The American Century: Literature since 1945 593Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946), and Clock Without Hands
(1961). She gave it many names, over the years, and placed it consistently in the
South. Southern though its geographical location might be, however, it was like no
South ever seen before. It was another country altogether, created out of all that the
author had found haunting, soft, and lonely in her childhood surroundings in
Georgia. It was also evolved out of her own experience of melancholy, isolation, and
occasional if often illusory happiness. “Everything that happens in my fiction has
happened to me,” she confessed in her unfinished autobiography (Illumination and
Night Glare (2000)). Her life, she believed, was composed of “illumination,” moments
of miraculous insight, and “night glare,” long periods of dejection, depression,
frustration – feelings of enclosure within herself. So are the lives of her characters.
The people she writes about may seem or feel strange or freakish because they belong
to a marginal group, maybe, because of their awkward age, because of their
anomalous desires, aberrant behavior, or grotesque appearance. But in their
freakishness they chart the coordinates of all our lives; their strangeness simply
brings to the surface the secret sense of strangeness all of us share in what McCullers
sometimes called our “lonesomeness.” So, for example, The Ballad of the Sad Café
revolves around a dance macabre of frustrated love, thwarted communication.
“There are the lover and the beloved,” the narrator tells us, “but these two come from
different countries.” Similarly, The Member of the Wedding is an initiation novel in
which the lonely, sensitive, 12-year-old protagonist, Frankie Adams, is initiated into
the simple ineradicable fact of human isolation: the perception that she can, finally,
be “a member of nothing.” At the heart of McCullers’s work lies the perception
Frankie comes to, just as the protagonist of Clock Without Hands, J. J. Malone does
when he learns that he has a few months to live. Each of us, as Malone feels it, is
“surrounded by a zone of loneliness”; each of us lives and dies unaccompanied by
anyone else; which is why, when we contemplate McCullers’s awkward and aberrant
characters, we exchange what she called “a little glance of grief and lonely recognition.”
Whereas McCullers published only four novels in her short life, and O’Connor
only two, Joyce Carol Oates (1938–) has produced more than fifty. In addition, she
has written hundreds of shorter works, including short stories and critical and
cultural essays, and several of her plays have been produced off Broadway. Often
classified as a realist writer, she is certainly a social critic concerned in particular
with the violence of contemporary American culture. But she is equally drawn
toward the Gothic, and toward testing the limits of classical myth, popular tales and
fairy stories, and established literary conventions. Many of her novels are set in Eden
County, based on the area of New York State where she was born. And in her early
fiction, With Shuddering Fall (1964) and A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), she
focuses her attention on rural America with its migrants, social strays, ragged
prophets, and automobile wrecking yards. In Expensive People (1968), by contrast,
she moved to a satirical meditation on suburbia; and in Them (1969) she explored
the often brutal lives of the urban poor. Other, later fiction has shown a continued
willingness to experiment with subjects and forms. Wonderland (1971), a novel
about the gaps between generations, is structured around the stories of LewisGGray_c05.indd 593ray_c 05 .indd 593 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM