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3. Depicting Consciousness in Modern Fiction: Expressionism and Impressionism from Crane to Cather and Hemingway
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3 Depicting Consciousness in Modern Fiction Expressionism and Impressionism from Crane to Cather and Hemingway Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exactly what it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you the emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped. Remember what the noises were and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement . Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling that you had. —Hemingway, By-Line What Hemingway went for was that direct pictorial contact between eye and object, between object and reader. To get it he cut out a whole forest of verbosity. He got back to clean fundamental growth. He trimmed off explanation , discussion, even comment; he hacked off all metaphorical floweriness ; he pruned off the dead, sacred clichés; until finally, through the sparse trained words, there was a view. —H. E. Bates, The Modern Short Story All literary historical genres possess an epistemological dimension: How can the self know the world? Related to this question is another: Where does “reality” reside? Generally speaking, American narrative from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century swung between two main foci: what might be called a world-out-there and a world-in-here. That is to say, throughout this period we see a pendulumlike movement between fiction that locates reality in the “objective” external world and fiction that locates it in the “subjective” internal landscape of the mind. For romance writers, the truest reality lay in the middle, in what Hawthorne termed a “neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other” (The Scarlet Letter 35). For Hawthorne, the “actual” 48 Expressionism and Impressionism 49 was the objective world and the “imaginary” was the subjective mind—reality was produced in tandem, and the romance was the transgeneric fictional form in which this combination could best be represented. For the romance writer, verisimilitude had to take into account both realities— that of the world-out-there and of the world-in-here. Thus, if one looks at a tree in the moonlight and sees a monster, then the “truth” is that what one sees is both a tree and a monster; the subjective truth is not subordinated to the objective. Realists, on the other hand, located reality purely in the external world and believed that the way to know it was to strip away subjective associations and view it as it was; in their formulation, the “imaginary ” was an impediment to viewing the “actual” and how it functioned. In Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, the passenger looks at the river (a synecdoche for the world) and sees “nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it,” but the pilot, who knows how to read the river/world, can view the pretty pictures and see in them the underlying reality they represent (94– 96). The realists did not ignore the existence of the world-in-here, but they only thought it “real” to the extent that it mirrored, or accurately grasped, the observable external world. For them, a tree was a tree, no matter what one projected onto it. The naturalists also believed that reality was located in the external world, and in biological forces within individuals, but, as opposed to the realists, they felt that humans were merely a part of that world—they did not acknowledge a human/extrahuman binary—and they did not believe that humans had the ability to read the world, let alone act meaningfully in it. Crane’s Henry Fleming may think, by the end of The Red Badge of Courage, that he understands both the external world and his own mind, but the text makes it amply and ironically clear that he grasps very little. By the time we get to modernism, there has been another major swing of the pendulum. The external world is incoherent, fragmented, and yields no meaning; only the human mind can provide order. This order, to invoke Wallace...