SOURCE: Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “A Feminist Reading: McCullers's Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” In Critical Essays on Carson McCullers, edited by Beverly Lyon Clark and Melvin J. Friedman, pp. 129-42. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1979, Spivak offers a feminist interpretation of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.]

We are in trouble over sex, race, and class. Any intellectual, any reader, any teacher must try to understand the world, even if she must remind herself constantly of the perils of taking understanding as a privilege or a goal. If she is a feminist, she must try to change the world, even if she is cautious enough at every step to reiterate at least two things: the sense of a “world” is the ever-shifting and many-planed converging point of interminable determinations; and even a “change” conceived of as a restructuring must be called again and again into question.¹ Even within this careful framing she cannot ignore that the categories of the class struggle are the best developed tools for understanding and change. Her first reaction, hesitant though not adverse, is that these categories are macro-structural. When the sexual struggle is translated into the class struggle, or when it is understood as analogous to the class struggle, the micro-structural daily intercourse between and among the sexes in public and private is programmatically excluded.

The way in which power is exercised in personal relationships and the way in which the ruling sex explains it away is what constitutes the micro-structure. The articulation of normative macro-structures that produce the most majestic edifices of the patriarchy will not allow this inconvenient dimension to clutter up the sphere of public analysis. Merely to co-opt feminism into the macro-structures of class analysis is to give in to this impatience that will not recognize that the micro-structures of sexuality cut across the private and the public. Rather than accept this dismissal by labelling a concern for the politics of sex as an obsession with the personal, feminism should redefine the personal as the micro-structurally political suppressed by the macro-structure. It should develop and act upon an analysis that is enriched by the class-component at every step, but is neither identical nor in contradiction to it.²

Any internationalist feminist must also consider the importance of the race struggle. In America, the race situation, except when the member of the racial minority or the ethnic group has been “tokenized” into the majority, can be identified with political oppression. The notion of the “class” (rather than the race) struggle as a collective effort as well as the cautions of “deconstructive activism” (regarding the limits of understanding and change mentioned in my opening paragraph) are alien to the white liberal feminist. A benevolent interest in the uplift of the races, however, has always been the genuine concern of Liberalism, even with a capital L, as in the nineteenth century movement in England. Its effects have been felt in the colonial theatre larger than the United States. Here the forces of Socialist Feminism can join with white liberal feminism without too much ado. Perhaps because of this alliance, or perhaps because of this incipient “vanguardism” of much Socialism in America, the internationalist approach to race-sexuality remains askew. It becomes “impractical” to recognize that the international informants of the American feminists are themselves marked by a privilege that allows them channels of communication with the ruling races.³ It is also overlooked that in Asia and Africa the situation of racialism is not domestically identical with the situation of political oppression; or that the internecine caste-class oppression in underdeveloped economies cannot be identified merely with the massive exploitation of the Third World countries by the First/Second Worlds, where the superpowers are white.⁴ It is further overlooked that, as a result of racialism, in those Third World countries the model of an unexamined white feminism is becoming, like riding, tennis, or club-womanship, at worst a fashion of the privileged elite and at best not far different from the ideologically ambiguous missionary and colonial impulse toward “native women's education.” Apart from, yet deeply and asymmetrically involved in all these complications, the micro-structural and often brutal politics of sex continues its work across the social spectrum, there as here.

If orthodox Socialist Feminism must privilege the macro-structure of class analysis in the interest of a cleaner and more feasible practice, orthodox Internationalist Feminism must privilege its “vanguardism” by a predictable refusal to recognize its own “ideological fix.” Indeed, any critique of that ideology must begin its work through the great macro-structures of the history of colonialism. And yet, if the micro-structural questions and cautions are given up, practicing such a critique becomes useless for a feminist, who forgets at her peril that sex straddles the private and the public. Feminism, it seems, must work with the personal and the political as they disguise themselves to foreclose the micro- and the macro-structures. To misunderstand this as a mere class-based personalization of the political might be to resist understanding, to resist change.

These issues are broader than the scope of Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Margaret Drabble's The Waterfall. Yet, as these issues inform my days, it is in terms of them that I have read these books.

I

One of the chief concerns of Carson McCullers's first book, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), is that people cannot discover a common bond.

One night soon after Christmas all four of the [main characters] chanced to visit [the central character—a deaf-mute named Singer] at the same time. But something was wrong. … Always each of them had so much to say. Yet now that they were together they were silent. When they came in he had expected an outburst of some kind. In a vague way he had expected this to be the end of something. But in the room there was only a feeling of strain. His hands worked nervously as though they were pulling things unseen from the air and binding them together.⁵

This failure of collectivity remains McCullers's lasting concern. But, by the time she comes to write The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943) or The Member of the Wedding (1946) the concern becomes the theme of individual loneliness, growing pains, social or physical marginality. In the first book, however, the irreducible separation is based on race-, class-, and sex-struggle.

Let us first consider the story of the struggle of the growing girl, Mick Kelly. Her story is the most accessible to a depoliticized American reader. It allows this tough and strange novel to be described, as in the Bantam paperback blurb, as “a searching and sensitive novel of innocence lost.” The book is an account of a few months of Mick's thirteenth year. She is ferociously independent and her creative impulses are concentrated in a passion for music. She situates this passion in her “inside room.” Through it she hopes to transcend the subject-object dichotomy and time itself by way of a vicarious autoeroticism: “This music was her. … The whole world was this music and she could not listen hard enough. … It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. … The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen. … Now that [the symphony] was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt” (100-101). Yet music, she hopes, will also get her to the great outside world: to foreign countries of splendid opulence. It will give her class mobility and thus launch her into the “outside” world: in hiding near a “cultured home,” she listens to the symphonies. It will permit her to place her unique name within the hierarchy of power. Among her first gestures in the novel is inscribing the following list on the walls of a new and empty house: EDISON, DICK TRACY, MUSSOLINI. “Then in each corner with the largest letters of all, made with green and outlined in red, she wrote her initials—M. K.” The female genitals as male obscenity, the prohibited object of pornographic consumption is included on the list. “She crossed over to the opposite wall and wrote a very bad word—PUSSY, and beneath that she put her initials, too.” Finally, “quickly she wrote the fellow's name at the very top of the list—MOTSART” (31).

An orthodox literary critic might comment that a list such as this is overdetermined—that it carries different investments of meanings in the different contexts endorsed by even a fairly simple reading of our novel. It can just as easily “mean” a differentiation of music from, rather than its inclusion in the world of technology, individual enterprise, politics, sexuality-as-commodity, selfhood. Since the reader is asked to provide the connectives among the items on the list, the critic might point out that two incompatible, mutually self-destructive points of view can be produced from the list. It seems more important to us to notice that on Mick's list politics, sex, art, power, music, and the proper name are assembled, though the syntactic connections are left open. The “inside room” is the way to the real outside—the man's world, where the only viable female commodity is sex. It is not surprising that Mick uses music to identify with her elder brother, and to distinguish herself from her sisters, who are typically “feminine.”

Halfway through the book, Mick loses her virginity. Harry Minowitz, a Jew, the only politically aware boy in Mick's crowd, takes responsibility for his act, worries about Mother seeing his sin in his eyes, and leaves town. The subtle process of Mick's growing up has begun. McCullers shows her caught in the body-mind bind again and again. Her first orgasm is “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 then this was the way. This was how it was” (235). Her desire couples her body to her brother's, and she worries about familial strictures upon love as she is exasperated by the constrictions of a legalistic (male) rationality based on evidence and demonstration.⁶ “The room was quiet and dark and George was asleep. She pinched him and twisted his ear. He groaned but did not awake. She fitted in close to him and pressed her face against his hot little naked shoulders. … ‘Suppose I wasn't your sister. Would you love me then?’ … ‘I reckon I would like you all right. But I still say you can't prove—’ ‘Prove! You got that word on the brain. Prove and trick’” (268-269). And then she thinks of the deaf-mute—Mr. Singer—and feels a love that bypasses family or body. “Mister Singer, Mister Singer. She said his name over and over. She loved him better than anyone in the family, better even than George or her Dad. It was a different love. It was not like anything she had ever felt in her life before” (268).

It is not her sex-predicament but her class-predicament that finally defeats her. The book laments not so much her loss of innocence as her entry into the work force. Her dreams are the dreams of a classbound free spirit, a girl who can think cannily about herself and her family: “They were mighty near as poor as factory folks. Only nobody could look down on them” (203). At the end of the book she is out of school and working in the Costume Jewelry section of Woolworth's. She is “shut out from the inside room,” although she is still not “the kind of common girl that would wear cotton stockings” (301, 300). She has accepted the system in undirected anger and resentment and has no recourse left but to talk of herself in vain reassurance:

It was like she was mad all the time. … Only there was nothing to be mad at. Unless the store. But the store hadn't asked her to take the job. So there was nothing to be mad at. It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated. … What the hell good had it all been—the way she felt about music and the plans she had made in the inside room? It had to be some good if anything made sense. And it was too and it was too and it was too and it was too. It was some good. All right! O.K.! Some good.

(304)

Those last two words carry a deep colloquial ambiguity. Perhaps in terms of the sex-struggle McCullers's Mick is merely conventional; perhaps the most we can say, knowing what we know, is that a girl of Mick's spirit has much less of a chance than a boy. But McCullers's class instinct is, in this one novel, intact. She does not make the liberal mistake of saying that one can choose to work in a factory rather than make music and the difference between the two is that the first obliges you to read Marx whereas the second involves making an American revolution while having fun.⁷

The real intrusion of the sex-struggle into The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is much more mysterious. It is a micro-structural experiment in the text that I can relate to the macro-structural impulse that leaves its signature in generic and traditional negative utopias, such as Gulliver's Travels.⁸ In this experiment we read of a human relationship of love and sexuality at furthest remove from so-called “normal” relationships. All details of a plausible heterosexual fiction have been filtered out. It is an unconsummated and, indeed, sexually unacknowledged relationship between two deaf-mute male homosexuals of completely incompatible personalities. Why and in what respect does this relationship still seem to carry the distinguishing mark of what the Western world has for so long celebrated in the “straight” scenario of love?

As in La Vita nuova or To the Lighthouse, it is a story of communication willingly given up.⁹ “When he was twenty-two he had come South to this town from Chicago and he met Antonapoulos immediately. Since that time he had never spoken with his mouth again, because with his friend there was no need for this” (8). As in La Vita nuova or Yeats's “Ego Dominus Tuus,” the absence of the beloved object not only does not hamper the narrative but advances it: if the book begins with an entry into that world of coupling that seems hardly real—“In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together” (1)—just six pages later Antonapoulos is taken away to the mental asylum, without his friend knowing “just what he really understood.”

Singer writes many letters to Antonapoulos, but never sends them. This can remind us not only specifically of La Vita nuova and Love's mediation there, but also of the many odes, epistles, minnesongs, sonnet sequences, and epistolary novels—not to mention invocations to the Muse—with the narrative of letters publicly addressed to, and sometimes exchanged with, the beloved, that crowd the literature of the West.¹⁰ It can make us begin to suspect that perhaps the “other” in those canonical and publicized exchanges has always been “really” like Antonapoulos in this story: mute, muted, distanced, displaced, imprisoned, mysterious, uncommunicative, and so unlike her “self” that she might as well be mad. The feminist must redefine those frozen signals of micro-structural intercourse; perhaps a reading such as this, of a text such as McCullers's, can contribute, even if minimally, to that collective project.

Singer's unsent letters are elaborate and serious, and indeed the one we are given in full (eleven long paragraphs) provides an analysis of that failure of collectivity which pervades the book:

Yah Freedom and pirates. Yah Capital and Democrats, says the ugly one with the mustache. Then he contradicts himself and says, Freedom is the greatest of all ideals. I just got to get a chance to write this music in me and be a musician. I got to have a chance, says the girl. We are not allowed to serve, says the black Doctor. That is the Godlike need of my people. Aha, says the owner of the New York Cafe. … You know how I have always said that to be rude and not attend to the feelings of others is wrong. … I write it to you because I think you will understand. … I am not meant to be alone and without you who understand.

(183, 184, 185)

It is of course possible to remark that such a letter, a piece of transparent self-deception on “the register of exactitude,” brings an indispensable effect of anacoluthon in the text even as it insists that the intended uncomprehending non-recipient of the letter must be written to because he understands.¹¹ More important to this paper is the next significant exchange between the two men: in a dream an undisclosed phallus (“something held above the head”) remains the object of worship as well as the mysterious unifier of the book's world. The final exchange between them shows us a childlike and idolized Antonapoulos who, indefinitely displaced through mutism, homosexuality, and idiocy, reveals the brutal image foreclosed by all the “normally” objectified love-goddesses of the world.

This is part of the dream:

Antonapoulos kneeled at the top of these steps. He was naked and he fumbled with something that he held above his head and gazed at it as though in prayer. He himself knelt halfway down the steps. He was naked and cold and could not take his eyes from Antonapoulos and the thing he held above him. Behind him on the ground he felt the one with the moustache and the girl and the black man and the last one. They knelt naked and he felt their eyes on him. And behind him there were uncounted crowds of people in the darkness.

(185)

Antonapoulos is, in part, described as the child-idiot-idol to whom Singer brings the offering of Mickey Mouse and Popeye films:

Antonapoulos! … He wore a scarlet dressing-gown and green silk pajamas and a turquoise ring. … When Singer stood before him he smiled serenely, without surprise, and held out his jeweled hand. … His head was immense against the white pillow. The placid composure of his face was so profound that he seemed hardly to be aware that Singer was with him. … His fat little feet had untucked the cover at the bottom of the bed. His smile faded and he kicked contemptuously at the blanket. … When [the nurse] had straightened the bed to his liking the big Greek inclined his head so deliberately that the gesture seemed one of benediction rather than a simple nod of thanks. … Antonapoulos watched [Singer] with his dark, drowsy eyes. Sitting motionless in his bright, rich garments he seemed like some wise king from a legend.

(187, 188, 190)

The unsent letters are the fiction of a paradoxically impure pure signifier that will never be sublated—that is, contradicted and preserved in a higher form—through its own contradiction and become a meaning-filled signified because the addressee receives it. In this encounter in the hospital we are shown a paradoxically impure completed exchange that is purely interobjective—Narcissus forever unfulfilled—and paradigmatic of the relationship: “The eyes of his friend were moist and dark, and in them he saw the little rectangled pictures of himself that he had watched a thousand times” (187). In this moment the verdict on “romantic love” is complete and sexual difference is seen as difference-as-such, which love must narcissistically deny. It is not at all surprising that at the death of the image-object-beloved the lover must methodically put a bullet through his chest.

As a heterosexual feminist, I have read this love-legend in extremis as a commentary on the ideology of “normal love” that is the sustaining glory of literature. I have suggested that the commentary consists of structural irreducibles that remain even after a fictional operation of distancing from “normality” has been performed. These irreducibles help us re-read and re-write not merely the literary but also the psycho-political canon. The love-legend can, of course, be a reminder of yet another sexual differential: the differential between the heterosexual and the homosexual worlds. Although women and male homosexuals are both marginal as “non-serious” versions of the male norm, the woman has a recognized use in the male economy of reproduction, genealogy, and the passage of property. The male homosexual, on the other hand, has only the unrecognized use of sustaining as criminal or monstrous the tremendous force of the repressed homoeroticism of the patriarchy. The latter part of this argument is developed in Jacques Derrida's Glas (Paris, 1974). Carson McCullers is certainly no Jean Genet, the homosexual playwright on the occasion of whom Derrida writes. Her homosexuality, like Woolf's, could find no socially collective voice and could not be macro-structurally endorsed like race or class. Yet in this alternate reading of Singer's story, it is not a transcendental androgynous model that stands as the book's god, but rather the male homosexual as the institutionalized insane. The depiction of Mick remains largely caught within the literary tradition of innocence-experience novels. That moving sentimentality seems to be utterly separate from the bizarre grandeur of this story of Singer and Antonapoulos.

Whether Singer's story is read as the irreducible and undisclosed description of the “straight” love stories with which the ruling sex animates the literary tradition, or as a more obviously historically determined representation of the absolute otherness (alterity) of homosexual love, we have here once again a situation of two unresolvable readings. I cannot really say that the text engenders both readings. How unorthodox a reading the text can convincingly be made to engender depends sometimes on the vested authority and power of the critic within the system of academic patronage. I can merely say that the cautions of deconstructive activism would prime the feminist reader toward a both/as-well reading, as well as an either/or reading. The next step would be to question the tight opposition between figural (formalist) and empirical (moralist) readings and suggest that these two versions of the Singer-Antonapoulos story might well constitute part of a practice that will see the predicaments of heterosexual feminists and homosexuals as forms of the sex-struggle, micro-structurally differentiated though macro-structurally pulling together in collectivities.

The race-class scenes are woven together and have little or nothing to do with the sex scene in the book. Benedict Copeland is a fanatically devoted black doctor who wants to raise his race into self-conscious self-governance. Jake Blount is a lower middle-class autodidact whose introduction into social justice was through an elderly schoolmistress. Copeland, wishing to make his children exemplary, named them Karl Marx, Alexander Hamilton, and Portia, but had no understanding of the pedagogic and affective nature of the family. His children remained his project alone and his wife stole them from him and foiled his plan. Blount's non-relationship to women can be cryptically indicated by the following multiply overdetermined example: Jake is addressing his working-class neighbors, whom he cannot touch, and of whom he thinks as “the don't knows.” “‘Come on, everybody,’ he roars, ‘Come one, come all. I'll settle you three at a time.’ ‘That's right, Honey,’ a whore called” (245). This nameless prostitute, like Copeland's daughter Portia, remains typecast: the good working-class whore who situates Jake's thwarted revolutionary impulse as childish machismo, and the solid black earth-mother who situates Copeland's thwarted socialist impulse as childish intransigence.

Copeland's and Blount's problem is putting theory into practice. They are both men of words—Jake much more so. McCullers gives to Copeland the profession of a doctor who has selflessly helped his prolific people while trying to teach them birth control. Jake's efforts at “organizing” have resulted in comic-opera pranks and confusion (132). Copeland is shown as suffering tremendous indignities at the hands of the police; his son's feet are cut off because of gangrene contracted through brutal punishment in prison. By contrast, Blount in a panic will still yell “Order! Help! Police!” and at the end of the book will still say “it felt good to be sitting safe in a booth and to have just eaten a good meal” (289, 297). For him “there was hope … and soon perhaps the outline of his journey would take form” (299). Copeland's story ends as he is being taken back to the farm on a mule-wagon driven by his father-in-law: “He felt the fire in him and he could not be still. He wanted to sit up and speak in a loud voice—yet when he tried to raise himself he could not find the strength. The words in his heart grew big and they would not be silent. But the old man had ceased to listen and there was no one to hear him” (287).

There is a dialogue between Blount and Copeland toward the end of the book. It is a discussion of theory and practice. Copeland is very sick, Blount very drunk. After a lifetime of patience, Copeland has realized that “the most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone” (259). His dream now is of a black march upon Washington. Blount's idea is to take Copeland's maimed son around in a cart as an object lesson and “give a talk on the dialectics of capitalism—and show up all of its lies” (260). For him the problem of the black is too special an interest. “The only way to solve the Negro problem under capitalism is to geld every one of the fifteen million black men in these states. … Who cares whether you and your thousand Negroes struggle up to that stinking cesspool of a place called Washington? What difference does it make? What do a few people matter—a few thousand people, black, white, good or bad? When the whole of our society is built on a foundation of black lies” (261). His solutions are fully macro-structural. Copeland pants out a broken plea for the individual but, of course, the question of micro-structural politics is not within his ken either: “The soul of the meanest and most evil of us on this earth is worth more in the sight of justice than—” (261).

If the letter from Singer to Antonapoulos is structurally so open as to be a dead end, this conversation, structurally a dead end, carries many open-ended moments of suspension in its texture. It begins at an indefinite time. Copeland asks Blount to leave because he is “a white man and a stranger.” Jake does not go. There is a sub-section break in the typography. It is “long past midnight.” A “long, exhausting dialogue” is mentioned, but not quoted. “And now a pause had come” (253).

It is in this many-times-suspended interstitial pause that Jake makes a portentious-seeming beginning: “‘So the time is ready for—’” But this moment too is lost. Copeland interrupts him. Some meaningless courtesies are exchanged, each urging the other to go on. In that further suspension Jake gives us this alternate opening: “‘Well—… I won't say what I started to say. Instead …’” (254). There is, in other words, some other topic, which we shall never know, for which the time was ready. This one is merely a substitute.

Slowly the internationalist turns “a cheap globe of the world that served as a paperweight … in his hands. … ‘If you was to ask me to point out the most uncivilized area on the face of this globe I would point here—’ ‘Watch sharp,’ said Doctor Copeland. ‘You're out in the ocean’” (254). Again a double-take and Jake chooses the thirteen states. The conversation proceeds through long speeches by Jake frantically interrupted by Copeland: “‘Mr. Singer is a Jew.’ ‘No, you're wrong there.’ ‘But I am positive that he is. The name, Singer. I recognized his race the first time I saw him. From his eyes. Besides, he told me so. I'm certain. Absolutely.’ ‘Very well,’ said Doctor Copeland. ‘We will not quarrel’” (257). A long tense pause ensues. Copeland breaks this suspense. Once again they interrupt each other. Once again, after mutual concessions, Jake takes the lead. “‘The only solution is for people to know’” (258). He proposes chain letters. Mr. Copeland tries many times to speak out. Finally the by now far from unique words emerge. “‘Do not attempt to stand alone.’” This time Jake's interruption does not work. “‘But, nothing,’ said Doctor Copeland didactically. ‘The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone’” (259). He now makes a plea for a practice that would reconcile the macro- and the micro-structural, but, once again, the micro-structural dimension is understood not as an arena of politics and the exchange of power, but as the individual soul: “‘Do not attempt to stand alone. … But once you enter this it must be all. … You must give of your whole self without stint, without hope of personal return, without rest or hope of rest’” (260). It is after this that Blount's brutal “internationalist” perspective on the question of the black is expressed.

What does this rhetoric of suspension, hesitation, substitution, iteration signify, represent, dramatize? One can not know. Let us say—a discontinuous dialogue, of course, but also a disarticulation between views of social justice based on class struggle as seen from a primitive internationalist “vanguardist” perspective, and on the race struggle as seen from the domestic perspective of the colonized. I am suggesting that a fully politicized feminism, far from being a special interest, can bring a consideration of the power-structure of the interstices of such a discussion within reach of practical analyses. I should like to think that McCullers's text gives a shadowy hint of support to such a view, when it makes of a character like Singer—totally divorced from his all-consuming sexuality—the mysterious bond among the characters. He understands nothing, yet they feel he understands. It is also a comment on the American Ideology, where both collective (macro-structural) efforts and demystified personal (micro-structural) relations are seen as threatening. A figure like Singer can be seen as fulfilling an empty dream of mysterious rather than historical “solutions”:

An old Negro women told hundreds of people that he knew the ways of spirits come back from the dead. A certain piece-worker claimed that he had worked with the mute at another mill somewhere else in that state—and the tales he told were unique. The rich thought that he was rich and the poor considered him a poor man like themselves. And as there was no way to disprove these rumors they grew marvelous and very real. Each man described the mute as he wished him to be.

(190; italics mine)

There is one person who does not need to create quite so much of a spell out of Singer and even wonders “why … everyone persist[ed] in thinking the mute was exactly as they wanted him to be—when most likely it was all a very queer mistake?” (191). His name is Biff Brannon. He is taken by everyone to be the picture of reasonableness. Yet he is impotent, has a crush on Mick as long as she is the half-grown boy-girl, and the most vivid story about him is that he had farted in a dark room full of people thinking he was alone and that his subsequent embarrassment had been as great as his response to his mother's death (202). He is conservative in politics and his icon is the cash register, behind which he is most often to be seen. He is the ever-vigilant bureau of investigations which, until it reaches federal proportions, can seem merely curious and idiosyncratic: he keeps his restaurant open day and night, although it is far from profitable to do so, and he has filing cabinets full of newspapers “chronologically from October 27, 1918, on up to the present date” (113). Of course I am doing an injustice to his personal goodwill when I describe him so harshly. Perhaps the best verdict is Jake's: “‘You been very reasonable. And since I think about it you're a right decent guy—from the personal perspective, that is’” (295). But the personal defined as if it can be undetermined and ideology-free is indeed not political enough. The very end of the book shows us Biff unable to accept a schizophrenia that I would read as a predicament that might be the only solution to a system—“the counter glass”—that separates the personal and the political:

In a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who—one word—love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror. … He saw that he was looking at his own face in the counter glass before him. … One eye was opened wider than the other. The left eye delved narrowly into the past while the right gazed wide and affrighted into a future of blackness, error, and ruin. … But, motherogod, was he a sensible man or was he not? And how could this terror throttle him like this when he didn't even know what caused it? And would he just stand there like a jittery ninny or would he pull himself together and be reasonable? For after all was he a sensible man or was he not? … Somehow he remembered that the awning [of the cafe] had not yet been raised. As he went to the door his walk gained steadiness. And when at last he was inside again he composed himself soberly to await the morning sun.

(306-307)

This is the careful glance into history and the broad glance into the future; on another register, it is the relationship between theory (knowing) and practice (doing). In yet another register, not quite the same but a similar one, it must be recognized that both knowing and doing are undermined, yet made possible, by the micro-structural network of an ever-fractured sense of being. A politicized socialist and inter-racialist feminism will work at redefining the personal as the micro-structural network of being that undermines as it makes possible the production of both theory and practice. McCullers's book is unable to provide a coherent redefinition. But the kaleidoscope of the micro-structure “changes minute by minute,” and its motives come from many places at once; indeed, a recognition of the micro-structure might disclose that a coherent redefinition is impossible. The Heart [The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter] at least dramatizes the incoherence: the simple story of an adolescent girl victimized by her class; the mysterious and secret story of the nature of sex as such and/or marginal sex; the political story of the lack of contact between race- and class-politics; the hopeless story of idolatry; the safe story of the recovery of reason. The questions at the end of the passage just quoted—which is indeed the end of the book—mark an edge between literature and ideology that can be discovered at any moment. The ideological charge of the reading depends on how we answer Biff's rallying questions to himself. As a feminist reader, I take it seriously that the questions are addressed to “motherogod.” I should be able to answer: “there are no more blessed virgins to give you your security, my son.” It is the jittery hysterical ninnies who would insist that to want merely to know causes, only to be sensible, demystified, and reasonable at all costs, is to insist upon the safety and convenience of macro-structural analyses that will not suffice—simply because even the most dedicated activist ticks to the minute micro-structure of the moment divided among the neural twitch, the heart beat, and the blink of two eyes.

.....

Within the manifold problematics of sex, race, and class, we should read books like The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Waterfall together. McCullers maps for us an entire network of problems—but the place of “our sister” is left virtually empty. Drabble fills that void with meticulous and helpful articulation, though she seems thwarted in any serious presentation of the problems of race and class, and of the marginality of sex. Both of them, however, seem to engage in that micro-structural dystopia, the sexual situation in extremis, that begins to seem more and more a part of women's work. If we are involved in a taxonomic rather than exclusivist practice, we will not ask writers or ourselves to do more than they or we can, but rather will put things together, move within a collectivity where our role is not that of the leader. Our motto, then, will not be Drabble's Jane's “I prefer to suffer, I think”—the privatist cry of heroic liberal women; it might be McCullers's Copeland's “Do not attempt to stand alone,” however already undone that directive might always be.

I realize in writing this I might be accused of Pierre Macherey's “normative fallacy.”¹² I am projecting an ideal whole that subsumes novels and social problematics and our lives as fragmented texts. It is only half in jest (and half in mortification) that I say that a choice of words can halt that accusation. It is “intertextuality” that I am engaged in, weaving in texts of “book,” “world,” and “life.” Refusing to acknowledge the inside and the outside of these three compartments, I am honoring, necessarily somewhat in the breach, the dictim: “There is no outside-of-the-text.”

What is one man's “intertextuality” can, alas, be diagnosed as another woman's “moralism.”

Notes

1. The broad methodological presuppositions of this essay are much influenced by my understanding of a deconstructive theory of practice. Although Derrida has written since then, the pieces that illuminate this theory best for me remain “Signature Event Context,” Glyph I, 1977, and “Limited inc abc,” Glyph II, 1977.

2. Sheila Rowbotham's “The Women's Movement and Organizing for Socialism,” Radical America XIII, 5, September-October, 1979, was brought to my attention after I had completed this essay.

3. In the case of anthropology, the problem of the status of the informant and the conditioning of the informant's response by the structure of the investigator's question is lucidly discussed and critiqued by Pierre Bourdieu in Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge, 1977.

4. In the case I know best, that of India, the contrast between the structures of domestic and international oppression can be appreciated if one compares Mahasveta Devi's Agnigarbha, Calcutta, 1978, with T. Nagi Reddy's India Mortgaged: A Marxist-Leninist Appraisal, Anantapuram, 1978.

5. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (New York: Bantam, 1953), pp. 178-179. Subsequent references included in text.

6. A reading of McCullers with reference to psychoanalytic thematics would consider the prevalence of little boy-elder sister relationships in her text. The most obvious example is John Henry West and Frankie in The Member of the Wedding.

7. Marcia Deihl and Pat Ouelette in Pam Annas, “The Politics of Music—Carrying It On: An Interview with the New Harmony Sisterhood Band,” Radical Teacher XIII, March, 1979, pp. 19-20.

8. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a text where a micro- and a macro-structural dystopia converge. The macro-structural experiment is the science-fiction possibility of the experiment itself and the investigation into the nature of social ostracism. The micro-structural issues are the male intellectual's womb-envy, which makes him want to make a human being without a mother, and his egotism, which makes him think the monster's revenge will fall upon himself.

9. The present essay will form part of a larger work on feminist criticism. The references to La Vita nuova, “Ego Dominus Tuus,” To the Lighthouse, Glas, the origin of the family, and numerous other arguments relate to other parts of that study. When, two sentences later in my text, I speak of the “narrative” of “Ego Dominus Tuus,” it should be remembered that the narrative energy of a Yeatsian poetic dialogue works rather differently from a Dantean sonnet sequence or a modern American novel.

10. The relationship of Bram Stoker's Dracula or Saul Bellow's Herzog to the thematics of sexual objectification would not be uninteresting to contemplate.

11. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, New Haven, 1979, p. 300.

12. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall, London, 1978, p. 19 and passim.