cubism
Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Fri, 06 Mar 1998 08:38:51 +0000
I was very engaged by Mattis's piece on literary cubism.
It had never occurred to me before that Hemingway's
early prose might be seen as a parallel to that movement
which was being developed in the visual arts around the same
time. Insofar as they both entail something radical & simplifying
I can see that there's something to be said for it.
I personally find though that the effects, as far as the reader
or viewer is concerned, are quite different.
To explode a visual image & reduce it to its component geometric
shapes moves it back, to some extent, from what it represents.
The viewer sometimes has to make a distinct effort to recognise
what he's meant to be seeing & is often left with the feeling of
the artist at play, someone horsing around, experimenting.
The enjoyment offered is essentially `fun'.
Hemingway's brilliant early stuff doesn't affect me that way
at all. I don't feel as if I'm being invited to look at things from
some intriguing new viewpoint. It may be a purely personal
reaction, but I don't have the feeling of Hemingway disintegrating
the world & then inviting me to reassemble it. He does the work
all too powerfully *for* his reader. Nor does his writing have any
great quality of `fun'. It feels, rather, as if he had shaved off
one of the layers protecting the nerve endings, leaving the real
world to makes its impact in an uncomfortably immediate way.
On the other hand, Salinger *does* to some extent go in for cubism -
as now defined. Those endlessly modifying clauses & the
multifaceted way Buddy presents Seymour, for example, is not
unlike a painting by Duchamp or Picasso. With Salinger more is
better, whereas with Hemingway less is more.
At a purely personal level, I find writers who concern themselves
with the recreation of the `real' world more compelling than those
whose interests are essentially spiritual or moral. Which is the
reason, I suppose, that Hemingway will always make my heart turn
over in a way that Salinger only ever did once - when he created
Holden.
Scottie B.