Hemingway and Faulkner: Vision and Repudiation

Despite some tentative technical adjustments in the literary market, it has become increasingly obvious in the last two decades since their deaths that Hemingway and Faulkner are America’s greatest fiction writers of this century. Since they shared so little in the pursuit of their art, it is not surprising that we find little evidence that they enjoyed or respected each other’s work or that their mutual wariness, their keen sense of professional competitiveness, should emerge not through personal contacts but through the public media that each writer in his own fashion learned to exploit so adeptly. Yet for all the explicit literary distance that naturally separated them—subject, aesthetic theory, style—their lives and careers bear an uncanny similarity if we think for a moment of the resonant association triggered by a few catchwords: Sherwood Anderson; Hollywood; American vernacular; alcoholism; writer’s block; younger women. Theirs are not parallel careers, however, and such comparable points of their experiences vary enough to remind us that the really pertinent intersections and convergences are those of history and circumstances: literary modernism, war and depression, physical and psychic dislocation. Out of the tangibles of time and place and the interstices of private lives come both a shared disposition skeptical of values and a deeply ingrained temperament that suspects all human striving to be worthless.

What Hemingway and Faulkner importantly share is a dark vision that subsumes both their own local instances and the piecemeal despairs of their American contemporaries: Anderson’s vague, generalized disquiet; Dos Passos’s fretting agitation; Wolfe’s egoistic torment. Theirs is not simply personal anxiety, though both men endured spectacular bouts of it, or cultural malaise, but a bedrock predisposition to posit a world as comfortless to the human animal as that seen sporadically in Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and other second generation American realists. The strength of the vision in both writers is its consistency, its pervasive force in many kinds of situations and all conditions of men. The glory of such a world view is not its substance authorially prescribed but its substance authorially dramatized, enacted through art; the application of hard-won art is as consistent and pervasive as the vision it projects. But the greatness of both writers, in many ways so unlike, finally lies in the calculated disparity between their vision and their art. Vision says man is doomed, but art says and yet . . .