Wunderkind (Criticism)

Criticism

Tom Faulkner

A freelance writer and copy editor, Faulkner is pursuing an M.A. in English at Wayne State University. In the essay below, he offers a thoughtful exploration of how the writer’s experience melds with the crafting of fiction, specifically in “Wunderkind.”

In the early 1930s, a Columbus, Georgia, teenager named Lula Carson Smith was bitterly disappointed in her artistic ambitions. While some of the details of her experience are disputed, its basic outlines are clear: Long considered a musical prodigy, having trained for years as a concert pianist and prepared to enter New York’s famous Julliard School, she suddenly gave up music entirely and began devoting her energies to a writing career. Her first published work was “Wunderkind,” written at age 19, originally for a college writing course. The story concerns a young woman’s final, emotional piano lesson, in which she realizes that the musical calling she had hoped for will never materialize. Within a few years, its author was a best-selling novelist (under her married name, Carson McCullers); and, given the known details of her life, it is common for critics (for example, Richard M. Cook) to treat this early story as “obviously autobiographical.” Clearly, the plot is based on the writer’s own experience — but what, exactly, does that mean, and how does it affect our appreciation of the story?

While critical studies may suggest otherwise, the significance of “autobiographical fiction” lies beyond the scholarly detective work of researching the author’s life and matching “real life” experiences with fictional characters, events, and effects — thereby revealing the “material sources” of the story. Such knowledge may inform our understanding of the work, and of its author’s creative process — but a story is not the same as a memoir. As Alice Hall Petry has observed, early works with clear parallels to their author’s lives often “cease to be regarded as fiction,” and are treated instead as “source material” for analyzing a writer’s later, greater work. Such scholarship surely has its place; but one effect of this approach is that it may encourage students to discount work that seems “merely autobiographical,” as if the author has somehow cheated us by reporting real events rather than “making up a story.” In practice, the writing of fiction usually involves both invention and experience. Writers are traditionally urged to “write what they know,” and fiction is commonly understood to be rooted in the author’s experience on some level, if not always in its literal details. Autobiographical fiction may draw its energy from events in the writer’s own life, but it succeeds through the artful and imaginative transformation of that experience: the dramatization of its universal, human elements, in a way that will touch and engage readers whose own experience may be far different from that of the writer. Often, the value of knowing the real-life “basis” of a story lies not in the similarities we can trace, but in the differences between the writer’s own circumstances and the fictionalized treatment she has created from the “raw material” of her life.

Many writers keep a journal of some kind; it may take the form of a diary, recording events in the author’s life on a regular basis, or a more informal collection of occasional thoughts and impressions. The nature of the writing will depend on the author’s purposes, and so will any use the writer may make of it in the future. Sometimes, a journal entry will evolve into a formal, professional piece, as the writer builds on the insights, emotions, and situations she had recorded earlier, developing their dramatic possibilities. Other writers claim never to re-read their journals, finding value in the very act of writing down their impressions and taking a distinctly different approach to works they prepare for publication. There are many reasons to write about one’s own life, even if the work is never shared with others, and the most basic may be that it seems to have a therapeutic value, particularly in times of stress and confusion. The effort to put our feelings into words can help us to “get a handle” on difficult circumstances, or achieve a clearer understanding of ourselves; and when we write from a state of emotional agitation, we sometimes give voice to feelings or insights that normally remain unexpressed. For these reasons, psychologists often recommend that their clients keep journals and go over them periodically in search of perspective on their problems. And of course, one needn’t be a professional writer, or a mental patient, to benefit from keeping a journal; though the habit is not widely practiced today, it was once common for “ordinary people” to keep such private records throughout their lives, writing about themselves for themselves.

But journals and diaries are not the same as writing about oneself for others. Each of us maintains a distinction between our “public” and “private” selves, and avoids revealing embarrassing, unflattering “private details” to others, particularly strangers. For writers, this distinction is intensified: everything they publish is read, and judged, by strangers — and often, it is judged on its “honesty” and “authenticity,” its resemblance to “real life.” Fiction that takes the author’s own experience as its starting-point thus forces a writer to make some difficult decisions, about what to reveal and what to conceal. One strategy is to “fictionalize” the situation, by changing the real-life experience in significant ways: giving characters different names and circumstances, for example, or choosing a setting different from the author’s own surroundings. Such changes may be viewed in a negative way — that the author is “hiding behind” her characters, using them to disguise parts of her own life she’d prefer not to “own up to.” Critics sometimes interpret the story’s Mr. Bilderbach in this way, knowing that McCullers’s real-life piano teacher was not a man, but a woman by the name of Mary Tucker — which suggests that Frances’ confused sexual feelings for her teacher were, in the writer’s own life, an experience of homosexual attraction. By changing her teacher’s gender in the story, McCullers can be seen either to avoid a subject that was considered controversial or shameful (particularly at that time), or as disavowing her own experience, perhaps out of concern for her reputation.

Fiction, however, is more than a disguise for “real life,” and there are several positive reasons to alter the details of an experience. As a practical matter, life experiences usually require considerable editing before they become stories. The “stories” we live through don’t usually unfold with convenient beginnings, middles, and endings; several different “plots” seem to develop at once, and we seldom have all the information possessed by a third-person narrator, who helps explain the action we are reading. Even if we happen to live unusually exciting lives, our day-to-day experiences are seldom as dramatic as the events in artistic productions, and seldom lead to a specific “meaning,” or reveal consistent “themes.” In shaping it as a story, an author must “re-package” experience, editing out details that don’t serve the story’s purposes — the experience, as it was actually lived, is already “changed,” even if no facts are altered. Furthermore, experiences don’t always make good, or satisfying, stories; storytellers of all kinds are tempted to “improve” their material, in order to make the telling more effective. Consider the kind of family anecdotes that are passed down, perhaps retold each year at holidays: the details and events tend to change considerably over time, and don’t always match the memories of those who witnessed them originally. It’s not that Uncle Joe or Aunt Minnie are really liars — they just love a good story. As they become caught up in the telling, their imaginations are stimulated; over the years, they may experiment, introducing new material, or different descriptions, and seeing how well the new versions “go over” with their audience. No less than the professional writer of fiction, they are composing and revising their stories, and in the process, they transform the raw material they began with: the actual experience that inspired them to tell a story in the first place. Writers may be seen as people who are fascinated, even obsessed, by this kind of tinkering with the elements of a story.

Unless an author specifically comments on the matter, we can only speculate on the reasons for the decisions she has made — and often can’t be certain about just which details have been changed. For example, critics may speculate about young McCullers’ feelings for Mary Tucker — but it is at least plausible that the element of sexual tension is itself something the author has introduced into the story for dramatic purposes, and was not a significant factor in her own student-teacher relationship. Certainly whether an important character is a man or a woman is no small matter — but still another possibility is that she cast this authority-figure as a man in order to dramatize the unequal status of women in the arts, and the particular pressures faced by females in a male-dominated environment. However we interpret this Bilderbach/Tucker equation, there are other differences between Frances’s situation in ‘Wunderkind” and McCullers’s own experience, which may be equally significant. Frances meekly submits to her defeat, never expressing the emotions that boil within her. She has many resentments, and is driven to find an explanation for her inability to play as she knows she can, but she rushes from Bilderbach’s studio, intent on getting out “[q]uickly-before he would have to speak.” Her own speech is a helpless, tear-choked whisper, offering no explanation beyond “I can’t.” But it is consistently reported that McCullers’s break with Mary Tucker occurred quite differently: the student confronted her teacher, dramatically announcing her intention to give up music and voicing her resentments over Tucker’s decision to move away. In the story, Frances seems drawn to the carefree childhood she has sacrificed so much of for her music; when she disappears in the story’s last line, down a street “that had become confused with noise and bicycles and the games of other children,” it is almost as if she is escaping back into childhood. She seems unable, and is perhaps unwilling, to take on adult roles and responsibilities; at the end of the story, the future she had counted on is shattered, and her prospects seem bleak and uncertain. McCullers, however, would seem to have recovered from her teenage trauma rather well, confidently moving into a different artistic field (for which she had already been preparing), and quickly achieving fame and respect for her work. While her life took many turns that may be considered tragic, she was hardly the pathetic, defeated figure we see in Frances. In these ways, we can see that McCullers has changed her own “character” for purposes of the story — but not, as we are so often tempted to do in our own storytelling, by showing herself in a stronger, more-admirable light. Instead, the “actress” she has chosen to play her own part has been deliberately made weaker, less assertive, and less articulate than she herself has been. Frances is not Carson, but someone else like Carson in many ways — perhaps a projection of what McCullers might have become if she had allowed herself to be crushed by her emotions and circumstances.

We may imagine that, at the time, McCullers must have/e// as hopeless and defeated as Frances seems to be. By altering and exaggerating her own experience, arranging it to emphasize the desperate confusion and stifling isolation she felt, she dramatizes the kinds of emotions commonly felt by adolescents in all walks of life. Assuming the reader can identify with Frances, McCullers thus achieves something remarkable: She allows us to share a particular experience she has had, by connecting it to our own, similar, experience — though most of us have never studied for a concert career, or known the pressures that confront a child prodigy. This remarkable something is commonly called “fiction.” It is not real life, but it involves the magnification of experience, by developing its possibilities and exploring its dynamics. Frances’s very specific experience includes the details of “real life,” and the story is told in a way that penetrates to the core of her conflict, taking it from a personal level to a more universal one. The story of Carson McCullers’s own musical career is intriguing, and dramatic, and must have affected her profoundly. But “Wunderkind” is what she has made of that experience; by her own choice, it is now “the real story” (or rather, one of her many real stories), and the biographical facts are now “source material” in its background.

Source: Tom Faulkner, “An Overview of ‘Wunderkind’,” in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• She’s Come Undone (1992), a novel by Wally Lamb, is a darkly humorous account of a woman forced to deal with the lifelong effects of growing up in a dysfunctional family.
• “Paul’s Case” (1905), a short story by Willa Cather, deals with a young man who, much like Frances in “Wunderkind,” longs to escape what he considers to be a “common” life.
• Mary Bray Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia (1994) examines female adolescence in contemporary America. Pipher, a clinical psychologist, covers issues such as divorce, eating disorders, and sexual pressure.
• Perhaps McCullers’s most famous work, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) tells the story of a young girl who learns the meaning of loneliness through her association with a group of social outcasts.
• Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” from her collection At the Bottom of the River (1983), is a young woman’s recollection of her mother’s instructions to her while growing up.