Less Is More?

[Cal McInvale]

what?  "less is more" = a modernist dictum?

disagreement:

1. hem did not believe entirely in the dictum. somewhere in his writing
(either "a moveable feast" or one of his letters) he pokes some fun at this
idea, which may or may not have been originated by gertrude stein. early on
hem said he would take a story and just go through cutting adjectives; in
"a moveable feast" he mentions that hadley's favorite writers use too many
adjectives, and he intends no to do the same. later in life hem realized
that it was not the cutting of words that made his writing good but rather
the attention to words.

2. the mere fact of faulkner's "logorhea" leads me to reject the idea.
faulkner was not just a fringe modernist; he ranks with eliot, pound and
joyce -- all of whom, by the way, were heavy with allusion and verbiage.
to say that hemingway's spare writing is part of the modernist way is
simply wrong, and faulkner et al are the proof of this.

the apparent evolution of pynchon in this regard: it seems perhaps from the
intro to "slow learner" that pynch may have rejected the "simple" writing
of people like hemingway or kerouac.  of course, the "slow learner" intro
is much like "a moveable feast" in that it is written late in the author's
career, where he may have a tendency to distort reality. (check out hem's
portrayals of the fitzgeralds: zelda's a conniving bitch and scott is a
whining rich boy. typical hemingway charicatures.)

i would guess that pynch, like most writers of his day, admired hem & the
modernists somewhat. (that he and farina attended a party as hem and
fitzgerald appears in the intro to "been down so long.") later perhaps
pynch encountered faulkner, joyce, et al and maybe found a style of prose
more compatible with his own vision.

of course the scarcity of actual biographical info makes all this conjecture...


Cal McInvale        e-mail:  godot at rt66.com
WWW: http://www.rt66.com/godot/welcome.html
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What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not
the still photographs of finished character but the movie, the soul in
flux.  -- Thomas Pynchon