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Preface
- Louisiana State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Preface This book is a sequel to Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story (2010). In Art Matters, my goal was to provide the definitive study of Hemingway’s short story aesthetics, exploring what he learned from previous artists—such as Poe, Cézanne, Maupassant, Henry James, Chekhov, Crane, Stein, Joyce, Eliot, and Pound—and how he developed this inheritance to create the unique style and innovative techniques that would revolutionize the craft of both fiction and the short story over the past century. The book was framed by a polemical preface, introduction , and coda arguing for Hemingway’s central place in the canon through his unsurpassed influence on his contemporaries and later authors , an influence that has cut across the artificial boundaries which culture and politics create: nationality, race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion. These authors, among them fourteen Nobel Prize Laureates, include writers as diverse as Raymond Chandler, Isaac Babel, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Sean O’Faolain, Nathalie Sarraute, John Steinbeck, Halldór Laxness, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Elio Vittorini, Eudora Welty, Albert Camus, Bernard Malamud, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, William Burroughs, Camilo José Cela, Heinrich Böll, J. D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac , Norman Mailer, Nadine Gordimer, Flannery O’Connor, Elmore Leonard, Gabriel García Márquez, John Munonye, Edna O’Brien, Derek Walcott, John Updike, Joan Didion, Cormac McCarthy, Kenzaburo Oe, Ellen Gilchrist, Mario Vargas Llosa, Raymond Carver, Russell Banks, JeanMarie Gustav Le Clézio, Robert Olen Butler, Ann Beattie, Terry Tempest Williams, and Junot Díaz. The bulk of the book examined through close readings the major elements of Hemingway’s art and explained exactly how each functions: dispassionate presentation, authorial judgment, suggestiveness , concision, omission, impressionism, focalization, repetition, juxtaposition, story openings and endings, the illustrative stamp, constructive dialogue, story characterization, and setting. In addition, it introduced and developed a new set of terms and concepts for analyzing the xii Preface short story as a distinct literary genre while also redefining older literary terms, such as impressionism and expressionism, which had become hopelessly misunderstood by critics. I did not have the necessary space in Art Matters to explore any individual story fully. Instead, in order to analyze the many technical aspects of Hemingway’s art, I drew upon exemplary passages from most of the fifty-three stories and eighteen vignettes he wrote between 1922 and 1939. Early in the book, I observed: Such a dissection has its obvious value; it gets beneath the surface to show how texts actually work. But it also tends to make stories into clinical specimens, treating parts of them rather than looking at each story as a whole. Hemingway, I should hasten to note, would probably have detested what I am doing here. As penance, in a future book I intend to examine a number of stories thoroughly as autonomous texts, putting back together what here I so callously take apart. The short story is a living thing; even in its final form it continues to grow, change, and reveal hidden aspects of itself to new generations of readers. But, as with human bodies, a certain knowledge of basic anatomy illuminates.1 Encouraged by, and grateful for, the response of critics and creative writers to Art Matters, I wish to make good on that penance I promised and present readings that do justice to a number of individual Hemingway stories. Although The Hemingway Short Story is best read after Art Matters, I have shaped it so that it can be read on its own. Therefore, whenever I use a term coined in the previous book, I explain it in a shorthand fashion so that the reader will get its gist. I also use endnotes to Art Matters for those interested in reading fuller definitions of the terms along with detailed analyses of examples drawn from Hemingway’s stories. In this manner, I hope, the craft readings in this book can be enjoyed with profit on their own while not being constantly interrupted by forays into the critical terminology developed in my earlier volume. The same three premises articulated in the preface and introduction to Art Matters also inform The Hemingway Short Story, although—once we are done with this preface—I will try to refrain from repeating my polemics and occasionally combative tone. I have no desire to beat a dead horse and, to be candid, I’m done trying to justify a study of...