Membership, décalage, and the trouble with terms

After our discussion on Monday, I was curious to see whether it would make sense to transfer Edwards’ concept of décalage to my primary work, and if so, what good it would do. When I first lit upon this idea I was concerned about “forcing it,” but it seems to me that since in introducing décalage Edwards is explicitly trying to provide a solution to problems of inclusion and difference in an understanding of diaspora in order to render the term usable for his purposes, I might see whether his solution works to understand the problems of inclusion and difference in the work I’m concerned with; more precisely, the problem of membership in The Member of the Wedding.

            In my last post I was wondering whether it was possible for Frankie to be a disavowing member of the “kitchen-world,” and I think that speaks to a general ambivalence in this novel about the value and purpose of membership. On one hand, Frankie’s “unjoined” status is clearly the novel’s central problem. It makes her unhappy: when John Henry points out that a “club” of neighborhood girls a little older than Frankie are meeting without her, she screams at him and wants to “shoot every one of them with a pistol” (10). It also puts her in danger: her encounter with a soldier who attempts to rape her is made possible by Frankie’s solitary status and lack of attachment to a family or community who might have wondered where she was. Most importantly, Frankie’s actions are always driven by a desire to belong, to become a member of the wedding (since Frankie actually wants to be a third party in the relationship between her brother and his wife rather than a bridesmaid, this might be better termed a member of the marriage), a member of a club, a family, or even a relationship between individuals, and her persistent isolation is what she is constantly trying to escape.

            But Frankie’s wish to belong to her brother’s marriage is aggressively rebuffed on the wedding day. In the end, “The wedding was like a dream outside her power, or like a show unmanaged by her in which she was supposed to have no part” (129), and Frankie has to be pried from the steering wheel as the bride and groom drive away. The kitchen-world that Frankie previously occupied is impossible to revisit, and other possibilities for membership, like popularity at school or a bridge club, are out of reach or undesirable for Frankie. It becomes necessary to implement the concept of décalage because Frankie cannot succeed in gaining membership as she had imagined it. This shifts the problem of membership from a quest to achieve it to a question of whether it is necessary and what it can do.

For Edwards, décalage refers to the irreconcilable differences that exist within unity, and the unity that is created through difference. Décalage suggests the articulation or “joint” which is “both the point of separation…and linkage” (Edwards 66). By the end of Member McCullers is offering a solution for Frankie that is close to Edwards’ use of décalage. The “we of me” (36) that Frankie had imagined sharing with her brother and the bride, a membership that would eradicate isolation, is impossible. Instead, after the wedding and John Henry’s death Frankie develops a close friendship with Mary Littlejohn. Irreconcilable differences between Mary and Frankie are articulated by their age gap and Mary’s Catholicism, “But for Frances this difference was a final touch of strangeness, silent terror, that completed the wonder of her love” (140). This new kind of relationship for Frankie, the only one that succeeds, is completed and maintained through difference.

            Décalage as a general concept fits nicely here, but as I see it the potential problem with using it in the context of Member is similar to the problem with diaspora that Edwards lays out in his article. Does it dilute the political and scholarly force of Edwards’ term, which he introduces to solve the specific problem of academic understandings of diaspora, to use it as I’ve used it here? For McCullers the question of “membership” is broad. Belonging is a problem of youth and coming-of-age, for Frankie, but also a problem of race and region and gender and being a human; the novel creates a fundamental disconnect in every interaction between its characters, so that using décalage in this context threatens to erase the significance of its use for diaspora by overwhelming it. There is also the obvious problem that Frankie is white and clearly not of the black diaspora that Edwards refers to, while the novel contains African American characters who would be much more immediately involved in the history of the term that Edwards narrates. If the novel’s central characters are presented as scattered and disempowered (which I would argue that Frankie, Berenice, and John Henry certainly are), and more in line with the history of diaspora and the impulses that made décalage necessary, would that make the analysis more significant/effective? It seems very possible that these problems make the use of the term in my analysis more harmful than helpful.