Reading the Unsaid in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio

Roberto Antonio Pérez Gil Master’s Thesis English Philology Department of Languages Faculty of Arts University of Helsinki November 2018

Tiedekunta/Osasto – Fakultet/Sektion – Faculty Laitos – Institution – Department Faculty of Arts Department of Languages Tekijä – Författare – Author Roberto Antonio Pérez Gil Työn nimi – Arbetets titel – Title Reading the Unsaid in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio Oppiaine – Läroämne – Subject English Philology Työn laji – Arbetets art – Level Aika – Datum – Month and Sivumäärä– Sidoantal – Number of pages Master’s Thesis year 83 November 2018 Tiivistelmä – Referat – Abstract

The written word in fiction does not only reflect reality but communicates in a complex way. In fact, literary language achieves its greatest potential when communicating through both that which is written and that which is implied. Literary language evokes and makes evident through devices like irony or metaphor, etc. It is a discourse that can communicate a message which escapes the boundaries of language, since it can rely on the unsaid to communicate the reality it constructs to readers. Thus, my focus in this thesis is the way readers comprehend the unsaid information of the literary text when reconstructing the experience of characters in fiction.

My primary material is Sherwood Anderson’s short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio (1919), where the communal experience of the people in this fictitious town is presented as fragments of truth, and the impossibility for characters to express themselves in the town’s conventional speech turns them into “grotesques.” Because of the grip conventionality has over the common people in an early twentieth century American town, I start my analysis by an aesthetic approach analyzing the novel’s language and its relation to essence. Then, in order to study the ways in which the literary language makes use of the unsaid to communicate the fictional experience to readers, I make use of cognitive studies, focusing on how enacting the embodied experience, reading the mind of the characters, and empathizing with them affect the way readers reconstruct the unsaid information.

My thesis shows how the absent information in literary discourse can make itself evident to readers, and that it is possible to identify textual evidence that helps readers reconstruct the fictional experience through interpreting the unsaid.

Avainsanat – Nyckelord – Keywords Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg,Ohio, the unsaid, aesthetics, cognitive studies Säilytyspaikka – Förvaringställe – Where deposited

Muita tietoja – Övriga uppgifter – Additional information

Contents

1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1 1.1. Aims and Methods……………………………………………………………………1 1.2. On Sherwood Anderson and Winesburg, Ohio ………………………………………2 1.2.1. Sherwood Anderson…………………………………………………………...2 1.2.2. Winesburg, Ohio……………………………………………………………….3 1.3. Genre………………………………………………………………………………….4 1.3.1. A Realist Work………………………………………………………………...4 1.3.2. The Unsaid Genre……………………………………………………………...5 1.4. Key Critical Sources…………………………………………………………………..7 2. Essence and Conventionality: Speaking Through the Unsaid………………………….9 2.1. λόγος and λέγειν………………………………………………………………………9 2.2. Convention and the Thingness of Things……………………………………………11 2.3. Naming, Words, and Absence……………………………………………………….16 2.4. The Crude and the Essential Word…………………………………………………..17 2.5. Painting the Cave Shadows………………………………………………………….19 2.6. “Respectability”……………………………………………………………………..22 3. The Unsaid and The Grotesque: Finding the Lost Language………………………..24 3.1. Fragments and Essence………………………………………………………………24 3.2. The Grotesque……………………………………………………………………….25 3.3. The Unsaid…………………………………………………………………………..30 3.4. “Loneliness”…………………………………………………………………………34 3.5. Concluding Remarks………………………………………………………………...38 4. A Cognitive Approach to Winesburg, Ohio……………………………………………39 4.1. Focalization………………………………………………………………………….39 4.1.1. “An Awakening”……………………………………………………………..39 4.1.2. Defining Focalization ………………………………………………………..40 4.1.3. External and Internal Focalization…………………………………………....43 4.2. Reading Adventures…………………………………………………………………44 4.2.1. Enacting Expectations………………………………………………………..45 4.2.2. Defining the Genre……………………………………………………………47 4.2.3. Unresolved Expectations……………………………………………………..48 4.2.4. “Mother”……………………………………………………………………...50

4.3. Reading Fictional Minds…………………………………………………………….55 4.3.1. “Adventure” and “Queer”……………………………………………………56 4.3.2. Theory of Mind or Mind Reading……………………………………………57 4.3.3. A Study of Emotions…………………………………………………………62 4.4. Empathizing with the Characters of Winesburg…………………………………….68 4.4.1. “Nobody Knows”…………………………………………………………….69 4.4.2. Empathy……………………………………………………………………...69 5. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….78

Works Cited...……………………………………………………………………………….81 Pérez 1

1 Introduction

1.1 Aims and Methods

Literature is a space to act, not a viewing point where to witness whatever happens, it is not passive but active, it is a space to work. When we read, we are participating in a story, we are giving meanings, we are interpreting, we are creating something new by imagining it in our minds, and we are also reliving experiences, recreating them even to the level of our own physical reactions (laugh, cry…). We are part of the story to an extend that overcomes language, that which is written. Things happen in the shadow, in the background, on the level of context or in the reign of supposition and speculation. It is because of this that something seems to be said through silence, through body interpretations, implications, and through social context and conventions. My aim in this research is to find elements that, without explicitly appearing in Sherwood Anderson’s text, drive the narrative of the story and help readers connect the text to their personal understanding of the world by filling the spaces left by silence.

Winesburg, Ohio presents a great opportunity for this study of silence, not only because of some of the comments on art and the creative process it offers, but also because of its fragmented structure, which allows me to focus on a few specific stories in order to give a general idea of the work, and on how fragmentation relates to language and silence. More particularly, in studying the silences in the text that transmit vital information, I will discuss that which is unsaid. The choice for this term relies on its both negative and positive quality in not uttering that which is at the same time somehow said. It is so that, in the text, elements that do not appear in a linguistic form still manage to offer meaning and information to readers. From a pure aesthetic interest, I will turn my attention to the way readers regard such unsaid elements and how those process may affect their reading. My belief in the relevance of classical theories for contemporary ways of understanding the reading process drives me to attempt this connection between the unsaid in aesthetic terms thorugh cognitive theory. Finally, my goal will be to try to understand some of the ways those unsaid elements trigger and drive cognitive processes in readers’ minds in order to fully experience the literary work.

Pérez 2

1.2 On Sherwood Anderson and Winesburg, Ohio

1.2.1 Sherwood Anderson

This subchapter is based on the introductory section of my edition of Winesburg, Ohio. Born in Camden, Ohio, in 1876, Sherwood Anderson became one of the most influential writers of his time. In 1883, he settled in Clyde, a small town in Ohio that is said to be a great influence for the shaping of Winesburg. Anderson spent his childhood working in a variety of different jobs in order to help support his family. For this reason, he had a discontinued education. He never finished high school, even though after returning from the Spanish-American war in Cuba, he went for a year to Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio (v).

He started working as a copywriter in 1900 in Chicago, already showing some interest in working with texts, and married his first wife in 1904, with whom he had three children. He started writing novels in his free time in 1910 as both passionate vocation and way to get some extra money. Soon enough though, he had a nervous breakdown after which he decided to go back to Chicago to work in advertising where he took part of the “Chicago- Renaissance” movement. In 1916, some of the stories of Winesburg, Ohio appeared for the first time in different literary magazines, and he published his first novel Windy McPherson’s Son, and got divorced from his first wife to marry the sculptor Tennessee Mitchell. In 1919, the publication of Winesburg, Ohio finally made his name known to the American public. The influence of his writing from this point extended even to the next generation of writers, including major names like Hemingway, Faulkner and Henry Miller. Works that followed are Poor White (1920), The Triumph of the Egg (1921) (where the influence of Gertrude Stein is already seen), Many Marriages (1922) or Dark Laughter (1925). With his personal narratives, A Story Teller’s Story (1924) and Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926), a book of prose poems, A New Testament (1927) and a collection of sketches, Sherwood Anderson’s Notebook (1926), his reputation begun to fall as critics started to see that the star that was born in Winesburg faded (vii).

In 1924, he married his third wife, Elizabeth Pall, through whom he got to know William Faulkner. By 1929 he had divorced his third wife, and worked in newspapers, as Pérez 3 editor, and as a lecturer in order to pay for the farm in Marion, Virginia, that would be his home for the rest of his life. During the 1930s, his reputation as writer continued dropping. Nevertheless, during this period he continued publishing works such as Beyond Desire (1932), Death in the Woods and Other Stories (1933), and some collections of essays like Perhaps Women (1931) (viii).

On March 8, 1941, he died of peritonitis in Panama during a trip to South America with his last wife Eleanor Copenhaver. His remains rest at the cemetery of Marion, Virginia (ix).

1.2.2 Winesburg, Ohio

Published in 1919, this work features a collection of short stories depicting the life and characters of a fictional rural town in Ohio. Every story is said in the content section to belong to one individual character of Winesburg. It is so that “Hands” will be “concerning Wing Biddlebaum,” “Paper Pills” “concerning Doctor Reefy,” “Mother” “concerning Elizabeth Willard” and so on. Nevertheless, the stories of these characters have a connecting point in the figure of George Willard. George is a young boy working at the town’s paper who has big dreams of moving to the city and becoming a writer. It is the interaction between him and the characters of the town that offers readers the chance to dig deeper into the idiosyncrasies of the characters.

Through the story of Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson masterly depicts the realities of rural America and the way it is affected by the industrial revolution of the time. Tradition and conventionality in opposition to personal nature will prompt the depiction of its characters as grotesque or unfitting within the society of the town. Characters like Elizabeth Willard or Alice Hindman see their sexual desire or personal ambitions hindered by the patriarchal society they live in, making their reactions to this living arrangement seem unsettling for the tranquility of the town. Many characters undergo a similar process in the clashing between personal nature and society, thus realizing or hinting at the problematic of not belonging, and leading to undesired outcomes such as marriage for many of the women; loneliness for Wing or Enoch; pregnancy for Louise Bentley; etc. It is, all in all, a great effort in depicting the reality of American rural society of the early twentieth century, and the stigmatizing consequences that the clash between tradition and modernity, and between rural and industrial society had over the nature of its people. Pérez 4

1.3 Genre

1.3.1 A Realist Work

Realism is born as both a reaction to and continuation of naturalism. In literature, realism is usually related to texts dealing with “real” people and situations, meaning, with a kind of fiction that tries to resemble reality as much as possible so as to properly portray society and its problems. In order to see some of the more specific characteristics of this literary movement I will make use now of Edwin H. Cady ‘s “‘Realism’: Toward a Definition”.

Realism is a literature where characters regain ground over plot. Rather than stories and their morality or teachings, it is the characters and the intricate paradigms of their minds and feelings what occupies a position of interest for realism (327). As we can see in Winesburg, Ohio, it is the psyche of people that is being related through their stories and their thoughts and feelings what is offered by narration. Realism presents characters as they are in their day to day life. One of the reasons why this movement bears the label of “real” is precisely because of the attempt to portray the everydayness of society, to represent the ordinary and the conventional in a reliable way.

In order to place an emphasis on the characters, realism usually advocates the disappearance of the author. “Transparent” narrators, or narrators who do not change or intervene in the narration other than to offer the details of that which cannot be seen by the description of the story will be the preferred style (327). Smilarly, the authorial voice in Winesburg, Ohio is relegated to the introductory chapter of “The Book of the Grotesque”, thus leaving the rest of the work free of such intrusion. The narrator’s voice is used as a tool to describe what goes in the minds of the characters, to give the information needed to contextualize the event, but the narrator is not a participant in the story.

Specially in America, there is a strong interest in the democratic quality of the realist movement. Common people, and the focus on their role as a group rather than individuals is a general interest in realist texts (328). In this sense, it is possible to see how, even though all stories in Winesburg focus on a single character, they are always presented in relation to the rest, not only with George Willard as a listener, but to the rest of the town as defining group that shapes their personality. Furthermore, and strongly emphasized by Anderson in his writing in general, the historical moment of industrial revolution and its effects on the rural Pérez 5

America and its people is another feature where that preference for democracy and the common people is exemplified (329).

Finally, it is important to notice how American realism’s interest for characters and their behavior as a social group affected their shaping of a rather psychological movement, where the exploration in detail of the mind of the characters becomes common.

1.3.2 The Unsaid Genre

Winesburg, Ohio may have enough characteristics to be considered a realist work, but being already close to modernism due to innovation and its time, new labels for Anderson’s style might seem more appropriate. In this sense, David Stouck’s “Anderson's Expressionist Art” and its view of the author’s style as expressionist seems greatly relevant. Stouck believes that Anderson was strongly influenced by painters and their view of art. Winesburg, Ohio is a good example of the view of art that Anderson himself noted at times (“he often described himself as a painter using the medium of words” [28] ), where the sketches that these stories are serve as brush strokes to create the full image of the town. Connecting to the realist tradition is Anderson’s preoccupation with the depiction of characters. He stated at times that his writing was indeed devoted to “bring to the surface the hidden depths of thought and feeling in the characters he created” (28). His stories are, especially in this work, focused on the characters itself rather than the plot, on the depiction of ordinary American people and their minds and feelings. Anderson does not seem to be interested in appearance, in the artificial representation of lively images, but instead he manipulates that surface in order to bring forward the essence of the subject, to find “the hidden inner truth” (29). The focus on the characters to the detriment of plot, on the psyche rather than the action, fits perfectly well in the shape of short stories as well, making every mind in Winesburg an element in the whole of that expressionist painting that is the final form of the work (31).

Furthermore, Stouck believes the label of realist is rather unfair to Anderson’s work, among other things, because of the attempt to find what lies hidden under the surface, for the use he makes of reality and representation in order to get to the essence of things. It is because of this that he offers the definition of expressionism in relation to the author’s work as follows:

Expressionist art cannot, strictly speaking, be designated abstract, because it remains referential, content-oriented, but it does reject the methods of verisimilitude in favor of Pérez 6

more stylized techniques---distortions (in both art and literature) of color, shape, syntax, vocabulary, oversimplification of form, exaggeration. The grotesque is often the result of these distortions. (31)

Among other ways in which Anderson’s work is seen as expressionist by Stouck is the use of repetition. Motifs like hands are used to exhaustion in Winesburg, Ohio, a device that Gertrude Stein understood as “a way of approaching the essence of a character, for she argues that people, carefully observed, are seen to repeat themselves, and in so doing they reveal their essential or ground nature” (43). All things considered, the way American people are represented in the text within the conventionality of their lives, as truthful representations of real people but in an attempt to search for their hidden truth, fits Stouck’s definition: “The term ‘expressionism,’ however loosely applied, indicated the artist's rejection of a surface realism and the attempt instead to make mainfest the hidden essence of things”(30). Anderson presents people and events as they occur, but in doing so he calls attention to the hidden or unsaid information about the psychology of those characters, and the idiosyncrasies of the American society of the time in general. Here, it is possible to see how Anderson influenced the next generation of writers, such as Hemingway and his iceberg theory, where “so much is hidden yet also revealed” (Moreland 50). This is the idea by which Hemingway justified the conscious concealment of information in the text that would need to be inferred from the presented surface events1.

To conclude, it is possible to say that Winesburg, Ohio escapes the common definitions of realism, in part, due to its resemblance to painting and other forms of art where the representation of real life seems to be directed toward the finding of the subject’s essence rather than its mere representation. As we shall see, one of the main reasons for my personal interest in this work in trying to develop the cognitive ways in which readers relate to the unsaid component in literary discourse is precisely this search for essence. Anderson’s apparent interest in finding the truth of American people through a depiction of them that is influenced by the non-discursive art of painting opens the space to a broader mind in

1Moreland suggests that “Hemingway was primed to be interested in the iceberg, in which so much is hidden yet also revealed, not only because it appealed to his psychological need to conceal yet disclose…but also because it resonated with a provocative version of aesthetic omission, concealment, and disclosure that he had discovered only a few short months before in one of the stories in Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.” (50) Pérez 7 understanding how the written text goes further than that which is explicitly said in carrying the desired meaning.

1.4 Key Critical Sources

In order to study silences and the way they affect the reading process, I will first employ an aesthetic approach to the text with especial emphasis on language and how we, as readers, fill those “gaps” in the text that are open by the absence that comes from the conflict between essence and the word. For this purpose, I will turn my attention to classical views on language, specially to the explanations given by Javier Martinez Marzoa on Platonic theory, in order to establish the bases for the relation between word and essence. Following my analysis over essence and language, Heidegger’s study of the thingness of the thing and language in relation to the work of art will be one of the touch stones in discussing the presence of that essence precisely through its absence in the word. Furthermore, Maurice Blanchot’s study of the work of art, especially in relation to the poetic word and the role of the poet, will be of great help in opening the path to the discussion of the unsaid element that is born from the absent presence of the essence. Both authors, will also be of use in defining the influence that conventionality, or the artificial use of ordinary language resulting from social and historical evolution, has over the character’s discourse in this work. Once terminology has been established, it will be time to provide a more specific analysis of these concepts in the text.

Having discussed the philosophical views over literary language in relation to essence and the unsaid, I will turn my attention to the way those unsaid elements may affect the cognitive processes involved in reading. For this section, I make use of different cognitive literary theories in an attempt to understand how readers may be conditioned by the unsaid, as well as of narrative studies to refer mostly to how the process of focalization affects the cognitive reception of the text. For this purpose, Marco Caracciolo’s view of the enacting imagination, or Wolfgang Iser’s study of the act of reading, are some of the relevant theories that will influence my analysis. In this section on cognitive theories of embodiment and imagination, I try to show how the categorization of the experiences of some characters as adventures (even though these are nothing of the sort) will help readers understand the full of extent of these experiences. Further on, in an attempt to better understand the display of emotions and their connection to the essence of characters, I will focus on Alan Palmer’s Fictional Minds and Lisa Zunshine’s views on mind reading, among others. Finally, Pérez 8 connecting the unsaid with the way focalization may affect readers relation with the characters, and with the help of a theorist such as Suzanne Keen, I will study empathy in Anderson’s work.

Pérez 9

2. Essence and Conventionality: Speaking through the Unsaid

In order to start the analysis of silent spaces in Winesburg, Ohio that will challenge the cognitive process of readers as studied in the next chapter, it seems very relevant to give a complete definition of that absent element in the text that gives an opportunity for readers to participate in the literary experience. In order to do so, philosophy and aesthetic theory provide a rich background on how language, and more specifically literary language, are intrinsically related to the way in which absence makes itself evident in the text. For this purpose, I will use the next chapter to the study of essence in language, as seen through history by philosophy, to open the space for the definition of the unsaid and the grotesque as means to carry information by making evident the limitations of conventionality in Anderson’s work.

2.1 λόγος and λέγειν It is, nowadays, still important to be able to understand the traditional ways of thinking in order to grasp our present. Ever since antiquity, the discussion of language and essence has been one of the main interests of philosophy and the understanding of the work of art. Thus, taking a look at such studies could help in enlightening the still prevailing limitations of language in dealing with essence.

In fact, there is in essence a reason for Plato’s dialogues never getting to an end. That reason is precisely the impossibility to name it, as from the moment essence is given a name it is being restrained and, therefore, concealed from its own essence by becoming an object. Ontologically speaking, essence cannot become an object, which irremediably happens when an attempt to understand it is made. As Felipe Martínez Marzoa explains in De Grecia Y La Filosofía: “Ahora bien, caracterizar y reconocer algo como algo (y, así, incluir discriminativamente en un conjunto) es lo que tiene lugar en el nombrar y decir”2 (20). This already offers a preliminary exposition of how essence is constrained by the placing, or categorization involved in saying that something is something and not some other thing. Naming, and in naming trying to discover the essence, risks putting the essence of all things in the same category, making it equal or the same, thus arousing the possibility to manipulate essence for the purpose of convenience.

2 “Now, to determine or recognize something as something (and in doing so, discriminatively include it into a specific group) is what happens in naming and saying” (my trans.). Pérez 10

In order to get deeper into the study of Greek terminology that deals with essence and language, let me know introduce the concepts of λόγος (logos) and λέγειν (legein). Logos has been recurrently identified as that which is part of the essence of humans (19), nonetheless, Marzoa explains how logos is not an anthropocentric concept, but rather something that exists independently from humans. It should be understood as separated from us rational beings, and so is legein, which rather than “saying” should be seen as the exposition of those words as such (21).

Furthermore, from Marzoa’s study it is possible to infer the meaning of logos as order, the order that makes something different from another thing (in as much as a stone is a stone because it is not a fish). Marzoa tells us of entity, which cannot be constrained as a stone or an animal is (73), but at the same time explains how entity does not depend upon the existence of humanity but upon existence itself (74). Legein, which etymologically means to gather or collect, is more commonly translated as saying or telling. It means to gather in the sense of exposing something as something or to tell of the qualitative characteristics of its elements as a whole (65). Legein is also to collect or recollect following certain rules in order to create an image of the things being said (68). Legein is, therefore, to put everything in its place (68). To some extent, it does not seem too far-fetched to say that these definitions could point to the use of language in the sense that it exposes that which is trying to be told, making legein possibly an action that involves not only the named word but that which is also unsaid through words.

Legein for the General, means taking command of an army, making the general an expert on the subject(s) of such army. But, while the Poet can tell about the general or the doctor and their doings, if the poet were to be in need to perform the doctor’s job, she or he would most likely fail, unless, of course, she is both a doctor and a poet (Marzoa, Historia 16). But as, no person could be at once poet, doctor, bus driver, general of the armies, lawyer, etc, it becomes self-evident how accessing the essence is not a less difficult task for the poet. Thus, in legein we have a kind of command of the essence of things in as much as the teller becomes the expert on the subject. The problem then arises when humanity understands the impossibility to be the expert of all, since that would mean knowing the essence of everything, which is intrinsically impossible. The essence cannot be said, it is always lost, always unsaid. The poet is not the one who provides the essence of things through the word, but the one who invites essence to come forward from the space of the (un)telling. As Marzoa puts it: Pérez 11

Así pues, el “reunir” significa aquí al mismo tiempo: conceder un cierto trato, tomar o poner como algo, por lo tanto también “contar” los elementos de un conjunto, constituir una multitud definida cualitativamente. 3 (Grecia 65)

Poets have been seen by many as those “experts on all”, those who can say or tell the essence. It is my opinion that the poet is not the one who tells the essence, not the one who magically destroys the ropes binding the essence in the logos’ constrains. The poet is the one who manages to use the logos in both saying and not saying, in both telling in words and without them. But let us go further first into the reign of the word and its essence before opening the ground to more recent views on the relationship between the poet, language, and the work of art.

2.2 Convention and the Thingness of Things

Modern philosophy continues to be concerned with the problematic of naming and, by doing so, affecting the very essence of the thing being named. Nonetheless, in order to properly understand the many layers in which essence and language may interact in the process of saying, it will be necessary to go back to those traditional definitions that try to shed light over what is being named. Heidegger, while talking about essence and the origin of the work of art in Off the Beaten Track, will sometimes make use of the concept of the thingness of the thing, which helpfully enough, gives us the possibility to start by placing all that is being given a name under the category of thing, a broad enough term to guide us through the intricate paths of his theory. Let me introduce here the definition of a thing in Heidegger’s words:

The stone on the path is a thing, as is the clod of earth in the field. The jug is a thing, and the well beside the path. But what should we say about the milk in the jug and the water in the well? These, too, are things, if the cloud in the sky and the thistle in the field, if the leaf on the autumn wind and the hawk over the wood are properly called things. All these must indeed be called things, even though we also apply the term to that which, unlike the above, fails to show itself, fails to appear. One such thing which does not, itself, appear [a ‘thing in itself’ in other words] is, according to Kant, the world as a totality. Another such example is God himself. Things in themselves and

3 “So, the ‘gathering’ means here at the same time: to give a certain treatment, to take or present as something, therefore also, to “count” the elements of a whole, to constitute a definitive multitude qualitatively.” (my trans.) Pérez 12

things that appear, every being that in any way exists, count, in the language of philosophy, as ‘things’. (4)

The thing can be everything that is named, everything that is there to be something. It is possible to define the thing in terms of its characteristics. As Heidegger notes, a jug can contain milk. One definition of jug, thus, would be (some)thing that may contain milk in it. Therefore, defining the characteristics of the thing may help in the understanding of the thing itself, but this will no help in understanding the thingness of the thing in its entirety. “Obviously the thing is not merely a collection of characteristics, and neither is it the aggregate of those properties through which the collection arises” (5).

Is it that thingness of the thing simply the understanding of the thing as such? A stone is most likely just a stone for all and everything, but it is important not to let the dullness of a rock in terms of social importance deceive that one who seeks the thingness of the thing into thinking everything will be so simple. Clothes may be seen as necessity for example, it is possible to define to a great extent the core of the thing as an item of clothing in terms of the characteristics that make it a whole, but it is also important to notice the other factors conditioning its understanding. Clothing is affected not only by social reasons but by historical as well. It may mean a great deal depending on the time place and type of clothing that is being displayed, it can make you rich, poor, suspect, respected, etc... It is because of this that it is possible to understand how that core of the thing has a relation to the common agreement those who name it have on its meaning, as much as the historical effects on the understanding of it. Heidegger says in explaining such matter that: “all we need to do, in order to be relieved of the tedious effort of making our own inquiry into the thingliness of the thing, is to grasp explicitly this traditional knowledge of the thing” (5).

It is not in the description of the thing and the traditional and social understanding of it that the essence as such is revealed, but it is because of them that a conventional understanding of the thing may be acquired. Regardless of how truthfully essence is represented through its naming, language serves a practical purpose and, in doing so, its making of the meanings of the things into conventions is just another resource in helping the practical purpose of language as a communicative device. The problem comes when conventional use of language in naming the thing evolves into a means for the prevalence of one way of thinking over another. It is so that things as patriarchal structures prevail through centuries in language, or historical mass murders are committed in the name of a word, but Pérez 13 those are problematics that escape the simplicity of this analysis. However, the conventional use of language, or what is the same, the social agreement over the thingness of the thing that develops through history in order to give the illusion of command over such thingness, renders not but a new problem in the attempt to understand the core.

What presents itself to us as natural, one may suspect, is merely the familiarity of a long-established habit which has forgotten the unfamiliarity from which it arose […] To be sure, the familiar concept of the thing fits every thing. But it does not comprehend the essence of the thing; rather, it attacks it. (7)

Thus, the thingness of the thing escapes the understanding we as social beings have of the thing. The essence, as explained in the previous subchapter, cannot surpass the barriers imposed by language. It is because of this reason that the attempt to understand the thingness irremediably pushes that who makes such attempt to recognize the value of and absent presence in the thing that is what results from the uttering of the thingness into thing. In understanding this same problem Heidegger proposes thus: “[m]ust not, then, this disconcerting and uncommunicative element in the essence of the thing become intimately familiar to a thinking which tries to think the thing? If so, we should not force our way into the thing's thingness” (12).

Finally, and before going any further into that absent presence that is manifested by trying to think the thingness of the thing, let me study further Heidegger’s views on essence and its relation to the work of art. Heidegger says that the work of art is not concerned with finding truth, as such thing belongs to logic, but with bringing forth the beauty: “The work [of art], then, is not concerned with the reproduction of a particular being that has at some time been actually present. Rather, it is concerned to reproduce the general essence of things” (16). Beauty is, then, in a kind of connection with essence as it escapes logic, and therefore, the constrains the thinking about the thingness of the thing imposes. Art, precisely because of its connection to beauty and the aesthetic experience, comes closer with the essence in a thinking that gives this beauty a transcendental view over the thing.

In talking about the core or the thingness of the thing, the concept of essence is continually brought up as the main thing that is trying to be understood. Truly, defining essence does not seem like an easy task as, since it has been mentioned above, precisely in naming is where the loss of that essence resides. I will not try here to propose a new definition for it, but will refer to essence mostly as that which includes both what is Pérez 14 transmitted in the saying of the thing and what remains at the same point hidden, or unsaid, by the same conditions that such saying of the thing imposes. Furthermore, and in order to give a probably less broad definition, it will be interesting to go back to Heidegger’s own words on the subject while setting the ground for his further discussion on the essence of truth itself:

What is it we are thinking of in speaking of ‘essence’? Usually, it is that common thing in which everything that is true agrees. An essence is discovered in generic and universal concepts which represent the one that holds indifferently for the many. This in-different essence (essentiality in the sense of essentia) is, however, only the inessential essence. In what does the essential essence of something consist? Presumably it lies in that which a being, in truth, is. The true essence of something is determined by its true being, by the truth of each being. (28)

In his essay “Poetics of the Unsaid”, Paul Standis further studies the concepts of essence and the unsaid as used by Heidegger. While his focus may be mostly the application of such theories in the pedagogical area, it is not less valuable for the study of literature and the reception of the work of art. Standis quotes Heidegger’s words: “Taking the essence of truth as the correctness of the representation, one thinks of all beings according to ‘ideas’ and evaluates all reality according to ‘values’” (152). From here, it is possible to draw a line that could link that connection between essence and readers. Readers may not have access to essence through the language that communicates the text, nonetheless, there is an understanding of the representations made by that language according to the ideas and values of readers. Finally, while readers will always participate in the textual experience as far as the language is understood, it is my belief that the spaces left by the impossibility of that essence to be transmitted through language representations is precisely one of the points of access to the text that will support, improve, or even trigger the aesthetic experience of the text by readers.

It is in social and historical factors that convention is born. Through a consensual social agreement and its evolution through time, it is possible to relate to the thing in language, but that convention is finally no more than an artificial construct made for the convenience of the user of the language. It has been described above how historical and social factors affect the understanding of the thing, it is precisely because of these factors that conventional use of language affects that understanding of the thingness of the thing. In Pérez 15

Frank Schalow’s Departures: At the Crossroads between Heidegger and Kant, it is explored how this occurs: “the possibility of aesthetic experience hinges on a “shared” state of mind, which in turn presupposes a form of articulation common to all (a sensus communis).” (388) This socially agreed truth in relation to the aesthetic experience and social consensus will be precisely the path to that convention that sets the ground for the exposition of the manipulated thingness of the thing in language. Language is, because of its communicative purpose, ultimately conventional, and through understanding that conventionality and the way social consensus defines it that it will be possible to achieve the aesthetic experience of the text.

Schalow understands Heidgger’s use of logos in its original sense, with legein’s meaning of collecting together or gathering, to define the agreement of individuals over a meaning in order to make discourse possible as opposed to the universality of a concept:

As Heidegger states in his 1929/30 lectures: “Words emerge from that essential agreement of human beings with one another, in accordance with which they are open in their being with one another for the beings around them …”391 In this way, the intersubjectivity of sensus communis becomes possible. “Only on the grounds of this originary, essential agreement is discourse possible in its essential function … giving that which is understandable to be understood.”392 (176)

Finally, language is not essence, nor being, but it is in its use, in discourse, that such being is transferred, “No es el ser el que atraviesa de parte a parte el lenguaje, sino que en éste queda inscrita la cuestión del ser, como un ‘discurso’” 4(Mittelmann 107)5. Thus, in order to make communication possible, language becomes understandable by manipulating the original word through history, loading it with features and meanings resulting from the social agreement as to their meaning. The word of this language is therefore naturally separated from its essence by those conventions imposed by language for the sake of purpose, but nevertheless, that essence or thingness is still alive within the word if only due to the recognition of its absence.

4“It is not the being who goes through language from side to side, but in it that the question of being is inscribed, like a discourse.”(my trans.) 5 Jorge Mittelmann offers in “Lenguaje Y Pensamiento: El Cours De Saussure Y Su Recepción Crítica En Jakobson Y Derrida” a similar approach to the study of language from the point of view of these authors.

Pérez 16

2.3 Naming and Absence

So far, I have studied some of the traditional views on language in order to establish the hypothesis that language, in putting a name to a thing, does not but obscure the essence of that which is being named. Rather than embark on a nihilistic discussion over the problematic of such impossibility to name the essence, I will now turn my attention to the spaces created by that act of naming, and the way they relate to essence.

It has been said that essence cannot be carried out by naming (thus saying), but does that mean that the essence of the thing disappears in trying to put it into words? Language may have a manipulating quality but not a destructive one as such, therefore, in uttering the name of the thing one does not destroy the essence but hinders the path to grasp it. If language does not destroy the essence, nor shows it in its naming, then it will be reasonable to agree that the essence stills exists in the word, in that naming, just in a different way, perhaps, in its absence.

Let us get a little bit closer to the understanding of the thingness of the thing and the way the play of absence occurs in language and experience. One way in which it is possible to see the broken chain in between the core of the thing and its name is precisely the sensual experience of such thing. For instance, the feeling of coldness does not need to be linguistically conceptualized for one to experience it, nor to understand it as it is itself inherently understood. Thus, the need to find a way to express it through language may be born in the need to communicate such feeling6. To illustrate this same idea, Schalow makes use of Japardize’s study of Kant in dealing with his views of pre-predicative roots of language:

Kant attempted to show in the analytic of the beautiful that sensation becomes a form of language prior to the production of signification. In the identification with the other, in the transference that takes place during the aesthetic communication that Kant calls silent, sensibility endows a precognitive experience with form and

6 In making this assumption I might be too bluntly disagreeing with the ideas of others such as Mark Dooley and Liam Kavanagh in The Philosophy of Derrida, who make use the philosopher’s ideas to express rather the opposite: “We can never have access to any kind of experience that would not already be structured by language. The only way we can comprehend anything at all is if we can conceptualize it to some degree” (19).

Pérez 17

signification. This experience, moreover, becomes the condition of the possibility of all linguistic communication, as it defines the unity of the speaking subject as such (180).

The fact that sensual experience may have a pre-predicative understanding does not mean the essence has been found outside of language, it is just an indication of the possibility to access it non-linguistically to some extent. Nonetheless, it is through language that literature works, and so it will be more interesting to see if there is any possibility to access that original pre-predicative sensual experience in an unpolluted way through language, and how literary language may bring forth those experiences.

It seems possible to access the original experience through language to some extent in the way the word as a sign relates to its accepted truth and bears that original experience in its absence. One way to recognize the communicative influence of those prelinguistic experiences is the way a specific experience may evoke a similar one in the mind of the receiver. It is so that for example the evocative quality of language will be powerful enough to transport the receiver of the message to the shared experience with the interlocutor when talking about “that warm sunny day when the smell of the sea filled them with joy.” There might be a clear non-linguistic element on the information transmitted by this message due to the evocation of a certain shared experience. It is therefore another way in which absence is reflected in the utterance by bringing up something through that unnamed element.

Here, I have tried to survey a few of the ways in which information transmitted linguistically relates to the extraverbal context of the utterance as well as the general nonverbal information transmitted through it, in an attempt to illustrate how the words said carry with them that which is unsaid. So, by evocating, referring to, contextualizing or making used of recognizable extraverbal expressions, one of the dimensions of that absence is made present in our understanding of language. This being said, it is time to put this discourse in connection to literature.

2.4 The Crude and the Essential Word

An interesting definition of language in its literary use is that provided by Blanchot in his study over the crude and the essential word. For Blanchot in The Literary Space, the crude word is the one that “has a bearing upon the reality of things … that gives it the presence of things, ‘represent’ them” as opposed to the essential word that “moves them away, makes them disappear. It is always allusive; it suggests, evokes” (38). This crude word Pérez 18 is the word we use in ordinary speech, the necessary word we employ as a tool to connect with those things it refers to. Nonetheless, this crude word is but an illusion. As it has been illustrated in previous chapters, naming is but a way to grow apart from what the name designates. For Blanchot, “the crude word is by no means crude. What it represents is not present…nothing is more foreign to the tree than the word tree, as it is used nonetheless by everyday language” (38). This crude word proper of the immediate language (as it gives the illusion of an immediate truth as its referent) is affected by the connotations that history and familiarity provide it (39). It is the word that transports its referents to the artificial ground of the familiar and ordinary. Broadly speaking, the crude word Blanchot describes is nothing but the one used in ordinary language. It is the word that hinders the access to an essence that is only present in absence, which lives in the silence of the word:

The crude word is pure silence … Silent, therefore, because meaningless, crude language is an absence of words, a pure exchange where nothing is exchanged, where there is nothing real except the movement of exchange, which is nothing. But it turns out the same for the word confided to the questing poet -- that language whose whole force lies in its not being, whose very glory is to evoke, in its own absence, the absence of everything. This language of the unreal, this fictive language which delivers us to fiction, comes from silence and returns to silence. (38)

Blanchot separates this from the poetic word, a word that does not use the world as referent but that is being in itself, “It becomes essential”, words that “have their ends in themselves” (40):

From this perspective, we rediscover poetry as a powerful universe of words where relations, configurations, forces are affirmed through sound, figure, rhythmic mobility, in a unified and sovereignly autonomous space. Thus the poet produces a work of pure language, and language in this work is its return to its essence. (41)

But if the language of the poem is essential in itself, why would it need silence to speak? In the end, what Blanchot may fail to make more evident is that the language used in the poem is nothing but that of the crude word in its material form. It is only because of its creating power, its command over the fictional world, that it escapes the label of ordinary language getting it closer to essence and divinity, as we have seen. Therefore, it is not the word itself that makes the difference in the poetic, but the literary discourse, and the spaces that silence opens in it, what will take that language to the ground of the essential. Pérez 19

In a poem, one of his last, Rilke says that interior space ‘translates things.’ It makes them pass from one language to another, from the foreign, exterior language into a language which is altogether interior and which is even the interior of language, where language names in silence and by silence, and makes of the name a silent reality. ‘Space (which) exceeds us and translates things’ is thus the transfigurer, the translator par excellence … Certainly, and we can boldly give it its name. This essential translator is the poet, and this space is the poem's space, where no longer is anything present, where in the midst of absence everything speaks. (140)

Finally, Blanchot uses theological imagery in order to understand the absence that reveals the essence of the word by taking poetic language to the ground of the divine. The poem becomes a communicative device only when hiding that essence (that belongs to the world of the divine) from and within the manipulating force of ordinary language. Essence can only survive in silence, it can only be communicated by being concealed from readers:

The poem shows, then; it discloses, but by concealing, because it detains in the dark that which can only be revealed in the light of darkness and keeps this mystery dark even in the light which the dark makes the first dawn of all. The poem is effaced before the sacred which it names; it is the silence that brings to the word the god that speaks in silence -- but since the divine is unspeakable and ever speechless, the poem, through the silence of the god which it encloses in language, is also that which speaks as poem, and shows itself, as a work, at the same time that it remains hidden. (229)

Thus, even if understood as a language that creates reality rather than reflect it, Blanchot understands in The Gaze of Orpheus that the work of art remains connected to a world of reality, even if only the reality of the imaginary world made real, a world that, as much as ours, is connected linguistically to essence only through absence. It is not therefore a divine discourse where essence is given a pure or true name, it is conventional discourse provided with a new layer where the process of naming essence can be recreated or at least recognized, it is a space to let absence communicate.

2.5 Painting the Cave Shadows

So far, it has been established that in uttering the word, the essence of the thing is lost as well as it is transferred through its absence or silence. It has been also said how conventionality affects the understanding of the utterance by the interlocutors as much as the Pérez 20 message is affected by the extraverbal qualities of this interaction. Now, it is time continue discussing how language is used in the work of art.

Language is the precinct (templum), i.e., the house of being. The essence of language is neither exhausted in reference, nor is it only a matter of signs and ciphers. Since language is the house of being, we therefore arrive at beings by constantly going through this house. …That is why only in this precinct, if anywhere, can the reversal from the region of objects and their representation into the innermost of the heart's space be realized. (Heidegger, Beaten 232)

Language is the tool of literature, is the very existence of literature, and so, it is in language that the understanding of the text begins. Heidegger tells us here that language hinders the access to essence, but also that through it language presents the possibility to infer or grasp the essence. It is through language, then, that it is possible to do the reverse process from which the thing that is named loses its essence in our discourse. Hence, from a platonic point of view, and in a way to illustrate how the reflections from the cave are conceptualized in the world, there is no one better than that who produces reality with language (the poet) to exemplify how those reflections are transferred into our conceptualization of the world. In other words, the poet gives the possibility to make the process of reflecting reality a recognizable one, getting us closer to the grasping of the essence by the studying of such process. Standis masterly illustrates Heidegger’s notions of how poets are the ones who turn that essence into being through the use of language by quoting from his address “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,”

The poet names all things with respect to what they are. This naming does not merely come about when something already previously known is furnished with a name; rather, by speaking the essential word, the poet’s naming first nominates the beings as what they are. Thus they become as beings. Poetry is the founding of being in the word. (Heidegger 2000, 59) (Standis 155)

If compared to Plato’s cave, what language is doing by placing the beings is no more than projecting those images of the cave into the physicality of the word. And who better than the poet, the creator of realities and projections through language is there to show this process? “The poet leads the way from the shadows of the cave by drawing attention to the way they are projected” (Standis 127). It is the poet who bears a connection to that first projection of the reflected truth through language in as much as she or he follows a similar pattern in Pérez 21 creating fiction. It is traditionally understood, then, that it is in the hands of the poet where the key to retrace our steps back to that absent essence may reside.

In a similar way, the poet brings into being that which is named. By using the literary language that being is projected with the appearance of an unconcealed thing. This is, once again, the use of the word for a precise purpose, as well as the use of its conventional appearance as a thing in order to transmit that reality (fiction) it narrates. Paul Standis explains how Heidegger puts into the role of the poet the weight of addressing the essence through language. It is the poet who, in last stance, brings the essence forth through language (155), but mostly, it is the poet through the use of that projecting language who recreates the process by which the conventional truth of the word is assumed by us:

Projective saying is that in which the preparation of the sayable at the same time brings the unsayable as such to the world. In such saying, the concepts of its essence - its belonging to world-history, in other words - are formed, in advance, for a historical people (Heidegger, 46)

Heidegger, in the chapter from Off the Beaten Track: “Why Poets?”, connects the relationship of poets with the divine and the platonic by separating them from ordinary use of language. This ordinary language, loaded with the manipulating charge of conventionality, serves us to shape the reality it conceptualizes to our liking, as opposed to the more “honest” mission of the poet in using language to create, rather than shape, a world in a similar way as the divinity does.

Nature is brought before man by human re-presentation [Vor-Stellen]. Man sets up the world as the entirety of objectiveness before himself and himself before the world. Man delivers [stellt zu] the world unto himself and produces [stellt her] Nature for himself. We must think of this production [Her-stellen] in its wide and diverse essence. Man tills [bestellt] Nature when it does not satisfy his representation. Man produces new things when they are lacking to him. Man rearranges [umstellt] things when they bother him. Man adjusts [s. verstellt] things when they distract him from his plans. Man displays [ausstellt] things when he extols them for sale and usc. Man displays himself when he emphasizes [berausstellt] his accomplishments and advertises his business. (215)

Moreover, while Heidegger may use these words to begin his study over the need for poets (“Why Poets?”), it seems that a strange warning can be read between the lines. It is Pérez 22 precisely because of this possibility of transforming or manipulating the world with the word, that the loss of the essence in naming opens the possibility to both beauty and evil in the utterance of it. The poet is thus idealized as a kind of prophetic figure whose closeness to the divinity provides her or him with the power of carrying essence in a more truthful way through the use of literary language and the creation of beauty with it. It is some kind of figure responsible from helping humanity to keep from the dangers of losing all connection with the original language.

While personally I do not regard literary discourse as transcendental compared to ordinary discourse, I do believe there is a greater ground in literature to find the spaces that carry information free of the connotations acquired by the conventionalities of such ordinary language. Literature has proven through history as the best means for language to explore its limits, and the many rhetorical and literary devices open to writers, as well as the broader predispositions of readers toward fictionality, create a perfect space where to transmit through silence the essence imposed over the word, to say without naming.

2.6 “Respectability”

Let me now try to explore the conflict between conventionality and literary language as exposed by Anderson in his work. In “Respectability,” Wash Williams is described as a dirty man and disgusting misogynist. This is a story about hate, about how Wash came to despise all women and think of them as already dead and rotten. The only beautiful thing about Wash is precisely his telling of that story to George Willard, as if the telling of that truth that is hate resembled the language of the literary, the original language. It is visceral, it is disgusting but at the same time, it is genuine. Wash Williams wants to warn George against women, since he saw him kissing Belle Carpenter and plans on killing that feeling of attraction George has for her: “The telegraph operator of Winesburg, sitting in the darkness on the railroad ties, had become a poet. Hatred had raised him to that elevation” (108). In doing so, Wash becomes a poet, a user of the original language of truths due to how purely he speaks from hate. Here, even if a negative feeling, hate is strong enough as to keep that connection with its original truth, making it a beautiful thing when expressed through language.

The story Wash tells George is that of his marriage with a woman whose name is never mentioned. This was a woman he was madly in love with, for whom he remained virgin until marriage, and who improved his social position. His love is described as religious Pérez 23 fervor, and the fact that he benefits from it by improving his social position, as well as the fact that he complies with the social customs such as staying a virgin for it, implies that Walsh experiences marriage as the artificial convention that it is, rather than as a product of love. As it turned out, his wife was cheating on him, and when he discovered this he left her, giving her the money he had in the bank and what he got from selling the house. He sent her back to her mother’s home and cried like “a silly boy” (109). But then her mother called for him to attempt a reconciliation. He waited two hours and he would most likely have ended up forgiving her, blaming the other men for her acts and saying he is sick of being lonely. Then the mother pushed the girl naked into the room, “When she had pushed the girl in through the door she stood in the hallway waiting, hoping we would--well, you see waiting” (110). Wash cannot even say what the mother wants the girl to do, it is again something unsaid in the text, the fact that the girl is forced by her family to try to have sex with Wash in order to lure him into staying with her to keep their respectable position. After that, Wash tried to kill the mother, but the neighbors stopped him from doing so, and now he will never fulfill his desire as she died from a fever.

It is interesting to see how Wash’s hatred seems to be directed toward the mother rather than the cheating wife, he seems to understand in that moment that she is also a product of the society she lives in. Ultimately, Wash limits his hatred for this conventional behavior to women, rather than the whole society. His personal feelings toward his wife lead Wash to forge this opinion of social status and respectability around women alone, nonetheless, this is the story of social appearances, and how fake social interaction has become in order to create such an image. In the same way, the girl’s mother does not name the truth of what is going on, avoiding the utterance and recognition of reality to keep the appearances of the conventional world they live in. Thus, this story makes use of such conventionality to make evident to readers the stigmatizing consequences of burying meaning under the appearance of words. By showing such consequences in Wash, that is, how conventionality works in opposition to human nature, even contrasting it with something as pure as the feeling of hate, readers may go further than the words being said to understand the irony of that respectability that they try to maintain to the cost of their very own dignity.

Pérez 24

3. The Unsaid and The Grotesque: Finding the Lost Language

3.1 Fragments and Essence

As Blanchot puts it, “[t]he tale is not the narration of an event, but that event itself” (Gaze 109). What Anderson presents in this work is precisely that, the narration of events that occur to the people of this town. He does not provide a deep analysis of the mind of the characters, neither a strong stream of consciousness or an explanation for their paradigms. Anderson gives us the event as such, he gives us a small fragment of reality, from which psychological depth can be inferred. If truth is fragmented, then, providing unpolluted images of those fragments would be a rather great way to reconstruct that idea of the town as a whole.

Being a realist work about a North American (fictional) town gives Winesburg, Ohio’s literary language an even greater weight in terms of the relationship to its historical and social context in relation to the ordinary language in it. Precisely that attempt to portray society as it is, the event as such in its context, emphasizes even more the problem of developing ordinary language into a stigmatizing conventionality. In this sense, Winesburg’s society talks of the reality of rural American towns, of how tradition affects the personal configuration of people’s identities. The use of literary language is but a great medium to make apparent that artificiality of conventional language when clashing with people’s idiosyncrasies, desires, and natures. Blanchot mentions in The Book to Come how language becomes being in the work of art and how language transforms as it becomes the tool of fiction.

Immediate language is not immediate, it is charged with history and even literature, and above all (this is the essential point) as soon as a writer tries to grasp it, it changes its nature in his hand. Here we recognize the “leap” that is literature. We use ordinary language and it makes reality available, it says things, it gives them to us by distancing them, and the language itself disappears in this use, always neutral and unnoticed. But having become the language of “fiction,” it becomes, apart from usage, uncommon, and no doubt we think we still get what it designates as we do in ordinary life, and even more easily since it is enough to write the word bread or the word angel to make immediately available to our imagination the beauty of the angel and the taste of bread-yes, but on what conditions? … language becomes the idle Pérez 25

profundity of being, the domain where the word becomes being but does not signify and does not reveal. (207)

Language does not become alien to us because of its literary status, rather it broadens its qualities to provide a further understanding than that which is achieved from its ordinary (or immediate) form. It is a recognizable language, but a language at the service of fiction that offers readers the possibility to find unity in that fragmentation of truth through the unsaid connection among its fragments.

3.2 The Grotesque

Andrew Corey Yerkes in “Strange Fevers, Burning Within” compares Anderson’s work to others of the time by Sinclair Lewis and Edgar Lee Masters stating that it “is less interested in satirizing politics or social trends than in revealing subtextual psychology” (200). While Winesburg, Ohio is not a work dedicated to the denunciation of social or political injustice in any explicit way, the reading of the book from a social perspective, rather than the more physical or neurological one Yerkes does, gives a very strong view of how the contemporary society of the time affected the very essence of its people, thus triggering the problematics that affect the characters of this town. Hence, rather than the grotesque and exaggerated sexuality that some of the feminine characters show in the work as seen by Yerkes in physiological terms, I believe natural sexual behavior that is misunderstood as strange, or grotesque, because of the social reality and sexual repression of the time could be a good example of the social psychology of the book. It is important to understand sexual desire as a common thing to all people, rather than some kind of exaggerated characteristic of these characters in order to make them grotesque (210). What appears as grotesque sexuality in this work is precisely the clashing of social views about it against the nature of sexual desire as such, especially in a patriarchal society where women are still expected to be monogamous and devoted to child bearing rather than to have a natural sexual behavior.

Nevertheless, Yerkes does specify the historical and social influences that shape the grotesque in the book, admitting through it that Anderson’s book may be more involved with sociological realism than previously stated:

Winesburg’s historiographic simplicity is essential to its formulation of the grotesque, because the novel repeatedly suggests that many aspects of human consciousness evolved out of historical conditions that no longer exist, and it is in the context of new conditions that instinctual human behavior appears as grotesque. (205) Pérez 26

Other authors, like Lihua Zhang in “ ‘The Book of the Grotesque’ and Winesburg, Ohio” find this grotesqueness closer to a more material quality. Grotesqueness resembles a mental disease affecting the characters. Zhang even uses strong words such as “crazy” to refer to them or focuses on the physical qualities of the characters (301). Furthermore, grotesqueness seems to be a quality particular to the specific event narrated in these short stories. Rather than an innate quality of the characters, the grotesque seems like an episodic thing, as if it was a kind of mental breakdown rather than the feature that defines them. I strongly disagree with such views: characters are not grotesque because of how they behave, they are grotesque because of the conflict between their essence and the oppression of their surrounding social reality.

Precisely this idea of the clash between historical social conceptions and the opening to new understandings of personal identity is one of the features that I see in the text as the reason for grotesqueness to appear. Continuing with the previous ideas over sexuality, in an era were sexual liberation was developing into what would finally detonate in the sixties, that seed of self-awareness regarding sexual identity, still embedded in a mentality that bears the mark of traditional thinking of sexuality and patriarchy, creates a conflict that will prompt that grotesque, or strange, behavior by those who experience it. Because of those conflicts between personal nature and convention the clash of individuals against their social group is another way in which some of these characters are grotesque.

Robert Dunne argues that “Anderson refashioned conventional meanings of the term in perceiving the grotesque as a characteristic of the alienation and isolation fostered by a modern, industrial age.” … and argues that these characters, as well as their narrator, are rendered grotesque as a result of their interaction with the “constraints and imprecision of language.” (Zhang 205)

While isolation can be recognized as a predominant feature in the work, its relation to the industrial era lies in the second statement of this quote regarding language. It is my belief that precisely the contemporary thinking, the discourse related to the conceptualization of their reality and the clashing of traditional thinking with the new ideas brought by industrialization, is what triggers both that isolation and the view of natural behavior as grotesque.

On the other hand, Ralph Ciancio defines grotesqueness in “‘The Sweetness of the Twisted Apples’: Unity of Vision in Winesburg, Ohio” as an inherent quality to the Pérez 27 characters rather than as a product of that clashing of conventionality with their nature. It is as if they were born grotesque in a traditional way, while the truth is that all of them are rather normal people who are almost ironically seen as grotesque because of the impossibility to belong to the kind of traditional society they live in. In “Queer,” for example, the protagonist’s main problem comes from his impossibility to express himself to others. He cannot tell them he belongs, that he is not strange, and so seeks a place where he can fit in the city. It is not so much he who is grotesque then, but the impossibility to fit in the society of Winesburg what makes him seem so.

Like the apples, the grotesques are the twisted crop of the human harvest, their essence having gathered to a gnarl, and hence they too are rejected. But for the very same reason, they are also the “sweetest”- as there are few perfect apples and untouched people, so there are few twisted apples and deformed people. (996)

Nevertheless, grotesqueness seems proper to each of the characters as opposed to those who fit, or give the illusion of fitting, better in the town, such as Tom Willard (George’s father). It is usually a personal quality that makes them seem grotesque, as in “Hands” is Wing Biddlebaum’s warm approach to his students that ultimately gets misunderstood as a pedophiliac behavior. His naivety over his own behavior and personality in the eyes of the society of his time turns him into a grotesque figure that is judged and punished. Wing is often seen as a misunderstood homosexual or as a raging pedophile, even in today’s criticism, only for keeping contact with his students in a society were even a hand in the shoulder can be misunderstood by the perversity of a long-miscarried discourse. But, what if Wing is just that way, what if he is just the kind of person who appreciates the warmth of human contact in a completely inoffensive way? Ciancio quotes from Ihab Hassan in observing how grotesqueness is “a kind of inwardness gone sour, a perverse insistence on subjectivity. It is innocence deformed and preying upon itself…” (997)

In this case, the unsaid that affects Wing is precisely his isolation from society, his concealment of information over his past or his inability to properly communicate with George after he touches him. It is not so much the unsaid in narration, the spaces of this story open for interpretation, as his own inability to speak that shows the conflict between the essence of what he would like to convey through his speech and the impossibility to express such thing in his social surrounding’s ordinary speech. Wing’s possible homosexuality only increases that clash between tradition and his personal identity even further, nonetheless, only Pérez 28 the way such behavior is taken out of context is enough evidence of the dissonant conception of discourse in the social context of Winesburg.

In talking about the concept of truth that appears in “The Book of the Grotesque,” Robert Dunne in “Beyond Grotesqueness in Winesburg, Ohio” maintains that: “[b]y truth, Anderson seems to imply variously held beliefs (regarding such notions as sex, possessions, behavior) that are the sum of a “great many thoughts” (180). These truths are beautiful, but as people fanatically live by them they seem to lose that quality and turn into a negative feature. Dunne exemplifies quite well how the grotesque makes them so, also because of their impossibility to fit in the town. The anxiety born from the isolation that the truth lived by characters motivates clashes with the traditional discourse, pushing them to try and find someone who shares the same preoccupations. That is, they have the need to not be lonely, which in many cases will (specially for female characters) be mistaken for sexual desire:

The truths the grotesque are obsessed with require them to look beyond themselves; they have the need to find other people who will both understand and share the very same truths. (185)

It is time now to provide Anderson’s own interpretation of the grotesque in the first story in Winesburg, Ohio. In his introduction to the book, “The Book of The Grotesque”, Anderson tells us about an old writer who calls a carpenter to raise his bed to level it with the window. The carpenter, who had fought in the civil war, smokes cigars and talks with him. They talk about war and the fact that the carpenter had been a prisoner. He lost his brother to starvation, and cries when he remembers it. A “ludicrous” image of the carpenter is given (3), of how he sobs with his white moustache going up and down with the cigar between his lips while crying, as if trying to portray this already as a somehow grotesque image of a character who at the end will be recognized as “the nearest thing to what is understandable and lovable of all the grotesques in the writer’s book”(6). Finally, they forget about the bed and the carpenter builds it without considering the writer’s opinion, ending with him having to disappointedly use a chair to get into bed. These are the events that serve to open the ground for the real topic of this story, but nonetheless it seems to be loaded with symbolic meaning over what is the grotesque in terms of the positive qualities the carpenter receives at the end among those grotesque characters in the writer’s eyes.

Once in bed, the writer thinks about his own death in a pacifying way: “He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn’t a Pérez 29 youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight” (4). It could be said this is death (a female knight), because of the previous image of what is growing inside of him. It could be related to Blanchot’s terms where the previous death talk would point to this pregnancy being the need for the writer to write and in the presence of death find the essence of language. However, as the text tells us: “It is absurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old writer” (4), it is instead the thing within him, what he is thinking about, what matters. It seems as if a specific warning against trying to give meaning to the symbolic was issued, as if readers would be advised to just read the events of the characters’ life rather than try to find the original intention of the writer.

This writer “had got, during his long life, a great many notions in his head” (4). He had met lots of people and many women had fallen in love with him. In his thoughts are those notions that are of his own, as those truths he chooses to live by, his personal grotesqueness, so: “[w]hy quarrel with an old man concerning his thoughts?” (4). In bed he dreams, or rather imagines as he is still conscious, many now grotesque figures of all the people he had ever met processing before his eyes. This grotesqueness appears on different levels where some of the figures are horrible and other even beautiful. Hence, after an hour of contemplation, he begun to write about them creating “The Book of the Grotesque” that helped author of this text understand lots of people and experiences. The main thought the author remembers of the book is this:

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful. (5)

The old writer talked about some truths in his book like virginity, wealth, poverty, passion, etc., which were all beautiful until people came and took those truths for their own: “It was the truths that made people grotesque” (6). It is so that when somebody would take a truth and try to live by it, such truth would become false and the person grotesque. So, the writer wrote of them.

At the beginning things (thoughts) did not have a name, they were not altered by the restraining force of language, but then man made the truths by taking parts of many thoughts. Truth, then, is the word, the name put to essence, it is the vague recollections of the world projected into language. Nonetheless, those initial truths are still beautiful, as archaic platonic Pérez 30 ideas, they are still free from the historical and social manipulation of language. The contact of those truths with people is what results in the grotesque. It is the living by the truth, the appropriation of them to the language of people, charging such truths with the prejudices and stigmas of social discourse, which makes originally beautiful truths that expressed but the nature of people, grotesque in its social expression. Virginity, passion, wealth, poverty, thrift, profligacy, carelessness and abandon (as the truths mentioned by this author) are taken away from their original meanings to create conflicts within the identities of the characters that render them as grotesque in the eyes of the town, but truly, it is only for living by their nature, by not accepting the normative meaning of those truths appropriated by people, that these characters are judged as so. It is the people who actually belong to the town who is grotesque, it is people like Tom Willard who live by the truths of conventional social discourse who turn into falsehood those beautiful truths that first named the thoughts in this world. Ultimately, then, it is characters like the carpenter, with his lips that hold a cigar while making his moustache dance to the rhythm of a sobbing, who is the most lovable among the grotesque. Regardless of how “funny” or ludicrous his image may appear to societies eyes, he is the most genuine of men, the one who lives closer to our original truths, in the same way the protagonists of these stories do.

3.3 The Unsaid

It is time to give a definition to the concept of the unsaid in terms of how it will be relevant for my analysis here. Broadly understood, the unsaid are those elements of the narration which, without being specifically named, are assumed and internalised by readers functioning as carriers of meaning through the plot line and helping or driving the narrative. Like the essence of the word, the unsaid is that which is carried in the discourse by the absence of it, that which is not there and at the same time makes itself evident in the text.

As Mallarme said: “To name is to destroy, to suggest is to create”, so the unsaid can work in many different ways. It can be the evocative power of discourse, the inferred message from consciously concealed information (as in a detective novel), the play between ambiguous concepts, the obviously satirical in a censored background, the metaphoric, the ironic, the occult, etc. Thus, the unsaid can be studied in terms of fictionality, of thematics, of contextual and historical analysis, of rhetorical devices, etc. Here, however, I will study it in terms of its relation to essence and the conventional use of language in order to open the Pérez 31 ground of discussion of how this use of language and discourse in a realist work such as Anderson’s can affect the way the unsaid is cognitively perceived by readers.

Blanchot theorizes that “silence and nothingness are the essence of literature (Orpheus 29). So far it has been made visible that there is a prescriptive power in naming over the essence that ultimately makes it disappear from the linguistic discourse. But let me use some more of Blanchot ideas in order to understand how the effect conventionality has on ordinary language may affect the literary text in a realist work that will precisely have the need to look for those unsaid spaces in order to make evident sometimes how the conventional use of language has not only hindered the path to its essence, but insisted so much on it being truthful that it seems to manipulate us into thinking of such ordinary language as essential one.

Everyday language calls a cat a cat, as if the living cat and its name were identical, as if it were not true that when we name the cat we retain nothing of it but its absence, what it is not. Yet for a moment everyday language is right, in that even if the word excludes the existence of what it designates, it still refers to it through the thing’s nonexistence, which has become its essence. (44)

It is true that language is truthful in depicting the thing by including the absence of its essence in its naming, but it also gives rise to the problem of that conventional language being assumed as an ultimate truth: “Every time we speak we make words into monsters with two faces, one being reality, physical presence, and the other meaning, ideal absence” (Blanchot 59). It is a monster precisely because it is dangerous, because it gives us the opportunity to understand some of the stigmatizing features that a word has gained over its historical and social development as ultimate truths of its essence. As Anderson illustrates by explaining grotesqueness as the belief over an exaggerated truth, believing ordinary language to be the essential one hinders the very same configuration of the human mind.

Ordinary language limits equivocation. It solidly encloses the absence in a presence, it puts a term to understanding, to the indefinite movement of comprehension; understanding is limited but misunderstanding too. (59 original italics)

The collision of this meaning in the ordinary language when used as literary language will be one of the ways in which the absence of language will become evident to readers. The exposition of how far society can turn a belief into undeniable truth opens the space for human nature to collide with the imposed conventionality, for female characters in this town Pérez 32 to be judged for they sexual desired, the need of its inhabitants to not be lonely to be mistaken with lust or craziness, the difficulty to communicate outside the regionality of its context as queerness, etc. Ordinary language will be thus, by taking command of the fictional world, a device in itself calling attention to its impossibility to name essence, to communicate the nature of Winesburg’s people. As those events that are no more than events, the literary language of Winesburg, Ohio is just ordinary language where the lack of words to make readers understand those events prompts the possibility to look into the open spaces of absence for a different language.

In the same way naming by words hinders the access to the essence of something while still transmitting it to some extent, literary discourse manages always to communicate more than that which is written. In this case, the aesthetic experience is traditionally seen as that process by which beauty and truth come together for the audience of the work of art. While the work of art, can of course be seen as a whole in where that essence is transmitted, it is the experiences transmitted through specific textual evidences that will contribute to a detailed analysis of the work. It is because of this that the unsaid should not be seen as the general meaning of a work, but as elements in the text that continually help readers to guide themselves through the literary experience. A problematic of this ideal would be the attempt to dogmatize the analysis of this textual elements in trying to give a general interpretation of the unsaid. Rather than that, and while taking into account that interpreting is not devalued of any merit by this statement, finding those unsaid elements and bringing forth their importance to the text may prove more relevant than giving them a specific meaning at every time. While some unsaid elements will be easily recognized because of historical and contextual features in this work (for example the problematics of female identity in a patriarchal rural society), other experiences of the characters of Winesburg may include more personal features that could be enriched by the different experiences of the different readers. Nevertheless, finding the unsaid element creating the meaning(s) or ideas that gravitate around it may prove useful in proposing a specific approach to the text. Furthermore, the study of how those unsaid elements are cognitively received by readers will hopefully serve to identify some of the ways in which those ideas influence the understanding of the literary experience in its entirety.

Wolfgang Iser explains in his essay “Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response” how the literary text and its language do not have a connection with the object in the real world in the same way a linguistic utterance has. Hence, the readers’ action is what gives determinacy Pérez 33 to the text. Iser tells us that it is readers who must feel those blank spaces, those gaps of indeterminacy so as to understand the text. The unsaid is, in many ways, that gap of Iser. It is a space in the text that needs to be filled, a piece of information whose existence depends upon someone recognizing the nature of its absence. Therefore, for the unsaid to be made possible there needs to be someone who reads the text, an active observer of the text who by fully committing to the experience of it will be able to recognize such experience in its entirety, in both its written and unwritten sense, and in the duplicity which is presented and which is necessarily absent because of its same presence.

The poem (literature) seems to be linked to a spoken word which cannot be interrupted because it does not speak; it is. The poem is not this word itself, for the poem is a beginning, whereas this word never begins, but always speaks anew and is always starting over… Perhaps this word is the source of the poem, but it is a source that must somehow be dried up in order to become a spring. For the poet (the one who writes, the “creator”) could never derive the work from the essential lack of work. Never could he, by himself, cause the pure opening words to spring forth from what is at the origin. That is why the work is a work only when it becomes the intimacy shared by someone who writes it and someone who reads it. (Blanchot, Space 36)

One way to analyze that absence in the text may be by studying the necessary gaps, the things that are left out of the discourse. For that purpose, Ruth El Saf examines in “In Praise of What is Left Unsaid: Thoughts on Women and Lack in Don Quixote” precisely the information that is obviated in the text. In doing so, the relationship of Don Quixote and Dulcinea, that fantastic idealization only existing in the mind of the knight, serves the purpose of properly exemplifying a textual reality living in its absence, the real Dulcinea that exists in opposition to what Don Quixote says about her. About this dichotomy of presence by its absence in the discourse El Saf claims that:

Dulcinea will never escape the fragile web of words in which he [Don Quixote] has caged her image, will never slip into the world of flesh and blood creatures, he is also owning, for the first time, his lack-recognizing her in himself as his own projection. (221)

It is not therefore the real Dulcinea that matters to readers, it is precisely her nonappearance what makes Don Quixote who he is, and the way she appears in his discourse by absence what offers the possibility to study that feminine discourse El Saf analyses even if Pérez 34 only by lack of it. In the same way, Don Quixote uses discourse to create a reality in which to make possible the existence of the self-made conceptualization of his identity, readers must provide the literary experience with a frame in which it will become understandable. In this process, distrusting Don Quixote’s discourse is precisely one of the reasons why the search for the hidden message brings readers to understand his experience in a literary world were fantasy and reality collide. It is, as El Saf studies in relation to the lack of feminine discourse in the work, that the unsaid, the words that are left out of Don Quixote’s discourse, provide a new layer of vital information in fully experiencing the text, in meeting that Dulcinea that is both a fictional creation in the hidalgo’s mind and a real woman in a fictional world.

Finally, trying to connect the idea of the unsaid and absence in literary language with Anderson’s own views on the creative process in this work, I will now turn my attention to the story “Loneliness”.

3.4 “Loneliness”

The story of Enoch begins with his origin in Winesburg, and the fact that the farm he grew at “was painted brown and the blinds to all the windows facing the town were kept closed” (151). This opaqueness already gives a faint hint about the way he will relate to the surrounding world in the future. He was a quiet but smiling young boy who had the bad habit of walking through the middle of the road, as if the rest of the world did not exist for him.

After moving away from Winesburg, Enoch became “a city man” living in New York for fifteen years, where he went to art school and learnt French. He dreamt of going to Paris to study, but it never happened. In the same way George wants to go to the city, it seems as if Enoch would see in Paris the next step in his search for a place to belong. Both characters, as many others in this work, yearn for that feeling of belonging and place the weight of its finding in a change of landscape that will bring different people into their lives.

Even though he had the qualities to be an artist, “Nothing ever turned out for Enoch Robinson” (151). The problem is that he never stopped being a child and “he couldn’t understand people and he couldn’t make people understand him”. He also became crippled after being hit by a car. In a way, it would be possible that his childish quality is intrinsically related to that impossibility to communicate. He is a child because he retains an early version of language, the first language were truths were made and were still beautiful, and so he cannot be understood by the other people who has taken those truths for themselves and manipulated their meanings. Pérez 35

Enoch is a child also in the way he relates to his surrounding reality, as he cannot properly interact with it. “Confused and disconcerted by the facts of life” (152), he cannot function in reality, he is an artist, and so seems to belong in fiction. He tries to fit by hanging out with a group of young artists and do the conventional things of a young boy. He gets drunk and arrested, getting really scared of the policeman, and also, he hooks up with a prostitute and runs away when he grows afraid of the affair. It is interesting to notice how Enoch’s attempt to enter into the conventionality of young man’s behavior is narrated in a kind of ironical tone, excluding all the details of reality and describing the word in its naivety, the way Enoch sees it. What happens in his eyes is that he meets a “woman of the town” waiting on the sidewalk (152). He walks with her for a while and the grows scared and runs away. The woman, who has probably been drinking, stays laughing at the sidewalk where another laughing man meets her, and they leave together. The important element here is not avoiding saying that she is a prostitute for readers to have to interpret that part, it is precisely saying that she is a prostitute by not saying it, meaning, by hinting or making apparent, that this unsaid will trigger an understanding on the way Enoch relates to his surrounding world.

Further on in the story, there is a specially interesting passage when talking about his room in New York. Here the narration stops, and the narrator gains entity by personally addressing readers “It is important to get that fixed in your mind” (152), referring to the hallway like shape of his room that acts as symbol of Enoch’s story. To his room came other artists “of the kind that talk” (153), the ones who use “lots of words”. In his room lots of people talk a language that he cannot fully comprehend, “Enoch wanted to talk but he didn’t know how” (153). He is overexcited and when he tries to talk he finds himself awkward: “He knew what he wanted to say, but he knew also that he could never by any possibility say it” (153). He cannot express himself in the same language those other artists use. This is made evident in the way he describes his own paintings as opposed to how others talk about them, as it is not about what they see and comment on, but what its hidden to their sight, that is the point of his work. From a dark spot in one of his painting he explains a whole hidden story of a house, elderly people, a woman hidden among them who just fell of a horse, etc. In the insignificance of that spot there is a whole word that remains unpainted but is still there. Finally, Enoch tells his friends that what they are supposed to be seeing is a woman, one just too beautiful to be painted, “I didn’t try to paint the woman, of course. She is too beautiful to be painted” (154). Then he goes on to suggest that they should just look at the sky and run away as he used to do. The painting is supposed to awake a physical reaction in them, the sky Pérez 36 in the painting shows much more than just a sky. Thus, there is a hidden world within it that should say more than is painted, that should arouse a reaction from its viewers, that should make them experience it.

With the passing of time he stopped inviting people to his room. Enoch started making up his own people with whom he was able to communicate, people like him who belonged to the same world and spoke the same language. Just as the previously explained conceptions of literary language, he is only able to express himself within the boundaries of fiction where conventionality has not polluted the meaning of the word.

Nevertheless, caught in between fiction and reality, and as he started to crave for the company of real people, loneliness made him get married. His physical desire is described as a kind of sickness, the physical boundaries of the human body as opposed to his artist mind. He gets married out of lust rather than love, has two kids, and gets a job in advertisement. It seems as if the conventionality of human life had caught up with Enoch, pushing him to fit in that society that is not his, making him into another ordinary person.

This new part of his life is described as living a “new game” (155) that, while making him proud at first for feeling part of the society, irremediably ended up in frustration. “He dismissed the essence of things and played with realities” (155), as if he had forgotten about the essence of things by becoming part of the conventional, by trying to use that language of society Anderson mentions in “The Book the Grotesque” that has polluted the original truths. Inevitably, he breaks up his marriage as the same feelings he had with his artist friends grow toward his family. When his mother dies, and he inherits some money, he gives it to his wife and tells her he is leaving (an act that makes her cry even though the narrator tells she does not care much, thus crying as if only by convention). Enoch then remains in his New Yok room surrounded by his fictional people, where he belongs. He makes those people into reflections of people he had seen, from images, like the poet who draws from the cave, as if from shadows: “There must have been two dozen of the shadow people, invented by the child-mind of Enoch Robinson, who lived in the room with him” (157). Following the idea of literary language as exposed in the previous chapters, Enoch seems to do the job of the poet in drawing attention to how language reflects shadows from reality. Like the poet, he recreates the way language tries to name the essence of things, and in doing so he lies closer to the original state of language where the connection between name and object was less estranged by its historical and social use. Pérez 37

Then something happens to him, a woman, that makes him go back to Winesburg. He tells this story to George Willard, with whom he seems to share an air of melancholy and sadness that makes him gain his confidence. In his room, Enoch tries to tell him the story of a room in Washington Square:

“You’ll understand if you try hard enough,” he said conclusively. “I have looked at you when you went past me on the street and I think you can understand. It isn’t hard. All you have to do is to believe what I say, just listen and believe, that’s all there is to it.”(159)

He met a woman in the hallway who used to visit his room, probably a violin player. A woman who would come to sit with him and say nothing, or at least nothing of importance. Even though “she was driving everything else away” (160), he was attracted to her and could not stop letting her in when she knocked at the door. He started telling her about all the people in his mind, he tried to keep things for himself and be quiet, but he could not stop telling her about it. One night he went mad trying to make her understand how important he was in his world, and he manically locks her in the room and tells her all about it until she seems to understand. But then he is scared that she does, that is, he wants her to understand and at the same time cannot allow that to happen, as if she would know everything his existence would become unnecessary. Thus, he insults her and demands her to leave and never come back. After that “‘Things went to smash,’ he said quietly and sadly. ‘Out she went through the door and all the life there had been in the room followed her out. She took all of my people away’” (162). Finally, Enoch is left feeling lonely in his room. He tries to explain the fiction he lives in, and in trying to do so he needs to make it understandable to the user of conventional language. He needs to change the language he used to create his fictional creatures in order to make them comprehensible, and in doing so he destroys the shadows he has created, and kills the very essence of their being.

Read as an analogy of the creative process and the way the mind of the poet works in relation to Anderson ideas on art as explained above, this story serves to illustrate my views on how the unsaid remains a necessary element of literary discourse because of its connection to essence and conventionality. Just as Enoch destroys his fiction by trying to explain it to the woman, literary discourse relies on the opening of possible spaces where the unsaid elements may bring forth the language of the experience in order to give readers the possibility to live in the fictional world. Pérez 38

3.5 Concluding Remarks

Essence cannot be named, cannot become the object, that is, in naming essence, it is concealed. Here, logos is not the word as we know it, is the word that has in it the traces of the essence that has been hidden underneath its surface, it is the word that in literary language opens the ground for essence to come forth through silence. Language is, nonetheless, the means of literature, and while the understanding of the word comes from the social agreement over its meaning, a process that may further hinder its relation to the essence because of how social and historical circumstances may affect that meaning, there is in literary language the possibility to access the space of absence that the essence creates in the word. The word is, then, the physical sign that serves as representative of that thingness it names, thusmaking possible the access to it through its absence.

The literary discourse employs the same word as the conventional one. It is due to its creative power, the way it produces fictionality, that it seems to be more closely related to essence. Just as ordinary language does, literary language names the word of fiction, and in doing so it brings forth the absence of essence and opens the possibility to play with the ways in which context affects the conventional use of language. Thus, the poet draws attention to how the shadows of the cave are represented in as much as the poet follows a similar pattern in creating fiction.

Finally, it is possible to recognize the silence in the text that brings forth the absence in what I have called the unsaid. These unsaid elements in the narration are precisely the spaces open for readers to recreate the experiences of the text further than the constrains of language allow. The unsaid is the space where readers may find an understanding of the experience that is not hindered by the conventional meanings of language. The unsaid elements are those spaces that demand the active participation from readers, the use of their cognitive faculties in order to participate in the literary experience regardless of the limitations imposed by language.

Pérez 39

4 A Cognitive Approach to Winesburg, Ohio

4.1 Focalization

In this chapter, I will try to explain the theoretical basis of what in narrative studies is called focalization. For this purpose, I will make use of the story “An Awakening” to illustrate how focalization works on different layers in the text. This story will offer not only a good example of most of the different ways in which focalization can be an external or internal process, but also some evidence of the masterly ways in which the different points of view of the narration will affect the way readers recreate the fictional experience in the text.

4.1.1 “An Awakening”

Belle Carpenter is a tall and strong woman working in the millinery shop in Winesburg. She has an abusive father she dislikes, Henry, and is in love with the bartender Ed Handby, even though she publicly dates George Willard in an attempt to have a better image in town. Ed, a bartender in Winesburg, inherited a farm and sold it for a lot of money that he spent on women, alcohol, gambling, and partying. He seems to have a quite violent and wild temperament but feels that is time to settle down and make Belle his wife.

George Willard is at the pool salon talking about women and drinking with his friends. When he leaves the salon, seemingly inebriated, he has a sort of revelation while talking to himself about having order in his life, which leads him to a new-found sense of self reassurance. After spending some time in the back alleys of the workers’ neighborhood, he decides to visit Belle to let her know he has become a new and stronger man.

Right before George arrives to Belle’s house, Ed has just left, having tried to woo her. Nonetheless, his attempt having gone wrong due to his nerves, Ed ends up threatening Belle and saying he will hurt both George and her if he ever sees them together. Filled with desire to make Ed even more jealous, Belle accepts George’s company as soon as he arrives. They walk together, and he tells her about his new strength as a man, but she seems distracted and pays little attention to him. When he finally kisses her, she does not resist, but he is pushed aside by Ed, who continually pushes him away from her, thus making evident that he is much stronger than George and leaving him to feel humiliated. Before taking Belle with him, Ed reprimands her and confesses that he would not take her as wife if it was not because he loved her so much. In the end, George finds himself walking back to his room humiliated and hating the same alleyways in which he had been previously feeling so strong. Pérez 40

4.1.2 Defining Focalization

In Manfred Jahn’s chapter “Focalization” in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, the term is first viewed in a rather broad way as “the submission of (potentially limitless) narrative information to a perspectival filter” (94). Simply put, focalization can be explained as the point of view of the text. Nonetheless, in an attempt to expose why a new terminology to refer to this process is necessary in narrative studies, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan in Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, starts by explaining why, following Genette, she substitutes point of view with focalization, mostly in order to avoid the visual meaning that may limit the cognitive and emotional aspects of its experience. The fact that the story of “An Awakening” is structured around three different character’s perspectives, added to that of the narrative voice, shows how the process of focalization surpasses the limitations of a point of view. Even though the story begins with a contextualization of the characters in the same way Jahn makes use of Genette’s view on nineteenth century novelists,7 viewing the narrated events through the perspective of these three characters seems to be the only possible way to follow the development of the story.

Furthermore, while discussing agency, Jahn places in modernism some of the first traces of the study of focalization, focusing mostly on the idea of reflector characters as those who offer the point of view of the narration (95). In fact, reflector character can be considered as the origin of focalizer in the same way Rimmon-Kenan established it as the vehicle of focalization (74). While narration and focalization may be at times combined, Rimmon- Kenan proposes that they are both different activities. It is so that the center of consciousness or the character in the represented world for first person retrospective narratives is the focalizer, and the third person witness to the story, the narrator (75). In Winesburg, Ohio, it is easy to recognize the voice of an omniscient narrator that guides readers through the story, nonetheless, that does not necessarily mean that there are no focalizing characters in text. In this story for example, after having introduced the two new characters in connection to George Willard, the narration shifts to the center of consciousness of the characters, to that point of view through which characters experience the present moment of the narration, thus making them separate focalizers of the text at different stages.

7According to Jahn “Genette notes that nineteenth-century novelists tend to introduce characters via externally focalized block description before using them as reflectors (Narrative Discourse, 190)” (99). Pérez 41

Moreover, on the basis of Mieke Bal, Rimmon-Kenan explains how the process of focalization involves an object that is focalized: “The subject (the ‘focalizer’) is the agent whose perception orients the presentation, whereas the object (the ‘focalized’) is what the focalizer perceives” (76). For example, in the passage where George Willard goes through the workers’ neighborhood, third person narration describes his feelings and thoughts about that part of the town: “For a half hour he stayed in the alleyway, smelling the strong smell of animals too closely housed and letting his mind play with the strange new thoughts that came to him” (168). Here, the center of consciousness is George Willard; he is the focalizer through which the text is experienced, even if the narrative voice is the one offering such information. Furthermore, it is possible to see here how George focuses his attention in that part of town, directing his thoughts to it, and making it the object of that which will be the focalized. Therefore, in this passage, the workers neighborhood can be seen as the focalized object in the narration.

In order to clarify the different ways in which focalization works in the text, especially in trying to reconcile the narrative and the characters’ own voice with the process of focalization, Jahn follows Genette’s theorization of the concept, distinguishing the models of zero focalization, internal focalization, and external focalization. For the purpose of my analysis, the second category is the most beneficial.

[In] internal focalization the story’s events are “focalized through” one or more story- internal reflector characters, and narrative information is restricted to data available to their perception, cognition, and thought. (98)

Furthermore, Genette distinguishes between three kinds of internal focalization: fixed focalization as focalization “exclusively told from the point of view of a single focal character”, variable focalization for “narratives that employ more than one reflector”, and multiple focalization “in texts in which the same events are told repeatedly, but are each time seen through a different focal character” (98). A blend of the two first categories Genette offers for internal focalization can be found in this story. For example, in the episode relating George’s revelation and his walk through the workers’ neighborhood, his role as single focalizer of the story seems quite clear, as readers are presented with his thoughts, perspectives, desires, and objects of contemplation: “Hypnotized by his own words, the young man stumbled along the board sidewalk saying more words. ‘There is a law for armies and for men too,’ he muttered, lost in reflection” (167). However, when George decides to go Pérez 42 to Belle’s house, the narration not only shifts to the recent event of Ed’s visit that turned into threats, but also changes the focus to first Ed, and then Belle, interchanging the focalization process among these three characters for the rest of the story. Thus, when the narrative voice tells about the quarrel between Belle and the bartender, first Ed’s thinking and emotions are revealed.

“You stay away from that kid,” he growled, thinking of George Willard, and then, not knowing what else to say, turned to go away. “If I catch you together I will break your bones and his too,” he added. The bartender had come to woo, not to threaten, and was angry with himself because of his failure. (170)

Immediately after this, the narration turns to the actions of Belle, telling about her going upstairs and looking through the window at her saddening lover. Nevertheless, this shift to Belle does not end in her actions, but readers are taken into her mind as well by being offered the content of her thoughts and desires, thus making her the focalizer of this narrative scene.

She was made happy by the sight, and when George Willard came to the door she greeted him effusively and hurriedly put on her hat. She thought that, as she walked through the streets with young Willard, Ed Handby would follow and she wanted to make him suffer. (170)

In just one page, it is easy to see how even in internal focalization, the text can offer many different perspectives affecting the experience of the text. It is because of precisely this reason, because of the interchangeability of focalization in this story, that the full extent of the text can be experience, thus unlimiting the inferential value of an experience only lived by one character. In a work were characters seem to have such a hard time expressing themselves in words, having the perspective of each one of them on the same event might help in reading through the silences in the text. Simply put, and taking into account what Jahn proposes in terms of empathy,8 focalization may affect the way readers relive the experience of the characters. It is so that having the possibility to empathize with all three characters of the story at the same time may hinder the possibility of positioning oneself with one specific

8 Jahn mantains that “[a]s the psychonarratologists Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon have pointed out, when readers negotiate a reflector-mode text and become privy to the working of a reflector's mind, they have a natural inclination to empathize and identify with the person concerned” (103).

Pérez 43 character, thus being more open to accept their perspectives and to recreate that fictional experience from every point of view.

Finally, in terms of the different kinds of focalization, Mieke Bal proposes the use of both zero and external focalization under the label of the latter (101). Bal notes that it is “external not because things are seen from the outside … but because they are imaginatively seen by the narrator who … is external to the story” (101). Furthermore, and making use of Bal’s categorization rather than that of Genette, Rimmon-Kenan also distinguishes between internal and external focalization, where “[e]xternal focalization is felt to be closer to the narrating agent, and its vehicle is therefore called ‘narrator-focalizer’” (76). In clarifying the distinction between internal and external focalization, Rimmon-Kenan’s study is of great use as seen in the next subchapter.

4.1.3 External and Internal Focalization

In further discussing external and internal focalization, Rimmon-Kenan distinguishes between three kinds of facets, the perceptual facet, the psychological facet, and the ideological facet. By making this distinction, she does not only enrich the study of focalization by helping us distinguish the factors that will help to identify it as external or internal, but also shows how the term focalization is rather more appropriate for narrative studies in that it provides the perspectival information of the text cognitive, emotional, and perceptual dimensions.

Moreover, Rimmon-Kenan analyses perception by dividing it into two coordinates: time and space. In terms of internal or external focalization, space determines them on the basis of the position from which the scene is viewed. For instance, external focalization may position the focalizer in a location far above the perceived object (having a kind of panoramic view). This view will have to change when that point of view adheres to a character or focalized location “internal to the story” (80), thus falling under the category of internal focalization. An external focalizer can be Belle watching Ed through her window if used in the most literal sense, nonetheless this role will most usually be identified with the narrative voice rather than the observing character, especially when she is situated as the single focalizer of the story in that same paragraph. In terms of time, an external focalizer has access to all the possible temporal dimensions, while the internal one remains chained to a present time. In this story, all characters remain within their present time as narrated in the past tense by the narrative voice, which is the one that has access to previous experiences of the Pérez 44 characters and who offers those while giving the preliminary overview of Ed and Belle at the beginning of the story.

Aside from perception, focalization is also affected by psychological elements concerning the mind and emotion of the focalizer. Here, Rimmon-Kenan distinguishes between the cognitive and emotive orientations of the focalizer in experiencing the object focalized. In terms of the cognitive orientations, the external focalizer will have complete access to the knowledge of the represented world, while the internal one is restricted by being a part of that world. Hence, while readers have access to the fact that Ed is actually trying to woo Belle, she only witnesses his violent and threatening behavior, and it is through the shift in focalization leading to the exposition of her thoughts that readers might interpret her intention to make Ed jealous as an expression of her love for him. In terms of the emotive layer of focalization, the dichotomy between external and internal focalization will depend on how objective or subjective the focalization is (Rimmon-Kenan, 82).

Finally, Rimmon-Kenan considers the ideological facet in terms of focalization, broadly explained here as that ideology to which the internal parts of the represented world may be subjected to. These have a very special role in a book like Winesburg, Ohio, where the ideology of the narrator seems to be mostly absent in the text, with the possible exception of the first chapter on the Grotesque. The ideological content, while present, will need to be inferred rather than acknowledged through the reading of this work. In fact, the possibility to adapt the point of view of different focalizer characters is one of the ways the text may open the ideological content to a much broader understanding of the book as a compound of minds.

4.2 Reading Adventures

In this chapter, I will try to find some evidence in the text that may help to explain how readers might understand the discourse of that which is not written in Winesburg, Ohio, in relation to the expectations that arise from labelling some of its stories as adventures, a genre in fiction that I will describe later on. For this purpose, I make use of cognitive theories that could help us grasp the connection between the embodied physicality of the reading experience and its outcome as an enacting exercise of the experience itself. In short, this study should help us understand how Anderson’s characters’ adventures will be available to the cognitive mapping of readers by creating a set of expectations conflicting with the development of the events narrated. Even though these stories hardly resemble an adventure, readers may still have adventure fiction genre’s expectations as a departure point in the Pérez 45 reading process. The expectations and predispositions prompted by this genre, and the embodiment of the experience, will be key elements in my analysis of how readers might successfully fill the spaces in the text, or more specifically, those silences that mark the character’s discourse and social communication.

4.2.1 Enacting Expectations

Let me start here by briefly defining embodiment. “By embodied, we mean reflection in which body and mind have been brought together. What this formula intends to convey is that reflection is not just on experience, but reflection is a form of experience in itself” (Varela et al. 27). Thus, embodiment means the recreation of an experience in readers’ mind to the extent that it involves the experiencing of it in such process. If you would eat a madeleine à la Proust, it is not the object in itself that awakes any kind of feeling, it is the referential value of its qualities, its flavor, its smell that (within the physicality of your embodied experience) makes you feel a certain way or transports you to a specific space. Few readers will go through the exact same experience as the protagonist of Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu does, nonetheless, the way that bite brings forth an experience in the mind of readers in the process of recreating it is precisely what makes it one of the greatest literary texts. Just as we try to understand this, it can be interesting to see how the madeleines we might find in Winesburg, Ohio will make us, as readers, participate in the experiences of the characters.

In “Adventure,” for example, the narration stops in order to introduce an event of the grotesque in the story as an adventure: “And then one night when it rained Alice had an adventure” (Anderson 102). Other than a simple anecdotal way to introduce a new topic in narration, the way these stories are labelled as adventures will most certainly affect the expectations of the following events. It is not just a word or a stylistic preference, it is a clear categorization of the story that is going to be narrated. In most of the stories labeled as adventures, we can find a specific event in the lives of these characters that usually marks, to some extent, the “truths that ma[k]e the people grotesques” (6). Usually, the adventure is an event that expresses that which characters are incapable of expressing in words, mostly due to their own personal conflicts, or a clash with the social conventions of the town. Adventures here are thus stories within stories. In many cases, a broad description of the character is given so that it would be possible to locate the suggested strength of the event’s discourse in relation to the characters’ idiosyncratic configurations. Thus, contextualizing Alice Hindman Pérez 46 in “Adventure” as a lonely woman deceived by love gives the story of her adventure a further dimension when understanding that which is unsaid in it. On the other hand, these adventurous events usually show a more specific way in which the characters fail to communicate or express what they want in a linguistic way. However, readers are able to grasp the undertone of these experiences in their silence by connecting the adventure narrated to the general overview of this characters. My claim is that it is the process of understanding those specific events in the characters’ lives while expecting an adventure, and more specifically, the lack of resolution of those expectations in facing an event than in no way resembles an adventure, what plays an important role in readers’ cognitive mapping of the events.

Marco Caracciolo presents a study of simulation and imagination in The Experientiality of Narrative. Here, the way Gallagher and Zahavi treat simulation is central for his argument, as is Goldman’s views on enacting imagination. A simulation entails to imagine undergoing a certain experience by creating a model representing such experience (94). Furthermore, in recreating this process Caracciolo distinguishes between a perceptual and a simulated experience.

What a perceptual experience and a simulated perceptual experience have in common is a structure of sensorimotor patterns … [P]eople simulate a perceptual experience through their familiarity with the sensorimotor patterns of perception, by drawing on memories of past interactions with the world. (95)

In other words, imagining is enacting, we imagine a situation and relive that experience in a way in which our bodies make use of previous sensorimotor experiences, and in order to construct that experience, we look back to our previous experiencing of the world. Caracciolo proposes the following: “I argue that sensory imagination acts by simulating (or enacting) a hypothetical perceptual experience on the basis of one’s experiential background, and that this accounts for its experiential quality” (95). Taking this into consideration, it seems plausible to employ Caracciolo’s ideas to the way genre, or genre expectations, might affect the reading process of the events depicted. Hence, along with previous experiences of the world, genre expectations may participate in the simulated perceptual experience and how imagination works. In order to relate this idea to Winesburg, Ohio, it will be necessary to take a look at what adventures mean in literary fiction.

Pérez 47

4.2.2 Defining the Genre

In Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture, John G. Cawelti states: “The central fantasy of the adventure is that of the hero … overcoming obstacles and dangers and accomplishing some important and moral mission” (39). Sometimes those missions are obstacles planned by some villain, and the hero might get some kind of reward from it (like the love of some young damsel). For Cawelti, “It [the adventure] presents a character, with whom the audience identifies, passing through the most frightening perils to achieve some triumph” (40). In analyzing this character, he finds two different ways of presenting the hero: “as a superhero with exceptional strength or ability or as ‘one of us’, a figure marked … by flawed abilities and attitudes presumably shared by the audience” (40). Cawelti also explains how the formulas of these adventure stories, especially regarding the dangers the hero will face and the space where the action takes place, vary from culture to culture and evolve with time. In Don D’Ammassa’s Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction, the definition is widened so that an adventure is “an event or series of events that happen outside the ordinary course of the protagonist’s life, usually accompanied by danger, often by physical action” (vii). However, Joyce C. Saricks insists on Cawelti’s definition of adventure in The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction, thus emphasizing the dangers the heroes will have to face in order to succeed in their missions (15).

Non-ordinary experiences in our lives can range from finding the love of your life while waiting in the emergency room after being hit by a motorbike crossing a red light to buying dark bread instead of the usual white one. In both cases, the perils one must endure will hardly resemble that of a mission in any way. Here, the hero lacks a purpose, and has in no way experienced an adventure. Something happened to someone, while an adventure is an active process, something one must embark on and take action to succeed in it. This is why Cawelti’s and Saricks’ views on adventure fiction will be most profitable for this thesis.

When reading an adventure, most likely certain expectations regarding it will arise. Readers may expect something out of the ordinary, as well as danger and perils or life- threatening events that will mark the difficulty of the mission. To a certain degree, readers will expect some risk which violent physicality might address the way the experiences being read are embodied. That is, readers might get as nervous or tense as the hero who is about to face those events. Pérez 48

As Cawelti explains, adventures can be different depending on their cultural and historical context. Even within the genre, stories can deviate from the norm. Huck Finn, for example, faces his adventures while describing the society of his time in a picaresque way, denouncing injustice, crossing the borders of fiction to touch readers morally and aesthetically. Don Quixote, from a point of view of a cognitively dissonant character, will make us as readers experience the wondrous adventures of the fiction within the world of fiction. Readers can face the dangers in safety, find the adventure where there is none, the extraordinary in the most ordinary events. Both novels transcend the genre by offering readers an extremely rich literary experience, but, nonetheless, both texts are adventures. Not even for the most fantastic mind in literature, capable of turning mills into giants, does an adventure escape the normal structure of the adventure genre in literary tradition.

4.2.3 Unresolved Expectations

What kind of expectations, then, may arise in readers when expecting an adventure to take place? More specifically, what kind of physical reaction (or embodiment of such expectations) will readers experience prior to an adventure? If Caracciolo’s ideas can be applied to a previous state of bodily predisposition in connection to cognitive expectations, then it might not be too forward to assume that stating that a character will have an adventure will be affected by enacting the imagined experience. Therefore, if the adventure is a dangerous mission the hero must encounter, a certain degree of nervousness could consequently possess readers. If Elizabeth, George Willard’s mother, were in a terrible danger in the adventure she goes through in “Mother,” some anxiety could probably be expected from readers learning about her experience. Similarly, in the story “Nobody Knows”, George Willard is nervous, even frightened. He is hiding from people and he does not want anybody to know something. While in “Mother” that feeling of tension or nervousness could maybe be expected from the predispositions prompted by the genre expectations, here it is clearly specified even before introducing the adventure in the way in which the character feels: “In the alleyway he trembled as though with fright” (40). In both cases, adventures may be marked by feeling of anxiety and tension for both readers and protagonist.

At the same time, there is something out of the ordinary in the statement “One evening in July … Elizabeth Willard had an adventure” (24). It is not the continuation of the previous narration in the story, it is a very specific way to call attention to a shift in the story. Pérez 49

Similarly, the narration is interrupted by the introduction of an adventure in “The Philosopher”: “ONE DAY in August Doctor Parcival had an adventure in Winesburg” (37). In the third part of the four-part series story “Godliness”: “One evening during her first winter in Winesburg, Louise had an adventure that gave a new impulse to her desire to break down the wall that she thought stood between her and John Hardy” (74). Or as a way to introduce the story in the fourth part of this series: “When David Hardy was a tall boy of fifteen, he, like his mother, had an adventure that changed the whole current of his life and sent him out of his quiet corner into the world” (79). This sort of exposition is exciting for readers, because it is new, and thus demands a higher effort from them to face the text that follows. Also, in doing so, readers are narratively reset to a new start, and must prepare themselves for the text by making use of that which is familiar to them, such as the genre expectations mentioned before. It is my belief that in this specific text, the categorization of the story as an adventure marks the predisposition of readers, and in creating expectations, the influence of the enacting imagination in preparing for the simulation of an adventure in our imagination may contribute to the understanding of the story.

An adventure can be dangerous, and since she is sick, Elizabeth is already in some kind of danger in “Mother.” In this case, readers might feel the anxiety of the threat, the tension provoked by the possibility of the protagonist being harmed. But nothing of the sort happens to Elizabeth. There is no adventure as such, no danger has hindered her path while undertaking the mission, while readers may have already been preparing for a completely different outcome of the events.

By calling it an adventure, the narrator could also be participating in the realistic tradition Elaine Ayoung in “Rethinking the Reality Effect” mentions in relation to implied fictional worlds and how readers are expected to recognize everyday scenes by encountering mere fragments of them. Thus, just as a light on stage simulating a ray of sun coming through the window in Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters evokes the existence of a fictional world outside that room (582), Ayoung explains, the narrative formula of someone embarking on an adventure could point to a truth not present in the text. Hence, emphasizing a specific element in the fictional world of Anderson’s stories might lead readers to other non-represented elements of that world of the text. In this sense, the perception of the text involves going further than the given information, and the preparation from readers to recreate the experience of an adventure might be one way to connect the information presented in it with readers’ experience of the world. Pérez 50

Let us make use of some of the terminology used by Catherine Emmott, Anthony J. Sanford, and Marc Alexander’s “Rhetorical Control of Readers’ Attention,” a study of attention and depth of processing when reading. One of the ideas developed in this essay is that readers’ attention toward a literary text can be manipulated by stylistic devices. They go on to claim that, “literary texts make use of foregrounding devices, with which writers may selectively capture and direct readers’ attention” (41). Just as I noted on the adventure genre, events out of the ordinary in characters’ experience can be another device in foregrounding a certain element in the text. As we have seen, “Elizabeth Willard had an adventure” seems like a rather straightforward way to attract reader’s attention. The foregrounding of the adventure element will most likely raise readers’ attention to the events to follow and at the same time encourage the creation of the expectations for an adventure. It is a way of telling readers that something out of the ordinary is about to happen as well as a way of making a clear shift in narration, thus introducing new events.

In other words, in “Mother,” just as in many other stories in Winesburg, Ohio, readers encounter a kind of framed narrative that attracts their attention by announcing the coming of new or different information. Something out of the ordinary is going to happen, something that should shed light on the fictional world readers are experiencing. In this way, the narrative itself leads readers to this space where predispositions seem needed, to “What will happen next?”, and the first hint in guessing what those events to come are is that they are an adventure. Now let me analyze the story of “Mother” in order to see how much of an adventure it really is before studying how this categorization of the story, and the predispositions it may arise, can affect the reading of it.

4.2.4 “Mother”

In this story, Elizabeth Willard, George Willard’s mother, experienes an adventure when she decides to leave her bed, despite her sickness, and walk along the hotel corridor toward her son’s room. She spies on her son by listening on the other side of the door to learn if there are any sounds coming from the room, and is happy when she hears him walking around. Among her deliberations, readers are told how she whispers to herself that George has that thing that she killed in herself when she was young, letting readers know that he still has the chance to be what she never became. Then she goes back to her room, since she is afraid that her son might come out and discover her. Stopping in the corridor, she witnesses her husband coming out of the boy’s room and overhears him lecturing the boy for being Pérez 51 distracted at work and lacking his father’s masculine predisposition to hard work. Back in her room, she decides to stab her husband, Tom Willard, to death with a pair of scissors in order to protect her son. Then her son comes into the room and talks about future plans to move to the city, and she reprimands him by undermining his plans. She is happy about her son leaving town and wanting to live a different life, but she cannot express this in words. Instead, she tells him to go out and be with other boys of his age, because he is spending too much time inside.

The beginning of the story “Mother” already offers an overview of its characters. A physical description of Elizabeth Willard portrays a woman beaten by time and illness whose beauty is lost by now. Similarly, Tom Willard is described both physically and in relation to his hopes or disillusionment with their hotel business. He is still handsome, but he sees in his wife and hotel a reflection of his own failures. There is also the description of his political beliefs and of how he considers them as his most important aspirations. Readers are told that there is a special bond of sympathy between Elizabeth and her son based on “a girlhood dream that had long died” (22). This bond is a silent one, an element that is often mentioned in the text while describing their relationship, “In the evening when the son sat in her room with his mother, the silence made them both feel awkward” (24). Readers know she sees in her son her lost dreams, that part of her she never ventured to freely experience. Right before the narrative shifts to introduce the adventure she tells her son: “I think you had better be out among the boys. You are too much indoors” (24), thus expressing that awkwardness among them in the same words she will use at the end of this story.

Plenty of information is left out of this story, and even more is said by saying something else or by saying nothing at all. Silences, or the unsaid, play an important role in readers successfully receiving the reality conveyed in the text. In grasping the unsaid, the contextualization of characters given prior to the adventure helps readers make inferences about that reality, nonetheless, other elements most likely also participate in the process of reading through these silences. But, for the purpose of my analysis, let me now do an exercise meant to show how the story of “Mother” fits the adventure genre formula. First, we have a hero, or rather a protagonist in Elizabeth Willard: a weak (ailing) and life sickened character who only finds pleasure in the company of her son. Her initial mission is to get to her son’s room, and the danger in it, is to be discovered by hotel costumers in such an unsuitable appearance, thus risking the “honor” and image of the business. During this endeavor a secondary mission is introduced when the character of the villain (her husband) appears. At Pérez 52 this point, the life of her son is threatened by that villain, and so her new goal is to kill the him in order to protect George. Finally, the mission is successfully resolved without implicating the protagonist, since almost by accident, George saves himself by deciding to leave town.

Even though this is a reasonable use of the adventure formula, it is obvious that such a reading would be rather different from that made by most readers. The events narrated in this story hardly resemble an adventure but presents a woman who seems to be regretting her choices in life. She sees in her son an opportunity to save him from committing her mistakes, by helping him leave Winesburg as she should have done when she had the chance. In any case, these are the inferences made on the basis of what the narrative suggests in terms of Elizabeth’s own reflections and thinking as well as by the preceding description of her character. Nonetheless, the adventure seems to be an important element in shedding some light over the whole experience Anderson is trying to express in “Mother”.

In sum, a hypothesis of a possible reading process of the story could be briefly stated as follows: Readers prepare for an adventure drawing on their personal background in order to imagine the events that will follow. In imagining what will be an adventure, the enacting properties of imagination in relation to fiction will, presumably, have some consequence in the physicality of readers. Readers might find themselves entering the narration from a previous state of, for example, nervousness or excitement, that the expectations of the adventure genre may have created. Readers identify the hero/protagonist and (at least ideally) focalize through her point of view, thus enacting a sick woman in her forties in the corridors of a hotel. Readers might easily embody the experience narrated then, especially if having fully taken on the perspective of the protagonist. They will have to make sense of the conflict in between the physicality of the experience being read from a previous state of predisposition and the final outcome were such expectations are not relieved. That is, the tension or nervousness that the predisposition to an adventure may have created needs to be reconciled with the frustration of not experiencing such thing.

Thus, Anderson calling the attention of readers by categorizing the framed narration as an adventure seems to play an important role in reading the story. Moreover, the predispositions an adventure might generate within readers will affect the reading experience. Finally, it seems that the role these expectations might have in the reading of the story might help readers understand the discourse in the text conveyed through silence. Pérez 53

As if attempting to find that essence or thingness of the thing, Elizabeth tries to find truth in language: “In all the babble of words that fell from the lips of the men with whom she adventured she was trying to find what would be for her the true word” (208, emphasis added). She tries to find the true word, essence or unpolluted truth, in her adventures with men, a motif also present in “Death.” Similarly, in the third part of “Godliness,” Louise Bentley takes John Hardy as her lover and later husband, because of her own adventure. In attempting to explain to him in words the way she feels, he continually misunderstands her approaches with sexual desire, thus making her dissatisfied with her life in general, including her son.

All during the first year Louise tried to make her husband understand the vague and intangible hunger that had led to the writing of the note and that was still unsatisfied. Again and again she crept into his arms and tried to talk of it, but always without success. Filled with his own notions of love between men and women, he did not listen but began to kiss her upon the lips. That confused her so that in the end she did not want to be kissed. She did not know what she wanted. (78)

There is silence in both of these women’s discourse, something expressed during their adventures that is not specifically told to readers. By the contextualization of the characters in the previous pages to the shift in narrative introducing the events of the adventure, and a general understanding of the social context of that time, readers can already begin to infer the message those women want to convey. However, the narrative emphasis on these adventures as greatly relevant events in their lives (“One evening in July,…” [24], “One evening during her first winter in Winesburg,…”[74]) seems to point to the importance of these episodes as expositions of their incapability to express something linguistically, and attempts to resolve that tension in their discourse. In the case of these female characters, including Alice Hindman in “Adventure” as we shall see, their own embodied experience of language seems to be hindered by the patriarchal configuration of the time, being certain feelings or desires mistaken by physical needs or sexualized by themselves or the men interacting with them. The need driving them to express a certain experience can have a physical outcome: for Elizabeth Willard it was to enjoy the company of different men in her youth, for Louise, the sexual engagement with John that leads to their marriage, and for Alice, the need she feels to go out of the house naked into the rain. Pérez 54

Certainly, Winesburg, Ohio offers plenty of different outcomes to these efforts in expressing the experience they had during their adventures. In “Mother” or in “Nobody Knows,” Elizabeth and George Willard, respectively, to say something different to what they really seem to want to convey. But for simplicity’s sake in relating the previous examples to the physicality involved in the enacting experience of genre expectations, I will focus now on the analysis of those female character’s experience. If we accept that, to at least some extent, readers will have had a physical reaction to the expectations created by the adventure genre, the grasping of the experience of these characters might be eased by it. Thus, if readers, in actually engaging in an enacting process while imagining that which is being read, and these imagined events being marked by the expectations of an adventure, would get a physical reaction to those expectations, then it could be possible to assume that the disagreement between those expectations and the final outcome of the story, added to the physical reaction in reading those by readers, may play an important role in the way they are understood. Even if taking this argument to a very basic level, when by talking about a physical reaction only a slight feeling of tension may arise from the adventure expectations, it would still most likely be something to take into account in the way readers understand the text. Furthermore, the physicality of the experience of these women in trying to express something without finding the “true words” for it, can be seen as a great analogy of how physicality might be an aid in comprehending experiences that are not linguistically uttered. If introduced into an episode where an adventure is expected to be experienced and the most ordinary event is actually narrated, surely those expectations and the lack of a resolution for them, contribute to the way the silent discourse is understood. There are things said in silence, there are things unsaid, and the physical reaction to very specific examples of events where words cannot be found might help us understand why a reader would connect with the experience being narrated in such a tight way that feelings, or thoughts, in the character’s minds are relived, or understood. It is so that, being the story of Elizabeth a story of frustration, pain and anxiety toward her own regrets, the physical tension and its lack of relief through the reading of a never occurring adventure may help readers relieve an experience where the need for words is overcome by the essence of the experience itself. To summarize, one of the main ways in which the characters’ impossibility to express in words the essence of their experience in Winesburg, Ohio is by categorizing the specific events in their lives that represent their respective difficulty under the label of adventures. Due to the great emphasis in framing these life experiences as adventures, and the impact it has in the narrative itself, it is likely that certain genre expectations will be created in readers’ Pérez 55 mind. If readers are told that the events to be narrated are an adventure, they will most likely expect an adventure in the next pages. Having defined the genre of adventure stories in this chapter, these expectations can be narrowed for the sake of this analysis, to at least a light nervousness, anxiety, or tension, when facing events that may be dangerous or challenging and out of the ordinary. Connecting these expectations with readers, cognitive theory, and especially Marco Caracciolo’s enacting imagination, can be helpful. In this way readers will draw on their own experience of the world in imagining a certain experience, thus most likely also facing an enacting outcome of imagining that experience. Especially in relation to how embodiment works in reading literature, enacting the expectations that are created in the process of imagining the narrated experience, may have physical consequences in readers. This makes this physicality of the experience an important factor in understanding the text itself. Therefore, if the text prompts a state of nervousness in readers, that physical state will be relevant in filling those gaps left in the text by the unsaid. Finally, it has been my claim that in reading the adventures in Winesburg, Ohio with the expectation created by the genre, and taking into account the lack of resolution of those expectations when facing the outcome of the story, the physical element in the process of embodying the experience helps readers grasp the discourse that is conveyed through silence in the text. Hence, they understand and connect with the experiences of the characters that are, due to social and personal barriers and obstacles, impossible to utter in a linguistic way.

4.3 Reading Fictional Minds

In reading fiction, readers build a new reality, and in order to do so, to recreate that world, it is necessary to base it on a previously known model, in other words, to draw on previous experiences and knowledge of the surrounding world. To what extent the tools used to recreate the fictional world affect the way readers embody the experience of the characters is one of the main points of my study. That is, memories, feelings, emotions, mental and physical states seem to link with the literary text in a way that transcends personal views.

In this chapter, I analyze the stories “Adventure” and “Queer” in trying to both continue the study of the previous chapter and open the ground to new ways of grasping the full fictional experience. Physicality remains an important element of my reading of Winesburg, Ohio, and here I link it to mental states, memory, emotion and what cognitive psychologists call Theory of Mind, rather than the expectations affected by genre. In doing so, I hope to make a plausible connection between previous expectations, or states of Pérez 56 predisposition, and the interpreting of the mental states of fictional minds. In this way, I seek to understand how what is not specifically named but still conveyed (that which is unsaid) helps us as readers to relive the experience of the fictional world.

4.3.1 “Adventure” and “Queer”

In “Adventure,” Alice Hindman, a twenty-seven years old woman, is a clerk who lives with her mother. She is a quiet, tall and somewhat slight woman with a large head and brown eyes and hair. When she was sixteen she had an affair with Ned Currie. At the time, Alice was very pretty, and Ned would say things he did not really mean and kiss her. Ned wanted to move to Cleveland and she confesses her love to him and offers to accompany him. Flattered by the offering, Ned thinks he is in love with her and suggests that she will join him once he has made some money in the city, after which he can marry her. On their last night, they become lovers and make promises of staying together forever. After a year in the city and having found some other woman who has attracted his interest, Ned gradually stops writing to Alice. Meanwhile she waits for years for him to return. She has started saving money, thinking that when she has enough, she could move to the city to her lover. Alice, who strictly relates the act of sexual intercourse to the promise of love, rejects every suitor she has, knowing it would be impossible for her to be with another man, “I am his wife and shall remain his wife whether he comes back or not” (98). She becomes obsessed with her daydreams about marrying him and spoiling him with the money she is saving, and so she loses herself in the habits of loneliness. After waiting for years, the realization that her beauty and youth have been spent on a delusion finally comes to her, which results in despair and thinking she will be alone forever. When she was twenty-five, and in order to avoid solitude, she joined the Winesburg Methodist Church, where she met Will Hurley, a drug store clerk who adopted the habit of accompanying her home. When she was twenty-seven she grew suddenly sick of the company of the clerk and decided to part ways with him: “And then one night when it rained Alice had an adventure” (102). She run naked in the rain and sees a man that seems to be alone. Not caring who he is but attending just to the fact that he is alone, and so also in need to be loved, she calls for him. He turns out to be an old and almost deaf man who does not understand the call. In that moment, she realizes the awkwardness of her situation and finally decides to go back home.

In “Queer,” Elmer Cowley works in his father’s shop Cowley and Son’s, a strange store that “sold everything and nothing” (175). We are told the story of his father Ebenezer, Pérez 57 who before getting into trading was a farmer, a weird character who always wears the same coat. His father is a bad merchant, always buying what cannot be sold. One time, when a seller tries to sell him a collar fastener, Elmer takes a gun and makes the seller leave the shop while yelling that they will not be queer anymore and buy stuff that does not sell. Elmer runs furiously away from the store and continues with an inner monologue about how he will not be seen as queer anymore and will fit with the rest of the people in Winesburg. Seeing in George Willard, even without knowing him, some kind of representative of the city’s judgment, Elmer directs his tribulations toward George. After this event, he visits his boyhood farm where he meets with his old and mentally handicapped friend Mook. To him, he confesses how ashamed he is of his father’s queerness, as well as that of his mother when she was alive. During this conversation he resolves to go and confront George Willard and tell him he is not weird. He goes to see George and when he comes out to meet Elmer, he reacts by yelling at George, saying he does not want to see him. Elmer then goes to the store and steals twenty dollars from his father’s safe. He decides to run away to Cleveland and start a new life. Finally, right before leaving town, he calls for George to be woken up and sent to meet him. Elmer tries to explain to him what he needs to say but ends up giving him the money he has stolen and punching him repeatedly.

4.3.2 Theory of Mind or Mind Reading

When readers witness that Elmer Cowley is uncontrollably beating George Willard (regardless of personal opinions and feelings toward this character), most likely there will be a desire to interpret the situation, to understand why such a violent event happens completely out of the blue. As Lisa Zunshine states in Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, “We all learn, whether consciously or not, that the default interpretation of behavior reflects a character’s state of mind, and every fictional story that we read reinforces our tendency to make that kind of interpretation first” (4). Although Elmer’s state of mind is linked more clearly to emotions (discussed below), it is easy to find it an apt starting point to explain what Theory of Mind involves.

Theory of Mind is a cognitive process that is central in our daily lives. In our interaction with other people we continually try to infer what the other is thinking, and to a certain extent, assume we have been successful in doing so. But let me start from the beginning here and give a definition of mind reading in Zunshine words: “it is a term used by cognitive psychologists, interchangeably with ‘Theory of Mind,’ to describe our ability to Pérez 58 explain people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires” (6). Furthermore, in “Theory of Mind and Fictions of Embodied Transparency,” Zunshine proposes that:

Theory of Mind, also known as mind reading, is the term used by psychologists and philosophers to describe our ability to explain behavior in terms of underlying thoughts, feelings, desires, and intentions. We attribute states of mind to ourselves and others all the time. (64)

Similarly, in “Theory of Mind and Theory of Minds in Literature,” Keith Oatley views the concept as follows: “Because of the opacity of others, human beings need a theory or model, or a simulation or image ... of mind to infer what a real human being might be thinking and feeling” (1). ToM is what gives us the ability to make such inferences, for which, a high level of imagination, reliance on previous experience and memories, and the expectation of possible deception play key roles.

In “Adventure,” Alice proposes that she will follow Ned to Cleveland, and it is this determination that changes Ned’s mind and feelings toward her, since he does not want to have her as his mistress any longer but nevertheless promises that they will always stay together. After they have had sex, he says: “Now we will have to stick to each other, whatever happens we will have to do that” (97). What kind of inference does Alice make of this utterance and his previous behavior? She spends years waiting for him to come back, even when he stops writing letters, because she believes what he said. When Alice makes use of her ToM, she believes that Ned’s words and actions are based on the fact that he loves her and plans to marry her. This is a clear example of how one may make inferences based on experience and expectations, how silences are filled. Alice bases her suppositions on conventions and previous experiences of life, which, sadly for her, turn out to be an ultimately wrong assumption.

Oatley also explains that we usually make stronger mental models of persons based on their behavior, if it seems likely that there will be a prolonged interaction with them (4). Hence, knowing that Elmer is a character who readers will be in contact with for the rest of the story will affect the way his behavior is read, and the way expectations and realizations on his thinking and emotions are made. Related to this idea is the fact that both Zunshine and Oatley regard mind reading as greatly context dependent. Other than context, Zunshine also notes that ToM is affected by personal interpretations, but, this comes after having already Pérez 59

“filtered” the fictional experience enough as to meet certain common standards (14). In this way, we can detect in Elmer’s violent actions toward George many different levels of personal feelings, but most likely, readers will see it as a consequence of an emotion such as anger or rage. Thus, while the reason to this anger might be more complex, it is possible to recognize at least the surface emotion that accompanies such behavior.

Moreover, context is extremely important in “Adventure.” To fully understand the extent of Alice’s experience one needs to contextualize her situation in an era when sexual liberation and female independence were different than now. Having a sexual experience before marriage and being despised by a man after having been promised marriage would probably have been a much more socially stigmatizing event in 1919 than it is nowadays. Alice’s resulting impossibility to accept that he is never coming back, the despair and social alienation due to the shameful feeling of having been “dishonored”, are some of the mental states that might more easily explain Alice’s breakdown at the end of the story.

It is possible, then, to use ToM to establish certain standards in reading characters’ behavior, so that, even before having the need to rely on readers’ personal experiences to interpret what goes through characters’ minds, certain mental states in readers are possibly affected by context and prolonged behavior. Furthermore, in applying ToM to literature Zunshine claims:

The very process of making sense of what we read appears to be grounded in our ability to invest the flimsy verbal constructions that we generously call “characters” with a potential for a variety of thoughts, feelings, and desires and then to look for the “cues” that would allow us to guess at their feelings and thus predict their actions. Literature pervasively capitalizes on and stimulates Theory of Mind mechanisms that had evolved to deal with real people, even as on some level readers do remain aware that fictive characters are not real people at all. (10)

Just like emotions, actions and mental states share a binding bond for humans. As an identifiable relation, this can be used in literature to enrich the experience of the text, since in the process of recreating the fictional world, readers make use of the same cognitive processes they use in dealing with the real world. For example, Zunshine mentions how Hemingway uses physical actions as representatives of his character’s mental states (32). By making use of previous experiences of the world, readers are able to make inferences of Pérez 60 mental states from character’s actions, thus making it unnecessary to describe everything that occupies the character’s mind.

Zunshine further connects the access we have to fictional minds in the text to those pieces of information about character’s states of mind that are offered to us by the narration. In fact, she proposes that readers believe that there is much more to a character’s experience than what is being specifically mentioned by the narrator, that readers assume that there is always more than what they are given (19). It is because of this that, when as readers we read about Alice being frightened and crawling back to her home after calling the attention of the old man, we do not remain satisfied with the attributed mental state of fear but go further in understanding her embarrassment and shame for her actions. Hence while reading, fictional characters are approached in the same way real people are, as readers make use of their ToM, and just as one may doubt the answer of a friend saying everything is alright when we know there is something wrong, the information given by the narration about characters’ mental states will be further judged by the way the story context and characters’ behavior affect the narration.

Linked to the idea of characters’ emotional states as transmitted by the narrator is the concept of embodied transparency explained by Zunshine in “Theory of Mind and Fictions of Embodied Transparency.” In discussing embodied transparency Zunshine states:

There seems to be a representational tradition, which manifests itself differently in different genres and individual works, of putting protagonists in situations in which their bodies spontaneously reveal their true feelings, sometimes against their wills. Such moments are carefully foregrounded within the rest of the narrative. In each case an author builds up a context in which brief access to a character’s mental state via her body language stands out sharply against the relative opacity of other characters or of the same character a moment ago. (70)

After Elmer has called to him, “George Willard, rubbing his eyes and again wearing the new overcoat, ran down to the station platform afire with curiosity” (184). From this passage it is possible to recognize that George is still sleepy, as he is rubbing his eyes in a way readers will easily associate with just waking up. It is also possible to understand that he is excited, as the narration states that he is so curious he runs there. But what happens when the physical reaction of the character, even if contextualized, escapes the conventional behavioral expectations from the described context? Even within its story context, somebody Pérez 61 reacting in an aggressive way to a predicament that might escape their understanding, or someone going outside of the house naked as a reaction to a failed romance, are events that transcend the simplicity of the just established formula of “George rubs his eyes, therefore he is sleepy”. Moreover, in order for readers to understand the experience of these characters a further effort in the use of their ToM might be expected. Even though reliance on established behavior may be helpful in building a character’s personality, the specific mention of mental states in their context may still prove to be insufficient for readers to understand characters’ experience without recognizing deeper emotional states.

Before going further into the study of emotions and mental states, I will try to activate my own ToM in an effort to understand Elmer’s actions as reliably as possible. First, his goals are openly presented in the narration, and so I know that what he wants is to tell George Willard (as representative of the whole town) that he is not queer. He wants to fit in, has no friends and feels that people laugh at him because of the way he and his family look, and he wants to take a stand and make clear that he is no different than the rest of the people in Winesburg. Because of the impossibility to express these feelings, he decides to run away to the city, where he will not be noticed. But right before he leaves, he makes a last attempt to explain to George Willard what he is not. He fails to fulfill his goal once again, and instead punches Willard and runs away. Why would he react in such a violent way toward somebody he does not even personally know? Elmer also gives the money he stole from his father back, showing remorse, and says “I’ll be washed and ironed. I’ll be washed and ironed and starched” (185). This expression has been used a few times before in this story by both his father and the mentally handicapped character, Mook. In both cases, the sentence is used as response to Elmer’s declaration about not being queer, as if used as a regular punch line for situations that escape the understanding of the characters. When Mook says it, he addresses the cows by saying “‘Elmer is crazy’ …. He’ll hurt someone yet, Elmer will” (182). Elmer is crazy, because he is talking nonsense, and Mook understands that nonsense may lead to violence. Somehow, this line seems to summarize Elmer’s inability to understand and express. Therefore, the fact that Elmer uses it while trying to explain himself to George might be indicative of him not being able to express himself in an intelligible way. Thus, the frustrating impossibility to communicate, as a consequence of confusion or lack of understanding, is what seems to prompt Elmer to react in a physical way toward George through the use of violence rather than words. Nonetheless, let us not forget that aggressivity is often linked with anger or rage and. Thus, what I infer from Elmer is that he is furious Pérez 62 because he is not able to express himself linguistically, because he does not belong to the same world as George does, to the conventional language of the town, and so he punches and kicks expressing his frustration physically. He might not be queer as such, but he seems to be so at least in the sense that he is an outsider to the community, that he does not fit in.

Finally, fury or anger are mental states, emotions. In order to have a better understanding of Elmer’s and Alice’s respective experience, I will now turn to the study of emotions and their influence in reading those silences that connect the many different layers helping readers construct the fictional world.

4.3.3 A Study of Emotions

In this chapter, I try to decipher what occupies the mind of Winesburg’s inhabitants, what it is that makes their behavior and social qualities become both grotesque to their neighbors and appealing to those who read them. In fact, it is not so much Alice’s thoughts in “Adventure” that motivate her to experience such a strange life event by running outside her house naked in the rain. Rather, it is the way she feels, her mental state, her emotions that ultimately trigger her actions. Hence, in this subchapter I study some of the qualities of emotions, hoping it will be useful in trying to reconstruct the characters’ minds. For this purpose, I will mostly make use of Alan Palmer’s chapter on emotions in his study Fictional Minds as well as Keith Oatley’s “The Structure of Emotions.”

In refuting the Heterogeneity Theory by William James in his exposition of emotions,9 Oatley tries to provide us with a more updated and open definition of emotion: “I propose that emotions are mental states with coherent psychological functions and that they are recognizable by empirical and theoretical criteria” (243). Furthermore, for him “An emotion is a distinctive mental state that normally occurs in identifiable eliciting conditions. It has distinctive parts and recognizable consequences” (244). The second part of the definition will be the most enlightening one, since it proposes some basic qualities of emotions, such as a mental state that is strictly marked by a context and will result in a reaction. Similarly, Alan Palmer draws on Lubomír Doležel and Antonio Damasio, who mainly focus on the power of emotions as motivational elements.

9 In “What is an Emotion”, William James holds what is nowadays considered an obsolete view, according to which emotions are “vestiges of our animal and infantile history that tend to distort mental adult functions” (Oatley 242). Pérez 63

After the seller has been driven away from the shop by Elmer, the narrator offers us precisely the reason for his previous and forthcoming actions: “Now that the immediate object of his wrath had fled, the younger man was embarrassed” (177). Elmer is in an emotional state of wrath, so he takes a revolver and threatens the seller in order to scare him away. Conventionally, reacting in an aggressive or violent way (such as threating with a gun) as a consequence of feelings, such as wrath or fury, is an understandable consequence. Therefore, we see how the emotions, or emotional states, in Elmer trigger his actions, and it is when his mental state is harder to connect to such recognizable actions or consequences that the text attains a new level of complexity.

Rather than defining emotions, Palmer gives priority to their categorization, which, according to Damasio can be distinguished as primary (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust), secondary or social (embarrassment, jealousy, guilt and pride), and background emotions (well-being, calm, tension, etc.) (114). Oatley, on the other hand, proposes a division between natural emotions (concerned with the body, with facts and our limitations) and cultural emotions (concerned with our plans and aspirations) (239). Hence, emotions arise as these two worlds, body and context, meet. Both in “Adventure” and “Queer,” we can easily recognize the social nature of most of the feelings the characters go through. In the end, this is a work where the social relations of the town and the way their grotesqueness affects them, have major roles. In commenting on the above quote from Elmer’s story, I mentioned that he feels embarrassed after the gun incident. The need for readers to interpret such a reaction, since this information is directly offered by the narrator, is more limited here. Nonetheless, embarrassment does not necessarily need to be specifically mentioned for readers to understand it. When Alice decides to go back home after calling the attention of an old man naked in the rain, she “was so frightened at the thought of what she had done that when the man had gone on his way she … crawled on hands and knees through the grass to the house” (103). Thus, it is fairly easy to recognize this frightened emotional state, including Alice’s behavior as a consequence of being embarrassed, due to her unconventional behavior of running around naked in the rain. Hence, similarly to the importance of context in ToM, the social dimension of emotions helps readers recognize the emotional state of a character at a given point in narration.

In Oatley’s opinion, emotions are consequences of psychological events, rather than physical. Furthermore, for him, “There is no physical situation that will reliably initiate particular emotions, because emotions depend on evaluations of what has happened in Pérez 64 relation to the person’s goals and beliefs” (244). Thus, simply put, Elmer’s actions can be seen as consequences of his desire not to appear awkward, and Alice’s, as consequences of her loneliness. Nonetheless, physical consequences can be observed from emotions, since the relationship between the physical and the emotional seems inseparable. It is my opinion that there is reciprocity, to some extent, in the relation between physicality and emotions. Thus, it is possible for a physical state to prompt or contribute to the experiencing of certain emotion. It will not be too far-fetched, then, to compare, how, for example, the embarrassment in front of the loved one leading to the blushing of one’s cheeks to the way experiences are embodied in the literary text. What I propose here is that in the process of understanding the emotions, or at least emotional states of the fictional mind, the physical state of readers (like that prompted by nervousness in expecting an adventure), might be an aid to sympathize with or grasp better such emotions, especially when the actions resulting from them do not easily clarify their nature. That is, if readers are already in a state of tension (or nervousness due to expectations) while reading Alice’s “Adventure,” I propose that this can help readers understand the pressure Alice must be feeling to react in such way while undergoing a similar experience in recreating or imagining it (9).

In analyzing the process of experiencing an emotion, and showing once again how both physical expression and mental states are key to the recognition of emotions, Oatley gives a brief description of the events accompanying one. Conscious preoccupation is that part of the emotion that deals with the inner monologues and worries, as for example Elmer Cowley’s continuous internal monologue over his queerness in the eyes of others. Bodily disturbance, or the physical observable reaction to an emotion, such as blushing in embarrassment, as easily observable in the example of Alice crawling back home out of embarrassment. And finally, expression is an emotion usually carried out through a physical expression or action. In this case, Elmer punching George seems like a relevant example.

This last point about the consequence of an emotion is a key element of study for both Oatley and Palmer. The latter proposes that “[e]motions are important in guiding our goal management, and this fact has important teleological implications for fictional minds” (117). He concurs with Doežel on the notion that behaviors are consequences of emotions. Furthermore, by giving emotions control over our goals, Palmer strongly implies the condition of emotions as action inducers. Similarly, Oatley proposes a process for emotions that includes: event coding, appraisal, significance evaluation, action readiness, and action (246). Hence, an action is the natural development of an emotion: “appraisal involves Pérez 65 comparing the coded event with the person’s concerns, evaluation involves diagnosing what can be done about it” (247). In both stories, then, the consequent action of an emotion will be precisely what provides the observable evidence to whoever is witnessing it. This means that readers who are given no specific information about the emotions of a character by the narrator will still have the resulting actions to account for them. Furthermore, and fairly recognizably in Winesburg, Ohio, Oatley claims that “[t]he consequences of an emotion are the way we act, perhaps somewhat involuntarily” (246). The extent to which the emotional state of a character by her or his actions can be explained will probably rely mostly on readers’ view of conventional behavior, a limitation that especially affects a text where conventions are shattered by the grotesque quality of its characters. However, both stories seem to offer an involuntary reaction to a mental state, as none of the goals that motivate such behavior (Elmer’s need to claim he is not queer, and Alice’s need to be loved) matches the reaction they carry out, in the sense that the violent reaction or being naked in the rain is not a conventional way to achieve those goals, but rather a reaction to the frustration obtained from them.

Moreover, another interesting way to try to connect the way readers might interpret those mental states is the influence of our memory. Michael Burke explains in Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion that the memories we might use in mind reading (such as our own experience) seem to be the same ones that prompt our emotional response (150). Similarly, Turhan Canli’s neurological study “Event-Related Activation in the Human Amygdala Associates with Later Memory for Individual Emotional Experience” concludes that in:

testing for the effect of reported emotional intensity … and memory performance … [the study] revealed a significant interaction between intensity and memory performance …, indicating that memory performance was significantly better for scenes that were rated as highly emotionally intense. (3-4)

This argument concurs with Damasio’s view, as discussed by Palmer, that emotions have cognitive significance, so that the higher emotional charge in a story, the higher the chances of readers’ remembering it.

Therefore, memory and emotional states seem to have a direct connection. The supposed interaction between them would benefit from testing to what level the reciprocity of the process actually exists, as to what extent a physical state could trigger a specific memory. Pérez 66

If proven to be a two-directional process, I wonder to what extent a specific memory evoked by the text could affect an emotional state in readers, possibly much like the description of an emotional state could affect the way readers will reconstruct certain events from the text.

Finally, it is not emotions themselves that we are trying to infer here, it is the mental events, since “[e]motions can be explicitly labeled or inferred from mental events that appear to embody an emotion such as anger” (Palmer 114). The action itself will probably be a consequence of the emotion, but it is the mental state that might be more easily recognizable, as discussed in relation to ToM. At the same time, it would be interesting to see if readers’ physical predisposition plays a role in acquiring a similar mental state as that of a character, so as to better understand the motivation for her or his actions. Thus, emotional states in relation to actions might be another tool for readers to interact with those silences of the text by which readers may be able to manage to decipher the mental state that drives a character’s actions.

The story of Alice offers a considerable challenge in dealing with emotions. As I am not a woman living in the 1919, it is most likely impossible for me to fully understand the extent of Alice’s experience. Nonetheless, the human capacity of using ToM and the understanding of emotions in a conventional context may be enough to help me to better understand what is it that makes Alice behave in such a radical way. I know Alice is a quiet woman, “but beneath a placid exterior a continual ferment went on” (95). From the beginning of the story, something seems to be disturbing the tranquility of Alice, growing inside of her and waiting to get out. The fact that “she gave herself to the emotions of love” (96) is a consequence of her “desire to have something beautiful come into her rather narrow life” (96). Alice decides to follow Ned to the city, that is, her love is tightly linked to the idea of leaving Winesburg. She plans to leave with him, and when he asks her to wait, she does so believing he will take her to the city in the end. When the possibility of Ned returning to take her with him starts to seem dimmer, she saves money to go and look for him. She wants to go away, as she tells herself: “[t]hen we can travel together all over the world” (98).

For Alice, the desire of something else, something different, leads to love, and love leads to exploration, to adventure. When she decides to join the Methodist Church, she does so because she thinks she is becoming “queer” and Ned will not want her anymore, as “‘[i]n the city where he is living men are perpetually young. There is so much going on that they do not have time to grow old’” (100). She starts feeling lonely and accepts the company of Will Pérez 67

Hurley, but she does not want to be close to him in an intimate way, even if she “want[s] to avoid being so much alone” (101). Similarly, at the end of the story, she realizes she does not care for Ned anymore, but just wants “something” to happen so as to not be alone, and to be loved by somebody.

During her adventure “a strange desire took possession of her” (102), a desire that drives her body and leads her to run freely in the rain, to feel young and alive again, but also a desire “to find some other lonely human and embrace him” (102). From the beginning of the story, the narration offers the idea of some kind repressed feelings growing inside of Alice, which is linked to her desire for change, to move away from Winesburg, to be loved and escape her narrow life. She “could not have understood the growing modern idea of a woman’s owning herself and giving and taking of her own ends in life” (98). Reading Alice’s story, trying to understand how she feels, her emotions, there will be the need to rely on those elements the narration has given. Hence, readers may face the challenge of understanding how the unfulfilled desire to be loved, the frustration of solitude, is linked to the desire to escape, not only to travel around the world, but to get out of one’s clothes, to get out of one’s house and social conventions. In this adventure, the dangers and perils of the protagonist could be solitude and social rejection, but the adventure readers read in trying to decipher her emotions, is the adventure of escaping an oppressive feeling, of having an adventure to reconcile the tension between desire and frustration.

Finally, it seems that a better understanding of experiences that escapes conventional behavior can be achieved through the study of the way ToM works in social interaction as mirroring the way readers approach fictional characters in the attempt to reconstruct their world as well as through the recognition of emotions as the reason for certain actions. In reconstructing the fictional world, it is important to take into account characters’ and readers’ contexts, social conventions, and explicit mentions of the characters’ emotions that help in communicating their personality to the readers. In the text, it is possible to find specific mentions of personality characteristics and emotional states, qualities that help readers categorize and approach fictional characters. But to be able to fully understand their fictional experiences, readers activate the same cognitive processes used in understanding the surrounding reality, as in both, not only what is seen or read gives a full understanding of the experience, but there is the need to interpret, to imagine what is underneath by connecting all the information offered. Thus, the analysis of emotions in connection to ToM may shed some Pérez 68 light on the way readers approach the characters’ experiences by reading through the silences that help in understanding them.

Furthermore, the study of emotions, may support my claim that there is a certain degree of bidirectionality in the process of embodied reading, being perhaps possible for a physical state or predisposition experienced by readers and prompted by the text to affect the way the fictional experience is understood. That is, the estate of nervousness that the predisposition of an adventure may have prompted in readers helpsthem to grasp what goes through the mind of Alice, and so facilitate readers to understand further than through what is specifically mentioned, meaning, through silence.

4.4 Empathizing with the Characters of Winesburg

Tightly linked with Theory of Mind is the study of empathy. Lisa Zunshine states that “[b]oth the affective and the cognitive functions are integral to empathy as it is understood today” (Hammond, Psychology 8). Empathy seems to be a bridging quality between humans, a way to come closer to the other in order to understand their experience, and thus, another way to shed light on the gaps left open for readers to fill. In the end, empathy is another tool in reading the mind of others, another way to grasp their experience and participate in it.In continuing with the study of the way readers might cognitively approach Winesburg, Ohio, and especially the way the silences of the text are uttered into words in the process of recreating the fictional world, empathy seems like a highly relevant place to starrt.

Feeling for somebody else, putting oneself in someone else’s shoes, understanding the other’s emotions, or feeling someone else, are some of the ways in which both sympathy and empathy are interchangeably used for how bridges between people’s experiences are constructed. On the basis of the recent discussion of empathy in literary studies, and its close connection to the, possibly, more general term of sympathy that was more widely used in English before the twentieth century, establishing a definition will be the first goal of this subchapter. Then, I will turn my attention to how focalization might affect the way empathy works in the characters of Anderson’s work, in an attempt to see how empathy might help us decipher the dimensions of those experiences which offer less information than needed to fully picture this fictional world. In brief, this chapter will try to connect the way we feel toward, for example, Alice in Anderson’s “Adventure,” to the understanding of the somehow sexually liberating experience she goes through in her adventure. In order to put the study of empathy into practice in this chapter I will analyze the story “Nobody Knows”. Pérez 69

4.4.1 “Nobody Knows”

“Nobody Knows” tells the story of George Willard and Louise Trunnion. Focalized by George, the story tells us how the young boy leaves his work at the Winesburg Eagle and secretly “sneaks around” the city as a consequence of him having “set forth upon an adventure” (Anderson 41). George finally comes to Louise’s home where he asks her to join him, revealing to readers the note that she had previously sent him, a message saying that she would be his if he would want it. Placed in this atmosphere of sexual tension and already having suggested what George’s intentions are, the narration offers diverse details of the struggle George goes through in fighting his nervousness or inability to express himself. In the end, the couple finds the pile of boards at Will Overton’s berry field right before a brisk narrative shift leads to George standing alone in the streets after (presumably) sexual intercourse with Louise had been consummated. Finally, the story ends with George muttering “She hasn’t got anything on me. Nobody knows” (44), most likely giving a new moral perspective to the whole of the events narrated.

4.4.2 Empathy

Before providing a definition of empathy, it may be interesting to return to some of the previous hypotheses. As studied before, the genre categorization of characters’ life events may be an important element in understanding the extent of their experience, both because of the involvement of physicality in relation to the embodiment of the literary experience and its value as cognitive information in reconstructing the fictional world. Now, claiming that Alice has an adventure in the short story about her life in Winesburg may strike as a far-fetched way to define her life experience. Thus, the cataloguing of such events as an adventure may initially seem as hindering rather than helping in the understanding of her experience, and therefore, certain level of estrangement can be attributed to the word adventure. Even though dealing with estrangement is not a goal in my study, it is sometimes hard to completely avoid being reminded of this process while dealing with the silences of the text. In general, every piece of information lacking in the text is, understandably, unknown to readers, and everything making the known harder to understand a way to defamiliarize readers from what is known, making it, to some extent, unknown again. The similarities of those things “unsaid” with estranged parts of the text are prominent in that both are elements that are there, but not presented to readers as such. Hence, it is my supposition that both estrangement and filling the gaps of narrative “unsaids” involve some of the same cognitive processes in readers, Pérez 70 including empathy. Moreover, I think that Suzanne Keen makes a highly relevant point in stating that estrangement can prompt empathy, since “unusual or striking representations in the literary text promote foregrounding and open the way to empathetic reading” (87). That is, the need to fill the void, to find the missing information or properly connect the dots might be another way to elicit empathy toward characters, however transitory or event-specific. In this sense, situating readers in an adventure context may make it easier to identify with the protagonist’s emotions both by the expectations created by a stereotypical hero in an adventure, and the fact that their experience is estranged by claiming it is something that it is not. In this way, readers try to understand what Alice is going through, and the fact that such understanding is further hindered by the text may increase their desire to understand what she is experiencing.

Meghan Marie Hammond broadly defines empathy in Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism as “a cognitive and affective structure of feeling, a way of bridging interpersonal distance” (5). In this definition, a few key words in the treatment of empathy can already be seen in terms of cognition, feelings (or emotions) and interpersonal interaction. Furthermore, Suzanne Keen, in the probably most influential recent work on empathy in literary studies, Empathy and the Novel, defines empathy as “a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect, [which] can be provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s condition, or even by reading” (4). Moreover, “in empathy…we feel what we believe to be the emotions of others” (5), as opposed to sympathy “in which feelings for another occur” (5). Therefore, empathy involves to some extent the understanding of the other, as explained in the previous chapter in relation to Theory of Mind, but with the further implication of identifying and experiencing another’s feelings or emotions. Recognizing is not enough in empathy but experiencing is the key to understand this concept, and thus the cognitive experience of the emotions that are identified in the other. When George Willard confronts the situation of being alone and face to face with Louise (with whom readers have been led to understand he might be attracted to), he seems to show some tension and insecurity: “[t]he young man began to laugh nervously. ‘It’s warm’ he said. He wanted to touch her with his hand. ‘I’m not very bold,’ he thought” (Anderson 42). Readers have been following George’s thoughts and actions for a few pages by now, and most likely an investment in his emotional state can be expected when reading about these events. At this point, George is alone with the girl he likes and the time to make a move seems to be getting closer, so he gets nervous and tense saying empty things to fill the Pérez 71 uncomfortable silence with words. If fully invested in the reading of his experience, readers may be expected to draw on their previous experience in order to recognize the ongoing situation. There is hardly much need to interpret his thoughts, as the narration already offers us his emotional state: he is nervous. Nonetheless, the engagement with the character, the fact that his emotional state is known, and the use of readers’ personal background to comprehend the extent of such emotions in their context may prompt the arousal of that emotion in readers’ minds. Therefore, in George’s first steps toward wooing someone he likes, similar feelings may arise in readers who have undertaken a similar experience.

Taking into account Damasio’s view of thinking and feeling as closely interconnected, Keen says that “human empathy clearly involves both thinking and feeling. Memory, experience, and the capacity to take another’s perspective … have roles in empathy”, and furthermore, “the experience of empathy in the feeling subject involves emotions, including sensations of the body” (27). Here it is possible to see how empathy connects to the previous chapters in this study by taking into account the physical dimension of this process as well as the relevance of thought and emotions shared by readers and characters (which are usually identified by using Theory of Mind). Memory is another key aspect, since it is important to keep in mind that mental representations depend on our previous knowledge of the world, therefore giving memories a central role in identifying emotions in general and linking those emotional states to events relating to our knowledge of the world. However, as it could be inferred from the example given in defining empathy regarding George’s experience, memories should not be mistaken for personal identification with other characters. Similarly, Keen theorizes that “character identification often invites empathy, even when the character and reader differ from each other in all sorts of practical and obvious ways” (70). Readers do not need to be like the characters for empathy to occur, nor do experiences have to be exactly the same. In The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion, Patrick Colm Hogan states that

The first thing to say here is that no two people have ever had precisely the same experiences. Every situation is singular. My experiences may be more or less similar to yours, but they cannot be one with yours. Empathy, then, is not a transfer of feeling across identical experiences. All empathy must be to some degree analogical. It must be a matter of experiences that are similar – in structure, consequence, intensity, and so on. (43) Pérez 72

Therefore, while a certain similarity might be expected among readers’ and characters’ experiences, they will never be exactly the same, nor need characters and readers be similar kinds of people. While identifying with George as a young person pursuing one’s object of attraction, readers might be transported to a memory of a similar experience in their past, such as feeling attraction toward another person while in their teens. Still, this does not necessarily mean that only white heterosexual young males living in an Ohio will be able to empathize with George’s experience. Identifying with a character may affect the degree in which empathy is prompted, still it is important to note that it is not a necessary condition for it to occur.

Hogan’s distinction between categorical and situational empathy might help to clarify how empathy relates to personal experience. Categorical empathy would be the kind that places readers, for instance, into a social category. In this sense, George Willard is a young white heterosexual man attracted to a woman, which many male readers might find themselves to be in the same categorical terms. Situational empathy, on the other hand, is about the fusion of activated memories and corresponding feelings with the shifting of those toward a different person in the situation that triggers such memories. As Hogan puts it,

Specifically, a triggering of autobiographical memories may involve a shift in the structuring perspective that leads us to put ourselves in the place of someone else and thus results in empathy, associating our own feelings with those of the other person. (142)

For Keen situational empathy falls under plot, but she also insists on the fact that “empathy for fictional characters may require only minimal elements of identity, situation, and feeling, not necessarily complex or realistic characterization” (69), and that “[m]any assert shared feelings despite different experiences” (72).

Although some features of the physicality of empathy, mostly in relation to embodiment, have already been mentioned, let me turn now to how the cognitive processes we go through in the way we relate to our surrounding world as “mappings” or models in which to build the fictional world affect the physical dimension of reading. In the same way as other notions in cognitive literary studies, empathy is supported by theorists with neurological and scientific evidence. Thus, Suzanne Keen uses fMRI studies on how the affective parts of the brain’s matrix are activated when watching a loved one in pain (13), which demonstrates some prototypical ways in which emotions are transferred from one Pérez 73 person to another. Furthermore, Keen uses Paul Ekman’s hypothesis of written language changing into sensations, pictures, sounds, smells, and even tastes in our brains, subsequently to be “treated like any other event by the automatic-appraisal mechanisms to arouse emotions (Emotions Revealed 35)” (88).

In the study of empathy, the use of mirror neurons as justifiers of the way humans reflect onto other’s emotions has been widely used. In an attempt to tone down the role of mirror neurons, Katja Mellmann has insisted in “Objects of Empathy” on the importance of separating what is experienced and what is imagined:

While it is true that empathic imaginations show an eminently sensuous quality (and thus resemble emotional experience) and that this might indeed be due to neural ‘mirroring’ processes (or similar phenomena), there is no worth in metaphors suggesting miraculous fusions of self and other, or a kind of wired connection between them. Actually, it is important to keep in mind the fundamental ‘barrier’ between self and other, because otherwise we would not be able to differentiate between someone experiencing an emotion and someone imagining that experience. (431)

In supporting these ideas, Mellmann offers a differentiation between emotional experience and empathic imagination, what is emotional contagion, what role empathic imagination plays in social emotions, and what brings the sensuous quality of empathic imagination. Thus, as I have noted, “It is quite possible that two people’s emotional experiences closely parallel one another” (432), but it does not seem so possible to experience the exact same emotion. Thus, emotional contagion helps to understand how when somebody is weeping I might have the impulse to weep as well (432), as different from empathic imagination and to the way I would imagine the emotion somebody else is undergoing and thus recreate it myself.

However, Mellmann does not view imagination as devoid of any physical relations, but places this link in empathy itself through the use of Antonio Damasio’s “as-if-body-loop” theory, or internal brain simulation. In this process, where representations of experience are what the brain is really dealing with, “the somatosensory maps respond only ‘as if’ a sensuous experience had taken place, while there are no actually incoming signals from the body” (435). Thus, by activating the representational mechanisms of our brain, empathy may carry a sensuous quality in imagining somebody else’s emotion, and hence arouse a certain Pérez 74 feeling. I agree with Mellmann that neural mirroring may be somehow overused as a general principle (mirroring whatever information about whatever kind of experience from another person), still, it is evident that there is a transference of similar emotions from one person to another sometimes just based on the observation of them, and that this process is somehow mirrored in the way the literary experience might be imagined by readers. Therefore, in “Nobody Knows”, George is nervous, readers know he is nervous, and in their reconstruction of his fictional world they might most likely start from being nervous.

In fact, it would be interesting to see to what extent mirroring some fictional character’s emotions would lead to sympathy as such, rather than actual empathic imagination. The explicit mention of how a character is feeling might lead readers to previous personal experiences, to memories that may awake a similar emotion, but it might as well just prompt a sympathetic feeling toward the character. When reading about Alice’s feelings of loneliness explicitly mentioned in the narrative, readers might feel for her, understand her pain and feel compassionate toward her, but that does not mean they necessarily experience the same emotional state. On the other hand, when reading the episode of her adventure in the rain, her emotional estate is not made entirely explicit, while the empathetic strength of the event might seem harder to deny. Taking this into account, I propose that evocative or implicit events in the text may sometimes be more powerful in suggesting empathy than actual depiction of emotions in an explicit way, therefore taking the discussion back to those silences in the text that need to be filled. In this sense, not explicitly stating Alice’s mindset may not prompt readers preparation for such emotions in recreating that experience, but the need to feel that void that is left by not explicitly mentioning her emotional state is what makes the already existing predispositions (such as those prompted by the adventure genre) take a much greater role in reliving it. Thus, by concealing her emotional state, readers may draw from their cognitive preparations in the moment of reading such events to decipher what goes through her mind. Hence, the state of tension in expecting an adventure added to the frustration of unfulfilled expectations might help readers actually relive her experience from a departure point of personal emotional readiness, rather than by recreating what is linguistically stated. Therefore, the emotional state of readers in expecting an adventure will be the context to draw on in deciphering what goes through Alice’s mind.

Most of the above theorists also insist on the power of emotions to arouse a reaction in the observer, thus putting a higher emphasis on how negative emotions will most likely prompt a stronger empathetic reaction. For instance, Keen hypothesizes that “empathetic Pérez 75 responses to fictional characters and situations occur more readily for negative feeling states, whether or not a match in details of experience exists” (72). Alice’s experience in “Adventure” will probably elicit compassion in readers regardless of their personal experiences, as most likely the idea of a naked person shaking out of nervousness while crawling in the mud will present a pitiful image of somebody who may need help. In terms of moral attachment to characters through empathy, Hogan states that:

Concerns of compassion become salient when we can adopt the other person’s point of view, when we can think what it means to be in his/her position. Adopting another person’s point of view is a dangerous thing... It creates feelings and attachments. It leads us to think of this other person in moral terms, as someone to whom we have obligations, as someone who has rights – in short, as someone like ourselves. (139-140)

Feelings of compassion, or generally sympathizing with characters may lead to empathy in readers, which at the same time involves some kind of suspension of their belief in adopting the new position. In explaining how fiction affects readers’ beliefs and how self- protection is minimized by readers due to skepticism and suspicion, Keen uses David Miall’s explanation of how “[th]e fiction reader who suspends disbelief … encounters devices that vouch for a novel’s fictionality and that are ‘capable of eliciting the decentering response of empathic projection’” (88). Similarly, Hogan notes that “the empathic adoption of someone else’s perspective involves, among other things, a shift from what one might call ‘objective mind’ to ‘subjective mind’” (145). Thus, moral qualities of the object of empathy will depend on subjective feeling of the specific moment. That is, empathizing with a villain, for example, does not seem as such a difficult endeavor, as even though moral judgments might prompt disengagement in readers, subjective feelings toward a character with whom empathy have already been established might blur such judgements: “The more subjective our understanding of someone, the more difficult it is to detach ethical predicates, especially negative predicates, from his/her particular acts and apply them to his/her ‘character’” (145- 146). Therefore, the fact that readers may have already experienced an empathetic reaction toward George’s experience as consequence of him being identified as kind of protagonist because of his involvement in the previous stories (three out of four by now) and the fact that he is the focalizing character of “Nobody Knows” might postpone a negative moral judgment on his actions. While he already shows some signs of perhaps not so acceptable behavior toward the girl he supposedly likes, such as “in his heart he had no sympathy for her” when finally gathering the strength to approach her, or the aggressive language used in describing Pérez 76 his manhood or his “dominion” over her, readers might overlook the negative moral qualities of such facts based on the subjectivity that empathetic feelings toward him may have prompted. To summarize, having learned to somehow care for, or at least sympathize with the character of George, will make it easier for readers to see these flaws as “not so bad” ones, and so postpone a negative moral judgement for as long as possible.

Moral judgment of character seems to be harder to make in relation to the character focalized in the text, even if empathy and focalization to some extent seem to work together. It may not be too far-fetched to say that the fact that the focalized character (once empathy been prompted in readers toward such character), might be a further agency in embodiment than the previously seen. Since George is the focalizing character, readers empathy may most likely be directed toward his feelings. But at the end of “Nobody Knows”, the negative moral implications of his behavior might actually turn readers sympathy toward Louise, therefore reverting somehow the focalizing process to focus on the emotions Louise may have been undergoing. In this way, the embodiment of George emotions based on readers previous experiences, and the clashing of such process with the new sympathy toward Louise is another way in which information that is unsaid in the text may still drive readers way of constructing the literary experience.

In relation to moral judgements, context, especially that of the time and society of the work, may be important in understanding the way readers may connect to the characters in the story. For instance, Keen states that “[th]e capacity of a particular novel to invoke readers’ empathy may change over time (and some texts may only activate the empathy of their first, immediate audience)” (74). Hence, George’s last words at the end of the story may have been less harshly judged in the society of its time, when the loose morality he shows by having sexual relationships before marriage or his concerns in terms of maintaining certain social reputation may have been more present in readers’ minds. Nonetheless, the feeling after his words remains as a negative one, he definitely “must have done something wrong,” so regardless of how wrong context may deem them, the core of his actions as being morally incorrect seems to remain unaltered.

In the end it is not textual evidence, focalization, or even empathy to George, that builds the readers’ experience of this story. It is precisely the unknown information, whatever happened between them that will never be known and the calling attention to it, what triggers its experience in readers. It is the unsaid information that shifts empathy toward Louise and Pérez 77 transforms every idea readers may have had during their reading of the story into new assumptions and judgements. Readers are led to empathize first with George, forgiving his flaws and idealizing his behavior as protagonist, and the way such feeling from readers clashes with the final revelation of him doing something wrong shatters previous ideas of the text and opens the space for a new understanding of his actions. Ultimately, the fact is that George takes advantage of Louise because she admires him, and how these acts are still allowed by a society that completely disregards feminine sexual identity or independence from men is made evident through the conflict of empathy.

Pérez 78

5. Conclusion So far, I have noted the impossibility for language to express the essence of things, if not by its absence. It is because of this that the unsaid brings a space where it is possible to interact with that which language fails to convey other than in silence. Winesburg, Ohio offers the possibility to analyze such spaces both because of its stylistic qualities and the way it is structured as a whole, where every story is a fragment of the bigger truth that is the American fictional town of Winesburg. Here, even the story of George Willard, the assumed protagonist, is narrated through others, as an unsaid story. Things are not said in Winesburg, because they risk being said in the words of the conventional language that has made people grotesque. It is a town that cannot express itself linguistically due to how far meanings have been taken from their original truths. Thus, the people living in it who find the need to express their nature and fail to do so within the conventionality of this town are unable to fit in and are seen as grotesque. In this way, Winesburg, Ohio offers a perfect opportunity for literary discourse to escape the chains of ordinary language and bring the experience of its characters to life in the mind of readers. Especially in a time where patriarchal structures, social appearances and reputation so deeply hindered the natural linguistic expression, talking without naming is a perfect mean to convey a true meaning. Hence, the unsaid offers the chance for readers to use their cognitive tools in order to fully experience the fictional text.

In this thesis, I have analyzed many different ways in which unsaid elements in the narration affect the reading process. The unsaid can be presented as concealed information, as in “Nobody Knows”, that drives both the narrative and the way readers empathize toward characters. It can be presented as communicating by prompting a specific state of predispositions in readers when leading them to prepare for a specific kind of event to come (like an adventure). Or it can say by avoiding a specific mention of characters’ emotional states such as Alice’s in “Adventure.” Therefore, the unsaid can be analyzed as textual evidence in the reading process. I have insisted on the labelling of adventure due to my belief that it can be analyzed as a textual device to prompt the physical experience in readers that makes it easier to connect with the non-linguistic experience of those characters. In other words, the characters’ anguish and anxiety toward the impossibility to express themselves in that society that has taken meaning so far away from the essence of its word would lose its aesthetic value if expressed in the same language that hinders its nature. Thus, awakening the similar physical conditions in readers that characters would experience in living those events Pérez 79 of frustration and impossibility to express themselves is a way to transmit the experience to readers in an understandable way.

Furthermore, adopting the perspective of different characters due to focalization also contributes to the enrichment of the events. Even if presenting just the surface, or the events as such, having to recreate that experience through the eyes of different characters contributes as well to making the recreation process a more complete one. In terms of my analysis, this is one of the ways in which empathy is affected by not letting readers empathize with a single character positioning themselves with whatever visions and moral judgements such character may have. Instead, readers will need to be open to the possibility of every character being to some extent “the good one”, thus having to adopt a broader understanding of their acts and emotions. The brutish Ed might be a lover incapable of expressing his pure feelings any other way and the cocky George a child with drunk delusions of grandeur, while, at the same time, Ed might just be a drunk and abusive bully and George a poor boy used by Belle. Witnessing the different fragments of an experience that different characters perspectives give makes it possible for readers to reconstruct the experiences from the perspective of the experience itself so as to say, free of the prejudices that a single perspective may impose.

If understanding emotions and their physical response as a two directional process in which a physical state could trigger and emotion, I propose that prompting a physical state on readers, or at least inviting the recreation of one through the use of imagination and mind reading, will help readers connect with the experience characters undergo further than is allowed by the literary discourse itself. Thus, when Elmer’s actions are presented as violent acts, readers understand the depth of such actions in connection to his personal frustrations by undergoing a similar experience when recreating the fictional world, or at least, making the cognitive preparations needed to face it. By studying empathy, I have defined how experiencing emotions physically in readers mind may occur from the recreation of characters’ fictional experience. While not mimicking the emotions that characters undergo, the readers’ cognitive process in relation to how an emotion is experienced may get activated, thus recreating that experience physically even if only in the preparation for it. Empathy helps both in leading readers toward the reconstruction of an experience from the perspective of different characters, as well as in facilitating the understanding of an emotional estate from the predispositions readers may have acquired through the text. Pérez 80

By now, I hope to have given enough evidence as to propose that, due to the interaction of readers cognition with the unsaid in the text, the literary text escapes the restrictions of language in conveying the nature and essence of human experiences. Thus it is possible to study human nature and its relations to social conventionality without the need to specifically saying so, as seen in Winesburg, Ohio. This relationship between the way the literary experience is embodied, and the way readers physicality or cognitive readiness to the physicality of a reconstructed experience is connected to the reception of the unsaid, contributes to the recreation of unsaid experiences in the fictional text.

Pérez 81

Works Cited Anderson, Sherwood, and John Updike. Winesburg, Ohio. [New York, NY:] The Modern Library, 2002.

Ayoung, Elaine. “Rethinking the Reality Effect.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 582- 590.

Blanchot, Maurice, and Charlotte Mandell. The Book to Come. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Blanchot, Maurice, and P A. Sitney. The Gaze of Orpheus, and Other Literary Essays. Barrytown, N.Y: Station Hill Press, 1981. Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Burke, Michael. Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind. New York: Routledge, 2011. Canli, Turhan, et al. Event-related activation in the human amygdala associates with later memory for individual emotional experience. Journal of Neuroscience 20.19 (2000): RC99-RC99. Caracciolo, Marco. The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014.

Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories As Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Ciancio, Ralph. " ‘The Sweetness of the Twisted Apples’: Unity of Vision in Winesburg, Ohio." PMLA 87.5 (1972): 994-1006.

D’Ammassa, Don. Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction. Facts On File, 2009. Dooley, Mark, and Liam Kavanagh. The Philosophy of Derrida. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007. Dunne, Robert. “Beyond Grotesqueness in ‘Winesburg, Ohio.’.” The Midwest Quarterly 31.2 (1990): 180. El Saffar, Ruth. "In Praise of What Is Left Unsaid: Thoughts On Women and Lack in Don Quijote." MLN 103.2 (1988): 205-222. Emmott, Catherine; Sanford, J. Anthony; Alexander, Marc. “Rhetorical Control of Readers Attention: Psychological and Stylistic Perspectives on Foreground and Background in Narrative.” Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative, edited Pérez 82

by Lars Bernaerts, Dirk De Geest, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.39-58. H. Cady, Edwin, “Realism”: Toward a Definition” Documents of American Realism and Naturalism, edited by Donald Pizer, Southern Illinois University Press, 1998, pp. 324-336. Hammond, Meghan Marie. Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Heidegger, Martin, and William McNeill. Pathmarks. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Heidegger, Martin, Kenneth Haynes, and Julian Young. Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Herman, David, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Cambridge: ProQuest LLC, 2011. Hogan, Patrick Colm. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Martínez Marzoa Felipe. Historia De La Filosofía. 2a. reimpr ed., I /. Madrid: Istmo, 2010. Martínez Marzoa, Felipe. De Grecia Y La Filosofía. Madrid: Universidad, Secretariado De Publicaciones, 1990. Mellmann, Katja. “Objects of Empathy”. Characters in Fictional Worlds : Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media, edited by Ralf Schneider, et al. New York: De Gruyter, 2010, pp. 416-442. Mittelmann, Jorge. Lenguaje Y Pensamiento : El Cours De Saussure Y Su Recepción Crítica En Jakobson Y Derrida. Servicio De Publicaciones De La Universidad De Navarra, 2000. Moreland, Kim. “Just the tip of the iceberg theory: Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson's Loneliness.”.” The Hemingway Review 19.2 (2000): 47. Oatley, Keith. “The Structure of Emotions”. Mind Readings: Introductory Selections On Cognitive Science, edited by Paul Thagard. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998 pp. 239-258. Pérez 83

Oatley, Keith. “Theory of Mind and Theory of Minds in Literature”. Theory of Mind and Literature, edited by Paula Leverage. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2011, pp. 13-27. Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. 2nd ed. London: Taylor & Francis, 2005. Saricks, Joyce G. The Readers' Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago: American Library Association, 2009. Schalow, Frank. Departures: At the Crossroads between Heidegger and Kant. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Standis, Paul, “Poetics of the Unsaid” Heidegger, Education, and Modernity, edited by Michael Peters, Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, pp. 151-170. Stouck, David, “Anderson's Expressionist Art” New essays on Winesburg, Ohio, edited by John W. Crowley, New York; Cambridge, 1990, pp. 27-48. Varela, Francisco J. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016. Yerkes, Andrew Corey. “ ‘Strange Fevers, Burning Within’: The Neurology of Winesburg, Ohio.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 35 no. 2, 2011, pp. 199-215. Zhang, Lihua. “ ‘The Book of the Grotesque’ and Winesburg, Ohio.” Journal of Language Teaching and Research 5.2 (2014): 301. Zunshine, Lisa. “Theory of Mind and Fictions of Embodied Transparency”. Theory of Mind and Literature, edited by Paula Leverage. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2011., pp. 63-92. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.