The Intentional Fallacy

Papa was a rolling stone

As many of you know, I have been a designated hater of Hemingway for some time now. I had read In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises, the latter probably his most lauded novel, and was not greatly impressed with either of them. I objected at the level of style, that often unquantifiable aspect of fiction. I preferred (and still do) a fancy prose style, like Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, and Hemingway is of course the antithesis of fancy: his language is eviscerated and repetitive, sometimes reading like he had only a cursory command of English. I understood the historical reasons for this: that the havoc wrought by the first World War had created a crisis in literature, had exploded former codes and ways of representation like a trench mortar, and that the Modernist movement was a response to this crisis. Modernism took a forked path: the maximalists attempted to absorb the entire literary tradition into their work and reinstill it with meaning (cf. Eliot, Pound, Joyce); the minimalists seemed to acknowledge the impossibility of meaning, the insufficiency of language, and emptied their prose as much as possible (cf. Hemingway).

But I still didn’t find Hemingway enjoyable, or at least worthy of his canonical status, until now, after starting A Farewell To Arms. In my last post, I lit upon a part of James Wood’s new book which extolls the virtues of form echoing content, and I think that is why I couldn’t quite get behind The Sun Also Rises. The book is essentially a catalogue of the Lost Generation’s hedonism: people travel around, get drunk, watch bullfights. Jake Barnes is wounded, and so too is the prose, but the profligacy of the characters is nowhere to be found in the language. (I understand that an opposite argument could be made here: that despite, or maybe because of, the characters’ profligacy, their lives are empty of meaning, and the language reflects that emptiness.) I couldn’t help but think of Fitzgerald, Hemingway’s contemporary and friend, whose buoyant prose seemed perfectly suited to the drunken, Jazz Age flaneur. In short, I wanted virtuosic feats of language, and Hemingway certainly didn’t provide.

I now realize that Hemingway’s unique style is designed for subject matter concerning which language constantly fails us. With love, the more ornate the language, really the more that is said about it, the more it sounds silly, the more it is demeaned. With War, the more detailed the descriptions, the more we become desensitized to it. The gruesome effects of war, if related in hackneyed metaphor and overwrought language, become just writing, and we only feel the effects intellectually. Not so with Hemingway: “…then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you had just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed and I was back. The ground was torn up and in front of my head there was a splintered beam of wood. In the jolt of of my head I heard somebody crying. I thought somebody was screaming. I tried to move but I could not move.”

Coming after pages and pages of declarative sentences, of clipped diction, this moment is sublime: exhilarating and frightening, rhythmic and hallucinatory.  The repetitions and the galloping “and’s” speak to Gertrude Stein’s heavy influence.  Then immediately Hemingway is back in his usual mode. The pain of Henry’s mangled legs, the death of a fellow driver, the ambulance ride away from the front, during which a dying soldier lying above Henry drips blood on him, all are reported in the same deadpan, journalistic tone. These scenes are so effective, and affective, because of Hemingway’s style: if a writer hovers too long on the terrible, it seems as if he is trying to convince the reader of its terribleness, and the reader finally says, “Alright, I get it.” Hemingway doesn’t take on the burden of proving anything to the reader, of “showing” how it was. His narrator doesn’t tell you what anything was like, he doesn’t tell you how it was, he just tells you what it was, and it is all the more horrible for seeming incontrovertibly true.

Though A Farewell To Arms has instilled a new faith in Papa, there remain some irksome facets of his writing.  Hemingway was one of the kings of the literary maxim, and his iceberg rule is probably his most famous. Essentially, Hemingway believed that if a writer is writing truly enough (well enough), he may omit salient details from his narrative and still give the reader a sense of them. Hemingway compared this type of writing to an iceberg, as only an eighth of an iceberg is above water and therefore visible. This isn’t a bad rule in general, but in practice it occasionally becomes ridiculous. When Henry is first brought to the American hospital in Milan, he meets a nurse, Miss Gage, and the hospital superintendent, Miss Van Campen. After having an ill-mannered conversation with Miss Van Campen, “She went out and Miss Gage came back. ‘Why were you so rude to Miss Van Campen?” she asked after she had done something for me very skillfully.” Come on! This “something” could literally be anything; this is tantamount to me telling a friend I have a great story to tell, and then refusing to tell it. Maybe Hemingway was being coy for censure’s sake — though A Farewell To Arms was published after Ulysses, which broke basically every residual Victorian rule about propriety in literature — but this particular scene seems not an instance of writing truthfully, but an example of a writer willfully obscuring the truth without legitimate reason, which is, suffice to say, colossally annoying.

Ah, James Wood, Let Me Count The Ways

Well, since I’ve moved to a different site, and thereby have disavowed what was or wasn’t said on Enfield, I am calling off the moratorium on Mr. Wood, as I have just finished his new book, and since it’s all about fiction, I feel obligated to write a little something on it.

How Fiction Works, Wood’s new book length essay, attempts to break down fiction into its constituent parts and relate to the common reader (as in, one who would have little patience for the pseudo-scientific structuralism of Barthes or Todorov) how fiction achieves its varied effects.  Wood has always been a close and careful reader — despite his dubious tastes — and he continues to prove himself here.

The book is divided into 123 mini-chapters, each essentially making a single point about a certain aspect of fiction.  The book begins with the subject heading “Narrating,” in which Wood expounds on the quite limited avenues of narration available to the writer.  He reports that though writers occasionally avail themselves of second person and first person plural points of view, an author, in order to create a lengthy narrative which can be denoted a novel, is limited to the third and first person singular.  This leads Wood to a discussion of “free indirect style” (or “free indirect discourse” as I learned it), which is when, in ostensibly omniscient third person narration, “…narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking.”  He adduces many worthy examples — Joyce’s “The Dead,” Austen — of this technique, which, when wielded by a great writer, is barely noticeable to the reader.  How many times have you been reading a book in the third person, and suddenly you realize that despite the preponderance of “he’s” or “she’s” you’ve been firmly situated in a character’s thoughts for pages?  Happens to me all the time.

Wood makes the best point of the entire book in this section, which I starred and underlined: “In order to evoke a debased language (the debased language your character might use), you must be willing to represent that mangled language in your text, and perhaps thoroughly debase your own language.”  This seems a pretty tall order: if you’re an aesthetician, a writer of glorious sentences, like Updike, or Roth, or DeLillo, you must be willing to write shittily if you wish to evoke common argot.  It is kind of a romantic notion, and has the added benefit of being true: in order for a story to be successful, its tone, its language, its form, must echo its content.  (Wood makes allowances for irony, and so will I: mock-heroic language is still incredibly funny; just read a bit of Wodehouse’s elliptical, highfalutin diction.)

But of course, in typical Wood fashion, his reasoned arguments jostle for space with his conservative literary tastes.  Wood is a notorious defender of the 19th-Century realist novel, and How Fiction Works sometimes reads — especially in the last chapter “Truth, Convention, Realism” — as a defense of this style of writing.  In propounding the value of realism, Wood inevitably disparages those that toy with those conventions.  Funny that one of the few writers Wood really takes to task in How Fiction Works is David Foster Wallace (Updike is another in a similar context).  Foster Wallace is maligned for his over-investment in the realist cause: he debases his language so thoroughly that it absorbs and refracts modern jargon and often gallops over grammatical convention; writing which Wood calls “hideously ugly.”  One could think this (I don’t) while also realizing it is the exhaustion of the realist prescription; it is the nth degree version of realism.  Wood seems sometimes to want it both ways: fiction that attempts to truly reflect life, but that does it in a particularly literary way.  It is a tenuous line to take, and many of Wood’s arguments suffer for his long cleaved-to positions.

Another problem with How Fiction Works will be recognized by anyone who has read Wood’s book of essays The Irresponsible Self.  Though he claims that nothing in How Fiction Works has been published previously, many of the arguments, even down to the writers named and quotes used, have been made elsewhere. (I too am guilty of this; when do I ever not talk about David Foster Wallace.)  This repetition can be read both positively and negatively: on the upside, Wood has been trying to teach his readers how fiction works throughout his entire critical career, and has a strong sense of the writers who best enact those techniques Wood finds most valuable, writers like Flaubert, Italo Svevo, Chekhov, and Henry James; on the downside, Wood’s tastes and positions have not evolved in the (at least) five years since the essays in The Irresponsible Self were first published.

Nonetheless, How Fiction Works is at its core a passionate defense and exegesis of literary fiction, one that speaks to how vital an art it is, and hopefully will continue to be.  For one who is interested in why great fiction affects us, Wood’s book is a fine place to start.

New!

Hey all,

So I’ve decided to say farewell to Enfield, and begin anew here at tumblr. I think the prefab design scheme looks a little better — simpler, cleaner — and maybe it will inspire me to newer, greater rhetorical heights! (Though I doubt it.) At any rate, I recently posted on Enfield the gameplan for the coming weeks/months, so I’ll repeat that stuff here, and hopefully the new look/new content combo will be just enough to warm the cockles of the literary heart.

On the horizon (possibly):

1) A semi-daily report on my slow progress through Tony Judt’s “Postwar.” It’s a long one, and is both brilliantly written and infinitely informative. Summation thus far (through 1956): France looking pretty bad on a political level though booming economically; Soviet satellites=oppression, show trials, general shitty feeling; all of Europe: rebounding! Like this blog!

2) A reassessment of Hemingway: I’ve been hard on Papa as of late in my discussions of him with friends — Natey-poo, you know who you are — so I’m about to start A Farewell to Arms in the hope that I’ll be convinced otherwise.

3) The Rachel Papers: Amis’ first novel, by his own admission autobiographical, about a British collegian and his relationship with a American girl. Just in flipping through it, I’ve found two separate references to venereal disease, so it has to be a winner.