carrie said: Re Papa - I'll admit that I haven't read that
much Hemingway, like 3 of the novels, and a handful of shorts
so I may be missing something. Except the Sun Also Rises,
though, I always feel like there's some kind of veil
between
me and the characters, disguising what they're really
thinking. I get the same vibe off Carver and it can be
interesting in small doses, but ultimately in both cases it
wears out on me and I can't get invested in it.
I quite enjoy his writing style though between the two
(strictly style) I prefer Chandler.
******************************************************
this is more a ramble and only an indirect response to your
post, carrie.
jim blue touched on hemingway's clean sharp style. but he
also believed that what goes unsaid is oftentimes more
important than what is said. i believe this just as firmly as
he did. HOWEVER, this can be a real pisser, cuz if you aren't
halfway psychic, a reader doesn't know what the heck is going
on. in "hills like white elephants", the woman is pregnant,
and they are talking about her getting an abortion. the word
"pregnant", "abortion", or "child" never comes up. i think
its entirely possible to read the whole thing and wonder,
"what the heck was that all about? that story sucked." in
"the short and happy life of francis macomber", it became a
standard assumption by the critics that the big unspoken
thing is that his wife's accidental shooting of francis when
the rhino(buffalo?) was charging was not accidental. he'd
found his courage, and was no longer under her thumb, and was
gonna dump her. recently i read a critic that said that was
bull... that the shooting was an accident. i don't agree with
that, but it pretty much demonstrates that some times
hemingway subtlety leaned towards ambiguity.
and more directly in response to your post, there was and is
a veil between you and the characters often. hemingway rarely
states what a character is thinking. you have to pick up on
the undercurrent to know what the heck is going on.
miker
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