章节正文
say, with only slight overstatement, that what An-
derson is doing in Winesburg, Ohio could be de-
scribed as "antirealistic," fictions notable less for
precise locale and social detail than for a highly per-
sonal, even strange vision of American life. Narrow,
intense, almost claustrophobic, the result is a book
about extreme states of being, the collapse of men
and women who have lost their psychic bearings
and now hover, at best tolerated, at the edge of the
little community in which they live. It would be a
gross mistake, though not one likely to occur by
now, if we were to take Winesburg, Ohio as a social
photograph of "the typical small town" (whatever
that might be.) Anderson evokes a depressed land-
scape in which lost souls wander about; they make
their flitting appearances mostly in the darkness of
night, these stumps and shades of humanity. This
vision has its truth, and at its best it is a terrible if
narrow truth--but it is itself also grotesque, with the
tone of the authorial voice and the mode of composi-
tion forming muted signals of the book's content.
Figures like Dr. Parcival, Kate Swift, and Wash Wil-
liams are not, nor are they meant to be, "fully-
rounded" characters such as we can expect in realis-
tic fiction; they are the shards of life, glimpsed for
a moment, the debris of suffering and defeat. In
each story one of them emerges, shyly or with a
false assertiveness, trying to reach out to compan-
ionship and love, driven almost mad by the search
for human connection. In the economy of Winesburg
these grotesques matter less in their own right than
as agents or symptoms of that "indefinable hunger"
for meaning which is Anderson's preoccupation.
Brushing against one another, passing one an-
other in the streets or the fields, they see bodies and
hear voices, but it does not really matter--they are
disconnected, psychically lost. Is this due to the par-
ticular circumstances of small-town America as An-
derson saw it at the turn of the century? Or does
he feel that he is sketching an inescapable human
condition which makes all of us bear the burden of
loneliness? Alice Hindman in the story "Adventure"
turns her face to the wall and tries "to force herself
to face the fact that many people must live and die
alone, even in Winesburg." Or especially in Wines-
burg? Such impressions have been put in more gen-
eral terms in Anderson's only successful novel, Poor
White:
All men lead their lives behind a wall of misun-
derstanding they have themselves built, and
most men die in silence and unnoticed behind
the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from
his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, be-
comes absorbed in doing something that is per-
sonal, useful and beautiful. Word of his activities
is carried over the walls.
These "walls" of misunderstanding are only sel-
dom due to physical deformities (Wing Biddlebaum
in "Hands") or oppressive social arrangements (Kate
Swift in "The Teacher.") Misunderstanding, loneli-
ness, the inability to articulate, are all seen by An-
derson as virtually a root condition, something
deeply set in our natures. Nor are these people, the
grotesques, simply to be pitied and dismissed; at
some point in their lives they have known desire,
have dreamt of ambition, have hoped for friendship.
In all of them there was once something sweet, "like
the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards in
Winesburg." Now, broken and adrift, they clutch at
some rigid notion or idea, a "truth" which turns
out to bear the stamp of monomania, leaving them
helplessly sputtering, desperate to speak out but un-
able to. Winesburg, Ohio registers the losses inescap-
able to life, and it does so with a deep fraternal
sadness, a sympathy casting a mild glow over the
entire book. "Words," as the American writer Paula
Fox has said, "are nets through which all truth es-
capes." Yet what do we have but words?
They want, these Winesburg grotesques*, to unpack
their hearts, to release emotions buried and fes-
tering. Wash Williams tries to explain his eccentricity
but hardly can; Louise Bentley "tried to talk but
could say nothing"; Enoch Robinson retreats to a
fantasy world, inventing "his own people to whom
he could really talk and to whom he explained the
things he had been unable to explain to living
people."
In his own somber way, Anderson has here
touched upon one of the great themes of American
literature, especially Midwestern literature, in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the
struggle for speech as it entails a search for the self.
Perhaps the central Winesburg story, tracing the
basic movements of the book, is "Paper Pills," in
which the old Doctor Reefy sits "in his empty office
close by a window that was covered with cobwebs,"
writes down some thoughts on slips of paper ("pyr-
amids of truth," he calls them) and then stuffs them
into his pockets where they "become round hard
balls" soon to be discarded. What Dr. Reefy's
"truths" may be we never know; Anderson simply
persuades us that to this lonely old man they are
utterly precious and thereby incommunicable, forming
a kind of blurred moral signature.
After a time the attentive reader will notice in
these stories a recurrent pattern of theme and inci-
dent: the grotesques, gathering up a little courage,
venture out into the streets of Winesburg, often in
the dark, there to establish some initiatory relation-
ship with George Willard, the young reporter who
hasn't yet lived long enough to become a grotesque.
Hesitantly, fearfully, or with a sputtering incoherent
rage, they approach him, pleading that he listen to
their stories in the hope that perhaps they can find
some sort of renewal in his youthful voice. Upon
this sensitive and fragile boy they pour out their
desires and frustrations. Dr. Parcival hopes that
George Willard "will write the book I may never get
written," and for Enoch Robinson, the boy repre-
sents "the youthfulsadness, young man's sadness,
the sadness of a growing boy in a village at the
year's end [which may open] the lips of the old
man."
What the grotesques really need is each other, but
their estrangement is so extreme they cannot estab-
lish direct ties--they can only hope for connection
through George Willard. The burden this places on
the boy is more than he can bear. He listens to them
attentively, he is sympathetic to their complaints,
but finally he is too absorbed in his own dreams.
The grotesques turn to him because he seems "dif-
ferent"--younger, more open, not yet hardened--
but it is precisely this "difference" that keeps him
from responding as warmly as they want. It is
hardly the boy's fault; it is simply in the nature of
things. For George Willard, the grotesques form a
moment in his education; for the grotesques, their
encounters with George Willard come to seem like
a stamp of hopelessness.
The prose Anderson employs in telling these sto-
ries may seem at first glance to be simple: short sen-
tences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax.
In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in
which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest
Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the
base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an econ-
omy and a shapeliness seldom found in ordinary
speech or even oral narration. What Anderson em-
ploys here is a stylized version of the American lan-
guage, sometimes rising to quite formal rhetorical
patterns and sometimes sinking to a self-conscious
mannerism. But at its best, Anderson's prose style
in Winesburg, Ohio is a supple instrument, yielding
that "low fine music" which he admired so much in
the stories of Turgenev.
One of the worst fates that can befall a writer is
that of self-imitation: the effort later in life, often
desperate, to recapture the tones and themes of
youthful beginnings. Something of the sort hap-
pened with Anderson's later writings. Most critics
and readers grew impatient with the work he did
after, say, 1927 or 1928; they felt he was constantly
repeating his gestures of emotional "groping"--
what he had called in Winesburg, Ohio the "indefin-
able hunger" that prods and torments people. It be-
came the critical fashion to see Anderson's
"gropings" as a sign of delayed adolescence, a fail-
ure to develop as a writer. Once he wrote a chilling
reply to those who dismissed him in this way: "I
don't think it matters much, all this calling a man a
muddler, a groper, etc.... The very man who
throws such words as these knows in his heart that
he is also facing a wall." This remark seems to me
both dignified and strong, yet it must be admitted
that there was some justice in the negative re-
sponses to his later work. For what characterized
it was not so much "groping" as the imitation of
"groping," the self-caricature of a writer who feels
driven back upon an earlier self that is, alas, no
longer available.
But Winesburg, Ohio remains a vital work, fresh
and authentic. Most of its stories are composed in a
minor key, a tone of subdued pathos--pathos mark-
ing both the nature and limit of Anderson's talent.
(He spoke of himself as a "minor writer.") In a few
stories, however, he was able to reach beyond pa-
thos and to strike a tragic note. The single best story
in Winesburg, Ohio is, I think, "The Untold Lie," in
which the urgency of choice becomes an outer sign
of a tragic element in the human condition. And in
Anderson's single greatest story, "The Egg," which
appeared a few years after Winesburg, Ohio, he suc-
ceeded in bringing together a surface of farce with
an undertone of tragedy. "The Egg" is an American
masterpiece.
Anderson's influence upon later American writ-
ers, especially those who wrote short stories, has
been enormous. Ernest Hemingway and William
Faulkner both praised him as a writer who brought
a new tremor of feeling, a new sense of introspec-
tiveness to the American short story. As Faulkner
derson is doing in Winesburg, Ohio could be de-
scribed as "antirealistic," fictions notable less for
precise locale and social detail than for a highly per-
sonal, even strange vision of American life. Narrow,
intense, almost claustrophobic, the result is a book
about extreme states of being, the collapse of men
and women who have lost their psychic bearings
and now hover, at best tolerated, at the edge of the
little community in which they live. It would be a
gross mistake, though not one likely to occur by
now, if we were to take Winesburg, Ohio as a social
photograph of "the typical small town" (whatever
that might be.) Anderson evokes a depressed land-
scape in which lost souls wander about; they make
their flitting appearances mostly in the darkness of
night, these stumps and shades of humanity. This
vision has its truth, and at its best it is a terrible if
narrow truth--but it is itself also grotesque, with the
tone of the authorial voice and the mode of composi-
tion forming muted signals of the book's content.
Figures like Dr. Parcival, Kate Swift, and Wash Wil-
liams are not, nor are they meant to be, "fully-
rounded" characters such as we can expect in realis-
tic fiction; they are the shards of life, glimpsed for
a moment, the debris of suffering and defeat. In
each story one of them emerges, shyly or with a
false assertiveness, trying to reach out to compan-
ionship and love, driven almost mad by the search
for human connection. In the economy of Winesburg
these grotesques matter less in their own right than
as agents or symptoms of that "indefinable hunger"
for meaning which is Anderson's preoccupation.
Brushing against one another, passing one an-
other in the streets or the fields, they see bodies and
hear voices, but it does not really matter--they are
disconnected, psychically lost. Is this due to the par-
ticular circumstances of small-town America as An-
derson saw it at the turn of the century? Or does
he feel that he is sketching an inescapable human
condition which makes all of us bear the burden of
loneliness? Alice Hindman in the story "Adventure"
turns her face to the wall and tries "to force herself
to face the fact that many people must live and die
alone, even in Winesburg." Or especially in Wines-
burg? Such impressions have been put in more gen-
eral terms in Anderson's only successful novel, Poor
White:
All men lead their lives behind a wall of misun-
derstanding they have themselves built, and
most men die in silence and unnoticed behind
the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from
his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, be-
comes absorbed in doing something that is per-
sonal, useful and beautiful. Word of his activities
is carried over the walls.
These "walls" of misunderstanding are only sel-
dom due to physical deformities (Wing Biddlebaum
in "Hands") or oppressive social arrangements (Kate
Swift in "The Teacher.") Misunderstanding, loneli-
ness, the inability to articulate, are all seen by An-
derson as virtually a root condition, something
deeply set in our natures. Nor are these people, the
grotesques, simply to be pitied and dismissed; at
some point in their lives they have known desire,
have dreamt of ambition, have hoped for friendship.
In all of them there was once something sweet, "like
the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards in
Winesburg." Now, broken and adrift, they clutch at
some rigid notion or idea, a "truth" which turns
out to bear the stamp of monomania, leaving them
helplessly sputtering, desperate to speak out but un-
able to. Winesburg, Ohio registers the losses inescap-
able to life, and it does so with a deep fraternal
sadness, a sympathy casting a mild glow over the
entire book. "Words," as the American writer Paula
Fox has said, "are nets through which all truth es-
capes." Yet what do we have but words?
They want, these Winesburg grotesques*, to unpack
their hearts, to release emotions buried and fes-
tering. Wash Williams tries to explain his eccentricity
but hardly can; Louise Bentley "tried to talk but
could say nothing"; Enoch Robinson retreats to a
fantasy world, inventing "his own people to whom
he could really talk and to whom he explained the
things he had been unable to explain to living
people."
In his own somber way, Anderson has here
touched upon one of the great themes of American
literature, especially Midwestern literature, in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the
struggle for speech as it entails a search for the self.
Perhaps the central Winesburg story, tracing the
basic movements of the book, is "Paper Pills," in
which the old Doctor Reefy sits "in his empty office
close by a window that was covered with cobwebs,"
writes down some thoughts on slips of paper ("pyr-
amids of truth," he calls them) and then stuffs them
into his pockets where they "become round hard
balls" soon to be discarded. What Dr. Reefy's
"truths" may be we never know; Anderson simply
persuades us that to this lonely old man they are
utterly precious and thereby incommunicable, forming
a kind of blurred moral signature.
After a time the attentive reader will notice in
these stories a recurrent pattern of theme and inci-
dent: the grotesques, gathering up a little courage,
venture out into the streets of Winesburg, often in
the dark, there to establish some initiatory relation-
ship with George Willard, the young reporter who
hasn't yet lived long enough to become a grotesque.
Hesitantly, fearfully, or with a sputtering incoherent
rage, they approach him, pleading that he listen to
their stories in the hope that perhaps they can find
some sort of renewal in his youthful voice. Upon
this sensitive and fragile boy they pour out their
desires and frustrations. Dr. Parcival hopes that
George Willard "will write the book I may never get
written," and for Enoch Robinson, the boy repre-
sents "the youthfulsadness, young man's sadness,
the sadness of a growing boy in a village at the
year's end [which may open] the lips of the old
man."
What the grotesques really need is each other, but
their estrangement is so extreme they cannot estab-
lish direct ties--they can only hope for connection
through George Willard. The burden this places on
the boy is more than he can bear. He listens to them
attentively, he is sympathetic to their complaints,
but finally he is too absorbed in his own dreams.
The grotesques turn to him because he seems "dif-
ferent"--younger, more open, not yet hardened--
but it is precisely this "difference" that keeps him
from responding as warmly as they want. It is
hardly the boy's fault; it is simply in the nature of
things. For George Willard, the grotesques form a
moment in his education; for the grotesques, their
encounters with George Willard come to seem like
a stamp of hopelessness.
The prose Anderson employs in telling these sto-
ries may seem at first glance to be simple: short sen-
tences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax.
In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in
which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest
Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the
base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an econ-
omy and a shapeliness seldom found in ordinary
speech or even oral narration. What Anderson em-
ploys here is a stylized version of the American lan-
guage, sometimes rising to quite formal rhetorical
patterns and sometimes sinking to a self-conscious
mannerism. But at its best, Anderson's prose style
in Winesburg, Ohio is a supple instrument, yielding
that "low fine music" which he admired so much in
the stories of Turgenev.
One of the worst fates that can befall a writer is
that of self-imitation: the effort later in life, often
desperate, to recapture the tones and themes of
youthful beginnings. Something of the sort hap-
pened with Anderson's later writings. Most critics
and readers grew impatient with the work he did
after, say, 1927 or 1928; they felt he was constantly
repeating his gestures of emotional "groping"--
what he had called in Winesburg, Ohio the "indefin-
able hunger" that prods and torments people. It be-
came the critical fashion to see Anderson's
"gropings" as a sign of delayed adolescence, a fail-
ure to develop as a writer. Once he wrote a chilling
reply to those who dismissed him in this way: "I
don't think it matters much, all this calling a man a
muddler, a groper, etc.... The very man who
throws such words as these knows in his heart that
he is also facing a wall." This remark seems to me
both dignified and strong, yet it must be admitted
that there was some justice in the negative re-
sponses to his later work. For what characterized
it was not so much "groping" as the imitation of
"groping," the self-caricature of a writer who feels
driven back upon an earlier self that is, alas, no
longer available.
But Winesburg, Ohio remains a vital work, fresh
and authentic. Most of its stories are composed in a
minor key, a tone of subdued pathos--pathos mark-
ing both the nature and limit of Anderson's talent.
(He spoke of himself as a "minor writer.") In a few
stories, however, he was able to reach beyond pa-
thos and to strike a tragic note. The single best story
in Winesburg, Ohio is, I think, "The Untold Lie," in
which the urgency of choice becomes an outer sign
of a tragic element in the human condition. And in
Anderson's single greatest story, "The Egg," which
appeared a few years after Winesburg, Ohio, he suc-
ceeded in bringing together a surface of farce with
an undertone of tragedy. "The Egg" is an American
masterpiece.
Anderson's influence upon later American writ-
ers, especially those who wrote short stories, has
been enormous. Ernest Hemingway and William
Faulkner both praised him as a writer who brought
a new tremor of feeling, a new sense of introspec-
tiveness to the American short story. As Faulkner
- vision [´viʒən]
n.视觉；想象力；幻影 (初中英语单词) - extreme [ik´stri:m] a.尽头的 n.极端 (初中英语单词)
- wander [´wɔndə, ´wɑ:n:dər] v.徘徊；流浪 (初中英语单词)
- mostly [´məustli] ad.主要地；多半；通常 (初中英语单词)
- humanity [hju:´mæniti] n.人类；人性；仁慈 (初中英语单词)
- suffering [´sʌfəriŋ] n.痛苦；灾害 (初中英语单词)
- driven [´driv(ə)n] drive 的过去分词 (初中英语单词)
- connection [kə´nekʃən] n.联系；关系；联运 (初中英语单词)
- economy [i´kɔnəmi] n.经济；机制；组织 (初中英语单词)
- physical [´fizikəl] a.物质的；有形的 (初中英语单词)
- ambition [æm´biʃən] n.雄心，野心；企图 (初中英语单词)
- clutch [klʌtʃ] v.抓住 n.爪子；控制 (初中英语单词)
- desperate [´despərit] a.拼死的；绝望的 (初中英语单词)
- sympathy [´simpəθi] n.同情，怜悯 (初中英语单词)
- writer [´raitə] n.作者；作家 (初中英语单词)
- release [ri´li:s] vt&n.释放；放松；赦免 (初中英语单词)
- unable [ʌn´eibəl] a.不能的；无能为力的 (初中英语单词)
- literature [´litərətʃə] n.文学；文献；著作 (初中英语单词)
- lonely [´ləunli] a.孤独的；无人烟的 (初中英语单词)
- thereby [´ðeəbai] ad.因此，由此 (初中英语单词)
- attentive [ə´tentiv] a.注意的；殷勤的 (初中英语单词)
- youthful [´ju:θfəl] a.年轻的；青年的 (初中英语单词)
- sympathetic [,simpə´θetik] a.同情的，有同情心的 (初中英语单词)
- vocabulary [və´kæbjuləri, vəu-] n.词汇；词汇量 (初中英语单词)
- formal [´fɔ:məl] a.正式的；外表的 (初中英语单词)
- instrument [´instrumənt] n.仪器；手段；乐器 (初中英语单词)
- emotional [i´məuʃənəl] a.易动感情的；情感的 (初中英语单词)
- tragedy [´trædʒidi] n.悲剧；惨案；灾难 (初中英语单词)
- enormous [i´nɔ:məs] a.巨大地，很，极 (初中英语单词)
- notable [´nəutəbəl] a.显著的 n.名人 (高中英语单词)
- collapse [kə´læps] vi.&n.崩溃；病倒；衰败 (高中英语单词)
- community [kə´mju:niti] n.团体；社区；公众 (高中英语单词)
- typical [´tipikəl] a.典型的；象征的 (高中英语单词)
- fiction [´fikʃən] n.小说；虚构；谎言 (高中英语单词)
- reporter [ri´pɔ:tə] n.报告人；记者；广播员 (高中英语单词)
- sensitive [´sensitiv] a.敏感的；感光的 (高中英语单词)
- sadness [´sædnis] n.悲哀；悲痛；凄惨 (高中英语单词)
- precisely [pri´saisli] ad.精确地；刻板地 (高中英语单词)
- befall [bi´fɔ:l] v.降临；发表(于) (高中英语单词)
- impatient [im´peiʃənt] a.不耐烦的，急躁的 (高中英语单词)
- critical [´kritikəl] a.批评的；关键性的 (高中英语单词)
- dignified [´dignifaid] a.尊贵的 (高中英语单词)
- negative [´negətiv] a.否定的 n.否定词 (高中英语单词)
- imitation [,imi´teiʃən] n.模仿；仿制品；赝品 (高中英语单词)
- tragic [´trædʒik] a.悲剧的；悲惨的 (高中英语单词)
- grotesque [grəu´tesk] a.奇异的，想象中的 (英语四级单词)
- trying [´traiiŋ] a.难堪的；费劲的 (英语四级单词)
- virtually [´və:tʃuəli] ad.实际上，实质上 (英语四级单词)
- somber [´sɔmbə] a.昏暗的；忧郁的 (英语四级单词)
- gathering [´gæðəriŋ] n.集会，聚集 (英语四级单词)
- fragile [´frædʒail] a.易碎的；虚弱的 (英语四级单词)
- preceding [pri(:)´si:diŋ] a.在先的；前面的 (英语四级单词)
- version [´və:ʃən, ´və:rʒən] n.翻译；说明；译本 (英语四级单词)
- authentic [ɔ:´θentik] a.真实的；可靠的 (英语四级单词)
- composed [kəm´pəuzd] a.镇静自若的 (英语四级单词)
- depressed [di´prest] a.消沉的；萧条的 (英语六级单词)
- misunderstanding [,misʌndə´stændiŋ] n.误解；隔阂 (英语六级单词)
- oppressive [ə´presiv] a.压制的；沉重的 (英语六级单词)
- inability [,inə´biliti] n.无能，无力 (英语六级单词)
- articulate [ɑ:´tikjulit] a.口齿清楚的 v.连接 (英语六级单词)
- calling [´kɔ:liŋ] n.点名；职业；欲望 (英语六级单词)
- untold [,ʌn´təuld] a.没有说到的；无数的 (英语六级单词)
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章节正文
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