Abstract
Caldwell’s analysis of Richard Ford’s “Issues” and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” displays how Molecular Sememics can be used as an aid for literary criticism. In commenting on the two authors’ styles, Caldwell notes that while Hemingway attempts to reify his words since he knows they will be distrusted as mere symbols, and Ford distrusts the words and categories he’s inherited as an author, both take up what Caldwell deems the creative obligation of writers: to make new meanings – new molecules – out of the terms we use every day. Hemingway also leaves it an open question to be resolved by the reader as to whether a character or the narrator is speaking, while Ford instead moves his authorial spotlight everywhere, leaving nothing to the imagination. With the former, this highlights how the meaning of the story lies just as much in what is unsaid as in what is said. For the latter, all molecules have every item exhaustively listed, and so there is nothing for the reader to learn beyond what is given. Operating subtly in this chapter, Caldwell’s theory of Molecular Sememics sheds light on authorial intention, as well as the effects of that intention, conscious or unconscious.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For a good discussion of the code of the hunter, see Robert Penn Warren’s 1949 essay, “Ernest Hemingway” (Warren 1958, p. 87).
- 2.
- 3.
Indeed, scrupulousness itself is another point of comparison between Ford and Hemingway. Ford’s discipline as a writer is that of a man hyper-conscious of Hemingway’s failure to maintain discipline in the face of success, as documented by Hemingway’s African companion-piece, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”. Cf., for instance, Baker, 1956, pp. 192 ff.
- 4.
And, perhaps Ford Madox Ford’s previous novel, Women and Men.
- 5.
This seems especially true of Ford’s most recent work. All three of the novelettes in Women with Men feature this juxtaposition.
- 6.
In a July 21, 1999, radio interview conducted by Beth Farnsworth at PBS, Ford argued that Hemingway’s compressed style was too compact to allow the necessary exploration of the moral issues. “Hemingway often, because he was casual in talking about despair, because he was casual in letting his characters not say what they thought often, he didn’t express for me enough. He was in many ways stingy with language and didn’t express what I thought was literature’s moral density and complexity accurately enough, or in a way, morally enough”. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec99/hemingway_7-21.html. [Editors’ Note: this URL is no longer available.]
- 7.
The issue of whether Margot meant to kill her husband has been analyzed from a number of other perspectives, too. There are biological, contractual, emotional, political, even logistical analyses of the issue. A few of them, respectively, are Bennett Kravitz (1998) “She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not: The Short Happy Symbiotic Marriage of Margot and Francis Macomber”; Michelle Sugiyama (1996) “What’s Love Got to Do With It? An Evolutionary Analysis of ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’” (see especially p. 27); Nina Baym (1990) “Actually I Felt Sorry for the Lion”. p. 113; Jerry A. Herndon (1975) “No ‘Maggie’s Drawers’ for Margot Macomber”, pp. 289–91.
- 8.
By one count, of course, it is hugely ironic that Marjorie cold-bloodedly kills her husband with the car immediately after she has railed at the “degraded humanity” of the driver of the pickup truck who ran over a “poor creature”, a raccoon. But there is no underlying psychological pattern that would make this irony meaningful in terms of her character. The story doesn’t even seem interested in letting us explain her as a sociopath. She may be one, but Ford’s point is that her condition is not personal. It’s built into the world.
Bibliography
Baker, C. (1956). Hemingway: The writer as artist. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Baym, N. (1990). Actually I felt sorry for the Lion. In J. J. Benson (Ed.), New critical approaches to the short stories of Ernest Hemingway (pp. 112–120). Durham: Duke University Press.
Ford, R. (2000). Issues. The New Yorker, 76(27), 136–141.
Hemingway, E. (1987). The short happy life of Francis Macomber. In F. Vegía (Ed.), The complete short stories of Ernest Hemingway (pp. 5–28). New York: Simon & Schuster.
Herndon, J. A. (1975). No ‘Maggie’s Drawers’ for Margot Macomber. In M. J. Bruccoli (Ed.), Fitzgerald-Hemingway annual (pp. 289–291). Washington, DC: NCR Microcard Editions.
Kravitz, B. (1998). She loves me, she loves me not: The short happy symbiotic marriage of Margot and Francis Macomber. Journal of American Culture, 21(3), 83–87.
Sugiyama, M. S. (1996). What’s love got to do with it? An evolutionary analysis of “The short happy life of Francis Macomber”. The Hemingway Review, 15(2), 15–32.
Warren, R. P. (1958). Selected essays. New York: Random House.
Wilson, E. (1939a). Ernest Hemingway: Bourdon gauge of morale. Atlantic Monthly, 164(1), 36–46. Reprinted in Harold Bloom (Ed.) (1985), Ernest Hemingway: Bloom’s modern critical views (pp. 7–24). New York: Chelsea House Publishers.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Caldwell, T.P., Cresswell, O., Stainton, R.J. (2018). American Shoot-Out: Hemingway vs. Richard Ford. In: Cresswell, O., Stainton, R. (eds) Discourse, Structure and Linguistic Choice. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 101. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75441-3_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75441-3_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-75440-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-75441-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)