舍伍德安德森短篇小说《手》的写作风格理解

巩艳秋

（南安阳工学院外国语学院 河南南阳 473061）

舍伍德安德森短篇小说《手》的写作风格理解

巩艳秋

（南安阳工学院外国语学院 河南南阳 473061）

舍伍德安德森的《手》是其小说集《俄亥俄州的温斯堡镇》中的一篇很有代表性的短篇小说。在这篇小说中作者深入人物的精神层面，塑造了一位孤独远离人群的怪诞人——飞翼比德鲍尔。本文试图通过分析这篇小说中的写作风格，来阐释作者如何运用这些技巧来反应文章的主题。

舍伍德安德森；手；怪诞人；疏离

I Introduction

In American literary history, Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio, is known for “his very great influence in liberating the American short story from a petrifying technique” and acknowledged as a major influence on later generations of writers, including William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Winesburg, Ohio is Anderson’s masterpiece, also called “the Bible of American consciousness”. The book gave him a foremost position in contemporary American literature.Winesburg, Ohio is an artistic representation of the difficult situations human beings are caused in and a parable of alienation and loss of love of the modern men. In this novel,each individual story is a poetic prose with slow pace and melodic tone.

Anderson does not only intend to present us an objective picture of life at that period of time, but also makes a record of an important historic period of America with his fertile imagination and deep love toward his compatriot. With the tone peculiarly of a story teller, Anderson tells the listener the group of weird and unaccountable tales of the grotesques and plays a melody full of nostalgia and despair. The novel seems loose in structure, but it’s a coherent whole. Anderson makes full use of imageries and lyrical words to impress the reader; of simple but meaningful symbols to reveal the dull and gray theme of loss of love; and of the moments of epiphany to expose the inner world of the grotesques and embody the eternity in one moment.

Ⅱ The style features in “Hands”

When Sherwood Anderson wrote fiction in the early 1900s,he was consciously experimenting with new short-story forms and with a new kind of written language to fit the new forms.He abandoned traditional ideas of plot and story-telling in order,but simply to expose the characters that were repressed and frustrated by intolerable social and industrial system. In Sherwood Anderson: A Study of the Short Fiction, Robert Allen Papinchak describes Anderson’s style as “less cluttered with lengthy sentences and multisyllabic words than that of Irving,Hawthorne, Poe, and other American writers to that time.Instead, Anderson used short, direct sentences, frequent modifications of nouns, series of prepositional phrases, and the repetition of phrases and ideas, which often depend on a structural circularity.” In fact, we can find all of Anderson’s stylistic qualities in “Hands”.

First is about Anderson repeated use of words and phrases to express the theme of the story. The most obvious example is the word “hand”. It occurs in the singular and the plural all together thirty times in the story that just runs over 2,350 words.The image of Wing Biddlebaum’s fluttering, fiddling, nervous hands is repeated so many times that it becomes a symbol of his alienation and loneliness. Something is more important is the repetition of “beating hands”. He seems unable to talk without something to beat on. If he and George Willard are out walking, and he feels the urge to speak, he would find “a stump or the top board of a fence and with his hands pounding”. He even got the name “Wing”, because his hands “like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird”. When he talked to George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum “closed his fists and beat them upon a table or on the walls of his house” “and beating like a giant woodpecker upon the top board had shouted at George.” Then we may have the feeling that the beating makes Wing feel comfortable to talk with George, even that he can not talk without beating something.

Naturally, we, the reader, would think where this beating comes from. Why the narrator repeatedly describing his beating hands and “the story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands”?Why Wing has the peculiar even grotesque behavior? As we go further to the story, we know that when Wing talks with George and beating his hands, he is urging George to dream. Then we would find that the ideas of dreams and dreaming form anther cluster of repeated phrases in the story. As he beat his hands, he cried to George, “you have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams.” And then he settles down and his voice became soft, forgetting his hands, “speaking as one lost in a dream.” “You must try to forget all you have learned,” he tells George. “You must begin to dream.” In fact, it is “dream” that connected the present Wing Biddlebaum to the past of him as Adolph Myers, a schoolteacher in Pennsylvania.In those days, his voice was always soft, and his hands did not beat the fence tops but only gently touched the boys’ shoulders or hair. The gentle voice and the gentle touch were “part of the schoolmaster’s effort to carry a dream into the young minds.”Under his touch, the boys lost their “doubt and disbelief” and“they also began to dream.” However, the dream is corrupted just because of his hands and the transition of dreams. One of the schoolboy’s father misunderstood his care and came to the school yard to “beat him with his fists”; “his hard knuckles beat down into the frightened face”. And finally, Wing had to flee from Pennsylvania and changed his name. Therefore, the beating gestures are tied up in Wing’s mind with the dreams and the horrible mistake and the father’s wrath. Because he never understood the reason of the beating, he can not separate them from all the rest of his life.

The third set of repeated phrases is about “doubts and shiver”. At the beginning of the story, Anderson mentioned that Wing is “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts” and “his shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts”. However, before his tragedy, it was Wing who cast“doubt and disbelief” from the minds of his students, but now he himself is filled with doubts. Then the “doubts” closely links him to the past misery “Hidden, shadowy doubts that had been in men’s minds concerning Adolph Myers were galvanized into beliefs”. The doubts then turn into “shiver”, shiver both of the people of the community: “Through the Pennsylvania town went a shiver” and even George, when Wing touched his shoulder, he went home “with a shiver of dread”.

All of the repeated words and phrases actually add a subtle bit of shading to the major theme of Winesburg, Ohio,alienation and loneliness. When Wing Biddlebaum is the school teacher, he is a normal man with love and care to the students.He is very like the fathers of his students, helping them get out of doubts and disbelief and dream of the future with his careful touching on their hair. However, just because of the alienation he was changed into a grotesque, who is isolated, lonely and even afraid of talking his true feeling to his (only) friend—George. In fact, Wing Biddlebaum’s world would not be so isolated if we treat people as we want to be treated.

Second, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio is an important literary document in the history of the American short story, for the collection marked a definite shift from the ironically patterned and linearly plotted stories of Edgar Allan Poe and O. Henry to a form that focuses on lyrical moments of realization structured around feelings and impressions Although Henry James and Stephen Crane made use of these impressionistic techniques long before Anderson, it is in Winesburg, Ohio that they become the primary characteristics of the modern short story. A series of thematically and symbolically related images rather than temporal plot holds Anderson’s stories together and gives them their sense of reality.

“Hands” is one of the most clearly impressionistic stories in the collection and thus a central example of Anderson’s development of what critics have called the modern lyrical story. Instead of being dependent on a straightforward plot line,the story revolves around the central image of hands in such a way that the main character is revealed by various reactions to them. As the Anderson said, it is “a story of hands”.

As the narrator says throughout the story that revealing the secret of Biddlebaum’s hands is a job for a poet, the ordinary tools of story—event and explanation can not fully communicate the subtle and delicate story of his hands. It is only the poetic language can work. This inadequacy of language is why the central metaphor of this story is Biddlebaum’s “talking hands”. Biddlebaum wants to express his feeling and genuinely communicate with others, but the only way he can express his feeling is through touching someone with his hands. His hands, in fact, are the imagery to represent Wing’s inner being. The different images of his hands reflect his different feelings towards people and the change of the hands is also his progress toward his grotesque condition. In his youth, his care and love for the schoolboy is shown through“the caressing the shoulders of the boys, playing about the tousled heads”. When he was in the Winesburg, the pounding of his fists on tables, walls, or fence posts mirrors his earnestness and enthusiasm during conversation with George;his anxiety is expressed through rubbing his hands together, his affection for George through a caress. However, he always tries to keep them hidden away and the hands have changed more into the expressing of his grotesque, although they can still reflect his emotion. The different images of the hands are passing throughout the story, which control the story in a whole,just like a lyric poem. The images appear and reappear and all come together in one climactic scene. They create echoes between characters and between situations, and they provide structure for the story, which nearly has the same function as refrains in a poem.

Third, Wing’s hands are a manifestation of his being grotesque. According to Anderson’s theories, a grotesque was one who grasped a truth of the world too independently and too completely and thus failed. Anderson’s grotesque is one who is ineffectual in communication, one who fails at expression.Wing’s hands can express Wing’s feelings, but he just does not allow them to. Wing’s hands had once been his medium of expression like a pen or typewriter is writer’s medium of expression.

We are told that Wing’s hands are quick, skillful and talented, but his skill is tainted and feared. The reader understands Wing as a harmless, sensitive man who is frightened by his own passions. We are endeared to Wing especially after learning about the circumstances which brought him to Winesburg. He urges George to dream and follow his own heart without giving into the influence of the townspeople.This parallels the life he had led as a school teacher before the scandal. The similarity of circumstances leads to his fear arising and his need to flee from George. But, we are soothed by the fact that the passion, the young woman inside of Wing,is still alive even though it has been chased out of one town and lives in fear in another.

Still, Wing has failed. He had lived a content life as a school teacher until his dreams had been broken by the town’s people. However, he was unable to fight back and turned into a grotesque. Wing comes close to finding that life within himself again only when he is with George. With George, Wing can act openly. George is the link between reader and grotesque figure,allowing us to see inside of the protagonist glaring instant and to view the living passion which had once driven them. When Adolph Myers flees to Winesburg and becomes Wing Biddlebaum, he is afraid to express himself through his hands and gestures as he once had with the boys he taught. This all changes when Wing is around George. In George’s presence,Wing feels free to be himself. George makes whole the ineffectual attempts at communication with which Wing struggles.

Ⅲ Conclusion

Through all of the special writing styles in the story,Anderson has shown a vivid image of the protagonist,especially his hands, which is a symbol of his life. Through the change of his hands action, Anderson shows his theme of the story, the loneliness of Biddlebaum and his fear to express his love. Although the story was structured so well in the form of lyric story, the reader can not have the enjoyment of reading a lyric poem. The picture unfolded before us is in an isolated backward town living a lonely old man. Though he is emotionally crippled, he longs for love and understanding.After reading the story, we know the grotesques are not bad people. They are just like the twisted apples that are left unpicked in the orchard, still possessing sweetness and even can save the hungry boy’s life.

And the story reveals that the loneliness of the grotesques result from their ineffectual communication, their lack of ability in expressing what is in their mind, their habitual silence.They are alienated by the machine age, lost and confused by the unseen walls—social relations, economic conditions and religion and so on. But they are not totally surrendered, they are still struggling. So Biddlebaum tells George “you must try to forget all you have learned” and “you must begin to dream”.Though unintentionally, it is an attempt to break down the walls that divide one person from another and even to seek back the lost good will and innocence in the society. As the reader of 21st century, we would get the alarm that we all need to be loved and understood; otherwise, maybe we would turn to a kind of grotesque.

Bibliography:

[1]Bily, Cynthia. Critical Essay on “Hands” Short Stories for Students,Vol. 11. The Gale Group, 2001.

[2]Howe, Irving. Sherwood Anderson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951.

[3]Papinchak, Robert Allen. Sherwood Anderson: A Study of the Short Fiction, 1969.

[4]穆杨.安德森《手》的符号界解读[J].外国文学，2007（2）.

[5]张强.舍伍德•安德森研究综论[J].外国文学，2003（1）.

The Understanding of style features in Sherwood Anderson’s“Hands”

Sherwood Anderson’s short story “hands” is one of the best stories in the book Winesburg, Ohio. This paper wants to analyze the writing styles in the story and try to explain how Anderson expresses the theme of the story through these techniques.

Sherwood Anderson; hands; grotesque;alienation

巩艳秋（1980-），女，辽宁兴城市人，硕士，南安阳工学院外国语学院教师。

2011-06-19