LSL "TSR" Hemingway

Wed Dec 4 09:09:03 CST 2002

Worth considering, perhaps:
Hemingway's ambulance driver experience; Levine's
harvesting the dead.
Levine gone native (see Hemingway gone native, below),
puffing that cigar as he claims another trophy in the
heart of the jungle/swamp.
Pynchon's overlay of allusions to A Farewell to Arms
in "TSR".
No macho man brave in the face of death, Levine seems
remote, detached, alienated, just following orders,
his encounter with death is altogether banal, part of
an assembly line process, in which he is moved by
powers in a System over which he has no control.

"Hemingway had often been close to death, he always
felt death to be near, and his prose, like the poetry
of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals, sought to
make the ultimate experience come close. Death might
yet be recorded in the sentient flesh -- as intimate a
sensation as eating, drinking, and lovemaking. "
>From "Hemingway as His Own Fable" (June 1964) -- a
review of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's posthumously
published memoir of his early years in Paris -- by
Alfred Kazin
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/64jun/6406kazin.htm

Interesting, in this Pynchonian context:

http://www.lostgeneration.com/hemfaq.htm#why
What is Hemingway's theory of omission or "iceberg
principle?"
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway outlined his
"theory of omission" or "iceberg principle."  He
states:   "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 the iceberg is due to only
one-eighth of it being above water.   The writer who
omits things because he does not know them only makes
hollow places in his writing."

http://www.oberlin.edu/~ctaylor/evasion.htm
"The Art of Evasion"
by Leon Edel
"The Art of Evasion." From Folio, XX (Spring, 1955),
18-20. Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Robert P. Weeks, Ed. Eaglewood Cliff, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall Inc. 1962. 
[...] Ernest Hemingway, I hold, belongs to the second
shelf of American fiction, not the first: he can
safely be placed beside Sinclair Lewis rather than
beside Hawthorne, Melville, or James. But my dissent
at this moment in not in matters of classification. It
stems from the Academy's bestowing of the prize on the
grounds of Hemingway's Style-his "mastery of the art
of modern narration." I am not, of course, sure what
the Swedish Academy means by "modern narration" unless
indeed it is thinking of brisk journalism, the most
characteristic form of narration of our time. But the
award has generally been interpreted as an award for
Style.[...]  In Hemingway's novels people order
drinks-they are always ordering drinks-then they
drink, then they order some more; they make love, and
the love-making is "fine" and "nice" and it is "good"
and it is sufficiently romantic, as in the pulps, that
is, sufficiently adolescent. There is some killing.
There is some fine riding and shooting and sailing. It
is a world of superficial action and almost wholly
without reflection-such reflection as there is tends
to be on a rather crude and simplified level. It will
be argued that all this is a large part of life and
thus has validity in fiction. Of course. [...]
Hemingway has created a world of Robinson Crusoes,
living on lonely islands, with a bottle and gun for
companions, and an occasional woman to go with the
drinks. [..] 

going native
http://contemporarylit.about.com/library/weekly/aa041101a.htm
" In 1955, Ernest Hemingway shaved his head, dyed his
clothing to match the colors worn by members of an
African tribe, tanned his skin dark enough to pass for
"half-caste," became engaged to an African girl named
Debba, and considered it an insult to be addressed as
a white man. He very badly wanted to pierce his ears
and cut his face in order to look more like a brother
to the African Kamba tribe members he so admired, but
he was deterred by this letter from his fourth wife,
Mary. "The fiction that having your ears pierced will
make you a Kamba is an evasion of the reality, which
is that you are not and never can be anything but an
honorary Kamba, and that it is out of harmony with
your best character which is that of a wise,
thoughtful, realistic adult white American male.  I
know that you are impassioned about Africa and the
Africans, writing about them, and allured by the
mystery and excitement of becoming one of them. And
you know that I love the fun and make-believe as much
as you do. But the attempt to convert fantasy into
actuality can only result, I think, in distortion and
failure. There are other ways of proving brotherhood
between you and the Kamba. I do hope you find them, my
Big Sweetheart." --Mary (October 4, 1955) 
The tenacious Ernest Hemingway stereotype-a
tough-talking, rugged, misogynistic, white
heterosexual male-has existed for several decades, but
the posthumous publication of his final book entitled
True at First Light, challenges the standard take on
Hemingway and his fiction.  [...]
As Toni Morrison suggests, the burgeoning of our
literary canon to include more women and minorities
has been one of the most necessary and vital
developments that has taken place in academia in the
past century. For far too long, extremely talented
authors have been marginalized or unpublished by
virtue of race, ethnicity, or gender. And yet, this
move toward greater inclusiveness has tended to draw
thick lines between the old and the new, lines that
suggest classic white male authors have little or no
relevance to this new and vital movement. A writer
like Ernest Hemingway can and should be considered an
integral part of these important changes in our
literary tradition. Opening the canon and recovering
texts by women and people of color must happen
concurrently with new readings of traditional texts. A
scrupulous re-reading of the texts that have always
stood at the supposed center of our American
experience will provide yet another way for readers to
discover the diverse cultural faces and voices that
have been there all along. "

Hemingway bio:
http://www.lostgeneration.com/childhood.htm

collections of articles and reviews:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/11/specials/hemingway-main.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/hemingway.htm

http://www.oberlin.edu/~ctaylor/
Welcome to the Ernest Hemingway Denigration Society

=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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