Hemingway: So Far from Simple - Softcover

Bouchard, Donald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 159102756X ISBN 13: 9781591027560

Verlag: G38-Prometheus, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Ernest Hemingway has long been recognized as one of the most important and influential fiction writers of the twentieth century. Despite receiving many accolades during his lifetime, including the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, his work also attracted a good deal of criticism. Some critics felt that his characters lacked depth; others, especially feminists, objected to his emphasis on hyper-masculine subject matter, such as warfare, bullfighting, and hunting.

This fresh reevaluation of Hemingway’s career takes a new and different perspective from that of traditional Hemingway critics. The author draws on the postmodernist writings of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Edward Said (who was greatly influenced by Foucault’s thought). From this perspective, he underscores Hemingway’s self-conscious focus on his career as a writer, and the ways in which he addressed critical responses to his works. He makes frequent reference to Hemingway’s correspondence to highlight key turning points in Hemingway’s career, takes issue with the early tendency to reduce Hemingway’s works to the "biographical," and shows how Hemingway’s innovations resulted from a variety of factors, most notably his preoccupation with his literary career.

The early chapters trace Hemingway’s specific view of literary modernism and its effect on his writing. The later chapters show how he disowned his earliest allegiance and developed a distinct "political" point of view—not one to be confused with party affiliations or political slogans but his own individualistic point of view. In addition, the author pays more attention than most critics have to those works that were largely ignored or devalued when published, especially Death in the Afternoon and Across the River Into the Trees.

This thoughtful, in-depth study of the career of a 20th-century literary icon shows that there is still a great deal in Hemingway’s work that deserves serious critical reflection.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Donald F. Bouchard (Albuquerque, NM), now retired, was an associate professor of English at McGill University for sixteen years and vice president for sales and marketing for Khoral Research, Inc. He is the author of Milton: A Structural Reading and the editor of Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, currently in its seventh printing.

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Hemingway

So Far from SimpleBy Donald F. Bouchard

Prometheus Books

Copyright © 2010 Donald F. Bouchard
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59102-756-0

Contents

A Note on the Texts...................................................................9Preface...............................................................................11Acknowledgments.......................................................................15INTRODUCTION..........................................................................17Chapter I. "Necessary Measures": Writing and the Inner Experience.....................33Chapter II. Rejecting Expatriate Practice.............................................49Chapter III. What You Make of It......................................................69Chapter IV. "My Book Has Created Me"..................................................93Chapter V. Being Collected............................................................115Chapter VI. "How It Really Was".......................................................125"Myself I Must Remake"................................................................147Afterword.............................................................................171Appendix..............................................................................179Notes.................................................................................195Bibliography..........................................................................203Index.................................................................................207

Chapter One

"Necessary Measures" Writing and the Inner Experience

Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller"

There is, of course, the problem of sustenance. A Moveable Feast

1

During an interlude of the hunt in Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway coalesces his youthful writing with his experiences of war. The catalyst fusing his private obsession as writer with the major public event of his time is a reading of Tolstoy's Sevastopol. "It was a very young book," he writes, "and had one fine description of fighting in it, where the French take the redoubt and I thought about Tolstoy and about what a great advantage an experience of war was to a writer." In this characteristic observation, Hemingway suggests the retrospective view of his emergence from the vignettes and stories of In Our Time through A Farewell to Arms. A double objective marks Hemingway's first writing: mapping the effects of war on his generation and, simultaneously, storming the redoubt of new writing in Paris during the 1920s. In the retrospective of Green Hills of Africa, WWI is more than an impetus to Hemingway's activity as writer, more than the material he would "represent." It is the basis of his differentiation, even eccentricity, with respect to earlier writers and contemporaries: "It was one of the major subjects and certainly one of the hardest to write truly of and those writers who had not seen it were always very jealous and tried to make it seem unimportant, or abnormal, or a disease as a subject, while really, it was just something quite irreplaceable that they had missed" (p. 70). Hemingway speaks to the issue of "rarity" in this passage, the exceptional nature of his writing and experience and the "statements," highly individualistic in their formation, that constitute his difference. It also points to the importance that Hemingway gives to his specific development and the "progress" already made in his career. In short, the experience of war is a hard-gained differentiation and the basis of the cultural significance of his works.

Throughout Hemingway's first decade as a writer, the experience of war was inescapable, as specific subject or as the general horizon encapsulating domestic scenes. Part of the achievement of A Farewell to Arms was in allowing Hemingway to end the apprenticeship that originated in his reaction to WWI and to begin a new phase of his career. In any event, his first war was decidedly perplexing and its effect not easily overcome, because it stood for the general collapse of individual values that overshadowed particular national defeats. It was the individual and the value of individual experience that most suffered the brutalizing effects of war. It was the individual who returned from the battlefield poorer in experience, incapable of telling his story because personal experience was now literally unaccountable, without meaning. Impersonal forces, tactical decisions, and chance events canceled individual initiative, and to recount this story was to tell a tale that was incomprehensible. Thus, the basis of a pointless vignette of In Our Time: "We'd jammed an absolutely perfect barricade across the bridge.... It was absolutely topping. They tried to get over it, and we potted them from forty yards. They rushed it, and officers came out alone and worked on it. It was an absolutely perfect obstacle. Their officers were very fine. We were frightfully put out when we heard the flank had gone, and we had to fall back" (p. 113). Measured by this scene, we can begin to appreciate Walter Benjamin's observation "that men returned from the battlefield grown silent-not richer, but poorer in communicable experience." Clearly, Benjamin shared the pathos of In Our Time: "A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body."

Another well-known vignette shows a wounded Nick Adams lying among the rubble of a war-torn village:

"Senta Rinaldi. Senta. You and me we've made a separate peace." Rinaldi lay still in the sun breathing with difficulty. "Not patriots." Nick turned his head carefully away smiling sweatily. Rinaldi was a disappointing audience. (p. 139)

Nick's isolated condition is coterminus with his sensitivity to "the tiny, fragile human body." Further, in three of the strategically positioned stories of In Our Time, we encounter the isolated substance of impossible communications. The first story of the collection, "On the Quay at Smyrna," deploys the disembodied voice of a nameless officer. It introduces us to pointless wartime atrocities along with equally pointless misunderstandings among the enlisted men under his command. The shock of these experiences is inexpressible, except in the language of dreams ("That was the only time in my life I got so I dreamed about things") or bluff understatement: "It was all a pleasant business. My word yes a most pleasant business" (p. 88). "Soldier's Home," a middle story of In Our Time, delineates another aspect of personal loss. Recently returned from the war, Krebs finds it impossible to convey the "cool, valuable quality" he experienced at the front. His audience, he learns, was "not thrilled" by his stories. Consequently, he discovers a new value in keeping to himself, now an alien in his country, a stranger among friends and family. In the last story of In Our Time, we again find a soldier's return: "The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it" (MF, p. 76). Nevertheless, the effect of war is readily...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: G38-Prometheus
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 159102756X
• ISBN 13: 9781591027560
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 226
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande