Intonations of melancholy in Carson McCuller’s
The Ballad of the Sad Café
Once upon a time ...
there was a dreary Southern town, imbued with the desertic, thirsty yellow of fading autumnal colours… nothing to do here but listen to the chain gang in the distance. A face, a hand, a shadow lurks behind the window panes of the once lively, but now gone Café. Nothing remains but a half-painted wall, Cousin Lymon gone, and a dismembered heart, Amelia’s.
The whispers of the chatting and prattling community have subsided, and only the narrator’s voice is left to recount in a flashback the events of such a miserable outcome. Tricky narrator, heterodiegetic, omniscient, and unreliable, crooked to the side as the buildings, characters, and hearts (Mónica pointed to the crooked metaphor). A love triangle —Mrs Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Mrs Amelia’s former husband, released from the penitentiary—comprises the parade of poetic grotesqueries to come.
Miss Amelia’s marriage to robber and seducer Marvin Macey only lasted 10 days due to some “perchance unholiness” (Sonsoles higlighted this) on their wedding night. A green-cape-clad hunchback ensues. Amelia, who had love galore in her heart, despite her ruddy nature, softens at the sight of Cousin Lymon’s deformity.
Amelia’s infatuation with cousin Lymon is somehow endowed with the same magic quality that her whisky oozes (Sonia pinpointed this), and explained as “Then Miss Amelia did a rare thing; she pulled a bottle from her hip pocket and ...handed it to the hunchback to drink” (page 14).
The whisky in Miss Amelia’s store has the power of uprooting hidden truths; it is elixir-like and transforms the coarsest spirits.
Perhaps without it there would never have been a café. For the liquor of Miss Amelia has a special quality of its own. It is clean and sharp on the tongue, but once down a man, it glows inside him for a long time afterward. And that is not all. It is known that if a message is written with lemon juice on a clean sheet of paper, there will be no sign of it. But if the paper is held for a moment to the fire, then the letters turn brown and the meaning becomes clear. Imagine that the whisky is the fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of a man -- then the worth of Miss Amelia's liquor can be understood.
Things that have gone unnoticed, thoughts that have been harbored far back in the dark mind, are suddenly recognized and comprehended. 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 a Sunday and come across a marsh lily. And in his palm, he might hold this flower, examining the golden dainty cup, and in him suddenly might come a sweetness keen as pain. A weaver might look up suddenly and see for the first time the cold, weird radiance of midnight January sky, and a deep fright at his own smallness stop his heart. Such things as these, then, happen when a man has drunk
The marsh lily anchors itself in dark, silty depths, its roots clutching unseen beneath the surface. Yet it rises through the murk to bloom out of the swamp, radiant in its full beauty. So too the weaver and the spinner, bound to their labor of endless, rhythmic repetition, are gradually transformed under the spell of Amelia’s liquor. Faerie-tale like the story drifts through distant memories that soothe the ache of solitude.
Cousin Lymon preys, abuses, twists, and tricks Amelia, but love is all-powerful. Marvin Macey comes back to take his grudge due to his unrequited love, and as if a spell was cast, or a curse … (Sonia pointed at this), he mesmerizes Cousin Lymon and subdues him in vassalage (Medieval love). Greedy and sneaky Cousin Lymon is transformed by the sole presence of Mavey. Cousin Lymon’s volatile nature is brandished in the visible lemon traces of his own character, once kindled by the spark of admiration, infatuation, or perverseness are visible to the eye.
They both fleece Amelia off love and material richness, shatter her cabinet of curios (Eva pinpointed how Amelia treasures beauty in her small world), and leave her pining and alone, a forsaken lily engulfed by the swamp.
The Ballad of the Sad Café bespeaks thus of the transformative power of love, which, unrequited, lacerates the heart and ensues in the searing loneliness of the human soul.
All is broken, deserted, torn, cracked, and crooked, only the singing of the chain gang in a coda can be heard, but the "Twelve Mortal Men" dwell outside the story, they are liminal to it. It is the same chain gang that ushered us into the town and the story but their song has now somehow changed, inviting us to brood with a broader heart about the story of the Sad Café.
