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Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Hemingway Travels

Iceberg Theory

front face view of dark-haired, dark-eyed young man dressed in shirt, tie and jacket
Hemingway's 1923 passport photo

The Iceberg Theory (also known as the "theory of omission") is a term used to describe the writing style of American writer Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961). Hemingway is best known for works such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea.

He began writing as a journalist, and in the 1920s he was stationed in Paris as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Through writing as a journalist, he learned the importance of focusing only on that which was being reported, though other important matters might lurk in the background or below the surface. He omitted these matters.

As a writer of short stories he honed his craft and created a surface story from which often the main story was omitted, or was merely hinted at. The meaning of a piece is not meant to be immediately evident from the surface story, because the crux of the story lies below the surface. Critics believe his iceberg theory, or theory of omission, in combination with his distinctive clarity of writing, created a distance between himself and the characters he created.

 
Table of Contents
1Background
2Definition
3Early fiction and short stories
4Novels
5Legacy
6Footnotes
7References

Background

Like Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and Willa Cather, Hemingway worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist; after leaving high school he was hired as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star,[1] where he quickly learned that the truth often lurks below the surface of a story.[2] He learned about corruption below the "veneer of city politics", and that in hospital emergency rooms and police stations a mask of cynicism was worn "like armour to shield whatever vulnerabilities remained."[2] In his journalism Hemingway presented only relevant events and excluded the background. As foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star in the early 1920s he covered the Greco-Turkish War. He wrote 14 articles for the newspaper, but in such a way that "he objectively reported only the immediate events in order to achieve a concentration and intensity of focus—a spotlight rather than a stage."[3] From the Greco-Turkish War he gained valuable writing experience that he translated to the writing of fiction. He believed that fiction could be based on reality, but that if the experience were to be "distilled" then "what he made up was truer than what he remembered."[3]

Definition

If a writer of prose knows enough of 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 ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
—Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon [4]

As a young writer living in Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway conceived the idea of a "new theory" in 1923 after writing the short story "Out of Season", about which he wrote in A Moveable Feast: "I omitted the real end [of "Out of Season"] which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything...and the omitted part would strengthen the story."[5] The first reference in which he compares his theory about writing to an iceberg occurred in the early 1930s in the opening chapter of his non-fiction work Death in the Afternoon.[5]

Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker explains as a writer of short stories, Hemingway learned how to "get the most from the least, how to prune language how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth".[6] The style is known as the iceberg theory because in Hemingway's writing the hard facts float above water; the supporting structure, complete with symbolism, operates out-of-sight.[6]

The concept of the iceberg theory is sometimes referred to as the "theory of omission." Hemingway believed the writer could describe one thing (such as Nick Adams fishing in "Big Two-Hearted River") though an entirely different thing occurs below the surface (Nick Adams concentrating on fishing to the extent that he does not have to think about anything else).[7] In his essay "The Art of the Short Story", written in the late 1950s, Hemingway is clear about his method: "A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors, omit."[8]

From reading Rudyard Kipling he absorbed the practice of shortening prose as much as it could take. Of the concept of omission, Hemingway wrote in "The Art of the Short Story": "You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood."[9] By making invisible the structure of the story, he believed the author strengthened the piece of fiction and that the "quality of a piece could be judged by the quality of the material the author eliminated."[9] His style added to the aesthetic: using "declarative sentences and direct representations of the visible world" with simple and plain language, Hemingway's became "the most influential prose stylist in the twentieth century" according to biographer Meyers.[9]

In her paper "Hemingway's Camera Eye", Zoe Trodd explains Hemingway uses repetition in prose to build a collage of snapshots to create a entire picture. Of his iceberg theory, she claims, it "is also a glacier waterfall, infused with movement by his multi-focal aesthetic."[10] Furthermore, she believes Hemingway's iceberg theory "demanded that the reader feel the whole story" and that the reader is meant to "fill the gaps left by his omissions with their feelings".[10]

Hemingway scholar Jackson Benson believes Hemingway used autobiographical details to work as framing devices to write about life in general—not only about his life. For example, Benson postulates that Hemingway used his experiences and drew them out further with "what if" scenarios: "what if I were wounded in such a way that I could not sleep at night? What if I were wounded and made crazy, what would happen if I were sent back to the front?" By separating himself from the characters he created, Hemingway strengthens the drama. The means of achieving a strong drama is to minimize, or omit, the feelings that produced the fiction he wrote.[11]

Hemingway's iceberg theory highlights the symbolic implications of art. He makes use of physical action to provide an interpretation of the nature of man's existence. It can be convincingly proved that, "while representing human life through fictional forms, he has consistently set man against the background of his world and universe to examine the human situation from various points of view".[12]

Early fiction and short stories

Gwendolyn Tetlow believes that Hemingway's early fiction such as Indian Camp shows his lack of concern for character development by simply placing the character in his or her surroundings. However, in Indian Camp the use of descriptive detail such as a screaming woman, men smoking tobacco, and an infected wound build a sense of veracity.[13] In other words, a story can communicate by subtext; for instance, Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants does not mention the word "abortion," although in the story the male character seems to be attempting to convince his girlfriend to have an abortion.[14] "Big Two-Hearted River" Hemingway explains "is about a boy...coming home from the war ....So the war, all mention of the war, anything about the war, is omitted."[8] Hemingway intentionally left out something in "Indian Camp" and "Big Two-Hearted River"—two stories he considered to be good.[15]

Baker explains that Hemingway's stories about sports are often about the athletes themselves and that the sport is incidental to the story. Moreover, the story "A Clean Well Lighted Place" which on the surface is about nothing more than men drinking in a cafe late at night, is in fact about that which brings the men to the cafe to drink, and the reasons they seek light in the night—none of which is available in the surface of the plot, but lurks in the iceberg below.[16] Hemingway's story "Big Two-Hearted River" is ostensibly about nothing, as is "A Clean Well Lighted Place", but within nothing lies the crux of the story.[17]

Novels

Benson believes that the omission Hemingway applies functions as a sort of buffer between himself as the creator of a character, and the character himself. He explains that as an author creates a "distance" between himself and the character he "becomes more practiced, it would seem". Furthermore, Benson claims the distance is necessary, which in the early fiction such as The Sun Also Rises is successful, but if "the author does not deliberately create such distance the fiction fails", as in the later works such as Across the River and into the Trees.[11]

Baker calls Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees a "lyric-poetical novel" in which each scene has an underlying truth presented via symbolism.[18] According to Meyers an example of omission is that Renata, like other heroines in Hemingway's fiction, suffers a major "shock"—the murder of her father and the subsequent loss of her home—to which Hemingway alludes only briefly.[19] Hemingway's pared down narrative forces the reader to solve connections. As Stoltzfus remarks: "Hemingway walks the reader to the bridge that he or she must cross alone without the narrator's help."[20]

Hemingway believed that if context or background had been written about by another, and written about well, then it could be left out of his writing. Of The Old Man and the Sea he explains: "In writing you are limited to by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to do something else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened."[5] Paul Smith, author of Hemingway's Early Manuscript: The Theory and Practice of Omission, believes Hemingway applied the theory of omission in effort to "strengthen [the] iceberg."[5]

Legacy

In October 1954 Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He jokingly told the press he believed Carl Sandburg and Isak Dinesen deserved the prize more than he, but that the prize money would be welcome.[21] The prize was awarded to Hemingway "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style".[22] A few days after the announcement, Hemingway spoke with a Time magazine correspondent, while on his boat fishing off the coast of Cuba. When asked about the use of symbolism in his work, and particularly in the most recently published Old Man and the Sea, he explained: "No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in...That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is alright, but plain bread is better....I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea, a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true."[23]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Meyers 1985, p. 23
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Reynolds 1998, p. 17
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Meyers 1985, pp. 98–99
  4. ↑ qtd. in Oliver 1999, p. 322
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 qtd in Smith 1983
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Baker 1972, p. 117
  7. ↑ Oliver 1999, pp. 321–322
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Hemingway, The Art of the Short Story
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Meyers 1985, p. 114
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Harvnb|Trodd|2007
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Benson 1989
  12. ↑ Halliday, E.M. (1956). "Hemingway's Ambiguity: Symbolism and Irony". American Literature (American Literature, Vol. 28, No. 1) 28 (1): 1–22. doi:10.2307/2922718. http://jstor.org/stable/2922718 
  13. ↑ Tetlow, pp. 53–55
  14. ↑ Mellow 1992, p. 348
  15. ↑ Smith 1983
  16. ↑ Baker 1972, pp. 123–125
  17. ↑ Baker 1972, pp. 123–125
  18. ↑ Baker 1972, pp. 274–275
  19. ↑ Meyers 1985, p. 445
  20. ↑ Stoltzfus 2003
  21. ↑ Baker 1972, p. 338
  22. ↑ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954". Nobelprize.org. The Nobel Foundation. 1954. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/index.html. Retrieved 2010-04-25. 
  23. ↑ "An American Storyteller". Time Magazine. Time, Inc.. 13 December 1954. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,935439-5,00.html. Retrieved 2010-04-25. 

References

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