Day 9.2: Carson McCullers and Heroes
May. 24th, 2024 10:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunshowerdandelionIn her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare, Carson McCullers writes out her outline for the novel 'The Mute', which would eventually become The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. She writes (or maybe, according to Mary V. Dearborn, author of Carson's biography, had her husband write with her):
I think these qualities are possessed by both Dr. Benedict and Jake Blount, as both are quite obviously activists and agitators: Dr. Benedict for Afro-American liberation and communism, Jake Blount for something similar (I think) to anarchism, with socialist colors. Both are massively angry, massively loving people - but only for their causes. Both are destructive to others and themselves (there's a memory involving nails and a hand that Jake Blount recalls that makes me physically cringe and Dr. Benedict is similarly violent towards his wife and his children), but fulfill Carson's definition for heroism. Both give all that is in them, Dr. Benedict's strong true purpose and Jake Blount's ideas of revolution (or at least organization).
It's very interesting how Carson interprets heroism as essentially causing the same affliction as suffered by all the working townspeople: Loneliness. Like Anita Brookner I think Carson is a poet of loneliness, but more than Brookner's relative complacency, Carson's characters fight and fight fiercely. They're mostly heroes in my book because of that.
Some men are heroes by nature in that they will give all that is in them without regard to the effort or to the personal returns
I think these qualities are possessed by both Dr. Benedict and Jake Blount, as both are quite obviously activists and agitators: Dr. Benedict for Afro-American liberation and communism, Jake Blount for something similar (I think) to anarchism, with socialist colors. Both are massively angry, massively loving people - but only for their causes. Both are destructive to others and themselves (there's a memory involving nails and a hand that Jake Blount recalls that makes me physically cringe and Dr. Benedict is similarly violent towards his wife and his children), but fulfill Carson's definition for heroism. Both give all that is in them, Dr. Benedict's strong true purpose and Jake Blount's ideas of revolution (or at least organization).
It's very interesting how Carson interprets heroism as essentially causing the same affliction as suffered by all the working townspeople: Loneliness. Like Anita Brookner I think Carson is a poet of loneliness, but more than Brookner's relative complacency, Carson's characters fight and fight fiercely. They're mostly heroes in my book because of that.
