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 19^th 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