Word: hemingway
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...logical continuation of the worship ofHemingway for his style alone was Francine Prose'sfinal comment to the closing plenary session ofthe Centennial conference. Sitting on a podiumalongside Saul Bellow, Henry Louis Gates and DerekWalcott, and Hemingway aficionados, Prose did notblink at asserting the necessity of the totallyinconceivable: "You have to ignore the content"she counseled, "and focus on the style." Not onlyhas Hemingway's valuable work been whittled downto a novel and some stories, but one is obligatedeven to sift away the bulk of those works,searching for what is valuable in the style alone...
...uniqueto Prose: remarkably--and despite the earlierassertions of the writer E. Annie Proulx and thecritic Seven Birkerts that style is not merely thearrangement of words but rather expressive of andinextricable from the author's entireworldview--nobody sitting on the podium with Proseseemed immediately bothered by her assertion. And,in Hemingway's case, perhaps it is not hard tounderstand why: if one can separate style fromcontent, one can perhaps remove from the text andfrom literary legacy the offensive of ErnestHemingway...
Because the summary judgment of the last 30years is that while he was a fascinating andromantic figure, Hemingway was a colossal jerk.He is seen, at best, as ignoring women and atworst as a vicious misogynist; he is cast asanti-Semitic; he is pronounced guilty of writingAfrican-American and native African characters outof his works and of racism when he does includethem. And even when Hemingway is not offendinganybody, he has been labeled infantile. Writerslike Tobias Wolff mark their adulthood at thepoint when they cease to be entranced byHemingway's bravado; and perhaps many--like PeterMathiessen, who smugly pronounced the author...
Some of those who would separate style andcontent are authors like Frederick Busch, whoclaims that Hemingway is "not interested inpeople, or social circumstances" and is then ableto praise Hemingway's work because he has confinedthe man's entire project to a stylistic endeavor.Then there are critics like Chinua Achebe, theNigerian author of Things Fall Apart, whois comfortable addressing Hemingway's stylisticcontributions to literature even while expressinghis disinterest in Hemingway's subject matter,because Achebe feels the content of the work hasno particular relevance to him as an African.Finally, there are those whose distaste forHemingway as a person forces them pastdisinterest...
Even imagining the separation of style andcontent requires a conception of style as simplywords on a page: one must not be interested in theimplications of Hemingway's omissions but merelyin the fact of omission. And it is here, I think,that Hemingway's place in the canon of what isread and appreciated by contemporary authors isslipping most rapidly. As those who grew to famewith Hemingway could easily see and as can perhapsbe easily forgotten today, what is implied byHemingway's subtlety is a set of social andhumanistic concerns of real depth and emotivepower. Malcolm Cowley considers Hemingway'sgreatest achievement...