Sunshowersy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sunshowerdandelion) wrote2024-05-18 02:59 pm
sunshowerdandelion) wrote2024-05-18 02:59 pm
Entry tags:
Day 3.1: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Mick Kelly
I've been re-reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter as part of Carson Month, and Mick Kelly's isolation and grotesqueness have leapt out at me.
I do not mean she is physically grotesque, rather that she (along with Jake, Biff, Singer, and Doctor Benedict) is well and truly a 'grotesque character' in the Southern Gothic sense of the word. I'm borrowing 'grotesque' from Sherwood Anderson's famous Winesburg, Ohio (1919) to describe characters who are so physically and/or mentally different that their difference separates them from the rest, and their character revolves around their difference and outsider-ness, as well as their various weird umwelten. I mean that in the kindest, most awestruck sense possible: The reader, in a good 'grotesque' novel, is invited to empathize with them, and make sense of their various hopes and losses as humans; of course (I think) this often runs together with a recognition of difference and separateness which in the worst novels invites pointing and staring, as of grotesques in everyday life.
Southern Gothic as a genre is (I'm told) peopled by grotesques. I haven't read the greats yet (Faulkner and the rest), but what little I've read bears this out. Eudora Welty's works is I think quite full of grotesques, the most memorable for me being Daniel Ponder off The Ponder Heart (1954). And also Jesmyn Ward's more modern Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) which has ghosts in it and other amazing characters. And also Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982)'s Celie is an amazing grotesque.
But I do think grotesques cross the genres and all writers write them, and I love them all. A recent favorite grotesque of mine is Eileen off Eileen (2015) by Ottessa Moshfegh, though I'm told that she writes all her characters Like That. But anyway.
I think Mick Kelly's grotesqueness struck me very hard this time around. Now that I know how her story plays out, she immediately strikes me as a fundamentally lonely character. It is her hunger for beauty that sets her apart. As Carson writes in her outline for the book, Heart is about how "Each man must express himself in his own way - but this is often denied to him by a wasteful, short-sighted society" and I think Mick embodies this most of all.
Mick is haunted by music. She repeatedly beats herself up (physically) and tries the most desperate things (trying to make a violin out of an ukulele and two strings) to express her musicality. Her hunger for music is painful and bursts out of her, and society, being wasteful and short-sighted (and run on capitalism) fails to recognize this and confines her to her gender and class and does not give her the means to fully express it. She is isolated from her family, most of all her brother and mother, because they struggle to understand (as Mick herself struggles to understand) her need for beauty - the part where she tries to talk to her brother early on is incredibly heartbreaking this time around for me because it is a cry for help. As Carson herself writes: "Her story is that of the violent struggle of a gifted child to get what she needs from an unyielding environment".
Violent struggle is right. I love her the most out of all the grotesques. Her struggle to comprehend herself is incredibly moving for me. She is so clearly a Carson character (along with Frances, Frankie, etc. from her other novels) that my love for her is instinctive and fierce. At the end she of course falters and her body and soul are ground to make the grit of profit but - as Carson mentions - "but still there is something in her and in those like her that cannot and will not ever be destroyed."
Amen. A thousand amens to that.
I do not mean she is physically grotesque, rather that she (along with Jake, Biff, Singer, and Doctor Benedict) is well and truly a 'grotesque character' in the Southern Gothic sense of the word. I'm borrowing 'grotesque' from Sherwood Anderson's famous Winesburg, Ohio (1919) to describe characters who are so physically and/or mentally different that their difference separates them from the rest, and their character revolves around their difference and outsider-ness, as well as their various weird umwelten. I mean that in the kindest, most awestruck sense possible: The reader, in a good 'grotesque' novel, is invited to empathize with them, and make sense of their various hopes and losses as humans; of course (I think) this often runs together with a recognition of difference and separateness which in the worst novels invites pointing and staring, as of grotesques in everyday life.
Southern Gothic as a genre is (I'm told) peopled by grotesques. I haven't read the greats yet (Faulkner and the rest), but what little I've read bears this out. Eudora Welty's works is I think quite full of grotesques, the most memorable for me being Daniel Ponder off The Ponder Heart (1954). And also Jesmyn Ward's more modern Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) which has ghosts in it and other amazing characters. And also Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982)'s Celie is an amazing grotesque.
But I do think grotesques cross the genres and all writers write them, and I love them all. A recent favorite grotesque of mine is Eileen off Eileen (2015) by Ottessa Moshfegh, though I'm told that she writes all her characters Like That. But anyway.
I think Mick Kelly's grotesqueness struck me very hard this time around. Now that I know how her story plays out, she immediately strikes me as a fundamentally lonely character. It is her hunger for beauty that sets her apart. As Carson writes in her outline for the book, Heart is about how "Each man must express himself in his own way - but this is often denied to him by a wasteful, short-sighted society" and I think Mick embodies this most of all.
Mick is haunted by music. She repeatedly beats herself up (physically) and tries the most desperate things (trying to make a violin out of an ukulele and two strings) to express her musicality. Her hunger for music is painful and bursts out of her, and society, being wasteful and short-sighted (and run on capitalism) fails to recognize this and confines her to her gender and class and does not give her the means to fully express it. She is isolated from her family, most of all her brother and mother, because they struggle to understand (as Mick herself struggles to understand) her need for beauty - the part where she tries to talk to her brother early on is incredibly heartbreaking this time around for me because it is a cry for help. As Carson herself writes: "Her story is that of the violent struggle of a gifted child to get what she needs from an unyielding environment".
Violent struggle is right. I love her the most out of all the grotesques. Her struggle to comprehend herself is incredibly moving for me. She is so clearly a Carson character (along with Frances, Frankie, etc. from her other novels) that my love for her is instinctive and fierce. At the end she of course falters and her body and soul are ground to make the grit of profit but - as Carson mentions - "but still there is something in her and in those like her that cannot and will not ever be destroyed."
Amen. A thousand amens to that.