Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers (2) - ongoing review

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1. nullimmortalis

   May 2, 2022 at 10:49 am Edit

   So, after all that strange horseriding mania, no wonder that the Captain was not at his own party, even having forgotten about it for a while and the circumstances later explained, as he eventually shapes up for a possible Lawrencian naked wrestling match with the Private, whereby any hatred could be quenched…

   At the party, meanwhile, Anacleto is in charge of the punch bowl…
   “After he [Anacleto] spotted Lieutenant Weincheck, standing alone near the front door, he was engaged for fifteen minutes in fishing out every cherry and piece of pineapple, then he left a dozen officers waiting in order to present this choice cup to the old Lieutenant.”

   …followed, most strangely, by…

   “a story to the effect that the little Filipino thoughtfully scented Alison Langdon’s specimen of wee-wee with perfume before taking it to the hospital for a urinalysis.”

   Any ‘angleworms’ wriggling inside the sound of classical music, notwithstanding.

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   • nullimmortalis

     May 3, 2022 at 12:39 pm Edit

     “‘Tomorrow I am going to tell you something,’ she said. ‘You ought to have an inkling of what it’s about. So prepare yourself.’”

     I feel that, with this book, it often becomes a book that reads as if it is written in the way that Anacleto does his paintings:
     “His work was at once primitive and oversophisticated.”

     And Anacleto describes to Alison of the Captain’s later arrival at party, with an injured head.
     Alison loathes everyone, even or especially herself, everyone, that is except the Lieutenant and Anacleto…
     Alison hears her husband, the Major, “carrying on a long didactic conversation with himself.”
     She feels she is about to die amid a scouring tour of her own backstory, a dead baby’s body and its eventual ashes no doubt, till her heart stops… to the sound of “The clock on the mantelpiece, an old pendulum clock with white and gilt swans painted on the glass of the case, ticked with a rusty sound.”
     SPOILER: Anacleto revives her with an Ovaltine party!
     He tells his own story as part of that party: “‘Then the dream changed, and instead of Catherine I had on my knees one of the Major’s boots that I had to clean twice today. The boot was full of squirming slithery newborn mice and I was trying to hold them in and keep them from crawling up all over me. Whoo! It was like –’” and “‘A peacock of a sort of ghastly green. With one immense golden eye. And in it these reflections of something tiny and –’”

     ***

     The Private stands watching Leonora sleeping again – twice!

     “On the table there was a saucer holding a half-eaten chicken leg. The soldier touched it, smelled, and took a bite.”

     “Private Williams always had been so unsociable that hardly half of his sleeping mates even knew his name.”
     Was he once a murderer? —
     “The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colours are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect. The mind of Private Williams was imbued with various colours of strange tones, but it was without delineation, void of form.”

     He wonders why the Captain is often seen following him….
     I wonder why we are following any of these characters, other than by each of our bespoke fascinations with them that we may, as readers, wish to disown?

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