Metafiction, Literary History, and the Limits of Industrial Identity in Winesburg, Ohio

There is a story.—I cannot tell it.—I have no words.

Sherwood Anderson, The Triumph of the Egg (1921)

In January 1914, Henry Ford doubled the income of laborers at the Ford Motor Co. plant in Highland Park, Michigan, by instituting a $5 per day wage. While broadening the economic horizons of workers and their families, Ford paired this raise with a stipulation. To qualify, laborers would have to open their homes to inspection by the newly established Sociology Department, a subdivision that would employ nearly two hundred middle managers and physicians by December. According to the department's criteria, acceptable families would demonstrate temperance, orderliness, sexual normality, and well-spent leisure time. They would function something like assembly lines.¹

In his first autobiographical work, A Storyteller's Story (1924), Sherwood Anderson ridiculed the impact of industrialism on American identity: "Surely individuality is ruinous to an age of standardization. It should at once and without mercy be crushed. Let us give all workers larger and larger salaries but let us crush out of them at once all flowering of individualities."² Anderson's corpus is replete with criticisms of the second industrial revolution and its godhead, "the man Ford of Detroit," whom Anderson held responsible for the homogenization of a formerly individualistic American identity (195). More specifically, Anderson saw in industry the deterioration of a heteronormative masculinity fundamental to the development of both individuality and agency. Industrialization, by Anderson's account, had rendered the American male "impotent" (195). As Mark Whalan has noted, Anderson sought to revive the masculinity of an idealized agrarian past through dalliances with a racist primitivism and, more visibly in his early fiction, tragic portrayals of men made "fairies" by industrial modernity. (In one story, for example, the Cowley father and son are literally made "queer" in the eyes of the town as they transition unsuccessfully from agrarian to commercial labor.)³ While recognizing the limitations of Anderson's social vision, I argue in this essay that a critique of industrialism both more powerful and palatable may be found in Anderson's use of and innovation in metafictional narrative. Attention to the self-aware, speculative dynamics of his seminal short story cycle, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), reveals a paradoxical destabilization of the very masculinist and homophobic frameworks on which Anderson's project seems to rest. And in establishing an unexpectedly flexible model of identity, I claim, Anderson marks his resistance to Fordist subjectivity as not only urgent but also deeply pertinent to our understanding of self-referential literature in the contexts of postindustrial society and late capitalism.

Throughout Winesburg, grammatical errors and temporal slippages facilitate self-referential speculation on the narrative's deficiencies and susceptibility to correction. Describing out of tense and time how the Winesburg tales fail to entice and might be improved on, Anderson's narrator stages the metafictional technique central to the text. We can attribute Winesburg's self-referential faculties to Anderson's reverence for the oral storytelling tradition of the Midwest, which Anderson scholars of the twentieth century associated with authenticity, however troubled that association might be. Anderson's sources, Horace Gregory wrote in 1949, "were the air he breathed, childhood memories of talk."⁴ The title of A Storyteller's Story marks Anderson's priorities. Stories are to be told, and Anderson, like his father, an uprooted southerner, is a teller. Likewise, Anderson crafts in his Winesburg narrator "a major theorist regarding the way the Midwest is constructed and the way those constructions affect those who live there."⁵ His stories are not about Winesburg but of Winesburg, voiced imperfectly, although with ethnographic expertise. Orality often comes at the expense of narrative organization; it is not infrequent that Anderson's text appears to glitch out chronologically, jumping days, months, or years as the narrator meditates on possible modifications to his tales. In his introduction to Winesburg, Malcolm Cowley identifies "time as a logical succession of events" as "Anderson's greatest difficulty in writing novels or even long stories." "He got his tenses confused," Cowley adds, and "carried his heroes ten years...