The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
THIS IS NOT A LOVE-STORY! Not in the romantic sense, in any case. Somehow the title had always made me think it was a soppy love story about unrequited romantic love. There is love in the novel, but for the most part not of the romantic kind. Rather, it is a cry into the existential darkness that surrounds humankind, and in many respects it is a deeply political, even philosophical novel, which reminded me of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.
The existential futility of lives beating like waves upon rocks, reminded me of the poetry of T.S. Eliot.
Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
…And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
…Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
…
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
…
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
…
(From: T.S. Eliot: The Hollow Men )
“Falls the Shadow” …the dividing line between striving and achievement, between longing and possession, between moving towards and reaching, between wanting and having, between potentiality and actuality.
…for in Heart, there is constant striving that falls just short of the Shadow, just short of reaching its goal. Blind striving, passionate striving, where helpless humans blindly beat at the bonds of their existence, only managing to escape the fetters of class and gender and biology and society in their minds, in their hearts, in their dreams; …and for some, the dream, the desire to transcend, the desire for agency, the desire toward actualization, and ultimately, the desire for recognition and understanding, is snuffed out like a candle in a gale.
In this, the novel is a tour de force of characterization and of apt psychological insight. The book can be read on various levels. For example, the unseen pivot around whom the novel secretly spins, the Greek mute Antonapoulos, seems too much of a caricature of Freud’s concept of the Id, for me not to see the relationship between Singer and Antonapoulos, as analogous to the relationship between the Ego and the Id.
Virginia Woolf is one of the most subtle literary composers, capable of the most intricate patterns in her literary structures that I have ever come across. This novel has qualities reminiscent of Woolf’s genius for structure. Mc Cullers’ technique is perhaps not quite as refined as that of a mature Woolf, but it is impressive nonetheless.
Mc Cullers herself likened the composition of the novel to a Baroque fugue, in which each voice is introduced separately to later form powerful contrapuntal harmonies between various singing voices, with four main ‘voices’ or melodies revolving around the central duet.
The thread of the opening leitmotif that forms the exposition of the fugue, the ‘center’, the eye of the storm, so to speak, the blind mirror, the inert heart of the novel, is introduced to us initially as a gentle melody that runs like a subtle, almost invisible theme through the development of the novel-fugue. Brilliantly, when this initial melody is echoed in the other four melodies or voices, it is reversed; a mirror. This initial theme that remains at the center, almost hidden, is present at the climax of the novel — in fact, the climax of the center sets in motion the climax of the entire novel and causes all of the separate peripheral melodies that had been brought in, one by one, like in a Bach or Händel fugue, to each reach climax and spiral away from the center, where the fugue ends as an adagio sung in one of the most subtle of the voices in the fugue-novel.
…but the book is much more than a metaphorical fugue or a Freudian analogy; it is also a Marxist critique of not only the race relations in the American South but also a bitter slap in the face of the Capitalist North:
“‘We live in the richest country in the world. There’s plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle — the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start?
There are corporations worth billions of dollars — and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat. And here in these thirteen states the exploitation of human beings is so that — that it’s a thing you got to take in with your own eyes. In my life I seen things that would make a man go crazy. At least one third of all Southerners live and die no better off than the lowest peasant in any European Fascist state.
[…] Everywhere there’s pellagra and hookworm and anemia. And just plain, pure starvation. […] ‘But!’ he repeated. Those are only the evils you can see and touch. The other things are worse. I’m talking about the way that the truth has been hidden from the people. The things they have been told so they can’t see the truth. The poisonous lies. So they aren’t allowed to know.’
…‘Who owns the South? Corporations in the North own three fourths of all the South. They say the old cow grazes all over — in the south, the west, the north, and the east. But she’s milked in just one place. Her old teats swing over just one spot when she’s full. She grazes everywhere and is milked in New York. Take our cotton mills, our pulp mills, our harness factories, our mattress factories. The North owns them. And what happens?’
Absentee ownership. In the village is one huge brick mill and maybe four or five hundred shanties. The houses aren’t fit for human beings to live in. Moreover, the houses were built to be nothing but slums in the first place. …-built with far less forethought than barns to house cattle. Built with far less attention to needs than sties for pigs. For under this system pigs are valuable and men are not. You can’t make pork chops and sausage out of skinny little mill kids. You can’t sell but half the people these days. But a pig — ’
…With three or four younguns they are held down the same as if they had on chains. That is the whole principle of serfdom. Yet here in America we call ourselves free. And the funny thing is that this has been drilled into the heads of sharecroppers and lintheads and all the rest so hard that they really believe it. But it’s taken a hell of a lot of lies to keep them from knowing.’
…Less than a hundred corporations have swallowed all but a few leavings. These industries have already sucked the blood and softened the bones of the people. The old days of expansion are gone. The whole system of capitalistic democracy is rotten and corrupt. There remains only two roads ahead. One: Fascism. Two: reform of the most revolutionary and permanent kind.’
…‘And the Negro. Do not forget the Negro. So far as I and my people are concerned the South is Fascist now and always has been.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘The Nazis rob the Jews of their legal, economic, and cultural life. Here the Negro has always been deprived of these. And if wholesale and dramatic robbery of money and goods has not taken place here as in Germany, it is simply because the Negro has never been allowed to accrue wealth in the first place.’
‘That’s the system,’ Jake said. “
It is rather strange that a book so hostile to the political status quo had such a mellow reception upon publication, but maybe it is because of that uncomfortable hostility which made no bones about the economic, political, and ideological realities of the situation, that the candid commentary taking place in the novel was sidestepped by commentators upon the novel, so to speak. Possibly it was partly due to the fact that Mc Cullers was female. Maybe it is because she wove her narrative so masterfully, interweaving its multifarious threads and blending them in on many levels, as she said herself, like a fugue with interleaving voices and melodies. (Threnodies?)
One is reminded that another female writer writing in more or less a similar time-frame, a much less talented writer writing in a shrill voice, a capitalist apologist in favor of supreme narcissism, writing under the pseudonym of Ayn Rand, received a much more marked response, both positive and negative.
…and speaking of female — not only does Mc Cullers utter a subdued feminist voice in the striving of young Mick, a 14-year old girl; not only does she subtly point out the fate of especially females from the poorer classes, but she manages to masterfully do a subtle sub-commentary on gender roles with her characters, especially with tom-boyish Mick, almost genderless Singer, and then a brilliantly done increasing fusion of genders in the leanings and yearnings of Biff Brannon, the dark-bearded tavern owner who starts to wear his wife’s perfume and who is an adept needleman. (The male of needlewoman?) Biff Brannon, who does the most divine flower arrangements and who longs to nurture children.
One wonders if the social commentary and political message of writers like Victor Hugo and Carson Mc Cullers sometimes goes almost unnoticed because there is so much emotive power, so much humanity, in their narratives.
Both writers are masters at showing human pain in its various guises, but they are also masterful at showing us social injustice: the one showing a man effectively ending up serving almost a life sentence because he was poor and from the lowest classes and his family was hungry and desperately needed the bread he stole for them to eat; the other showing a man losing his legs because justice for white men and justice for black men are not the same kind of justice; the one showing a woman so desperate to keep her child alive that she ends up selling even her hair and her teeth ; the other showing a promising young girl who should have the world as her oyster, being forced to give up her dreams for the future because she was cheated by “the system”.
… but one almost cannot help feeling that Mc Cullers would have understood if and why her work was slighted. After all, a great part of the novel is about people trying to get messages across, and failing, because their audience is not ready to hear that message.
I like to think that she felt like Dylan Thomas about the matter:
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers [love of the common people], their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
Because you, Carson, wrote for the love of the people .
And it shows.
