Hemingway's Influence on Camus: the Iceberg As Topography

Hemingway’s Influence on Camus: The Iceberg as Topography

Ben Stoltzfus

“[L’Étranger:] the best Hemingway novel […] written by Camus.” wilfrid sheed

When analyzing Albert Camus’s style in L’Étranger, critics have not men- tioned Ernest Hemingway’s iceberg theory of writing, a theory that adumbrates Roland Barthes’s degré zéro de l’écriture and the style of Camus’s first novel. By adopting Hemingway’s technique, Camus produced a brilliant work that Wilfrid Sheed ironically says is the best novel Hemingway ever wrote.1 After all, in accordance with Hemingway’s theory of writing, Meursault, the main character of Camus’s book, does not openly articulate his inner feelings. If Meursault’s actions—that is, what is visible in L’Étranger—represent the tip of the iceberg, then, as in the novels Hemingway penned, the invisible, “submerged” portion contains all the psychological drama. Given Camus’s writings on the absurd, alienation and death in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Camus’s philo- sophical essay might therefore afford pertinent insight into the origins of Meursault’s emotional state. As such, the two works, together, constitute the topography of the iceberg. In a 1945 interview published in Les Nouvelles littéraires, Albert Camus wrote that he had adopted Hemingway’s style while writing L’Étranger (1942) because he wanted to describe “un homme sans conscience apparente” (oc ii, 658). Jean-Paul Sartre, in his “Explication de L’Étranger”, evidently noticed the stylistic connection, mentioning the possible influence of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises on Camus’s first novel.2 What this influence implies is that L’Étranger was most probably written using Hemingway’s iceberg theory of writing—a theory that, based on descriptive omission and stylistic compression, allows the reader to see only the tip of the iceberg whereby the remaining seven- eighths of its mass remains submerged. Describing his theory of writing in

1 Wilfrid Sheed, “Desperate Character”, The New York Review of Books, May 12 (1977), 31–34 (p.34). 2 Simone de Beauvoir, in La Force de l’âge, states that a great many of the rules she and Sartre observed in their own novels were inspired by Hemingway. Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p.145.

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1932, in Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway wrote that a good writer gives the reader a feeling for the topography below the surface, where a character’s feelings and state of mind reside:

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 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.3

In a 1958 interview with George Plimpton for The Paris Review, Hemingway said that he always wrote on the principle of the iceberg.4 In practice, this means that Hemingway omitted inner monologue, stream of consciousness, and authorial commentary because he believed that description and dialog were sufficient, and that such writing, if well crafted, would give the reader the true feeling of lived experience. This view adumbrates Camus’s own aesthetic principle as formulated in his Carnets between 1935 and 1942. In particular, Camus states that a work of art should be well cut, like a diamond, in order to reflect its richness and unspoken experience: “La véritable oeuvre d’art est celle qui dit moins” (oc ii, 862). In the fiction of both Hemingway and Camus, descriptions of the land, sea, and sun can be understood as the tip of the iceberg; and the topography of what is not stated is implied because the characters’ behavior and surrounding landscape function as objective correlatives. As a result, descriptions of things and places become a visual statement of what a character is thinking or feeling. And, with respect to Camus’s desire to craft a character without consciousness, it becomes clear that Meursault’s actions—i.e., what we as readers are witness to in the novel—constitute the visible portion of the iceberg; his sen- tience (conscious or unconscious), in so far as it is not “apparent”, constitutes the submerged, invisible part of the iceberg. In “Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory”, Toshihiro Maekawa says that both parts of the iceberg—the tip and the submerged portion—need to be present simul- taneously. Singling out “Big Two-Hearted River” as the most successful example of such simultaneity, Maekawa notes that the story never mentions the war yet succeeds in communicating the stress and anxiety Nick feels while fishing. Although invisible and submerged, his state of mind is objectified in the descriptions of the river, the trout, and the marsh. Scene and sensory detail

3 Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner, 1932), p.192. Henceforth: dia. 4 George Plimpton, “Ernest Hemingway: The Art of Fiction xxi”, The Paris Review, 18 (1958), 60–89 (p.84).