Comment by mykowebhn
6 years ago
On the one hand I feel Hemingway was being sincere when he said/wrote this quote. On the other hand, part of me feels he was saying this just to be provocative.
Also, I'm not sure anyone has ever told me "Actually..." when I've explained what I thought I read. If this was a teacher/professor of yours he/she did you a huge disservice.
I can think of two reasons (I'm sure there are more) for why artists say what they want to say indirectly.
1) Things tend to stick in our brains the more we have to work to gain that knowledge. If someone imparts knowledge to you and you take it in passively this knowledge tends not to stick around in our brains as well as if you had to struggle to acquire this knowledge.
2) Many times in our history what an artist said or wrote could get that artist killed. As a result, they tended to mask the true meaning of their message using allegory and/or metaphor.
From what I know of Hemingway, it's sincere.
The image he gives of himself (or imagines of himself) is a barrel chested beer swigging straight shooting Man's Man. He bullied "pencil necked" little Fitzgerald into alcoholism, and possibly abandoning his wife. He used a writing style that was the quintessential "no fluff" style of the period.
I don't know him but from what I know of him he would not be a fan of having untanned literary professors claiming his works were about more than literally just an old man pissing in the sea or a bull fighter fighting bulls.
> from what I know of him he would not be a fan of having untanned literary professors claiming his works were about more than literally just an old man pissing in the sea or a bull fighter fighting bulls.
... I think that's the point - even if it were more than that, he might not be a fan of admitting it.
Actually.. ;) Fitzgerald’s insane wife bullied him into alcoholism. Hemingway was more of a rum drinker and the main bully of the writers of the time was Gertrude Stein.
But your point still stands. Hemingway thought not highly of literary critics.
The fun thing about Hemingway was his persona was 50% real and 50% self-cultivated myth, except we can’t really tell which half was which. As far as his style, that was a direct result of his journalism training at the Kansas City Star. https://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/arts-culture/articl...
I don't think artists intentionally encode secret messages or deep meanings into their work, but it doesn't necessarily have to be intentional. Or you could just stop caring about intentionality and just acknowledge that you're basically cloudwatching.
Some do the structure of Gravity's rainbow for example.