Seeking Togetherness: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers

I’ve been trying to work out what Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café is about. I spent a while pondering over who the hero and villain were, because every character comes across as mean in their own way. But I guess that’s what makes the story realistic: humans are fallible.

I’ve come to the conclusion it’s about love and togetherness. The characters who suffer the most are those who have felt loneliness to the point of grief: Miss Amelia, Marvin Macy, and Cousin Lymon. All three characters are rejected by the person they love.

I think McCullers is trying to tell us that loneliness is the worst form of living. In the final pages, the juxtaposition of Miss Amelia – dejected and isolated – with the choral singing of the chain gang, seems to say this.

‘And those [Miss Amelia’s] grey eyes – slowly day by day they were more crossed, and it was as though they sought each other out to exchange a little glance of grief and lonely recognition.’

‘The music will swell until at last it seems that the sound does not come from the twelve men on the gang, but from the earth itself, or the wide sky. [..] And what kind of gang is this that can make such music? Just twelve mortal men, seven of them black and five of them white boys from the county. Just twelve mortal men who are together.’ (My bold.)

Is loneliness a worse form of punishment than being imprisoned, and being made to work in the chain gang? Perhaps loneliness is a type of prison itself. The chain gang sing in unison, and Miss Amelia is in her boarded-up café, alone.

I’m a big fan of McCullers, and her work seems to consistently highlight the condition of loneliness. (You can read my other post about her work, here.) Perhaps The Ballad of the Sad Café is a reminder to us to reach out to people who are alone, and who need support and love, regardless of their fallibility.

Time and Meaning: Artful by Ali Smith

I’m reading Artful at the moment and it is fantastic. I say reading because I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m hoping to later this evening (in keeping with my target of finishing a book every other day). I have about 80 pages left. It’s not that I haven’t had time, it’s that I’ve decided to take more time to read it, so I can understand the content fully.

Artful is a book of essays (née lectures, given by Smith at St Anne’s College, Oxford), and sometimes I have to re-read bits to let them sink in. The essays are embedded within a fictional story and various poems, and the whole thing is beautiful.

The irony here is that my favourite essay in the collection is called ‘On Time’. I am absolutely fascinated with the concept of time in narrative, which is why someone bought Artful for me. I called them yesterday with explosive enthusiasm: ‘Why didn’t I read this before?!’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘It’s about time! Time!’ ‘I know. That’s why I chose it.’

This person also lives in a different time zone usually, and our lives are rarely in sync. But due to the virus they are here in the UK, and now that we are sharing the same sun, things feel different. Better, actually.

Weirdly, too, an opportunity came up yesterday to possibly teach a degree-style, 6-week programme on Time in Literature. This was met with equal (maybe more) enthusiasm. So – since when has my life had a theme? (To be fair, every human’s running motif is time.) Smith writes:

‘Is it that time translates our lives into sequence, into meaning? Does sequence mean that things mean?’

My housemate said to me ‘don’t you think this feels like one long day?’, and it does. Life in self-isolation feels like one never-ending day with a few naps. It feels, because we have positioned ourselves in one, seemingly unmoving space, that time does not move either. It feels like I am stuck in a short story that someone wanted to make into a novel, but instead of writing more, they just copied and pasted the same story over and over again onto the page.

It sounds tiresome, but in fact, reading the same story on repeat can be amazing:

‘We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once. Books and music share more in terms of resonance than just a present-tense correlation of heard note to read word. Books need time to dawn on us, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought […] You can’t step into the same story twice – or maybe it’s that stories, books, art, can’t step into the same person twice, maybe it’s that they allow for our mutability…’

At the moment it feels as though the whole of the UK is at a loss. People have lost routine and sequence – so does that mean our lives have lost their meaning? No, I don’t think so. We just have to repurpose our purpose.

Even though the days don’t feel like they are changing, we are. And if we are, we can make it so the days reflect our change; so that there is no longer a feeling that we are living through one, eternal day or story, but many days and many stories. Let’s reclaim our time. Let’s make our own sequences and meaning. Let’s read our story more than once.

I’m about to go into a very long Easter holiday, which is a lovely break, but it is also anti-climatical, as our current situation is not exactly what I think about when I hear the word ‘holiday’. I won’t be able to see any family, or the person who gave me this book. But I will be able to relax by doing things I love, and I will carry on with my projects and start new ones. Each project means I am gaining something: knowledge, strength. It changes me, so it changes my days.