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Article Excerpt
Far more often than Hemingway's work, the writings of James Agee, John Dos Passos, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell are examined for their politics, and their politics of form. But Hemingway's multi-focal aesthetic situates him alongside these more obviously politicized writers. Built upon his famous "iceberg" theory of omission, and imitating film rather than singleshot still photography, Hemingway's multi-focal aesthetic confronted the problem of "official" history and interwar doubts over language's ongoing capacity for expression.
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One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one's words as to endure one's thoughts. The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more over-strained and knocked about and voided than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through an increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder.
--HENRY JAMES, 1915
AT SOME POINT during the process of writing A Farewell to Arms (1929), Ernest Hemingway typed out part of a 1915 New York Times interview with Henry James. The quotation, which Hemingway left between the pages of his own manuscript, expresses doubt over language's ongoing capacity for expression; James worries that "the war has used up words" so that "we are now confronted ... with a loss of expression through an increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk" (3-4). Hemingway prefaced this snippet with the phrase: "on the debasement of words by war." Then, echoing James's sentiments about ghostly or limp words and noting their opposite--the "concrete"--Frederic Henry famously observes in A Farewell to Arms that "[a]bstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates" (165). (1)
While James questioned "what ghosts will be left to walk" Hemingway chose to offer skeletons instead. As Paul Fussell explains, Second World War j writers would eventually express "a general skepticism about the former languages of glory and sacrifice and patriotism." They were "[s]ick of the inflated idiom of official morale-boosting tub-thumping and all the slynesses of wartime publicity and advertising," and "preferred to speak in understatement, glancing less at the center of a topic than at its edges" (xxv). Long before this, however, Hemingway's limited vocabulary, few adjectives, and concrete descriptions of specific objects all countered with minimalism the problem of "used up words."
Yet alongside Hemingway's skeletal sentences was another solution to the "increase of limpness": a camera-eye aesthetic that re-embodied reality and expelled the ghosts. This aesthetic was often multi-focal. Imitating film rather than single-shot still photography, it rejected all apparently coherent and exclusive ways of perceiving the world, and asked readers to "mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together" (SAR 121). Against these "stories that hold together" his multi-focal aesthetic asserted the existence of "various angles" (SAR 35); after all, the nose of Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises (1926) could have been flattened in a boxing ring, or by a horse, or "maybe his mother had been frightened or seen something" (12).
Built upon his "iceberg" theory of omission and taken up as a style by 1930s writers, Hemingway's aesthetic tried to grasp the "many things which it is necessary to know" (238), as he puts it in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). It was a politics of form that reached for what George Orwell famously termed "unofficial history, the kind that is ignored in the text-books and lied about in the newspapers" ("Arthur Koestler" 220). Hemingway noted the "hole in the story" (qtd. in Plimpton 88). Then, with his multi-focal aesthetic, he acknowledged the whole story. (2)
I. You'll Lose It If You Talk About It: Diagnosing and Solving the Problem of Language
Writing in the aftermath of what Bertrand Russell called in 1914 the First World War's "foul literature of 'glory'" (cliched accounts of heroism and sacrifice, often in the passive voice), Hemingway reiterated James's idea of "used up" words across his own work (qtd. in Dentith 133): Nick Adams believes that "[t]alking about anything was bad. Writing about anything actual was bad. It always killed it" ("On Writing" 237); Krebs of "Soldier's Home" (1925) discovers that stories strip experience of its "cool valuable quality" and that everyone has "heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities" (IOT 70); and Hemingway observes in Death in the Afternoon (1932) that "all our words from loose using have lost their edge" (71). Confirming the communicative failures of language, The Sun Also Rises even contains scenes that omit Jake Barnes's responses to questions:
"Don't you think so, Jake?" "There's a fight to-night," Bill said. "Like to go?" (85).
And:
"Did you get my line, Jake?" The cab stopped in front of the hotel and we all went in (95)
The war has used up men, like the war-wounded and impotent Jake, and has apparently used up words as well. (3)
Within his form, Hemingway embedded a further commentary upon language's depleted capacity for expression. For example, his paratactic syntax--which juxtaposes clauses and like syntactic units without subordinating conjunctions--creates static, abrupt sentences that seem to stammer or bark; anticipating Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1941), where the leaders of the Revolution have tongues that "stammered and barked" (120). In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan intends to "write a book when he got through with this" (238), but knows that "to get a full picture of what is happening you cannot read only the party organ" (236), that he will "have to be a much better writer" than he is now because the "things he had come to know in this war were not...
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