Clock Without Hands, Carson McCullers‘ final novel, is permeated by a sense of illness, death and social disease. Set in a small town in the South of the United States, circling the lives of four very different men, two young, two old, their lives collide in the present and in the past in a series of violent, unsettling confrontations. Bleak and despondent as it is, McCullers imbues this darkness with an understanding of the fragility of the human heart, the futile rage against death and the necessity of the fight against social injustice.
The novel opens with J.T. Malone, the local pharmacist, discovering that he is suffering from leukemia and only has a few months to live. A mostly virtuous man, he begins to question and lash out at the world which offers him no hope, no cure and no redemption. He considers his life differently knowing that he has not much time left to live it. He maintains a somewhat close friendship with the larger than life figure of Judge Fox Clane. Excessive in opinion, body and stature, but with his mind succumbing to the senility of old age and having suffered a stroke which paralyzed half his body and dealing with diabetes, the Judge continually denies any evidence of illness to all outsiders. His wife’s death left a considerable gap in his life, and he tries to fill it with other women, women with similar habits or looks, only to find them all unsatisfactory. Having lost his only son to suicide, the Judge’s only relation is the idealistic and sensitive Jester Clane.
Several months ago he had read in these bylines the words: ‘How can the dead truly be dead when they are still walking in my heart?’ It was from an old Indian legend and the Judge could not forget it.
Jester’s relationship with his grandfather is bristling with their conflicting opinions over the issue of race. While the Judge longs for the old days of the South, Jester antagonizes him with his desire for full integration. Despite the Judge’s racist attitudes, his closest relationship is with his amanuensis, the blue-eyed black boy Sherman Pew. An orphan who is constantly searching for his unknown mother, and desperately seeking her in musical stars, Sherman is prickly to everyone that is around him. Nonetheless, he and Jester share a friendly competitiveness and antagonism which often becomes humiliating to both. Jester, it is suggested, harbours deeper feelings for Sherman.
Not only are their current lives and situations delicately intertwined, but as the novel moves along and revelations are made, their pasts are just as connected. Jester’s discovery of his father’s personality and circumstances before his suicide through the late night hysterics of the Judge answers the vital questions of identity for him, whereas Sherman’s own acknowledgment of his parentage only leads to more questions and his sense of self utterly destroyed. It is these questions and uncertainty that lead him to take action against the racist implications of the town, which in turn leads to the horrifically violent confrontation that ends in his death. Meanwhile, Malone, gradually closer to his death, stands up to his townsfolk and refuses their intense appetite for destruction in the name of morality, making his final grasp at heroism. Though he doesn’t achieve it in the eyes of the betrayed, hurt townspeople, he comes closer to peace with himself and the world around him.
As he sat holding the pestle there was in him enough composure to wonder at those alien emotions that had veered so violently in his once mild heart. He was split between love and hatred – but what he loved and what he hated was unclear. For the first time he knew that death was near him. But the terror that choked him was not caused by the knowledge of his own death. The terror concerned some mysterious drama that was going on – although what the drama was about Malone did not know. The terror questioned what would happen in those months – how long? – that glared upon his numbered days. He was a man watching a clock without hands.
The most somber detail of the novel is the profound sense of the failure of traditional spiritual or religious modes to explain death or to offer comfort to the dying. The Judge freely moves from church to church, mainly hoping to find someone who can mimic his dead wife than to find solace in religion; Malone too looks for comfort in the church but fails to find it, and yet refuses to commit the act of violence because he doesn’t want to endanger his soul. Redemption is made on earth, in humane actions, but Malone seeks justification for it in the sacred.
Yes, the earth had revolved its seasons and spring had come again. but there was no longer a revulsion against nature, against things. A strange lightness had come upon his soul and he exalted. He looked at nature now and it was part of himself. He was no longer a man watching a clock without hands. He was not alone, he did not rebel, he did not suffer. He did not even think of death these days. He was not a man dying – nobody died, everybody died.
As in all of McCullers’ novels, Clock Without Hands seeks to explore the injustices of society, spiritual isolation and confusion, the confounding nature of human love and affection, our own battles with ourselves prying us apart from those around us. Yet, as bleak as the issues it deals with are, one doesn’t leave the vivid world of Clock Without Hands feeling weighed down by the impotence of our struggle against death, but rather with the intimation that hope is always available at all junctures of life, even on the very cusp of death.
