Midday frankness or Sunny windless
Ernest Hemingway is famously responsible for a narrative aesthetic of emotional restraint. His younger self was searching, Hemingway claims in Death in the Afternoon (1932), to “put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced”; he was working to get the “real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.”
Emotion was not to be erased from narrative, it seemed but expressed in a strategy of metonymic displacement that would allow writers to avoid overtly emotional displays. Hemingway's iceberg theory of writing, which also receives articulation in Death in the Afternoon, comes readily to mind. The “dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water”, Hemingway states. His context is the ability of the true writer to “omit things that he knows.”
But emotion might be thought of as being similarly submerged beneath the surface of the text, invisible, potent, leaving on display only those actions that are, in Ezra Pound's assessment of the modernist response to Victorian poetics, “austere, direct, free from emotional slither” (“A Retrospect” 12). The expression of these ideas in terms of character would have to be (in Philip Young's term) the Code Hero, that tough, taciturn exemplar of autonomous manhood whose devotion to a private Code of action demonstrates and authenticates the manly “real thing”.
1991 year, Oil x Canvas, 100x80 centimeters, St. Petersburg, signed as Y. Gribanovsky
Artist’s possession 2011. The painting has been destroyed accidentally by the author in 2015.
© Copyright | George Grie | Copying is permitted only with an active link to neosurrealismart.com
Midday frankness or Sunny windless painting by George Grie