SOURCE: Whitt, Jan. “The Loneliest Hunter.” Southern Literary Journal 24, no. 2 (spring 1992): 26-35.

[In the following essay, Whitt views the character of John Singer as a Christ figure in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.]

“I've lost the presence of God!” cried the author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter late in her career. Remembered afterwards by the group of artists who had been with Carson McCullers at the Yaddo Artists Colony, the statement provides a tragic thesis for both McCullers' life and her work. Haunted by a Christ who remained entombed, a twenty-one-year-old McCullers created an allegory in which numerous characters seek to work out their own salvation by relaying their individual fears to John Singer. Singer, a deaf mute, becomes a paralyzed Christ figure, so restricted by the expectations of others that he is fictionalized by them.

Only the author and the reader know Singer; Mick, Dr. Benedict M. Copeland, and Jake Blount merely fashion him into the savior they crave. For each he takes on a different face, a singular ministry. Copeland, a persecuted black doctor, believes Singer to be a Jew; Blount insists he's Irish. McCullers herself refers to Singer as a “repository,” for all his friends “impute to him all the qualities which they would wish for him to have.”¹ Furthermore, the all-too-ordinary theme of isolation in an indecipherable world attains heightened significance as each minor character in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter embarks on his or her own spiritual quest. Each, says Margaret McDowell, is in “revolt against enforced isolation and his or her urge to express the self at all costs.”²

While the perils of interpreting art via authorial experience or attitude must be evident by now, McCullers' own search for God and home can hardly be considered irrelevant to her first novel. In the early 1940s—with Reeves gone, her relationship with David Diamond unresolved, and her professional standing in question—McCullers must have faced many of the same trials as her early characters. Virginia Spencer Carr, McCullers biographer, writes in The Lonely Hunter: “Above all, Carson felt that she needed God, that she must be able to pray again if she were to effect her own redemption.”³ McCullers, Carr says, “recognized God as an omniscient being, a supreme creator who imposed order on the universe, but she sometimes saw Him as a capricious deity whose specialty was freaks.”⁴

Not only was McCullers alienated from God, she could not tap into the sense of place which sustained writers such as Eudora Welty and William Faulkner. In an essay in The Mortgaged Heart, McCullers says, “A visit to Columbus in Georgia is a stirring up of love and antagonism.”⁵ While other Southern writers reconciled themselves to the fundamentalist Protestantism of the South and claimed at least a love-hate relationship with their homeland, McCullers fled Georgia for New York. In a letter from Reeves to a friend, Reeves writes: “I have to keep Carson tied by a leg to the bedpost at times to keep her from going mad as she hates the South so.”⁶ In “How I Began to Write,” McCullers says: “By that winter the family rooms, the whole town, seemed to pinch and cramp my adolescent heart. I longed for wanderings. I longed especially for New York.”⁷The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was her only novel written in the South. One critic notes that McCullers “wanted nothing to do with the land of yokels and reactionaries.”⁸ Yet perhaps this perspective is too pat, for McCullers also said that the South provided a “truer pitch”: “When I work from within a different locale from the South, I have to wonder what time the flowers are in bloom—and what flowers? I hardly let characters speak unless they are Southern.”⁹

With confusion about God and animosity toward country, it is small wonder that the fictional world of McCullers is peopled with those who long for a home. Hers is a strange rebellion; as Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of Herman Melville, she longed to believe and was unsettled in her unbelief. Ultimately, heaven could offer no more solace than Columbus, Georgia, had, and McCullers breathes life into a protagonist named John Singer to play out her own isolation in an allegory of human non-communication. D. E. Presley explains the confessions of Jake Blount and Dr. Copeland by claiming they were “victims of a cruel joke”; the mute, Presley believes, “does not understand a single word they say. Singer is like a dead god; those who trust in him, who believe in the redemptive potential of communication, deceive themselves.”¹⁰ Although the futility of human communication in this worst of all possible worlds must be noted, Singer cannot be considered ignorant of the messages directed his way. We are told early in the novel that he is a proficient lip reader. Neither is he a dead god. It is his compassion—his interest in his fellows—which radiates from him. For example, when Singer is accosted by strangers on the street, he refuses to ignore them, although the reader soon learns that Singer is unable to save them from their respective demons. “By midsummer,” McCullers writes, “Singer had visitors more often than any other person in the house.”¹¹

Singer, this most reluctant of all messiahs, has no destination, no sense of mission: “He was always glad to stop with anyone wishing his company. For after all he was only walking and going nowhere” (169-70). Jesus, certainly, considered himself a living signpost to the Kingdom of God. Singer simply wants companionship; he listens because others insist on seeking him out. McCullers writes of Singer, “Mick Kelly and Jake Blount and Doctor Copeland would come and talk in the silent room—for they felt that the mute would always understand whatever they wanted to say to him. And maybe even more than that” (81). Others interpret the quiet spirit of confidence and self-control, which Singer assuredly exhibits, as being all-knowing. Singer's very humanity is betrayed when those who have the potential to befriend him—to hear his song—create a messiah in their own image and begin to exploit him. McCullers promotes the reader's understanding through Biff's eyes: “How Singer had been before was not important,” he thinks. “The thing that mattered was the way Blount and Mick made him a sort of home-made God” (198). Through a sporadic omniscient point of view, McCullers tells the reader: “Each man described the mute as he wished him to be” (190). By making Singer divine, the townspeople depersonalize and, in effect, murder him.

The loneliest hunter of them all is John Singer, the man with “gentle eyes [as] grave as a sorcerer's” (81). The reader meets him in the company of Antonapoulos, an obese deaf mute, who depends on Singer but often fails to listen to him or to respond to sketches Singer tries to show him. Antonapoulos eventually is committed to a sanitarium, and Singer then writes letters he never mails—the opening, “My Only Friend,” reminds the reader of how few have reached out to Singer. McCullers describes Singer after his loss: “This was the friend to whom he told all that was in his heart. … This was the Antonapoulos who now was always in his thoughts. … For something had happened in this year. He had been left in an alien land. Alone” (173). Biff, the proprieter of another sad cafe, wonders silently in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter about the “dark guilt in all men, unreckoned and without a name” (199). Singer, perhaps because he knows the pain of what remains unspoken, never fails to hear the words of the guilty or lost ones around him: “Singer nodded and wiped his mouth with his napkin. His dinner had got cold because he couldn't look down to eat, but he was so polite that he let Blount go on talking” (111). Dependable and kind, Singer “was always the same to everyone,” writes McCullers. “He sat in a straight chair by the window with his hands stuffed tight into his pockets, and nodded or smiled to show his guests that he understood” (78-79).

The parallels between Singer and Christ in McCullers' allegory begin to be obvious—sometimes McCullers and sometimes Copeland point out the Jewishness of the mute: Singer “listened, and in his face there was something gentle and Jewish, the knowledge of one who belongs to a race that is oppressed” (114). Here is the man who is purported to have healed the sick, held children in his lap, and told parables to the uneducated and the poor. The description of Singer visiting a hospital ward with Dr. Copeland easily reminds one of Christ walking among the crowds of the sick and dying in Palestine:

[Copeland] treated a syphilitic child and pointed out to Mr. Singer the scaling eruption on the palms of the hand, the dull, opaque surface of the eye, the sloping upper front incisors. … In a room where the fire burned low and orange on the hearth they were helpless while an old man strangled with pneumonia. Mr. Singer walked behind him and watched and understood. He gave nickels to the children.

(114-15)

While unlike Flannery O'Connor in her vision of faith and the world, McCullers is like her fellow Georgian in pointing out the emptiness of self-reliance in her characterization of the confident, powerful Copeland, who cries to his audience, “We will save ourselves. Not by submission and humbleness. But by pride. By dignity. By becoming hard and strong” (165). It is Portia who sees her father's failures and who reminds Copeland that strength can be only partially self-generated. She, too, is the one who forces him to recognize the rift between his head and his heart. “You think out everthing [sic] in your brain,” she says. “While us rather talk from something in our hearts that has been there for a long time” (67). Jesus, called the “Light of the World” in the New Testament, takes ironic shape in Singer, who provides direction for Copeland. Once again, it is Portia who reveals Copeland's hidden fears. “You haves grand electric lights,” she tells her father. “It don't seem natural why you all the time sitting in the dark like this.” Copeland replies, simply and profoundly, “The dark suits me” (61).

Copeland believes Singer is a Jew; he longs for identification with the members of oppressed races and cannot justify a friendship with a white man without casting him as a Jew. Singer appears in the doorway at one of Copeland's parties, as people turn to stare. Copeland describes him by saying, “The mute stood by himself. His face resembled somewhat a picture of Spinoza. A Jewish face. It was good to see him” (159). Alone one night, Copeland remembers Singer and strangles on self-expression. Thoughts of Singer flow over him like a balm: “Doctor Copeland held his head in his hands and from his throat there came the strange sound like a kind of singing moan. He remembered the white man's face when he smiled behind the yellow match flame on that rainy night—and peace was in him” (77). Later in the tale, Copeland makes a visit to Singer's room and experiences the same kind of restoration. Yet what Copeland cannot see is that the purveyor of peace, of sanity, is not peace itself. Singer, too, needs others and must suffer in loneliness without a confessor. When Singer commits suicide, an aging Copeland travels full circle and once again needs to speak: “The words in his heart grew big and they would not be silent … there was no one to hear them” (287). Copeland has used Singer, but he has not learned from him; he doesn't know the mute, nor has he heard his story. Copeland is destined to live embittered and alone, looking for strength within himself and questioning the death of his would-be savior.

Mick Kelly, too, recreates Singer, fantasizing about him and wondering about his death. McDowell errs when she suggests that Mick might be more important to the novel than Singer, that both Mick and Portia “reach out with some hope to the future.”¹² McCullers says she organized the novel in spokes that revolve around Singer; the novel itself is the story of what she calls “five isolated, lonely people in their search for expression and spiritual integration with something greater than themselves.”¹³ While an author is not always her own best critic, McCullers' words are easily supported. Lonely and trying to alleviate her pain through music, Mick comes closer than other characters to recognizing her deification of Singer and to echoing McCullers' own spiritual search: “Everybody in the past few years knew there wasn't any real God. When she thought of what she used to imagine was God she could only see Mister Singer with a long, white sheet around him. God was silent … ” (101-2). Insistently, McCullers reminds us that understanding speaks louder than words, and the horror of the novel is that a deaf mute must show his fellows how to communicate. Soundlessly, Singer reaches out; those with the physical means to speak are emotionally bankrupt; their words pour out unintelligibly. When Mick thinks of God, of salvation, she visualizes Singer. Yet Mick, too, is trapped. Presley claims that “Mick Kelly's destiny as a clerk in Woolworth's is the author's projection of her future in the South, had she not escaped.”¹⁴ When Singer dies, Mick is as lost as Copeland or Blount:

Mick raked her hair from her forehead. Her mouth was open so that her cheeks seemed hollow. There were these two things she could never believe. That Mister Singer had killed himself and was dead. And that she was grown and had to work at Woolworth's.

(300)

One story of despair blends into another. Jake is the only figure who speaks of his need in terms of Christ, but all cast Singer in the role of savior. Jake tells Singer about his early need for Jesus:

My first belief was Jesus. There was this fellow working in the same shed with me. He had a tabernacle and preached every night. I went and listened and I got this faith. My mind was on Jesus all day long. In my spare time I studied the Bible and prayed. Then one night I took a hammer and laid my hand on the table. I was angry and I drove the nail all the way through. My hand was nailed to the table, and I looked at it and the fingers fluttered and turned blue.

(128)

This grotesque portrait is more in keeping with the fictional method of O'Connor, for here one finds the spiritual distortion of soul she often revealed. Jake threw himself into the arms of fundamentalist Christianity—with its tent revivals, wailing soloists, and damnation sermons. The Jesus he met demanded crucifixion, the annihilation of self. Haze Motes of Wise Blood walks with stones and glass in his shoes; Jake hammers a nail through his hand. Guilt festers and spreads as humanity seeks release. Once again, it is Jake's agonized spending of words which points to his poverty of soul: “Jake Blount leaned across the table and the words came out as though a dam inside him had broken” (20). Jake's outpouring also reinforces his identification with Christ:

The words swelled within him and gushed from his mouth. … And at last the deluge of swollen words took shape and he delivered them to the mute with drunken emphasis: “The things they have done to us! The truths they have turned into lies! The ideals they have fouled and made vile. Take Jesus. He was one of us. He knew.”

(133-34)

It is Biff, as always, who provides the commentary on Jake's need to pour out his pain in language: Because it is in some people to “give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons—throw it to some human being or some human idea” (27). Those who must tell all—who seek transformation via the one who listens—cannot see beyond their need to the loneliness of their priest. The selflessness of Singer moves out and encompasses his fellows, making them long for the solace of his quiet spirit. The very room in which Singer sits communicates stillness, acceptance, peace. Townspeople come to him for renewal without heeding either their dependence or his personhood. They come face to face with the mute and meet themselves.

Jake recalls Singer's giving spirit when he was taken home drunk. Jake “had got a lot of things off his chest and the man had listened,” McCullers writes. “At first he would keep waking up with nightmares and have to turn the light on to get himself clear again. The light would wake this fellow also, but he hadn't complained at all” (46). Much of the power Singer possesses is entrusted to him by his fellows, who create characteristics in him to fill the void in themselves. “You're the only one in town who catches what I mean,” says Blount. “For two days now I been talking to you in my mind because I know you understand the things I want to mean” (19). Singer, of course, may or may not understand any unarticulated message. But he has been endowed with the power to see, to understand, to heal. In spite of the human desire to create a heroic figure, one who can save and unscramble the puzzle of existence, the results are often only temporarily positive. By molding someone to reach out to them, people may learn to feel as they have not felt before. McCullers writes of Jake: “The mute's face was in his mind very clearly. It was like the face of a friend he had known for a long time. … He began walking again down the hot, deserted street. He did not walk as a stranger in a strange town” (52). Momentarily, Jake is placed, contained. His love for Singer knows no limits and explodes the bounds of reason. The ability to love so profoundly provides a restitution of its own, but because it is born of fantasy, such a love is short-lived. Not taking its object into consideration, love born in intense need is destined for disappointment. Just as Copeland's last thoughts are bitter, Blount's are full of despair. Singer is dead. A sense of betrayal infects the spirits of Copeland, Blount, and Mick. Finding himself once again drowning, Jake flees for the only solace he knows—the mute's “quiet room” (55). McCullers writes, “In his confusion he had run all the way across town to reach the room of his friend. And Singer was dead” (290). One may be reminded of the friends of Christ who gathered, grieving, at an empty tomb. His sanctuary in ruins, Jake remembers “all the innermost thoughts that he had told to Singer, and with his death it seemed to him that they were lost” (291). Even in the throes of grief, Jake's thoughts are focused inward. The reader wonders: Why had Singer died? What was he lacking? Where was his foundation? The questions do not simply go unanswered; they go unasked. The receptable of Jake's best self is dead. Copeland finds himself in total solitude; Jake stumbles through a darkened town in search of a dead messiah; and as a clerk in Woolworth's, Mick faces the end of her dreams.

McCullers' repetition and simplicity of style take their toll. Only occasionally are her analogies subtle, and too often she pummels the reader with Christian imagery. Yet her need to say is as profound as that of her characters, and she is capable of startling detail. In a rare moment of subtlety, McCullers has Alice, Biff's wife, teach a Sunday school class. Her text is the New Testament story of Simon and Andrew, who opt to follow Christ. Citing Mark i. 36-37, she reads: “And Simon and they that were with Him followed after Him. And when they had found Him, they said unto Him, ‘All men seek for Thee.’” All people seek for Christ, McCullers believes, no matter how they define him, no matter what they create him to be. What her earliest novel lacked in substance and form it made up in intensity and in understanding of the searching of the heart. In The Mortgaged Heart McCullers writes:

Spiritual isolation is the basis of most of my themes. … Love, and especially love of a person who is incapable of returning or receiving it, is at the heart of my selection of grotesque figures to write about—people whose physical incapacity is a symbol of their spiritual incapacity to love or receive love—their spiritual isolation.¹⁵

McCullers understands loneliness and the transience of life. When Biff loses Mick to adulthood, he remembers the effervescence, the hope of her childhood. His words could be the final message of each of the lives McCullers weaves: “And now, as a summer flower shatters in September, it was finished. There was no one” (305).

Deliverance from fear is but momentary. Biff does temporarily transcend the bondage of his fellows. Through an understanding of Singer's life and death, Biff finds worth in human feeling. In an almost Faulknersque tribute to human courage and emotion, McCullers writes of Biff: “For 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” (306). Singer, Biff realizes, sacrificed himself in order to love. Swallowed by his own need, Singer is, of course, a flawed savior. He is not killed by religious leaders or Roman soldiers; as a symbol of modern humanity, he chooses to end his own life. Richard M. Cook calls Singer, simply, the “embodiment of the community's need to find acceptance.”¹⁶ But through her portrayal of Singer and his disciples, McCullers accomplishes more than recreation of biblical myth. She has demonstrated the frailty of language, the ultimate failure of self-expression. As McCullers writes in an essay, “Communication is the only access to love—to love, to conscience, to nature, to God, and to the dream.”¹⁷ But, for all the peace and hope the characters of her first novel experience, each might as well be a mute. As in modern life, McCullers' fictional universe contains too much need, too few listeners.

McDowell calls The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter McCullers' representation of her “regret that selfless love is rare and apt to be evanescent.”¹⁸ Faith is no option for the characters of McCullers' novel; men and women choose a flesh-and-blood hero to take the place of the prophet from Nazareth. When McCullers lists the theme she believes she had developed in the novel, a “unifying principle or God” plays a major role: “There is a deep need in man to express himself by creating some unifying principle or God,” she writes in The Mortgaged Heart. “A personal God created by man is a reflection of himself and in substance this God is most often inferior to his creator.” Another concept she supports fictionally is that in a “disorganized society these individual Gods or principles are likely to be chimerical and fantastic.”¹⁹ Because Copeland, Mick, and Blount create Singer to meet their needs, their god is not divine. He is all too human. Rather than his pointing the way to God through a Gethsemane moment, isolation damns Singer. His song is never heard. McCullers has written an allegory of an individual's search for self, and those internal glimpses remain rare and incomplete. Whatever the stylistic failures of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers has successfully explored what she termed the “solitary region of simple stories and the inward mind.”²⁰ Her characters do not carry a pack labelled “Sin” on their backs, but Singer easily may be cast as an allegorical Everyman. The pain of the characters is as internal as it is destructive, and their cries for deliverance go unheard.

Notes

1. The Mortgaged Heart, ed. Margarita G. Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971) 125.

2. Carson McCullers (Boston: Twayne, 1980) 31.

3. The Lonely Hunter (New York: Doubleday, 1975) 186.

4. The Lonely Hunter 194.

5. The Mortgaged Heart 279.

6. Quoted from a letter to Vincent Adams, in Carson McCullers, Richard M. Cook (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975) 9.

7. The Mortgaged Heart 251.

8. D. E. Presley, “Carson McCullers and the South,” Georgia Review 28 (Spring 1974):26.

9. The Mortgaged Heart 279.

10. ”Carson McCullers and the South” 28.

11. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1977) 77. Subsequent references to this text will be noted parenthetically.

12. McDowell, Carson McCullers 32.

13. The Mortgaged Heart 125.

14. “Carson McCullers and the South” 20.

15. The Mortgaged Heart 274.

16. Cook, Carson McCullers 38.

17. The Mortgaged Heart 281.

18. McDowell, Carson McCullers 15.

19. The Mortgaged Heart 124.

20. The Mortgaged Heart 251.