A New Book of the Grotesques
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A New Book of the Grotesques

Contemporary Approaches to Sherwood Anderson's Early Fiction

Robert Dunne

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A New Book of the Grotesques

Contemporary Approaches to Sherwood Anderson's Early Fiction

Robert Dunne

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About This Book

The first extensive treatment of Sherwood Anderson's work from a postmodern perspective

Sherwood Anderson, remembered chiefly as a writer of short stories about life in the Midwest at the turn of the century, was acknowledged as an innovator of the short story form and a major influence on such writers as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Valuable critical studies have examined his works from biographical, New Critical, or psychoanalytical approaches, but contemporary criticism on Anderson has been nearly nonexistent.

A New Book of the Grotesques (the title is adapted from the first tale in Winesburg, Ohio) does not challenge previous studies of Anderson as much as it looks at Anderson's early fiction from contemporary interpretative methodologies, particularly from poststructuralist approaches. With this study, author Robert Dunne breaks new ground in Sherwood Anderson scholarship: his is the first sustained, full-length critical work on Anderson from a postmodern theoretical perspective and is the first study of a substantial body of Anderson's work to be published in more than thirty years.

A New Book of the Grotesques is an important critical study that adds significantly to the field and to the understanding of Sherwood Anderson's fiction and the modernist period.

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CHAPTER ONE

Anderson’s Grotesques

PERSONAL SUBJUGATION AND THE
INDETERMINACY OF MEANING IN
A HOSTILE WORLD

Up until the late nineteenth century, the concept of the grotesque in the arts and literature had focused predominantly on the fantastic, the macabre, or the supernatural.1 The grotesque subject bore some resemblance to the “ordinary” but typically in a distorted way so that often the physical features of the subject were frightful or even comically absurd.2 From the Renaissance into the nineteenth century, the grotesque often converged the mysteries of the spiritual realm with allegorical representations of human depravity. Because the term has covered such expansive ground, it is difficult to pin down neatly a precise meaning of the grotesque in both its characteristics and form. As Geoffrey Galt Harpham has observed, “The grotesque is concept without form: the word nearly always modifies such indeterminate nouns as monster, object, or thing. As a noun it implies that an object either occupies multiple categories or that it falls between categories.”3 Rather consistently, though, the grotesque subject was objectified as a thing or person deviant from the social norm. It was a freak in a normal world. But by the late nineteenth century, this conception would undergo a change: artists began to perceive the “normal world” as either itself grotesque or a significant cause of a person’s becoming grotesque.
As Wolfgang Kayser argues, it is in the late nineteenth century when fiction of the grotesque emerges that is not based on supernatural or fantastic elements but as a result of social phenomena. Both Kayser and Bernard McElroy locate this shift in the work of Russian authors such as Dostoevsky and Gogol; McElroy hails the Russians as forerunners of the modern grotesque.4 By the end of the century, with the inroads of industrialism and the centralization of political power (contained either in the state or in a capitalistic economy), the role and purpose of the individual were undergoing a change. The romantic conviction in the autonomous powers of the individual was beginning to be seen more and more as the stuff of myth rather than as an attainable possibility.5 This change would take place so rapidly that by the second decade of the twentieth century, when Sherwood Anderson emerged as an author, the fin de siùcle was already regarded as a bygone age in the country’s history. But it is in Anderson’s early work that we see a crystallization of the modern grotesque.
In the early twentieth century, American authors such as Anderson began to experiment with the concept of the grotesque as a condition of modern life rather than as a fantastic or supernatural phenomenon. This is significant in part because the focus was no longer on the grotesque subject-as-deviant but on modern society’s role in either inducing grotesqueness or being grotesque itself. Also, grotesque characteristics were no longer primarily physical but had become sublimated to the psychic realm, where alienation and isolation became its main features. McElroy offers an excellent summation of these features:
Man is usually presented as living in a vast, indifferent, meaningless universe in which his actions are without significance beyond his own, limited, personal sphere. The physical world of his immediate surroundings is alien and hostile, directing its energies to overwhelming the individual, denying him a place and identity even remotely commensurate with his needs and aspirations, surrounding him on every side with violence and brutalisation, offering him values that have lost their credibility, [and] manipulating and dehumanising him through vast, faceless institutions.6
This passage underscores how artists began to regard the individual in modern society as powerless, subject to the apparent whims of far-reaching and anonymous sources of power. From this perspective, Michel Foucault’s writings on power and the body can shed valuable insights on both the modern grotesque and Anderson’s conception of the grotesque.
In many of Foucault’s writings, such as Discipline and Punish (1975), Madness and Civilization (1961), and The History of Sexuality (1976), the French critic analyzes the progressive alienation and powerlessness of the individual from a number of perspectives, focusing on the Renaissance period through the twentieth century. In Madness and Civilization, for instance, in which Foucault discusses how Western society has identified and treated the insane, the analogies to the modern grotesque become inescapable. If a recurring characteristic of the traditional grotesque had been deviance from or failure to attain the social norm, then what Foucault says about Western society’s treatment of the insane has particular relevance to the modern grotesque.
In describing nineteenth century asylums in Europe, for example, Foucault argues that surveillance and judgment—rather than physical discipline—became the mainstay in ministering to the insane. The madman would be given certain liberties dependent on his good behavior and be informed that his retention of such liberties was contingent entirely on himself. As Foucault states, “The madman ... must feel morally responsible for everything within him that may disturb morality and society, and must hold no one but himself responsible for the punishment he receives.”7 The individual must subject himself, in other words, to an environment that is watching and evaluating—and subjecting—him. But this watching and evaluating is based only on what can be seen visibly. One’s interiority must suffer the consequences as one’s exterior behavior in society becomes the primary means of validating sanity. For, as Foucault goes on, the individual deemed mad would be placed in formal social situations “where everyone was obliged to imitate all the formal requirements of social existence,” whereby “everyone” could observe, or “spy out [in the insane] any incongruity, any disorder, any awkwardness where madness might betray itself.”8 One result for the individual is a constant tension between his outer conformity to social norms and his silenced inner self. As Foucault argues, “Curiously, this rite is not one of intimacy, of dialogue, of mutual acquaintance; it is the organization around the madman of a world where everything would be like and near him, but in which he himself would remain a stranger, the Stranger par excellence who is judged not only by appearances but by all that may betray and reveal in spite of themselves.”9 The individual therefore remains alienated from his society, knowing that judgment surrounds his every action; “he must know that he is watched, judged, and condemned.” From this societal surveillance and self-surveillance, a “homogenous rule of morality” is preserved and “its rigorous extension [applied] to all those who tend to escape from it.”10
The combination of surveillance and subjection and the upholding of a normalized morality can be extended from the domain of presumed insanity to others as well. As Foucault details elsewhere, sexuality and labor also fall under this rubric. In The History of Sexuality he discusses the repercussions of science overtaking organized religion as the authority on sex during the nineteenth century. Regarding science and its role in treating this subject, Foucault writes, “It concerned itself primarily with aberrations, perversions, exceptional oddities, pathological abatements, and morbid aggravations. It was by the same token a science subordinated in the main to the imperatives of a morality whose divisions it reiterated under the guise of a medical norm.” “Sexuality” as a term came into use by science in the nineteenth century as a “domain susceptible to pathological processes, and hence one calling for therapeutic or normalizing interventions.”11 Here, too, another dimension of the individual falls prey to subjection and surveillance, with the goal of preserving a “homogeneous rule of morality.”
Elsewhere Foucault argues that the individual’s autonomy over his body in the domain of labor is also contingent on similar kinds of control and subjection. In Discipline and Punish, for example, he maintains that the individual is deemed useful in society if he is simultaneously productive and constrained:
But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, ... force it to carry out tasks. ... This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection ... ; the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body.12
Again, this subjection manifests itself in societal and self-surveillance. Foucault discusses at length the architectural design and psychological implications of an innovative prison model called the Panopticon, which was a tower containing not bars but open windows as well as backlighting, with the goal of officials being able to observe undesirables without their knowing when. (Of course, the prisoners would know that they might be under surveillance at any time.) Calling this method of surveillance Panopticism, Foucault observes that “he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibilities for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; ... he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”13 Foucault extends this analysis from prison confinement to society at large, charging that similar means to exert control and reinforce confinement can be integrated into virtually any sphere—the military, hospitals, work places. The metaphor of the Panopticon itself, he adds, “has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole.”14
Although in the examples above Foucault focuses on asylums, scientific specialization, and prisons as sources of power, he does not limit such sources to just these three areas. As Foucault asserts in the previous passage, power resides in an amalgam of shape-shifting sources; it cannot be pinpointed to a static “group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state. ... It is the moving substrate of force relations,” he adds, that “constantly engender states of power” and that are “local and unstable.”15 In other words, power cannot be identified with a sole entity; it is pervasive as well as contingent on which potential source interacts with an individual.
If we accept McElroy’s summary of the modern grotesque as the individual’s growing powerlessness and subjection to other sources of power, then Foucault’s work on power and the surveillance and subjection of the individual can be viewed as a valuable extrapolation of McElroy’s description of the social conditions of the modern grotesque, especially as Sherwood Anderson develops the concept by the time he writes Winesburg, Ohio. It is in this work where Anderson succeeds in subtly depicting the milieu in which his grotesques grasp onto truths, lead frustrated lives, and seek to communicate their grotesqueness to someone, often George Willard, who will provide understanding. This milieu is in effect a dramatization, a portrait, of the relationship of power, individual subjection, and surveillance as observed by Foucault. Chapter 3 will argue that Winesburg can yield many fresh insights if read from a Foucauldian perspective. But a postmodern attention to language can also shed significant light on the book, if we turn our attention to Anderson’s deceptively simple prose style.
. . .
As early as 1927, in one of the first biographies of Anderson, Cleveland B. Chase observed that Anderson’s prose style had only the illusion of simplicity and was in fact much more complex than it appears at a first glance:
His air of simplicity and ingenuousness, the apparent rambling, the way in which he appears to be haphazardly setting down ideas as they come into his mind in an attempt to discover their meaning, his groping, his artlessness, his naiveté—these are but tricks of the story teller’s trade to earn our sympathy for the story which he unfolds graphically and without confusion.16
Uncovering these “tricks of the story teller’s trade” is essential in gaining an understanding of how in his best work Anderson was able to integrate in innovative ways both his subject matter and the manner in which he related that subject matter.
In terms of how he told his tales, Anderson yet again would find himself in good company with postmodern theories, particularly with such theories’ concerns with the indeterminate meaning of language. Several years ago David Stouck first detected this tendency in Anderson’s work. Finding parallels between Anderson’s fiction and the postmodern novel, Stouck noted that “life itself is a fiction, based on a series of temporary arrangements, so that paradoxically the only ‘realistic’ narrative is one that continually draws the reader’s attention to the fact that everything is fictional.”17 What is even more intriguing about Anderson’s writing is that if language is always in a state of flux, then he contributes to this instability by means of his purposely evasive narrators. In his best fiction, Anderson deconstructs language without the need of a deconstructionist critic.
Many contemporary theorists of language have argued that with regard to language and objective meaning, never the twain shall meet. As Jacques Derrida had maintained, there is a gulf between the sign and what it signifies—what he called diffĂ©rance—that renders meaning to be at best conditional: “The substitution of the sign for the thing itself is both secondary and provisional: secondary due to an original and lost presence from which the sign thus derives; provisional as concerns this final and missing presence toward which the sign in this sense is a movement of mediation.”18 The “thing itself” cannot manifest a transparent, absolute meaning via language; it remains just outside of language as a “deferred presence.” But in order to comprehend this deferred presence, we must realize that every sign we use to accomplish this feat is itself “related to something other than itself.” Derrida called any such act of interpretation of signs as a “systematic play of differences,”19 whereby meaning may be deciphered only tentatively, based on the given context of signs. When a public official says she has been “quoted out of context,” for example, she is not questioning the accuracy of the actual words quoted but is declaring rather that their meaning has been distorted because they have been isolated from what surrounded them. Derrida used the example of citing a sign as ev...

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