I can’t remember the sequence by which I came to this thought. In fact, I can’t even remember when it occurred to me. (NB Unlike so many who like to lay down the law and pronounce that ‘this is’, what I am about to write is by way of merely being a suggestion of how we might view something, a suggested different perspective as when we consider what an object is we are apt to pick it up and look at it from different angles).
It struck me that when we read fiction (and here I am talking about fiction which treats the reader as though the reader has a mind and uses that mind to engage actively with what she or he is reading, not Da Vinci Code bollocks — and, no, I haven’t read it, so, yes, I am not qualified to regard it as literary cack of the first order, so chalk up two Brownie points of the thought crossed your mind), we sometimes come across a thought or notion which is not ‘new’ to us, but which is articulated in a way we ourselves would be unable to articulate.
It’s why we recognise it: we are already familiar with it, though in ourselves it has never been a defined ‘thought’. Instead it was more of a ‘feeling’, or perhaps something in that vague middle-ground where ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’ meet and are neither one nor the other. (Similarly, perhaps, like me you ‘understand’ something — what is going on in a situation or a theory you have come across, for example, but would be more than hard-pushed to pass on to anyone else your ‘understanding’, so pragmatically you assume you haven’t really ‘understood’ it though . . .
Sounds familiar? I hope so, because I can’t otherwise explain it.)
Then, on paper, some writer — in whatever way she or he might — lays it out, articulates it, defines it in a way we ourselves can’t. To try to give an example, I doubt whether anyone reading or watching Othello will fully understand his irrational, green and ultimately murderous jealousy unless she or he has themselves felt such made jealousy (which I’m prepared to believe is every adult alive today).
In the sense in which I am writing, the writer is not so much an ‘originator’ but an ‘interpreter’, and ‘articulator’, even (though it’s a bloody ugly word, so don’t take me to task) a ‘conveyor’, putting into words what we, ourselves (the reader) ‘understand’ and have perhaps for some time, but can’t ourselves put into words.
Just how my suggestion might be applied to music and the plastic arts I really don’t know, so rather than make a pretentious tit of myself, I shall leave well alone and not go down that road.
. . .
The above occurred to me while I was reading Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay The Death Of The Author — and, I now hear you say, ‘whoa, hold on, this is a common or garden blog, not a Sussex University seminar!’ Well, I hadn’t (I must admit) heard about the essay until yesterday, although I had heard of Roland Barthes. But I knew little about him, and I assumed he was just another of those tricksy Frogs who are apt to make us meat ’n potatoes Brits move smartly in the opposite direction, one of those tricksy frogs (French friends and readers look away now) who will intellectualise and analyse to death pretty much anything and everything from saying your own name to writing a shopping list and taking a dump, then publish it to great acclaim and wonder.
If we humans do it, they will obfuscate it: that’s more or less the routine, they’re built that way (and is my slip showing?). That was Barthes, I thought. (Michel Foucault is another name reliably able to strike terror into the soul of most stout-hearted Brits. What is it with these Frenchmen and women? Why can’t they simply boil all vegetables to death like the rest of us? I ask you!)
I can’t even remember what I was reading when I came across a reference to the essay, but it — especially the name, The Death Of The Author — was what caught my attention. I was (and am while her in Germany) working on this interminable project of mine about Hemingway, his pretty ordinary writing and his extraordinary rise to fame, and one thing I mention in it in several places is another essay about literature. It was — and still is — called The Intentional Fallacy and is by two US academics, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley and was published in 1946 as part of the then ‘new criticism’ movement in literary criticism (now no doubt old hat and superseded, as is the way, but some new movement).
Wimsatt and Beardsley’s idea repeats (what I understand to be — I’m very careful here not to pretend I know more than I do) one of the central ideas of new criticism, that an author’s ‘intent’ is irrelevant to evaluating her or his work. They were discussing poetry, but I can’t see why the view can’t be extrapolated to include prose writing.
In The Death Of The Author Barthes says, although he was writing 21 years later, more or less the same thing or, at least, something related: to the existence of a piece of writing the ‘author’ is irrelevant. The piece exists entirely on its own and has an existence wholly separate from its ‘creator’ (my word). That is not quite what Wimsatt and Beardsley were suggesting, but to me it seems essentially to be the same point: a poem, story, play or novel can only be evaluated as itself and nothing else. Details of what the author intended the work to do (Wimsatt and Beardsley) or biographical details about the author, or any other details extraneous to the work (Barthes), are irrelevant: a work stands or falls on its own.
Though my knowledge of literary criticism and its history could be written on the back of a small postage stamp (and I am careful to try not to give the impression I think otherwise), I must say that when a year or two ago I went into The Intentional Fallacy a little deeper (I first came across the term and its thesis at Dundee and vaguely knew about it and suspected it might be relevant to what I wanted to say about Hemingway and his work) I was attracted to it. Quite why I don’t know, but it might be worth admitting that temperamentally I rather take against all the ‘art is sacred’ crap and insistence that we should (it seems to me) genuflect before ‘the artist’ as something ‘greater’. Folks who do so might deny it but it does seem to happen quite a bit. So in that regard, the central thrust of The Intentional Fallacy and The Death Of The Author metaphorically solely putting the work itself on stage and leaving the ‘author’ outside in the foyer with the raincoats (or even having a crafty fag outside in the car park) is far more to my taste.
. . .
So far I have read several biographies about the old phoney (my description, other descriptions are available) and I am struck by how quite often the biographers speculate and write almost as fact what was — or, a favourite phrase they use — ‘might have been going on’ in Hemingway’s head. What is also noticeable is that once you have read more than one biography, you come across the same old anecdotes again and again. You might wonder why I mention it — surely, you ask, that is a given if these are incidents in Hemingway’s life? — but my point is that quite often, surprisingly often, in fact, the telling of those anecdotes are strangely similar.
I haven’t bothered with Carlos Baker’s or Philip Young’s because those were written very soon after Hemingway’s death (in fact, Young’s was written while he was still alive) or A.E. Hotchner’s memoir. Hotchner seems to have been something of a hanger-on, although this was encouraged by Hemingway who couldn’t do without an audience for his increasingly tall tales (I’ve mentioned quite a few here I think). From what I gather (from reading later biogs) all three are rather to hagiographic, especially Hotchner who from most accounts comes across as something of an arse-licker, again something Hemingway will have appreciated.
The later biogs — by Jeffrey Meyers, James Mellow and the five volume work by Michael Reynolds as well as Verna Kale — sound a more sceptical note and don’t, thank the Lord, take on trust all the crap Hemingway put out there about himself. (The guy was an extraordinary braggart and, as he got older, outright liar.)
Here’s a good example: in December 1922 Hemingway was in Lausanne reporting on the peace conference and, according to Hemingway, a fellow journalist had shown an interest in his fiction and wanted to see more. Hadley as due to join him there, but her departure was postponed because she had the ’flu, and when she finally went, she packed almost all the work he had so far completed (several stories and a novel in progress) into a valise to take with her. While waiting for her train to depart from the Gare de Lyon, she left her suitcase and the valise in her compartment while she went of to get a bottle of water. When she got back her suitcase was still there, but the valise was gone.
The accepted tale in most biographies simply repeats Hemingway’s account that when Hadley arrived and told him the bad news, he almost immediately took a train to Paris to see if there was some way he could track down the stolen valise and spent the next three days doing so. The visit also, he says, took in a meal with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas at which they tried to console him over his loss. His search proving fruitless, however, he returned to Lausanne. All fine and dandy, and a great anecdote underlining the dedication of a single-minded writer concerned solely with ‘his art’ (the kind of image Hemingway liked to portray). Except, according to Reynolds, it just isn’t true.
Unlike the other biographers, Reynolds took the trouble to do a bit of sleuthing, comparing dates in personal diaries and letters, and discovering that not only could Hemingway not have had a meal with Stein and Toklas (because they weren’t in Paris in December and didn’t return (from their place in the country) until the spring but that Hemingway didn’t return to Paris until January 1923, with Hadley.
Reynolds wrote his biography in five volumes and in the introduction to the second (Hemingway: The Paris Years), he makes a point of stressing that he chose not to include in ‘facts’ about Hemingway’s life which he could not verify independently. That doesn’t necessarily imply they weren’t true, but he doesn’t include any claims made solely by Hemingway. And one such claim is that he rented a garret room in a house (some accounts say an hotel) at no 39 rue Descartes (alternatively the rue Mouffetard, depending upon your source) to do his writing because the flat in which he and Hadley lived was too cramped. A telling touch is that according to Hemingway the Decadent poet Paul Verlaine died in the same house (or the same room, again depending upon your source) 25 years earlier.
The problem is that Hemingway is the sole source for the ‘fact’ that he did rent a garret room there (and, as I say, it could well be true). He wrote about it in his memoir A Moveable Feast but there is no other record of his doing so. Oh, and according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/Verlaine-Paul Verlaine died ‘in Eugénie Krantz’s lodgings’ and according to a piece in the New York Times or his ‘shabby two-room lodgings’ according to other sources.
Of course, all three could be the same building, but my point is that it all somehow simply burgeons Hemingway’s artistic credentials. And it is difficult to square that claim — that because his flat was too cramped he felt obliged to rent a room elsewhere in which to write — with his other claims that he wrote in bed of a morning and/or that he spent his time writing in cafes. All accounts sound suitably romantic, but all accounts somehow don’t gell. Call me an old cynic, but . . .
I have also wondered, although this is not a point I have come across anywhere in any biography why, for a man who spent says he spent a great deal of time ‘working hard’ in those early years in Paris he produced so bloody
As a guy who in 44 years working as a hack, first as a reporter then as a sub-editor, finds it comparatively easy to deal with words, it’s odd that Hemingway, also a hack who turned out news stories, seems to have found it such a challenge if he was obliged to re-write and re-write his fiction again. Going by what eventually appeared in print — which to my mind is no great shakes by a long stretch despite the ‘critical acclaim’ — you do wonder what all the bloody fuss was about. But then ‘the fuss’ all comes from Hemingway. And, I must add, pretty much as always. Viva Michael Reynolds, who took a more sceptical view.
But it is late and my reservoir of bile is running low. Time to go to bed to replenish it and renew attack on the idiot another time when I have more energy. Anyway, I’d now like to retire to watch an episode or two of Cheers on my iPad.
Pip, pip.
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