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DA VID WILLIAMS The Poetics of Impersonality in A Farewell to Arms Hemingway's two principal books, The Sun Also Rises ... and Farewell to Arms [sic], are delivered in the first person singular. What that involves may not be at once apparent to those who have not given much attention to literary composition. (Wyndham Lewis, Men without Art, 1934) Had Wyndham Lewis given more attention to the literary composition of A Farewell to Arms, he might have discovered the real aesthetic problem behind Hemingway's narrative use of the first person singular. But Lewis was convinced that the problem, in its ultimate reach, was political: that Hemingway, in his unfortunate imitation of the literary mannerisms of Gertrude Stein, had lent credence to the 'proletarianization' (34) of the language of the novel which would debase Anglo-Saxon civilization and make it hostage to the levelling influence of Jews and other Central European immigrants. Of course, 'the personality of this First-personsingular , imposed on him largely by the Stein-manner' (29), also made Hemingway himself a hostage to 'a Weltanshauung [sic], which may not at all be his, and does in fact seem to contradict his major personal quality. This infantile, dull-witted, dreamy stutter compels whoever uses it to conform to the infantile, dull-witted type. He passes over into the category of those to whom things are done, from that of those who execute' (27)· Lewis's aesthetic objections to the Hemingway style have taken longer to discredit than his own reactionary politics: 'The sort of First-personsingular that Hemingway invariably invokes is a dull-witted, bovine, monosyllabic simpleton. This lethargic and stuttering dummy he conducts , or pushes from behind, through all the scenes that interest him. This burlesque First-person-singular behaves in them like a moronesque version of his brilliant author' (29). More than one apologist has tried to defend this troublesome constriction of style in terms of poetry or of poetic method. Thus Schneider (1968) has argued that 'the strength of Hemingway's novels is explained best, I think, by noting that they are in spirit and in method closer to pure lyric than to epic, and that they systematically exclude whatever threatens to interfere with the illusion of life beheld under the aspect of a single, dominant, all-pervasive mood or UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1989190 'A FAREWELL TO ARMS' 311 state of mind. ... Consequently, Hemingway's art has both the virtues and the limitations of lyricism: maximum intensity on the one hand, extremely limited range on the other' (Schneider, 283). And Nicholas Joost (1968), who first explored Hemingway's use of Imagist techniques in his prose, also notes that, in general, 'Such a method constricted unbearably the range of poetic expression' (Joost, 37). Other apologists have not been as willing to concede the limitations of this style. In Ernest Hemingway and the Arts (1971), Emily Stipes Watts traces the influence of Dadaism, surrealism, and imagism on the young Hemingway in Paris, especially in their common revolutionary search for an art of 'synaesthesia' which might not only unify all sensory experience but all the arts as well (Watts, 19). In considerable detail, she demonstrates how indebted Hemingway is for his style to techniques learned from the painting of Goya, Juan Gris, Klee, Miro, and especially Cezanne. The narrator of A Farewell to Arms might appear to be such a critic of the arts himself when he is forced to put on a disguise at the Swiss customs house: 'I have been studying architecture,' he declares with a minimum of truth, then adds euphemistically, 'My cousin has been studying art' (Farewell, 280). While the customs official consults with a colleague, Frederic coaches Catherine on the work ofRubens, Titian, and Mantegna, using critical terms that would make an undergraduate blush: 'I'Large and fat.... Titian-haired," I said, "How about Mantegna?" ... "Very bitter," I said. "Lots of nail holes.'" Frederic Henry's art appreciation is evidently facile enough to warrant Lewis's caricature of him as a man without art; but his 'brilliant author' (Lewis, 29) can hardly be painted in the same sweeping strokes. More recently, Bernard Oldsey (1979) has examined the...

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