Irving Howe
THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE *
The history of
Winesburg
is a curious instance of the way
criticism, with its passion for "placing," can reduce a writer to harm–
less irrelevance. At various times the book has been banished to
such categories as the revolt against the village, the rejection of
middle-class morality, the proclamation of sexual freedom, and the
rise of cultural primitivism. Whatever the justification for such tags
may once have been, it is now quite obvious that Anderson's revolt
was directed against something far more fundamental than the re–
strictions of the American village and was, for that matter, equally
relevant to the American city; that
Winesburg
is not primarily con–
cerned with morality, middle-class or otherwise, if only because most
of its characters are not in a position to engage in moral choice; that
while its subject is frequently tangential to sex it expresses no opinions
about and offers no proposals for sexual conduct, free or restricted;
and that its style is only dimly related to anything that might be
called primitive.
If
read as social fiction
Winesburg
is somewhat
absurd, for no such town could possibly exist.
If
read as a venture
into abnormal psychology the book seems almost lurid, for within
its
total structure the behavior of its hysterics and paranoids is quite
purposeless and, in the absence of any norms to which their devia–
tions might be compared, even incomprehensible.
In
fact, if read
according to the usual expectations of twentieth-century naturalistic
or conventionally realistic fiction,
Winesburg
seems incoherent and
the charge of emotion it can still raise inexplicable.
In
its fundamental quality
Winesburg
is non-realistic ; it does
not seek to gratify the eye with a verisimilitude to social forms in the
way a Dreiser or Lewis novel does.
In
rather shy lyrical outbursts
the book conveys a vision of American life as a depressed landscape
*
This is a section from a critical biography of Sherwood Anderson, to be
published this spring by William Sloane Associates, in the American Men of
Letters Series.
