ABSTRACT
Carson McCullers’ novella is among the finest early examples of the reworking of folk elements that constitutes the major contribution to surrealism on the North and South American continents. A strategy common to both the Latin American real maravilloso and the most influential popular music of the era, it is interpreted here in terms of the Heideggerian concept of “the worldhood of the world,” an approach that allows the unknowable totality of the world to be conceived as a mysterious character in its own right, over and above the gender-fluid figures who populate the book. This signature feature of mythical and folk narrative recedes into the background in Simon Callow’s film adaptation, which substitutes a conventional form of historical realism for the novella’s sophisticated use of the conventions of pre-individualistic storytelling.
