Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg,
Ohio (1919) appeared almost exactly one hundred years after the publication
of Washington Irving's The Sketchbook.
In that hundred-year period the short story form changed from primarily
a folktale and fable genre to a form that focuses more on lyric moments of
realization than linear events.
The notion of
sympathy and identification, a complete loss of authorial self, is an important
key to the success of Winesburg.
Hart Crane once said of Anderson:
"He has a humanity and simplicity that is quite baffling in depth
and suggestiveness." The most
frequent remark made about the characters in Winesburg is that they are
psychic deformities, cut off from society, adrift in their own consciousness,
unfulfilled, metaphors for American estrangement. In his book The Lonely Voice, Frank
O'Connor uses Winesburg as a central example of his notion of short
story characters representing not individuals, but a submerged population
group. The image of isolation is
important in Anderson's stories for isolation is a central concept of the short
story.
Anderson's suggestion in the story that the secret of Biddlebaum's hands is a job for a
poet is part of the basic change in the short story signaled by Chekhov. Anderson struggles with the problem of the
prose writer trying to communicate something subtle and delicate, feeling the
words are clumsy, for all he has are the events and the explanation. What he needs is a way to use language, the
way the poet does, to transcend language.
This is why the central metaphor of this story is "talking with
hands"? However, what one aspires
to is not hands but wings, that enable one, like the poet, to fly. The use of hands as a central image also
suggests many other implications, such as the magic of "laying on of
hands," "keep your hands off," maintaining "clean
hands," etc. Biddlebaum wants to
transcend the physical, but the only way he can touch someone is with hands,
which by their very nature are physical.
The problem is trying
to express the kind of love Wing has for the boys without it sounding crude or
being misunderstood. The issue, of
course, is that it is not flesh but spirit that is at stake, and spirit is
difficult to communicate. Motifs
throughout the story suggest this counterpoint between the spiritual and the
physical: dreams becoming facts for the half-witted boy; doubts becoming
beliefs for the men of the town. The
metaphor of hard knuckles versus fluttery hands suggests the force of life
being diffused rather than centralized.
In
his study of Anderson, Rex Burbank notes the influence of impressionism and
post-impressionism on the stories in Winesburg, Ohio. (Burbank,
Rex. Sherwood Anderson Boston:
Twayne Publishers, 1964.). He
points out that the narratives stem from the flow of feeling and impressions
rather than according to time; their structure is psychological rather than
chronological. What holds them together
is a series of disconnected images that unite because they are thematically and
symbolically related. In his Memoirs
Anderson said "There are no plot stories in life." Burbank calls
"Hands" is one of the best tales in the collection and one of the
most influenced by the post-impressionists;
He notes the central image of the hands and how incidents charge the
image with meaning.
Sister
M. Joselyn discusses "Hands" as a central example of Anderson's
development of what she terms the lyrical story. "Normal time sequence is almost
obliterated as Anderson penetrates with the reader further and further into the
mysterious recesses of Wing Biddlebaum's mind." She points out that the events of
Biddlebaum's life are presented neither straightforwardly nor in a conventional
flashback but rather by means of a box-within-a-box structure; Biddlebaum is
revealed first through the eyes of the townspeople, then through the eyes of
George Willard, and finally through his own sense of himself." All these perspectives, she argues, are so
thoroughly suffused with Biddlebaum's consciousness we are not aware of any
awkward juncture between sections. (Sister M. Joselyn, O.S.B. "Sherwood Anderson and the Lyric
Story," The Twenties/Poetry and Prose, Eds. Richard E. Langford and
William E. Taylor. Deland, Florida: Everette Edwards, 1966. 70-7)
David
Anderson says that what Anderson achieves in "Hands" is the
transformation of a "poor little man, beaten, pounded, frightened by the
world in which he lived into something oddly beautiful." (Anderson, David
D. Sherwood Anderson: An Introduction
and Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967).
At the end of
"Hands," when Wing Biddlebaum is performing the mundane task of picking
up crumbs, the gesture is transformed into a spiritual act. This technique is similar to the stories of
Chekhov, Mansfield and Joyce, in which intangible spiritual desires and
feelings are either contaminated by the material, or the material is used to
communicate them.
Tomorrow: Ambrose Bierce's "Chickamauga"
Tomorrow: Ambrose Bierce's "Chickamauga"
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