Sherwood Anderson

Much of Anderson's 'Winesburg, Ohio' expresses the decline of expression in urban-industrialized America. His language throughout the novel, common and plain, reflects this struggle to articulate the inexpressible: qualities of the human condition.

I think the writing comes out of an era in which philosophy art are becoming increasingly indifferent to the masses. There's not a lot that the average hotel can get out of 'Ulysses.'

Anderson is writing about the human condition, to give a voice to the general proprietors of that disposition: the common people, struggling in the factories to maintain the economy that supports those French critics who would embrace the novel as an early work of humanist realism.

Simplicity is key in this text. Not simplicity as a reductionist technique, to qualify the general public as a sad brewing lot of helpless ignorants subject to the great capitalist machine, but simplicity as an expression of the most rudimentary forms of human catharsis.

"The windows of the house were high and he wanted to look at the trees," Anderson says of the writer.

That he bothers to record this motive exemplifies Anderson's interests in the story. He is not interested in bemoaning the condition of the old writer, and obviously sympathetic character; instead Anderson intends to portray the consistency of his character: The subtle intuitive drives that compose 'the writer''s motivations, convictions, and general humanity.

Anders on is interested in the intuitive not the cerebral.

"The grotesque" are abstractions, Anderson does not interpret or project some great meaning onto the nearly prophetic manifestations of the writer's unconscious, instead he portrays them as a spectacle. Each grotesque is treated with a visceral but delicate measure of perception by Anderson. He is a master of constructing these abstractions without reckoning through any reductive interpretation.

I love this story.

More on this tomorrow.