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Hemingway Achieves the Fifth Dimension

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Frederic I. Carpenter*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley 4

Extract

In Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway prophesied: “The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if anyone is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension that can be gotten.” Since then many critics have analyzed the symbols and mythical meanings of Hemingway's prose. A few have tried to imagine what he meant by “a fourth and fifth dimension.” But most have agreed that the phrase is pretty vague.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 69 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1954 , pp. 711 - 718
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954

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References

1 See esp. Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton, 1952), and Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1952).

2 Joseph Warren Beach, “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” Sewanee Rev., lix (Spring 1951), 311-328; Harry Levin, “Observations on the Style of Hemingway,” Kenyon Rev., xiii (Autumn 1951), 581-609; Malcolm Cowley, The Portable Hemingway (New York, 1944), “Introd.”

3 See Bergson, Durée et Simultanéité: à propos de la théorie d'Einstein (Paris, 1922).

4 I use the term “mystical” in its most general sense, to describe any intense experience or “ecstasy” which results in insight or “illumination.” I have defined this kind of mysticism at length in my Emerson Handbook (New York, 1953), pp. 113-116.

5 See R. P. Warren, “Hemingway,” Kenyon Rev., ix (Winter 1947), 1-28.

6 A New Model of the Universe (1st publ. 1931, rev. ed., New York, 1950), p. 375.

7 For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York, 1940), p. 72.

8 See Joseph Beaver, “ ‘Technique’ in Hemingway,” College English (March 1953), 325-328.