The major literary discovery for me this year (so far) is a classical author - classical in the sense of having enough class to be novel decades (at least) after the writing. Her name is Carson McCullers, and I should be publicly denounced for having ignored her books for so long.
I did once read "The Ballad of the Sad Café", a long time ago. But perhaps I was so wrapped up in something else (maybe it was my bad mood at the time, maybe the rain, maybe Heidegger, maybe some other theoretical concern that overshadowed everything) that it did not leave much of an impression on me. I am often an inattentive, hasty reader.
Back in May, I was reading the charming recent novel "That Old Ace in the Hole" by EA Proulx, and commented on its forsaken Oklahoma ambience to Mónica. The well-read novia responded by referring to McCullers and the ballad. In the interests of chiming well with these matters, I ordered (from my friend Matthias, the ever-compliant bookseller) several books by McCullers. Then I read some of them.
The humanity of McCullers is perfectly conveyed through the humanity of her characters. This may sound as if it was obvious, but it is not. The only comparable example I can think of in the literary canon is Chekhov. But not even Chekhov invests his characters with as much authentic feeling in the moment. One might say that McCullers is a writer of the moment, of the feeling of the moment achieving a certain timelessness. The re-introduction of time (e.g. Singer's eventual suicide in "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter", the tragic-cathartic ending of the "Sad Café", the destruction of the "member of the wedding") only serves to display this timelessness. There is no beginning to her stories just as her characters, unlike Faulkner's, say, seem to have no history, no past that explains or determines their present... Thus her works achieve a certain emotional immediacy that I find rare, rare indeed.
Another novel of hers, "Reflections in a golden eye" was different. At first, it reminded me of early Nabokov (Russian Nabokov). Now an icy view of sexual play takes the place of the deep humanism of the other works. Maybe it's the countering, made necessary as a kind of mirror image. But the theme is still loneliness, and the problem of the human heart.
As I got deeper into it, my analysis of affinities went further back in time, even though it stayed in the same geographical place. I suddenly felt as if I was reading a mean version of a Turgeneve or Chekhov novella. Back to Chekhov, then?
I sound like a fucking literary critic! My point was something about how this has impacted me over the past few weeks, and how it resembles and foreshadows something about Murakami who to my mind remains the most interesting currently active author with whose work I am familiar.
The story "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" to me is a prefiguration of Murakami that is almost eerie. Go read it, and then read any story of Murakami's, and you will know what I mean. In that story there is an amazing insight into love, which, as the dialectical other of loneliness, is also the great theme of McCullers: the idea of having to learn how to love with something simple (i.e. starting with, say, a rock, a tree, a cloud, not with loving that which is most difficult to love, namely another person) is stunning in its simplicity and its originality. And it holds true as an insight, but also in its own structure, not just chronologically, but as something to be taken up again and again.
I also want to quote something from the "Ballad of the Sad Café". It's an authorial/reflective commentary on the long-ago brief marriage between Amelia and Marvin Macy:
"The town laughed a long time over this grotesque affair. But through the outward facts of this love are indeed sad and ridiculous, it must be remembered that the real story was that which took place in the soul of the lover himself. So who but God can be the final judge of this or any other love?"
Truer words, as the true cliché goes, have not been spoken.
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