{"id":101,"date":"2018-11-15T23:39:51","date_gmt":"2018-11-15T23:39:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/?p=101"},"modified":"2018-11-15T23:54:27","modified_gmt":"2018-11-15T23:54:27","slug":"genderqueer-hemingway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/15\/genderqueer-hemingway\/","title":{"rendered":"Genderqueer Hemingway"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Hemingway's<\/a>

From the Film Adaptation of Hemingway’s Garden of Eden.<\/p><\/div>\n

I seem to have this irrational fear of scarcity when it comes to great novels.\u00a0 I keep worrying I will run out.\u00a0 Obviously (and thankfully!) this will never happen, but then again there are certain authors I really love reading almost without fail\u2026 and so I parcel out their books to myself very sparingly, because I dread that day when I will have read the author\u2019s last book.\u00a0 I should get over this habit because it has prevented me from reading a lot of great books.\u00a0 I should remind myself that if a book is truly awesome, I can read it more than once.\u00a0But, for now, there are a few authors I have faith in and I take some comfort in knowing that a few of their books are waiting for me.\u00a0 Donna Tartt, for instance\u2014I loved The Little Friend and The Goldfinch, but keep saving The Secret History for a rainy day.\u00a0 Haruki Murakami, who is thankfully prolific, and I\u2019ve read at least a half dozen of his novels, but need to prevent myself from always going straight to his shelf when it\u2019s time to choose a new book.\u00a0 Virginia Woolf, because wow.\u00a0 Michael Ondaatje, for the same reason.\u00a0 And then there is Ernest Hemingway\u2026<\/p>\n

I often run into resistance when I mention Hemingway.\u00a0I see different reasons why not everybody loves his writing; some people think his vocabulary is too small, his words aren\u2019t big enough, or his sentence structures are too simple.\u00a0 Others are fine with all that, but think his characters aren\u2019t fleshed out enough or that the plots aren\u2019t thick enough.\u00a0 Many different reasons, and you could say there is some literal truth to all of these statements\u2026 except really all that is missing the bigger picture.\u00a0 Hemingway does a ton of amazing things that happen beneath the surface.\u00a0 You might see three or four short, simple sentences and be unimpressed, but it\u2019s only because you\u2019ve neglected to notice the subtle friction arising between them.\u00a0 Lamenting the lack of bigger words, you fail to realize that bigger words would only stilt or water down the narrative drive.\u00a0 And you might think a character or plot are flat and nondescript, but then you are failing to read between the lines.<\/p>\n

All of that is only preface to my saying that this artistry fails in The Garden of Eden.<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0 The simple sentences and simple words have nothing behind them here, and no friction between them.\u00a0 The straightforward language seems blunt and empty.\u00a0 The characters have no life off the page and fall flat even when they are taking actions that should be evocative.<\/p>\n

This is a terrible shame, because I picked up the novel with high hopes, seeing that its focus was bisexuality, which I didn\u2019t know Hemingway had written about so openly.\u00a0 So I was curious.\u00a0 Coupled with that was an upbeat blurb on the novel from James Salter (one of the writers whose books I\u2019ve exhausted and wish there were more of).\u00a0 But what happens in The Garden of Eden<\/strong><\/em> is that the words fail.\u00a0I had a hard time identifying the story and engaging the characters.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t detect the friction below the surface and between the sentences. \u00a0It was a very hollow read, almost like reading some novice trying to mimic Hemingway.\u00a0 The short words and sentence structures were there, but they all failed.\u00a0Even the sweeping, multiple compounded simple sentence landscape descriptions felt hollow and evoked no images.\u00a0And with all that failing, the bisexuality and gender fluidity scenes felt like a farce.\u00a0 Catherine tells David that she will be the boy and he will be the girl.\u00a0 Other times they are both boys.\u00a0 They get identical bob haircuts, and Catherine dresses like a man.<\/p>\n

As I was reading, my impression was that Catherine was a true genderqueer and David was just sort of going along for the ride.\u00a0But Catherine had no real depth.\u00a0She was a flat character.\u00a0 They both fell flat.\u00a0 Her actions were simple and straightforward, mostly via dialogue, and lacked meaning and complexity.\u00a0 Then another woman comes into the picture and they both fall in love with her.\u00a0 In some ways, she is more interesting than both David and Catherine.\u00a0 She seems very much alive and her character jumps off the page more than the main characters, which is probably how most writers convey falling in love.\u00a0 Then the slow three-way romance begins, but it is very spare and hollow.\u00a0 Catherine enjoys being the man for this new woman, but also shows some trepidation and excitement to be the woman for her also.\u00a0Somewhere along the line, I just couldn\u2019t go on reading.\u00a0 I discovered a film version and decided to try it, but it was a faithful adaptation\u2014meaning that it, too, seemed hollow and untrue.<\/p>\n

It is said that Hemingway worked on this story for 15 years and couldn\u2019t get it to meet his expectations.\u00a0 I\u2019d like to believe that Hemingway was expressing his sensitivity and personal interest in bisexuality and gender fluidity.\u00a0 I\u2019d like to believe he wanted to express a part of himself that remained unwritten.\u00a0 I\u2019d like to believe that he was struggling not only against the confines of what was acceptable in his era, but also the confines of his personal experience as a writer and the gender roles that he had always previously employed. \u00a0But I can only speculate at his motivation because this novel is simply not fully realized. \u00a0Here is a writer known for plunging under icebergs barely dipping his toes with trepidation beneath the surface. \u00a0Decades after his death, they cobbled this book together and released it as a novel.\u00a0 Knowing this, I feel the criticism is more justly directed not at Hemingway, but at this book\u2019s editor and publisher.\u00a0 I choose to believe that if Hemingway had lived another ten years, this might have become something brilliant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I seem to have this irrational fear of scarcity when it comes to great novels.\u00a0 I keep worrying I will …<\/p>\n

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