Entering the Compound: Becoming with Carson McCullers’ Freaks

Abstract

This essay addresses the inscription of “freakishness” in Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding (1946) on a formal and stylistic level to argue against hermeneutical procedures that offer a symptomatology of either psycho-political systems or of the inner struggle of a writer or character. Drawing on key concepts from Gilles Deleuze’s writing on art and literature, the essay foregrounds the liminal figure of the novel’s protagonist as an aesthetic creation, whose function cannot be reduced to the disciplinary operations of established forms of literary criticism. As such, the freakish adolescent constitutes a literary configuration through which possibilities for movement, for becoming, for the new are opened up: Frankie emerges as a queer textual figure that affects us, as readers, as a “bloc of sensations.”