Moreover, the characters often seem helplessly impelled toward acertain course of events.The chorus moves because "the time had come" or "the instinct to act" came upon them.Cousin Lymon behaves as if bewitched by Marvin Macy . Miss Amelia seems "to have lost her will" when she reacts to Marvin Macy's charming of the hunchback, makes no protest when Marvin Macy moves in on her, and stands "helpless" when Marvin Macy bounces her curses back upon herself.The climactic brawl at the end of the story comes pcisely at seven o'clock in the evening-a time instinctively "known to everyone, not by announcement or words, but understood in the unquestioning way that rain is understood, or an evil odor from the swamp . "Each of the three principals fills his role as if the whole action had been" arranged in some manner beforehand. "
What has not been sufficiently noted, however, is that these elements-the quasi-poetic stylistic devices, the fairytale atmosphere, the non-literal meanings-are the marks of the mythic imagination, and their combination in this story suggests the making of amodern myth.The Ballad of the Sad Cafémay be set in atwentieth century Southern town and speak of things like Greyhound buses and brick privies and marijuana cigarettes, but the imagination which informs it is in many important ways close kin to the imagination of those ancient authors who set their stories on Olympus, in Valhalla, and in Camelot and spoke of winged sandals and golden thrones and magic potions.
[In the following essay, Griffith examines the ways in which McCullers imbues The Ballad of the Sad Caféwith mythic elements.]
The mythic aura which surrounds the characters extends to the events as well.In the first place, Mrs.McCullers sets the action in the remembered past, so that we do not see it directly as it happens but retrospectively as it is recalled, re - created, interpted.We are allowed to glimpse first the psent desolation of the town, then to have the cause of the des olation explained as the ballad unfolds.The style is psentational, however, rather than repsentational: we are always aware of the mediating influence of the narrator.The narrator's panoramic vision opens before us in the very first lines of the novella, those hauntingly poetic lines that merge past and psent, intimacy and mystery, fact and mythic imagination in the evocative decription of the dreary town. "These August afternoons-when your shift is finished there is absolutely nothing to do; you might as well walk down to the Forks Fall Road and listen to the chain gang, "we go on to read, unconsciously being affected by the colloquial tone, the second person address, the intruding interptations of apersonalized viewpoint.In Percy Lubbock's terms, this is a "pictorial" work in which we face toward the story-teller and listen to him, instead of a "scenic" work in which we would turn toward the story and watch it. "So let the slow years pass and come to aSaturday evening six years after the time when Cousin Lymon came first to the town," the narrator will say, reminding us that the story has its primary existence in his memory and imagination.
Author (s): Albert J. Griffith Publication Details: The Georgia Review 21.1 (Spring 1967): p46-56.
Both the characters and the events in The Ballad of the Sad Café, then, have the remoteness, the mystery, the numinousness of myth.This is not gratuitous, however, for Mrs.McCullers' central insight in this work-that the operations of love are not amenable to nor explainable by reason-is not one to be demonstrated scientifically, but by an appeal to those very sources of irrational knowledge from which love itself springs.To treat of love "wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp, "Mrs.McCullers has elevated her primitive characters and their grotesque actions to the wild, extravagant, and beautiful level of myth.
Cousin Lymon, bedecking himself like alittle king in knee-breeches, stockings, and lime-green shawl, quickly comes to fill an important role in the town, a role unfilled before his advent.For Cousin Lymon, we are told, is "the type of person who has aquality about him that sets him apart from other and more ordinary human beings "-the instinctive ability" to establish immediate and vital contact between himself and all things in the world. "His magical ca maraderie brings" the air of freedom and illicit gladness "that changes Miss Amelia's business-like store into awarm and genial café.Despite the fact that he is agreat" busybody "and" mischief-maker, "who without aword is capable of setting people at each other" in away that was miraculous, "he is" most responsible for the great popularity of the café. "" When he walked into the room, "the narrator says," there was always aquick feeling of tension, because with this busybody about there was never any telling what might descend on you, or what might suddenly be brought to happen in the room.People are never so free with themselves and so recklessly glad as when there is some possibility of commotion or calamity ahead. "And commotion and calamity is, of course, exactly what Cousin Lymon brings with him.
The violent clash which ends the story is no private skirmish entered into in the heat of passion but apublic encounter with all the ceremony of agladiatorial contest or aknightly joust.It is ppared for by several ritualistic confrontations in which the antagonists take their fighting posture swithout actually coming to blows.As if on cue, the whole town automatically gathers for the fray at the mystically chosen hour.Cousin Lymon, the proximate cause of it all, hops onto the counter where he sits like avictor's trophy until he awards himself at the last minute to Marvin Macy by attacking the nearly triumphant Miss Amelia.The rubrics of destruction are fulfilled by the final ritualistic devastation of the Café, the surrogate enemy, the avatar of Miss Amelia herself.
Source Citation: Griffith, Albert J. "Carson McCullers'Myth of the Sad Café." The Georgia Review.21.1 (Spring 1967) :46-56. Rpt.in Short Story Criticism.Ed.Margaret Haerens.Vol.24.Detroit : Gale Research ,1997.46-56. Literature Resources from Gale.Gale.Sichuan International Studies Uni.13 Mar.2009.
. Marvin Macy was the handsomest man in this region-being six feet one inch tall, hard-muscled, and with slow gray eyes and curly hair.He was well off, made good wages, and had agold watch which opened in the back to apicture of awaterfall.From the outward and worldly point of view Marvin Macy was afortunate fellow; he needed to bow and scrape to no one and always got just what he wanted.With hyacinthine locks and golden talisman, Marvin Macy is the composite image of the great Greek gods and heroes: a young Adonis, the beloved of all the pastoral nymphs "with tender sweet little buttocks and charming ways"; a country Orpheus, parading "up and down the road with his guitar" and descending into the underworld of the penitentiary near Atlanta; a thieving Hermes, carrying "forbidden marijuana weed to tempt those who were discouraged and drawn toward death" and holding up the A & P (Apollo's?) Store of Society City; a muscular Heracles, fighting for the girdle, as it were , of the Amazonian queen; a passionate Phoebus, finding his Daphne struck by the frigid tip of the leaden arrow.
Now the names of the men of the group there on that evening were as follows: Hasty Malone, Robert Calvert Hale, Merlie Ryan, Reverend TMWillin, Rosser Cline, Rip Wellborn, Henry Ford Crimp, and Horace Wells.Except for Reverend Willin, they are all alike in many ways as has been said-all having taken pleasure from something or other, all having wept and suffered in some way, most of them tractable unless exasperated.Each of them worked in the mill, and lived with others in atwo-or three-room house for which the rent was ten dollars or twelve dollars amonth.All had been paid that afternoon, for it was Saturday.So for the moment, think of them as awhole.If the people of the town are to be thought of "as awhole," it is even more necessary to think of the "twelve mortal men" of the chain gang as awhole.Their single shared personality is emphasized by their prison uniform, the chains linking their ankles, their common labor, and their har-monious singing.The chain gang functions, then, as akind of second chorus, more removed from the action of the story and commenting only indirectly through their song on the great issue of the story, the problem of love and alienation. The very existence of these "twelve mortal men who are together" is itself the most telling commentary possible.
Carson McCullers'The Ballad of the Sad Caféis as grotesque in characterization and incident as anything in American literature.The simple summarizing of the situation reveals its perverseness: a dark, masculine, cross-eyed giant of awoman develops strange, possessive love for adirty, mischievous, hunchbacked dwarf of aman, who in turn worships ahandsome, guitar-strumming robber and seducer, who in his turn had pviously so desired the giant woman that he had contracted amiserable ten-day unconsummated marriage with her.
Miss Amelia's final attribute is also one which in folklore often attests to asuperhuman status: she is agreat healer. "She possessed great imagination and used hundreds of different cures," we are told. "In the face of the most dangerous and extraordinary treatment she did not hesitate, and no disease was so terrible but what she would undertake to cure it. "The fact that" female complaints "are the one exception to her healing skills foreshadows another fact that the story will bring out, that Miss Amelia is helpless in dealing with her own sexual weakness, her love for the hunchback, Cousin Lymon.
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Yet the quality of the novella most frequently cited by critics is the mysterious beauty which encompasses the whole work.Even the violence of the denouement-a primitive bare-fisted agon between the woman and her onetime bridegroom over the hunchback-fails to mar the poetic serenity of the tale for most readers.The story as awhole is neither amorbid Gothic monstrosity perpetrated for mere shock effect nor aspecimen of the extreme naturalism, a la Erskine Caldwell, sometimes associated with the South.Somehow The Ballad of the Sad Cafésublimates its unpromising ingredients .
The trio of principal characters, for instance, seems to step right out of the world of folk imagination.Each of them has physical characteristics, personality traits, and community functions which set him off, not only from others in the story, but in some ways from all humankind.Miss Amelia, the dominating figure in the story, is perhaps the most impssive of the three.She is first psented as aface looking down on the town from the one unboarded window of the deserted Café: "a face like the terrible dim faces known in dreams-sexless and white, with two gray crossed eyes which are turned inward so sharply that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret gaze of grief. "This phantasmagoric impssion remains even in the later descriptions of Miss Amelia in the days before her withdraw al from the life of the town. "She was," we are told, "a dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like aman.Her hair was cut short and brushed back from the forehead, and there was about her sunburned face atense, haggard quality. "Throughout, she appears with akind of barbaric regal dignity, towering above the lesser mortals of the town, always moving surely and deliberately in a" slow, gangling swagger, "asserting with a "proud and stern" face her authority over all who venture near her pmises.
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The most impssive of all the ominous signs that winter is the unpcedented snowfall that covers the town the day Marvin Macy moves into Miss Amelia's house.The snow makes most people "humble and glad about this marvel" so that they speak in "hushed voices" and say "` thank you'and `please '" more than is necessary.The day of the violent denouement turns out to be Ground Hog Day and the ground hog sees his shadow: a sign bad weather is ahead.Further, a "hawk with abloody breast "flies over the town and circles twice around the property of Miss Amelia.Significantly, the happenings at the sad caféhave reverberations in the whole chain of being.
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Yet Miss Amelia is not totally estranged from the life of the town.She plays, indeed, the beneficent role of abucolic Vesta, psiding over the private and public hearth.She is the "richest woman for miles around" and, even before the founding of her Café, runs acountry store from which the staples of life (feed, guano, meal, and snuff) are dispensed.Furthermore, from her still three miles back in the swamp, she runs out the best liquor in the county-liquor with a "special quality of its own," "clean and sharp on the tongue" and capable of bringing out "that which is known only in the soul of aman" the way fire brings out amessage written in lemon juice.Her whisky is veritably amystic potion:
Source: Short Story Criticism.Ed.Margaret Haerens.Vol.24.Detroit: Gale Research, 1997.p46-56.From Literature Resource Center.
The mythic quality, discoverable in both the characters and the incidents, does not perhaps inhere so much in the subject itself as in the author's attitude toward the subject.It is the implied psence of apersonal narrator in The Ballad of the Sad Caféwhich transforms the story . The bare incidents, stripped of the narrator's poetic psentation, are ugly, ludicrous, even repulsive; no paraphrase could ever begin to convey their significance, much less their beauty.The characters, psented out of context, would be unreal, aberrant, unfathomable ; the setting, bizarre, contrived; the theme, sentimental, foolish.In context, the grotesqueness remains but is turned towards apurpose, becomes part of awhole which is not grotesque, transcends the human and moves into the numinous.
Marvin Macy's whole personality and upbringing sets him apart from the others of the town.As one of seven unwanted children deserted by wild young parents who only "liked to fish and roam around the swamp," Marvin Macy developed early aheart "hard and pitted as the seed of apeach. "He chops off the tails of squirrels in the pinewoods" just to please his fancy, "degrades and shames gentle young girls, and carries with him" the dried and salted ear of aman he had killed in arazor fight. "His demonic degeneracy is stressed in the imagery: the narrator says" his heart turned tough as the horns of Satan "; Miss Amelia vows he will never set his" split hoof "on her pmises; Cousin Lymon is" possessed by an unnatural spirit "on first sight of him; and all the townspeople know that he never sweats even in the summer," surely asign worth pondering over. "Furthermore, his evil is" not measured by the actual sins he had committed, "for, quite apart from his innumerable crimes, "there was about him asecret meanness that clung to him almost like asmell." And to the one marvelous event in the story-the unheard-of snowfall-Marvin Macy lays claim, since he alone of the townsfolk has had the prior experience to cope with it and to use its suspected pternatural significance to his advantage.In short, Marvin Macy is also created of heroic stature, a worthy antagonist to the established tyrant of the town, Miss Amelia.
The third of the principal characters, Cousin Lymon, springs perhaps from deeper sources in the mythopoeic subconsciousness.Although he has certain affinities with the deformed gods (Haephestus, for instance) and monsters (the Sphinx, the Minotaur, the Harpies) of Greek mythology , he is most ways probably closer to the oneiric creations of the Teutonic mentality-Loki, the fickle mischief-maker of Asgard; Rumpelstiltskin, the mysterious little man who appears from nowhere and bargains for favors; and all the trolls, dwarfs, elves, and gnomes who haunt the forests of the north.
Things that have gone unnoticed, thoughts that have been harbored far back in the dark mind, are suddenly recognized and comphended.A spinner who has thought only of the loom, the dinner pail, the bed, and then the loom again-this spinner might drink some on aSunday and come across amarsh lily.And in his palm he might hold this flower, examining the golden dainty cup, and in him suddenly might come asweetness keen as pain.A weaver might look up suddenly and see for the first time the cold, weird radiance of midnight January sky, and adeep fright at his own smallness stop his heart.Such things as these, then, happen when aman has drunk Miss Amelia's liquor.He may suffer, or he may be spent with joy-but the experience has shown the truth; he has warmed his soul and seen the message hidden there.Like atutelary deity, too, Miss Amelia rules over the rituals at the changes of season.It is she, who, when the first frost comes, goes out to "judge the day." Already she has led the town in pparations for the new season: she has made anew and bigger condenser for her still, ground enough sorghum to dizzy her old grist mule, scalded her Mason jars, and put away pear pserves.People "come in from the country to find out what Miss Amelia thought of the weather"; they await her word for the ritual slaughtering of the first hog.When her command is given, the scene is reminiscent of apagan sacrifice: "There was the warm smell of pig blood and smoke in the back yard, the stamp of footsteps, the ring of voices in the winter air. "Only the unpcedented snowfall near the climax of the Ballad catches Miss Amelia unppared; she simply shutters herself up in her house and ignores it so she will not "have to come to some decision" about it.
The events as narrated seem, furthermore, to be fore-ordained, the result of destiny, not free will.Motivation for the peculiar actions of the characters is sometimes suggested, but never clearly specified.Why Marvin Macy loves Amelia, or Amelia, Lymon , or Lymon, Marvin Macy can only be conjectured.The famous disquisition on love-"Now some explanatio nis due for all this behavior.The time has come to speak about love," etc.-is no psychological explanation at all; at best it is aphilosophic hypothesis which only begs the question.
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Contrasted with Miss Amelia is another godlike personage, Marvin Macy, the loom-fixer destined to become first her lover, then her rival:
Strong and domineering as an Amazonian queen, Miss Amelia is in personality as inscrutable as avisitant from Asgard or Olympus.Her expssion has been known to have a "look that appears to be both very wise and very crazy" and her ways and habits are " too peculiar ever to reason about. "Her reticence is such that the people of the town resort to wild conjectures (" I know what Miss Amelia done.She murdered that man for something in that suitcase ") to explain her behavior, for she provides no explanations herse lf, acting always in confident self-righteousness.Her pattern of life is both solitary and independent; she makes her own schedules (often spending "whole nights back in her shed in the swamp, dressed in overalls and gum boots, silently guarding the low fire of the still ") and ignores whenever she pleases the conventions of the community (not warming" her backside modestly, lifting her skirt only an inch or so, as do most women when in public, "but pulling up her red dress "quite high in the back so that apiece of her strong, hairy thigh could be seen by anyone who cared to look at it"). Using everything about her with great success, she is in fact ill at ease only with people.Even here, her chagrin is that of ademiurge over the recalcitrance of creatures: "People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and changed overnight to something more worth-while and profitable.So that the only use that Miss Amelia had for other people was to make money out of them. "Her penchant for lawsuits is reminiscent of the endless litigations the classical divinities entered into with morta ls.
The reason for the paradoxical charm of this grotesque story is not difficult to find.From its first appearance, critics have recognized the lyricism of the McCullers narrative style, which can render even sordid subject matter in poetic terms.They have also noted the aura of legend which surrounds the incidents recounted, embuing them with apeculiar remoteness in both time and space.They have even sensed the allegorical structure which gives significance to otherwise pverse literal details.
Some eight or ten men had convened on the porch of Miss Amelia's store.They were silent and were indeed just waiting about.They themselves did not know what they were waiting for, but it was this: in times of tension, when some great action is impending, men gather and wait in this way.And after atime there will come amoment when all together they will act in unison, not from thought or from the will of any one man, but as though their instincts had merged together so that the decision belongs to no single one of them, but to the group as awhole.At such atime no individual hesitates.And whether the matter will be settled peaceably, or whether the joint action will result in ransacking, violence, and crime, depends on destiny . When the time comes and the "instinct to act" is felt, the group all at once enters the store "as though moved by one will." "At that moment," we are told, "the eight men looked very much alike -all wearing blue overalls, most of them with whitish hair, all pale of face, and all with aset, dreaming look in the eye. "Not only do they look alike and act in unison, they also share acommon font of experience: < br /> Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
The man was astranger, and it is rare that astranger enters the town on foot at that hour [toward midnight]. Besides, the man was ahunchback, He was scarcely more than four feet tall and he wore aragged, dusty coat that reached only to his knees.His crooked little legs seemed too thin to carry the weight of his great warped chest and the hump that sat on his shoulders.He had avery large head, with deep-set blue eyes and asharp little mouth.His face was both soft and sassy-at the moment his pale skin was yellowed by dust and there were lavender shadows beneath his eyes.He carried alopsided old suitcase which was tied with arope.He is mistaken at first for acalf, then for achild; later he is compared to afly, a mosquito, a hawk, a magpie, a child of aswamphaunt.Because Cousin Lymon sniffles and weeps, the loafers on Miss Amelia's porch call him "a regular Morris Finestein," a reference to "a quick, skipping little Jew" who had lived in the town years before and moved away under the force of calamity, a reference that thus links Cousin Lymon indirectly with the saga of the Wandering Jew.Further, no one is ever able to guess his age and he himself professes not to know whether he has been on the earth for ten years or ahundred.
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Omens and natural portents provide clues to what destiny has in store.When Cousin Lymon first comes upon the scene, a dog begins "a wild, hoarse howl." When Miss Amelia is suspected of murdering Cousin Lymon, it is noticed that the lamps in the houses make "mournful, wavering flickers" and that the wind comes not from the swamp but from the cold black pinewoods to the north.At Miss Amelia's wedding the sun shining through the ruby windows of the church puts a "curious glow" on the bridal pair.On the day that Henry Macy gets word his brother is out of the penitentiary on parole, little children are fretful, Cousin Lymon compulsively tells aweird lie about stepping on an alligator in Rotten Lake, Henry Macy himself develops anervous tic, and somewhere in the darkness awoman sings "in ahigh wild voice" a tune that has "no start and no finish" and is "made up of only three notes" repeated endlessly.Marvin Macy brings back with him "bad fortune, right from the first, as could be expected "; the weather turns suddenly and unseasonably hot, the freshly slaughtered pork spoils, and an entire family dies from infected meat at areunion.Sadly, it is" a time of waste and confusion "and Marvin Macy is" the cause of all this. "
Cousin Lymon appears first as the Mysterious Stranger, the visitant from an unknown world:
Surrounding these three principals are the townspeople.None of these are developed as three-dimensional characters and only afew-Henry Macy, Merlie Ryan, Stumpy MacPhail, the Rainey twins-are individuali zed at all.The townspeople function in the story as asingle character ; they are, indeed, a kind of Greek chorus, reacting to and commenting on the action, occasionally forcing an issue and pcipitating acrisis.Thus, when rumors circulate that Miss Amelia may have murdered the hunchback, the chorus reacts:
This is not to say that Mrs.McCullers in The Ballad of the Sad Caféwas writing acontemporary parallel to some well-known myth, as Joyce, Faulkner, Eliot, Welty, Updike, and many other modern authors have done.Mrs.McCullers' story seems to have sprung from her own imagination, but she has invested it with some of the same qualities which distinguished the archetypal literature of past cultures.She has not parodied an old myth but created her own new one out of primitive elements.
What has not been sufficiently noted, however, is that these elements-the quasi-poetic stylistic devices, the fairytale atmosphere, the non-literal meanings-are the marks of the mythic imagination, and their combination in this story suggests the making of amodern myth.The Ballad of the Sad Cafémay be set in atwentieth century Southern town and speak of things like Greyhound buses and brick privies and marijuana cigarettes, but the imagination which informs it is in many important ways close kin to the imagination of those ancient authors who set their stories on Olympus, in Valhalla, and in Camelot and spoke of winged sandals and golden thrones and magic potions.
[In the following essay, Griffith examines the ways in which McCullers imbues The Ballad of the Sad Caféwith mythic elements.]
The mythic aura which surrounds the characters extends to the events as well.In the first place, Mrs.McCullers sets the action in the remembered past, so that we do not see it directly as it happens but retrospectively as it is recalled, re - created, interpted.We are allowed to glimpse first the psent desolation of the town, then to have the cause of the des olation explained as the ballad unfolds.The style is psentational, however, rather than repsentational: we are always aware of the mediating influence of the narrator.The narrator's panoramic vision opens before us in the very first lines of the novella, those hauntingly poetic lines that merge past and psent, intimacy and mystery, fact and mythic imagination in the evocative decription of the dreary town. "These August afternoons-when your shift is finished there is absolutely nothing to do; you might as well walk down to the Forks Fall Road and listen to the chain gang, "we go on to read, unconsciously being affected by the colloquial tone, the second person address, the intruding interptations of apersonalized viewpoint.In Percy Lubbock's terms, this is a "pictorial" work in which we face toward the story-teller and listen to him, instead of a "scenic" work in which we would turn toward the story and watch it. "So let the slow years pass and come to aSaturday evening six years after the time when Cousin Lymon came first to the town," the narrator will say, reminding us that the story has its primary existence in his memory and imagination.
Author (s): Albert J. Griffith Publication Details: The Georgia Review 21.1 (Spring 1967): p46-56.
Both the characters and the events in The Ballad of the Sad Café, then, have the remoteness, the mystery, the numinousness of myth.This is not gratuitous, however, for Mrs.McCullers' central insight in this work-that the operations of love are not amenable to nor explainable by reason-is not one to be demonstrated scientifically, but by an appeal to those very sources of irrational knowledge from which love itself springs.To treat of love "wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp, "Mrs.McCullers has elevated her primitive characters and their grotesque actions to the wild, extravagant, and beautiful level of myth.
Cousin Lymon, bedecking himself like alittle king in knee-breeches, stockings, and lime-green shawl, quickly comes to fill an important role in the town, a role unfilled before his advent.For Cousin Lymon, we are told, is "the type of person who has aquality about him that sets him apart from other and more ordinary human beings "-the instinctive ability" to establish immediate and vital contact between himself and all things in the world. "His magical ca maraderie brings" the air of freedom and illicit gladness "that changes Miss Amelia's business-like store into awarm and genial café.Despite the fact that he is agreat" busybody "and" mischief-maker, "who without aword is capable of setting people at each other" in away that was miraculous, "he is" most responsible for the great popularity of the café. "" When he walked into the room, "the narrator says," there was always aquick feeling of tension, because with this busybody about there was never any telling what might descend on you, or what might suddenly be brought to happen in the room.People are never so free with themselves and so recklessly glad as when there is some possibility of commotion or calamity ahead. "And commotion and calamity is, of course, exactly what Cousin Lymon brings with him.
The violent clash which ends the story is no private skirmish entered into in the heat of passion but apublic encounter with all the ceremony of agladiatorial contest or aknightly joust.It is ppared for by several ritualistic confrontations in which the antagonists take their fighting posture swithout actually coming to blows.As if on cue, the whole town automatically gathers for the fray at the mystically chosen hour.Cousin Lymon, the proximate cause of it all, hops onto the counter where he sits like avictor's trophy until he awards himself at the last minute to Marvin Macy by attacking the nearly triumphant Miss Amelia.The rubrics of destruction are fulfilled by the final ritualistic devastation of the Café, the surrogate enemy, the avatar of Miss Amelia herself.
Source Citation: Griffith, Albert J. "Carson McCullers'Myth of the Sad Café." The Georgia Review.21.1 (Spring 1967) :46-56. Rpt.in Short Story Criticism.Ed.Margaret Haerens.Vol.24.Detroit : Gale Research ,1997.46-56. Literature Resources from Gale.Gale.Sichuan International Studies Uni.13 Mar.2009.
. Marvin Macy was the handsomest man in this region-being six feet one inch tall, hard-muscled, and with slow gray eyes and curly hair.He was well off, made good wages, and had agold watch which opened in the back to apicture of awaterfall.From the outward and worldly point of view Marvin Macy was afortunate fellow; he needed to bow and scrape to no one and always got just what he wanted.With hyacinthine locks and golden talisman, Marvin Macy is the composite image of the great Greek gods and heroes: a young Adonis, the beloved of all the pastoral nymphs "with tender sweet little buttocks and charming ways"; a country Orpheus, parading "up and down the road with his guitar" and descending into the underworld of the penitentiary near Atlanta; a thieving Hermes, carrying "forbidden marijuana weed to tempt those who were discouraged and drawn toward death" and holding up the A & P (Apollo's?) Store of Society City; a muscular Heracles, fighting for the girdle, as it were , of the Amazonian queen; a passionate Phoebus, finding his Daphne struck by the frigid tip of the leaden arrow.
Now the names of the men of the group there on that evening were as follows: Hasty Malone, Robert Calvert Hale, Merlie Ryan, Reverend TMWillin, Rosser Cline, Rip Wellborn, Henry Ford Crimp, and Horace Wells.Except for Reverend Willin, they are all alike in many ways as has been said-all having taken pleasure from something or other, all having wept and suffered in some way, most of them tractable unless exasperated.Each of them worked in the mill, and lived with others in atwo-or three-room house for which the rent was ten dollars or twelve dollars amonth.All had been paid that afternoon, for it was Saturday.So for the moment, think of them as awhole.If the people of the town are to be thought of "as awhole," it is even more necessary to think of the "twelve mortal men" of the chain gang as awhole.Their single shared personality is emphasized by their prison uniform, the chains linking their ankles, their common labor, and their har-monious singing.The chain gang functions, then, as akind of second chorus, more removed from the action of the story and commenting only indirectly through their song on the great issue of the story, the problem of love and alienation. The very existence of these "twelve mortal men who are together" is itself the most telling commentary possible.
Carson McCullers'The Ballad of the Sad Caféis as grotesque in characterization and incident as anything in American literature.The simple summarizing of the situation reveals its perverseness: a dark, masculine, cross-eyed giant of awoman develops strange, possessive love for adirty, mischievous, hunchbacked dwarf of aman, who in turn worships ahandsome, guitar-strumming robber and seducer, who in his turn had pviously so desired the giant woman that he had contracted amiserable ten-day unconsummated marriage with her.
Miss Amelia's final attribute is also one which in folklore often attests to asuperhuman status: she is agreat healer. "She possessed great imagination and used hundreds of different cures," we are told. "In the face of the most dangerous and extraordinary treatment she did not hesitate, and no disease was so terrible but what she would undertake to cure it. "The fact that" female complaints "are the one exception to her healing skills foreshadows another fact that the story will bring out, that Miss Amelia is helpless in dealing with her own sexual weakness, her love for the hunchback, Cousin Lymon.
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Yet the quality of the novella most frequently cited by critics is the mysterious beauty which encompasses the whole work.Even the violence of the denouement-a primitive bare-fisted agon between the woman and her onetime bridegroom over the hunchback-fails to mar the poetic serenity of the tale for most readers.The story as awhole is neither amorbid Gothic monstrosity perpetrated for mere shock effect nor aspecimen of the extreme naturalism, a la Erskine Caldwell, sometimes associated with the South.Somehow The Ballad of the Sad Cafésublimates its unpromising ingredients .
The trio of principal characters, for instance, seems to step right out of the world of folk imagination.Each of them has physical characteristics, personality traits, and community functions which set him off, not only from others in the story, but in some ways from all humankind.Miss Amelia, the dominating figure in the story, is perhaps the most impssive of the three.She is first psented as aface looking down on the town from the one unboarded window of the deserted Café: "a face like the terrible dim faces known in dreams-sexless and white, with two gray crossed eyes which are turned inward so sharply that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret gaze of grief. "This phantasmagoric impssion remains even in the later descriptions of Miss Amelia in the days before her withdraw al from the life of the town. "She was," we are told, "a dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like aman.Her hair was cut short and brushed back from the forehead, and there was about her sunburned face atense, haggard quality. "Throughout, she appears with akind of barbaric regal dignity, towering above the lesser mortals of the town, always moving surely and deliberately in a" slow, gangling swagger, "asserting with a "proud and stern" face her authority over all who venture near her pmises.
Tabs Literature Criticism (145)
The most impssive of all the ominous signs that winter is the unpcedented snowfall that covers the town the day Marvin Macy moves into Miss Amelia's house.The snow makes most people "humble and glad about this marvel" so that they speak in "hushed voices" and say "` thank you'and `please '" more than is necessary.The day of the violent denouement turns out to be Ground Hog Day and the ground hog sees his shadow: a sign bad weather is ahead.Further, a "hawk with abloody breast "flies over the town and circles twice around the property of Miss Amelia.Significantly, the happenings at the sad caféhave reverberations in the whole chain of being.
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Yet Miss Amelia is not totally estranged from the life of the town.She plays, indeed, the beneficent role of abucolic Vesta, psiding over the private and public hearth.She is the "richest woman for miles around" and, even before the founding of her Café, runs acountry store from which the staples of life (feed, guano, meal, and snuff) are dispensed.Furthermore, from her still three miles back in the swamp, she runs out the best liquor in the county-liquor with a "special quality of its own," "clean and sharp on the tongue" and capable of bringing out "that which is known only in the soul of aman" the way fire brings out amessage written in lemon juice.Her whisky is veritably amystic potion:
Source: Short Story Criticism.Ed.Margaret Haerens.Vol.24.Detroit: Gale Research, 1997.p46-56.From Literature Resource Center.
The mythic quality, discoverable in both the characters and the incidents, does not perhaps inhere so much in the subject itself as in the author's attitude toward the subject.It is the implied psence of apersonal narrator in The Ballad of the Sad Caféwhich transforms the story . The bare incidents, stripped of the narrator's poetic psentation, are ugly, ludicrous, even repulsive; no paraphrase could ever begin to convey their significance, much less their beauty.The characters, psented out of context, would be unreal, aberrant, unfathomable ; the setting, bizarre, contrived; the theme, sentimental, foolish.In context, the grotesqueness remains but is turned towards apurpose, becomes part of awhole which is not grotesque, transcends the human and moves into the numinous.
Marvin Macy's whole personality and upbringing sets him apart from the others of the town.As one of seven unwanted children deserted by wild young parents who only "liked to fish and roam around the swamp," Marvin Macy developed early aheart "hard and pitted as the seed of apeach. "He chops off the tails of squirrels in the pinewoods" just to please his fancy, "degrades and shames gentle young girls, and carries with him" the dried and salted ear of aman he had killed in arazor fight. "His demonic degeneracy is stressed in the imagery: the narrator says" his heart turned tough as the horns of Satan "; Miss Amelia vows he will never set his" split hoof "on her pmises; Cousin Lymon is" possessed by an unnatural spirit "on first sight of him; and all the townspeople know that he never sweats even in the summer," surely asign worth pondering over. "Furthermore, his evil is" not measured by the actual sins he had committed, "for, quite apart from his innumerable crimes, "there was about him asecret meanness that clung to him almost like asmell." And to the one marvelous event in the story-the unheard-of snowfall-Marvin Macy lays claim, since he alone of the townsfolk has had the prior experience to cope with it and to use its suspected pternatural significance to his advantage.In short, Marvin Macy is also created of heroic stature, a worthy antagonist to the established tyrant of the town, Miss Amelia.
The third of the principal characters, Cousin Lymon, springs perhaps from deeper sources in the mythopoeic subconsciousness.Although he has certain affinities with the deformed gods (Haephestus, for instance) and monsters (the Sphinx, the Minotaur, the Harpies) of Greek mythology , he is most ways probably closer to the oneiric creations of the Teutonic mentality-Loki, the fickle mischief-maker of Asgard; Rumpelstiltskin, the mysterious little man who appears from nowhere and bargains for favors; and all the trolls, dwarfs, elves, and gnomes who haunt the forests of the north.
Things that have gone unnoticed, thoughts that have been harbored far back in the dark mind, are suddenly recognized and comphended.A spinner who has thought only of the loom, the dinner pail, the bed, and then the loom again-this spinner might drink some on aSunday and come across amarsh lily.And in his palm he might hold this flower, examining the golden dainty cup, and in him suddenly might come asweetness keen as pain.A weaver might look up suddenly and see for the first time the cold, weird radiance of midnight January sky, and adeep fright at his own smallness stop his heart.Such things as these, then, happen when aman has drunk Miss Amelia's liquor.He may suffer, or he may be spent with joy-but the experience has shown the truth; he has warmed his soul and seen the message hidden there.Like atutelary deity, too, Miss Amelia rules over the rituals at the changes of season.It is she, who, when the first frost comes, goes out to "judge the day." Already she has led the town in pparations for the new season: she has made anew and bigger condenser for her still, ground enough sorghum to dizzy her old grist mule, scalded her Mason jars, and put away pear pserves.People "come in from the country to find out what Miss Amelia thought of the weather"; they await her word for the ritual slaughtering of the first hog.When her command is given, the scene is reminiscent of apagan sacrifice: "There was the warm smell of pig blood and smoke in the back yard, the stamp of footsteps, the ring of voices in the winter air. "Only the unpcedented snowfall near the climax of the Ballad catches Miss Amelia unppared; she simply shutters herself up in her house and ignores it so she will not "have to come to some decision" about it.
The events as narrated seem, furthermore, to be fore-ordained, the result of destiny, not free will.Motivation for the peculiar actions of the characters is sometimes suggested, but never clearly specified.Why Marvin Macy loves Amelia, or Amelia, Lymon , or Lymon, Marvin Macy can only be conjectured.The famous disquisition on love-"Now some explanatio nis due for all this behavior.The time has come to speak about love," etc.-is no psychological explanation at all; at best it is aphilosophic hypothesis which only begs the question.
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Contrasted with Miss Amelia is another godlike personage, Marvin Macy, the loom-fixer destined to become first her lover, then her rival:
Strong and domineering as an Amazonian queen, Miss Amelia is in personality as inscrutable as avisitant from Asgard or Olympus.Her expssion has been known to have a "look that appears to be both very wise and very crazy" and her ways and habits are " too peculiar ever to reason about. "Her reticence is such that the people of the town resort to wild conjectures (" I know what Miss Amelia done.She murdered that man for something in that suitcase ") to explain her behavior, for she provides no explanations herse lf, acting always in confident self-righteousness.Her pattern of life is both solitary and independent; she makes her own schedules (often spending "whole nights back in her shed in the swamp, dressed in overalls and gum boots, silently guarding the low fire of the still ") and ignores whenever she pleases the conventions of the community (not warming" her backside modestly, lifting her skirt only an inch or so, as do most women when in public, "but pulling up her red dress "quite high in the back so that apiece of her strong, hairy thigh could be seen by anyone who cared to look at it"). Using everything about her with great success, she is in fact ill at ease only with people.Even here, her chagrin is that of ademiurge over the recalcitrance of creatures: "People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and changed overnight to something more worth-while and profitable.So that the only use that Miss Amelia had for other people was to make money out of them. "Her penchant for lawsuits is reminiscent of the endless litigations the classical divinities entered into with morta ls.
The reason for the paradoxical charm of this grotesque story is not difficult to find.From its first appearance, critics have recognized the lyricism of the McCullers narrative style, which can render even sordid subject matter in poetic terms.They have also noted the aura of legend which surrounds the incidents recounted, embuing them with apeculiar remoteness in both time and space.They have even sensed the allegorical structure which gives significance to otherwise pverse literal details.
Some eight or ten men had convened on the porch of Miss Amelia's store.They were silent and were indeed just waiting about.They themselves did not know what they were waiting for, but it was this: in times of tension, when some great action is impending, men gather and wait in this way.And after atime there will come amoment when all together they will act in unison, not from thought or from the will of any one man, but as though their instincts had merged together so that the decision belongs to no single one of them, but to the group as awhole.At such atime no individual hesitates.And whether the matter will be settled peaceably, or whether the joint action will result in ransacking, violence, and crime, depends on destiny . When the time comes and the "instinct to act" is felt, the group all at once enters the store "as though moved by one will." "At that moment," we are told, "the eight men looked very much alike -all wearing blue overalls, most of them with whitish hair, all pale of face, and all with aset, dreaming look in the eye. "Not only do they look alike and act in unison, they also share acommon font of experience: < br /> Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
The man was astranger, and it is rare that astranger enters the town on foot at that hour [toward midnight]. Besides, the man was ahunchback, He was scarcely more than four feet tall and he wore aragged, dusty coat that reached only to his knees.His crooked little legs seemed too thin to carry the weight of his great warped chest and the hump that sat on his shoulders.He had avery large head, with deep-set blue eyes and asharp little mouth.His face was both soft and sassy-at the moment his pale skin was yellowed by dust and there were lavender shadows beneath his eyes.He carried alopsided old suitcase which was tied with arope.He is mistaken at first for acalf, then for achild; later he is compared to afly, a mosquito, a hawk, a magpie, a child of aswamphaunt.Because Cousin Lymon sniffles and weeps, the loafers on Miss Amelia's porch call him "a regular Morris Finestein," a reference to "a quick, skipping little Jew" who had lived in the town years before and moved away under the force of calamity, a reference that thus links Cousin Lymon indirectly with the saga of the Wandering Jew.Further, no one is ever able to guess his age and he himself professes not to know whether he has been on the earth for ten years or ahundred.
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Omens and natural portents provide clues to what destiny has in store.When Cousin Lymon first comes upon the scene, a dog begins "a wild, hoarse howl." When Miss Amelia is suspected of murdering Cousin Lymon, it is noticed that the lamps in the houses make "mournful, wavering flickers" and that the wind comes not from the swamp but from the cold black pinewoods to the north.At Miss Amelia's wedding the sun shining through the ruby windows of the church puts a "curious glow" on the bridal pair.On the day that Henry Macy gets word his brother is out of the penitentiary on parole, little children are fretful, Cousin Lymon compulsively tells aweird lie about stepping on an alligator in Rotten Lake, Henry Macy himself develops anervous tic, and somewhere in the darkness awoman sings "in ahigh wild voice" a tune that has "no start and no finish" and is "made up of only three notes" repeated endlessly.Marvin Macy brings back with him "bad fortune, right from the first, as could be expected "; the weather turns suddenly and unseasonably hot, the freshly slaughtered pork spoils, and an entire family dies from infected meat at areunion.Sadly, it is" a time of waste and confusion "and Marvin Macy is" the cause of all this. "
Cousin Lymon appears first as the Mysterious Stranger, the visitant from an unknown world:
Surrounding these three principals are the townspeople.None of these are developed as three-dimensional characters and only afew-Henry Macy, Merlie Ryan, Stumpy MacPhail, the Rainey twins-are individuali zed at all.The townspeople function in the story as asingle character ; they are, indeed, a kind of Greek chorus, reacting to and commenting on the action, occasionally forcing an issue and pcipitating acrisis.Thus, when rumors circulate that Miss Amelia may have murdered the hunchback, the chorus reacts:
This is not to say that Mrs.McCullers in The Ballad of the Sad Caféwas writing acontemporary parallel to some well-known myth, as Joyce, Faulkner, Eliot, Welty, Updike, and many other modern authors have done.Mrs.McCullers' story seems to have sprung from her own imagination, but she has invested it with some of the same qualities which distinguished the archetypal literature of past cultures.She has not parodied an old myth but created her own new one out of primitive elements.
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