The Performative Aspects of the Confessional Hemingway

Session Organizer: Joseph Michael Sommers
Department of English, University of Kansas
sommers@ku.edu

“The Nervous Necessity to Joke”: Humor and the Hemingway War Hero

This presentation traces Hemingway's interest in humor from his Oak Park high school columns and Ring Lardner imitations through three major novels: The Sun Also Rises; A Farewell to Arms; and For Whom the Bell Tolls. It explores Hemingway's development from his primary reliance on orthodox humor through puns and verbal irony as identified by the late James Hinkle and Robert Fleming in The Sun Also Rises to far more sophisticated humor in the later novels. It highlights how Hemingway has characters openly evaluate and censor one another's jokes in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, particularly the gallows humor in the latter. Jokes become, for Hemingway's characters, a major subject which they create, critique, and censor. Also, this presentation advances Kenneth G. Johnston's critical work examining Hemingway's use of humorous scenes as foreshadowing for their darker counterparts. In the end, this argument will suggest that as Hemingway matured, he became less reliant on sophomoric puns and more cognizant of the craftsmanship needed to shape readers' moral centers through his characters' actions and plot lines.

Bill Church
Missouri Western State College
church@mwsc.edu

“He Only Looked Sad the Same Way I Felt”: Hemingway, Hunting, and the Narrative Confession

For some readers, Hemingway's novels and stories about hunting only help reinforce many, if not all aspects of what has come to be known as Hemingway's “code.” Yet it seems too easy to argue that the Hemingway Code is always rigidly fixed in place, that the code itself does not challenge its own assumptions. In Hemingway's works, the acts of hunting and killing in fact raise issues of sympathy, guilt, and sorrow – issues that seemingly contradict the code notions of hardness, mastery, “not talking about it,” and “not thinking about it.” This paper proposes to briefly read “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “An African Story,” and Green Hills of Africa as Hemingway's sympathetic, compassionate treatment of animals – even as the texts simultaneously reinstate hard, unfeeling code values. And while it would be improper to deem him a nature or environmental writer, Hemingway is still very aware of the need for hunters and animals to coexist harmoniously without the dominator / dominated relationship. The act of writing leads to a confession, among other things, of guilt and sadness over an animal's pain and suffering.

Carey Voeller
University of Kansas
cvoeller@sbcglobal.net

Chronicling Life in the Shadow of the Unattainable: Autobiographical Hemingway's Narrative Confessions and the Villains He Creates in Order to Surpass Them

In examining Hemingway's construction of himself as a first-person narrator and, therein, his own fiction's tyro protagonist, I argue that he violates his own reporter's stance as he editorializes in his narrative performance. Frequently, these editorials are performed for the audience as confession – commentaries, sometimes ironic, sometimes isolating, but always enabling the reader to become Hemingway's confessor attempting to realize him in a community that validates and corroborates his opinions as the real thing a true writer seeks. Unfortunately, to show himself as a fine apprentice to the code hero he cannot be, Hemingway vilifies other textually-constructed competitors in order to diminish their status to readers who, operating in the blind compliance of their representation, are constructed as sympathizing with and elevating Hemingway's values in “code economy.” The resultant effect, though, is counter-climactic. In violation of the peculiarities of his own code, Hemingway's protagonist shows himself complicated within his own construction. Too tortured, too messy and too thoughtful, the Hemingway protagonist unmakes his own attempts at living by the code in illustrating his inability to “not talk about it” constantly trying to order his world through the dismissal of others to an audience left silent and helpless to resist him.

Joseph Michael Sommers
University of Kansas
sommers@ku.edu