Unit 1 - A Nation's Coming of Age

The US at the turn of the century

Former beliefs and values are rejected and a search for new ones begins. The Civil War had initiated significant social and economic changes. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) paved the way for existential reflection and the divine nature of humankind suffered a severe drawback. Karl Marx's Das Kapital (1867) stressed the dependence of human lives on economic imperatives. Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) stated the unconscious was the custodian of socially unacceptable impulses and desires that must remain repressed. Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (1916) asserted that space and time are part of a continuum. Thus, the physical world was a dynamic flux that resisted categorization and absolute representation.  James Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion (1890-1915) emphasized religious beliefs as cultural phenomena.

All these texts coincided with the argument that human actions and personality were far from being the result of conscious effort and will. Freud and Frazer disclosed the unreliability of superficial reality and rational thinking. The new era rejected the authority of fallible establishments and set out to replace the lost references. Modernist authors thus understood the subject as fragmented and deconstructed its deceptive wholeness. They also challenged the idea of life as a line. Twentieth-century scientific research on the matter and the universe would soon see concepts like "probability", "relativity", and "quantum gaps" replacing positivists' terms such as "causality", "certainty" and "wholeness". Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle" shaped the representation of people and events in literature.

Industrialization and technology transformed life entirely. With the railway system, cars, and movie theaters a mass society was underway and its most accomplished representation was the assembly line.  Life became faster and physical mobility became interesting for sociological and artistic reasons. Automobiles, trains, and planes provided Americans with machines that entailed mythical power and freedom. The US had been a fragmentary agrarian country in the nineteenth century, but the turn of the century witnessed the consolidation of a nation.  The frontier disappeared in a double sense: economic factor and myth. It was closed in 1893, and it meant the disappearance of an economic and psychological territory for opportunity and freedom. Meanwhile, industrialization and mechanization threatened the pastoral image the Americans had about themselves.  The myth of the frontier was articulated as a masculine, middle-class, and white principle. Boundaries undergo a revision as much as the pastoral myth is reevaluated. The American Dream had its parallel in a fantasy of the open land and the harmonious relationship between human beings and nature.

Part of the American process of national definition was its isolation from European and world affairs. America's involvement in 1917 intensified the horror and lack of confidence in institutions and metanarratives and it seriously questioned the human capacity to organize and direct life through reason. Enlightenment gave way to other systems of beliefs, or at least to the attempt of shaping them. Marxism came to the front, Freudian psychology became very popular and Catholicism became an apt option for others. The dissolution of America's sense of itself was already observed in the Realist and Regionalist trends of the 19th century. Materialism defied the Jeffersonian ideal (the agrarian, America-as-a-virgin-land utopia where independence and individuality were basic values)

Literary Modernism in America

A sense of loss and uncertainty, and the need for spiritual relief, shaped the literature of the day. American Literature was concerned with quests, a doomed search for sense and logic in the face of a chaotic perception of experience. However, the modern mind was in fact born with the end of religion as an organic reference of human existence. The process started as the Middle Ages ended and gave way to the advent of the reasoning mind and Renaissance.  What we broadly call Modernism, is the later period of that modernity in which human rationality questioned itself and the world around, challenging the 19th century's moralism and conventionality and reshaping moral values and codes of conduct. A string of small avant-garde movements was already bringing new ideas and beliefs into visibility in the second half of the Victorian Era. All artistic endeavors, from architecture to painting, to music searched for some kind of pattern that could restore the damaged old order. They deviated from Victorian compartmentalization and repression of experience, and instead highlighted the openness and continuity of life. Human experience was conceived as dynamic and fluent, which made abstract conceptualizations and absolute knowledge impossible to attain.   

Art embraced a revolt against the nineteenth-century commitment to mimesis (reproduction of reality as accurately as possible). Impressionistic painters sought emotion encompassed in a scene. Cubism, Expressionism, and other forms of non-representational expression further moved from mimetical intention in art. Music moved from its classical harmonic compositions to the experiments in rhythm sought by blues and jazz. Victorian dichotomies were overcome. and wholeness was attempted by overlapping disparate fragments or planes of existence. Some critics use the term "Modernism" in its extensive sense, that is to say, as an interational artistic sensibility that sprang from the European bohemia and embraced all avant-garde authors and works from 1890 to 1930. Others restrict the term to what will be labled "High Modernism", i.e. the trend including the most innovative authors, whose works range from about 1910 to 1930.   In the book, "Modernism" is used in an all-inclusive meaning, containing the most radical formal manifestations as well as milder forms of interrogation of former ideas and literary practices. The term "Modernist" comprises those artists who sought to emphasize the alienation and inconsistency of modern life and traditional forms of thinking, living and creating, as well as efforts to mirror the psychological process of the human mind.

According to the characteristics of the era, literary Modernism refers to those authors and literary works that: Feel the need to investigate new forms and styles to convey the interrogative mood of the era and question the conventions to install some freshness among the signs of decadence.  Stress fragmented forms and discontinuity which mirrors the dissolution of beliefs in institutions, Newtonian science, and history.  Settings and plots evoke collective or individual past Reevaluation and reinterpretation of myths to provide order to an increasingly meaningless existence. Characters in isolation and alienation who lack the energetic drive. Unmotivated, benumbed, or doomed characters reflect the overwhelming power of the social and economic forces at work. An emphasis on the individual and the inward workings of consciousness, over the social and public domains. The search for impressionism and subjectivity favoring multiple perspectives, unedited reports, and inexistent hazy moral positions. Attention to the new social concerns demanded by the increasing demographic variety. Exploration of previously silenced voices and the changing power relations between races, sexes, and classes.

The general impression given by Modernist literature was that of a disunited world in constant transit. Influenced by Post-Impressionist art, authors attempted to reproduce the broken images of Cubism and the shattered forms of EXpressionism. According to Christopher J. Knight, Modernism was defined by a doctrine of perception the focused on the object. Thus, representation was replaced by presentation, invoking a new understanding of objectivity. The artist should perceive the object and try to reveal its intrinsic value.   Apart from the myth of the frontier, which is nuclear to US literature and culture, two other ideas underwent resistance in this era: the City upon the Hill and the American Adam.  T.S. Eliot's influential work The Wasteland (1922) provided the spatial image that suited the dominating feeling of ruin and consumption. manifold images of wastelands of physical, sexual, or moral nature invaded Modernist works. The mythical figure of the American Adam stood for individualism, self-reliance, mobility, innocence, lack of commitments, and youth. His painfully trying to cope with the Wasteland configured the literature of the era. Two main literary myths epitomized this: Babbit and Gatsy. American literature of the early 20th century was concerned with spiritual survival in an inextricable universe. Each author highlighted his or her particular cause of restlessness, and each verbalized it with personal strategies and tones. This variety is derived from the lack of fixity and the prevailing disbelief. The modern spirit challenged assumptions about reality and illustrated the drive to come to terms with and articulate modernity.  

A variety of approaches to that modernity coexisted in American Modernism, reflecting the different styles of perceiving and representing which results in a kaleidoscopic scenery: Romanticism: the romantic rejection of reason and institutional certainty in favor of the individual's experience persisted. Imagination empowered the Modernist artist to create coherence out of chaos. However, Modernist aesthetic principles were different from those of Romanticism. Realism:: Although accurate pictures of society and the human experience were still produced, they hinted at the author's changing attitude towards the dubious accurate representation of the real. Realism would thus be challenged and renewed by the aesthetic upheavals of the late nineteenth century. High Modernism: (See units 2 and 4) The Zenit of modernism comprised several authors who reconsidered traditional literary assumptions and the role of literature in the modern era. Naturalism: American Naturalism (as opposed to English Naturalism) is characterized by its interest in environmental issues and its debt to the Calvinist substratum of American culture. The spirit of the movement remained in the attention paid to the sense of imprisonment in America's progress. The portrayal of individuals deprived of free will allowed them to retreat from making moral judgments. These naturalistic outskirts were not necessarily attached to the realistic strategies that some critics hold to be fundamental in previous naturalistic works.

Approaching Anderson's "Hands"

Anderson belonged to a generation of midwestern writers who remained traditionalists but proved to be rebels nevertheless. They portrayed small-town life and examined elemental struggles, but revitalized what the eastern taste called "regionalist" literature.  He is one of the authors that heralded the literary innovation of American literature and one of the first authors to "become aware of the implications in the work of Sigmund Freud, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein" (White: 3). Winesburg Ohio (1919) offered a new understanding of the short story form, contributed to the transition of narrative techniques to the modern era, and prepared the path for some leading writers of the 20th century.  The novel/collection is set in an imaginary town that resembles Clyde, where Anderson spent his childhood. He approached his characters with realism but their struggle for integration and compassion surpassed the temporal and geographical limits of the setting. Anderson sought a mystic encounter between individuals that permanent barriers made troublesome. He deplored the age of the machine and pursued plainer states of being.  He structured a "novel" around a series of connected stories, independent but conceived as a whole, in which he explored the psychological dimensions of his characters. Winesburg thus represents a microcosm, a collection of human samples of social and emotional diversity. The work typifies the literary revolt from the village. This myth of a harmonious existence in small communities had evolved from pioneering days when nature and civilization found a site for reconciliation.  Masters, and Anderson after him, disclosed that the friendliness and honesty were in fact a fallacy that disguised hypocrisy, hostility, bigotry, and frustration.

The very form of the work invites us to reflect; it hints at totality while such totality is rendered in terms of fragmentation and isolation. The different fragments participate in the same spatial and temporal setting, and the narrative voice offers an effect of wholeness. Anderson achieved a sense of disconnection by reserving a separate chapter for each character. James Joyce's Dubliners are the first representatives of what Forrest Ingram has called the short story cycle, that is, a particular design that combines the individuality of each story and the totality to which they belong.  Two reasons can be posted for this innovative structure: the author's dissatisfaction with the pressing demands of conventional storytelling, or poison plot, and that he felt more comfortable with short-story because he combined his literary activity with another occupation. Nineteenth-century short-story writers, especially after Edgar Allan Poe's example, were intended to achieve a preconceived effect, and every element of the story worked in the same direction. Therefore, The narration flew along with rising tension.  Anderson configured each story in such a way that plots seemed rambling, and denouements challenged the reader's expectations. he thus anticipated Modernists' concern with truth to life's actual mechanisms, not to literary stereotypes. The rambling quality of his plots was also accountable to the oral tradition of storytelling to release narrative from strict framing of plot and structure and to communicate a familiar, small-town air.  The author portrayed the personal and the collective in perpetual collision and he shifted the traditional focus of short-story writing (action and plot) to characters.  

Revisiting "Hands"

Fragmenteriness is a ubiquitous device in Modernist texts and reflects the impossibility of perceiving the world as a unified totality. The figure of the narrator shapes our reading because it articulates how we read and how the information gets to us. One of the main narrative features in "Hands" is the oral tradition of storytelling that pervades it, in particular, the use of authorial comments addressed to the reader, with which he establishes a point of contact and complicity with his reader. We also observe a heterodiegetic narrator, that is, an external narrator who does not participate in the events but has privileged access to the characters' thoughts and feelings. However, this third-person narrator subtly shows and conceals pieces of information in such a way that the story seems to be composed of fragments. As a consequence, it is open to many readings. The above contributes to the evasiveness that hovers over the story, that air of fragmentariness. Thus, this narrator lacks the capacity to embrace and account for the totality of the story, despite his apparent omniscience and complicity with the reader. Anderson thereby challenged the traditional notion of the third person realistic narrator and proposed a version that could not satisfy our expectations of an all-knowing, all-controlling voice. The effect of this is an idea of a godless world, deprived of an unfolding authority by which everything and everybody has a place and a mission. The narrative voice thus participates in the irony of the story.   

Anderson advanced several of the central concerns of American Modernism.  The fragmentary design of Winesburg, Ohio indicated the alienation of modern existence and the tragic loneliness of the individual in a world without certainties.  The inhabitants of Winesburg are presented as detached, disconnected from other villagers, or any sheltering institution such as family, church, or town hall. The narrative strategy of telling each story from one personal perspective emphasized the idea of disconnection.  All the grotesque characters are misfits who cannot find their own place. One of the signs and consequences of such loneliness is a failure of communication perceived in each story. In "Hands" pathetic inability to express one's necessities and anxieties, which results in the character's impossible adaptation to his environment. Another unifying principle is the theory of the grotesque that Anderson anticipates at the beginning of the volume. He understood and defined the grotesques as human beings that capture the truth from life and live by it in utter isolation, unable to share it with other people. They are thus prevented from developing as human beings or overcoming their grotesque nature fueled by the discrepancy between the characters' expectations and their reality (irony). Hands began in media res thus calling attention to the suffocating circularity of things. The subsequent retreat into the characters' inner lives leads to an exaggeration of characterizing features. Nonetheless, the term involves some tenderness towards them, and the narrative voice reveals sympathy. In fact, Wing's name suggests the frailness and entrapment of a bird, as does the final scene where he picks up crumbs from the floor.

According to Malcolm Cowley, the tales are "not incidents or episodes, they (are) moments, each complete in itself". These were labeled epiphanies by James Joyce. The term "epiphany" has survived as a critical term to designate the author's depiction of characters who "either realize or fail to realize, the inner significance of their lives" (Curry: 247).  By focusing on a central character a sense of fragmentariness is achieved. Readers can only concentrate on a single view at a time, never apprehending a global vision of the scene. This narrowness of perspective equals the narrowness of small-town America. The protagonist attempted an escape only to find another kind of constriction, a deceiving change of scenery, where images of decay surround the protagonist. The decline of the Jeffersonian ideal is also found in the story. For example, Wing's hands can only be depicted in terms of productivity. Another myth contested is the pastoral ideal. Noteworthy is the inclusion of the train in the story. The pastoral image of berry-picking subdued to the mechanical processes intervening. The presence of railway tracks or highways seems to announce that the landscape has been devoured by a modern state of things that does not allow further division of symbolical or cultural spaces. The ideal homogeneity of small rural communities is defined by the grotesqueness that the town is unprepared to accept. The theme of death in life appears in all the stories and touches upon the characters' inhibited passions, whatever their origin. Each of the stories engages in a discussion of this force on the verge of the final release but ultimately repressed. Life is represented as an unending movement, lacking definite starting and ending points, and their closure suggests continuity.  David Stouck detects this Dance of Death theme in the overall structure of the work. Such dance constituted a representation of Death as it took away people's lives in a procession of dead bodies marching out of this world. In fact, the dead danced with the living in an attempt to warn them of their fate. This would account for the strange gestures that Wing makes in "Hands".  Most of the characters in the collection are returning "ghosts" apparently rescued from Anderson's childhood memories. However, death does not refer to a physical end but a spiritual closure. The grotesques try to warn their neighbors with their symbolic eccentric behavior which is tragic in itself because it proves repeatedly ineffectual.