4 - Critical Theories Take Hold: The Mid-1970s to Mid-1980s

Summary

IN HIS BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY on Hemingway of 1989, Bruce Stark pointed out that “[i]n an academic field that has become an industry,” “production stimulates production” as Bernard Oldsey puts it, and “the more that’s written on a subject, the more significant the subject seems, and the more significant it seems the more secondary (tertiary) will be the matters that seem worth going into” (Stark 407, quoting Oldsey, 144). This phenomenon certainly came strongly into play in Hemingway criticism from the late sixties on. The Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual began publication in 1969 and continued for a decade. The journal Hemingway notes was published from 1971 to 1974, then again from 1979 to 1981, when it was superseded by The Hemingway Review. In 1976, Jackson Benson counted a total of 67 books and 234 articles about Hemingway and his works published in just the years 1971 to 1974, with 21 specifically on The Sun Also Rises (Noble 20). An important development that fostered the continuance of this growth in Hemingway scholarship was the opening of the Hemingway Collection of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, which made Hemingway’s manuscripts available to scholars.1 Carlos Baker’s publication of The Selected Letters in 1981 also had a stimulating effect. In short, the Hemingway industry was in full swing during the seventies and eighties, and still the critical streams diverged, with psychoanalytical studies, influence studies, investigations of ritual and religion, studies of how money worked in the novel, studies of its style, and early feminist readings, along with manuscript readings to justify whatever point of view was being advanced — there was no cohesion, but many descriptions of various parts of the elephant. Kate Millett in her Sexual Politics, the groundbreaking book of early feminism in 1970, did not mention Hemingway, but rather scrutinized the attitudes of D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer. Judith Fetterley, in an inflammatory attack that claimed Hemingway hated women, dealt only with A Farewell to Arms, not The Sun Also Rises, and then scrupulously assaulted only its character Frederic Henry, not Hemingway. Hemingway also appeared as a character in the works of other writers, including Tennessee Williams (Clothes for a Summer Hotel), Ray Bradbury (“The Kilimanjaro Device”), as well as many lesser-known authors; he was also portrayed in biographical plays and a television mini-series (by Stacy Keach in 1988).