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The Ma (間) of Hemingway: Interval, Absence, and Japanese Esthetics in In Our Time
- The Hemingway Review
- University of Idaho Department of English
- Volume 29, Number 2, Spring 2010
- pp. 74-88
- 10.1353/hem.0.0061
- Article
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Hemingway’s self-described “iceberg theory” has influenced decades of scholarship tracing various “things left out” of Hemingway’s work. But such scholarship, however locally efficacious, presumes that his textual absences and silences are information-rich fields which beg decoding through bio-historical or other literary analysis. By approaching In Our Time through a Japanese esthetic notion of ma, I offer a new way to understand the greater sublimity of Hemingway’s work. Silence, interval, and emptiness are not voids resulting from omissions, waiting to be filled with things-recovered, but are themselves the meaning of the work.