Prose as Cubism - Hemingway, Gris, Stein - "The Big Two-Hearted River"

One of my favorite Hemingway stories is the two part "The Big Two-Hearted River," published in Hemingway's first trade edition book, In Our Time [1925]. The story is of especial interest to sportsmen, as it relates a fishing trip the central character takes on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan shortly after the First World War. It captures in Hemingway's unforgettable style the feelings and sensations--the sheer physical exhilaration--of hiking, eating, wading,--all the simple impressionistic details, with an immediacy and pungency that are unmatched in straight narrative writing.     

What are the qualities of Hemingway's prose style, where did he derive the special techniques which are the basis of his innovative method? It isn't my purpose here to explicate the thematic meanings of the story, which scholars have been doing relentlessly over the last half-century. Rather, I'm interested in how the prose exemplifies formal discoveries and tricks which stretched and expanded our concepts of composition. 

It has frequently been speculated that Hemingway's style is derived from conversations he had with Gertrude Stein, regarding certain aspects of her own work, and also from her and Hemingway's perceptions about Cubism, the brash experimental abstract painting style in vogue at the time. How could writing incorporate the configurations of Cubism into abstract narrative? Let me quote randomly from the 15th paragraph of Part I:

"Then it was sweet fern, growing ankle high, walk through, and clumps of jack pines; a long undulating country with frequent rises and descents, sandy underfoot and the country alive again."

On its face, this is a straightforward sentence, grammatical, and filled with vivid detail characteristic of Hemingway's concentration on concrete objects and impressions. One important aspect of the story is Hemingway's evocation of the burned-over destroyed town of Seney--and the vitality and verdancy of the natural landscape. This contrast is used to symbolize the central character Nick Adams's (Hemingway's stand-in) spiritual wound from his war experiences, and his desire to reawaken and renew his primitivistic regard for nature and solitude. It's a journey of healing. 

The clause "walk through" is used as both a modifier and a noun phrase, which interrupts the descriptive flow. The phrase "and the country alive again" differs from the other parts of the sentence in not being descriptive in sequence, but is a commentary--judgmental, moralistic--upon the whole scene. It's a grammatical enjambment set against the ("undulating") flow of description. The rhythm of the prose is an analogue of the progress of the character's movement, through the foliage, thinking as he goes, reflexive, multi-leveled. Hemingway classic insistence on sensory impressions foregrounds the visual and tactile qualities of actual things, and wedges mental iterations and deductions into the structured dimension of the prose: Time, words flowing, mind noting, images coming forward, all fitted tightly into an order that is at once illogical (irrational)--in the traditional sense--but deliberate. 

Compare this technique with these random sentences from Stein's Tender Buttons [1914]:

A circle of fine card board and a chance to see a tassel. 

*

NOTHING ELEGANT. 

A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest. 

*

A RED STAMP. 

If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they do this they need a catalogue.

Though the quality and occasion of Stein's experiments is different from Hemingway's, the same kind of technique is at work. Stein's enjambment of descriptive language and reflexive commentary "if they do this they need a catalogue" is set off against the "red stamp" and the "white lilies"--"they will dirt a surface" etc. In other words, the tactile and visual qualities of actual things are forced together to form distorted constructions which may resemble more accurately the way in which perception actually occurs in the brain. The language thus becomes both a vehicle and an analogue for a program of representation of experience. 

This may be what Hemingway "learned" from Stein and Cubism. Though Hemingway was not, in the strictest sense of the word, an "experimental" writer, he saw how a description of raw sensory data tightly conjoined to overly simplistic, direct statement--"Nick was glad to get to the river...His trousers were soaked with the dew as he walked...The river made no sound"--would allow him to eliminate unnecessary bridges and connectors in the interests of concision and rapid continuity. The flow of sensation runs like a thread through consciousness, picking up specific impressions, leaving nothing behind--the silent flow ("no sound") of the current of time/feeling.

           

Stein's experiments seem much more closely aligned to a true "Cubist" elaboration, derived from painting. Language, however, is multi-dimensional, and multi-contextual, in ways that two-dimensional art is not. Both Stein and Hemingway admired the work of Juan Gris, whose classic cubistic arrangements are perhaps the most distinctive and satisfying of the genre. Employing straightforward objects, distorted into competing dimensions and perspectives implying multiple, simultaneous views, his compositions are nevertheless tightly controlled puzzles of angles and masses, which "fit" together to make decorative arrangements "locked" in a kind of frozen tension.   

Though Gris's studies and still lifes are static and immobile, they imply a kind of meditative accommodation which is a commentary upon the paradox of perceptual integration and disintegration, as well as acknowledging irrational distortions that modify the experience of perception itself. In the canvas below, the left hand side of the open book becomes both a (verso) leaf, and a mirror reflecting the recto leaf lying flat (it's almost like an Escher!). Abstract shapes accidentally suggest other things--a hand with finger pointing, a bird head and beak, etc. This kind of whimsicality bears comparison to Stein's deliberate linguistic distortions. A coffee-cup may suggest dirty yellow, coal black, rose-wood, but what do these sensations lead to? Perhaps a "mingled astonishment"?