The agreement we hold—human to human, citizen to citizen—is that we are telling one another the truth. So obvious is this that even those who know they are not speaking the facts are telling their lies on the presumption that they are true, because no one believes what a liar says is a lie. Truth backs even what is untrue.
That same tacit and civil agreement of saying things as we truly see them stands also behind the relationship between writer and reader, in nonfiction of course, but even in the fictional world of novel or short story. What a writer writes will stay silent on the page unless and until there comes along some trusting someone who is willing to give the writer the benefit of the doubt and begin to read what one presumes to be the truth. That is to say, we must allow ourselves to be ushered into an unfamiliar world, the world the writer has conjured for one of any number of possible reasons: merely to entertain, or to expose, or to teach. But then we must give ourselves over on the presumption of truth and coherence until incoherence or bad faith reveal themselves.
Hence the very great (could we ever say too great?) importance of understanding how language works. In 1925 and so after the First World War, the American novelist Earnest Hemingway wrote a very short story entitled “Soldier’s Home.” Hemingway is known for his peculiar style, “clipped and staccato, colloquial, with short sentences and monosyllabic words, often repeated in a free-verse effect, and an extremely simple, detached, ‘hard-boiled’ narrative technique” as Benet’s indispensable Reader’s Encyclopedia succinctly puts it. And indeed the second paragraph of Hemingway’s story illustrates that idiom:
There is a picture which shows him on the Rhine with two German girls and another corporal. Krebs and the corporal look too big for their uniforms. The German girls are not beautiful. The Rhine does not show in the picture.
Such a style can make it easy for us to give ourselves over to the verisimilitude of characters and events Hemingway is drawing out. There is little not to understand there, and this series of straightforward subjects and predicates continue for another paragraph and a half until we learn that Krebs, a soldier who has returned home later than most others in his town, could not get a hearing about his wartime experience unless he lied by embellishment about it: “his town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities.” And so Hemingway has raised the enduring question of memory, and whether, as the story unfolds, our deliberate lying about our past comes in the end to belie ourselves. In order to depict such moral confusion, Hemingway’s short, clipped sentences give way to this one long and winding and confusing twofold predication which takes us off guard on first reading:
All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves.
So as close readers, what are we to do when we suddenly come upon a difficult passage like this in a story whose much simpler language has made it attractive for us to let down our critical guard and trust? Ideas, simple or complex, are carried in forms, and so if we are prepared to analyze the language, we can find the ideas and their connections, no matter how tricky the sentence structure might be. Sentences are made up of clauses, and every sentence which is not a fragment must have at least one independent clause. Every clause, in turn, has a bony structure, a skeleton of subject and predicate which carries the weight of the meaning it wishes to communicate. In this long, sixty-three-word, un-Hemingwayesque sentence, that skeletal notion is nothing more than the one subject the times, and the one compound predicate for that one subject lost their quality and were lost themselves.
That is not an easy sentence, hardly the cool and clear structure typical of Hemingway. Rather, it is a distorted rhetorical statement: the first twenty-two words to the semicolon go nowhere grammatically, a figure of speech known as anacoluthon, the want of grammatical sequence. With such grammatical confusion, Hemingway might very well be mirroring Krebs’s own disarranged interior life, which may be prompting his readiness to lie as he rehearses his memories from the front lines of war and tries to secure the acknowledgement of it he so desperately needs. But literarily, we are supposed to stumble over that sentence, whose meaning will hit us all the more dramatically because we had first given ourselves over, in the civilized presumption of coherence, to an ordered world the author had invited us to enter.
We cannot say that Hemingway tricked us, because he did not write in bad faith. But we can remind ourselves that to expect always the simple and unvarnished truth plainly expressed (Then why didn’t he just say that if that’s what he meant?) is to forget that even what is true, literally or fictively, can be at times cunningly hidden under cover of conflicting desires and duress. In literature and life both, a critical spirit will serve us well.
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fascinating, as ever.