Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Contrast
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
His fiction depicts an absurd, meaningless world. His characters are anti-social and individualistic. They reject conventional society and take refuge in vigorous, risky physical activity. Facing death and anger alone, they feel close to the ultimate truth about existence. His fiction is extremely masculine, and women are problematically portrayed. They appear aggressive and vampiric but also fragile. For him, the truth is bare, lean, and impacting. He mostly uses what has been called the ‘simple declarative sentence’. His style has been described as journalistic and of hard objectivity. His first novel is The Sun Also Rises, set in post-war Paris.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
He is one of the first writers to report the rise of a new form of popular culture (the cinema) and of a new class of people associated with it (Hollywood actors and producers). The touch of disaster appears in his 1920s works, in the violence, brutality, and indifference on behalf of the rich towards people who suffer or are somehow disadvantaged. For example, in The Great Gatsby, Tom hits his lover and breaks her nose. His characters are set in a world of money, leisure, and parties, ending up in addiction and mental disease. This represents his own life. He took care with the choice of words and the rhythm and structure of his sentences.
Interiorization of Mimesis
Modernism, for the most part, furthers interiorization and promotes an inward turning of the novel and poetry. The novel, poetry, and even drama will try to convey movements of consciousness, the different thoughts that cross through a character’s mind, since that is where the interesting material is. Once we focus on psychology, literary convention shakes; traditional narrative or naturalist discourse is inadequate to portray the inner mind. Underlying this interest in interiority, there is an implicit criticism of the existing social system. The inward turning of the novel brought about an expansion of the usual topics of literature. During Modernism, writers started to deal with taboo topics such as sexuality. Ulysses, for example, contains scenes of masturbation. In addition to sexuality, themes like psychological alienation, madness, and nervous disorders were also represented. This interest in interiority reinforces the idea that Modernism can be seen as a new form of Realism.
Aesthetic of Imagism
- Hard images, underlying the idea that poetry before had been soft, blurry, and vague. Now it is concrete, precise, and sharp-edged.
- Rejection of narrative discursive elements. Imagism demands a concentration on poetic matter: the object, thing, poetically rendered.
- Rejection of metaphysics was focused on concrete, everyday objects, sensations, and ‘street’ emotions and also in giving poetic form to aspects of modern existence.
- Against subjectivism and emotion; but instead, objects, images, and things are present.
- Conciseness and freedom, sparing and using the minimum number of words and free rhymes.
- The revival of antiquity, such as Classical Greek and Egyptian art, the Japanese Haiku; and primitive art, like African or Indian ones.