Ernest Hemingway

About Graphic Novels

–and their potential influence on literature.

Graphic novels and comic books aren’t taken seriously by literary people, even though they’re an offshoot of the novel (19th century melodrama; early 20th century pulp fiction), and are a gateway for many readers to the novel.

The basic building block for the narrative comic book is the panel. Mini-paintings or portraits, usually with words added. When they’re not, the stand-alone illustration is meant to make a point– to emphasize a key plot moment, even depict the story’s climax. The result: interconnected micro-chapters. Dialogue is used sparingly but well. The graphic novel embodies the principle of “less is more.” A single sentence or lone illustration carries meaning beyond itself. The technique works on not spelling everything out. On not having to spell everything out, a principle used first by impressionist painters, impressionist music composers like Debussy, and by 20th century modernist writers Georges Simenon and Ernest Hemingway.

“It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg Address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.” -Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was heavily influenced by Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne. Like Stephen Crane, Hemingway saw literature as a visual art.

USING THE TECHNIQUE

JUST AS the comic book/graphic novel was an outgrowth of popular novels, there’s no reason why serious fiction writers can’t in turn be influenced by the graphic novel. “The graphic novel without graphics.”

Ways to do this:

1.) More striking, over-the-top characters.

2.) More dramatic plots.

3.) Short mini-or-micro chapters, to emphasize each plot moment– and to keep the narrative moving at a faster pace than traditional literature. All part of what I call multidimensional writing.

ADVANTAGES OVER GRAPHICS

What graphic novels can’t do is get inside the heads of their characters. This can be used in multidimensional writing, as in traditional fiction, without going full Henry James-Virginia Woolf “stream of consciousness.” One of the failings of contemporary writing is the trend toward alt-lit/autofiction-style solipsism, which often as not cuts out the actual world: the tragedies and happenings of now. Which is a shame, given today’s contentious chaotic happenings begging to be intelligently addressed with understanding, compassion and outrage.

One of the strengths of multidimensional fiction is the ability to present a variety of viewpoints, quickly switching between them for a rounded, three-dimensional effect.

As we’ve begun doing with some (not all) of our writing. Including the just-released novella, The Loud Boys— now available in ebook form at Amazon. Print version coming soon.

-Karl Wenclas

Why Hemingway Matters

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

About Modernist Literature

A RANT

WHAT TRUE MODERN LITERATURE SHOULD LOOK LIKE

FUNNY: Modernist writers Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and their famous protege, Ernest Hemingway, saw the key to moving literary art forward in removing Victorian-era verbiage. They stressed “economy of language.” They saw modernism in the same terms as modernist painters, architects and designers: via simplicity and clarity. Eliminating the unnecessary to get to the core emotion beneath. Hemingway’s own prose, beginning with his earliest in our time vignettes, embodies this philosophy.

I ASK, then, how did we arrive at the piled-on unreadable verbiage of High Literary Modernism? A combination of Henry James sentence fetish, detail disease, and word clot? Run-on Joyce Faulkner Woolf paragraphs of stream-of-consciousness nonsense within endless Proustian narratives, through which the reader haplessly hopefully wades, as if digging through a garbage dump, until said reader, stupefyingly bored after hundreds or thousands of pages, at last cries out, “Enough!”

WHO PRAISED these High Modernist con artists? Who made them an essential inextricable part of the literary Canon– the art’s Pantheon– while more accessible and frankly more intelligent authors were expunged? High Modernists are held up to gullible students as role models, but in reality they’re giant OBSTACLES preventing the art from moving forward.

OUR STANCE at New Pop Lit is that Ernest Hemingway was not an end point of modernist writing, but a beginning, marking a path to take– one of outward-looking, in-the-real-world expectation and experience. A clear-eyed, clear-headed plunge into the world of now, connecting DIRECTLY and immediately with readers in electric communication– a current of art running through readers like a surge of energy.

THAT’S the path to follow. New art which wakes up the stunned sleepy public to announce, “Literature is BACK!” Then spreading across the planet.

Anyway, that’s the plan.

-Karl Wenclas