HEMINGWAY FESTIVAL 2024

TODAY it takes historical perspective to realize Ernest Hemingway was the most important literary modernist of the 20th Century. Whoever’s #2 isn’t close.

Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound were there before him– huge influences on his work. It took Ernest Hemingway to use their insights and innovations to create truly compelling new work which engaged the greater reading public. If experimentation is just for a tiny circle of aficionados, what’s the point?

What were the modernist insights?

One of them surely was that less is more. As with impressionist painting, you don’t need to describe every minute aspect of a scene or event. A few striking details is enough. Our brains fill in the rest. We need some description of course– but it needs to be artfully handled.

Several studies show, for instance, that presenting too many choices causes the brain to tune out. (Here’s one article about it.)

YET what do we get from, say, a Don Delillo? An endless recitation of data. The ethos of this age. Data! And ever more of it. Sentences piled upon sentences. Information and more information. This isn’t art, but the absence of art.

(Something’s loaded down alright, and I kinda think it’s the narrative.)

AS his writing style engaged the public, Ernest Hemingway engaged the world– via wars, traveling, hunting, fishing, boxing, partying– and in the process created the classic Hemingway persona.

(photo c/o cooperhemingway.com)

He became that most horrific of literary animals– a celebrity! (Gasps from the status quo intellectual crowd.) For a brief period of time, writers mattered. Literature mattered– was at the center of society and the world, as it clearly isn’t now.

-Karl Wenclas