Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic

2 “Marvelous and Very Real”: The Grotesque in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Wise Blood

2 / “Marvelous and Very Real”: The Grotesque in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Wise Blood Very early in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers offers a scene of domestic discord between Biff Brannon and his wife, Alice. Frustrated with his preferential treatment of an unusual customer, Alice charges, “It’s a disgrace to the business. And besides, he’s nothing but a bum and a freak.” To which Brannon responds, “I like freaks” (14). This direct statement of Brannon’s affinity for freaks—a group later elaborated to include sick people, cripples, anybody with TB or a harelip, hunchbacks, amputees, and John Singer, another central character and the local “deaf-mute” (22)—applies not only to a character in McCullers ’s fiction but also to the author herself, as well as to a score of authors writing novels in the mid-twentieth century. American writers of the period, including McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Sherwood Anderson, Nathaniel West, and William Faulkner, constitute a proliferation of fiction of the grotesque. As reflected in their prose, these writers are drawn to freakish bodies as both the effect of and antidote to a modern world characterized as alienating and stifling in its embrace of homogeneity. Bodies at the margins of national norms seem to provide a conduit to the material real and, in this proximity to reality, access to exceptional insights. This quality of seeming both more real and more otherworldly than the quotidian social world suggests just one of the complexities of representing physical difference and its figural burden in novels of the mid-twentieth century. In its emphasis on materiality, contradiction, spectacle, and populism, the grotesque form provides a representational 60 / “marvelous and very real” scaffold for these freakish bodies, offering the tropes by which they become legible in the national imagination. Originally conceived to name the mingling of plant, animal, and human in visual arts, the grotesque of the twentieth century retains an emphasis on the visual and on contradictions of somatic form. While much of contemporary criticism responds in some fashion to Mikhail Bakhtin’s foundational work on the grotesque, Rabelais and His World, there are nearly as many definitions of the grotesque as there are writers about it. Unlike Bakhtin’s utopic vision of a ludic and liberatory “grotesque realism,” for Wolfgang Kayser the grotesque represents alienation and mocking, satanic laughter. In an even more contemporary vein, Geoffrey Harpham sees the form as an expression of a poststructuralist crisis in language and meaning. What these and shelves of other diverse perspectives share, however, is an insistence that the grotesque is never abstract, that it constantly presents its own materiality. The grotesque, then, operates alongside the figure of the embodied citizen as each entails the body as an inescapable ideological property. And like disabled citizens, the grotesque, even in its most symbolic modes, always retains a residue of the material. This mutual burden of embodiment shared by the grotesque and disability coincides with a shared history in the approach to physical difference in literature. Before disability studies emerged as such, the two major competing critical genres for the study of disability were split between the sentimental and the grotesque. While neither form offers an emphasis on rights or offers a theorization of disability’s social formulation , both sentiment and the grotesque serve as the historical rubrics under which preceding scholars discussed illness, deformity, and physical excess. In chapter 1, I explore sentiment as an animating mode in the approach to bodies, politics, and texts. Here, I turn my focus to the grotesque as an interpretive scheme deeply influential in the representation of disability in mid-twentieth-century literature. Critics who concur on little else will agree that the grotesque is as much a form as it is an unsettling effect and that this effect expresses a social, political , or spiritual comment.1 As Bernard McElroy argues, “To imagine a monstrosity is to imagine a world capable of producing that monstrosity ” (11). It is most common, among scholars of the grotesque, to show how the grotesque body reflects a social body gone awry, but less common to find critics who wonder what this role as national symbol means for the grotesque citizen. Even at their most politically invested, studies of the grotesque offer largely static accounts of the disabled figures that “marvelous and very real” / 61 populate grotesquerie. In fact, many of the gains of...