Ernest Hemingway, F.

Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). Ernest Hemingway's fiction depicts an absurd,

meaningless world. His characters are somewhat anti-social and individualistic. They
reject conventional society and take refuge in vigorous, risky physical activity. (They
are often fighters in wars, big-game hunters, or fishermen, as in The Old Man and the
Sea, or in the unfinished Islands in the Stream). Facing death and danger alone, they
feel close to the ultimate truth about existence, which is its futility and ultimate
absurdity.
The world of Hemingway's fiction is extremely masculine, dominated by men.
Women are problematically portrayed. They appear as aggressive and vampiric or else
as weak and fragile. But males are quite problematic as well; they are solipsistic, self-
isolated, unable to find roots and affection, or to establish meaningful bonds with
others. Interpersonal relationships are usually doomed by miscommunication and by a
fatalistic feeling that they do not matter after all. An example is The Sun Also Rises,
Hemingway's first novel. It is set in post-war Paris. Its protagonists are an American
writer-journalist and an aristocrat British lady; they love each other but the
relationship cannot be fulfilled. It is hinted that he was wounded in war and because of
this, has become impotent. For her part, she has dozens of lovers, going from one
affair to the next, all in an attempt to make up for the fact that she cannot be with him.
Hemingway's style is spare, characterized by its absolute economy of language,
detail, and situation. Verbosity is rejected as inauthentic. For Hemingway, "the truth"
is bare, lean, and impacting. As a result his fictions are very elliptical, at times barely
fleshed out. He uses mostly what has been called the "simple declarative sentence."
His style has often been described as journalistic, possibly learned when he worked as
a reporter for the Kansas City Star, before leaving as a volunteer for World War I. It
has also been called a style of "hard objectivity." It usually presents things from an
external perspective, and for that reason it has also been compared to a "camera eye"
view.
Hemingway's most celebrated works are his novels from the 1920s: In Our
Times, 1925; The Sun Also Rises, 1926; A Farewell to Arms, 1929. Although the
early fiction is focused on individualistic heroes, in the 1930s works there is a usual
defense of social engagement and a concern with community. This was in part a
response to the mood of the period, which, as we will see, stressed solidarity and unity
in the face of crisis. Works of this period are To Have and Have Not (1937) and For
Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Later works, however, return to the solitary protagonists.
Most popular among them was The Old Man and the Sea (1953).

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940). He claimed his writing was about "the flight
of the rocket"--the provisional title for his novel The Beautiful and Damned--that is,
about "the flash and wide flare that forerun the predestined catastrophe." Like this
quote indicates, his literary universe is the glittering, fast-moving world of the upper
classes enjoying "the jazz age"--the era of hedonism and economic prosperity that
followed the war. Scott Fitzgerald's work chronicles the rise of new fortunes in this
period. He is also one 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 stars,
producers, directors, scriptwriters.)
In an autobiographical sketch, Fitzgerald himself described the background of
his fictional world: "The uncertainties of 1919 were over - there seemed little doubt
about what was going to happen - America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree
in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it. The whole golden boom
was in the air - its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous
death struggle of the old America in Prohibition. All the stories that came into my
head had a touch of disaster in them." ("Early Success," 1937)
The "touch of disaster" appears, in Fitzgerald's 1920s works, in the violence,
brutality, or/and indifference, on the part of the rich, towards people who suffer or are
somehow disadvantaged. (For example, in The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan hits his
lover Myrtle and breaks her nose in the middle of a drunken spree.) In his later novels
and short stories this tragic streak becomes more obvious. The world of money,
leisure, parties, and dissipation which his characters inhabit is the setting for
trajectories of personal disintegration, addiction, and mental disease. This, in a way,
mimes Fitzgerald's own personal life, which also had a touch of disaster in it. He was
a great success early in his career, with novels like This Side of Paradise (1920) or
The Beautiful and Damned (1922). But as he grew older, both the public and the
critics turned their back on him. By the late 1930s, his stories were poorly paid and all
of his early work was out of print. The end of his life was marked by his losing fight
with alcoholism, depression, and bankrupcy. In addition, his wife, Zelda, was
diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1931, when she was thirty-one, and, after that point,
she spent most of her life in mental hospitals. She died in a fire in 1948, when the
hospital where she was at the time burned down.
Fitzgerald was a great stylist. He was highly praised by Gertrude Stein, who
said he was the only writer of his generation who “wrote in sentences”--which means
that he took extreme care not only with the choice of words but with the rhythm and
structure of his sentences. These have a very peculiar flow and rhythm of their own.
The beauty of his language contrasts with the moral squalor his works often describe
and condemn.

Works: the novels This Side of Paradise (1920); The Beautiful and Damned (1922);
The Great Gatsby (1925); Tender is the Night (1934); The Last Tycoon (Unfinished).

Short-story collections: Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age
(1922), Taps at Reveille (1935), and the posthumous collection, The Pat Hobby
Stories, about Pat Hobby, ironic, mild, detached alter-ego: a fairly unremarkable
screen writer immersed in the Hollywood scene. This last collection not widely known
but well worth reading. In addition, there is an interesting, also posthumous collection
of reflections and essays: The Crack-Up.
William Faulkner (1897-1962). He was the most experimental of the modernist
fiction writers. The history, landscape, and people of the South, and particularly of
Mississippi, his native state, are the main themes and settings for his fiction.
Hence, his work provides an unusual combination of localism, with local color
themes such as the wilderness, rural life, etc, and modernism --subjectivism, formal
fragmentation, experiments with narrative voice and perspective.
In the 1920s, when Faulkner started to write, Mississippi was largely a rural
state without big cities, characterized by relative poverty, underdevelopment and
isolation. Its society was divided between the rural gentry and the poor farmers, and
was also strictly segregated along color lines, with blacks suffering under white
racism. The Mississippi that appears in Faulkner's work reflects these real social
conditions. However, it is also a slightly mythologized land. Just like García Márquez,
who set his stories and novels in the imaginary town of Macondo, Faulkner set his
fiction in an imaginary geography: the county of Yoknapawtawpha, capital Jefferson.
But notice that it was Faulkner who influenced García Márquez, who started to write
in the late 1940s and early 1950s, not the other way round.
Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha is a symbol for the South as a whole. Through the
(imaginary) people, history, and legends of this imaginary county, Faulkner intends to
give a picture of the history and conflicts of the South. In this county there are several
families whose lives he writes about, and whose members recur in different works and
tales. It is a fairly consistent fictional universe that populates his extensive production.
The main characteristic of this county is its being a frustrated region trying to
relive its legendary past. This legendary past is the pre-war period of the great
plantations, worked with slave labor, and owned by a small class of white rich land-
owners. It was dominated by an aristocratic society which highly prized honor,
courage, and nobility. After the war, these values were replaced by commercialism,
industry, and individualism. In addition, the wealth of the dominant classes
diminished; with the opening of the Western territories, the South ceased to be the
main source of agricultural products such as cotton and tobacco. The decay of
Southern society after the war is a theme dear to Southern literature. In general,
Southern literature is nostalgic for the sort of pre-war society portrayed in novels and
films such as Gone with the Wind--a commercial best-seller of 1936 written by
Margaret Mitchell.
Faulkner does share this kind of nostalgia but he also shows that the legendary
Southern past was not merely heroic and idyllic; it was flawed by violence. It was
built on a double genocide: of the native Americans, from whom the land was forcibly
taken, and of the African-Americans, who were held as slaves. In some ways, the
Civil War was a foretold punishment for these originating acts of violence. In
Faulkner's works, past violence haunts characters in the present. They end up paying
for the weaknesses and the excesses of their ancestors.
From a formal perspective, the survival of the past in the present frequently
causes a break-up of the time-line and a confusion of narrative voices. The present and
the past become tightly interwoven in the telling of the story. The voices and thoughts
of characters in the present are haunted by those of their predecessors. At times the
transitions between the voices and times are not clearly demarcated; the narrative
abruptly shifts from the thoughts of a character living in the thirties (for example) to a
dream his great-grandfather had seventy years earlier. In the famous story "The Bear"
--in the collection Go Down Moses--the words of a narrator living in the 1930s are
interspersed with journal notes from the diaries of a slave-owning relative who lived
half a century before. Personal events are influenced by the collective history of the
region and characters compulsively reenact the violent deeds of their predecessors.
Their acts are determined by the environment they inhabit and by their historical
inheritance.
Faulkner is an exponent of the tradition of psychological horror represented as
well by E. A. Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and Henry James. Because of the combination of
localism with psychological horror, he has been called a writer of "Southern gothic".
Mixed with such tragic seriousness, there is in Faulkner considerable humor
(this is a frequently forgotten aspect of his work.) It shows particularly in his 1940s
work and in a cycle of novels dedicated to the Snopes family: The Hamlet (1940); The
Town (1957); and The Mansion (1959). Faulkner's irony can occasionally be glimpsed
in his famous short story, "A Rose for Emily" (1930).
Faulkner had a long and fruitful career. He wrote more than thirty titles--mostly
novels with some interesting short-story collections such as Go Down Moses or These
Thirteen. Although he wrote continuously right until the end of his life, his main (and
most innovative) works were written in the 1930s: Sanctuary; The Sound and the
Fury; The Wild Palms; Absalom, Absalom!; As I Lay Dying; and Light in August,
among others.