In Dark Laughter, Anderson is speaking in more than sexual terms when he states that «one left one’s own body and went, quite completely into the body of another » elsewhere in the novel he compares lovers to drops of water «merging into each other.'I like to be between chairs, that's how we say it in German, like one foot between the chair, and no chair.

Generally another human being is seen as the instrumentality of self-loss. The novel Many Marriages and the tales «Seeds » and «The Man’s Story » are explicitly concerned with the most developed form of flight from self which is merger with other.Ĭentral to Anderson’s thought is a duality of being: an imprisoning self which in its symbolic translation gathers an imagery of death (stasis, coldness, dirt, solitude, darkness, etc.) and a spiritual essence which we call the «Essential I » - associated with antithetical life-images of movement, light, fire and whiteness - and which strives to free itself and, ultimately, to unite with a like essence in nature or man. With such a title, it is a tautology to say that flight from identity - here sexual - is central to «The Man Who Became a Woman ». The little girl in «Tandy » (Winesburg, Ohio) sobbingly refuses her real name in favor of the one the drunkard has given her. Anderson’s second novel, Marching Men, is domi¬ nated by a protofascistic longing for merger of self into mindless regimented mass. Another change of name and identity occurs in the novel Dark Laughter where the newspaperman John Stockton runs away, grows a beard and becomes the worker «Bruce Dudley ». The hero of his first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son, walks out of his life as a multi-millionnaire and wanders about the country for years dressed like a workman.

In «Hands » the school¬ teacher Adolph Meyers becomes the agricultural laborer «Wing » Biddlebaum. It appears un¬ mediated, as part of the very narrative armature, in a great number of the tales and novels. The iheme is omnipresent in Anderson’s fiction. » 1 This statement occurs in a letter Sherwood Anderson wrote a few months before his death it testifies to the perennity of a preoccupation which runs through his correspondence and autobiographical writings: the recoil from unbearable personal identity. «The disease we all have and that we have to fight against all our lives is, of course, the disease of self.

Out of the Darkness by Kate Sherwood