Philosophy Now Forum

Hemingway achieved notoriety for his literary style of neutrality, a ‘degree zero style of writing’. Finding inspiration from the Impressionists, Hemingway’s use of omission inspired other authors to consider how meaning is not simply enhanced by style and form, but can be conveyed by style and form. Perhaps also due in part to his journalistic background, his short stories are honed and exact. Every word has been carefully selected, not so much to represent, as to signify a greater, more significant, absence. Hemingway’s focus on a plain description of the everyday observable, is a deliberate attempt to avoid the abstract and unknown. Everyday objects are imbued with their own significance. Hemingway crafted a prose self-consciously devoid of symbolism. Writing about his 1952 novel The Old Man and The Sea he said “There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. […] What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.” The power and intensity of his writing is sufficient to create its own resonances and depths without the use of metaphor. Hemingway’s concern is to condense the emotionally affective material of fiction by using stylized techniques. And, as with Carver, he presents characters who pretend to be other than they are and who refuse emotions they ought to have.
His modernist method uses understatement, brevity of diction, dissemblance and omission. One critic called this Hemingway’s via negativa. The ‘implied’ under the surface of things points to undeclared knowledge, like an epistemic iceberg:

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one eighth of it being above water. [By contrast] A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”
(Ernest Hemingway on Writing, ed. Larry W. Phillips, p.77)

Carver, equally renowned for his brevity, states, “for the details to be concrete and convey the meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise that they may even sound flat, but they can still carry if used right; they can hit all the notes.” (‘On Writing’ in Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, p.26, 1991.) A sparseness of detail contributes to the disconnected narrative structure. The reader is responsible for making the necessary connections between seemingly banal details and the periods of stasis that the vulnerable characters of his stories hide behind.

When we explore language it is imperative to identify its limitations. Obviously, we can never fully know what any other person is feeling. We cannot fully bridge the gap that spans the incommunicable void between us. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of ‘language games’ implies that the mimetic (reality-imitating) function of language is secondary to the rules which dictate the ways in which language may be used. He also implies that reality may be mistranslated by language: “Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them. What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language. Propositions show the logical form of reality” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, p.31), and that the margins of the human world are indicated by the boundaries of language: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (ibid, p.68). For the characters in the short stories of Hemingway and Carver, silence is a recognition of the Wittgensteinian limits of language.

© Meghan Bidwell 2013

Meghan Bidwell was born in the USA, has an MA in English Literature from the University of Aberdeen and is now studying Material Cultures and the History of the Book at Edinburgh University.