A Farewell to Arms, again
Since reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, I’ve been pondering how such a stale romance became a classic. If a woman had written it (she says bitterly) it would probably be as maligned as Twilight, because the relationship is even duller than Bella & Edward’s and the heroine yet more self-abnegating.
Yes! Yet more! People like to slam Bella for having no interests, but she does have at least one overriding interests: she thinks Edward is really, really hot. She wants to have sex with him; she positively pesters him about it. Now, pestering is not a very mature way to get what you want. But at least Bella, unlike - just a second, I need to look up her name; I can’t remember any of the characters’ names from A Farewell to Arms -
See, this is another good thing about Twilight. The characters tend to be rather one-note, but most of those single notes are memorable: I don’t go “Wait, who are you again?” when they show up. It’s rather like Gordon Korman’s MacDonald Hall books: most of the characters have one trait (Elmer is nerdy, Sidney Rampulsky is clumsy, Dave Jackson is American...), but they’re rather endearing with it.
Catherine Barkley. That’s the love interest’s name in A Farewell to Arms. Unlike Catherine Barkley, Bella Swan does not pride herself on having no desires in the world but to please her beloved. She wants to have sex with him, she wants to be made a vampire: she and Edward occasionally leave off their rounds of “I love yous” in order to argue about whether or when or how she will get what she wants.
Catherine and the narrator of The Sun Also Rises never argue. Their conversations are all a sort of “I love you so much! No, I love you so much!” feedback loop.
To be compelling, a relationship has to be about something other than itself: that is, the characters can’t just talk about their feelings about each other all the time. We need to see why these characters love each other so much. What do they have in common? Do they talk about books, politics, the nature of Good and Evil? Or, say, what the fuck the point of World War I is, given that they’re smack dab in the middle of it?
I have no idea why Hemingway’s prose style is so lauded. It’s main point seems to be to iron the emotion and the intellectual content out of his work. He’s writing about a war. A war in Italy. The main characters have nothing to say to each other about politics, warfare, art, the meaning of life, religion?
Of course actual conversation is harder to write than “I love you more than a million sunbeams!” dialogue, and may seem less to the point, if the point is to show that these people looooove each other. The thing to remember is that discussing the plot twists in Twelfth Night or arguing about the nature of Good and Evil is also, in its way, a negotiation of the relationship.
Yes! Yet more! People like to slam Bella for having no interests, but she does have at least one overriding interests: she thinks Edward is really, really hot. She wants to have sex with him; she positively pesters him about it. Now, pestering is not a very mature way to get what you want. But at least Bella, unlike - just a second, I need to look up her name; I can’t remember any of the characters’ names from A Farewell to Arms -
See, this is another good thing about Twilight. The characters tend to be rather one-note, but most of those single notes are memorable: I don’t go “Wait, who are you again?” when they show up. It’s rather like Gordon Korman’s MacDonald Hall books: most of the characters have one trait (Elmer is nerdy, Sidney Rampulsky is clumsy, Dave Jackson is American...), but they’re rather endearing with it.
Catherine Barkley. That’s the love interest’s name in A Farewell to Arms. Unlike Catherine Barkley, Bella Swan does not pride herself on having no desires in the world but to please her beloved. She wants to have sex with him, she wants to be made a vampire: she and Edward occasionally leave off their rounds of “I love yous” in order to argue about whether or when or how she will get what she wants.
Catherine and the narrator of The Sun Also Rises never argue. Their conversations are all a sort of “I love you so much! No, I love you so much!” feedback loop.
To be compelling, a relationship has to be about something other than itself: that is, the characters can’t just talk about their feelings about each other all the time. We need to see why these characters love each other so much. What do they have in common? Do they talk about books, politics, the nature of Good and Evil? Or, say, what the fuck the point of World War I is, given that they’re smack dab in the middle of it?
I have no idea why Hemingway’s prose style is so lauded. It’s main point seems to be to iron the emotion and the intellectual content out of his work. He’s writing about a war. A war in Italy. The main characters have nothing to say to each other about politics, warfare, art, the meaning of life, religion?
Of course actual conversation is harder to write than “I love you more than a million sunbeams!” dialogue, and may seem less to the point, if the point is to show that these people looooove each other. The thing to remember is that discussing the plot twists in Twelfth Night or arguing about the nature of Good and Evil is also, in its way, a negotiation of the relationship.