Private English Tutor/Tuition Bolton Manchester: Carson McCullers’ Master Class-The Member of the Wedding.

Who would want to settle for less than BRILLIANCE  in the opening of a story?

The WOW factor must be there…

Call it magic, call it strangeness call it quite simply the RECOGNITION OF SOMETHING SINGULAR THAT SPEAKS  TO US…

Yes…I have felt like that….or YES , that is exactly RIGHT…or How ridiculously BIZARRE…But there must be CONFIRMATION at some level of EMOTION…

We open some books, read a few lines and put them down for they seem dead. .. Why should  we persist with a story if the opening lines fail to  ensnare us; whether we are long haul readers or short haul readers  or even a little of both?

For Reading requires commitment  – and energy of different levels and kinds.

 

Some of us are intense readers, eager to get through and find out what the book will make of its dilemmas; some of us read steadily at certain times, careful with pages, careful to make sure we ration the reading.

Some of us enjoy the stolen pleasure of reading hiding away with a book until we are done. ( I used to hide books in the toilet to AVOID washing up).

Holidays are great opportunities  to read for they give us the TIME that escapes us for so much of our lives.

I love the private ‘game’  of what to pack book wise… deciding on a long list, a short list and then with the advent of kindle, we how many can I take without anyone knowing!

A story in many ways  is like starting a spontaneous conversation  or relationship. You have to be  CURIOUS or why would you bother to initiate contact and reading is a form of   INITIATION.

We can be braver, more cowardly, more vengeful, more thoughtful;  more anything, more anybody when we read and no one can stop us, not even ourselves!

 

Carson McCullers’ writing recognizes how uniquely lonely and lonesome we all can feel,  trapped within the daily confines of our lives.

She is one of the best writers about vulnerability and awkwardness I have ever read.

The changes that arrive in her stories bring about shattering readjustments in the lives of her characters and often  leave these figures desolate,yearning after what they have lost, resigned to accept what is inescapable.

Self knowledge is an ironic friend in her narratives yet McCullers ‘ also reminds us that compassion is a the persistent healer, and everyone, no matter what they say or do, is deserved of compassion.

The opening to Carson McCullers’ short novel The Member of the Wedding is wonderfully ‘right’ and ironically explores a young person’s feelings of being ‘wrong’. For Frankie, the protagonist, feels profoundly awkward in her own skin, in her own daily experience of being alive.

It feels when I read this novel that Frankie  is a like a pressure cooker, something unresolved is  waiting to explode with  daring…yearning to be expressed…

I am sure JD Salinger and Plath both found resonances in McCullers’ novel, recognizing the pain of being ‘unjoined.’

‘It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. she belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid .In June the trees were bright dizzy green, but later the leaves darkened, and the whole town turned black and shrunken under the glare of the sun…and at home there was only Berenice Sadie Brown and John Henry West. The three of them sat at the kitchen table, saying the same things over  and over, so that by August the words began to rhyme with each other and sound strange. The World seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer…’

Notice how the narrator moves from the inside to the outside of Frankie’s experience.‘Green’ denotes the verdant state of nature and perhaps connotes the innately ironic promise of such a fertile time. This is an outside condition which ironises Frankie’s inner turmoil. 

If the term ‘crazy’ connotes an inner mental  state, Frankie’s state perhaps, when everything feels  upside down and out of kilter, even out of control.

Frankie has lost her bearings, she is disorientated from her own experience. 

This is ‘that’ summer. We are transported to a particular time in the past, and this is what the tale will reveal through remembrance…..we want to know why ‘that’ summer was so ‘crazy’ and how Frankie dealt with not being a ‘member’.

Have you ever ‘hung around in doorways’?

Surely We have all hesitated before entering a room or crossing a threshold into a new space…thresholds challenge our confidence and unsettle our complacency.

We have faltered because we were afraid like Frankie…her discomfort confines her to the fringes of her community.

McCullers drenches Frankie’s external world with her internal emotions. The colours and images wonderfully capture her psychological nausea surrounding ‘home’ and we read on because we want to know why…why has home become a place of alienation and dullness…

 

I am also reminded of Carol Ann Duffy’s once banned poem, Education For Leisure where a dangerously sensitive, even neurasthenic protagonist remarks upon the glittering pavements.

In Duffy’s superb poem, perception becomes hallucinatory and renders the world threatening and savage.

Here, McCullers reveals Frankie’s confirming perception that her external reality seems brittle and menacing, horrible reflective of her own feverish imaginings.

Frankie’s ‘secret trouble’ confines her to the repetitious world of home where her companions are too familiar and their conversation is stale and without freshness or surprise.

Indeed their conversation appears to lose its identity and become foreign…rendering Frankie a stranger to herself, her words and her world!

What I find wonderful in this opening is the immediate and powerful way in which the writer captures awkwardness and a feverishly realized  world of dissatisfaction.

Frankie’s world is glaring back at her with derision: ‘so that the cement burned and glittered like glass.’ Our emotions contaminate our reading of the world and here Frankie finds confirmation of her unease in the stifling and cruelly indifferent heat of the day. 

Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar owes much to McCullers’ for this peculiarly sensitive, claustrophobic sensibility as does Duffy’s poem Foreign where characters ‘fail’ to integrate themselves at a terrible personal cost. 

 

Look at the understated brilliance of the word ‘thing’ in this sentence. 

‘At First Frankie walked around doing one thing and another.’ 

How desultory and unfocused does this feel as we read it?  And what did Frankie do LATER we wonder. She doesn’t even name anything she does because  it is not worthy of being named or maybe she does the same things day after day…until….