| |
|
I've been trying to answer this question all day, and I can't really organize my thoughts, so I'll just ramble on a while and say provocative things. Hemingway was pretty important to me when I was about 16--at least as important as Robert Heinlein, esp. For Whom the Bell Tolls and a number of short stories. The critical line on Hemingway... well, there are two.
The first critical line is about his extremely reductive prose style, this sleight of hand where he creates tension through allusion, not description. In some story, it may be A Farewell To Arms, but it may be one of the short stories, about a cat, too, a couple are having a nasty argument about an abortion, but neither mentions the abortion or even appears to be angry. And that famous opening scene of A Farewell To Arms, with the soldiers marching into the woods in the rain with ammunition under their ponchos; or the part of that story where the Indian on the top bunk turns to the wall.
Ha ha, I'm driving myself crazy here. Anyway, similar techniques are used to cause a psychological state in the reader, later, by... Vonnegut maybe, Salinger certainly, and maybe Pynchon? Who else? Where there is sort of a spare, droning prose, with lots of repetative, inane dialogue, which lulls or hypnotises the reader, punctuated by intense imagery. It is a style that sort of fell out of fashion in the 70s and 80s, with the Stephen King/John Irving approach, let's call it psychologically lush, lots of consideration of every little gesture and emotion, and less though given to Meaning. Which brings us to line two:
Hemingway was part of a generation of novelists who had been involved in the European wars of the early 20th century, and there is this sense of disgust and frustration with words and rhetoric, the basic conflicts at the center of "civilized" behavior. I keep thinking about Raymond Chandler, too, and Samuel Beckett. What is there to talk about? What is the sense of writing a book? What can our stories possibly be worth, in the face of all the people we've killed? Robert Jordan, the hero of For Whom The Bell Tolls, is an architect who blows up bridges--Take that, Ayn Rand! People who dislike Hemingway usually talk about how he glorifies violence and bloodsport, but he's ambivalent. Violence is a part of human nature, and he's fascinated with all the lengths we'll go to to try and suppress it, and what happens when the wheels come off. Cf, The Short Happy Life of Francis Maycomber. Cf it right now. |
|
|
