The
Iceberg Theory of Hemingway
Article by - Sudhanshu kumar
Date - 17.08.2013
Ernest
Miller Hemingway was a 20th century American novelist who can best be
remembered for his economical and understated style. His style had a strong
influence on the 20th-century fiction while his life of adventure as a world war journalist and reporter , and his public
image as a writer cast a great influence on later generations. Hemingway’s
legacy to American literature is his style of writing . Writers who came after
him emulated it or avoided it .1 After his reputation was established
with the publication of The Sun Also Rises, he became the spokesperson for the
post–World War I generation, having established a style to follow . 2
Reynolds, the literary critic asserts the legacy is that "he left stories
and novels so starkly moving that some have become part of our cultural
heritage." In a 2004 speech at the John F Kennedy Library, Russell Banks
declared that he, like many male writers of his generation, was influenced by
Hemingway's writing philosophy, style, and public image.
Hemingway
produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s and won the
Nobel Prize in literature in 1954 for The Old Man and the Sea. He published
seven novels, six short story collections and two fiction works. Three novels ,
four collections of short stories and three non-fiction works were published
posthumously. Many of these are considered classics in modern era literature.
The New York Times wrote in 1926 of Hemingway's first novel, "No amount of
analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping
story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary
English to shame." 3 The novel is written in spare, tight prose
that influenced countless crime and pulp fiction novels and made Hemingway
famous across the globe. The Sun Also Rises, in fact , epitomizing the post-war
expatriate generation, received good and appreciative reviews . Hemingway
himself later wrote to his editor Max Perkins that the "point of the
book" was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the
earth abideth forever". He believed the characters in The Sun Also Rises
may have been "battered" but were not lost.
Hemingway
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his mastery of the art of
narrative, and for the influence that he
exerted on contemporary style . He wrote
the draft of The Old Man and the Sea in eight weeks, saying that it was
"the best I can write ever for all of my life". The Old Man and the Sea became a
book-of-the-month selection, made Hemingway an international celebrity, and won
the Pulitzer Prize in May 1952 , a month before he left for his second trip to
Africa. James Mellow , his biographer claims Hemingway "had coveted the
Nobel Prize"… Because he was suffering
pain from the African accidents, he decided against travelling to
Stockholm. Instead he sent a speech to
be read, defining the writer's life:
" Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers
palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He
grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work
deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he
must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day."
From
1913 until 1917, Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School where
he took part in a number of sports, namely boxing, track and field, water polo,
and football. He excelled in English classes, and performed in the school
orchestra with his sister Marcelline for two years.4 In his junior year,
he took a journalism class, taught by Fannie Biggs, which was structured
"as though the classroom were a newspaper office". The better writers
in class submitted pieces to the The Trapeze, the school newspaper. Hemingway
and Marcelline both had pieces submitted to The Trapeze; Hemingway's first
piece, published in January 1916, was about a local performance by the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra . He continued to contribute to and edit the Trapeze and the
Tabula, the school's newspaper and yearbook. For this he imitated the language
of sports writers and thus later on in his life his language of novels seems to
be a vivid running commentary of the stock of situations he is dealing with .
Like Mark Twain , Stephen Crane Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis , Hemingway was a
journalist before becoming a novelist ; after leaving high school he went to
work for The Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. Although he stayed there for
only six months he relied on the Star's style guide as a foundation for his
writing: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous
English. Be positive, not negative."5 Carlos Baker, Hemingway's
first biographer, believes that Paris where he went to work as a reporter
provided him opportunities to meet the most interesting people in the world .
In Paris Hemingway met writers such as Gertrude Stein , James Joyce and Ezra Pound who "could help a young
writer up the rungs of a career ". Stein, who was the bastion of modernism
in Paris, became Hemingway's mentor. She introduced him to the expatriate
artists and writers of the Montparnasse
Quarter , whom she referred to as the " Lost generation "— a term
Hemingway popularized with the publication of
The Sun Also Rises . A regular at Stein's Salon , Hemingway met
influential painters such as Pablo Picasso ,
Joan Miro , and Juan Gris . They may have bearing upon the pictorial
quality of his writing. Biographer James Mellow believes A Farewell to Arms
established Hemingway's stature as a major American writer and displayed a
level of complexity not apparent in The Sun Also Rises. For Whom the Bell Tolls became a
Book-of-the-Month Club choice, sold half a million copies within months, was
nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and as
Meyers describes it, " triumphantly re-established Hemingway's literary
reputation".
“In
the late summer that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across
the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were
pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and
swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the
road and the dust they raised powdered the trees’’. Opening passage of A Farewell to Arms shows
Hemingway’s use of the words and overall prose diction effective enough to impress
a reader. This may be one of the reasons that he could reach out to the maximum
number of the readers across the globe and became a literary celebrity. Jackson
Benson believes Hemingway used autobiographical details as framing devices
about life in general—not only about his life. For example, Benson postulates
that Hemingway used his experiences and drew them out with "what if"
scenarios: "what if I were wounded in such a way that I could not sleep at
night? What if I were wounded and made crazy, what would happen if I were sent
back to the front?" Writing in "The Art of the Short Story,"
Hemingway explains: "A few things I have found to be true. If you leave
out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened.
If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be
worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your
editors, omit." 6
We
can judge the simplicity of Hemingway’s prose well. It may be deceptive as
well. Zoe Trodd, the critic , believed that Hemingway crafted skeletal
sentences and offered a ‘multi-focal’ photographic reality. The syntax, which
lacks subordinating conjunctions creates static sentences. The photographic
snapshot style creates a collage of images. Many types of internal punctuations
are omitted in favour of short declarative sentences.The
sentences build on each other, as events build to create a sense of the
whole. He also uses other cinematic
techniques of shifting quickly from one scene to the next or of splicing a
scene into another.7 This may be the quality of a journalist or a
reporter reporting from a spot or a video editor capable enough in creating
visual effects. In his literature, and in his personal writing, Hemingway
habitually used the word "and" in place of commas. Hemingway's
polysyndetonic sentences used to convey immediacy . In his later novels his
subordinate clauses contains conjunctions to juxtapose startling visions and
images. Jackson Benson compares them to haikus ,8 an unrhymed verse form
of Japanese origin having three lines containing usu. Many of Hemingway's
followers thought this style intended to eliminate emotion. We should believe,
it was rather a way to portray the things more scientifically. Hemingway
thought he sculpted collages of images in order to grasp ‘ the real thing ’ ,
the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion . This use of an image
as an objective correlative is characteristic of writers like Ezra Pound, T. S.
Eliot , James Joyce and Proust .9 However , Some critics have
characterized Hemingway's work as misogynistic and homophobic . Susan Beegel
analyzed four decades of Hemingway criticism, published in her essay "
Critical Reception ". She found, particularly in the 1980s, "critics
interested in multiculturalism" simply ignored Hemingway; although some
"apologetics" have been written . Typical is this analysis of The Sun
Also Rises: "Hemingway never lets the reader forget that Cohn is a Jew,
not an unattractive character who happens to be a Jew but a character who is
unattractive because he is a Jew." During the same decade, according to
Beegel , criticism was published that investigated the "horror of
homosexuality", and racism in Hemingway's fiction .10 Nonetheless,
Hemingway scholar Hallengren believes the " hard boiled style" and
the machismo must be separated from the author himself . ’’
REFERENCES
1 ^ Oliver
(1999), 140–141
2^ Nagel
(1996), 87
3^ “ The Sun Also Rises” (October 31, 1926). TheNew York Times . Retrieved 30 November 2011
4^ Reynolds
(2000), 19
5 ^ “ Star style and
rules for writing “. The Kansas City Star. Kansacity.com Retrieved 30 November
2011
6 ^ Hemingway
(1975), 3
7^ Trodd
(2007), 8
8^McCormick, 49 ^
Benson (1975), 309
9^ McCormick,
47
10^Beegel
(1996), 282
