A Farewell To A Farewell To Arms
One of the most fun things about “reading like a writer” (as Francine Prose put it) is recognizing tics in a writer’s style. When I say “reading like a writer,” I mean the technique of stepping back from the text and consciously imagining what the writer was trying to do. When I do this, and I often forget to, I actually imagine the writer sitting at his desk, typing/writing on his typewriter/computer/legal pad, and thinking about what he wants to communicate to the reader with a particular word, gesture, or change in narrative point of view. It can be an edifying practice when you read something you really love, and wonder why it works the way it does, why it affects you so strongly.
It is a different kind of reading than most are used to. We have all heard people, when recommending a book to someone else, say “I was totally absorbed by it” or “it’s really easy to get into.” It’s a funny formulation, because it is almost the exact opposite of what they really mean. What they really mean is that the book was absorbed by them; that the words on the page were transformed into unkbroken images in their imagination. The reader is the actor, and in many senses, the creator, of the story: without him, a book is just an occasionally elegant, but more often slapdash, construction of paper, ink, and glue.
Oppositely, when reading like a writer (or maybe just like an English major in my case; that is, for certain codes and techniques), the reader must wrench the text out of his imagination, refuse the writer’s attempt to create images, and focus exclusively on the language. This is surprisingly easy to do with Hemingway, since everything is so constant. One immediately adapts to his style, and is free to let his mind wander over the cut-and-dry descriptions and blocky movements. But when he steps out from that style, the reader immediately notices, and can question Hemingway’s motives for doing so. Forthwith are a couple of examples from A Farewell to Arms where Hemingway stops being Hemingwayesque and some possible explanations why:
1) In the final chapter of Book I, before Henry is moved to the American hospital in Milan, the Major and Rinaldi come visit him in the field hospital. The three get drunk (of course), and an almost free-associative conversation ensues between them. The typography begins to reflect the drunken interlocutors: instead of new paragraph breaks for each speaker, and quotation marks for each utterance, the conversation begins mid-paragraph without quotation marks, as if hijacking Henry’s narration. At first, there are “I said”s and “said the major”s, allowing the reader to tell who’s talking, but suddenly those authorial flags drop out, and all we get are snippets of the conversation without any sort of cue as to who is speaking.
Hemingway relates this conversation in what my Joyce professor called the “tape recorder technique.” Basically, the writer is simply “recording” the conversation like a tape recorder, and like a tape recording, the only way the listener/reader can tell who’s speaking is by the way their voice sounds, or, in the case of writing, how they talk. Joyce uses it in the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter of Ulysses, which is probably the most formally inventive chapter of the entire novel. In it, Joyce parodies the entirety of English literary history, from the earliest alliterative Anglo-Saxon poetry up to non-sequitur- and obscenity-laden Irish slang. The climax of the chapter is Joyce’s use of the “tape recorder technique” to relate the drunken carousing of Stephen Daedalus and his compatriots.
Obviously this particular technique is well-suited to characters getting drunk. When one gets drunk, edges blur and distinctions elide; it is a purposeful disorientation. Hemingway echoes this disorientation in the reader by omitting authorial cues, by letting his characters’ utterances blend into each other. Or, alternatively, Hemingway might have just been drunk himself when writing it.
2) By virtue of his iceberg maxim, Hemingway rarely tells the reader what Henry is thinking. Henry’s voice in the novel is itself something of a tape recorder, or maybe a video camera: he for the most part objectively reports what he sees. There are only four or five moments in the entire novel where we get a bit of inner monologue, a little stream of Henry’s consciousness, and at least two of these moments are in the second person, thereby removing them from Henry himself and foisting them on the reader. But there is one sad and moving moment where Henry actually comments, in his own voice, on an event. I’m pretty sure it’s been used as the foreword to another novel, though I can’t remember which. He and his fellow drivers are attempting to catch up to the Italian retreat on foot, and Henry leads them into the forest. They are fired upon as they walk along an embankment, and one of them, Aymo, is killed. As they leave him, Henry describes him thus: “I looked back. Aymo lay in the mud with the angle of the embankment. He was quite small and his arms were by his side, his puttee-wrapped legs and muddy boots together, his cap over his face. He looked very dead. It was raining. I had liked him as well as anyone I ever knew.”
