Faulkner v. Hemingway

E.L. Doctorow's recent essay on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying has set me to thinking about the two big American writers of the modern period: Faulkner and Hemingway.  Doctorow begins his essay, which appeared in the New York Review of Books, with a brief and inconclusive comparison of the two rivals.  Though Faulkner and Hemingway are opposites in so many ways, I've always seen them as going together: the two sides of the coin that, together, mark the currency of the American literary culture of the first half of the twentieth century. 

Hemingway, of course, took the global view, his settings ranging from Michigan and Montana to Europe and Africa, but his characters almost inevitably assess the role that the American individual plays in these places.  Faulkner, by contrast, famously and deliberately limited his range, with a few odd exceptions, to the borders of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, his own "native postage stamp of soil."  Whereas Hemingway's protagonists, with the partial exception, perhaps, of the old man Santiago, seem like circumstantially distinct iterations of the same principle of identity (each an alternate version of Nick Adams, himself an alternate version of the writer himself), Faulkner's novels are so variously plotted that they often lack a single protagonist, and the characters are diverse and far-reaching, though most always Southerners: various Snopeses, Bundrens, Compsons, among many others, including both masculine and feminine, both black and white (and the potentially black and white Joe Christmas).  That Faulkner dared to write seventy-some odd pages from the perspective of a mentally retarded narrator says much about the distinctive plurality of Faulkner's narrative vision.

Each writer was a great stylist, each a purveyor of his own particular and peculiar idiom, often imitated (and parodied) but never successfully copied.  Both started from the same place: late 19th-/early 20th-century American realism: Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson, among others, with their emphasis on regional life, on vernacular, on stories that seek to capture realities of the human experience.  Hemingway would take this realist approach (more in the mode of Anderson than of Twain) through a brief tour of the Michigan peninsula before steaming off to Europe, to the wars that defined the time.  Hemingway would make the terse prose of realism more terse, testing the boundaries of a certain kind of experimental minimalism, excluding everything that could be excluded to create a prose style that is eminently distinctive, that always keeps its reader thinking and guessing, looking over the text to find out who is speaking, to find out what has happened, to find out what it means.  The result is that we pay attention to Hemingway's words.  Joan Didion's 1998 essay in the New Yorker, marking (and, in Didion's own gradual and skillful way, condemning) the publication of the posthumous "Hemingway" novel True at First Light, will always seem to me the defining assessment of Hemingway's prose style, of his eminent skill as a crafstman (that is, to those who still believe there is something to be gained from literature, as an artist).  Didion defines two kinds of writers, or perhaps two kinds of people: those who care about words and those who don't.  She sets (again in a subtle and skillful way) Hemingway very significantly among those who do.  That Hemingway's prose style seems to us less novel, less experimental, less adventurous to us than Faulkner's does is to some extent a sign of the tremendous influence Hemingway has had on the craft of prose writing -- both in fiction and in nonfiction.  We are writing and reading everywhere, whether we like it or not, in the shadow of this giant.  In the end, I assume that Hemingway's style required more labor than Faulkner's.  The process of trimming, of scrutinizing each word and assessing its necessity, its relationaship to every other word in the text, must have been part of what drove the author literally to the point of ill mental health.

Faulkner took the realist approach (varying between the modes of Twain and Anderson, though it is Melville who rings in most clearly in Faulkner's prose stylings) in the opposite direction: he made it more real by making it more strange(1).  Whereas Hemingway cut things, Faulkner added them.  Faulkner magnified the focus on place till he had honed in with cartographical precision on one particular and discrete place, and then he examined every character, every situation, every detail, from every possible angle (and from a few impossible angles, as well) until the reader gains a kind of fly's eye perspective on things: several images coming together not in stereoscopic clarity but in juxtaposition to each other, in collage.  This approach is most evident in The Sound and the Fury, with its four different narrators, and in As I Lay Dying, with so many narrators I had to take the book from the shelf and count them out before I'd venture to offer a number (which is fifteen, it turns out). 

Hemingway looked for the one way to say something; Faulkner looked for the many ways to say something, but he typically chose the most complex and convoluted approach to saying it.  That Faulkner used big multisyllabic words and a more Latinate diction, that he played so relentlessly with perspectives, does not necessarily make his work more difficult or more experimental(2).  Try teaching The Sun Also Rises or "Hills Like White Elephants" to a group of high school students, and you'll know what I mean.  Certain key elements in Hemingway do not emerge as self-evident.  Not that Faulkner is by any means easier than his reputation purports him to be -- it's just that Hemingway is not as easy as his reputation purports him to be. 

It is quite clear that Faulkner cared about words as well, but with a difference: Faulkner unmistakeably loved words, so much so that one suspects that in any particular work he would have used them all if he could have, some of them more than once.  Thus Hemingway emerges from the journalistic tradition, which has for its foundation the strict necessity of words in the conveyance of information, while Faulkner emerges from the poetic tradition, which has for its foundation the aesthetic potential of words.  This is not say that Hemingway could not be poetical or that (once you dig through the layers of narrative detail)  Faulkner could not be a journalistic presenter of story, but this difference captures the essential trajectory of each writer.  Faulkner's prose is magisterial but heavily freighted; Hemingway's, by contrast, is always in a low, even register, so light that it sometimes seems to blow away before you've fully felt it. 

Finally, both men do, in a way, bring their individual concerns and preoccupations to bear in their work.  Hemingway does so in a blunt and well-celebrated and equally well-derided way: most of his stories and novels are about parallel-universe iterations of the life he lived.  All of Hemingway's personal neuroses are on display in rather blunt fashion in his work(3).  Hemingway's obsession with the stereotypically masculine behavior of his times is probably what made him so popular in the man's world the living man inhabited, but which threatens to derail his legacy completely in our times, alienating a contemporary audience comprising individuals who have either moved past all that dated he-man stuff or have traded in the machismo of the author's time for a more contemporary brand of the same thing.  Hemingway's sexism -- his shallow, innaccurate, incomplete, or just plain odd portrayal of women characters in his stories and novels -- has succeeded in alienating (Didion notwithstanding) a sizeable chunk of the human population.  For his ideas, Hemingway might just not seem very relevant anymore.  We don't see the giant anymore -- we can't; we only see his shadow.  What we have to do with that shadow, though, is to extrapolate back to the giant himself, to see what he meant in his time and place. 

What are Faulkner's neuroses?  Perhaps they are more typical, less the result of ingrained psychological wounds than they are the result of the situations of the man's life: poor success in pursuing his romantic ambitions (followed up by a qualified success in the second act, when he eventually succeeded in his courtship of Estelle Oldham, the married woman he had pursued for over a decade), struggles with money, alcoholism(4).  Faulkner also struggled to define his place in the world, wanting initially to live the kind of life Hemingway lived -- a life abroad -- instead of what he ultimately embraced: a kind of panoramic and self-aware provincialism.  Faulkner relentlessly explores the issue of what the South means.  His body of work might be seen even as a set of theories on the meaning of the American South.

All of this leaves us with the question of which writer is more relevant to the literary present, to the literary future.  Again, we have two sides of one coin.  You cannot understand the culture of American literary modernism without reading -- and reading deeply -- both authors.  Hemingway may give us an outmoded way of seeing the world, but it was still a profoundly influential way of seeing the world.  Thus Hemingway is no longer modern as we are modern --just as Shakespeare and Dickens are no longer modern.  In the time, just over half a century, since his death, the world has inevitably changed.  We see, on the surface, a Hemingway no longer relevant, but underneath a Hemingway who is no less fascinating, or perhaps more so because now we can see him for what he truly was, one who struggled with a sense of uncertainty, who felt always the need to prove himself, who embodied certain experiences of the era in which he lived.  Maybe we don't merely see the shadow, after all.  I think that we may, in fact, be able to understand Hemingway from a privileged perspective now, one that people in his own time could not. In Faulkner, we have a figure more in tune with the great overarching 20th century concerns of American society: race, class, and gender.  We look through a window, a window of a singular gothic house rising out the swamp, and a scene bespeaking these concerns unfolds.  Thus, again, we have the drama of the individual and the social drama.  Both are part of the American psychology, and you can't understand one without the other.

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(1) Consider what music critic Greil Marcus had to say about traditional American folk music: that it was evidence of "the old, weird America."  Along these lines, Hemingway might be said to explore the psychology of the individual -- an individual whose consciousness is inevitably modeled after his own -- whereas Faulkner plumbs the collective consciousness of American identity.  What Faulkner finds is a truer, weirder America than any of us suspected was there.

(2) By calling both writers "experimental," I mean essentially that they were great stylists, great self-editors who considered the varying potentials of different vocabularies, different syntactical structures, different architectonics.  To a lesser or greater extent, all writers do this, but rarely in so deliberately and self-consciously a way as Hemingway and Faulker did.

(3) Perhaps not all.  As the man grew older, his work could not keep pace with the number and intensity of his problems.

(4) Faulkner certainly shared alcoholism in common with his literary nemesis, but with this crucial difference: Hemingway's work always revolves around the drinking habits of his characters, whereas Faulkner's does occasionally.  I wonder, though, the extent to which alcohol truly contributed to Hemingway's troubled life story.  Once you get past the prominent role the props of alcoholic behavior play in the fiction, other problems dominate the scene.  Alcoholism may have been more a symptom of disease than the disease itself.  By contrast, alcohol played a very direct role in Faulkner's demise: he is reported to have been plastered drunk during the riding incident that resulted in his death.  In terms of money, Hemingway never seemed to be at much of a lack of it, and neither did most of his "code heroes."  The typical Hemingway protagonist seems never to be worried about money: he can always get more from a grandfather somewhere who will send him sight drafts.  Faulkner always seemed to be in need of money, by contrast, and many of his characters who have it know only how to lose it.