Ernest miller hemingway (july 21, 1899 — july 2, 1961) ern

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 — July 2, 1961)
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak
Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.
Hemingway was the first son and the second child born to
Clarence Edmonds "Doc Ed"
Hemingway - a country doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway.
The Hemingways lived in a six-bedroom Victorian house built
by Ernest's widowed maternal
grandfather, Ernest Miller Hall, an English immigrant and Civil
War veteran who lived with the
family. Hemingway was his namesake.
Hemingway's mother once aspired to an opera career and earned
money giving voice and music
lessons. She was domineering and narrowly religious, mirroring
the strict Protestant ethic of Oak
Park, which Hemingway later said had "wide lawns and narrow
minds." While his mother hoped
that her son would develop an interest in music, Hemingway
adopted his father's outdoorsman
hobbies of hunting, fishing and camping in the woods and lakes
of Northern Michigan. The

family owned a summer home called Windemere on Walloon
Lake, near Petoskey, Michigan and
often spent summers vacationing there. These early experiences
in close contact with nature
instilled in Hemingway a lifelong passion for outdoor adventure
and for living in remote or
isolated areas.
Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School
from September 1913 until
graduation in June 1917. He excelled both academically and
athletically; he boxed, played
football, and displayed particular talent in English classes. His
first writing experience was
writing for "Trapeze" and "Tabula" (the school's newspaper and
yearbook, respectively) in his
junior year, then serving as editor in his senior year. He
sometimes wrote under the pen name
Ring Lardner, Jr., a nod to his literary hero Ring Lardner.
After high school, Hemingway did not want to go to college.
Instead, at age eighteen, he began
his writing career as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star.
Although he worked at the
newspaper for only six months (October 17, 1917-April 30,

1918), throughout his lifetime he
used the guidance of the Star's style guide as a foundation for
his writing style: "Use short
sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be
positive, not negative." In honor
of the centennial year of Hemingway's birth (1899), The Star
named Hemingway its top reporter
of the last hundred years.
Hemingway left his reporting job after only a few months and,
against his father's wishes, tried
to join the United States Army to see action in World War I. He
failed the medical examination
due to poor vision, and instead joined the Red Cross Ambulance
Corps. On his route to the
Italian front, he stopped in Paris, which was under constant
bombardment from German artillery.
Instead of staying in the relative safety of the Hotel Florida,
Hemingway tried to get as close to
combat as possible.
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On July 8, 1918, Hemingway was wounded while delivering
supplies to soldiers, which ended
his career as an ambulance driver. Although the events of his
wounding have been subjected to
doubters, it is now conclusively known that he was hit by an
Austrian trench mortar shell that left
fragments in his legs, and was also hit by a burst of machine-
gun fire. His knee was badly
wounded,
Hemingway received treatment in a Milan hospital run by the

American Red Cross. With very
little in the way of entertainment, he often drank heavily and
read newspapers to pass the time.
Here he met Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington, D.C., one of
eighteen nurses attending groups
of four patients each, who was more than six years his senior.
Hemingway fell in love with her,
but their relationship did not survive his return to the United
States; instead of following
Hemingway to America, as originally planned, she became
romantically involved with an Italian
officer. This left an indelible mark on his psyche and provided
inspiration for, and was
fictionalized in, one of his early novels, A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway's first story based on
this relationship, "A Very Short Story," appeared in 1925
For a short time from late 1920 through most of 1921,
Hemingway lived on the near north side
of Chicago, while still filing stories for The Toronto Star. He
also worked as associate editor of
the Co-operative Commonwealth, a monthly journal. On
September 3, 1921, Hemingway
married his first wife, Hadley Richardson. After the honeymoon
they moved to a cramped top

floor apartment on the 1300 block of Clark Street. In
September, they moved to a cramped fourth
floor apartment (3rd floor by Chicago building standard) at
1239 North Dearborn in a then run-
down section of Chicago's near north side. The building still
stands with a plaque on the front of
it calling it "The Hemingway Apartment". Hadley found it dark
and depressing, but in December
1921, the Hemingways left Chicago and Oak Park, never to live
there again, and moved abroad.
On the advice of Sherwood Anderson, they settled in Paris,
France, where Hemingway covered
the Greco-Turkish War for the Toronto Star. Among the more
famous events of this important
but now obscure war, Hemingway witnessed the catastrophic
burning of Smyrna, an event that
he introduced in several pieces of short fiction. Ander son gave
him a letter of introduction to
Gertrude Stein. She became his mentor and introduced him to
the "Parisian Modern Movement"
then ongoing in the Montparnasse Quarter; this was the
beginning of the American expatriate
circle that became known as the "Lost Generation," a term
popularized by Hemingway in the

epigraph to his novel, The Sun Also Rises, and his memoir, A
Moveable Feast.
His other influential mentor was Ezra Pound, the founder of
imagism. Hemingway later said of
this eclectic group, "Ezra was right half the time, and when he
was wrong, he was so wrong you
were never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right."
After much success as a foreign correspondent, Hemingway
returned to Toronto, Canada in 1923
writing under the pseudonym of Peter Jackson. During his
second stint living in Toronto,
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Hemingway's first son was born. He was named John Hadley
Nicanor Hemingway, but would
later be known as Jack. Hemingway asked Gertrude Stein to be
Jack's godmother.
Around the same time, Hemingway had a bitter falling out with
his editor, Harry Hindmarsh,
who believed Hemingway had been spoiled by his time
overseas. Hindmarsh gave Hemingway
mundane assignments, and Hemingway grew bitter and wrote an
angry resignation in December
1923. However, his resignation was either ignored or rescinded,
and Hemingway continued to
write sporadically for The Toronto Star through 1924. Most of
Hemingway's work for the Star
was later published in the 1985 collection Dateline: Toronto.
Hemingway's American literary debut came with the publication
of the short story cycle In Our
Time (1925). The vignettes that now constitute the interchapters
of the American version were
initially published in Europe as in our time (1924). This work
was important for Hemingway,
reaffirming to him that his simplistic style could be accepted by

the literary community. "Big
Two-Hearted River" is the collection's best-known story.
In April 1925, two weeks after the publication of The Great
Gatsby, Hemingway met F. Scott
Fitzgerald at the Dingo Bar. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were at
first close friends, often drinking
and talking together. They sometimes exchanged manuscripts,
and Fitzgerald did much to try to
advance Hemingway's career and the publication of his first
collections of stories. Hemingway
and Fitzgerald's wife Zelda took an instant dislike to each other
with Zelda calling Hemingway a
"phony.”
Hemingway divorced Hadley Richardson in 1927 and married
Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout Roman
Catholic from Piggott, Arkansas. Pfeiffer was an occasional
fashion reporter, publishing in
magazines such as Vanity Fair and Vogue. Hemingway
converted to Catholicism himself at this
time. That year saw the publication of Men Without Women, a
collection of short stories,
containing The Killers, one of Hemingway's best-known and
most-anthologized stories. In 1928,

Hemingway and Pfeiffer moved to Key West, Florida, to begin
their new life together. However,
their new life was soon interrupted by yet another tragic event
in Hemingway's life.
In 1928, Hemingway's father, Clarence, troubled with diabetes
and financial instabilities,
committed suicide using an old Civil War pistol. This greatly
hurt Hemingway and is perhaps
played out through Robert Jordan's father's suicide in the novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls. He
immediately traveled to Oak Park to arrange the funeral and
stirred up controversy by vocalizing
what he thought to be the Catholic view, that suicides go to
hell. At about the same time, Harry
Crosby, founder of the Black Sun Press and a friend of
Hemingway's from his days in Paris, also
committed suicide.
Following the advice of John Dos Passos, Hemingway returned
to Key West, Florida in 1931,
where he established his first American home, which has since
been converted to a museum.
From this 1851 solid limestone house — a wedding present from
Pauline's uncle — Hemingway
fished in the waters around the Dry Tortugas with his longtime

friend Waldo Pierce, went to the
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famous bar Sloppy Joe's, and occasionally traveled to Spain,
gathering material for Death in the
Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing. Over the next 9 years,
until the end of this marriage in
1940, and then in a second period throughout the 1950s,
Hemingway would do an estimated 70%
of his lifetime's writing in the writer's den in the upper floor of
the converted garage, in back of
this house.
Death in the afternoon-book about bullfighting, was published
in 1932. Hemingway had become
an aficionado of the sport after seeing the Pamplona fiesta of
1925, fictionalized in The Sun Also
Rises. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway extensively
discussed the metaphysics of
bullfighting: the ritualized, almost religious practice.
Hemingway considered becoming a
bullfighter himself and showed middling aptitude in several
novieros before deciding that writing
was his true and only suitable professional metier. In his
writings on Spain, he was influenced by
the Spanish master Pío Baroja. When Hemingway won the
Nobel Prize, he traveled to see

Baroja, then on his death bed, specifically to tell him he thought
Baroja deserved the prize more
than he. Baroja agreed and something of the usual Hemingway
tiff with another writer ensued
despite his original good intentions.
In 1936, Hemingway traveled to Spain in order to report on the
Spanish Civil War for the North
American Newspaper Alliance. While there, Hemingway broke
his friendship with John Dos
Passos because, despite warnings, Dos Passos continued to
report on the atrocities of not only the
fascist Nationalists whom Hemingway disliked, but also those
of the elected and radicalized left-
leaning Republicans whom he favored; characteristically,
Hemingway spread a story that Dos
Passos had fled Spain out of cowardice. In this context
Hemingway's colleague and associate
Herbert Matthews, who would become more well known for his
favorable reports on Fidel
Castro, showed a similar predilection for the Republican side as
Hemingway. Hemingway, who
was a convert to Catholicism during his marriage to his wife
Pauline, began to question his

religion at this time, eventually leaving the church (though
friends indicate that he had "funny
ties" to Catholicism for the rest of his life). The war also
strained Hemingway's marriage. Pauline
Pfieffer was a devout Catholic and, as such, sided with the
fascist, pro-Catholic regime of
Franco, whereas Hemingway mostly supported the Republican
government, for all his criticisms
of it. During this time, Hemingway wrote a little known essay,
The Denunciation, which would
not be published until 1969 within a collection of stories, the
Fifth Column and Four Stories of
the Spanish Civil War. The story seems autobiographical,
suggesting that Hemingway might
have been an informant for the Republic as well as a weapons
instructor during the war.
One section of the sea trilogy was published as The Old Man
and the Sea in 1952. That novella's
great success, both commercial and critical, satisfied and
fulfilled Hemingway. It earned him the
Pulitzer Prize in 1953. The next year he was awarded with the
Nobel Prize in Literature. Upon
receiving the latter he noted that he would have been "happy;
happier...if the prize had been

given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.” These awards
helped to restore his international
reputation.
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On a safari, he was seriously injured in two successive plane
crashes; he sprained his right
shoulder, arm, and left leg, had a grave concussion, temporarily
lost vision in his left eye and the
hearing in his left ear, suffered paralysis of the spine, a crushed
vertebra, ruptured liver, spleen

and kidney, and first degree burns on his face, arms, and leg.
Some American newspapers
mistakenly published his obituary, thinking he had been killed.
Hemingway was then badly injured one month later in a
bushfire accident, which left him with
second degree burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and
right forearm. The pain left him
in prolonged anguish, and he was unable to travel to Stockholm
to accept his Nobel Prize.
A glimmer of hope came with the discovery of some of his old
manuscripts from 1928 in the
Ritz cellars, which were transformed into A Moveable Feast.
Although some of his energy
seemed to be restored, severe drinking problems kept him down.
His blood pressure and
cholesterol were perilously high, he suffered from aortal
inflammation, and his depression was
aggravated by his dipsomania. However, in October 1956,
Hemingway found the strength to
travel to Madrid and act as a pallbearer at Pío Baroja's burial.
Baroja was one of Hemingway's
literary influences.
Following the revolution in Cuba and the ousting of General

Fulgencio Batista in 1959,
expropriations of foreign owned property led many Americans
to return to the United States.
Hemingway chose to stay a little longer. It is commonly said
that he maintained good relations
with Fidel Castro and declared his support for the revol ution,
and he is quoted as wishing Castro
"all luck" with running the country. However, the Hemingway
account "The Shot" is used by
Cabrera Infante
]
and others as evidence of conflict between Hemingway and
Fidel Castro dating
back to 1948 and the killing of "Manolo" Castro, a friend of
Hemingway. Hemingway came
under surveillance by the FBI both during World War II and
afterwards (most probably because
of his long association with marxist Spanish Civil War veterans
who were again active in Cuba)
for his residence and activities in Cuba. In 1960, he left the
island and Finca Vigía, his estate
outside Havana, that he owned for over twenty years. The
official Cuban government account is
that it was left to the Cuban government, which has made it into
a museum devoted to the author.

In 2001, Cuba's state-owned tourism conglomerate, El Gran-
Caribe SA, began licensing the La
Bodeguita del Medio international restaurant chain relying
largely on the original Havana
restaurant's association with Hemingway, a frequent visitor.
Some health problems characterized this period of Hemingway's
life: an anthrax infection, a cut
eyeball, a gash in his forehead, grippe, toothache, hemorrhoids,
kidney trouble from fishing, torn
groin muscle, finger gashed to the bone in an accident with a
punching ball, lacerations (to arms,
legs, and face) from a ride on a runaway horse through a deep
Wyoming forest, and a broken arm
from a car accident.
In February 1960, Ernest Hemingway was unable to get his
bullfighting narrative The Dangerous
Summer to the publishers. He therefore had his wife Mary
summon his friend, Life Magazine
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bureau head Will Lang Jr., to leave Paris and come to Spain.
Hemingway persuaded Lang to let
him print the manuscript, along with a picture layout, before it
came out in hardcover. Although
not a word of it was on paper, the proposal was agreed upon.
The first part of the story appeared

in Life Magazine on September 5, 1960, with the remaining
installments being printed in
successive issues.
Hemingway possibly suffered from manic depression, and was
subsequently treated with
electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic. He later blamed his
memory loss, which he cited as a
reason for not wanting to live, upon the ECT sessions.
Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, and
received ECT treatment again. On the
morning of July 2, 1961, some three weeks short of his 62nd
birthday, he died at his home in
Ketchum, Idaho, the result of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to
the head. Judged not mentally
responsible for his final act, he was buried in a Roman Catholic
service.
Hemingway is believed to have purchased the Boss & Co.
shotgun he used to commit suicide
through Abercrombie & Fitch, which was then an elite
excursion goods retailer and firearm
supplier. In a particularly gruesome suicide, he rested the gun
butt of the double-barreled
shotgun on the floor of a hallway in his home, leaned over it to
put the twin muzzles to his

forehead just above the eyes, and pulled both triggers. The
coroner, at request of the family, did
not do an autopsy.
Other members of Hemingway's immediate family also
committed suicide, including his father,
Clarence Hemingway, his siblings Ursula and Leicester, and his
granddaughter Margaux
Hemingway. Some believe that certain members of
Hemingway's paternal line had a hereditary
disease known as haemochromatosis (bronze diabetes), in w hich
an excess of iron concentration
in the blood causes damage to the pancreas and also causes
depression or instability in the
cerebrum. Hemingway's father is known to have developed
haemochromatosis in the years prior
to his suicide at age fifty-nine. Throughout his life, Hemingway
had been a heavy drinker,
succumbing to alcoholism in his later years.
Hemingway is interred in the town cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho,
at the north end of town. A
memorial was erected in 1966 at another location, overlooking
Trail Creek, north of Ketchum. It
is inscribed with a eulogy he wrote for a friend, Gene Van

Guilder:
Best of all he loved the fall
The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods
Leaves floating on the trout streams
And above the hills
The high blue windless skies
Now he will be a part of them forever
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholism
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·'~:{)';':!'!-~',~,.:.;:~~

Chapter 7
Interpreting narrative
In ddinmg intapn:!;]!ive meanilJg as a compound of ideas and
judgment,
we need to be L.lrdi.ll- cspcciallv with the word 'Judgment,"
since for some
this word on conjure up the image of.t judge making
blisteringjudgmems.
But judpl1l'Ilt, in the broad sense that we are using it, is all
attunement
ot" feeling to its object. These feeling-; COllle in all shades and
strengths.
If mrrariv e i, no stranger to th•.•ff'rocity of Old Testament
judgments. its
judgmenrs LJn .ilso b •.•extraordinarily subtle:
THIS IS JUST TO SAY
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
F'U were probably
saving
(or breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
50 sweet
and;o cold
William Carlos Villi:llm's short narrative poem about a rhefi of

fruit says
something tiT from earth-shaking about simp] e pleasures. It
tells us of their
irnport.mre, how hard it is to resist them sometimes. and (more
deeply
byen:d in the poem) the value of ,1 rebtiomhip that has found
ways to
honor such undl'Tstlndablc weaknc«. It Tenders a judgment, but
one that is
delic.irclv 1ll1.111Ced. Perhaps "evaluation" isa better word.
For longer works. most of the terms we haw been discussing so
t~r in
this book dl"lrihe clements that gTe.ltl)' help when it comes to
bringing OUt
ideas .md judg!1lt'nts in narrative. In this chapter. we will take
up a few more
concepts that are central to .1 general undcrst.ulding of what is
involved in
the intcrpret.uion of rl.1n~tive ....••gain. I will restrict attention
to the most
useful of these. Hut where the terms discussed in the last
chapter are largely
[orma! terms in the sense that they describe dement, like "the
narrator"
76
Interpretation 77
and "focalization" that are part of the form of narrative
discourse, ill this
chapter I will shift the balance to focus more on what we, as
readers and
audiences, actually do when we interpret a narrative.

The implied author
In the last chapter. we referred to the challenge readers and
audiences 01:'
ten face in trying to locate a scnsibilitv behind the narrative that
aCC()UIl{~
for how it is constructed - a sensibility on which to base their
interpre-
tations. A good term for the sensibility that we seek is the
implied author.
Obviously, given what we have covered in the foregoing
chapter, we cannot
necessarily rely on the narrator to act as a direct, or even an
indirect. rep-
resentative of the implied author. Even the most sober,
seemingly reliable
narrators can turn out to be profoundly IIlIreliabie (or at least
discordant, to
use Dorr ir Cohn's term). The master butler who cautiously and
precisely
narrates Kazuo Ishiguru '5 77lC Remains <'f the Da)' (I (.IS'!)
loses credibility as
a direct result of his seeming objectivity. His capacity ro
suppress emotion
in the service of duty makes him incapable either of responding
to low
when it comes his way or of recognizing and responding
appropriately to
evil, which also comes his way. lshiguru '5 is OIlC of many
narratives (Hogg's
Conkssions (~ra Jus/!fied Sinnet is another) in which we are
required to go
beyond the sensibility of the narrator for J just assessment of
the novel's
import. But if the narrator cannot be relied upon, the real author
- the per-

son who actually created the narrative - may be equally
uncertain as a guide.
After all. the real author is a complex, continually changing
individual of
whom we may never have any secure knowledge'. So we posit
an implied
author. This is J key concept in interpretation, iI1S(~/;zr as II'C
arc concerned IPi/h
"authorial intention" - an important qualification, to which [
will return in
the next chapter.
An implied author is that sensibility (that combination of
feeling. il1-'
relligcnce, knowledge. and opinion) that "accounts tor" the
narrative. It
accounts tor the narrative in the sense that the implied authorial
views that
we tind emerging in the narrative afC consistent ivitl: 1111 lire
c/ClI1f111S 4 II/('
Ildrm/ir'e discourse tlta! file arc aware 0{ Of course, when the
real living and
breathing author constructs the narrative, much of that real
author goes into
the implied author. But the implied author is also, like the
narrative itself,
a kind of construct that among other things serves to anchor the
narrative.
We', in our turn. as we read, develop our own idea of this
implied seusi-
bility behind the narrative. So the implied author (rhc term
COllie'S trorn
Wayne' Booth) could as easily be called "the inferred author"
and perhaps
with more justice, since we often diller from each other (and no
doubt the

---~"I:."-""'~=_~_.::..c.,--" ....•.•.•...",..._~_. -- •
7H T71{' (:lullh";lke introduction te' IWrrtltil'f
.wthor ~<; well) in the views and Ii:dings WI." attribute to the
implied author.
But the key point h that, insofar as we: debate the intended
meaning of a
narrnrive, we root our positions in a version of the implied
author that we
infer trom the text.
,~",.~~.*...,."".,," ''''''~''''"-'''~''''''''''' "''',~'...••
e_'..•.··•..•,.'.••.,'....•._,,"'..••......••....•...,... -
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•••I''...,~'"i"'•••.~~
Department of Amplification i
I
I
I
1
"i
i,
t~
i
i
j
t
!
j

1
I
I
But seriously, why do we need to say "implied author"? Why
not just
say "the author"? The best answer is that, if by "author" we
mean the
person who wrote the narrative (which we usually do), then we
are
referring to somebody with a rich and complex life, whose
personality
is no doubt as multi-faceted as our own, and who like us is
constantly
changing. The real author may be open to many views that are
actually condemned in the narrative. The real author may even,
within
a space of time, find her own work repugnant and repudiate it.
In the
case of a Hollywood film, the real author may not be a person at
all,
but a committee. So we may never have a good understanding of
the
real author, but we do have a chance of understanding the
author
implied by the narrative, or at least of constructing a plausible
author
by inference. In film theory. Albert laffay used the term "grand
imagier," or "grand designer" to refer to an intelligence that is
at once
present and invisible behind what we see in a film. 1 In his
book on
Ulysses, David Hayman uses the term "the arranger" to
"designate a
figure or a presence that can be identified neither with the
author nor

his narrators, but that exercises an increasing degree of overt
control
over increasingly challenging materials. "2 If you are looking
for yet
another way around this problem of attribution, you may find
Umberto Eco's concept of the "intention of the text" attractlva.!
But I
find it awkward to attribute-intention to a non-sentient entity
like a
text. For me, "implied author" comes closest to describing what
an
author projects as she writes and what a reader infers as he
reads.
In the years since Booth introduced the concept of the Implied
Author, there have been many determined attacks on the
concept,
especially in the 19805 and 19905 when the implied author was
seen
as no less a reductive, exclusionary concept than that of the
author:
one moreover that perpetuates the same iltusion of human
beings as
whole entities with clear boundaries. David Bordwell's
articulate
critique of the concept in Narration in the Fiction Film sees the
implied
author as part of the mistaken imposition of the "classic
communication diagram: a message is passed from sender to
receiver." He calls instead for attending primarily to the
narrative text
itself, "understood as the organization of a set of cues for the
construction of a story" (62). But my remarks in this chapter,
including
lntcrprctntion 7<)

my treatment of the implied author, apply to a specific kind of
reading,
which I am calling "intentional." There are other kinds (I will
take up
two others in the next chapter), but reading intentionalty is a
very
widespread activity, whether it calls itself intentional or not.
We tend
not to see a film as put together accidentalty, or by chance, but
by
intention. And we do this even when chance may have played a
key
role in the film's construction. Our "habit" of referring to
Truffaut or
Ophuls in the same way as we refer to Joyce or Dickens as we
try to
put together a reading is a clear symptom of this trait. Whether
it is
culturally determined or in some way genetic, I cannot say. But
the job
of work in this chapter, and part of the next, is not to judge but
to bring
into view what is involved in this common approach.
l._ ..':,_'-"tn.>_ .•..~_ ..•OO':<l.-.:: ••."'~_..,~~n.. .....•~
..•......•.~ .••,_•...~"'.;....•..,-t.-',,.. .....•...•••.•.......-.'..•.. :.-
.•..~~.•.
Underreading
When we try hard to develop an adequate sense of an implied
author behind
a text, one thing that becomes wry clear is how vulnerable texts
are to their
audiences. For milch of the earlier part of this book I made the

opposite case:
that we are vulnerable to narrative texts, that is. that given their
rhetorical
resources they seem to manipulate us and in general to exercise
a good deal of
power over our lives. Narrative texts hold us through suspense,
they make us
sympathize with this character and hope to see revenge against
that one, they
withhold the closure we seek and then (sometimes) they grant it.
Not only
do the narrative texts we come across have this power, but some
would argue
further that throughout our lives we are prisoners of these
cultural texts - that
they even do a lot ofour thinking for us. But the final twist to
all this is that we
do manipulating of our own. As readers, we exercise a power -
over narrative
texts that is arguably as great as their power over us. After all,
without our
willing collaboration, the narrative does not come to life. And
the price we
exact for this collaboration is that we do not simply absorb the
information
in the narrative discourse but, almost invariably, we overlook
things that arc
there .md put in things that are not there. We undertcad and we
"IJt'TrC<1d.
It is easy to see why we should underread. It is simply very
difficult to
achieve and then to maintain an awareness of all the derails of a
narrative.
In the words of Prank Kerrnodc, who coined the term:

It is not uncommon for large parts of a novel to go virtually
unread; the
less manifest portions of its text (its secrets) tend [0 remain-
secret, tend to
resist all but abnormally attentive scrutiny, reading so minute,
intense,
and slow that it seems to run counter to one's "natural" sense of
what a
novel is. CArl of Telling, 138)
I •••
~, '} he (.',11111.1, itl:~(' illlrl'till(fi(ll/ /(l nutratn«
Looking ag,lin at the second quorarion from ,[".iall1c B"I'M)'
quoted in the
l.N ch:tptn, how m.mv of us rcading this four hundred-page
novel would
pick up on the Itrmge phr.ise "ekC'LlC cpithalarnium ," in
Emilia's wish list
ii'1r the man of her dream-, (".t 111,11l likc a lvre wirl: strinf,"
of bronze. intoning
,.'Iq;iac cpith.li:Jmiullls to the heavens")? More than J few
readers, ofcourse,
nllght not even know tht'se words. But my guess is that even if
they do,
mo-t would undcrre.n] Jt this point. letting the curious phrase
slip by. But
the reader intent Oil not underreading would have to ask: How
did this odd
phr.isc come into Emma'> stream of consciotlSness and what is
its effect?
"Ekgi,K" is the Jdjectivc iN '~le".y:' and 311 t'legy is a lament,
usually for

sornconc who ha, died. nut an "epithalamium" is a poem
celebrating a
wcdding, Vhar on earth would an "degiac epithalamium" bt'? It
seems to
be a tht contradiction. Are these. thcll,just tancy words thrown
together in
the contusion of Ernma's mind, conveving by their sound alone
something of
the grandeur of this ide.rl lover she imagines? Are they limited
to expressing
her pretentious shallowness? Or might they JI,o exprr-«
something that is
on her mind .- the de.ldliness of her own nl.lrriage to Charles
Bovary? Or,
till.,lly. is this till1llY phrase a sly comment. Sent to us from
the implied
author, who lISes the cOllfilsion of Emma" mind to make a
statement about
the institution of Ill.lrriage in provincial towns?
If w« do pass OVL'r"dcgiac epithalamiums," we do something
that happens
;J!l thr time in our re;lding and viewing of narrative. l3ut
Kermode was also
rhink ing of major lllldnreadings that have had the power to
shape cultures
and even to shape the course of history.
The history of interpretation may be thought of as the history of
exclusions, which enable us to seize upon this issue rather than
on some
other as central, and choose from the remaining mass only what
seems
most compliant. (GI'II.'.,ir of Sca~cy, 20)
III the,e insr.mces, we seek by exclusion to close the narrative

at the level
of questions, and in doing: so we achieve an interpretation. Of
course, even
.J( a high degree of richness or sophisucation, inrerpreration is
a form of
rlasur; in that it is an assertion of lllt'aning within which the
text can be
Jcc('1rnmo(brcd. Even if the interpretation is all assertion of the
text's multiple
.1I11hi[:uitic5, that itself is an embracing formulation.
Vben interpretation requires the rough and ready exclusions
that
Kermode rcfi-rs to, it is ''.lSY to see how vested cultural or
personal inter-
est.s might be rOllSciClmly or unconsciomly at work in them.
/I..1uc!J of the
mot;,<: in this, ()( course, is the devire to restore: normality, to
settle a text's
disturhing qualitv and bring it into line. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
c,ltchcs
the Heed to imerpret by e xcluvion in his story H/ Very Old
Man with
Enormous x/il1!-":' Finding an ancient man with huge wings
floundering
lntcrprcuuion 81
in their back yard, Pelayo and Elisenda key their reading of the
creature to
hi, "incomprehensible dialect" .md "strong sailor's voice": "That
was how
they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite
intelligently
concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship
wrecked

by the storm."4 This is absurd, of course, but the demand tor
interpretive
closure exhibited by Pelayo and Elisenda, with its attendant
undcrreading,
probably to some degree reflects a necessity of ordinary life,
Robert Musil, in Tlu: Aim/ Without Qualitics, went so far as to
argue that
narrative itself em be a kind of undcrreading insofar as it is
rooted in the
desire (and necessity) to undcrread the complexity of life.
[Wlhen one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one's
life, the
basic law of this life, the law one yearns for, is nothing other
than that of
narrative order, the simple order that allows one to say: "First
this
happened and then that happened .. , ." It is the simple sequence
of events
in which the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is
represented, in a
unidimensional order, as a mathematician would say, stringing
all that has
occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us;
that
celebrated "thread of the story," which is, it seems, the thread
of life itself.
Lucky the man who can say "when," "before," and "after"!
Terrible things
may have happened to him, he may have writhed in pain, but as
soon as
he can tell what happened in chronological order, he feels as
contented as
if the sun were warming his belly. This'is the trick the novel
artificially

rurns to account: Whether the wanderer is riding on the highway
in the
pouring rain or crunching through snow and ice at ten below
zero, the
reader feels a cozy glow, and this would be hard to understand
if this
eternally dependable narrative device, which even nursemaids
can rely on
10 keep their little charges quiet, this tried-and-true
"foreshortening of the
mind's perspective," were not already part and parcel of life
itself. 5
Put more sympathetically, underreading, like the desire to find
(and if nec-
essary create) interpretive closure in the narratives we
encounter daily, is
probably rooted in the fact that in life we have to act. In order
to act, we
need to know (or at least think we know) what the story is. Our
survival as
a species has probably depended on our doing this with
sufficient speed and
efficiency to get done what we need to get done in order simply
to stay alive.
The primacy effect
One interesting form of underreading is what Emma Kafalenos
and
others call "the primacy effect," which is our tendency to
privilege, in
our memory of a narrative, the first impression we developed
early in
the reading or witnessing of it. In our memory, the primacy
effect

can override the much fuller, and sometimes quite opposed,
understanding of the narrative we may have had when we
originally
---- FE? •
~2 The C'lIl1brid~( iiuroduaion In 1l,!rr.uil'l'
read or viewed it. Thus. for many. the tragedy of Catherine and
Heathcliff almost exclusively dominates their impression of
Wurtlering Heights. even though the novel is only half way
through i
i when Catherine dies. and the budding romance of Hereton
Earnshaw j
_.a~::~~u~:.:~::~~~~:~~~~::::~~~~~.:~:: 1
Overreading
At the s.ime rime. we overread. That is. we find in narratives
qualities,
motive" moods, idcJs, judgments, even events for which there is
1]0 direct
evidence in the discourse, This, .1gain. should not come as a
surprise, We
are difE-rent people wid] different background~, different sets
of associations,
difl<:rent fl'~rs .md desires. It" I grew up as an ungainly girl
with few friends
.ind I had .1 bcautiful lirrle sister, who alwJYs complained of
her lot and who
'.1' .1lways petted .md who wound up marrying J handsome,
wealthy prince,
I might see Cinderella in a diflt'rent light than others. I might
even see her

•IS .1 scheming hypocrite (though it would take a lot of
underreading along
with ovcrrcadinp to do so). I might and I might not. But you can
certainly
rccogniz« in this example ~omething that is very common.
Overreading
is '1 phenomenon that is lrcquenr]« cued by the masterplots in
which our
t<'.ir' and desires arc I11mt engaged. It is what allow, some
people to flesh
out an incident involving inexplicable lights in the night sky
v..ith a chain
of event, involving extraterrestrial heing>. It is what allows
others to load
up .1 stranga with an unflattering moral character, cued only bv
the color
"f hi~ skin. Our minds seem to abhor narrative vacuums. Ve try
to ftIl
t hem ifl.
So, if the ronr eprx of underrcading and overreading seem
obvious. we
noncrhclcs tend to forger our own susceptibility to them in
almost evcry
ar~'1IIl1l'J1( we have about the mcaning ora particular
narrative. This brings us
b.ick to rhe issue of .-I,>mrl'. ProbJbly the most difficult thing
about reading
narr.rt ivcs is to remain in a state of uncerrainrv If a narrative
won't close
by it,df, one often tries to close it. even if it means shutting
one's eyes to
<orne of the details and imagining others that arcnr there,
underreadinp and
overre.rding. This !!o('s tor novels. tihm. plavs. narrative
poems, histories,

newspaper reports, legal uses. and even the plulllber'o; account
of how your
drains got cloggc·d. It il true, in fact, of our rcspume to all but
the shortest
.md ,il1Jpiest narrative texts. And maybe not even these.
Looking back at
thosl' two -horr C,'X!' we cited in Chapter Five. call you safely
say that you
h;!vell'r miSled am-thing signiticanr in either of them, or
foisted something
upon them th.ir isn't there?
Interpretation 83
Powerful as the tendencies to underread and overrcad are, it is
well worth
kec:ping in mind that we also have the capacity to revise our
readings. In this
light, one way to define intentional interpretation (which is the
kind we have
been discussing) is the effort to reduce both underrending and
ovc:rreading to
a minimum. It is a process perhaps best achieved by minds
coming together
in a mutual lending of perceptions. One person, a woman
perhaps, reading
the passage quoted in the last chapter in which Rodolphe gazes
at Emma
Bovary, might respond to it quite dilIl'rendy from someone else,
a ru.ui
perhaps. reading the same passage. Our hypothe tical woman
might tee! thc
gaze as prying and oppressive, an act of visual appropriation, J
reduction
of Emma to her material being. Our hypothetical man, in
contrast, might

see the power and inscrutability of her image; he might feel
something of
Rcdolphes mixture of bafflement and desire. Similarly, some of
us, reading
the second passage quoted from the same novel. might look with
repugnance
on an ignorant and shallow mind. corrupted by cheap romance,
refusing to
grow up. Others of us might be moved by the plight of this
vigorous woman,
trapped in a stale marriage and the narrow hypocrisy of French
provincial
towns .
It is hard to say where overreading ends and undcrreading
begins in
these conflicting iuterprerations of the two passages. But we
might finally
conclude that each of them under reads more than it ovcrrcads.
In other
words, the implied author that we finally construct for this
novel would be
a complex fIgure who combines in his mind all these readings in
a mixture
that is at once provocative and disquieting. F. Scott Fitzgerald
once wrote:
"the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
opposed ideas
ill the mind at the same time."7 Whether this is true or not, it is
the case
that in works at this level judgment is rarely black and white.
Gaps
There is another reason why ovcrreading is inevitable:
narratives by their

nature are riddled with gaps. Even if we conic as close as we
humanly can
to avoid underreading and overreading, we still haw to fill
things in If we
are to make sense or the narratives we read or sec.
That night we lay on the floor in the room and Ilistened to the
silk-worms eating. The silk-worms red in racks of mulberry
leaves and all
night you could hear them eating and a dropping sound in the
leaves."
III these first two sentences of Hemingway's short story "Now [
Lay Me:'
<1 number of gaps open up. Where are we' Why are we lying on
the floor?
What do silk-worms sound like when they eat' What is a
"dropping sound"
....-.•...•...•_. •
~4 '111(' C'lm/'ridC!' introdurtio« t» lIorratil',
Is it like the sound 0'- rain? "lilly CJI1't or wonr the narrator
shut out the
vound 0'- the silk"worms; If he (is it a he;, listens "all night:'
whv is he
sr.wing ;1',lke;
As WL' rc.rd, the llJrrJtJ'l' dl"OUI"c give lIS some !,.'Uid.lllce
tor tilling
ill lhe,,· ~.lrS, 'e lr.rr n th.u the narrator is [colling .1 lime
when he was
c(lfl',d"s"illg "<even mih« behind rhe lines." from a lew

historical markers
.ind thl' f.]c,t th.n I'm ordnl" is .m lr.ili.in who w.« conscriptnl
when he
rctur m-d home, 1I'e'mfer th.it thl'se "line,' .irc the It.l1ian from
during World
I/;lr I. Ve inter Il'om the Llc( that they "were lying on blankets
spread
(WIT S(LI"'." that the narr.nor and his orderly are in J
makeshifi ward ill
,1 structure (,I hous,,; a 113rn;» ;]ppropriJted felr the purpose,
But much of
these mll'fellces, imol;,r ;1 we build the m In our minds, arc
constructed
trom wh.it We know or inuginL' or houses or barns in It,1Iy in
the second
decade of thl' twentieth (Cmury, VL' never rercive Jny more
information
(1) the <ound of sJ/k-worms c.lling (nn:pt that it is ditter(,Tlt
lrorn that
of gurls 1!1 the dist,lncel. so if this g.rp is going to be' fiUed
in, we must
me what We know. or inl:Jginc', .ihour the sounds of things
dropping on
lcavr«.
And 'hy c.inr he skcpo 'i/c learn .J rcavon for tillS in the next
two
"t"iHt"n(('~:
I myself did not want to vlecp bccJuse I had been living for a
long time
with U1C knOwledge that if I ever shut rnv eyes in the dark and
let myself
go, rnv soul would g(' nut of my body, I had been that way for a
long time,
ever since 1 had been hlnwn up at night and felt it go out of me

and go off
and then come back,
This expLnm why Ill' knows that the ,ilk-worn1s ieed all night.
Bur it also
helps ux, by ink'rence, t n an'ount for whv he may listen to them
ohsessively-
becHI"" they hdp hlork OUt the more di,t.lnt sound of the guns,
As lor the
specific nature of his wounds when he V,lS "blown up," this
gap remains
WIde open. We do learn, with rvg.ird to the immediate impact
of thar event,
that his soul Went our of his body and then came back "gain,
but for most
ot u-, we arc J~"ill fl)rcl'd to dn some filling in since t-"~' of
us haw had this
':'p~·rtl'n('c.
Tltt' n:ading of l1.lrr;ltivt' is a tine timlt' of insertions like rillS
that we
m.ik« .1S w,' move from point to point. )nd though this call
ofien lead to
ovnrt'.lcling, it "lso givc, rhe experience of narrative much ofits
power.
I n other worrk, the energy n.lrt,1tivl' draws Oil is our own,
Wo!tgang Ist'r,
who wrote at It'ngth abolt( the gaps III n,1rrJtive, put it this
way: "it is onlv
throll~h in<''itabk omi"iom that d story gains its dyn,llllislll,""
Bur it is also
worth un(h:rscnring at this point that we have lirtle clear
undcrs~1nding of
wh.rr ex.nrlv the mind does when it reads, And if tilling in gaps
is one of

I=""~'="''''="'==''-~--~=~~ ~~-~.",,,
11llrrprcfl1tj{JIl 85
the ways the mind makes narrative "dynamic," another W,l)' is
to limit this
filling in -not tn go too far. When Satan is dcscr ihed ill
Hll'luij,j(' Lost, rising
from the burning lake in hell, Milton gives an indication of his
immensity
by str~tcgically limiting the information he gives us:
Then with expanded wings he stcars hi, night
Aloft, incumbent on the dusky Air
That felt unusual weight (I, 22')-7)
Had he told us that Satan was lO() feet in length, had a
wingspan of X5 teet,
and weighed roughly 8 tons, Milton would not have
communicated the
same sense of immensity that he does in these three lines. He
gains by
leaving out, by suggesting and not specifying, Satan dot's not
fly, but "<tears
his flight" like a ship; he is weighted with low "u" sounds,
"incumbent on
the dusky air"; and even the air, normally so unfazcd by
everything and
anything, "felt unusual weight." As in a bad dream, we don't see
but rather
feel the satanic hugeness of this creature, Satan arouses awe to
the degree
that the reader docs not till in the descriptive details about him.
So here i~
another interesting complication in the field of narrative, If
narrative comes

alive as we fill in its gaps, it also gains lite by leaving some of
them unfilled.
III the art of narrative, less em be more,
Gaps and multiple interpretations
"[O[nc text is potentially capable of several different
realizations, and
no reading can ever exhaust the full potential, for each
individual
reader will fill in the gaps in his own way, thereby excluding
the
various other possibilities; as he reads, he will make his own
decision
as to how the gap is to be filled, In .this very act, the dynamics
of
reading are revealed, By making his decision, he implicitly
acknowledges me inexhaustibility of the text; at the same time
it is
this very inexhaustibility that forces him to make his decisions,"
Wolfgang Iser (2RO)
I

I
i
I,
'· ••• ~· .•••_'I.J- ".,. ,"-'.-0. ~ •• ' ••••.."""0· ·.'-".-;"O •••
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.:.•_·••,,;,.!"""." ••..•......·.~_o '.' …
Week 5 lecture

This week, we start the novel The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest
Hemingway. Written in
1926, after WW I, the novel is strongly influenced by the after
effects of the war,
including the expatriates who left the U.S. and fled to Paris.
Throughout much of the
twentieth century, Paris was widely viewed as the cultural
capital of the western
world. As such, it exercised a magnetic attraction upon several
generations of artists
and intellectuals, large numbers of whom migrated to the French
capital from all over
the world. The number of English-speaking expatriates was
especially impressive.
Like the thousands of tourists who flocked to Paris, they were
stirred by the city's
physical beauty, its sense of history, its fine restaurants and
sidewalk cafés, and its
lively and sometimes even decadent nightlife. Unlike more
casual visitors, however,
the expatriates came to stay, at least for a time (some for only a
few months, others for
many years). They were commonly self-exiles, who chose to
leave a homeland they

considered artistically, intellectually, politically, racially, or
sexually limiting or even
oppressive. They were drawn to Paris by the reputed vitality of
its artistic and
intellectual scene, by its apparent tolerance for innovation and
experimentation, by the
high respect accorded the artist by Parisians of all classes, and
by the accompanying
level of freedom allowed the individual in his or her search for
identity and artistic
voice.
There was an obvious development to the migration of
expatriates to Paris. Two fairly
distinct waves can be discerned. The first wave lasted roughly
from the end of World
War I to the onset of World War II. Expatriate activity during
that period was highest
in the 1920s and was associated with what Gertrude Stein called
"the Lost
Generation," which referred to the alienation of the young men
and women who had
lived through and sometimes witnessed firsthand the
devastations of the recent war in

Europe. Activity tapered off dramatically after the stock market
crash of 1929, as the
ensuing economic depression forced many expatriates to return
home. The onset of a
new European war in 1939 and the German occupation of Paris
in the following year
brought their presence to an abrupt and virtually complete end.
During the twenty-one
years of the first wave (1919 to 1940), however, the number of
English-speaking
authors who lived as expatriates in Paris was large and included
some of the most
important literary figures of the time. Among them were
Sherwood Anderson, Djuna
Barnes, Samuel Beckett, Kay Boyle, John Dos Passos, Lawrence
Durrell, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Ernest
Hemingway, James
Joyce, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude
Stein.
This novel will be the subject of your next paper, which is a
research paper, using
scholarly articles. This is a process, so we’ll be working on this
for a few weeks. For

this week, I am including one article for you to read: one is
Interpreting Narrative, a
chapter from a literary theory book. Sometimes it is what
Hemingway doesn’t
say…e.g., what is it about the men who came into the club with
Brett, and why does
Jake react so strongly?
I have also included a documentary about Hemingway’s life.
Although I don’t always
think it is necessary or appropriate to understand a writer’s
background, Hemingway’s
personal experiences are often included in a study of his work.
Hemingway is not
exactly Jake, but Hemingway knew the character’s influences
well.
You will begin to write about Hemingway’s style in Journal #3.
So, enjoy beginning this wonderful novel!

Ernest miller hemingway (july 21, 1899 — july 2, 1961) ern

Ernest miller hemingway (july 21, 1899 — july 2, 1961) ern

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Ernest miller hemingway (july 21, 1899 — july 2, 1961) ern