Abstract
Sherwood Anderson’s “grotesque” characters in The Triumph of the Egg (1921) often express, in a half-muted way, their paralleled senses of entrapment within and alienation from American soil. Their torments can be seen as an index to the depth of Anderson’s investment in the theme of “America’s original sin”: the enslavement of Africans and the usurpation of the lands inhabited by indigenous peoples. In “Out of Nowhere into Nothing,” Walter Sayer, one of its main characters, relates that America “still belongs to a race who in their physical life are now dead.” In a letter addressed to Roger Sergel on 30 March 1938, Anderson writes about how Native Americans can “get into their bodies some kind of earth rhythm we miss.” “That Christopher Columbus was a cheat,” declares the narrator’s father in “The Egg.” “He talked of making an egg stand on its end. He talked, he did, and then he went and broke the end of the egg.” Walter Sayer sings “the river song of the young black warriors,” an old African song which “slavery had softened and colored with sadness.” The song suggests the complexity of Sayers’s desire since its lyrics imply his fancied cross-identification with black invaders and rapists. Anderson’s authorial impulse to “believe” in America, which William Faulkner reflects in his essay in 1953, finds one of its most poignant expressions in Rosalind Wescott’s “odd floating sensation” in “Out of Nowhere into Nothing.” Through this, the whole city of Chicago and Rosalind’s body leave the ground and ascend into the air, allowing, symbolically, the doomed descendants of “the conquering whites” to escape from the land owned by “the red men who are gone.”
