A Spokesman of the Age: - Hemingway, by writing of the condition of the modern man and
his agonized and futile responses to the calamities that befell him, carved a niche for himself
in the temple of immortality. The Swedish Committee set the stamp of approval on him by
awarding him the Nobel Prize in 1954, even though he did not come up to the ideals of the
philanthropist. Primarily the learned committee commended his contribution to the style of
modern narration especially in The Old Man and the Sea yet they had in their minds
Hemingway’s writings of the last thirty years. The literature of the Twenties would be poorer
for the loss of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. For Whom the Bell Tolls remains
a landmark in American fiction of the Forties.
Revitalises the Novel: - The nineteenth-century fiction with its overwhelming emphasis
on realism had more or less come to a dead end. It needed revitalisation. And some fresh
blood had already been injected into its veins by powerful writers like Henry James, D. H.
Lawrence, Joseph Conrad and others but it remained for Hemingway to revive the dying art
of the novel and give it a new lease of life.
A New Style: -Hemingway in his apprenticeship as a journalist had learnt to be sceptical of
decoration, embellishment, flowery language and metaphorical fat. He brought to fiction the
colloquial style of speech to serve literary ends. His sentences were short and crisp. They
were usually not qualified because when they are qualified the reader’s attention is diverted
from the main clause. Therefore, in Hemingway’s early style in the Twenties one finds a sort
of machine gun burst of short sentences, sometimes linked by a conjunction “and” or “but”
going directly to its target. This style, in part imitation of the Bible, is an excellent medium
for expressing an exact but limited truth. The language may be bleak and bane but there is
poetry in it. His prose rhythms have transformed the staccato rattle into the liquid, cadenced
ripple of his later works. Compare the following paragraph:
Walking carefully, downhill, Anselmo in the lead, Agustin next, Robert Jordan placing his feet
carefully so that he would not slip, feeling the dead pine needles under his rope-soled shoes,
bumping a tree root with one foot and putting a hand forward and feeling the cold metal jut of
the automatic rifle barrel and the folded legs of the tripod. then working sideways down the
hill, his shoes sliding and grooving the forest floor, putting his left hand out again and
touching the rough bark of a tree trunk, then as he braced himself, his hand feeling a smooth
place, the base of the palm of his hand coming away sticky from the resinous sap where a
blaze had been cut, they dropped down the steep wooded hill side to the point above the
bridge where Robert Jordan had Anselmo watched the first day. (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
Two Styles Compared: - If the first passage reflects the newly forged medium to
express an intense emotional response to a brutal, animalistic and chilly world the second is
a specimen of grace and poise in which the author seems to have acquired a peculiar vision
of the world but a vision nonetheless. His preoccupation with action is reflected in his earlier
style as well as in his later style. It moves in a rhythmic pattern in which the reader’s
attention is focused on the action all the time but he can afford to relax occasionally.
Unique Ability to Transmit Experience: - Whether he was writing in the Twenties or in
the Fifties he reflects a youthful response to light, colour, form, and atmosphere of particular
places that he has visited and which he is utilizing in his novels and short stories. He remains
one of the supreme masters who have the unique ability to transfer on paper what they have
felt and experienced. In the last period of his life when he wrote The Old Man and the Sea he
brought about a synthesis of the controlled style of the early Twenties and the relaxed style
of the Thirties. In The Old Man and the Sea one can sense the austerity of the biblical style
and at the same time the beauty of the world that has charmed him :
He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of
strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on the beach. They
played like young cats in the (tusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed
about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his
trousers and put them on. He urinated outside the shack and then went up the road to wake
the boy. He was shivering with the morning cold. But he knew he would shiver himself warm
and that soon he would be rowing. (The Old Man and the Sea)
Maintains High Standards: - Throughout his life he did not let his standards for the exact
word, the concrete statement and his concentration on the physical world of things relax. He
makes a scene so real, that we can almost smell the pine-covered slopes or the surf on a
sea-beach. In A Farewell to Arms the fall is vividly depicted in Chapter 1, and the famous
Caporetto retreat remains a landmark in realistic technique. Similarly, El Sardo’s last stand
on the hill-top creates on the mind of the reader an impression not very different from that
of a coloured movie.
A Mastery on Dialogue: - To this admirable gift of his he brought another talent : the art
of writing dialogue. His ear, because of its somewhat erratic training in music that he might
have received from his mother, was a very sensitive device to catch the peculiarities of
accents of various speakers. He also captured their speech rhythms. They are not literally
transferred on to the paper but they are transformed into brilliant dialogue by the unique
process of artistic transformation. He shunned all authorial comments and let the
conversation convey to the reader what it stands for by itself. If an authorial comment, in
Hemingway’s opinion, is needed then the writer has not visualised the scene or listened
attentively to the conversation that he is putting on paper. He applied to prose the
kinaesthetic test that Robert Jordan felt when he heard Maria’s story.
Pilar Among Memorable Characters: - Hemingway has created some of the most
memorable characters of our time. Beginning with Prick Adams who is a symbol of the
twentieth-century shocked sensibility, to Santiago in The Old Man .and the Sea his
characters are individuals and at the same time representative of a whole generation of men
and women whom they portray. Orville Prescott thinks : “It is the guerrilla chieftain’s wife,
the super-woman Pilar, who alone survives in memory and who will continue to do so as long
as the bitter courage and heroic defiance of the Spanish, people in the civil war are not
forgotten. Pilar is Mr. Hemingway’s only triumphant feat of characterization” On My Opinion,
p. 67).
Many Memorable Characters: - One cannot agree with Orville Prescott entirely because
in Leslie Fiedler’s opinion Brett Ashley (in The Sun Also Rises) is the only al female
character in Hemingway’s fiction. Again, Carlos Baker thinks that Margot Macomber is a
perfect representative of the predatory Anglo-American bitches and at the same time an
individual. Whatever be her morality and her code of ethic she is certainly a living character
and will last as long as Hemingway’s stories are read. Similarly, Manuel in “The undefeated”,
not only exists as a symbol of the undefeated human spirit but also as an individual whom we
see charging at the bull with a sword in his hand forgetting all the pain of a broken wrist.
Even characters like Count Greffi or Dr. Valentini in A Farewell to Arms make much deeper
impact upon us than what their brief appearance, in the novel warrants.
Cyclic Plots: - Hemingway’s plots are extremely simple. With the exception of For
Whom the Bell Tolls in which social and political forces are introduced and_ they play very
important roles in the lives of the main characters, the rest of the novels have very simple
plots. They depict one or two major characters, their ordeals, their disappointments and their
failures and their vain or successful struggle to achieve a measure of dignity. The novels end
usually at a point where they begin. Jake Barnes love for Brett Ashley cannot be
consummated because of his physical injury. At the end of the novel he has gained a measure
of maturity and learnt to live without love but the love still remains unconsummated.
Similarly, in A Farewell to Arms one crazy lover (Catherine Barkley) at the beginning of the
novel is replaced by another shocked lover (Frederic Henry). In For Whom the Bell Tolls,
Maria carries the wound of having loved and lost which is as deep as the shock of rape
committed by the Fascists. Robert Jordan’s attempt to blow-up the bridge, in spite of his
success, is an exercise in futility because the Fascists have already known of the
Republicans’ plan of launching an offensive and they have already carried their
reinforcements across the bridge which Robert Jordan is supposed to destroy just before the
offensive. In his last novel, The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago returns as empty-handed
after three days of his ordeal on the sea as when he set out hopefully on the eighty-fifth day.
Characters Grow Up: - Carlos Baker calls the plots of Hemingway’s novels cyclic but if
they were cyclic there would be no insight obtained in the course of the action depicted in
the novels. It would be far better to say that the plots of his novels are spiraled rather than
cyclic, because in a spiral there is a difference of level even when one comes to the starting
point and it indicates the maturity of the main character, as a result of the action. The main
character grows in stature in the course of the novel.
Now Becomes Eternal: - In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway mentions that an author
can attain fourth and fifth dimensions in prose if he is sincere enough and lucky too. Critics
have not reached any definite conclusion as to what he meant by the fourth and fifth
dimensions. However, there is some agreement that the fourth or fifth dimension could mean
the raising of “now” to the level of eternal now. By concentrating on the present and the
intensity of its experience, the “now” becomes “eternal now”. And in this intensity of
experience the participants share their experience with people in other times and at other
places who have had or will have similar experiences. They share with these people a sort of
mystical union and a sort of immortality not very unsimilar to what Robert Jordan has
experienced in his love for Maria.
Fragile Affirmation: - Hemingway tried to be a realist all his life. But as time went by
he moved toward some affirmation from his earlier near-nihilism and this is reflected in the
deeper layers of his prose narration. He has utilized the techniques of irony, allusion,
extended metaphor, symbolism, and even myth to connote meanings that are not apparent on
the surface. Frederic Henry’s experience of the First World War reflects the experience of
‘the whole American nation which was betrayed by the politician. Jake Barnes’ experience as
embodied in The Sun Also Rises is the experience of a whole generation––the lost
generation, the American expatriates wandering aimlessly in the cities of Europe. Again, his
use of rain as a symbol in A Farewell to Arms is highly suggestive. Rain in itself is no evil but
the way it is associated with Henry’s misfortunes and finally. Catherine’s death it becomes a
symbol of disaster, death, defeat anti decay. His use of the hyena and the vulture as symbols
for artistic betrayal in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” suggests a new dimension in his art. Even
a short scene in A Farewell to Arms, in which Frederic Henry empties his glass on a burning
log of wood so that he may have his whisky and by this action kill hundreds of ants
prematurely, even though they were born to die, becomes a symbol of man’s fate in a
deterministic universe. There is “no exist” for any of us but we all try to make our little
contributions to the welfare of the, human race. That is why one should not ask for whom the
bell tolls; it tolls for thee.His
Vision of Nada: - More than all these, Hemingway is one of the supreme spokesmen of
the twentieth-century man. His vision of Nada–nothingness–penetrates to the depth of the
existential dilemma that man faces today. Man is lonely, and he has seen that the world is
purposeless and that there is no meaning beyond what meaning man gives to his life. Action
is to be performed for its own sake and it is its own justification. There are no gods or
superhuman agencies that will support man in an hour of crisis. If man is to live meaningfully,
he must evolve a code for himself based upon the empirical evidence of his senses. There is
no life beyond the grave and therefore one must realise one’s identity in this life on earth. It
is the picture of a solitary man in an indifferent universe that Hemingway seems to project in
his novels and short stories. Jordan, in the last scene of For Whom the Bell Tolls is a symbol
of “the lonely rebel” whose despair is unrelieved by any hope. Love, drink, religion, community life––all are no good. It is a stark and bare statement of a stark and bare truth; and it is not easy to be reconciled to this vision of nothingness and meaninglessness. One can occasionally seek comfort in fishing or love-making or drinking or the company of friends but
man is basically alone. But Hemingway is no nihilist for his is an art of affirmation.
Affirmation in Art: - It is his devotion to art that ultimately redeems him from nihilism. It. is
his craft that gives him the scope for creativity and his sense of identity. It is an art .that he
wants to practice without fakery and without tricks. He wants it to be the religion of a
creative artist and it will give him the justification for his life. Similarly, even, when the
winner takes nothing he attains dignity in the manner of his losing like Robert Jordan. This is
where the matador, the artist, and the ordinary man become one; and one can face life as the
matador does in the bull-ring.
High Quality Art: - Hemingway has not written much and the impact that he has made on
the reading public is far too great as compared to the volume of his work. But they are
chiselled jewels and in the service of his art he has spared no pains and in spite of the
limitations that Earl Rovit mentions he has achieved almost a permanent place in the history
of the twentieth-century novel.
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