The introduction to my (very cheesy) 1965 Time Life Books
edition of The Member of the Wedding
says that McCullers compared the structure of this novel to a musical fugue. I
haven’t managed to discover where this piece of information comes from, and a
little googling suggested that McCullers might have actually said this about The
Heart is a Lonely Hunter, but nevertheless
I think the characterization is apt. I don’t know whether anyone in this class
is a classical music buff, but I am not, so I thought I’d offer up this Wikipedia entry and this Youtube video to help us understand what a fugue is
before I dive in too far.
The
novel is structured in three parts, and each part
plays upon a theme with variations. This theme certainly includes Frankie's desire to take part in the wedding, which is introduced in part one, built up and dwelled upon in
part two, and ends in disaster in part three. But casting the event of the wedding as the novel's driving force tends (as in my cheesy Time Life introduction) to encourage simplistic interpretations having to do with coming-of-age and Frankie's desire to grow up and find love. I find it more compelling to consider the shifts and transformations of Frankie herself as the theme we follow through this literary fugue, since the novel is so concerned with her process
of becoming, and since the variations of her conception of herself are made so
clear. One of the most striking examples of Frankie’s variability is her changing name. In part one she is
Frankie, in part two she becomes F. Jasmine, and in part three, on the bus home
from the wedding, we learn her final name: “Frances wanted to whole world to
die” (126). It becomes even more enticing to cast Frankie in this role if we
consider that, in musical terminology, the theme in a fugue is referred to as
the “subject.”
I
want to first of all suggest that we can connect the structure of a fugue to
Derrida’s conception of structurality. The fugue allows us to think “the
structurality of structure” (Derrida 278) by simultaneously emphasizing and
deemphasizing its center—that is, its theme. We are introduced to a melody in
the beginning, and we want to be able to follow it, but as the fugue
reintroduces the same melody in another pitch the initial melody begins to
dissolve. The melody is continually and simultaneously creating and destroying
itself throughout the piece, and since that melody, or theme, or subject, is both the thing that makes up the different parts
of the fugue and the entirety of the fugue itself, its status as a center is
constantly called into question.
When
we understand the structure of Member as
a fugue, and when we place Frankie/F. Jasmine/Frances in the role of the
fugue’s subject, a Derridean understanding of fugue can lead us to a Derridean
understanding of the novelistic subject in Member. Frankie’s renaming is part of a continuous effort
to inscribe herself on her surroundings, but Berenice and John Henry never
remember to call her by her new names. She imagines herself dead or mutilated:
“It is a terrible thing to be dead!” (66), “I feel just exactly like someone
has peeled all the skin off me” (32). She creates personas for herself:
“Captain Jarvis Addams sinks twelve Jap battleships and decorated by the
President. Miss F. Jasmine Addams breaks all records. Mrs. Janice Addams
elected Miss United Nations in beauty contest. One thing after another
happening so fast we don’t hardly notice them” (103). Frankie, like the fugue’s
melody, creates, destroys, and recreates herself, not only in her renaming at
the start of each formal section of the novel, but constantly and continually.
Frankie’s desire to understand
herself as a fully realized subject is expressed as a desire to belong to the
wedding of her brother and the bride, but we always know that this realization
will, in the end, show itself to be impossible. The pain and longing that
Frankie experiences as she tries to belong to the wedding and to make herself
understood in varying ways can be expressed as a Derridean “nostalgia for
origins,” and in this way what we see played out in Member is an expression of the “[dream] of deciphering a
truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which
lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile” (Derrida 292).
More googling suggests that the fugue is well-trodden territory in philosophy, to which I can only say, duh. But I'd like to insist anyway that I had no idea that that was the case when I was writing this, so I welcome enlightening comments.
ReplyDeleteHi Lindsay!
ReplyDeleteLet me begin by saying, Yay, multi-media postings! There is nothing like listening to a nice fugue first thing in the morning. I found your connection to both the fugue structure and Derrida's center very natural and convincing.
When I was watching the fugue video that you posted I noticed that two other "voices" (purple and red lines) join the main musical theme at intervals and I wondered if this could account for the dissonant voices of Berenice and John Henry that you describe. I thought the description of fugue as "imitative counterpoint" might come into play here in a way that could strengthen your argument even more.
I also thought that Frankie's declaration of her death, as both a subjective affirmation and destruction, might be able to be more explicitly linked back to the Derridian break-down of structure in an interesting way.
I like your post. The fugue seems like a great analog for Frankie's shifts of identity. If the fugue form as such represents Derrida's idea of the structurality of structure, I wonder if the idea of "origin" gets confounded through counterpoint. To think the sturcturality of structure, as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud attempted to do, seems to mean something like juxtaposing opposing melodies and playing them simultaneously. Nietzsche's perspectivism suggests that all actions can be equally evaluated from multiple perspectives. In regards to your primary work, it would be interesting to know if Frankie goes through at least minor shifts of identity throughout the entire novel.
ReplyDelete