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From “Arrowsmith” by Sinclair Lewis

The state of Winnemac is bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, and like them it is half Eastern, half Midwestern. Zenith, the largest city in the state, was founded in 1792. But Winnemac is Midwestern in its fields of corn and wheat, its red barns and silos, and, despite the immense antiquity of Zenith, many counties were not settled till 1860.

The University of Winnemac is at Mohalis, fifteen miles from Zenith. There are twelve thousand students; beside this prodigy Oxford is a tiny theological school and Harvard a select college for young gentlemen. The University has a baseball field under glass; its buildings are measured by the mile; it hires hundreds of young Doctors of Philosophy to give rapid instruction in Sanskrit, navigation, accountancy, spectacle-fitting, sanitary engineering, Provençal poetry, tariff schedules, rutabaga-growing, motor-car designing, the history of Voronezh, the style of Matthew Arnold, the diagnosis of myohypertrophia kymoparalytica, and department-store advertising. Its president is the best money-raiser and the best after-dinner speaker in the United States; and Winnemac was the first school in the world to conduct its extension courses by radio.

In 1904, when Martin Arrowsmith was an Arts and Science Junior preparing for medical school, Winnemac had but five thousand students.

Martin was twenty-one. He seemed pale, in contrast to his black smooth hair, but he was a respectable runner, a fair basket-ball center, and a savage hockey-player. The co-eds murmured that he “looked so romantic”, but they merely talked about him at a distance, and he did not know that he could have been a hero of amours. For all his stubbornness he was shy.

The University had become his world. His idol was Professor Edward Edwards, head of the department of chemistry, who was universally known as “Encore”. Edwards’ knowledge of the history of chemistry was immense. He could read Arabic, and he infuriated his fellow chemists by asserting that the Arabs had anticipated all their researches. Himself, Professor Edwards never did researches. He sat before fires and stroked his collie and chuckled in his beard.

In college Martin had not belonged to a Greek Letter secret society. He had been “rushed”, but he had resented the condescension of the aristocracy of men from the larger cities. Now that most of his class-mates had departed to insurance offices, law schools, and banks, he was lonely, and tempted by an invitation from Digamma Pi, the chief medical fraternity.

Digamma Pi was a lively boarding-house with a billiard table and low prices. Rough and amiable noises came from it at night, and a good deal of singing about “When I Die Don’t Bury Me at All”; yet for three years Digamma had won the valedictory and the Hugh Loizeau Medal in Experimental Surgery.

Martin had prized the independence of his solitary room. In a fraternity all tennis rackets, trousers, and opinions are held in common… But at last Martin decided to come in.

Martin, Ira Hinkley, Angus Duer, Clif Clawson, the class jester, and one “Fatty” Pfaff were initiated into Digamma Pi together. It was a noisy and rather painful performance, which included smelling asafetida. Martin was bored, but Fatty Pfaff was in squeaking, gasping terror.

Fatty was of all the new Freshmen candidates the most useful to Digamma Pi. He was planned by nature to be a butt. He looked like a distended hot-water bottle; he was magnificently imbecile; he believed everything; and anxiously he forgave the men who got through the vacant hours by playing jokes upon him.

Every night when Fatty retired he had to remove from his bed a collection of objects which thoughtful house-mates had stuffed between the sheets – soap, alarm clocks, fish. He was the person to whom to sell useless things. But Fatty’s greatest beneficence to Digamma was his belief in spiritualism. He went about in terror of spooks. He was always seeing them emerging at night from the dissecting-room windows. His class-mates took care that he should behold a great many of them flitting about the halls of the fraternity.

Digamma Pi was housed in a residence built in the expansive days of 1885. The living-room suggested a recent cyclone. Knife-gashed tables, broken Morris chairs, and torn rugs were flung about the room, and covered with backless books, hockey shoes, caps and cigarette stubs. Above, there were four men to a bedroom, and the beds were iron double-deckers, like a steerage.

For ash-trays the Digamma used sawed skulls, and on the bedroom walls were anatomical charts to be studied while dressing. In Martin’s room was a complete skeleton. He and his room-mates had trustingly bought it from a salesman who came out from a Zenith surgical supply house. He was such a genial and sympathetic salesman; he gave them cigars and told stories and explained what prosperous doctors they were all going to be. They bought the skeleton gratefully, on the instalment plan… Later the salesman was less genial.

Martin Arrowsmith Freshman

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) started his career as a journalist. His first novels – “Our Mr. Wrenn” (1914), “The Trail of the Hawk” (1915), “The Innocents” (1917), “The Job” (1917), “Free Air” (1919) were mostly entertaining and got but measured praise. It was “Main Street” (1920) that got him universal acclaim, first in USA, then in Europe. It was to become the first of a number of the writer’s books in which realism is marked with a strong and bitter satirical note. The targets of the author’s ridicule were mediocrity and pettiness (“Main Street”), a complete standardization of American life and the callousness of “the dollar civilization” (“Babbitt”, 1922), commercialization of science (“Arrowsmith”, 1925), religious hypocrisy (“Elmer Gantry”, 1927).

Sinclair Lewis was the first American author to be awarded the Nobel Prize (1930).

Of the writer’s later books most important are “Gideon Planish” (1943), satirizing American demagogues turning into hirelings of fascists, and “Kingsblood Royal” (1947) – a powerful denunciation of race prejudice.

But we can say in all justice that it was “Main Street”, “Babbitt” and “Arrowsmith” that brought the writer a world-wide recognition and a well-deserved fame.

“Arrowsmith” depicts a man of science who strives to benefit mankind and whose lofty ideals are shattered in an encounter with society (a problem later picked up in the works by A. Cronin and M.Wilson).

Martin Arrowsmith, first a small town medical practitioner, later Acting Director of the Public Health Department in the city of Nautilus, dreams of serving science selflessly and devotedly and of doing his doctor’s duty to suffering humanity, but his endeavour comes to naught, hindered by the commercial exploitation of medicine.

The extract under consideration is an ironic description of the University of Winnemac where Martin Arrowsmith took a course at a medical school.

The extract is presented in one compositional part – the author’s speech.

The writer places the University in the non-existent town of Mohalis situated in the non-existent state of Winnemac.

A strong ironic effect of the description is realized due to a combination of quite a few stylistic means and devices.

With mock seriousness the author enumerates the subjects, both real and invented, in which “hundreds of young Doctors of Philosophy” “…give rapid instruction”, and whose great number unusual diversity is but striking:

“…Sanskrit, navigation, accountancy, spectacle-fitting, sanitary engineering, Provençal poetry, tariff schedules, rutabaga-growing, motor-car designing, the history of Voronezh, the style of Matthew Arnold, the diagnosis of myohypertrophia kymoparalytica, and department-store advertising”. Most often in describing the university the author uses:

hyperbole: “… Beside this prodigy Oxford is a tiny theological school and Harvard a select college for young gentlemen”. “… Its buildings are measured by the mile”.

Not less picturesque are the people that teach and study at the University. Here the writer resorts to paradox:

Martin’s idol, Professor Edward Edwards, “universally known as “Encore”, has an immense knowledge of the history of chemistry, but he “never did researches. He sat before fires and stroked his collie and chuckled in his beard”.

Digamma Pi, “the chief medical fraternity”, notorious for their night uproaring and singing “When I Die Don’t Bury Me at All”, “for three years…had won the valedictory and the Hugh Loizeau Medal in Experimental Surgery”.

Other figures of speech are represented by:

epithets: “he was a respectable runner, a fair basket-ball centre, a savage hockey-player”; “Rough and amiable noises came from it at night”; “Fatty Pfaff was in squeaking, gasping terror”;

simile: “The living room suggested a recent cyclone”;

“He looked like a distended hot-water bottle”;

“He was planned by nature to be a butt”.

oxymoron: “He was magnificently imbecile”;

zeugma: “Diigamma Pi was a lively boarding-house with a billiard table and low prices”;

irony and metonymy: “… Fatty’s greatest beneficence to Digamma was his belief in spiritualism. He went about in terror of spooks. His class-mates took care that he should behold a great many of them…”. “In Martin’s room was a complete skeleton. He and his room-mates had trustingly bought it from a salesman… He was such a genial and sympathetic salesman… They bought the skeleton gratefully, on the instalment plan… Later the salesman was less genial.”

Well-developed structures with long raw of homogeneous elements and syntactic parallelism make it possible for the author to create vivid pictures and give an exhaustive characteristics of personages:

“Knife-gashed tables, broken Morris chairs, and torn rugs were flung about the room, and covered with backless books, hockey shoes, caps and cigarette stubs”.

“He was planned by nature to be a butt. He looked like a distended hot-water bottle; he was magnificently imbecile; he believed everything; and anxiously he forgave the men who got through the vacant hours by playing jokes upon him”.

The joint effect of the precision of the vocabulary chosen and an apt combination of lexical and syntactic stylistic devices is a masterful and witty caricature that had been the writer’s object.