literary alchemy and elemental wordsmithery

102 Pages·2016·1.06 MB·English

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:
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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