| Home |
 |
Fiction |
|
Ernest Hemingway |
|
 |  |  |  |
From the very beginning, the element of Hemingway's work that attracted the greatest notice was his style. A classic exemplar of "the art that conceals art," Hemingway took infinite pains with his work, disciplining himself from the start of his career to hammer out a pure style that would be true to the sensations and descriptions it needed to convey, writing and rewriting obsessively throughout his life to achieve precisely the effects he was seeking. Thus, in the analysis of his work, the FORMALIST approach has been a dominant mode, as critics have sought to demonstrate how the repetitions, the lack of subordination, and other prominent features of Hemingway's prose are themselves vehicles of theme. "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is a story particularly amenable to this sort of analysis. Critics have also interested themselves in applying Hemingway's own so-called iceberg theory of writing, the idea that a story derives its effect from the nine-tenths of its meaning that lie beneath the surface, present but unexpressed.
The other major trend in standard Hemingway criticism is the PSYCHOLOGICAL approach, the analysis of Hemingway's view of human personality, especially in terms of its engagement with outer reality (the "wound" of one sort or another that is so frequent a motif in his work). Philip Young, for instance, devised the terms "Hemingway hero" and "code hero" to define the central relationship in many of Hemingway's works between a naively hopeful young man and an older, more experienced figure who functions, by precept or example, as a mentor to him. Even when so precisely defined a relationship does not exist, there is often, as in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," a contrast between youthful smugness and imperception, on the one hand, and seasoned understanding and acceptance, on the other.
The main current approach to Hemingway is the BIOGRAPHICAL, with both biographers and critics exploring with their differing emphases the interconnections between his life and his art, as critics use the facts of his life to further illuminate the patterns and themes of his fiction, while biographers sometimes employ the emphases and obsessions of his fiction to try to better understand the nature of the personality that produced it. And, given the pronounced concern with--and controversial assumptions about--sex roles and man-woman relationships in Hemingway's work, his work is presently undergoing significant re-evaluation in the context of GENDER criticism. In something of a combination of the two modes, there are those who suggest, no doubt inevitably, that the source of Hemingway's extreme machismo was a massively repressed homosexuality.
|