Hemingway and Modernism

1. Hemingway and Modernism Critical Contexts for The Sun Also Rises

2. Contexts for Modernism Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

3. After World War I • Disillusionment with eternal verities of “glory,” “honor,” and “patriotism” after what the soldiers had witnessed. • Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum est,” “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” “Anthem for Doomed Youth” • Gertrude Stein (actually, she overheard this): “You are all a lost generation.” • Meaninglessness of life after the slaughter of the war.

4. Nature of Truth • In realism and naturalism: reality and truth exist, and it is the artist’s responsibility to represent them in a coherent fashion. • In modernism: reality exists, but it can only be represented partially, in fragments, since that is the nature of modern experience. • In postmodernism: reality and truth are necessarily partial and represented subjectively through each person’s experience.

5. Modernism • Fragmentation: the idea that truth could be represented only partially and from multiple perspectives. Related to Cubism in art. • Alienation from and resistance to traditional cultural norms and values

6. Modernism, continued • Fascination with technology and the modern as subject matter and analogue for modern life • Imagism: Poetic movement that valued clear, objective description as a creator of meaning rather than abstractions. • Ezra Pound: • “No ideas except in things.” • “Go in fear of abstractions.” • Poets: H.D., Pound, William Carlos Williams

7. Modernism and Culture • Exploring the past and myth as a way of making meaning (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land) • Exploring other (and non-Western) cultures, including their forms of poetry • Translations • Haiku and other forms

8. Modernism and Psychology • Psychology and psychiatry (Freud, Jung) as a means of exploring consciousness and the nature of being human. • Subjective viewpoints: • Stream of consciousness • Experimental forms of poetry, including free verse

9. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) • Modernist techniques of fragmentation, allusions to the past, and symbolism • Use of two significant legends associated with the Holy Grail • The fisher king, who has an incurable wound in the legs or groin, leaving him impotent and his land infertile • The quest for the Holy Grail

10. Ezra Pound, from Hugh Selwyn Mauberly • Disillusionment with World War I, a war fought for abstractions like glory, honor and country “There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization, Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth's lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.”

11. Contexts for Hemingway • Literary influences • Editorial help (grudgingly acknowledged) from F. Scott Fitzgerald • Critical responses to The Sun Also Rises • Mid-20th-century approaches

12. Hemingway on American Authors (from The Green Hills of Africa, 1934) • “The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That’s not the order they’re good in. There is no order for good writers.” • “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn . . . . It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” • “Crane wrote two fine stories, “The Open Boat” and “The Blue Hotel.” The last one is the best.”

13. Iceberg Theory From Death in the Afternoon, ch. 16, p. 192 “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 a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eight of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

14. Original opening to The Sun Also Rises • This is a novel about a lady. Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins she is living in Paris and it is Spring. That should be a good setting for a romantic but highly moral story. As every one knows Paris is a very romantic place. Spring in Paris is a very happy and romantic time. Autumn in Paris, although very beautiful, might give a note of sadness or melancholy that we shall try to keep out of this story.

15. Fitzgerald to Hemingway, June 1926 • “Anyhow I think parts of Sun Also are careless + ineffectual. . .. I find in you the same tendency to envelope or . . . To embalm in mere wordiness an anecdote or joke that’s casually appealed to you . . . That’s what you’d kid in anyone else as mere ‘style’—mere horse-shit.” • That biography [of Brett Ashley] from you, who always believed in the superiority (the preferability) of the imagined to the seen . . .

16. Fitzgerald to Hemingway, continued • “You can’t play with people’s attention—a good man who has the power of arresting attention at will must be especially careful. • The heart of my criticism beats somewhere upon p. 87 (ch. 7). I felt the lack of some crazy torturing tentativeness. . . . He isn’t like an impotent man. He’s like a man in a sort of moral chastity belt. • Oh, well. It’s fine, from Chap. V on, anyhow, in spite of that—which fact is merely a proof of its brilliance.”

17. Hemingway to Max Perkins • Max Perkins was Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s editor at Scribner’s; Fitzgerald had urged Perkins to publish Hemingway. • “I believe that, in the proofs, I will start the book at what is now page 16 in the Mss. There is nothing in those first sixteen pages that does not come out, or is explained, or restated in the rest of the book—or is unnecessary to state. . . . Scott agrees with me” (5 June 1926, in Letters 208).

18. Responses to The Sun Also Rises 1926 John Dos Passos: "instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation," The Sun Also Rises is "a cock-and-bull story about a whole lot of tourists getting drunk.“ Conrad Aiken: “If there is better dialogue being written today I do not know where to find it.” Bruce Barton: Hemingway “writes as if he had never read anybody’s writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself.”

19. Philip Young’s “wound theory” (1950s) • “Wound theory”: Hemingway’s wound from WWI found its way into his writing in many forms as Hemingway sought to recapitulate and master the scene of trauma. • Repeated scenes of violence and courage in his works are part of this, and his many wounded heroes (Jake Barnes among them) psychologically revisit these scenes. • Hemingway hated the “wound theory” and thought it was totally wrong, yet it has been highly influential in Hemingway criticism. • Young also posited a split between the “code hero” and the “Hemingway hero.”

20. The Code Hero • Lives by a system of ethics in which personal courage and an absolute code of conduct rules his actions. • Understands that death is inevitable and that life must be handled with “grace under pressure”—as Hemingway defined “guts” in a 1929 interview with Dorothy Parker. • Idea of courage usually involves physical skill and sometimes brutality; it also includes fair play for man and beast (when hunting, bullfighting, boxing).

21. The Code Hero, continued • Is usually master of a craft or skill that he pursues with the devotion more typically reserved for religion. • Romero’s bullfighting • Wilson (the white hunter) in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” • Recognition that, as Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald, “we are all bitched from the start”; despite mastery of craft, the code hero is under no illusions that it will bring transcendence or salvation.

22. The Code Hero, continued • Consistency of action and behavior although the code may require going outside the norms of conventional morality. The code hero is answerable (in his own mind) only to himself and his sense of personal honor. • Typically includes traditional attributes of masculinity, including silence and stoicism in the face of what can’t be helped. • Typically an isolated figure who moves within a social world but does not truly belong to it.

23. The Hemingway hero • Flawed hero who admires and attempts to live up to the code hero but typically fails to do so; may be a member of the “lost generation” whose ideals were shattered in World War I. • May be the “wounded hero” of Young’s theory. • May be more articulate, better educated, and thus more contemplative (rather than active) in his approach to problems.

24. The Hemingway Hero, cont. • Mastery of a skill signifies his approach to the code hero, as does his increasing masculinization (e.g., Francis Macomber). • Must master his fear and learn to live in the moment and in the world unafraid, as the code hero does. • Jake Barnes: “I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it” (152).

25. What’s missing from these critical perspectives? What other perspectives could be useful? • Racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism not addressed • Issues of gender and power • Would ecocritical perspectives work? • Approaches considering the novel’s violence and animal cruelty • Travel, cosmopolitanism, global perspectives, • Your thoughts?