英美文学选读学习笔记 Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), a Nobel Prize winner for literature, is one of the greatest American writers. His style, the particular type of hero in his novels, and his life attitudes have been widely recognized and imitated, not only in English-speaking countries but all over the world.

Hemingway was a myth in his own time and his life was colorful. He was born Ernest Miller Hemingway in Oak Park, Illinois, son of a successful physician. Hemingway was a good son in the sense that he complied with his parents' expectations. He made good grades in school; he wrote for the school paper and literary magazines; he participated in sports. And Hemingway often went hunting and fishing with his father or his friends on the lake near Charlevoix, Michigan, which provided him with materials that he drew on for some of his best writing. However, he was not comfortable with the polite, effete, but curiously materialistic culture of his time. After high school, he left home for Kansas City and worked as a reporter. During World War I he served as an honorable junior officer in the American Red Cross Ambulance Corps and in 1918 was severely wounded in both legs. After the war, he went to Paris as a foreign reporter, employed by The Toronto Star. Influenced and guided by Sherwood Anderson, Stephen Crane and Gertrude Stein, he became a writer and began to attract attention. Later he actively participated in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.  In 1961, in ill health, anxiety and deep dession, Hemingway shot himself with a hunting gun.

Greatly and permanently affected by the war experiences, Hemingway formed his own writing style, together with his theme and hero. In Our Time (1925) is the first book to sent a Hemingway hero -- Nick Adams. It was truly the start of everything that he was going to do. The great part of the book traces in separate, but thematically related, short stories the growth of a young man called Nick Adams from his childhood in the Michigan woods to his return as a war veteran. Exposed to and victimized by violence in various forms. Nick becomes the prototype of the wounded hero who, with all the dignity and courage he could muster, confronts situations which are not of his own choosing yet threaten his destruction. Also in this book, Hemingway sought to endow prose with the density of poetry, making each image, each scene, and each rendered act serve several purposes.

The Sun Also Rises (1926) is Hemingway's first true novel. It casts light on a whole generation after the First World War and the effects of the war by way of a vivid portrait of "The Lost Generation," a group of young Americans who left their native land and fought in the war and later engaged themselves in writing in a new way about their own experiences, The young expatriates in this novel are a group of wandering, amusing, but aimless people, who are caught in the war and removed from the path of ordinary life. In this novel the Hemingway Code hero is exemplified in different versions.

Hemingway's second big success is A Farewell to Arms (1929), which wrote the epitaph to a decade and to the whole generation in the 1920s in telling us a story about the tragic love affair of a wounded American soldier with a British nurse. Frederick Henry resents the experience of a whole nation, who is wounded in war and disillusioned with the insanity and futility of the universe. He deserts the army and flees with Catherine to Switzerland, where they believe they could find some peace by disengaging themselves from society so as to concentrate on the intensity of their emotional life. But what they share, instead, is the sense of doom. In this novel, Hemingway not only emphasizes his belief that man is trapped both physically and mentally, but goes to some lengths to refute the idea of nature as an exssion of either God's design or, his beneficence and to suggest that man is doomed to be entrapped.

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952) tell more about the later Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls clearly resents a new beginning in Hemingway's career as a writer, which concerns a volunteer American guerrilla Robert Jordan fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Although fully aware of the doomed failure of his struggle, he keeps on striving because it is a cause of freedom and democracy. In the end, the manner of his dying convinces people that life is worth living and there are causes worth dying for. The Old Man and the Sea is a triumph, a tender fulfillment of the affirmative attitude that makes its first successful appearance in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Capping his career and leading to his receipt of the Nobel Prize, this short novel is about an old Cuban fisherman Santiago and his losing battle with a giant marlin.  In a tragic sense, it is a resentation of life as a struggle against unconquerable natural forces in which only a partial victory is possible. Nevertheless, there is a feeling of great respect for the struggle and mankind.

Other works by Hemingway contribute to his success as a major literary figure in the twentieth century, too. Men Without Women (1927) is a collection of short stories, the best of which are "The Undefeated," "The Killers," and "Fifty Grand," known for the Hemingway hero of athletic prowess and masculinity and unyielding heroism. In Death in the Afternoon (1932) Hemingway sents his philosophy about life and death through the depiction of the bullfight as a kind of microcosmic tragedy.  The Green Hills of Africa (1935) is about how the writer can survive against the threats to his talents of genteel traditions in America: success, money, and domestic entanglements; The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936) tells a brilliant short story about a mortally wounded American writer who attempts to redeem his imagination from the corrosions of wealth and domestic strife. To Have and Have Not (1937) is one of many to show Hemingway's characteristic pattern of a lonely inspanidual struggling against nature and the environment.

Hemingway's world is limited. He deals with a limited range of characters in quite similar circumstances and measures them against an unvarying code, known as "grace under ssure," which is actually an attitude towards life that Hemingway had been trying to demonstrate in his works. Those who survive in the process of seeking to master the code with the honesty, the discipline, and the restraint are Hemingway Code heroes. In the general situation of his novels, life is full of tension and battles; the world is in chaos; man is always fighting desperately a losing battle. However, though life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually. Obviously, Hemingway's limited fictional world implies a much broader thematic pattern and serious philosophical concern.  And this concern, closely connected with the code, even has the resonance that has come to mark his prose style. Hemingway himself once said, "The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."

Typical of this "iceberg" analogy is Hemingway's style, which he had been trying hard to get. According to Hemingway, good literary writing should be able to make readers feel the emotion of the characters directly and the best way to produce the effect is to set down exactly every particular kind of feeling without any authorial comments, without conventionally emotive language, and with a bare minimum of adjectives and adverbs. Seemingly simple and natural, Hemingway's style is actually polished and tightly controlled, but highly suggestive and connotative. While rendering vividly the outward physical events and sensations Hemingway exsses the meaning of the story and conveys the complex emotions of his characters with a considerable range and astonishing intensity of feeling. Besides, Hemingway develops the style of colloquialism initiated by Mark Twain. The accents and mannerisms of human speech are so well sented that the characters are full of flesh and blood and the use of short, simple and conventional words and sentences has an effect of clearness, terseness and great care. This ruthless economy in his writing stands as a striking application of Mies van der Rohe's architectural maxim: "Less is more." No wonder Hemingway was highly praised by the Nobel Prize Committee for "his powerful style-forming mastery of the art" of creating modern fiction.