Review: [untitled] Author(s): David Seed Source: The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 44, No.

175 (Aug., 1993), pp. 452-453 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/517318 . Accessed: 16/06/2011 00:39
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occasionally hectoring note to the prose; but the Notions remains an essential source document, full of topical and occasionally prophetic interest and, on any criterion, well worth reprinting.
Newnham College, Cambridge
SUSAN MANNING

New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Edited by JACKSON BENSON.Pp. xvi+512. Durham, NC and London: Duke University J. Press, 1991. Cloth, ?49-90; paper, ?18-95. (The American Novel). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Cloth, ?20; paper, ?6-95. Jackson J. Benson's new collection of essays forms a sequel to his similar 1975 volume on Hemingway's short stories. It assembles thirty-five pieces which bear eloquent testimony to continuing critical interest in Hemingway, and concludes with a checklist of criticism (published between 1975 and 1989) on the short stories. Benson has divided his volume into five sections, the final two comprising respectively an overview of this criticism by Paul Smith, and the checklist. The opening section, 'Critical Approaches', makes the firmest gesture towards critical theory and contains one of the best pieces in the whole volume, a semiotic analysis of 'A Very Short Story' by Robert Scholes. Scrutinizing that story's rhetoric, Scholes concludes that the third person operates as a 'mask of psuedo-objectivity', and he nimbly relates its rhetorical and physical themes as two forms of retention. Of an equally high calibre is Hubert Zapf's application of two notions of implied reader deriving from Iser and Freud. Where the former stresses indeterminacy and the constructive nature of reading, the latter places its main emphasis on daydreaming. So The Sun Also Rises responds better to the first model which explains its stylistic distancing, but the second bears more fruit on application to a story like 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'. Two other theoretical approaches figure in this section-a Lacanian reading of 'After the Storm' and a structuralist analysis of 'Cat in the Rain' which makes due acknowledgement to David Lodge-but it must be admitted that no general policy of theoretical discussion is pursued here. So a rather chatty essay on the lion in 'Frances Macomber'could scarcely be dignified as 'feminist' and the opening essay by Debra A. Moddelmog sets a keynote for a number of other pieces in this collection. She pursues a two-part argument that Nick Adams not only supplies the unifying consciousness of In Our Time but can even be read as its author. A number of other critics, swayed by the fact that Hemingway planned a Nick Adams novel but abandoned the project before completion, follow Moddelmog's lead in trying to naturalizethe stories around the protagonist's psychology, proposing a coherence based on Nick Adams's fixations. E. R. Hagermann wisely resists this tendency and in an essay from a work in progress argues that In Our Time gets its coherence as much from historical and imagistic continuities. Although the first three sections are notionally distinguished as 'Critical Approaches', 'Story Technique and Themes', and 'Story Interpretation', there is a fair amount of overlap between them. 'Cat in the Rain' is discussed twice, the second time to no very constructive purpose in the suggestion that there were originally two cats. Hemingway's treatment of Indians similarly receives two discussions. One of the main strengths of Benson's volume lies in its explications of comparatively neglected stories like 'Fathers and Sons'. The contributors show a sensitive awareness of Hemingway's methods, his omission of details, respect for lines of movement, and his combination of metaphor and metonymy. Accordingly they demonstrate a general
New Essays on A Farewell to Arms. Edited by SCOTTDONALDSON. Pp. viii+ 140

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skill at explaining nuances and shades of suggestion. Steven K. Hoffman, for instance, glosses the various meanings of nada in 'A Clear Well-Lighted Place' and then applies them to his evocation of the void in other stories. Secondly, although only a few essays would fit into this category, the stories are placed in their topical context. Wayne Kvam does a particularlygood job of demonstrating that 'Banal Story' is a 'parable that embodies an aesthetic theory' and, virtually through a sentence-bysentence analysis, documents how Hemingway parodied the cultural conservatism of the journal Forum. A third strength of the collection is that many contributors have used Hemingway's drafts to good effect, whether to identify his early styles (and it is still essential to emphasize that there is no single Hemingway style) or, as William Braasch Watson has done, to chart the composition of 'Old Man at the Bridge' through various stages from notes to reportage and finished story. There are unfortunately still all too few rigorous stylistic analyses of these stories. The essay by Scholes mentioned above is one rare exception and Pamela Smiley's discussion of 'Hills Like White Elephants' is another. In the latter she identifies gender differences in the characters' speech patterns (appeals to facts as against appeals to feeling, for instance) and thereby pins down the nature of the oppositions within the novel's dialogues. Benson's new collection is full and varied. It should become required reading for anyone interested in Hemingway's stories. Scott Donaldson's volume of essays on A Farewell to Arms is the latest in the Cambridge University Press American Novel series. Donaldson's introduction recounts the critical reception of the novel and in the first of the four essays Paul Smith, who is developing a specialism of analysing Hemingway's manuscripts, locates the genesis of the novel in a 'horde of stories and sketches', some of which date back to 1919. This is not only a bibliographical exercise because Smith also has helpful points to make about Hemingway's disavowal of romance, his treatment of death, and his use of imagery drawn from games. James Phelan next considers Frederic Henry's naivety and finds plenty of signals in the text for the readerto look behind the narrator'swords or to consider them from a different perspective. He suggests interestingly that the shooting of the sergeant shows how far Henry is caught up in the code of military honour despite his disclaimers. Ultimately, he argues, there is a paradox in the narrativesince 'Frederic writes as if he does not know what he in fact knows'. Where Phelan scrutinizes the narrator, Sandra Whipple Spanier sets out to 'restore' Catherine Barkley, i.e. to rescue her from biased negative readings by the critics. In a sense this essay has as much to say about the gender attitudes of Hemingway's critics as about the character herself although she does emerge from this reading as a more serene, aware, and therefore dynamic figure in the novel. This essay makes a sharp contrast with the final piece, a discussion of the novel's language by Ben Stoltzfus. He starts promisingly by examining the pronominal shifts ('I' to 'we', 'I' to 'you') but then psychologizes Henry's narration as a compulsion. Applying Lacan, Stoltzfus interprets Henry's love-affair as a desire for the mother and argues more generally (and more convincingly) that early sections of the novel only make adequate sense when reread with the benefit of hindsight. Instead of simply seeing Henry as a character which would beg such questions as why his naming should be delayed, Stoltzfus explains him as a rhetorical area which is occupied by a debate between civilian and military selves. This insight, together with many other constructive suggestions about the implications of hospital and the range of meaning in the novel's title, makes the concluding essay by far the most rewarding of this collection.
Liverpool University DAVIDSEED