Week 7.2: Ernest Hemingway & William Faulkner

Although he died more than 60 years ago, the image of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) still lives on. For generations , Hemingway has epitomized the word "macho," and his critical fortunes have rested on our evaluation of that sort of masculinity. Hemingway found his inspiration in man's struggles, whether that be war (A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises,  For Whom the Bell Tolls),  bullfighting (Death in the Afternoon), or with nature itself (The Old Man and the Sea). Highly associated with his protagonists, Hemingway cultivated an image of himself as a man's man, an adventurer who was just as willing to go on safari as to drink a rival under the table.

Like many of his fellow American modernists (Eliot, Pound, Fitzgerald), Hemingway was a product of the Midwest but he developed as an artist when he became an expatriate in Europe. In Paris, he apprenticed himself to Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), learning to domesticate her more difficult avant-garde prose as he typed her handwritten manuscripts. Hemingway  attributed his taunt prose to his days as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, claiming that he had to streamline his prose for the telegraph operators. For Hemingway the sentence was key to any story. He once claimed that you could cut the arm of a man and he is still a man, but if you change a word to one of his sentences the meaning was forever altered.

While Hemingway never joined his fellow modernists, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, and Nathaniel West in Hollywood, the movies embraced his legend and his works were often adapted for the big screen. Indeed, Leonard J. Jeff has argued that Hollywood was one of Hemingway's conspirators, helping to promote him as a celebrity and keep his fortunes well above those of Fitzgerald or Faulkner. Hollywood's influence can also be seen in his own work. Hemingway's protagonist in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan, was created with the actor Gary Cooper in mind. Indeed, Cooper later did play Jordan in the movie version.

William Faulkner (1897-1962) currently stands as the preeminent American author of modernist fiction. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner was named after his great-grandfather, Col. William Clark Falkner, a Civil War officer and novelist. Although Faulkner did not think the colonel a strong writer, the colonel's legacy and the legacy of the South exerted a strong influence on Faulkner's writing. In The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August  (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner wrote about the history of the South and the difficulty of living with that past. In his novels from the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner's style combined the stream-of-conscious technique pioneered by James Joyce and Virgina Woolf with a poetic lyricism that was uniquely his own. These novels can also be very difficult, but their reward comes from this difficulty. For instance, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury has four narrators, the first of which, Benjy Compson, is mentally retarded, deaf, mute, and lacking a normal conception of time. His observations only become comprehensible to the reader after she reads about the same events from the point of view of his brothers, the doomed Quentin and the greedy Jason, and the family's maid Dilsey. Faulkner's prose turns the reader into a literary detective whose goal is to figure out not "what happens next?" but "what just happened?". While these  characteristics are hallmarks of Faulkner's style, by far Faulkner's signature invention is that of Yoknapatawpha (Yoke-Na-Pa-Taw-Fa), the fictitious county where most of Faulkner's fictions take place.  

Faulkner's reputation rests upon his modernist novels, but financial necessity meant that he spent  much of his time producing more commercial writing. At the same time that Faulkner produced high modernist novels, he wrote short stories for the slicks, commercial magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. Yoknapatawpha would feature prominently in both his short fiction and in his novels and incidents mentioned in his short stories would offer reappear in his novels and vice versa. "Barn Burning" (1939), one of his most frequently anthologized short stories, illustrates how Faulkner restrained his modernist style for a commercial marketplace while still dealing with many of the same themes. The events of the novel would later appear in his Snopes trilogy of novels. During the 1930s and 1940s, Faulkner also went to Hollywood where he worked as a screenwriter for MGM and Warner Bros. Although he said that he hated Hollywood, these screenwriting jobs kept Faulkner financially afloat during the Great Depression when his writing was largely forgotten and went unsold. "The Golden Land" is his only fiction that addresses the culture surrounding the film industry.

Faulkner's fortunes would change in the late 1940s and 1950s with the canonization of the modernist movement. Critics recognized Faulkner as a preeminent writer and his books came back in print. He went on speaking tours on behest of the State Department, promoting American art and ideals abroad, and spoke out (somewhat tentatively) against segregation in the South. In 1949, Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for literature, becoming the only high school and college dropout to do so.

Reading: 

Ernest Hemingway, "In Another Country" & "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" PDF
William Faulkner (1005-9), "Barn Burning," 1005-27
Digital Draft Due on Saturday by 11:59 PM

Study Questions:  

1. ¿Por qué nada? What is the outlook of these two Hemingway stories? What values are praised implicitly or explicitly in both Hemingway stories? Support your answers with examples from both texts. 

2. How does the racial and economic order of the South structure the conflict in Faulkner's short story?