Hemingway’s Prose Style:
Most critics agree that Hemingway’s fame depends as much on
his prose style as on his content and subjects.
His early style is lean, laconic, and devoid of strings of adjectives
and adverbs. Lacking excessive
modifiers, his sentences tend to be simple or compound declarative clauses;
conjunctions are coordinating, rarely subordinating, so that items are arranged
spatially or sequentially (not by cause or logic—Hemingway’s world is ruled
more by fate and luck than by cause and effect and logic). The prose depends on nouns (many
monosyllabic) for concrete imagery.
There is a poetic use of repetition (learned in part from the Bible and
in part from Gertrude Stein) and a concentration on surface detail, on
suggesting character through things said and done rather than through authorial
asides and psychological analysis. Like
his Imagist contemporaries, especially Ezra Pound, Hemingway sought the
concrete detail that would capture the essence of the moment and convey its
emotional content to readers. His
bare-bones style is in part a reaction to the over-ornate Victorian prose and
to the political rhetoric surrounding World War I. Obviously influenced by the techniques of
journalism, it is also an attempt to strip away all that is false, misleading,
and unessential. Among the elements that
Hemingway shares with other Modernist writers are alienated characters and
their rejection of conventional moral standards, a manner of presentation that,
in its incomplete and fragmented manner, echoes the sense of a pervasive social
disintegration. Often cited is
Hemingway’s “iceberg” technique, where vital elements of a story are left out
in order to force greater reader engagement (even rereading). The actual text read by readers is only the
tip of the “iceberg”: readers are left to ponder what lies beneath.
Hemingway on his iceberg technique:
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing
about he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is
writing truly enough, will have the feeling of those things as strongly as
though the writer has stated them. The
dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above
water.
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for
every part that shows. Anything you know
you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.
The Myth of Antaeus:
Antaeus was the son of Poseidon and Ge (mother earth). He was a giant who wrestled Hercules. Whenever he was thrown to the ground, he
arose stronger than before from the contact with his mother. Perceiving this, Hercules finally lifted
Antaeus into the air and crushed him to death.
The myth of Antaeus simply refers to anyone who is replenished, and restored
by returning to nature. As a romantic
notion, the myth is used to refer to a process of revitalization whereby an
individual, once oppressed and overwhelmed by society, seeks solace in nature. Hemingway’s characters often seek such
restoration in nature through the simple rituals of hunting, fishing, and
camping.
Modernism:
As a term, modernism is most often used to identify the most
distinctive forms, styles, concepts, and sensibilities in literature and art
from WWI to the post-WWII years. Since
it is a broad intellectual movement, modernism varies widely in specific
features, but most critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical
break with the traditional bases of both Western culture and Western art. Modernists were writers and artists who
questioned the certainties and standard truths that had previously provided
support systems for all social organization, religion, morality, and the
conception of the human self. Modernists
were influenced by late 19th century thinkers, such as Nietzsche,
Marx, Freud, and Darwin.
The modernist revolt against traditional literary and
artistic forms and subjects manifested itself strongly after the catastrophe of
WWI, which shook human faith in the continuity and foundations of Western
culture. The inherited mode of ordering
a literary or artistic work—and for that matter of ordering the world—assumed a
relatively stable and coherent worldview. But there was a general shattering of
traditional beliefs and foundational truths after WWI, and there was a general
emergence of a belief in the futility and meaningless of life, that the world
was characterized by disorder rather than order, by anarchy rather than
stability. Experimenting with new forms
and styles, modernists explored the dislocation and fragmentation of parts
rather than the traditional artistic concept of unity. Modernist writers subverted the conventions
of earlier prose fiction by breaking up narrative continuity, departing from
standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax
and coherence of narrative language.
Such techniques have obvious parallels in the violation of
representational conventions in the modernist paintings of Cubism, Futurism,
Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism as well as in the violations of standard
conventions of melody, harmony, and rhythm by the modernist composers
(Stravinsky, Copeland).
A prominent feature of modernism is the attempt to be
“avant-garde,” a military term for “advance-guard.” Quite self-consciously, authors and artists
attempted to, in Pound’s famous phrase, “make it new.” By violating accepted conventions and
decorums, they undertook to create new artistic forms and styles and to
introduce neglected, often forbidden subjects.
Frequently avant-garde artists represent themselves as alienated from
the established order, against which they assert their own autonomy. Their aim is often to shock the sensibilities
of their audiences and to challenge the norms and pieties of bourgeois culture.
Free verse, stream-of-consciousness, objective correlative,
imagism, multiple points-of-view, broken or fragmentary narratives, iceberg
narratives, alienated characters, defiance of traditional values.
Joyce, Faulkner, Pound, Eliot, Conrad, Proust, Woolf,
Pirandello, Brecht, Fitzgerald, O’Neill
