|
|
|
Ernest Hemingway – A Critical Look
The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The
shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What
goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
--Selected Letters, taken from Ernest Hemingway on Writing
An Introductory, Critical Look into Hemingway's
Writing |
|
Ernest Hemingway--before the literary world developed its current aesthetic, perhaps moral,
aversion to his profound contributions to the art of fiction--was respected for his spartan,
declarative style. Hemingway's desire to discover the limits of communicating experience
urged him to follow a path--though seemingly intuitive and even cliche according to current
standards--that split fundamentally, and decisively, from literary tradition.
|
|
Hemingway believed that communicating experience to another human being is the heart,
even the definition, of fiction. Finding ways to delve into the most basic, root commonalities
of human experience required, he believed, an acceptance of pleibian, universal truths, rather
than a desire for individuality. For artists of all callings, the invisible line between the
individual's self and the universality of humanity is the essential location where all
artistic creation takes place. There can be no true communication without an understanding
of this boundary. If Dickens, Austen, and Tolstoy attempted to mesmerize the reader into
forgetting this boundary--by creating colorful, bustling semblances of reality--then Hemingway
attempted to foreground the boundary. You cannot recreate the world, says Hemingway, because
every individual experiences only an infinitesemal piece of the whole. Instead, fiction has
the unique capacity to whittle down reality, to remove traces of individual experience rather
than to depend upon them. Most significantly in his short stories, this technique allowed
Hemingway to bring moments of precious meaning to the places in his fiction that he
deliberately
omitted. The most famous example of this type of omission is found in "Hills Like White
Elephants" (see discussion)
|
|
When considering Hemingway's effect on literature from a critical perspective, we can see how
his attempt to bring forth "common experience" through common language might have, ironically,
alienated a large segment of the common reader population. The assumptions people
make about common experience are the central targets of new criticism, and most notably,
perhaps, postcolonial thinking. These schools of theory argue that assumptions of
common experience are in fact acts of violence. |
|
Many arguments are made, both criticising and defending, Hemingway's depiction of women.
One line of argument, again both criticising and defending, follows a study of the
"roundness" or accuracy of his female characters. Opponents argue that Hemingway's
fiction portrays women by way of a singular mold--a flat, incomplete mold--preventing any
authentic representation of "woman" as a potentially individual human being. If Hemingway
is attempting to describe the common experience of women, then these critics identify the
irony of his effort. Struggling with half-citizen status might be a common experience for
women; fulfillment as a sounding board for male common experience is not. |
|
Proponents, on the other hand, argue that while Hemingway strove to whittle the language
down to these commonalities, he was not proposing universal truth. Hemingway's struggle was
the
struggle of communicating his own experience to an audience. Proponents of Hemingway's
method argue that the hopeless isolation of the individual forms the core of his work, using
whittled-down fiction to communicate through the impenetrable barrier between human beings.
This barrier, the ethereal boundary water identified by all artists, was the fundamental
truth of Hemingway's experience, argue his supporters. This distance becomes the common
narrative perspective that speaks throughout his stories, and the distance allows for a
self-depreciating
irony. The limitations, the sadness, is Hemingway's own--not a fault of his
characters. |
|
As a result of Hemingway's work, nearly an entire generation of young writers attempted to
follow
his example. The sparse, simple voice he used in his writing encouraged students to mimic his
style as if this voice was an answer to the complexity of modern existence. Inevitably, this
movement of imitation could not survive, though its traces are now permanent fixtures within
the
literary canon. This seems obvious to me: the unrelenting perspective of Hemingway's voice
was revolutionary--not for his bluntness, nor his judgments, nor even the simplicity of his
dictionary--because he was able to place his own perspective within the larger perspective of
his
generation. Two hundred years from now, readers will still understand his stories, and the
struggle of his characters within the confines of Hemingway's vision. Critics will continue
to build stronger and stronger cases for his mysogeny, or, as Anthony Burgess once declared
while standing over Hemingway's grave, that Hemingway's writing was filled with overpowering
homosocial tendencies. These cases are, I believe, legitimate, albeit in a limited way--in the
sort of way that criticizes running as bad for the knees. Of course Hemingway's perspective
was
limited. After all, that was his point. |
|
Take a Critical
Look at Three Hemingway Novels
|
|
|
|
|
