March 28-29, 2009
Though not a major participant in the action of the novel, the pharmacist J.T. Moran is the pivot point for "Clock without Hands." Diagnosed with leukemia, he is awakened to the world around him. But this awakening brings mostly loathing and resentment that he will be outlived by family, people in the streets, even trees. Moran resentful as well of his wife using money she has saved from packaging sandwiches and cakes to buy Coca-Cola stock -- sees it as a sign of economic independence that calls into question the necessity of his own life. His days are numbered, but he does not know the extent of the span still ahead of him: "what would happen in those months -- how long? -- that glared upon his numbered days. He was a man watching a clock without hands."
Moran is rapidly losing weight. His physical opposite is the "corpulent nor fat" 300 lb. judge, segregationist, and former congressman Fox Clain. Judge Clain, in his 80s, still shows the effects of a stroke 10 years earlier. Hearing from Moran of his fatal and incurable blood illness, the Judge authoritatively encourages him to simply eat a lot of liver.
The Judge's beloved son Johnny committed suicide years earlier after losing a case in his father's court in which he defended a black man accused of murder of a white man and rape of his wife. Judge Clain's family now reduced to Johnny's son, John Jester Clain, just now discovering his own "passions" -- flying, music, and racial justice.
Opposing the bitterness bloodlessness of Moran and the corpulence and decay of the Judge, Jester is full of life, light: "Jester Clain stood in the room with the sunlight from the street behind him. He was a slight, limber boy of seventeen with auburn hair and a complexion so fair that the freckles on his upturned nose were like cinnamon sprinked over cream. The glare brightened his red hair but his face was shadowed and he shielded his wine-dark eyes against the glare. He wore blue jeans and a striped jersey, the sleeves of which were pushed back to his delicate elbows." Jester ardently, romantically believes that all humans should be required to fly.
Jester's opposite is the blue-eyed "nigra" foundling Sherman Pew (Sherman being' of course, the ultimate charged name in Georgia), an inveterate liar, divided between a feckless black radicalism and a dandyish devotion to European high culture.
Jester begins to challenge his grandfather the Judge's segregationist rhetoric and to mock the old man's master plan to introduce legislation to redeem the value of Confederate money. Simultaneously, he develops a passion for Sherman Pew that is anything but requited. In imitation of Sherman's showy high cuture, Jester abandons boyish attire and begins to dress stylishlessly and practice classical piano. All of which infuriates Sherman, both his blue-eyed ambitions and his dark-skinned anger.
Ten years earlier, Sherman, then a boy and working as a golf caddy, had along with Jester saved the life of the Judge. when he collapsed with a seizure into a water trap -- the two thin boys dragging the massive old man out of the pond and onto the fairway. The Judge also knows the secret of Sherman's parentage: that he is the son of the black man Johnny Clain had tried to defend in his court and his lover, the white child bride he was accused of raping.
Johnny Clain's defense of Sherman's father had been a disaster because he had tried to make a constitutional argument before a jury made up of illiterate whites -- or, as the Judge calls them "twelve men good and true."
The Judge's behavior constantly undercuts his behavior, whether it be derived from great oratory of the past, Shakespeare, or diet books. There are also repeated references to similarity of Clain family and mules. Jester sees in amateurish painting (by the Judge's sister) of a plantation scene a cloud that looks like a pink mule. Moran notices in portrait of Judge's late beloved wife (by same artist) that her left foot looks like a tail. The Judge speaks of getting dental attention from a relative, a vetrinarian who speaks of the tenderness of mule mouths.
The Judge tries out inflammatory rhetoric on Jester -- "'How would you like to see a hulking Nigra boy sharing a [school] desk with a delicate little white girl?' The Judge could not believe in the possibility of this; he wanted to shock Jester to the gravity of the situation. His eyes challenged his grandson to react in the spirit of Southern gentlemen." Jester responds: "How about a hulking white girl sharing a desk with a delicate little Negro boy?"
Having challenged his grandfather's racial ideology, Jester (who is repulsed by the "gummy smeary" lipstick worn by most women and girls in the town) attacks his moral bombast. Uncomfortably seeing his attraction to Sherman reflected in the pages of the Kinsey report but triumphant in having just proved his normality in a whore house, Jester attacks the Judge for not having read the book and, indeed for having it banned from the Public Library. McCullers reveals that, in truth, Fox Clain had been an avid reader of Kinsey, hiding it behind the dust wrapper of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
Warned against "digging his grave with his teeth," the Judge's follows a different kind of diet. Unbelievably narcissistic, he becomes fascinated with his own bodily functions, gleefully reading his diet book, a recipe for "Lemon Crustless Pie," while defecating. "When the odor in the bathroom rose, he was not annoyed by this; on the contrary, since he was pleased by anything that belonged to him, and his feces were no exception, the smell rather soothed him."
Just as the corpulent Judge has a surfeit of ego and identity, so the withering Moran has a deficit. Moran sees his incorporeality expressed in the pages of a pop psychology book' "Sickness unto Death," he selects from the hospital book cart: "The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wide, etc., is sure to be noticed."
Disappointed by his beloved grandson's disapproval of his Old South rhetoric, the Judge engages the Europhilic Sherman as his amaneunsus and companion. But the more Sherman discovers of the racial prejudice underlying the corpulent old man's bombastic rhetoric, the more he sees he cannot stay in that role, however comfortable. In the Judge's papers, Sherman discovers the story of his birth, dashing his fantasy that he is the son of the opera singer Marian Anderson.
Sherman tries to fuse his black rage with his European aspirations, renting and furnishing in high-style a house in a rickety white neighborhood.
In response to Sherman's provocation, the Judge revives in miniature his former Klan chapter. Lots are drawn as to who will firebomb the offending "nigra." Moran's number comes up but, despite his lionization of the Judge, he refuses the duty, explaining that his impending death puts him in fear of his mortal soul."
Jester, who spies on the meeting. tries and fails to convince Sherman to flee. He then tries and fails to take revenge on Sherman's assasin.
Jester senses a kind of schizophrenia in the rages of both Sherman and his Grandfather, a gap between lofty desire and bigotry. He asks himself if his grandfather is "acting crisscrossed in his old age, laughing fit to kill when he ought to be crying?"Hearing of the Supreme Court decision on Brown vs. Board of Education, Judge Clain is so disoriented that he begins reciting the Gettysburg Address on the radio to the horror of the station's management -- a last crisis of the gap between rhetoric and reality.
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