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  • Hemingway and French Writers
  • Roch C. Smith
Ben Stoltzfus, Hemingway and French Writers Kent: Kent State University Press, 2009

Guided by Hemingway's "iceberg" principle that seven eighths of what he writes is hidden from view, this book examines the "artistic reciprocity" (xxii) between Hemingway and major French writers of the first half of the twentieth century, including key nineteenth-century forerunners and later twentieth-century theorists. The prism for these "transatlantic refractions" (xxv) is Paris, the center of an "international literary space" (xiii), where Hemingway, "a novice writer from the literary backwater of America" (xvi), learns, grows, and eventually gains ascendancy as "the master of modernity" (xxii). Stoltzfus has proven himself to be a perceptive comparatist and the present work makes judicious use of pertinent studies and commentaries by others as well as material of his own that had appeared previously. Largely following the chronology of Hemingway's works, the specific pairings of this analysis reveal a "structural necessity" (xxvii) that brings a fresh perspective to both sides.

In a first chapter the author explores Hemingway's introduction to French writers and other artists during his years in Paris in the 1920s where "the people he met and the books he read gave him the college education he never had" (3). In each of the subsequent nine chapters Stoltzfus examines one or more works by Hemingway in relation to the writings of specific French authors, beginning with Flaubert's Madame Bovary where associative relationships serve to illuminate the connotative complexity of A Farewell to Arms.

Focusing on the play of language and meaning in The Sun Also Rises, Stoltzfus sees writing itself as the elusive protagonist of the novel. This postmodern reading, abetted by Lacan's psychoanalytical theories, invites a regeneration of the unconscious and the pleasure principle embedded within the text. Here too, as with the Flaubert comparison, Stoltzfus points out that "clusters of meaning" (53), found in the telling and its web of "floating signifiers" (45), are recovered by the reader who ventures beyond the mimetic immediacy of the story that is told.

After linking Montherlant's and Hemingway's writing on bullfighting with the "ontological dimensions Sartre's L'être et le néant" (78), Stoltzfus sees in the eponymous hero of Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" an existential figure who, in overcoming his cowardice, foreshadows the issues of choice, freedom, and authenticity associated with Sartre. Turning to issues of engagement with political theory and practice, Stoltzfus notes Hemingway's artistic and moral kinship with Camus and, based on Hemingway's socio-political commitment during the Spanish civil war, with Sartre as well. But, as Stoltzfus observes, such [End Page 260] activism can compromise artistic integrity, as revealed in the shortcomings of To Have and to Have Not and The Fifth Column.

Stoltzfus's comparison of Malraux's L'espoir and Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls seeks to explain the well-known antagonism between the two writers on the basis of an encounter between two aesthetic perspectives and practices. As Stoltzfus explains, For Whom the Bell Tolls, while it contains postmodern features with elements of self-aware narration, is nevertheless a referentially realist novel grounded in plot and individual character. L'espoir, with its "panoramic simultaneity" (125), though not a self-aware postmodern work, breaks with classical narration by focusing on collective action. In Stoltzfus's view, Malraux's emphasis on fraternal engagement can be linked to early twentieth century Unanimism. Such a comparison elicits a fresh consideration of these two widely admired novels of the Spanish civil war, although Stoltzfus's observation that "Malraux's characters are flattened out, as in modern painting" (123) may be challenged by a fuller consideration of a characters like Manuel, the leader who must undergo profound personal changes in order to command effectively.

Following a consideration of Proustian themes in Across the River and into the Trees and a return to Sartrian and Camusian perspectives in Gide's Oedipe and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, a concluding chapter examines Hemingway's suicide in light of Camus' discussion of that question in Le mythe de Sisyphe. As Stoltzfus sees...

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