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Carson McCullers: The Top 5 Works

Ranking one of the world's most enigmatic modern writers

By Annie KapurPublished 4 years ago 8 min read
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Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers is one of my personal favourite writers of the modern age. Whatever she writes, she writes with beauty and passion, and every single word seems as if it has been specially chosen for its position in a sentence and every sentence for its position in the text. Though Carson McCullers didn't live very long, I do think that her body of work (though short) is pretty impressive. I always identify with her lonely and struggling characters who hold it all inside as they walk, discontented through meaningless lives, seeking something other than what they have. The eternal displacement.

Carson McCullers' writing style though, isn't just beautiful and it doesn't romanticise the human condition as we'd expect it to. Instead, it presents both beauty and sadness at the same time, working together but showing that humans are in fact, contented though their positions may be difficult and their minds and hearts broken. It is the mental survival of the fittest and what will happen if they falter and eventually fail themselves.

McCullers' characters are nearly always impacted by one major change which makes them different to others. For example: the two mutes in one of her novels (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter) makes them stand out from almost everyone else in the book, but then again in her book "The Member of the Wedding" the main character is distraught and aggressive, discontented and uncomfortable with not being able/allowed to do a specific thing only contented when permitted to do so (I am not saying since I do not want to spoil the books for anyone!).

Let us begin with our list then!

5. Clock Without Hands

“German lieder is creepy music. That’s why I specialise in it.”

Clock Without Hands is a classic McCullers book in the sense that it is filled with sensational language and experienced characters. It makes various statements regarding the racial, classist and sexist tensions that underly the society of Georgia. And, whilst it is only a small town story, the novel reflects on issues that are at large even today.

4. Reflections in a Golden Eye

“Afterward the Captain was to tell himself that in this one instant he knew everything. Actually, in a moment when a great but unknown shock is expected, the mind instinctively prepares itself by abandoning momentarily the faculty of surprise. In that vulnerable instant a kaleidoscope of half-guessed possibilities project themselves, and when the disaster has defined itself there is the feeling of having understood beforehand in some supernatural way.”

Set on a Southern Army post, this I believe is one of McCullers' more enigmatic tales about love and loss. It concerns the themes that were so rampant in her time including: social class, justice, morality and whether the armed forces were acting as patriots or the perpetuators of great amounts of violence.

3. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world—a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring—this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth. Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else—but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself. It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.”

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is probably McCullers' most endearing work of literature containing several stories including the tale of The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. There's a prodigy pianist who experiences great loss, love stories that don't turn out quite right and haunting tales of experience and grief that have left readers charmed, courted and enchanted for decades. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is also a tale that fits right into McCullers' own time as one of the best written books of her decade.

2. The Member of the Wedding

“I think I have a vague idea what you were driving at,” she said. “We all of us somehow caught. We born this way or that way and we don’t know why. But we caught anyhow. I born Berenice. You born Frankie. John Henry born John Henry. And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. Me is me and you is you and he is he. We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself. Is that what you was trying to say?” “I don’t know,” F. Jasmine said. “But I don’t want to be caught” “Me neither,” said Berenice. “Don’t none of us. I’m caught worse than you is.” F. Jasmine understood why she had said this, and it was John Henry who asked in his child voice: “Why?” “Because I am black,” said Berenice. “Because I am colored. Everybody is caught one way or another. But they done drawn completely extra bounds around all colored people. They done squeezed us off in one corner by ourself. So we caught that first-way I was telling you, as all human beings is caught. And we caught as colored people also. Sometimes a boy like Honey feel like he just can’t breathe no more. He feel like he got to break something or break himself. Sometimes it just about more than we can stand.”

This text I read only a few months ago (it is, at the moment the Autumn of 2019) and I very much enjoyed it. It tells the story of Frankie who is incredibly bored until she happens to hear her brother is getting married. She is then excited to the point of no return, wanting to go everywhere with the couple. Although, she is not invited on the honeymoon, she wants to go on that with them as well. The whole story is told through various conversations and episodes with a housemaid and a six year old boy who is her cousin. I loved this book because it was a lively and enchanting change for a Carson McCullers text. Though, underlying it is a deep and meaningful sorrow which Frankie cannot fix herself.

1. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“We in this room have no private properties. Perhaps one or two of us may own the homes we live in, or have a dollar or two set aside—but we own nothing that does not contribute directly toward keeping us alive. All that we own is our bodies. And we sell our bodies every day we live. We sell them when we go out in the morning to our jobs and when we labor all day. We are forced to sell at any price, at any time, for any purpose. We are forced to sell our bodies so that we can eat and live. And the price which is given us for this is only enough so that we will have the strength to labor longer for the profits of others. Today we are not put up on platforms and sold at the courthouse square. But we are forced to sell our strength, our time, our souls during almost every hour that we live. We have been freed from one kind of slavery only to be delivered into another. Is this freedom? Are we yet free men?”

This book really enchanted me. Told about the friendship between two mutes who then move apart as the world they live in grows to encompass other people. The novel turns into a fully-fledged drama about friendship, realism, freedom and the will to help others. Carson McCullers uses beautiful and tragic language to explain and describe this world filled with poverty and danger around ever corner, a world skewed against anyone who is even so slightly different to the norm and a world where those who are outcasted are brought together in a tale of fate. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a classic of modern literature for way more than one or two reasons, this book is possibly one of the most important novels of the 20th Century.

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About the Creator

Annie Kapur

190K+ Reads on Vocal.

English Lecturer

🎓Literature & Writing (B.A)

🎓Film & Writing (M.A)

🎓Secondary English Education (PgDipEd)

📍Birmingham, UK

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