"there's f*cking nothing there" - my dad

So.

I was considering writing about gender for this blog post, and sort of ranting about how I didn't actually think Brett was a vessel for Hemingway's critical analysis of gender roles as we had seemed to consider in class, but more of an embodiment of them. I was thinking about all of our discussions, and how people were making good points about her masculinity and behavior being a sign of Hemingway's role reversal, but also how we could draw conclusions that argued she was really a tired trope, and realized quickly that my thoughts were getting all knotted and lost. It took me a while to figure out why I couldn't really decipher stuff, and then it hit me, and i was like "yo, I can't come up with any solid arguments or sort out my thoughts cause they're aren't any solid arguments! Nothing is solid with this book besides straight up textual stuff!! I wrote a 1600 word blog post on nothing at all!!" (it was a dope post but the point still stands)

I got to thinking and this is what I came up with: you can theorize as much as you want with most books and root your ideas in the text, the thoughts. But this book skimps majorly on personal thought and deeper emotion, peels the text itself back to the absolute basic -- verb, noun, subject, object. Getting at that kind of serious analysis, therefore, is really difficult. Now, it's definitely possible; we can allow ourselves to read into the text and through that bring out some really cool ideas; but a lot of the time they're for sure ideas that get dragged out of the novel, not gracefully presented. With most literature, theory is based mostly on a few quotes from the book and understanding the context it was written in, and we could do that with The Sun Also Rises. We could totally do that -- but to a limited extent, and in a very particular context. When I began reading this novel I really didn't like it; Hemingway writes in a way that, alone, it's hard to draw ideas out of. It's a really surface-level style of writing, that I didn't pick up on when I was reading on my own. In-class discussions were awesome, but had those not been presented as a different lens to look at the book thru, I most assuredly wouldn't have taken away the greater ideas and concepts I ended up getting from this novel.

So, why did Hemingway like writing in the tip-of-the-iceberg style? I'm about to go totally out of line, but it really reminds me of the way Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series writes. They both strategically use a vague style to allow us to fill in where we will; for Meyer, its her main character Bella; the reader can essentially push themselves in to her silhouette and project onto her their own personality and experience as they see fitting. For Hemingway, it's the reasons, the conclusions, the motives, the thoughts, all of that stuff. Hemingway allows the reader to think to themselves, "why did this character do this? What is the larger context of this? How can I explain this to myself?" He wants us to fill it in on our own, answer our own questions to a large degree. It seems to be taken as a really smart move, kind of creaking into modern literature and theory and stuff like "oh man, Hemingway was so smart he made YOU decide what the book was about," but I found it to be really tired after a few chapters. It also made me think of the fake deep phenomenon, which is honestly best described by just looking at how people quote fake deep stuff on twitter. Basically, you front like you're saying something thoughtful and multi-faceted, but... you're not really saying anything. Hemingway followed that path, for me, because he allowed everything in this novel to be up to reader interpretation outside of the most basic aspects and character traits. It just didn't feel like he was actually saying anything solid, but instead provided a vessel for the reader to float their ideas on. Some people find this book to be super macho and sexist, others think it looks at deeper emotions and gender role reversal. And the big thing is, you could argue for ANY of those points, because it's such an open-ended novel. Sure, I wrote a giant post about how gay Bill and Jake are, but I could also spit one out in a few hours about how straight they are; how their fishing trip was just them hanging out and bonding with no connotations outside of that. This writing style got on my nerves because it came off as Hemingway trying to point a mirror at the reader and inspire their ideas to be pushed into how they understood the novel, but it just ended up, for me, being too open -- things were just blank in a lot of the text. The point I'm trying to make here is that this novel is whatever you take from it, it's anything you want it to be, because Hemingway didn't really say all that much; literally and metaphorically. I see it as a bad thing because I feel like Hemingway is using the method of presenting the novel as being "thoughtful and deeper than it looks" to actually not write anything meaningful and not really make any points. But hey, it's your decision on how you take it, you're the reader after all!!