Relegation and Rebellion: The Queer, the Grotesque, and the Silent in the Fiction of Carson McCullers

The grotesque demands attention. A contorted doll, nail-pierced hand, nipple-shorn bosom, gouged-out eye: these are aggressive images that insert themselves into mind's eye and linger. Such startling word-pictures punctuate fiction of Carson McCullers so that when we think of her writing, we think of that which makes us shudder: we think of grotesque. Equally characteristic of McCullers's work are lonely, alienated, queer characters whose feelings, fears, and desires are conveyed through silence and exemplified by figure of mute, central character of and author's intended title for her first novel, published at its editors' suggestion as The Heart Is Lonely Hunter (1940). Though silent, mute speaks to those characters in Heart who believe that he recognizes and affirms their own differences, which they feel but cannot name as queer: His eyes made person think that he heard things nobody else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before (Heart 24). The visual and aurai are often linked in McCullers, andjust as mute seems to hear with his eyes, careful readers can discern silent in her fiction speaking in image as grotesque. This synesthesia is result of relationship between queer and grotesque, an association that generates picture of destructive effects of queer silencing. The grotesque as McCullers uses it appears not so much as fully embodied, (1) but in wide range of imagery and vividly illustrated behaviors. Spectacularly, politically metonymic rather than metaphoric, grotesque registers not queer but distortion produced by its relegation to silence, and in so doing, resists this practice. To fully appreciate McCullers's visual rebellion, we must contextualize We must ask, in other words, what it might have meant to McCullers. In mid-century America word, broadly speaking, signified oddity-a kind of negative exceptionalism. More specifically, it often designated that which deviated from heterosexual and/or traditionally gendered, sometimes as shaming appellation (Adams 55) and sometimes as a code word known to many 'in life' but few outside.... As an effective cover, it fully retained its root meaning of 'odd,' 'strange,' 'off-beat' (Kenschaft 221). (2) Gender deviancy was deemed queer precisely because of its suspected proximity to--its supposed reliability as an indicator of--homosexuality. Thus queer included homosexual desire and but stretched beyond these factors--precisely because of society's fears of them--suggesting possibility of difference that was sexual in nature. In short, queerness signaled difference in derogatory way, with underlying implication that that which was most queer--the nastiest difference--was sexual deviance. I have chosen to engage with word queer--to interpret and to employ it--on simple terms outlined above, though without, of course, any derision. I do so, first, because this is how McCullers most likely understood, and so utilized, queer. Second, I see its contemporary, enormously encompassing usage as problematic. In desire to draw attention to and, more importantly, to make available and acceptable range of practices, identifications, and ways of being, current queer theory has begun to detach queerness from sexual identity and gender deviance (Halberstam 1), thus framing non-normative as queer, and threatening, inadvertently perhaps, to collapse queerness and difference completely. (3) Popular journalism and queer activism reflect this academic trend. The Week magazine, for instance, offering summary of Gregory Rodriguez's late 2007 Los Angeles Times article, Gay--the new straight, quipped, it's not queer to be gay anymore (18). On overtly political front, same appears to be true: the queer of contemporary queer politics is conceived not in opposition to heterosexuality per se but as broader defiance of all kinds of oppressive social norms (Adams 556). …