Fictional technique of Ernest Hemingway
A Poet and a
Stylist
In the last
analysis Hemingway will be remembered for his fictional technique, his dialogue
consisting of short, concrete statements, his concentration on the physical
world of violent action, his passionate search for the exact word which will
express an exact and limited truth, his experiments with prose rhythms which
have transformed the staccato rattle of his early writing into the liquid,
cadenced ripple of some of his later work. The truth is that Ernest Hemingway
is a stylist and a fine one. He is also a poet. His sensitivity to the light,
colour, form and atmosphere of particular places, is lyrical; his ability to
suggest an emotional atmosphere usually of an elementary sort is remarkable.
Mr. Hemingway is unquestionably a master literary craftsman. What his mind can
conceive his typewriter will transfer to paper with superb skill.
The rules arc
build upon the great abstractions mentioned above. They are so bound up with
the procedure for their application that the procedure itself might be
considered to be a rule or better, that neither rules nor procedure exist
without one another. Hemingway’s philosophy of manhood is a philosophy of
action; a man is honest when he reacts honestly, he is humble when he acts
humble, he loves when be is loving or being loved. Thus, taking an awareness of
abstractions for granted, Hemingway concerns himself primarily with the
presentation of procedure. The procedure is carefully outlined; it is
meticulously detailed. If no part of it is overlooked or sloughed off, it must
result in a satisfying experience almost in and of itself.
The Bull Fight
This procedure,
this ritual—for such is what the procedure actually amounts to is most clearly
evident in Hemingway’s treatment of the bullfight. Death in the Afternoon is
devoted to an evaluation of the Manhood of various bullfighters on the basis of
their ability to abide by the rules, and to a description of the ritual by
means of which they prove possession and communicate the satisfaction to be
gained from a proper performance of function to the spectator. War, the
prize-ring, fishing, hunting, and making love are some of the other
celebrations by means of which Hemingway’s religio-philosophy of man is
conveyed. But the bullfight is the greatest, because besides possessing, as the
others do also, a procedure inviolate, intimately related to the great
abstractions, it always ends in death.
It assumes the stature of a religious
sacrifice by means of which a man can place himself in harmony with the
universe, can satisfy the spiritual as well as the physical side of nature, can
purify and elevate himself in much the same way that he can in any sacrificial
religion. The difference between Hemingway’s religion of man and formal
religion is simply—yet profoundly that in the former the elevation does not
extend beyond the limits of the world, and in the latter Christianity for
example, the ultimate elevation is totally otherworldly.
Other Examples
It is not only
in his treatment of the bull fight that this second aspect of Hemingway’s total
work is evident though there it may be most immediately apparent. The
abstractions, the rules, the ritual, the sacrifice dominate the details of the
Old Man and the Sea as they dominate those of The Undefeated and The Sun Also
Rises. We are told carefully, painstakingly how the Old Man performs his
function as fisherman; how
he prepares for the hoped-for struggle:
“Before it was
really light he had his baits out and was drifting with the current. One bait
was down forty fathoms. The second was at seventy-five and the third and fourth
were down in the blue water at one hundred and one hundred and twenty-five
fathoms. Each bait hung head down with the shank of the hook inside the bait
fish, tied and served solid and all the projecting part of the hook; the curve
and the point, was covered with fresh sardines. Each sardine was hooked through
both eyes so that they made a half-garland on the projecting steel. Each line
as thick around as a big pencil was looped onto a green sapped stick so that
any pull or touch on the bait would make the stick dip and each line had two
forty-fathom coils which could be made fast to the other spare coil so that, if
it were necessary, a fish could take out over three hundred fathoms of line.”
We are told how
he hooks the fish and secures the line, waiting suspensefully for the fish to
turn and swallow the bait, then waiting again until it has eaten it well, then
striking, “with all the strength of his arms and the pivoted weight of his
body”, three times, setting the hooks; then placing the line across his back
and shoulders so that there will be something to give when the fish lunges, and
the line will not break. We are told specifically, in terms reminiscent of such
descriptions of the bull fight, how the kill is made:
The old man
dropped the line and put his foot on it and lifted the harpoon as high as he
could and drove it down with all his strength he had just summoned, into the
fish’s side just behind the great chest fit that rose high in the air to the altitude
of the man’s chest. He felt the iron go in and he leaned on it and drove it
further and then pushed all this weight after it.”
Conclusion
The immanence of
death for the sacrificer as well as for the sacrificed, and his total disregard
of its possibility, are made clear at the climax of the struggle when the old
man thinks, “You are killing me, fish. Come on and kill me. I do not take care
who kills who.”
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