Ernest Hemingway

Early Life

• Born in raised in Oak Park, Illinois:

• “the town where the saloons end and the churches begin”

• “it was developed to hold at bay the corruption of the city”

• “a town of wide lawns and narrow minds”

• Affluent, conservative, traditional town; now a suburb of Chicago

• Cultured place

Ernest Hemingway

• 1874-1976• Adventure

Key works:• A farwell to the arms (1929)

– Is about ambulance driver in the WWI.

• For whom the bell tolls (1940)

– Is about a volunteer in a guerrilla war.

• The old man and the sea (1952)

– About a Cuban fishingmans adventures at the sea.

Lost Generation• refers to those writers who were devoid of faith, values

and ideals and who were alienated from the civilization the capitalist society advocated. It includes the writers such as (Hemingway, F.S. Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Louis Bromfield) and poets (like Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, Archibald Macleish, and Ezra Pound), who rebelled against former values and ideas, but replaced them only by despair or a cynical hedonism. They were totally frustrated by the WWI and returned from that “Great War” to their own country only to find the grim reality that the social values and civilization were hollow and affected if compared to the cruel realities of the battleground. They felt alienated from American civilization, which was conveyed in their lives of exile and expatriation.

Lost Generation• They had cut themselves off from their past and old values

in America and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. They wandered pointlessly and restlessly, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, but they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile. Their whole life was undercut and defeated. They cast away all past concepts and values in order to create new types of writing, which was characterized by disillusionment with ideals and further with civilization the capitalist society advocated. They painted the post-war western world as a waste land, lifeless and hopeless due to ethical degradation and disillusionment with dreams.

Hemingway’s Father

• Physician who came from a respectable, civic-minded family

• Apparently was reasonably successful; family lived in a large house in a neighborhood with other professionals

• Great outdoorsman; Hemingway’s love for nature comes from his father

• Suffered from depression and eventually committed suicide

Hemingway’s Mother

• By all accounts an interesting, imposing woman: “a personality who could not be ignored”

• What was she like? Did she really dress the boy Hemingway in girls’ clothing? Did Hemingway really hate her? Or was Hemingway very much like his mother?

• She was an opera singer and music teacher who also composed and published music; had a studio and recital hall in their house

Hemingway as a boy

• Very athletic: football, cross country, boxing, swimming, water polo

• Standard school curriculum: math, Latin, English literature, history, music, composition: he wrote from an early age (probably papers for school on a weekly basis); also wrote for high school newspaper

• Read widely, both classics and popular books of the day

• Never went to college, but had a strong secondary school education

Beginnings as a writer• October 1917: becomes a cub

reporter for the Kansas City Star• Internalized the newspaper’s rules

for style: “short first paragraphs, vigorous language, no superfluous words, few adjectives, no trite phrases”

• Said he “learned to write a simple, declarative sentence” from the experience

Hemingway/ cont

2 books already exhibited style and technique for which he later became famous

-- expressed feelings of war-wounded people disillusioned by loss of faith and hope

-- major theme: defeat / collapse of former values

Typical Characters

a) Intelligent men and women who have dropped into exhausted cynicism (having atrophied nerves---) stoic acceptance of primal emotions

b) ‘Primitives’ and / or tough people (frontiersmen, Indians, professional athletes, bullfighters): their essential courage, honesty are contrasted with the brutality of civilized society

Style and Discourse

Emotion held at arm’s length: only the bare happenings recorded-- writer=reporter

-- understatement, spare dialogue

Elliptical, terse Tight control of details Metaphoric intensity Shifting points of view No authorial guidance to reader

The Snows of Kilimanjaro, 1936; 1938

Situation: Middle-aged intellectual, Harry, lies dying of blood poisoning from his gangrenous leg in camp on his African safari surrounded by wife and native attendants; waiting for a rescue plane to take him to hospital

-- remembers experiences saved, though missed writing about

-- realizes he prostituted his talent for money and comfort-- threatened by imminent death, he tries to write-- drops off, dreaming the plane has come and takes him

not to hospital but to the top of Kilimanjaro (ambiguous ending)

The Snows

-- Central symbolic thematic motif:Wound—impotence—emasculation—

disempowerment (see Jake Barnes/The Sun Also Rises; Eliot’s The Waste Land)

Wound as emblem for cultural/spiritual exhaustion, and loss of order

In story, woundedness and loss also played out in a gendered setting charged with the narrator’s male anxieties:

Snows/ cont

-- Harry’s defeat is enhanced by ‘gender disorder’: wife is wealthy, a heavy drinker and a good hunter; she is active—he is passive, and dying

End of story: wishfulfilment dream of gender order, masculine significance, and immortality (as a writer)

-- associative identification with the majestic leopard (‘frozen carcass of a leopard’)

Narrative Strategy

-- Modernist ambition to be authentic/real

-- Structural cohesion maintained by COLLAGE:

* recombining fragments, ensuring the simultaneity of present and past: recollections, stream of consciousness, description of scenes in Africa

* uniting discontinuous fragments

-- Setting up the ‘logic of the metaphor’ i/o applying tangible causality and linearity (snow-leopard-hyena-vultures, etc)

Hemingway’s style

• Hemingway’s view of “true” writing: “sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.”

Hemingway’s Style

• In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway wrote: “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 the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.” The iceberg theory of writing: “There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.”