8 - “Hemingway”: Site for Competing Theories (1991–1999)

Summary

WRITING IN 1992, PETER MESSENT (1992b) said that one positive aspect of recent Hemingway criticism was that it had begun the process of replacing the image of him as the poster boy for the all-American male with a more nuanced view of his life and work. No longer was there universal agreement that Hemingway's work presented a monolithic picture of “an existentialist figure” confronting “an indifferent world” in a stoic fashion (270). Messent cited the contributions of feminist criticism, the new psychoanalytic approaches of Kenneth Lynn and Ben Stoltzfus, Spilka's analysis of the influence of androgyny, the efforts of critics (like Messent himself) to rehistoricize him, and the work of structuralists to provide sophisticated analyses of the fiction. A new portrait of Hemingway was emerging, he said, “that of a self-reflexive but also a self-divided writer, deeply concerned with the subject of modernity and its meaning, writing fictions which obsessively explore issues concerning the instability of gender roles, which deny epistemological coherence, and where repetition and renewal exist in dense and unresolvable relations to one another” (275).

An excellent snapshot of the status of Hemingway studies can be seen in editor Frank Scafella's (1991) Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment. Although not comprehensive, the volume provides insight into the broad lines of inquiry being pursued after the opening of the Hemingway Papers at the Kennedy Library and the publication of The Garden of Eden. Scafella pointed out the importance of these events, noting that Hemingway's unpublished writings present a writer radically different from the one known by his own contemporaries and the scholarly world for nearly six decades. Established and emerging Hemingway scholars, including Scott Donaldson and Michael Reynolds, explain how, even with the new evidence, writing Hemingway's life story remains a complicated task. A group of essays loosely focused around the topic of “psychology” examine Hemingway's life and fiction from various theoretical viewpoints. James Phelan's narratological examination of A Farewell to Arms and Ben Stoltzfus's Lacanian reading of The Old Man and the Sea illustrate how new approaches to literary study could be used to expose hitherto undiscovered dimensions of Hemingway's oeuvre.