Discerning Love, Recuperating Hope: The "Search for God" in Carson McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

ABSTRACT:Even though Carson McCullers described the act of writing as a "search for God," much of the scholarship concerning her debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) is suspicious of the role that religion plays in maintaining political acquiescence and hopeful self-deception. Adopting a charitable hermeneutic, this essay takes seriously McCullers' faith as well as the particular religiousness of the text. Therefore, I encounter the novel in terms of McCullers' written "search for God," in which the "search" takes the form of loving discernment and "God" refers to the recuperative power of hope located within the relationships between persons. First, I posit that the novel's implicit critique of both secularism and religion is postsecular because it acknowledges their joint imbrication in perpetuating racialized segregation without reducing religion to a Marxist opiate of the masses. The novel takes seriously spiritual consciousness as a means of overcoming social and spiritual isolation. Second, I re-read the loving relationships in the novel with the understanding that love is not a resource in rare supply, nor does it place limits on personal freedom. Love between persons is mutually revitalizing and is the novel's primary source of hope. Finally, I stress an attunement to the moments in the novel in which characters have spiritual experiences—revelations during which they glimpse the horizon of God and consider the dialogic interrelatedness of all being. Far from self-delusions, these scenes of spiritual experience build on the novel's themes of relationality and answerability.