Ernest Hemingway and the 1920s Paris Avant-Garde: Prose as Architecture, Spatial Art, and Intercorporeality

Abstract

This paper examines how the influence of genre-transcending Modernist artistic experiments in 1920s Paris hybridized Ernest Hemingway, locating him between the French and the American, and also between the popular and the avant-garde. The key to his popular success, and his famously simple style, was this avant-garde influence which enabled him to construct “spatial” prose—prose as architecture—by accumulating simple sentences with no decoration (adjectives), a style usually known as “hard-boiled.”

Hemingway stayed in Paris from 1921 to 1928 and his work through the 1920s was influenced by his exposure to the avant-garde Modernist art movement there, especially through his interaction with artists of the plastic/visual arts. For example, through his then-mentor Gertrude Stein, Hemingway met Picasso and Miro; and the influences of those meetings are inscribed in his works: Hemingway structured his first collected short stories In Our Time(1925) as a Cubist painting, and wrote the final interchapter of In Our Time, “L’Envoi,” in a dream-like style reminiscent of Miro’s surrealist painting. Hemingway was also acquainted with Man Ray, the former New York Dadaist, famous for his photographic portraits of artists and celebrities in Paris. Man Ray was also experimenting with movie works and created some surrealist classics such as Le Retour a la raison(1923). Hemingway not only wrote “A Divine Gesture”(1922) under the influence of New York Dada, but also invented “cinematic prose” in “My Old Man” in In Our Time. In some stories and interchapters, he also experimented with a unique narration that can be compared to the movie camera.

Of all the avant-garde experiments in his writing during the 1920s, Hemingway was most clear about the influence of Cezanne’s paintings. Crucially, Hemingway learned that Cezanne sought to paint what he “really” saw: that is, not an artificial representation following the Renaissance perspective method, but something that accorded with his own perceptions. Hemingway intuitively understood this intercorporeal viewpoint of Cezanne’s, and realized it himself in “Big Two-Hearted River” where he was “trying to do the country like Cezanne”(SL 12). This story depicts an American landscape in detail but wholly through the perceptions of the sole character, Nick.

Through Cezanne’s paintings, Hemingway learned both how to write spatial prose and an intercorporeal understanding of the world. He first realized this in “Big Two-Hearted River,” where he depicted the American country that had been inscribed in his own body. Cezanne’s French bodiliness is thus connected with Hemingway’s American bodiliness. In addition, this intercorporeality is consonant with the American philosophy of Pragmatism that values physical experiences, and also can be related to the “organic architecture” of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Hemingway’s spatial/corporeal prose is a blending of the French and the American, and it came to be essential throughout his career, even in his later works, in particular For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea. Thus, the foundation of this popular American writer is deeply related to his exposure to the Modernist avant-garde in 1920s Paris.