Abstract
In this thesis I will lay out an argument for an implicit intimacy between Hemingway and his reader that runs counter to a great deal of the tired ideas we have about the writer. I will propose that the aesthetic dimension mediated by the Hemingway reading experience promises a mutual escape for both the reader and the writer, and that that intimacy and that promise of escape is at the heart of Hemingway’s continuing appeal to the reader. At first glance this may seem ridiculous, in part due to our common ideas about Hemingway and perhaps more directly because of the more than seventy years of critical explanations which have more or less reworked the same terrain by speaking about style and subject matter, the “iceberg technique,” violence, manliness and so forth. But an attentive observer may pause to ask if these old hats still fit. When I first encountered Ernest Hemingway I was a child in the twenty-first century. And sure, some of those old hats still adorned the bust of my image of Hemingway, but what kept me reading was not the presence of the things I was told that I would find there. Instead, what kept me reading what that little secret, that little shared experience that no one ever told me about. Since then, the intimacy has deepened, not because I’ve come to understand more about Hemingway’s style or his biography, but in spite of those things, as if the more I read about Hemingway, the further I get from what it is about Hemingway that hooked me in the first place. My project here then is simply an attempt to articulate a more accurate description of the relationship between Hemingway and the reader, and the intimate escape within that shared aesthetic experience. Drawing from aesthetic response theory, my work traces the relative position of the reader and the writer on two sides of the aesthetic textual divide to demonstrate how Hemingway’s initial position as a reader, and his interest in the affective potential of the aesthetic experience ultimate rendered the aesthetic ideal that we so frequently try to identify when we make claims about his masculinity, or his work as a “stylist”. In short, I assert that the continuing appeal of Ernest Hemingway is due in significant degree to to the transportive experience of reading him which takes us away, as it were. While his subjects and stylistic approach do represent notable aspects of his writing, it is not his supposedly masculine texts or his “tough, terse prose” that account for Hemingway’s still significant appeal. Instead, it is the highly participatory aesthetic experience of reading him, and the consistent idealization of escape in his work that keep us close. While the trajectory of his career would see the exploration of escape manifest in different aspects— at times idealized as a physical remove or a getting away from social contexts, and other times manifest in the exploration of the experiential potential of reading and writing themselves— in total, Hemingway’s belief that the aesthetic potential of reading could be transportive, and his persistent pursuit of a higher degree of intimacy in the aesthetic space shines through like a beacon, summoning the reader with still seemly unflagging intensity.