prickvixen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
prickvixen) wrote2016-05-24 04:11 am
prickvixen) wrote2016-05-24 04:11 am
(no subject)
I just finished In Our Time, a collection of short stories by Ernest Hemingway. In general I enjoyed them and was impressed by them. Their brevity helped. I'm going to list my disjointed thoughts here.
As I read, I thought more than once that the language was reminiscent of that used by elementary school kids in essays and book reports. Basic words and flat, declarative sentences and very naive, earnest statements. Relating Hemingway's writing to the inexpert writing of children is like assuming that an abstract artist isn't talented enough to draw realistically. The naivete is a conscious choice. One effect of it is to create a kind of immediacy in Hemingway's writing; he seems to have picked this up while writing for newspapers. Journalistic writing is intended to pipe facts into your head without the impedence of embellishment.
The trick Hemingway performs repeatedly in these stories is to convey heavy emotion by implication; we are rarely if ever told what is happening in the mind of the characters. Often this is because the characters themselves are unable to articulate their state of mind. This approach must have been pretty amazing at a time when fictional characters were known for spouting long speeches about their emotional state. I can't decide if emotional isolation is a theme Hemingway returns to frequently, or if is a side effect of his writing approach. Or both. Many of the stories feature characters with an inability to communicate.
There's a black character, Bugs, in one of the stories; he is basically acting as a caretaker for this spent, brain-damaged white ex-prizefighter. He is not just supremely organized and sharp, he is probably the most competent character I've encountered in a Hemingway story. But I found the story's language jarring. While the narrator uses the pronoun 'the man' to refer to the fighter, he refers to Bugs as 'the negro', or sometimes by the other word. Bugs doesn't even get a last name. The dehumanization implicit in these word choices is striking. Maybe not if you're black; maybe you deal with this constantly. Maybe Hemingway is trying to make a point about casual racism and how it is at odds with what's inside a person, about how you can be some kind of polymath but white people will only see the color of your skin, and you have to pretend you aren't as good as you are. Or maybe it's unintentional. I can't decide. I want to believe Hemingway didn't write anything accidentally, but my privilege enables me to give him the benefit of the doubt...
The parts I enjoyed most were the fragments placed between stories. Hemingway's economy of writing really shines on these paragraphs. They purport to be chapters of a complete story but only relate to each other roughly, which is even better. (Am I too enthusiastic about nonlinear narrative?)
I finished The Sun Also Rises before I began this collection. Perhaps unfairly, I wasn't as impressed by it. A problem is that I'm seeing these works in hindsight. The bare-bones approach to writing is now commonplace. But also when I read Hemingway, it becomes kind of a game to determine what it is he's trying to show us without showing... kind of like a murder mystery, where you're sifting for clues instead of reading a story. You know you're being given a test, so you optimize your analysis of the test material. That kind of has to be what's going on in The Sun Also Rises, because otherwise it's a lengthy examination of a bunch of wastrels bumming around Europe and abusing each other; and while that kind of story can be fun (thinking of Fear & Loathing here), Hemingway's description of it is often arid, and the wealth of exposition meant to elicit an emotional state is very draggy taken as narrative. This seems to be the problem some readers have with Hemingway; they desire edification from a text which is designed as a form of meditation.
Having said that, I do like his work, and think I can learn from it. But I don't expect I'll be re-reading these books, although I suspect they work more smoothly upon repeat reading.
As I read, I thought more than once that the language was reminiscent of that used by elementary school kids in essays and book reports. Basic words and flat, declarative sentences and very naive, earnest statements. Relating Hemingway's writing to the inexpert writing of children is like assuming that an abstract artist isn't talented enough to draw realistically. The naivete is a conscious choice. One effect of it is to create a kind of immediacy in Hemingway's writing; he seems to have picked this up while writing for newspapers. Journalistic writing is intended to pipe facts into your head without the impedence of embellishment.
The trick Hemingway performs repeatedly in these stories is to convey heavy emotion by implication; we are rarely if ever told what is happening in the mind of the characters. Often this is because the characters themselves are unable to articulate their state of mind. This approach must have been pretty amazing at a time when fictional characters were known for spouting long speeches about their emotional state. I can't decide if emotional isolation is a theme Hemingway returns to frequently, or if is a side effect of his writing approach. Or both. Many of the stories feature characters with an inability to communicate.
There's a black character, Bugs, in one of the stories; he is basically acting as a caretaker for this spent, brain-damaged white ex-prizefighter. He is not just supremely organized and sharp, he is probably the most competent character I've encountered in a Hemingway story. But I found the story's language jarring. While the narrator uses the pronoun 'the man' to refer to the fighter, he refers to Bugs as 'the negro', or sometimes by the other word. Bugs doesn't even get a last name. The dehumanization implicit in these word choices is striking. Maybe not if you're black; maybe you deal with this constantly. Maybe Hemingway is trying to make a point about casual racism and how it is at odds with what's inside a person, about how you can be some kind of polymath but white people will only see the color of your skin, and you have to pretend you aren't as good as you are. Or maybe it's unintentional. I can't decide. I want to believe Hemingway didn't write anything accidentally, but my privilege enables me to give him the benefit of the doubt...
The parts I enjoyed most were the fragments placed between stories. Hemingway's economy of writing really shines on these paragraphs. They purport to be chapters of a complete story but only relate to each other roughly, which is even better. (Am I too enthusiastic about nonlinear narrative?)
I finished The Sun Also Rises before I began this collection. Perhaps unfairly, I wasn't as impressed by it. A problem is that I'm seeing these works in hindsight. The bare-bones approach to writing is now commonplace. But also when I read Hemingway, it becomes kind of a game to determine what it is he's trying to show us without showing... kind of like a murder mystery, where you're sifting for clues instead of reading a story. You know you're being given a test, so you optimize your analysis of the test material. That kind of has to be what's going on in The Sun Also Rises, because otherwise it's a lengthy examination of a bunch of wastrels bumming around Europe and abusing each other; and while that kind of story can be fun (thinking of Fear & Loathing here), Hemingway's description of it is often arid, and the wealth of exposition meant to elicit an emotional state is very draggy taken as narrative. This seems to be the problem some readers have with Hemingway; they desire edification from a text which is designed as a form of meditation.
Having said that, I do like his work, and think I can learn from it. But I don't expect I'll be re-reading these books, although I suspect they work more smoothly upon repeat reading.