Abstract
Being distinguished from many greatest American writers, Hemingway is noted for his writing style. Among all his works, The Old Man and the Sea is a typical one to his unique writing style and technique. The language is simple and natural on the surface, but actually deliberate and artificial. Sometimes the simple style is made a little different. The dialogue is combined with the realistic and the artificial. The simplicity is highly suggestive, and often reflects the strong undercurrent of emotion. Occasionally, the author uses some figures of speech. Hemingway’s style is related to his experience as a journalist, his learning from many famous writers, and most importantly, his conscientious effort in looking for a style of his own. The influence of his style is great all over the world.
The Old Man and the Sea is full of facts, most of which comes from Hemingway’s own experience. So the way to use facts is a very important writing technique in this novel. The facts in the novel are selected and used as a device to make the fictional world accepted. In the forepart of the novel, they are used to show the quality of Santiago’s life, and are narrated simply and naturally; while in the latter part of the novel, they are used from inside Santiago’s own consciousness and form part of a whole scheme of the novel.
Keywords: Facts; Simplicity; Artificial; Iceberg Theory
中文摘要
在众伟大的美国作家中，海明威以独特的写作风格而著称。在他所有的作品中，《老人与海》最能体现他独特的写作风格和手法。这部小说语言看似简洁自然，其实包含了作者的精心揣摩和润色加工。有时为了突出某一部分，作者会采用长句代替短句。文中的对话内容真实、贴近生活，而表达形式则经过了艺术加工。小说简洁自然的语言背后隐藏了深刻的意义和感情。文中还运用了比喻、拟人等修辞手法.还名位的这种独特风格与他当过新闻记者的经历有关,同时他兼菜各家之长,自成一体,形成了自己独特的创作方法和艺术风格。这种风格对整个世界文坛产生了重要的影响。
《老人与海》这部小说中运用了大量的事实,他们大多来自于作者亲身经历。海明威对这些事实精心选择,从而吸引读者的兴趣并使读者有一种身临其境的感觉。小说一开始用大量事实描写了主人公生活的环境,叙述风格简洁自然,未加任何感情色彩。随着情节的发展,大量的事实主要被运用于主人公的心理活动之中,而不是主要由作者来叙述。同时,这些事实构成了整个小说体系中不可缺少的一部分。
关键词：
事实；简洁；加工；冰山理论
Hemingway’s Writing Style and Techniques in The Old Man and the Sea
Introduction
Among many great American writers, Hemingway is famous for his objective and terse prose style. As the last novel Hemingway published in his life, The Old Man and the Sea typically reflects his unique writing style. This paper aims to discuss the writing style and techniques in The Old Man and the Sea. Of course, Hemingway has used many techniques in this novel, such as realism, the creation of suspense, monologue, etc. And this paper focuses especially on the language style and one of the important techniques-the way to use facts in this novel.
In his task of creating real people, Hemingway uses dialogue as an effective device. It is presented in a form “as close to the dramatic as possible, with a minimum of explanatory comment.”3 Here is an example chosen from The Old Man and the Sea:
‘What do you have to eat?’ the boy asked.
‘No, I will eat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?’
‘No, I will make it later on. Or I may eat the rice cold.’
Here we can see that such interpolations as “he said” have frequently been omitted and the words are very colloquial. Thus the speech comes to the reader as if he were listening. Hemingway has captured the immediacy of dialogue skillfully and has made the economical speech connotative.
But it is good to note that Hemingway’s style is deliberate and artificial, and is never as natural as it seems to be. The reasons are as follows. Firstly, in some specific moments, in order to stand out by contrast and to describe an important turning point or climax, the style is made a little different:
He took all his pain and what was left of his long gone pride and he put it against the fish’s agony and the fish came over on to his side and swam gently on his side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff, and started to pass the boat, long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water.5
The language in this one-sentence paragraph is different from other parts of the novel. Kenneth Graham has commented that the sentence builds up its parts in a carefully laborious sequence-“all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long gone pride”. It emulates the movement of the exhausted marlin and the physical strain of the old man. And it mounts to a heavy crescendo in the very un-prosaic inversion of adjectives-“long, deep, wide”-ending in the virtually poetic cadence, “interminable in the water.”6
The dialogue, too, is combined with the realistic and the artificial. Usually the content contains and the expression contains the artificial. In The Old Man and the Sea, the language style is very peculiar from Hemingway’s other writings. This is because the novel is an English version of the Spanish that Santiago and Mandolin would speak in real life. “Since we are meant to realize that Santiago and Mandolin could not possibly speak like this, since English is not his tongue anyway, we are more likely to accept other artificialities of the dialogue. Using the device of a pretended ‘translation’, which would be bound to stilt in any case, Hemingway can ‘poetize’ the dialogue as he wishes.”7 The speakers are distanced from readers to a certain degree. And while their language taking on a kind of epic dignity, it does not lose its convincingness. Even slightly strange exchanges like the following become fairly acceptable. For example:
‘You’re my alarm clock’, the boy said.
‘Age is my alarm clock’, the old man said. ‘Why do old man wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?’
‘I don’t know’, the boy said. ‘All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard’.
‘I can remember it’, the old man said. ‘ I’ll waken you in time.’8
The simple sentences and the repeated rhythms hit at the profundities that the surface of the language tries to ignore. Its simplicity is highly suggestive and connotative, and often reflects the strong undercurrent of emotion. Indeed, the more closely the reader watches, the less rough and simple the characters appear. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway uses an effective metaphor to describe his writing style:
If a writer of the prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.9
Among all the works of Hemingway, the saga of Santiago is thought as the most typical one to this Iceberg Theory. The author seldom expresses his own feelings directly, nor does he make any comments or explanations. On the contrary, he tries to narrate and describe things objectively and blend his own feelings harmoniously to the natural narration and description this gives readers a pictures compression, from which-the 1/8 of the iceberg above water, they can learn the implying meaning and feelings of the author- 7/8 of the iceberg under water. When Hemingway said of this story, “I tried to make a real old man, a real sea and real sharks”, he then went on to say, “But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.”10 So this novel has a great and significance conveyed by a compressed action. The core of the novel’s action is fishing. To the hero, fishing is not simply of contest in life. It contains profound philosophic meaning. In addition, two details-the baseball match and the hand wresting with the Negro, like fishing, symbolize the contention in life. They compensate and enrich the inner meaning of the main plot of fishing. So the simplicity of the novel is highly suggestive.
So Hemingway has formed of narrative and dialogue, though natural and simple on the surface, is actually deliberated and artificial. It combines elements that are realistic with elements that are stylized and heightened.
How Hemingway has formed such a writing style? The reason is related to his own experiences. “His use of short sentences and paragraphs and vigorous and positive language, and the deliberate avoidance of gorgeous adjectives are some of the traces of his early journalistic practices.”13 After leaving school at 17, he went to the Kansas City Star, which was one of the best newspapers in America at that time. He served as its eager and energetic reporter. As a journalist, Hemingway trained himself in the economy of expression. He once said that, during his working in Star, he had to learn to use simple sentences, which is very useful to him; and that the experience of working as a journalist would not do harm to a young writer, instead it is very helpful if he could cast it off timely. He laid stress on “speaking” with facts and objected groundless concoction in writing. His descriptions of details are full of factuality, and are as precise as news reports.
The influence of Hemingway’s language style is great. In the latter part of his life, Hemingway was known as “Papa Hemingway.”14 It refers mainly to his contribution to the development of a new writing style in America-the colloquial style. His simple word, short sentences and vividly colloquial language purity American novel. In England, which Miss Storm Jameson discussing “The Craft of the Novelist” in the January 1934 issue of The English Review, she advanced an explanation of Hemingway’s popularity:
It is this simplicity, this appeal to our crudest interests, which explains Hemingway’s success…In English at least his success has been largely with the intellectuals. Thy have praised his simplicity, his directness…15
When Hemingway’s death was reported on 3 July 1961, the obituary in The Tines pronounced pontifically:
No history of the literature of our time will be able to ignore his achievement or his far-reaching influence…his last masterpiece, The Old Man and The Sea, he remained a solitary both in achievement and style…16
And Hemingway’s influence as a stylist was “neatly expressed in the praise of the Noble Prize Committee about ‘his powerful style-forming mastery of the art’ of writing modern fiction.”17
Apart from the language style, which The Old Man and the Sea is famous for, the writing techniques in this novel are also worth paying close attention to. A very important one of them is the way to use facts. The main events of the story seem to be based on a real incident, which is described by Hemingway in an article about fishing in the Gulf Stream in Esquire for April 1936. So the novel of full facts, such as the habit of fish, the technique of catching marlin, the weather, the sea, and so on. But the power of the novel lies in the way to use these facts.
Firstly the facts are selected. “Hemingway’s old man, boy, sea, fish, and sharks are not so much built up in our minds, detail by detail, facts by facts, as drive into our mind by the force and the sympathy with which the author himself shares in their imaginary existence.”18 Like any realist, he relies on selection. When the giant marlin finally surfaces, his tail “was higher than a big scythe blade and a very pale lavender above the dark blue water.”19 Sargasso weed is bleached and yellow by day; Tuna are silver when they jump out if the water, but blue-backed and gold-sides when swimming. Hemingway never described them with excessively, but choose some effective ones. He uses them with a sense of how colors shift and change in their relationship. Without selection, there can be no intensity, and compression.
Secondly, the facts are used as a device to make the fictional word accepted. The novel is not simply a manual for us to study the technique to catch a fish or how to survive in a boat. The author tries to implicate people’s imagination in what is happening by appealing to our love of practical knowledge. This shows “the facts are fundamentally a device, a technique of reassuring our sense of everyday values.”20 So they can help to make us accept more readily what the author has invented and made more dramatic than in everyday life. Still take the use of color as example:
The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long green line with the gray-blue hills behind it. The water was a dark blue now, so dark that it was almost purple. As he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the plankton in the dark water and the strange light the sun made now.21
These facts show readers the process of fishing, which mostly comes from the author’s own experience. From these facts, which are vivid, precise and terse, readers can learn a lot about how to catch a fish and can also feel as if they themselves were catching a fish. Then they will have the sense that what the author describes is real and believable. Therefore, as Kenneth Graham has said, many facts in the novel about fishing and about the sea have a double function: they satisfy people’s sense of the real word. And this is what underlies Hemingway’s famous statement that his intention was always to convey to the reader “the way it was.”22
All in all, Hemingway’s language in The Old Man and the Sea is simple and natural on the surface, but actually deliberate and artificial. “The language is rarely emotional. Rather, it controls emotions: it holds them in.”23 The forming of this distinct style is related to Hemingway’s own experience. And the influence of this style is not only within America but also all over the world. The facts in the novel are selected and used as a device to make the fictional world accepted. Unlike other novelists who add allegorical meanings to their facts, Hemingway uses the facts simply and naturally, without any emotion. In the latter part of the novel, instead of being narrated by the author, the facts are used from inside Santiago’s own consciousness, and form part of a whole scheme of the novel. Besides what have been mentioned above, other techniques in The Old Man and the Sea, such as realism, monologue, the creation of suspense and so on, are also very successful. All these show Hemingway’s superb artistic attainments as a Nobel Prize winner.
Notes:
1. Kenneth Graham, “commentary” in York Notes: The Old Man and the Sea, (Beijing: world Publishing Corporation, 1991), p41
2. Chang Yaoxin, “Chapter 14” in A Survey of American Literature, (TianJin: Nankai University Press, 1987), p304
4. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, (Beijing: world Publishing Corporation, 1998), p8
5. Ibid, p83
7. Ibid, p45
10. Times, 13 December 1954.
12. Ibid, p1
14. A.E.Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, (New York: Random House, 1966), p1
15. Roger Asselineau, ed, “Hemingway’s English Reputation” in The Literary Reputation of Hemingway in Europe, (New York: New York University Press, 1965), p15
16. Ibid, p10
17. Chang Yaoxin, “Chapter 14” in A Survey of American Literature, (TianJin: Nankai University Press, 1987), p305
19. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, (Beijing: world Publishing Corporation, 1998), p79
23. Peter B. High, “Chapter 11” in An Outline of American Literature, (New York: Long man Inc., 1986), p147
Bibliography:
1. Chang Yaoxin, “Chapter 14” in A Survey of American Literature. TianJin: Nankai University Press, 1987
2. Kenneth Graham, “commentary” in York Notes: The Old Man and the Sea. Beijing: world Publishing Corporation, 1991
3. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea. Beijing: world Publishing Corporation, 1998
4. 崔道怡等编.《“冰山”理论：对话与潜对话》工人出版社， 1987.
5. 刁绍华. 《海明威》. 辽宁人民出版社, 1980.
6. 傅景川. 《二十世纪美国小说史》. 吉林教育出版社, 1996
