ŷ������

“Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,
Go also to the nerve-racked, go to the enslaved-by-convention,
Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.
Go as a great wave of cool water,
Bear my contempt of oppressors.��

“G����, commands Ezra Pound in his poem “C�dz����������Dz��� .
And so I obey, and I go.
I go and listen to the mute choir of the lonesome and the restless, of the disinherited and the excluded, of the alienated and the embittered.
Isolated voices withering in despair, wrestling in incomprehension, anguished voices that interweave with each other creating a desolate fugue where only the tuneless can sing.

A nameless mill town in the middle of the deep South during the thirties serves, not only as a background orchestra for these discordant voices, but also as the universal representative of the spiritual solitude that underlines the human condition. Four main characters struggle against different kinds of afflictions depending on race, class, age and sexuality.
Thirteen-year-old Mick Kelly nurtures her passion for music locked in her secret “inside-room��. Mr.Coperland, a colored doctor, tries to control his anger against the submissiveness of his race. Jake Blount, an alcoholic communist wanders from town to town spreading his inner contradictions. Biff Brannon, the owner of the Café, sits behind the booth and observes it all, especially boyish Mick, who seems frozen into eternal youth.
These disconnected individuals, eager to appease their escalating sense of alienation, pivot around John Singer, a deaf mute, whose grey eyes offer mute solace.

“Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.��

��ٱ�𲹰���, continues Pound’s song.
And speak is what these four rotating “satellites�� do while hovering around their beaming sun, their self-created icon, like blind moths being drawn recklessly towards the scorching lightbulb. They all turn to Singer like starving souls, pouring all their turmoil into his opaque face, which looks back with a peaceful glance, a glance that swallows it all. Despair, anger, shame, pain, emptiness. All of them gone, diluted in the indefinite wells of easiness emanating from John Singer’s being, who becomes the so much coveted savior, the embodiment of goodness and empathy, the guardian angel who listens and understands.

“Mick Kelly and Jake Blount and Doctor Coperland would come and talk in the silent room �� for they felt that the mute would always understand whatever they wanted to say to him. And maybe even more than that.�� (87)

But does Mr. Singer really hear the uneasy songs of his faithful “disciples��? Can he fully grasp the implications of their vivid speech? Oh, the talking. Isn’t all the talking less about communicating rather than unburdening oneself? Isn’t the soul after all, as Virginia Woolf said, a “wedge-shaped core of darkness�� ? Something invisible to others?
For what these lost souls don’t know is that Mr. Singer wanders the night as the most lonely of them all, imagining the face of his friend, his lover, the face of his only reason to keep on moving, his only reason to be.
Love, even when seemingly directed at another, is often a form of egoism.
What is then, the adored one?
Only a blank canvas on to which anything can be painted, only a shallow mirror reflecting whatever is wished. As in a chimerical fantasy, these off-balance voices, enraged by events, at once bruised and musing, fixate on the make-believe scene they create in their locked minds and think they live, cheating themselves.

“Oh how hideous it is
To see three generations of one house gathered together!
It is like an old tree with shoots,
And with some branches rotten and falling.��

As the trees in Ezra Pound’s poem, the condemned, the voiceless and the rejected stand staring at the abyss of their own incomprehension, in a world hovering on the edge of a Great War. Some will fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, some with sex or drink, and some �� like Mick �� with a quiet but fierce resolution to keep the beauty of Beethoven’s (also a deaf) “E���Ǿ������� engraved in the most recondite part of her soul.
But mostly, they will be suspended in uncertainty, swaying between radiance and darkness, between bitter irony and faith, between music and silence; eternally bend in a double-edged posture where empathy can be corrosive as well as liberating, where one can imagine the other as a melody of life, or as McCullers appears to be saying, as a melody of death.

“Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.�� (107)


Note: I have had the pleasure to read this novel at the same time that my friend Tej and his criss- crossed comments and kind encouragement have made of this novel an even more intense reading experience. Thanks for sharing and building expectations along with me, Tej.