Reading Escape and Writing It

Reading Escape and Writing It Intimacy and Away in the Hemingway Aesthetic David Andrew Burke Master’s Thesis, ILOS UNIVERSITETET I OSLO 15 May 2018 II © David Andrew Burke 2018 Reading Escape and Writing It: Intimacy and Away in the Hemingway Aesthetic David Andrew Burke http://www.duo.uio.no/ Trykk: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo III Abstract In this thesis I will lay out an argument for an implicit intimacy between Hemingway and his reader that runs counter to a great deal of the tired ideas we have about the writer. I will propose that the aesthetic dimension mediated by the Hemingway reading experience promises a mutual escape for both the reader and the writer, and that that intimacy and that promise of escape is at the heart of Hemingway’s continuing appeal to the reader. At first glance this may seem ridiculous, in part due to our common ideas about Hemingway and perhaps more directly because of the more than seventy years of critical explanations which have more or less reworked the same terrain by speaking about style and subject matter, the “iceberg technique,” violence, manliness and so forth. But an attentive observer may pause to ask if these old hats still fit. When I first encountered Ernest Hemingway, I was a child in the twenty-first century. And sure, some of those old hats still adorned the bust of my image of Hemingway, but what kept me reading was not the presence of the things I was told that I would find there. Instead, what kept me reading what that little secret, that little shared experience that no one ever told me about. Since then, the intimacy has deepened, not because I’ve come to understand more about Hemingway’s style or his biography, but in spite of those things, as if the more I read about Hemingway, the further I get from what it is about Hemingway that hooked me in the first place. My project here then is simply an attempt to articulate a more accurate description of the relationship between Hemingway and the reader, and the intimate escape within that shared aesthetic experience. Drawing from aesthetic response theory, my work traces the relative position of the reader and the writer on two sides of the aesthetic textual divide to demonstrate how Hemingway’s initial position as a reader, and his interest in the affective potential of the aesthetic experience ultimate rendered the aesthetic ideal that we so frequently try to identify when we make claims about his masculinity, or his work as a “stylist”. In short, I assert that the continuing appeal of Ernest Hemingway is due in significant degree to to the transportive experience of reading him which takes us away, as it were. While his subjects and stylistic approach do represent notable aspects of his writing, it is not his supposedly masculine texts or his “tough, terse prose” that account for Hemingway’s still significant appeal. Instead, it is the highly participatory aesthetic experience of reading him, and the consistent idealization of escape in his work that keep us close. While the trajectory of his career would see the exploration of escape manifest in different aspects— at times idealized as a physical remove or a getting away from social contexts, and other times manifest in the exploration of the experiential potential of reading and writing themselves— in total, Hemingway’s belief that the aesthetic potential of reading could be transportive, and his persistent pursuit of a higher degree of intimacy in the aesthetic space shines through like a beacon, summoning the reader with still seemly unflagging intensity. IV V VI Acknowledgments Thank you to Bruce Barnhart, Marianne Svarstad, and Oslo Collective for your immediate influence on this project. Thank you to Tom and Peggy Rice and Walter Mattson for the nudges and shoves a long time ago. Thank you to Emily Jones, Jon Burke and Daniel Burke for contributions too numerous to attempt. And, thank you to Maja Gudmundsen, for her part in all of it. VII VIII Contents Chapters I) Introduction ………………………………………………………………… 11 II) Reading, Writing and Aesthetic Complicity ……………………………….. 31 III) Writing Escape ……………………………………………………………... 59 References Works Cited ………………………………………………………………… 105 IX X Introduction Section I) Premise I.i) Why do we still read Hemingway? When I first picked up Hemingway, I was a teenage boy beset by a standard set of contemporary woes; a fragile and foundering sense of masculinity, a disaffected, bored, and underwhelmed disposition, and a defensive formulation of identity. I read In Our Time and kept it close like a secret. Returning to a senior English class one year after a long summer, one of my classmates delivered a scathing report on A Farewell to Arms and I resolved myself to read it because I knew that she was wrong. There was something there that she was missing, surely. Since then, I’ve had an agreement with Hemingway. Like Jake Barnes and Montoya in The Sun Also Rises, I’ve been a secret intimate with Hemingway. Montoya “always smiled as though there were something lewd about the secret to outsiders, but that it was something that we understood. It would not do to expose it to people who would not understand” (SAR 136). As with Jake and Montoya, Hemingway and I share an intimate understanding. But apparently it is not just me. According to The Hemingway Society, in 2017 alone, there were nineteen major “Hemingway-related publications,” seventeen in 2016, seventeen in 2015, and two already on the list for 2018. Why, then? Why are we still enamored of the artist and his work? Admittedly, the cult of Hemingway has become a sort of cottage industry, and I cannot deny that. His biographies and representations play well in a contemporary climate where shaky and shifting identity formulations gravitate toward an imagined past greatness. But while these types of Hemingway-related products do keep Hemingway’s name in the popular mind, they do not account for why we are still reading him. In this thesis I will lay out an argument for an implicit intimacy between Hemingway and his reader that runs counter to a great deal of the tired ideas we have about the writer. I will propose that the aesthetic dimension mediated by the reading experience promises a mutual escape for both the reader and the writer, and that that intimacy and that promise of escape is at the heart of Hemingway’s continuing appeal to the reader. At first glance this probably seems ridiculous, in part due to our common ideas about Hemingway and perhaps more directly because of the more than seventy years of critical explanations which have more or less reworked the same terrain by speaking about style and subject matter, the “iceberg technique,” violence, manliness and so forth. But an attentive observer may pause to ask if these old hats still fit. When I first encountered Ernest Hemingway I was a child in the twenty-first century. And sure, 11 some of those old hats still adorned the bust of my image of Hemingway, but what kept me reading was not the presence of the things I was told that I would find there. Instead, what kept me reading what that little secret, that little shared experience that no one ever told me about. It wasn’t how manly his writing was. It wasn’t how stylish. It was something felt. “Big Two-Hearted River” was an escape. Crickets buzzed in the burnt out grass. Trout shifted like prismatic ghosts in the cold running current. “The End of Something” hurt me because I’d done it too. “The Three Day Blow” was me and a friend and gin and tonics out of pint glasses and a baseball game and endless cigarettes and trying to walk home through a horse field and vomit on my shoes. It was feeling hope after feeling hollow. It was getting back. Since then, the intimacy has deepened, not because I’ve come to understand more about Hemingway’s style or his biography, but in spite of those things, as if the more I read about Hemingway, the further I get from what it is about Hemingway that hooked me in the first place. My project here then is simply an attempt to articulate a more accurate description of the relationship between Hemingway and the reader, and the intimate escape within that shared aesthetic experience. I.ii) Against the Hemingway Monument Of course, what we tend to say about Hemingway has no sense of this dynamic. We talk about Hemingway’s style. We talk about how manly he was. We cover these talking points so automatically that Style and Masculinity (I capitalize these in accordance with the convention that has us capitalize nicknames) have become the twin pillars of a frozen figure that Richard Hovey calls the “Hemingway monument”(xi). But these synonymous tags do precious little to really speak to why we still read Hemingway. In my experience, they do quite the opposite. As with nicknames, familiarity undermines curiosity. Name something and you know it. Hemingway is a great stylist, we say, and we parrot the monument makers. He wrote “in short, declarative sentences and was known for his tough, terse prose.” He “did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer in the twentieth century.”1 And we take this assessment, and we make it a nickname—Stylist. And in that superimposed knowing, we miss something— a “little lower layer” to borrow an idea from Melville2. Masculinity works the same way with Hemingway. One of my favorite descriptions comes from Jackson J.

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