Name: Zarna Bhatti
Sem: 3
Paper: American
Literature
Roll no.5
Email Id:
zarnabhatti10@gmail.com
Assignment Topic:
“The Old Man and The Sea”: Hemingway’s language style and
writing Technique.
Submitted by: S.B.
Gardy Department of English MKBU.
Year: 2015-2017
Introduction:
Ernest Miller
Hemingway was born in 21st July, 1899. He was an American
novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Hemingway produced most
of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six
short story collections, and two non-fiction works.
“The Sun also
rises”
“A Farewell to
Arms”
To have and have not
“The Nicks Adams
Stories”
“The Old Man and
the Sea”
Hemingway’s
writing Style:
From almost the
beginning of his writing career, Hemingway's distinctive style
occasioned a great deal of comment and controversy. Basically, his
style is simple, direct, and unadorned, probably as a result of his
early newspaper training. Actually, a close examination of his
dialogue will reveal that this is rarely the way people really speak.
Hemingway goes on at
some length, but the essence of what he says may be in this
paragraph:
“A writer's style
should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his
words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of
brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent
stylists”.
Definition
of the Iceberg Theory:
| If a writer of prose knows enough of 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-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. |
| —Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon |
Hemingway's biographer Carlos Baker believed that as a writer of short stories Hemingway learned "how to get the most from the least, how to prune language and avoid waste motion, how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth." Baker also notes that in the writing style of the "iceberg theory" suggests that a stories narrative and nuanced complexities, complete with symbolism, operate under the surface of the story itself.
For example, Hemingway believed a writer could describe an action, such as Nick Adams fishing in "Big Two-Hearted River," while conveying a different message about the action itself—Nick Adams concentrating on fishing to the extent that he does not have to think about the unpleasantness of his war experience. In his essay, "The Art of the Short Story," Hemingway is clear about his method: "A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors, omit." A writer explained how it brings a story gravitas:
Hemingway said that only the tip of the iceberg showed in fiction—your reader will see only what is above the water—but the knowledge that you have about your character that never makes it into the story acts as the bulk of the iceberg. And that is what gives your story weight and gravitas.
— Jenna Blum in the Author at Work, 2013From reading Rudyard Kipling Hemingway absorbed the practice of shortening prose as much as it could take. Of the concept of omission, Hemingway wrote in "The Art of the Short Story": "You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood." By making invisible the structure of the story, he believed the author strengthened the piece of fiction and that the "quality of a piece could be judged by the quality of the material the author eliminated." His style added to the aesthetic: using "declarative sentences and direct representations of the visible world" with simple and plain language, Hemingway became "the most influential prose stylist in the twentieth century" according to biographer Meyers.
In her paper "Hemingway's Camera Eye", Zoe Trodd explains that Hemingway uses repetition in prose to build a collage of snapshots to create an entire picture. Of his iceberg theory, she claims, it "is also a glacier waterfall, infused with movement by his multi-focal aesthetic". Furthermore, she believes that Hemingway's iceberg theory "demanded that the reader feel the whole story" and that the reader is meant to "fill the gaps left by his omissions with their feelings".
Hemingway scholar Jackson Benson believes Hemingway used autobiographical details to work as framing devices to write about life in general—not only about his life. For example, Benson postulates that Hemingway used his experiences and drew them out further with "what if" scenarios: "what if I were wounded in such a way that I could not sleep at night? What if I were wounded and made crazy, what would happen if I were sent back to the front?" By separating himself from the characters he created, Hemingway strengthens the drama. The means of achieving a strong drama is to minimize, or omit, the feelings that produced the fiction he wrote. Hemingway's iceberg theory highlights the symbolic implications of art. He makes use of physical action to provide an interpretation of the nature of man's existence. It can be convincingly proved that, "while representing human life through fictional forms, he has consistently set man against the background of his world and universe to examine the human situation from various points of view." Early fiction and short stories
Gwendolyn Tetlow believes that Hemingway's early fiction such as "Indian Camp" shows his lack of concern for character development by simply placing the character in his or her surroundings. However, in "Indian Camp" the use of descriptive detail such as a screaming woman, men smoking tobacco, and an infected wound build a sense of veracity. In other words, a story can communicate by subtext; for instance, Hemingway's "Hills like White Elephants" does not mention the word "abortion", although in the story the male character seems to be attempting to convince his girlfriend to have an abortion. "Big Two-Hearted River" Hemingway explains "is about a boy...coming home from the war ....So the war, all mention of the war, anything about the war, is omitted." Hemingway intentionally left out something in "Indian Camp" and "Big Two-Hearted River"—two stories he considered to be good.
Baker explains that Hemingway's stories about sports are often about the athletes themselves and that the sport is incidental to the story. Moreover, the story "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" which on the surface is about nothing more than men drinking in a cafe late at night, is in fact about that which brings the men to the cafe to drink, and the reasons they seek light in the night—none of which is available in the surface of the plot, but lurks in the iceberg below. Hemingway's story "Big Two-Hearted River" is ostensibly about nothing, as is "A Clean Well-Lighted Place", but within nothing lies the crux of the story. Novels
Benson believes that the omission Hemingway applies functions as a sort of buffer between himself as the creator of a character and the character. He explains that as an author creates a "distance" between himself and the character he "becomes more practiced, it would seem." Benson says in Hemingway's fiction the distance is necessary, and successful in early fiction such as in The Sun Also Rises, but if he as "the author does not deliberately create such distance the fiction fails," as in the later works such as Across the River and into the Trees.
Baker calls Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees a "lyric-poetical novel" in which each scene has an underlying truth presented via symbolism. According to Meyers an example of omission is that Renata, like other heroines in Hemingway's fiction, suffers a major "shock"—the murder of her father and the subsequent loss of her home—to which Hemingway alludes only briefly. Hemingway's pared down narrative forces the reader to solve connections. As Stoltzfus remarks: "Hemingway walks the reader to the bridge that he must cross alone without the narrator's help."
Hemingway believed that if context or background had been written about by another, and written about well, then it could be left out of his writing. Of The Old Man and the Sea he explains: "In writing you are limited to by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to do something else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he has read something it will become part of his experience and seem actually to have happened." Paul Smith, author of Hemingway's Early Manuscript: The Theory and Practice of Omission, believes Hemingway applied the theory of omission in effort to "strengthen [the] iceberg.
Technically speaking, it is perhaps Hemingway's most conventional fiction. None of the modernist— indirection, implication, allusion, omission, unexplained juxtaposition — that Hemingway so elaborately deploys in In Our Time (1925; see separate entry) and other works are used in this parable like tale, which helps to explain why it reaches the widest audience of any Hemingway work.
Consider, for example, his use of symbolism to suggest that Santiago is a Christ-figure or, at the very least, that Santiago's suffering is analogous to Christ's suffering. After the sharks attack his marlin, Santiago cries out "Ay"; then Hemingway writes that "there is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood”
http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/elt/article/viewFile/470/479
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