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2. Minimizing Words and Maximizing Meaning: Suggestiveness, Concision, and Omission
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2 Minimizing Words and Maximizing Meaning Suggestiveness, Concision, and Omission Guess I got in the habit [of counting words] writing dispatches. Used to send them from some places where they cost a dollar and a quarter a word and you had to make them awful interesting at that price or get fired. Then I kept it up when started writing stories etc. —Hemingway to Charles Scribner (1940), Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. —Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins (1945), Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters Hemingway certainly helped to bury the notion . . . that the more you pile on the adjectives the closer you get to describing the thing. —Tom Stoppard, “Reflections on Ernest Hemingway” The short story’s lack of space leads to prose that relies heavily on suggestiveness and implication, allowing the reader a greater role in bringing the narrative to life. Sean O’Faolain observes: “Telling by means of suggestion or implication is one of the most important of all the modern short-story’s shorthand conventions. It means that a short-story writer does not directly tell us things so much as let us guess or know them by implying them. The technical advantage is obvious. It takes a long time to tell anything directly or explicitly . . . and it does not arrest our imagination or hold our attention so firmly as when we get a subtle hint” (150–51). To better understand O’Faolain’s point, let us turn to the most suggestive of story writers. In counseling his older brother, an aspiring writer, Chekhov told him “to seize upon the little particulars, grouping them in such a way that, in reading , when you shut your eyes, you get a picture.” He then penned the classic commentary on the technique of suggestiveness: “For instance, you will get the full effect of a moonlight night if you write that on the mill-dam a little glowing star-point flashed from the neck of a broken bottle, and the 34 Suggestiveness, Concision, and Omission 35 round, black shadow of a dog, or a wolf, emerged and ran, etc.” (LSS 70– 71). This passage—which Chekhov thought enough of to later incorporate into the final act of The Seagull (Plays 798)—gives us not only a moonlit night but also a suggestively resonant landscape of broken bottles and animals running loose. One need only rewrite the passage in more direct prose to substantiate Chekhov’s point: “The full moon shone down from the sky, illuminating everything in sight. On the mill dam lay the neck of a broken bottle, the glass reflecting in the light. Then a dog or a wolf appeared, casting a shadow as it ran across the scene, etc.” What one first notices is that Chekhov ’s passage is shorter (29 words as opposed to 45) because the language is more compressed. A passage relying on prosaic explanation usually employs more words than a similar passage of suggestive prose. The Chekhov passage is also more convincing—the reader is less conscious of the writer ’s presence because the images appear and appeal without interruption. The scene is more verisimilar because our minds have taken part in creating it, and, vain creatures athirst for narrative, we overlook the obvious fact that the author has successfully enabled us to participate. By contrast, the passage told through direct statement bypasses our senses and makes its appeal to our abstract recollection. Our intellect, forced into passive acceptance , naturally grows suspicious and locates the source of the information —the author—and our absorption in the text is compromised. This sort of Chekhovian suggestiveness can be found almost at random in Hemingway’s stories. Consider, for example, the opening sentence of “The Light of the World”: “When he saw us come in the door the bartender looked up and then reached over and put the glass covers on the two free-lunch bowls” (SS 384). In a mere thirty-one syllables, we have a vigilant and distrustful bartender, two suspicious-looking and perhaps hungry protagonists, a hint of a down-and-out world, and a certain sense of apprehension that we are in a community lacking in civility. Imagine how many words it would have taken most nineteenth-century writers to conjure up all of this. Ultimately, suggestiveness is so important to the story because without it the reader is...