Sherwood Anderson is passive, a little vague, and decidedly weird. Weird for 1919, anyway. And eccentric for Winesburg, Ohio, I might add.
His style is, like I said, very passive, but only so because Anderson tells the story in past tense. Also I think the passivity adds to the stories' tone of an old man creaking in and out of bed to write down his half dreams. The tone is slow, but like the youth inside the old man, the story itself is undisciplined and modern. I would also like to point out that Anderson switches from strict third person to a bit of first person smack dab in the middle of this story. Suddenly the old man writer is not just a story, Anderson knows him. And, I get the strange feeling, Anderson possibly is him (though looking at his age at the time this was published--43--he isn't terribly old). Then! In the second to last paragraph, he throws in some second person! Just for fun, obviously.
This story as a whole would make a great 2-D early Disney cartoon short, I think. The colors of the Grotesques in the old man's dream would be spectacular all drawn or painted out.
Both Anderson stories, however, seem to have morals at their ends. These are the bare bones of the morals I picked up on, anyway: in "Book of the Grotesque" it is ' Truth is beautiful, but it makes people grotesque.' And in "Paper Pills" (whose title I don't particularly fancy) it is 'sweet beauty can come from unexpected, imperfection.'
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Both writers have a passive style, right? One thing I noticed from the passages you picked from Hemingway is that his hypotaxis doesn't happen. Same with Anderson. They have sentences whose parts seem like they should have some logical connection, but they don't. This creates a tension between the expectation of an organizing intellect and its absence. It makes the world seem even more eerie.
ReplyDelete