novel were infinite, but she started hers with those who cannot communicate in the conventional way with their voices, compelling them to use other methods of communication that force others to hear and notice them but also requiring Others in the novel to demand from themselves another method of communicating with the mute Singer, even if it is with their voices or through eye contact. Other methods of communication expand, flip, or confront the norm, which may 56 subsequently challenge the powerful, but as Stazsak maintains, powerful people often easily quash any power or voice Others believe they have.

McCullers alters her technique somewhat when she exposes Doctor Benedict Mady

Copeland’s Otherness first by providing details about where he resides, directly recalling

Stazsak’s observation about segregation of the Other, and secondly, revealing his skin color after describing attributes about his countenance and how he is spending a rare, quiet evening in his home with his thoughts and without interruptions:

Far from the main street, in one of the Negro sections of the town, Doctor

Benedict Mady Copeland sat in his dark kitchen alone. It was past nine o’clock

and the Sunday bells were silent now. Although the night was very hot, there was

a small fire in the round-bellied wood stove. Doctor Copeland sat close to it,

leaning forward in a straight-baked kitchen chair with his head cupped in his long,

slender hands. The red glow from the chinks of the stove shone on his face—in

this light his heavy lips looked almost purple against his black skin, and his gray

hair, tight against his skull like a cap of lamb’s wool, took on a bluish color also.

(Heart 70)

Such details humanize Doctor Copeland and impel readers to read further to understand what ails this man and why he lights the room with fire on a hot, summer evening when he has access to electricity; a man whose name is an amalgam of a title rare to most, including white people. He possesses the namesake of a both a traitor from the Revolutionary War and the seventeenth century heterodox philosopher Baruch (in Latin, Benedictus) Spinoza, with the simple adjective

“mad” and the addition of a “y” to create a unisex middle name, easily testifying to his state of anger over the conditions his people face and his children’s apprehension about educating 57 themselves in the way he had planned for them. A compound word composed of “cope” and

“land,” his surname discloses his state of contention in a country, specifically in the southern

United States, a location where white people showcasing their white authority and privilege were adamant about preventing his equality and maintaining his place of subordination. He copes in a land where he feels unwelcome and rejected, where he must navigate by way of his skin color.

With purpose and intent, McCullers’s diaphanous portrayal of Dr. Copeland reveals a troubled, educated black man who prefers solitude, spends his nights reading philosophers like

Karl Marx and Spinoza, and sits in near darkness, with a fire serving as his only light source.

His home’s external appearance distances him from others in his community because of his once steady income and its building materials reflect his fortitude, his durability, and the strength of his unwavering beliefs: “The houses in the neighborhood had a miserable look. Doctor

Copeland’s house was different from any other building near-by. It was built solidly of brick and stucco. Around the small front yard there was a picket fence” (McCullers, Heart 71).

Everything about Dr. Copeland classifies him as an Other—even within his own family and community—because of his profession, education, vegetarianism, and agnosticism. To solicit tolerance from her more prejudiced readers, McCullers applies to Dr. Copeland beliefs that she feels might also align with theirs—his strong belief in birth control for black people in order to avoid a “sixth or fifth or ninth child”—even though she immediately has Dr. Copeland explain his reasoning, meant to enlighten white readers, that what this man wants for his people is “more chances for the ones already on earth.” Dr. Copeland speaks directly to both white and black entrepreneurs, politicians, and businessmen, who may be in the position to create jobs and opportunities, almost admitting an understanding that his race’s rate of procreation appears unsustainable and uncontrollable, subsequently suggesting the importance of education and self- 58 control in one’s circumstances. His strongly-held support for “Eugenic Parenthood for the Negro race” absolutely mirrors the beliefs of many whites, who were admittedly also against miscegenation and accentuates an unwavering idealism that diminishes his own family’s closeness but also illuminates the social injustices of the time (74).

Horace Taylor characterizes Dr. Copeland as a frustrated idealist who clings to his

“visions with all the crazed fanaticism of those who are driven to the brink of insane despair by ridicule and indifference” (qtd. in James 16), accounting for why his male children and he “are

[distant and] psychological strangers” (qtd. in James 17), why his wife Daisy originally left him, and why he lives alone; this is what Copeland wants for himself—perpetual solitude, rigidity, and disappointments—rationalizing his own choices in an unjust society, ignoring the consequences of his strict idealism, thus believing himself more educated and elevated above most of his own people. Taylor construes the grotesque display of a man who has emotionally disconnected from his own family because they disregard his “real purpose[s] for them” because

“he knew exactly how each thing should be with them. Hamilton would be a great scientist and

Karl Marx a teacher of the Negro race and William a lawyer to fight against injustice and Portia a doctor for women and children” (McCullers, Heart 80); Dr. Copeland saw fit to assign each of his children, like pawns in his own race game, a profession he felt suited his needs—not theirs— with the intent of advancing his people.

As a result, his children ignored his exhortations, left his home, and made lives for themselves and through his own dismissal of their choices and his stoic treatment of them, he categorizes them as Others. Most incensed because they disregarded his plans for them, he embraces the theories and ideals existing in his head and on paper instead of physically embracing and supporting his children and their own choices, treating his wife Daisy with 59 respect, or focusing on what is tangible; sadly, this is what Dr. Copeland actively concocts for himself—perpetual disappointments and a life of sterility—rationalizing his own choices and theories in an unjust society and imitating and perpetrating conditions from the macrocosm into the microcosm of his existence. Staszak’s theory warns of the Other perceiving his own group as

Others and ascribing Otherness to them, but Dr. Copeland not only transfers this Otherness to his family, he rancorously and unforgivingly attributes it to his own patients: “He was always meeting one of them—crawling naked on the floor or engaged in a game of marbles or even on a dark street with his arms around a girl. . . . He had counted one day, and there were more than a dozen named for him.” Since he delivers their babies “maybe two score times a week,” his thoughts about his patients project his assumptions and judgments of their excessive sexual appetites and their collective indolence, also reflecting his disgust with his patients for birthing so many children that carry his name and for his people’s blatant ignorance and rejection of his advanced theories on birth control (74).

Dr. Copeland’s bitter comments conduct this same measure of Otherness to all members of his race, who he contends were fraught with “the yoke of submission and slothfulness,” yet he sharply criticizes how they might see themselves in their living conditions or how they account for and accept their own mixed heritage, while he simultaneously maligns and dismisses their beliefs as “subterfuges” because he is “interested only in real truths” that correspond with his own vision or a theory from a book he has read and internalized (78). Furthermore, he depicts all blacks as mythical martyrs who enjoy their collective place on the crucifix, a symbol of the social, religious, racial, and economic construct of America, instead of working the way he works to change the future for black people: “The Negro race of its own accord climbs up on the cross on every Friday” (77). Such myopic thinking postulates black people might somehow 60 relish the injustices and continuous subordination perpetrated against them so much so that they would want to repeat slavery, the brutality subjected against them while they were enslaved, the cruelness of Jim Crow, or any other violations they have experienced as a result of their skin color. Dr. Copeland does not represent the only staunch idealist whose intent is to correct social injustices in the story, however.

With Jake Blount’s character, McCullers introduces another male whose ideologies bind and constipate his ability to connect with people so much that she eliminates his physical presence from the initial characterization and frames him through the Otherness of his only suitcase, a symbol of transience, limits, and human movement. Two minor characters, Biff

Brannon and his wife Alice, owners the New York Café, hold Blount’s suitcase in their bedroom above the café. To Alice, the suitcase belongs to them now because Blount has been using their charity and seems complacent and stuck in a perpetual state of inebriety; Brannon disagrees.

Brannon supports Blount in this argument because he identifies Blount as a man who needs support and compassion, but his wife directs her focus on what she believes are Blount’s negative attributes: “. . . [Blount is always] so drunk it’s a disgrace to the business. And besides, he’s nothing but a bum and a freak.” Instantly, Brannon responds to Alice’s cynical labels with

“I like freaks,” reflecting the author’s lifelong interest in them as well (14). McCullers indirectly depicts Blount through this disagreement between a husband and a wife, who have no prior knowledge of or experience with Blount but who seem only to communicate through conflict, antagonistic statements, and condemnatory intent. Alice exchanges empty threats and insults, while Brannon ignores her initially but realizes, “He was sorry he had talked to Alice. With her, silence was better,” because with her, his words create friction (15). This perpetual discord personifies the relationship between Blount and the world, since he often yells when he speaks 61 because he exudes contention, struggles to relate with others, eludes connectedness, and seems hypercombative. Brannon notes how Blount would “Talk—talk—talk” but “most of the time nobody was sure just what he was saying. . . . The words came out of his throat like a cataract,” revealing a deluge of incongruities juxtaposed with complexities to match his jumbled mental state and an Otherness via words (17).

McCullers continues Blount’s characterization in media res through the eyes of the narrator utilizing temporal details and descriptions about his minimal height but considerable musculature, portraying a mélange of odd, contrasting, and almost grotesque features to lay emphasis on various aspects of his physicality, distinguishing him as an Other, and immediately casting him with an exaggerated human form compared to other characters in Lonely Heart:

It was the morning of May 15, yes, that Jake Blount had come in. He [Brannon]

had noticed him immediately and watched. The man was short, with heavy

shoulders like beams. He had a small, ragged mustache, and beneath this his

lower lip looked as though it had been stung by a wasp. There were many things

about the fellow that seemed contrary. His head was very large and well-shaped,

but his neck was soft and slender as a boy’s. The mustache looked false, as if it

had been stuck on for a costume party and would fall off if he talked too fast. It

made him seem almost middle-aged, although his face with its high, smooth

forehead and wide-open eyes was young. His hands were huge, stained, and

calloused, and he was dressed in a cheap white-linen suit. There was something

very funny about the man, yet at the same time another feeling would not let you

laugh. (16)

Here, the narrator portrays Blount exactly as Brannon sees him, selecting four similes to 62 illustrate him as an external representation of the torment brewing inside him that began when he was a child. In her outline of the novel, McCullers describes Blount as “working fourteen hours a day” when he was nine years old and existing “among conditions of absolute poverty and degradation,” yielding a troubled itinerant in search of a place he might stay and where others agree only with his ideologies (“Author’s” 131). Blount retains some aspects of his childhood appearance, his neck and face, because they convey a stagnated innocence but seem unbalanced by “the mustache” and his “huge, stained, and calloused” hands. He hides his shame beneath the veil of a “white-linen suit,” but the “white” cannot conceal his poverty, loneliness, alcoholism, or homelessness (McCullers, The Heart 16). He becomes a grotesque cartoon character, a foil unto himself, who solicits a two-pronged curiosity from readers which might result in laughter, fright, disgust, or maybe empathy. This third-person omniscient detail recalls Victor Frankenstein’s creation, completely assembled from the parts of corpses, and rejected by his creator because his appearance aroused terror, misunderstanding, and disgust; likewise, through words McCullers assembled Blount with parts too large and too small, sublimely imagined and characterized with grotesque pieces that do not fit together.

Additionally, Blount’s Otherness becomes evident in the narrator’s description of

Blount’s drinking and subsequent behavior by way of more of Brannon’s observations. Between consuming “a pint of liquor … in a half hour” and beer after his “big chicken dinner” in one sitting at the café, this “was [only] the beginning” of his alcoholic consumption for one part of the day, yet this level of drinking provokes Brannon to consider Blount and alcohol’s effects privately: “Never had he seen a man change so many times in twelve days. Never had he seen a fellow drink so much, stay drunk for so long.” This observation advances Blount’s constantly evolving Otherness—an Other to his own Otherness; a discomfort of self so great, only alcohol 63 comforts him and his parts. Alcohol alters him from one Other to the next like some grotesque chameleon or sublime storm clouds. McCullers employs the rhetorical device anaphora to describe this incessant transformation with “Never had he seen a” to magnify Blount’s role as an

Other by sublimely enlisting readers to complete the sentence themselves to further estrange him from readers but also engage them enough to continue reading to fulfill their own wonderment and examination of such grotesque, possibly familiar behavior (16). To substantiate his

Otherness, Blount’s own vacillating rage and volatile personality further outline and segregate him as an outcast. Also, McCullers’s employment of anaphora implores readers to examine their own alcohol consumption through the eyes of someone else, through an Other, and consider their own pending transformations from loved ones or friends into alcoholic Others.

A drunken Blount recognizes and briefly claims his Otherness when he returns to New

York Café with Dr. Copeland, intending to sit with him at the counter and have a drink. Blount ignores and disregards the rules of segregation and places Dr. Copeland and himself in physical danger. After being chastised by a café guest for bringing “a nigger in a place where white men drink,” Blount immediately challenges the guests by proclaiming, “I’m part nigger myself,” as well as listing other ethnic groups in his rant to challenge the theory behind and the false claim of ethnic purity. While this declaration projects the immediate consideration that the heritage of the southern café guests might be—and probably is—questionable, it also initiates the reality and exposes the secrecy of miscegenation that Dr. Copeland and many whites, in an open forum, reject and condemn—even though it exists and should not be ignored. After his verbal classification of self as a combination of ethnic groups, in his “We Are the World” chant, Blount quickly repudiates all of these groups by claiming, “I’m a stranger in a strange land” (23), sublimely declaring and claiming the human condition of Dr. Copeland and himself using an 64 aphorism heard myriad times since Odysseus’s travels and since modernity, supplanting himself and professing his identity of Otherness—a stranger—because he emotionally detaches from all that is to become all that is strange or Other.

65

CHAPTER 4

EXPLORING THE HUMAN CONDITION: LINKING THE GROTESQUE

AND THE SUBLIME

Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too scornful in misfortune. --Socrates

I am always talking about the human condition and about American society in particular: what it is like to be human, what makes us weep, what makes us fall and stumble and somehow rise and go on from darkness into darkness and that darkness carpeted. --Maya Angelou

When people contemplate and attempt to parse their complexities and experiences, as they similarly consider how they live their lives and how they interact, exist in their societies, they traverse the human condition. Without the human condition, humanity would lack meaning, but without humanity, the human condition would fail to exist. The human condition affords insights and perspectives into commonalities that become part of human responses, interactions, and composures when interacting with others, but within the composures, interactions, and responses so too can live negativity, judgement, and ignorance; Plato acknowledges this contrariness in his “The Simile of the Cave”: “I want you to go on to picture the enlightenment or ignorance of our human conditions” (241; bk. 7, sec. 514a), indicating that Plato concludes most people will align themselves with one of these extremes, with a small percentage of people who will decipher values and aspects of enlightenment and ignorance within the human condition and who may write about their findings. Carson McCullers denotes an author who does both—and she designates these dichotomic aspects of ignorance and enlightenment as analogous with the grotesque and the sublime, but McCullers does something else—she establishes an additional correlation between the Other and the human condition because it seems impossible to 66 examine the Other without considering it within the context of the conditions humans experience. To understand the role of the grotesque and the sublime and the purpose of linking them using Lonely Hunter, it is necessary to explore some aspects of the human condition and explain its spiritual, heuristic, sentient, and contradictory dimensions, since within these dimensions, the mental and external factors influence, constipate, and suspend McCullers’s characters Mick Kelly, Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, Jake Blount, and John Singer.

Four modern philosophers—Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), Viktor Frankl (1906-1997),

Erich Fromm (1900-1980), and Terry Eagleton (born 1943)—formulate distinct, diverse definitions of the human condition that consider the rapidly developing, sometimes grotesque events of the world and the subsequent and seemingly cyclical, sublime influences on inhabitants and landscapes. Through comparisons between contemporary society and the Hellenists and by invoking Plato and his cave, Aristotle and the importance of change, and Homer’s function as mass educator, Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher who authored The Human Condition

(1958), declares how the human condition comprises “more than the conditions under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence,” meaning that circumstances of where, what, how, when, and why also account for the human condition, and interactions with objects result in responses or choices not to respond. While a condition may manufacture a choice, the choice, too, becomes a component of a condition, producing a reciprocal relationship between the two. The human condition embodies an ever-growing sum in the complicated equation of life and included in that equation are all of variables and circumstances individuals can and cannot control. Arendt recognizes the earth as an equally instrumental and influential complement and variable: “The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and 67 earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice,” intending earth’s role as immeasurable (sublime), an aggregate (sublime and grotesque), and noteworthy

(grotesque) (ch. 1). McCullers might label Arendt’s earth as an aggregate, copious landscape, and it serves as a motif in Lonely Hunter, since an unnamed town represents anywhere or

Georgia, as identified in the novel, and images of violence, poverty, racism, and twisted beauty and suffering.

Labeled “the theorist of beginnings” because she optimistically reflects “on the human capacity to start something new” during insurmountable circumstances (Canovan), Arendt organizes the human condition into three constitutive public and private activities she considers fundamental to human existence—labor, work, and action—all collectively surface in Lonely

Hunter. Arendt’s definitions of these three terms incorporate the role of the human because of the performance component in each; she identifies labor as corresponding “to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself” (ch. 1). Concluding with this metaphor allows readers to invert it—life itself is the human condition of labor—and readers may connect the concepts to all the characters in McCullers’s novel, since Kelly (“spontaneous growth”), Singer (“metabolism”), Dr.

Copeland (“decay”), and Blount (a combination of “metabolism” and self “decay”) each “labor” through “life itself,” as they each suffer through “a combination of free will and environmental entrapment” (Carr, Understanding 19); circuitous, ineffective communication and caustic interactions; and the processes of their aging bodies, and in Kelly’s case, puberty. Arendt regards work as “the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence” and affords a 68 method of obtainability, providing people with “an artificial world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. . . . The human condition of work is worldliness” (ch. 1). While

McCullers appropriates a fair share of “unnaturalness” and a desire to obtain “a world of things” to Kelly’s family because her parents rent rooms in their house to strangers for income and because Mr. Kelly remains unemployed (other than a watching fixing business that is not lucrative), yet his teenage children work to earn money for the family; contrarily, McCullers illustrates how Dr. Copeland’s possessions—other than his books—have no meaning to him because his rampant idealism chased away everyone with whom he might share these possessions.

When Arendt designates action as “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, correspond[ing] to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world” (ch. 1), her definition connects humans as they all share space and time on earth, but when readers investigate this premise within Lonely Hunter, it magnifies the characters’ inability to communicate clearly, yet they share space in close proximity, and “action” means more to McCullers than a state of “plurality” existing between humans possibly because she witnessed racial and experienced gender and social disparities, so she aimed to redefine it by using several characters who experience their own separate “actions” spiraling within the confines of her literary Georgia and emulating the nonfiction Georgia of the 1930s. Arendt extends and applies an equal relevance to politics, its multiplicity, and the human responses to it, as she classifies the dangers of inertia, indecision, calculation, and fabrication, reporting them as by-products and dangers of modernity.

While Hannah Arendt visualizes the human condition through specific human activities and an idealistic, anachronistic retrospection of the ancient Greeks, Viktor Frankl associates the 69 human condition with the state of one’s mind. In the “Foreword” of Man’s Search for Meaning

(1959), Harold S. Kushner articulates what psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl conveys about the importance of what individuals can control during the worst experiences of any human condition: “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you” (Kushner xi). This view posits that regardless of one’s circumstances, one’s consciousness controls the experience; however, this mastery of control requires an exceptional human being—one who can mindfully search for life’s meaning during the worst, most unimaginable experiences and who can recognize suffering as an intrinsic component of life’s meaning and of existence. Like Arendt, Frankl reports a tertiary, modest structure to this optimistic maxim for living and sustenance of self during extremely trying times and during every day experiences: “[I]n work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times” (Kushner x). Frankl conceives and regards the response as an absolute, pivotal choice in the survival of one’s person and spirit, and in the response, this theory permits a conversion of the grotesque into something sublime.

As a young girl and teenager, McCullers spent a substantial amount of time alone in her bedroom or in hospitals convalescing, so she controlled her own circumstances of solitude by reading and playing piano; unfortunately, she had difficulty warding off the loneliness because it served as a subject that haunted many characters in all of her novels and living in a body that ailed her both physically, emotionally, and sexually, so much so she poisoned it with alcohol and cigarettes. In Parts One and Two, McCullers equips Mick Kelly with a conscious control 70 reflective of Frankl’s theory to effectively shift herself between her inside and the outside room for the purpose of self-preservation and to salvage her flourishing imagination and musical abilities, but she eventually revokes this control and substitutes fear and exhaustion as a consequence of Kelly’s sexual rite of passage meant to derail and to disconnect her from her previous self of nonconformity.

As Frankl recounts his own experiences, observations, and interactions with others at

Auschwitz, he gracefully and empathetically recognizes how for some of the imprisoned, suicide presented their only emancipation from suffering: “[Suicide] was born of the hopelessness of the situation, the constant danger of death looming over us daily and hourly, and the closeness of the deaths suffered by many of the others [in the camp]” (Frankl 18). He acknowledges an

“abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior,” thus concluding why suicide emerges as a normal response to unfathomable circumstances that represent reality for those held in the camps (20). In Lonely Hunter, Singer faces “unfathomable circumstances” when he discovers Antonapoulos, his friend of ten years, has died at the asylum during the six months since he last visited. Singer’s responses incorporate reactionary, withdrawn, delinquent, and metaphorical behaviors readers would expect from Antonapoulos: flailing his hands and stamping his feet as a response to a lost coin in a slot machine (McCullers, Heart 324); he

“carried away” a number of items from his hotel room; he has difficulty using his hands to communicate with other mutes (324); and he “left his luggage in the middle of the station floor,” before he pulls “a pistol from his pocket” and places “a bullet in his chest” in a house where children sleep (326). To respond to his loss, Singer abruptly, violently, and grotesquely withdraws himself from the lives of Mick Kelly, Jake Blount, and Dr. Copeland, because

McCullers recognizes, “Each character must be responsible for himself alone,” so she eliminates 71 the beacon of the sublime for these characters, subsequently magnifying their loneliness (Carr,

Understanding 26).

What happens when people elect life, but in order to survive, they mute their emotions as a mechanism of self-defense and self-preservation? Frankl indicates how common this practice of “relative apathy” or “the blunting of the emotions” exemplifies the prisoners’ “psychological reactions” to all the death, the misery, the constant threat of terror, and the despair around them, granting them some semblance of control over their own spirits and survival in “the enforced physical and mental primitiveness” of life in the camps (23, 36). A symbol of modernism, chaos, and the Depression, Jake Blount utilizes such practices when dealing with others, and these practices epitomize his gross alcohol intake and his technique of self-alienation that he employs to avoid developing caring relationships with people. Blount responds with passive-aggressive behavior because he cannot decide whether he wants to be part of a problem or a solution, and he reacts this way to avoid healthy, reciprocal relationships with people save John Singer and to maintain an illusion of control even though he supposes he has little to no control over his own circumstances.

By discussing how people survived the camps spiritually and physically, Frankl references “the apparent paradox that some prisoners of less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust [background or] nature,” while the “sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less,” suggesting these

“sensitive” people retreated inside themselves, where they found comfort in their pasts and communed with their memories instead of others (36). Frankl bestows an awareness—a truth, a secret “human poetry”—through his own example and recollection of his wife, where “love is 72 the ultimate and the highest goal with which man can aspire,” claiming “[t]he salvation of man is through love and in love,” as those endure their suffering, it becomes honorable through the act of imagining, recall, and contemplation—offering life to what was so that it may be again (37).

Somehow, McCullers twists Frankl’s “awareness” because it is as though the love he articulates does not exist in Lonely Hunter, except maybe between Kelly and Bubber, and even this love seems warped and based in loneliness, between Portia and her own family, and Portia and the

Kelly children. In Blount’s recollection of his past, love appears absent from him, too, since he left home at a young age, and McCullers’s grotesque caricature of him makes him challenging for people, including readers, to love or respect. To contrast Blount, Singer’s love might represent “human poetry,” but his love represents an unbalanced love of enabling someone who is incapable of reciprocation, which inevitably grows reflective of how the other characters objectify, personify, and elevate him.

Frankl reiterates his thinking that people’s mental states very well construct the landscapes of their own human conditions, but in addition to love and work, he values suffering because it promotes growth if people project purpose into it. He warns suffering can fill “the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little”; suffering “is absolutely relative” and is completely individualized (44), yet humans may achieve something in how they distance themselves from suffering and examine their suffering as something of the past—objectifying the suffering to make it less powerful, harmful, and influential, but with

Blount, the reverse occurs: his objectification of his suffering grows greater than he is, like a dark companion, driving him further into his alcoholism and political fixations. Frankl professes as soon as humans “form a clear and precise picture of it” and recognize suffering as unavoidable but manageable (68, 74), people might accept “the challenge to suffer bravely” and 73 with dignity (114). McCullers not only foreshadows the potential for suffering using the title

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, but she, like readers would expect from Shakespeare, cascades the human condition and suffering as though they were both synonymous with tragedy because everyone in the novel suffers; she distributes them evenly and creates a grotesque and sublime landscape where her characters suffer to be loved, suffer to be heard, suffer to be accepted, suffer to escape loneliness, suffer to create, and suffer under the weight of familial responsibility.

Furthermore, Frankl emphasizes the singularity of one’s experience: “[Life’s tasks] form man’s destiny, which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response.” This thinking cautions people against homogenous and restrictive judgements and expectations and against believing experiences are uniform; such thinking expects and conveys compassion and empathy, as he maintains, “Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness,” so retribution should never be justification for one to do wrong (77, 91).

Frankl’s expectations of humanity remain elevated, as he specifically recommends humans disconnect themselves from what feels retaliatory in order to stifle and mitigate a truly human response. He idealistically construes the singular experience as more purposeful to one’s individual development and as instrumental in determining one’s future, whereas McCullers carefully crafts the tenets of modernism to pervert singularity so much so that most of her characters cannot relate to one another enough to discuss their conditions, thereby making their destinies disappointing, rigid, and futile. Ironically, through this perversion of singularity, she communicates how unsatisfactory, polarizing, and potentially dangerous both conformity and nonconformity may be. While this bifurcation of singularity underhandedly reinforces Frankl’s notion that situations are incomparable, McCullers subtly advocates a necessary vacillation 74 between conformity and nonconformity, even though all of her characters struggle to obtain a balance between both extremes.

To contrast, McCullers imparts still another understanding of Frankl’s singularity because Lonely Hunter supplies several characters, including Kelly, Blount, and Dr. Copeland, who live differently from one another and the other ones, and they exhibit character diversity and hold various flaws, yet her characters spiral within their dysfunction, anger, and loneliness, seeking direction and understanding from John Singer, a man who does not understand them.

The novel lacks Frankl’s optimism because hope is absent from nearly every character’s story, which represents another tenet of modernism, and although McCullers places her characters in the same city, this looming singularity does nothing to prevent their loneliness and inner suffering or to remedy their inability to communicate—it reinforces, perpetuates, and magnifies them—thus rejecting Frankl’s idea “no situation repeats itself,” with McCullers proving in the

South, conditions, circumstances, sublimities, and grotesqueries do replicate themselves in fiction.

Like McCullers, Erich Fromm’s examination of the human condition originated from events that occurred in his adolescence and appear tantamount to his life-long search for understanding war, human needs, and what it means to be human. Fromm, recognized as one of the world’s leading psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, cites his Latin teacher’s delight at the pending First World War with the utterance of “Si vis pacem para bellum” (if you want peace prepare for war), contradicting his teacher’s previous teachings about peace. Equally shocking was “the hysteria of hate against the British, which swept through Germany in those years,” imprinting upon him an interest in and a need to understand the human condition, the individual, and social phenomena, but he, too, recalls how war disturbed, affected, and altered him, forcing 75 him to question religious and national doctrines. After the war concluded, he depicts himself as

“a deeply troubled young man who was obsessed by the question of how war was possible.”

Through “a passionate desire for peace and international understanding,” he sought to comprehend and possibly explain “the irrationality of human mass behavior.” Moreover, he grew deeply suspicious of all official ideologies and declarations and filled himself with the conviction

“of all [ideologies and declarations] one must doubt” (Beyond, ch. 1).

Amidst his mounting suspicions of national and spiritual affirmations, Fromm envisions humans as responsible for other humans, in some reciprocal structure, creating possibilities and challenges within the contemplation of “what does it mean to be human?” and qualifying every human as carrying “all of humanity within himself—the saint as well as the criminal”

(Revolution, ch. 4, sec. 1). Philosophers Karl Marx, Baruch Spinoza, and Aristotle interested

Fromm early in his career because they viewed “people as social beings whose actions have real consequences” and because “[t]heir philosophies address concrete issues: how to live a good life and how to organize society to make this possible” (A. Thomson 7). Similar to Fromm, Dr.

Copeland reads Marx and Spinoza and supports and values their theories, and Dr. Copeland believes black people’s actions had exaggerated, “real consequences” in a white world, so he feels responsible for educating them to accord them equal status with whites—only if they avoid certain influences he has identified. First, he attempts to educate his children using the theories and ideologies he endorses, but he becomes much too harsh and myopic a teacher and restricts their personal growth and choices in the process. Unfortunately, Jim Crow’s restrictions, racism, and another question that many whites fail to comprehend—what does it mean to be black?— haunt Dr. Copeland, as he again contemplates this question during a visit from Portia, his daughter, whose anxiety builds after her brother Willie’s letter is delayed, and her intuition tells 76 her something terrible has happened to him. Instead of acknowledging her worries, Dr.

Copeland instructs her to hold up her shoulders and “cease moping. You mope and drool around until I cannot bear to look on you,” before he encourages her to “[h]ave patience” and dismisses her concerns with “[a]ll will be well,” because his patients occupy his thoughts and not his incarcerated son, possibly in Dr. Copeland’s own act of defiance toward his son (McCullers, The

Heart 196). Like a race martyr, Dr. Copeland holds himself responsible for other black people by trying to instill the importance of the new science around birth control, but most of them disregard his teachings because he can be so condescending towards them.

Unlike Frankl and Arendt, Fromm’s theories regarding the human condition highlight both a physiological and an anthropological perspective and imply the human condition originates from two concepts: “the decrease of instinctual determinism the higher we go in animal evolution, reaching its lowest point in man” and “the tremendous increase in size and complexity of the brain in comparison with body weight.” The first concept addresses the condition of vulnerability and insecurity because most humans have lost their instincts for survival in nature and in this increasing technological climate, so they must make decisions for themselves and risk failure and death, as they also manufacture these missing instincts from new experiences, building character and capacity for decision making (Revolution, ch. 4, sec. 2).

However, with all of this character building, Fromm warns of insanity as something else with which humans must concern themselves, since humans require frames of reference in order to protect themselves from various threats. These concerns force humans to make decisions about the conditions in which they reside; aside from these concerns, he assures humans of two things they can be certain: birth and death (ch. 4, sec. 2). In Lonely Hunter, Blount epitomizes Fromm’s certainty of life and death because of the primal sensibilities McCullers imposes upon him and 77 that permeate his character, coupled with his alcoholic intake and his extreme alienation, these things influence and produce his vitriolic, maniacal responses to almost everyone and everything around him. Even though the second concept addresses the size of the human brain compared to the size of the human body, Fromm notes the brain’s “complexity” and ability and power to reason, since so much about functioning and non-functioning brains remains unknown, and accordingly, thus corresponding to the sublime and the grotesque.

To further explain this complexity, Fromm characterizes humans as “freak[s] of nature”

(all exist in Lonely Hunter) because some possess “self –awareness,” exhibit “the capacity to feel lonely,” or exist “within nature,” yet they transcend it (ch. 4, sec. 3, sec. 2); he portrays this transcendence as a quest “to find principles of action,” relating to and restoring the lost instincts and creating their own conditions of destruction and creation (ch. 4, sec. 2). Though Fromm classifies society as having “both a furthering and inhibiting function” (Beyond, ch. 12), he indicates that while humans employ possibility, wield power, create, and destroy, they also populate and exist within various social orders: “the social order can do everything to man— starve him, torture him, imprison him, or overfeed him—this cannot be done without certain consequences which follow from the very conditions of human existence” (Revolution, ch. 4, sec. 2), implying a correlative cycle occurs when humans represent an ingredient. To contrast what the social order can do to humans, he allots an opportunity to escape their conditions; he notes how sleep serves as the only “state of being in which man is free from the need to take care of his survival” (ch. 4, sec. 4). Likewise, McCullers utilizes sleep to comfort and as a time not requiring deliberate physical action for Blount, Kelly, Dr. Copeland, and Singer, but she also couples it with dreaming to not only predispose them to distorted social orders but to suspend these characters within the hardships of their human conditions and the landscape, making it 78 impossible for them to engage in Fromm’s idea around freedom “to take care of” themselves.

Also, she purposes sleep and dreaming to exist as an alternate state of reality and a metaphorical state where she might exploit grotesque and sublime imagery to present subtle messages to her characters and readers. Her near perversion of Fromm’s notion of escape begs these questions:

Are humans really free when they sleep? What happens when the human condition haunts the dream state and produces restless sleep and nightmares? Are people isolated or not when they sleep? Do they commune with those from whom they desire escape? Is sleep a physiological response of self-imposed isolation serving to suspend consciousness and disconnect someone from the human condition? Did McCullers, at twenty-one, understand the efficacy of a dream state?

Fromm expounds five existential needs necessary to remedy, to correct, and to create harmony within the human condition and to mitigate what he referred to as the human dilemma of isolation—“relatedness,” “transcendence,” “rootedness,” “sense of identity,” and a “frame of orientation”—and their corresponding antitheses “narcissism,” “destructiveness,” “incestuous clinging,” “herd conformity,” “irrational” devotion (A. Thomson 26-29, 93-94). Annette

Thomson interprets the importance behind the principles as people manage or do not manage their individual experiences and subsequently design, manifest, or fall victim to their conditions:

“relatedness” outlines how humans “strive to make sense of people and things” (exemplifying

Singer’s relationship with Dr. Copeland) (27), while “narcissism” conveys a failure “to connect” and those affected remain “locked in the illusion of their own realit[ies]” (symbolizing Blount and Dr. Copeland) (93); “transcendence” focuses on “the search for meaning” (Kelly illustrates both) (26), whereas “destructiveness” results from a society not harnessing the collective creativity of its people (evidenced by the Southern landscape); “rootedness” implies “a sense of 79 belonging” (Dr. Copeland and Blount both resist a sense of belonging), but “incestuous clinging” refers to a “fear of our own independence,” so people cling to “narrow traditions” without conceiving of other ones (typifies Singer) (27); a “sense of identity” addresses the “potential for individual freedom” as people “make sense” of “I” (epitomizes Dr. Copeland, Blount, and Kelly)

(29, 93), as “herd conformity” displays actions where people stifle their individuality and “strive for sameness” (the rioters depict both and Kelly succumbs to this conformity when she quits school and accepts the position) (63); and a “frame of orientation” permits people to locate a

“moral position” and a “basis for action” and choices (Singer illustrates these for the others even though he is as equally flawed), yet “irrational” devotion implies an examination “of the various forms of religion” and religion’s presentation of “answers” that vilify the human quest or provide

“worse solutions to man’s quest for meaning” (embodies Kelly’s, Dr. Copeland’s, and Blount’s devotion to Singer), than humans might forge themselves (29).

Where Arendt, Frankl, and Fromm contribute more psychoanalytic definitions of the human condition, in The Meaning of Life, Terry Eagleton evaluates the human condition by investigating its propensity for tragedy and by posing the connotative, relative, and existential question “what is the meaning of life?”. In much the same way Shakespeare applied, valued, and exploited tragedy, Eagleton infers its ability to conduct responses, reciprocate, and produce further tragedy: “Tragedy at its finest is a courageous reflection on the fundamental nature of human existence” (11). Not only does he identify the reflective nature of tragedy, but he implies in order for tragedy to be reflective or for something to be defined as a tragedy, people must reflect and name it as such, suggesting, too, the power of humans and language; McCullers discerns this power in reflection and application; creates her own readers’ paradox with characters inspired by Schrodinger’s cat in the tradition of Modernism—who seem both alive 80 and dead—as they experience the indeterminacy of the human condition; purposes tragedy and the human condition like arch antagonists within Lonely Hunter; and fashions such conditions and casts the Other within them, so readers feel just as hopeless but inspired and engaged enough to continue reading because of the human desire to watch tragedy unfold, returning readers to

McCullers’s and Mann’s previously noted desire to read and to hunger further for grotesque details. Eagleton theorizes how tragedy within the human condition conducts substantial, unequivocal, and reductive power, which denies the ontological response to administer assumed and accepted ideologies to conditions and to people around them: “Tragedy at its most potent is a question without an answer, deliberately depriving us of ideological consolation” or understanding, insinuating an inevitability of ambiguity and meaning that making sense of tragedy often eludes those interested in defining it (12). His observation about tragedy’s ability to deprive people of their consolatory practices aligns tragedy both to the sublime and to the grotesque because these elements often accomplish the same type of deprivation and substitute veneration, disbelief, denial, or consternation in place of understanding, response, and processing.

Eagleton stresses a value of people speaking on the human condition because “language

. . . allows us not only to get a fix on ourselves, but to conceive of our situation as a whole,” but

“because we live by signs, which bring along with them the capacity for abstraction, we can distance ourselves from our immediate contexts, free ourselves from the imprisonment of our bodily senses, and speculate on the human situation” (13), revealing power and consequences of abstraction and distance, while echoing Fromm’s notion of escape from an albatross, Frankl’s assertion of power in a healthy mind, and the sublime’s ability to leave people transfixed within the construct of time. Abstraction within the human condition highlights the dual properties of 81 creation and destruction, and McCullers constructs the human condition like a cryptogram around each character in Lonely Hunter, making readers consider whether one condition seems worse than the next, as her characters struggle to “accommodate the realities” she composes

(Eagleton, Meaning 76). Eagleton enriches his previous comment by magnifying how

McCullers overlooks “the literariness” of her novel—possibly because of her age and her own experiences—by treating each character “as though they were actual people” bound by Southern human conditions and her intuition (How 45).

Highly reminiscent of Frankl and Fromm, Eagleton articulates how for most people, their lives become “meaningful by their relationships with those closest to them” (Meaning 88); he intimates further how people strive for “happiness” as a paradigm for existing within their conditions, where they acquiesce to “the[ir] idea[s] of happiness,” appearing “both vital and vacuous” in their creations and sacrifices and, due to its relativity, exposing the grotesque and the sublime qualities of their own happiness (81). To contrast these ideals (one expects this from

Eagleton), he aptly evokes Ludwig Wittgenstein, who portends, “The best image of the soul is the body” (qtd. in Meaning 81), and McCullers supplies Lonely Hunter with characters whose bodies appear distorted either through readers’ interpretations or perceptions or her narrator’s own descriptions, depositing readers directly into the traveling carnivals of her childhood; she volunteers and exposes her own “abject loneliness,” as she designs conditions and characters saturated by it (Carr, Lonely 1). Also, her characters, appearing as “social animals, who must co- operate or die,” lack the ability to cooperate and to listen, so she voluntarily confers upon readers the death of the most liked character (by the other characters), as exemplified by Singer, who selfishly kills himself because he elects, as he simultaneously grieves, not to “co-operate” or to connect with others (Meaning 88). Since McCullers characterizes him as deaf mute, he is 82 incapable of listening in the manner other characters do; however, Dr. Copeland and Blount choose not to listen. For Dr. Copeland, he awaits a premature death due to his tuberculosis, while Blount’s alcoholism and violent tendencies may result in his own untimely death. Kelly relinquishes her drive to create music in order to “co-operate” and to financially assist her poor family, alleging her own creative death due to her family’s condition.

Like Frankl, Arendt, and Fromm before him, Eagleton returns to the role of the individual and finalizes his original quest for understanding the meaning of life by quoting Julian Baggini:

“[T]he search for meaning [in the human condition] is essentially personal, involving the power and responsibility to discover and in part determine meaning for ourselves” (97), illuminating the dual power of search and self in the process. Offering a similar insight, McCullers manufactures an ending to Lonely Hunter, where she further rewards Biff with “the power and responsibility to discover” the meaning of life from his position behind his café’s counter, as he gazes reflectively into the lives of Others, as they, too, are caught within the webs of the human condition.

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CONCLUSION

LONELY HUNTERS AND A BEAUTIFUL SUICIDE

The real intimacy of the sublime is not so much the way in which it connects us to what we perceive and judge in the value of things and their nature but to the ways in which it connects us to community and humanity, the humanity in ourselves. --Stanley Plumly, “The Intimate Sublime”

In much modernist literature one finds a bitter impatience with the whole apparatus of cognition and the limiting assumption of rationality. Mind comes to be seen as an enemy of vital human powers. Culture becomes disenchanted with itself, sick over its endless refinements. --Irving Howe, “The Culture of Modernism”

The physicality of grotesque bodies that “hurt the eyes” is repeated in the corruptions of human behavior to represent ethical disorder and the chaos of the human condition, and this unruliness is reflected in the text’s setting. --Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund, Grotesque

Whether The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter conveys an “impression . . . [that] is not terrifying” but “is, rather, that of a grave, sad beauty, a diffused poetic pity” (Allen 134); symbolizes a hybrid novel where McCullers exhibits an “unwillingness to separate the experiences of black and white characters, whose identities are so distinct that they necessarily overlap or impinge on each other” (Yaeger, Ch. 6, sec. 3); or illuminates evidence of the modern dilemma where “modernism must always struggle but never quite triumph, and then, after a time, must struggle in order not to triumph” (Howe 48), something appears abundantly clear—at a young age, McCullers simultaneously employs the elements of the sublime and the grotesque, and through this deliberate juxtaposition, she provides insight into the human condition and the honors the experiences of the Other. She supplements her third-person omniscient narration style with a necessary empathic detachment, presenting characters and their thoughts exactly as they are, while she incorporates individual character grotesqueries and sublimities to render the 84 characters interpretable, vulnerable, and transparent, for “if they differ from other human beings they do so only in degree; the laws that govern their being[s] are universal laws,” and she masters these laws to outline “the common business of human existence,” as her Others bear “the common joys, anxieties, [losses], and endurances” (Allen 134), illustrating the commonality and unison of experience. Through this detachment, she intertwines hypnotic details about the landscape to offset and cushion the vein of futility that courses through the novel.

As expected in a modern novel, Lonely Hunter supplies characters in various timeless dilemmas masterfully reported and engineered by McCullers, who endeavors through literary means to confront and share her Southern culture, “marked by a prevalent style of perception and feeling” and to not only expose its hypocrisies but unmask the hopelessness and loneliness that seems to haunt everyone—regardless of region (Howe 48), suggesting the mire of modernism will never cease and revealing a presence of a personal abyss filled with components of the grotesque and the sublime. The grotesque delineates a “semiotic switchboard” that “can be understood as a prose technique [that McCullers enlists] for moving background information [or history] into the foreground” of her novel (Yaeger, ch. 1, sec. 4), whereas the sublime resides in

“a marginal or tangential place, even a subversive one, because of its ‘violence to purpose’” in its employment (Guerlac 192). McCullers’s juxtaposition of the sublime and the grotesque broaches numerous signs and pathways, uncovering a shell game of violence and purpose within the human condition and the experience of the Other.

Through the novel’s narrator, McCullers describes John Singer’s suicide using a detached, blended process of vivid details about the surroundings, delayed temporal particulars, and black letters on egg shell-colored pages, producing an immediate shock and disconnect for readers once Singer shoots himself; he cleans his room—before he kills himself—because 85

McCullers metaphorically ushers the cleanse and restoration of readers’ literary palates, so they no longer expect other characters like him; she effectively yet abruptly discharges him from his service. Would Singer’s suicide be more memorable or impactful if it had been captured on film?

What if Singer had walked off the platform in front of passengers, who were waiting to board an arriving train, so he remains alive in their memories? What if McCullers would have publicized

Singer’s fictional suicide by moving it from his private room to a tree or to the porch outside the

Kelly home? If she would have altered the circumstances surrounding Singer’s suicide, would readers consider her actions a glorification of his suicide or condemn her?

A photograph exists that graphically captures, displays, and immortalizes a moment after a modern era suicide—the suicide of 23-year-old Evelyn McHale—and provides a visual, aesthetic example of linking the grotesque and the sublime, as it occurs within nature and the human experience. On the morning of May 1, 1947, just after 10:35 AM, McHale “stepped out on the parapet,” threw herself from the observation deck located on floor 86 of the Empire State

Building, “cleared the setbacks,” and landed on her back, facing the sky, atop a “United Nations

Assembly Cadillac limousine parked on 34th Street” (“Evelyn”; Cosgrove), the street notorious for the fictional Christmas miracle, coincidentally released in theaters on May 2, 1947 (Miracle).

When she left her fiancé earlier that morning in Pennsylvania, nothing seemed amiss to him; their wedding was planned for June 1947. Once she returned to New York City via train, from

Penn Station she walked to the Governor Clinton Hotel, where she stopped briefly to compose a suicide note and walked two blocks to the Empire State Building (“Evelyn”).

Robert C. Wiles, a young photographer, happened to be across the street from the loud disturbance and a growing, noisy crowd surrounding the tableau before them, so he moved quickly to the scene, where with his camera, he recorded time forever—four minutes after 86

McHale landed on the limousine. On May 12, 1947, Life Magazine elegiacally published the photo as a full-page image (figure 1) as the “Picture of the Week” coupled with this poetic, yet tragic caption: “At the bottom of the Empire State Building the body of Evelyn Hale reposes calmly in grotesque bier, her falling body punched into the top of a car” (“Evelyn”; Cosgrove).

Later that same day, on the observation deck, a detective found her coat folded and placed neatly over the wall and a dark-colored notebook with this note:

I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me. Could you

destroy my body by cremation? I beg of you and my family—don’t have any

service for me or remembrance for me. My fiancé asked me to marry him in June.

I don’t think I would make a good wife for anybody. He is much better off

without me. Tell my father, I have too many of my mother’s tendencies.

(“Evelyn”; strikethrough appears in the original note)

At least she left a note, intimating her premeditation and clarifying her attempt to eliminate herself completely from people’s concrete memories, as if she does not belong—anywhere.

Sadly, this note depicts someone so deeply affected by her past that she is willing to remove herself from the possibilities of her future; she requests to be essentially forgotten, magnifying this wish through her application of the verb “destroy.” She concludes her note with a candid proclamation directed at her father because she believed this sentence would explain why she leapt.

Before she elected to jump, she probably never considered her post mortem notoriety, ultimately securing her fate in death, since she may have supposed the height (1,050 feet) alone might have made her perish or might carry her away. After her sister identified her body, authorities cremated McHale, and a marker does not exist to memorialize her; however, the 87 existence of this photograph repudiates her wishes—because Wiles, the photographer, possessed no knowledge about her desire to completely self eliminate. Whether he was moved by providence, a predestined connectedness to McHale, or a simple desire for fame, he forever captures—because his camera symbolizes an artificial means to fabricate or reproduce time and memory—and features her death, chronicling one seized moment, a blend of whites, blacks, and greys carefully paired and working in unison to produce an image so enigmatic and significant to frame the tenets of modernism. Viewers relinquish their judgement and disgust, as they bear witness to a strikingly peaceful McHale wearing her white gloves, gently grasping her pearls with subtle sophistication; we become witnesses to her slumber. The dark metal, fixed around her like a deranged halo, cradles her body gently, as the broken glass sparkles like dew to the right of her feet; other small pieces of broken glass crown her head, creating a fairy tale for some worthy princess who recovered her family’s stolen jewels. Her left foot rests peacefully over her right, but her stockings project a grotesqueness witnesses temporarily ignore. This picture claims little evidence of trauma to her person, save a trickle of blood above her left eye (figure

2), but viewers know differently because she is no longer a person; she is a projection of what viewers want her to be. Evelyn McHale appears to have defied the laws of gravity and physics, but her shoes did not—where are her shoes?

88

Fig. 1. Robert Wiles, The Most Beautiful Suicide – Evelyn McHale.

89

Fig. 2. A colorized version of Wiles’s photograph

90

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