The Pictorial In Ernest Hemingway's Fiction And Its Moral Tension Of Escape And Act: "Accessory That Covertly Explains

The ancient parallel between literature and the visual arts – i.e. painting, sculpture, and architecture – become newly relevant in the twentieth century. Modernist writers often patterned their literary experiments on parallels drawn from the visual arts. American famous writer Ernest Hemingway is appropriately among them.Indeed, many readers and critics have noted the literature affinity in Hemingway's fiction with modern visual arts, and especially the literary implications of the visual arts in it are vast. Even Hemingway's admission of this influence in A Moveable Feast recapitulated what he had already said on many occasions that he was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that he was trying to put in them. Still, it is sensed that Hemingway's kinship with modern visual arts has not yet been sufficiently plumbed. The parallels thus far drawn have not gone beyond a surface comparison of what appears in Hemingway's highly visual prose to what modern visual artists put on canvas. And no one has attempted in recent times to improve on these comparisons. Though Shannon Latimer discusses at length "Hemingway and Cezanne's affinity, however, cannot lie solely in artfulness of landscape description. There must be something more significant underlying the careful craftsmanship of each artists' pictorial," his reference to Cezanne takes us no further than earlier critical estimates.A discussion of the pictorial does have its value. Yet we instinctively want something more to come of an art-related study if our critical expectations are to be met. As Jean H. Hagstrum explains, "the pictorial is most effective when it is more than merely pictorial and when it serves some larger aesthetic or intellectual purpose. The achievement of the merely pictorial may be interesting as a stroke of technical virtuosity. But it must join with and support other values if it is to be fully satisfying." Or Samuel van Hoogstraten, an important art theoretician in the seventeenth century, once used the term "accessories that covertly explain" succinctly to describe a method of submerged moralizing common to Dutch genre whereby the artist inserts into the mainstream of his painting, in relatively unobtrusive fashion, one or more images which, when "read" in the way that readers read literary images for their moral value. Hemingway does not disappoint us in this respect. His use of modern visual arts, especially of Cezanne's genre painting in appearance provides a detective perspective of the pictorial in his fiction. More specifically, the pictorial as the thematic apex of the writer's fiction insofar, first, reveals the pictorial as the intrinsic moralistic culmination of all that has preceded in all his fictions and, second, establishes a moralistic tension of escape and act of his characters, and achieves a meaning of epistemology.