"It could drive you wild": Media dissonance and The Member of the Wedding

Robin Bernstein, in her essay on dolls and children’s literature, highlights the necessity of considering the two together in order to “look anew at nineteenth century white children and see not racist culture’s reflectors but its coproducers” (167). In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson considers the entangled roles of the census, the map, and the museum in creating and recreating colonial and postcolonial structures of power and oppression. Vilem Flusser argues that when we “read” films, the “line thought” that we depend upon to read written text and the “surface thought” that we depend on to read images become intertwined. And when Wendy Hui Kyong Chun takes up the question of reading software, the source code and the screen, the user and the programmer, become so tied up that it is finally necessary to argue that “software can only be understood in media res” (323). If a medium can be understood as an object through which messages are constructed and conveyed, then each of these projects depends on the inextricability of different forms of media. When we analyze a book or a painting or a film to get it to tell us something about the culture in which it was made, though we may think we analyze it on its own, that culture, indeed the very fact of the thing we call “culture,” dictates that a medium never stands alone.

            Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding is a 20^th century cultural object, and as such its production and consumption takes part in what we might consider the hyper-inextricability of media characteristic of its time. The novel was first published in 1946, McCullers adapted it into a play that opened on Broadway in 1950, and in 1952 the play, rather than the original novel, was readapted into a film, with many of the Broadway production’s actors reprising their roles. Sylvia Plath, a McCullers fan, used a phrase from the novel to begin one of her poems. McCullers was a musician, and I have already discussed how her musical knowledge informed the novel’s structure. Clearly no more examples are needed to show that what Bernstein, Anderson, Flusser, and Chun all allude to (or discuss directly) is at work in this instance. But I want to argue that though it is crucial to understand the ways in which media are yoked to each other, both the content of Member and its iteration as an object I hold in my hand show us the necessity of considering dissonance. Dissonance between media is also always at work, and even when different forms of media exist within what we perceive as the same cultural object, their refusal to work in consonance is characteristic of the same age that would seem to move toward erasing media distinctions altogether.

            My edition of Member, from 1965, has some curious cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon (the image itself alludes to other media: its original was done in crewelwork embroidery). There are aspects of this cover that, to my mind, don’t quite connect it with the novel it claims to represent (either that, or the novel has trouble living up to its cover art). If this cover represents a work that understands historically specific racial distinctions as a significant aspect of its central question of what membership can mean, why are Frankie and John Henry green and blue? If the cover represents a story that is, in part, about the historically specific experiences and consequences of World War II, why does the whole thing look so psychedelic ‘60s? The book’s other extratextual content (if it can be considered extratextual) creates more dissonance. The preface by “The Editors of TIME,” for example, is written in rather clunking prose and contains a sentimentalizing narrative of McCullers’ life, both of which joltingly contrast McCullers’ careful syntax and complex depictions of subjectivity.

            All of this is not to say that I think covers of books can or should be somehow “accurate” in representing their content, or that if a book were to have a preface that tried to match the subsequent prose it would be somehow “better,” or even that the cover and the preface are somehow separate from what the book is “really about,” but to emphasize how often we experience the different media that make up a cultural object as discordant. Though these media are presented to us as attached to one another, and that they are, as Bernstein et al. show, inextricable, they can’t completely harmonize. I want to point to the dissonance that exists within the atmosphere of hyper-inextricability I mentioned earlier.

If I can be allowed, for a moment, to rip the content of the novel artificially from the media surrounding it, I’d like to mention in closing that part of Member’s work is to remind us to consider dissonance, perhaps not specifically in the way that media interact but certainly in relationships more generally. To choose one example among many, as Frankie sits in the kitchen and listens to a nearby piano-tuner “harp and insist” on one note, she considers a piano’s keys: “If you start with A and go on up to G, there is a curious thing that seems to make the difference between G and A all the difference in the world. Twice as much difference as between any other two notes in the scale. Yet they are side by side there on the piano just as close together as the other notes. Do ray me fa sol la tee. Tee. Tee. Tee. It could drive you wild” (95).