you know that thing about icebergs that hemingway wrote and that creative writing professors always want to tell you hemingway wrote like it’s the best advice?
here, i found this on wikipedia:
If a writer of a prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
“of a prose” sounds a little mannered, or actually just weird, but i’m not going to go looking around to see if it’s a typo. otherwise, duh.
i recently reread the sun also rises because, having been accused on many occasions of lacking subtlety (literature-wise), i decided to teach myself subtlety by studying an iceberg invented by the inventor of icebergs. i enjoyed it more than i had on previous reads. it’s a book about a guy who loves and is loved by the most beautiful woman in the world but it can never work because the cong blew up his specials and hemingway was spending too much time on icebergs to invent something practical like a mouth or sex toys. you know, subtle, like that baudelaire poem about the guy from nantucket.
i know it doesn’t look good when i play dumb. blame it on my lack of subtlety or the fact that i’m not actually dumb. anyway, let me just get to the point:
subtlety is not what happens, in a book or anywhere. what happens is just what happens. and for fuck’s sake you won’t look more subtle when you write an iceberg in which nothing happens, just boring. and also, every book can only be the tip of an iceberg because nothing can cover everything, not even everything that it’s “about,” not even infinite jest. hence the “duh” up near the top of the post. mfa professors, please find a better thing to say.
one of these things is stuffed
but my point is more subtle than that, so it has to be stated explicitly:
if what most people talk about when they talk about subtlety with regard to literature these days were proper subtlety, then subtlety would be either impossible or pointless by now. that’s because everything these days is permitted on the page. scratch that. almost everything verbal is permitted almost everywhere.
here is an example of what i’m talking about:
a while back i was waiting in line at the post office and the middle-aged woman in front of me was talking loudly on her cellphone about getting artificially inseminated. back when hemingway was writing, there might have been reason to write “subtly” about something like that.
but! that doesn’t mean that a contemporary novelist couldn’t create subtle reasons for her to get artificially inseminated or, even better, why she was talking so loudly about it on her cellphone in line at the post office. maybe she hope to be mentioned on a lit-blog one day.
contemporary novelists and bloggers: please do not write about this woman. she is boring and unsubtle.
my final point is, there’s always more, which is why that iceberg comment is so obvious, like when my lit professors decided to introduce me to the radical concept of subjectivity, and later, inter-subjectivity.
in my first novel, when the guy who huffs gasoline all the time gets shot, he explodes.
that said, there are signs that an iceberg isn’t subtle enough. here are a few of them:
- it includes the phrase, “and the moral of the story is…”
- it isn’t a satire and characters say things like, “no one undertsands me” or, conversely “i really feel like you understand me”
- the subtitle begins with, “a novel of …”
- it is fiction and has a subtitle
- the names ayn rand or chuck palahniuk are on the cover
thank you. i really feel like you understand me. now plumb my depths.
This post is one of my ever favorite things. Cuz also (and you know this!) icebergs are not at all wished for or helpful in many cases, for instance when you are on a disney cruise. where they shoot fireworks off the boat in the middle of the night ocean. when on a disney cruise, what is helpful is a magical safety and what you say here and how you say it is also a magical safety. Thanks.