Such a Rare Thing: The Art of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (review)

Clarence Lindsay's Such a Rare Thing takes its title from a letter from Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in which she wrote "Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it." But it may have taken its approach to Winesburg, Ohio from a line of her poetry: "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant," because Lindsay's book presents a strong argument that Anderson's novel reveals a powerful truth about the nature of American identity, not by looking directly at the issue but by subtly revealing the fictive nature of American identity. For this, Lindsay argues, the novel's "interrelated tale" form was ideal. Rather than privileging the individual, as in the traditional novel, Anderson's radical structure examines the manner in which each figure in the narrative effects a version of romantic selfhood and how these internalized scripts collide with prevailing community narratives, portraying American identity as a self-authored negotiation between the individual and the community.

The introductory chapter discusses some theories about Anderson's small town aesthetic, in which the problematic nature of the American self is particularly heightened. The small town, Lindsay notes, was for Anderson not a folksy venue for celebrating American values but rather the perfect medium for revealing a postmodern awareness of the fictive nature of American identity. Anderson's theory about the nature of that identity, Lindsay argues, is what he famously referred to as the "Grotesque." What makes one a "grotesque" is adopting a truth for one's self and trying to live according to this invented "truth." The democratically inclusive nature of Winesburg reveals that all of its denizens are thus "grotesques," which, as the word generally denotes something aberrant or bizarrely strange, is rather oxymoronic. But this was just the point, according to Lindsay. Winesburg, Ohio shows that the common trait of Americans is a sense of identity predicated on being a singular, solitary individual at odds with the larger community. The first two chapters after the introductory one examine this nature closely, showing how the ways in which the characters' ingrained meta-narratives contend with one another and help form the "grotesques" that populate the story—particularly how sexual desires are internally narratized so that the principal self metaphorically becomes the romantic script. The story of the misanthropic and misogynistic Wash Williams, for instance, is unfolded to show how Wash's early romanticized idealization of his wife is simply an inversion of his later hatred of all women. The inner desire of the respectable and well-liked Reverend Curtis Hartman to experience God's numinous power as would an Old Testament prophet is grafted, rather fetishistically, onto Kate Swift. The next two chapters look at how Anderson's theory of the self engages critically with the female characters, and especially in their relationships to men. Lindsay argues that Anderson's women deserve more than the dismissive treatment of earlier critics and suggests that many of these women (though not immune to falling prey to their own romantic narratives of selfhood) recognize the fictive nature of this selfhood more clearly than the men, and that in them Anderson has created some of the strongest female characters in American fiction.

Lindsay's task, as he describes it, is two-fold: he wishes to argue that both Anderson and Winesburg, Ohio deserve more critical attention and that the text is as worthy of close sustained reading as any authored by Anderson's more canonical modernist contemporaries (e.g., Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald). Carefully scrutinizing the text's interweaving narratives, Lindsay demonstrates that Anderson's technique of overlapping stories is not haphazard or accidental but the sure and skillful work of an artist, revealing nuances and surprises that layer meaning upon meaning. Although his attention to only a relatively small number of "stories" somewhat belies his contention that the text should be treated as a novel and not a collection of...