Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action

3. Memoryin A Farewell to Arms: Architecture, Dimensions, and Persistence

56 3 Mem­ ory inA Fare­ well to Arms Archi­ tec­ ture, Di­ men­ sions, and Per­ sis­ tence Re­ mem­ brance has a rear and front,— ’T is some­ thing like a house; It has a gar­ ret also For re­ fuse and the mouse. Emily Dick­ in­ son the war that mat­ ters is the war ­ against the imag­ i­ na­ tion all other wars are sub­ sumed in it. Diane di Prima, “Rant” Two weeks after the pub­ li­ ca­ tion of A Fare­ well to Arms in 1929, ­ William­ Faulkner’s Quen­ tin Comp­ son fu­ tilely at­ tempts to de­ stroy time by mu­ ti­ lat­ ing its in­ stru­ ment of meas­ ure­ ment, re­ call­ ing his ­ father’s les­ son that “clocks slay time . . . time is dead as long as it is being ­ clicked off by lit­ tle ­ wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life” (Sound and Fury 85). ­ Quentin’s ­ father cau­ tions that the watch ­ should not en­ cour­ age “con­ stant spec­ u­ la­ tion re­ gard­ ing the po­ si­ tion of me­ chan­ i­ cal hands on an ar­ bi­ trary dial which is a symp­ tom of ­ mind-function” (77). A Fare­ well to Arms—un­ like ­ Faulkner’s more strik­ ingly ex­ peri­ men­ tal work—is not ­ widely rec­ og­ nized as a pro­ found state­ ment about the na­ ture of mem­ ory, nor is it ­ praised as an in­ ci­ sive in­ ves­ ti­ ga­ tion into the Memory in A Farewell to Arms E 57 psycho­ log­ i­ cal or phil­ o­ soph­ i­ cal im­ pli­ ca­ tions of time. For many crit­ ics, the novel is em­ ble­ matic of ­ Hemingway’s non­ think­ ing char­ ac­ ters, an ode to Be­ hav­ ior­ ism or ­ anti-intellectualism. A fail­ ure to rec­ og­ nize the tem­ po­ ral ele­ ment in A Fare­ well to Arms re­ sults in view­ ing the novel as flat, plod­ ding, a one- or at most ­ two-dimensional work. How­ ever, one of ­ Hemingway’s ear­ li­ est aes­ thetic state­ ments about his own fic­ tion ap­ pears in a 1925 let­ ter to his ­ father, in which he pro­ claims his de­ ter­ mi­ na­ tion to ­ create multi­ di­ men­ sional char­ ac­ ters and texts. Hem­ ing­ way, then writ­ ing his early work in Paris, out­ lines his ap­ proach: “You see I’m try­ ing in all my sto­ ries to get the feel­ ing of the ac­ tual life ­ across—not to just de­ pict life—or crit­ i­ cize it—but to ac­ tu­ ally make it alive. So that when you have read some­ thing by me you ac­ tu­ ally ex­ pe­ ri­ ence the thing. . . . It is only by show­ ing both sides—3 di­ men­ sions and if pos­ sible 4 that you can write the way I want to” (SL 153). Hem­ ing­ way often al­ luded to this bold lit­ er­ ary pro­ ject, while al­ ways in­ sist­ ing on the word “di­ men­ sions.” Taken to­ gether, his re­ marks read as sly chal­ lenges to sub­ se­ quent crit­ ics, since he never ex­ pli­ citly de­ fines his terms. The aptly named “Banal Story” from Men With­ out Women re­ fers ab­ surdly to the same idea: “Think of these ­ things in 1925—Was there a ris­ qué page in Pu­ ri­ tan his­ tory? Were there two sides to Po­ ca­ hon­ tas? Did she have a ­ fourth di­ men­ sion?” (SS 361). In Green Hills of Af­ rica, Hem­ ing­ way tells his in­ ter­ loc­ u­ tor Kan­ di­ sky: “How far prose can be car­ ried if any one is se­ ri­ ous ­ enough and has luck. There is a ­ fourth and fifth di­ men­ sion that can be got­ ten. . . . It is much more dif­ fi­ cult than ­ poetry. It is a prose that has never been writ­ ten” (26–27).1 As Hem­ ing­ way re­ calls in A Move­ able Feast of his ef­ forts of the mid-1920s, “I was learn­ ing some­ thing from the paint­ ing of Cé­ zanne that made writ­ ing sim­ ple true sen­ tences far from ­ enough to make the sto­ ries have the di­ men­ sions that I was try­ ing to put in them...