artistic change

How Ernest Hemingway Reinvented the Literary Game

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AN ANALYSIS

When “Shock of the New” artistic change happens, which resets everything involved with an art form, later generations look back at the change as a given. The cultural earthquake becomes an accepted part of the environment. Only if you go back in history to grasp the pre-moment– the world, the art, as it existed before the change– can you understand the full impact.

Such is the case with Ernest Hemingway.

You could say Hemingway was the Beatles of literature. He became the face of a stylistic reinvention of the art– a reinvention now largely discarded by literati– and a role model for that always-endangered animal: male writers. The list of American authors inspired by his success is a long one: J.D. Salinger; James Jones; Irwin Shaw; Norman Mailer, James Baldwin; Gore Vidal; Richard Yates; Herman Wouk, to name several, each of them in pursuit of that elusive prey, the Great American Novel.

ASPECTS OF CHANGE

STYLE: Ernest Hemingway’s compressed, less-is-more writing style was based in part on the innovations of Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, but also on his observation of Impressionist painters like Cezanne, who could create an image and capture a moment in time with a few brush strokes. Give the right detail and the observer’s brain fills in the rest.

Hemingway applied the same principle to writing. (As would under-appreciated French detective writer Georges Simenon.) The goal: more sense of immediacy; increased intensity.

Ernest Hemingway made writing look easy– when his technique was anything but. The minimalists of the 1980’s were, for the most part, a caricature of the Hemingway style. Not to mention most pop detective fiction! See Mickey Spillane. Simenon without the humanity.

The trick when assessing Hemingway’s work is treating it as a starting point, not an end point. He opened a door that other writers– including today’s writers– need to jump through.

DESIGN: Ernest Hemingway was, like his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, a student of overall narrative design, most evident in his two famous short stories of the 1930’s, “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

The former artfully switches viewpoints throughout, from Margaret Macomber to Wilson the big game hunter, to Francis Macomber. At one point the story enters the viewpoint of a lion! Masterful.

PERSONA: The 1920’s, care of the Lost Generation of expat writers in France and Spain, is looked back at as the most glamorous period of American writing. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway– public figures both– were as celebrated as rock stars. A large part of this was the swaggering Hemingway persona. The two, in different ways, made writers cool again, as they hadn’t been since Byron. The literary scene became exciting.

Ernest Hemingway ended up as big, or bigger, a cultural figure as pop singers, athletes, and movie stars.

(image c/o Everett)

Can Ernest Hemingway be a model for writers now?

You won’t find a better one!

-Karl Wenclas for New Pop Lit NEWS

Achieving Artistic Breakthrough

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EVERYONE involved with today’s literary scene knows the art is in trouble. Complaints pour in from every direction. “Not enough male readers!” “The New Yorker story is overwritten!!” “Genre fiction is all the same!!!”

Proposed solutions to the problem are tepid at best. Needed: drastic change in the art itself to better connect literature to the general public. To wake people up. To shock the world like a sudden surge of electrical current leading to artistic and cultural–

BREAKTHROUGH!

To get to that point, all received wisdom– every stale assumption about what is-or-isn’t allowable– needs to be set aside. Prevailing prescriptions for the health of the literary art don’t work.

THE STATUS QUO

The problem with approved literary intellectuals is they know only one direction. They pursue it relentlessly, under the influence of their literary gods and icons. The Approved Canonical Works: texts written as if existing within a narrow corridor, the narratives trapped, unable to escape. The reader follows the verbiage as it travels along, constricted, words following words, then more words. Where is it headed? What does it mean?

Professors are employed full-time at universities to explain what it means, along with esteemed critics– stuffed and mounted on metaphorical walls– at highly touted stuffy publications, and you can only say in response to their explanations, “Makes sense, I guess?” Bullied to accept every part of it, because, after all, these are the experts. Authorities. A circle of approval perpetuating itself like a clock, existing without independent thought.

But those approved tomes haven’t connected to your life or the ongoing life of the society around you. They haven’t moved or enlightened you and they certainly haven’t entertained you.

When it comes to saving literature, the only credible solution is to turn pop into art– or art into pop.

BUT HOW?

Our primary idea has been pop-lit: the fusion of popular writing with the “literary” to create an all-new hybrid reflecting the best of both styles. Going a step beyond that, more recently we’ve been working on “hyper-pop” multiple viewpoint stories in order to achieve a quicker, quirkier, more 3-D effect. (See, for one example, the novella The Loud Boys.) Impetus for this is our belief that anyone who can radically change the art of fiction, improving the reading experience, will own the future of the art.

We see the New Pop Lit project as an Innovation Island, but without the crutch– the necessity– of new electronic technology. THAT innovation wave has peaked, and is showing signs (AI) of increasing desperation to keep the investment bubble backing it inflated.

Better: A new wave of creativity based on long dormant human-centered innovation.

WAVE THEORY

Most people in this mad technocratic world are indoctrinated from birth into a linear mindset. One step followed by another. This includes a progressive, linear view of history. They’re unaware of the concept of waves, articulated by Nikolai Kondratieff, Ralph Nelson Elliott and others. The question always is where a cultural form is, in its particular wave or cycle. In the early stages? Ascending? Peaking? At a plateau? In decline?

BOTTOMING OUT? Which is where I place American literature at the present moment.

THE LAST GREAT CULTURAL WAVE

That would have to be rock-pop music, which coalesced around various strains of roots music– blues, folk, gospel, country– in the mid-20th century, before igniting and taking off like a rocket ship on February 9th, 1964, when The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.

INSTANTANEITY

To better understand exactly what happened then– the quick cultural breakthrough– I’ve been reading several books on the period. Among them, Revolution In the Head by Ian MacDonald, which analyzes Beatles records and their impact. One term MacDonald uses caught my attention: instantaneity. He described it as “an elusive maelstrom of fragmentary impressions, perceptions, and jokes reflecting the collage spirit of an instantaneous, simultaneous, chance-embracing new age.”

But, he adds: “Not that The Beatles were fans of formlessness; quite the opposite.”

Structured chaos? A controlled cultural nuclear explosion? The term, anyway, gives us much to think about as we attempt to leap ahead of the literary pack with new artistic ideas.

-Karl Wenclas for New Pop Lit NEWS

How to Write the New Story

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WRITING THE BETTER SHORT STORY

feather pen

ONE THING which surprised me after we released to the world the first “3-D” multiple viewpoint short story is how not-obvious the technique appears to people. A tribute to how well the tale is put together to maintain momentum and flow, despite there being 82 individual mini-chapters, with continual switching of point-of-view– what had been told to me by esteemed literary writers should never be done by the serious writer.

(When an expert tells you something is impossible, or shouldn’t be done, that’s exactly what you want to work on accomplishing.)

MOST story writers maintain a single viewpoint throughout, whether that of one character, one consciousness, or for the more ambitious, the omniscient narrator, who in a short story still tends to have a narrow focus. Many use first person, which strongly emphasizes the single viewpoint.

A similar narrowing effect is created when writers eliminate quote marks normally used to distinguish when characters are speaking. (See Sally Rooney.) This strengthens the solipsism of the work. Many writers today, focused more on themselves than the reader’s experience, are solipsistic.
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The new 3–D fiction writing technique destroys all of this to bring in a multiplicity of viewpoints. Shifting angles, so that characters, events, and the world are viewed multidimensionally. The technique gives a more real depiction of the world, but also makes for a faster-paced story. “Vodka Friday Night” compresses enough plot and number of characters for a short novel into a 7,000-word short story. The overall effect of the piece becomes more concentrated. Intense. Dynamic.

HOW IT WORKS

A few simple tricks are utilized to do this. One is dividing the story into chapters, making sure each one is extremely brief. Separating them in some way, whether by asterisks, titles, or chapter numbers. F. Scott Fitzgerald did this in his long 1920 story “May Day.” Jay McInerney did something like this as well in his 1998 novella, Model Behavior. (I’m sure other authors have done so also.)

How brief of chapters?

I settled on a 240-word limit. Fitzgerald’s “May Day” chapters are way longer– except for the concise conclusion, which comes in at 238 words.

I came to the limit though by having the McInerney book open before me, on a particularly A.D.D.-tired eyes day, and choosing which chapters held my interest at a glance, and which didn’t. The ones at 240 words or less always came out right.

If you notice in the “Vodka” story, I also play with time in it, using a flashback or two, or not putting a few sections in strict chronological order. The idea being that we don’t experience the world in a straight line. Interspersed with the moment may be memories of past happenings, or images of future dreams.

There’s a lot more which can be done in that regard. The idea is to get the short story out of the narrow corridor it’s been trapped in, by playing with both time and space. (Ideally, expanding the number of views, characters, directions, broadens the work.)

THE RESULT

The result is a faster-paced yet more involved story. The reader enters a new world– of hyper-experience.
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I plan on using other tricks in future prototypes. My co-editor Kathleen Marie Crane plans to do so as well. (Her first foray into the idea was when she took the title story from her short story collection, “Aloha from Detroit,” and rewrote the same events from the perspective of another character– which we ran at New Pop Lit as “Aloha from Detroit Revisited.” Reading both stories one after another adds roundedness; depth.)

THERE REMAIN many, many aspects of the short story form which can be played with. It’s time writers began playing with them.

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-Karl Wenclas, New Pop Lit News

What Is the Pre-Breakthrough Moment?

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WHAT IS the Pre-Breakthrough Moment?

It’s that period before drastic artistic upheaval when everything seems quiescent on the surface but for the very acute, rumblings of dynamic change can be sensed beneath the surface. A conjunction of forces about to come together to become explosive.

Beatles_with_Ed_Sullivan

AN EXAMPLE of this is the moment in the 1960’s– late 1963– when the universe was ready to signal such change. When all in America seemed calm, yet within months a rock and roll band from Liverpool, England, would appear on the scene so different in look and attitude it would overturn the culture and herald the overwhelming changes of the Sixties, spearheaded by the rock revolution. The Beatles appearance on national television on the Ed Sullivan Show the initial step.

img_The_Beatles_Hello_Goodbye-36

Is such long-overdue change coming to the literary world?

We can hope!

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(3–D Day is June 6th, exclusively at New Pop Lit.)
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-Karl Wenclas, New Pop Lit NEWS

Critics and New Art

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THOUGHTS ON THE 3–D SHORT STORY

impression sunrise claude monet(“Impression Sunrise” by Claude Monet.)

THE TEST of an artistic critic is how swiftly the person adapts to artistic change. The ability to embrace the NEW and not be left behind.

EXAMPLES from the past include the rise of modernist art, beginning with the 19th century Impressionists. As Robert Hughes and others noted, the inability of art critics to keep up with change became a cliche, until anything new was automatically accepted in fear of being wrong again.

jazz singer

ANOTHER example is the transition in the late 1920’s from silent cinema to sound. Or, in the 50’s and 60’s, from “silver screen” movies to Technicolor and Cinemascope, which even as astute a film critic as Pauline Kael found difficulty dealing with, so enamored was she with smaller films of the 1930’s. Kael’s antipathy to wide screen movies was such that director David Lean once exclaimed to her, “You won’t be happy with any movie I make unless it’s shot on 16 mm in black and white!”

lawrenceof

HOW will literary critics react to the emergence of a new style of short story? One faster, more designed, more exciting than any short story offered now? A story, moreover, which fuses literary and pop elements to create a visibly different work?

Questions, questions. . . .
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Karl Wenclas, New Pop Lit NEWS

Why Change?

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WHY CHANGE THE SHORT STORY ART?

THE ATTITUDE throughout the literary world is that our stories are very good no one could do better so why change anything?

Yet art like everything in nature needs to adapt, mutate, change.

The Rolling Stones

THERE ARE scores of bands today who can do anything the Rolling Stones did– in presentation, posturing, music– likely better, but the Stones got there first. Or almost first. Early enough.

Bob-Dylan

Hundreds, maybe thousands of wannabe folk singers can sing and play the guitar as well or better than Bob Dylan ever did– some even write as well– yet Bob Zimmerman got there before them.

ABBA_-_TopPop_1974_1

Dozens of singers in groups and bands can blend their voices as well as did the 70’s Swedish pop act ABBA. But ABBA did that kind of thing before them.
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Here’s a photo of an ABBA sound-alike group from California, Music Go Music. They’re pretty good. Ever hear of them?

music go music****

MEANWHILE, there are at least a hundred rock bands out there influenced by– and sounding and looking very much like– the classic rock band Led Zeppelin. Most prominent among them is Greta Van Fleet, which won the 2019 Grammy for Best Rock Band. (You know rock lost its cred and impetus when they created a Grammy category for it. Tamed and neutered.) Here’s a photo of the band:

greta van fleet

What, are we back in the 1970’s? This is not called reinventing an art form, or even renewing it. It’s called recycling something which lost steam more than twenty years ago. It’s art going through the motions– staying alive in a culture, but barely. On life support. (The situation “Literature” has been in for decades.)
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THERE ARE EVEN today painters who can paint just like Paul Gaugin and Vincent van Gogh (if not with quite their amount of passion and soul), but when those two artists came onto the scene no one was painting like they were painting.

We remember the pioneers, the innovators, the creators-not-regurgitators, in any field.

WHAT are we asking of short story writers?

We’re asking them to be prepared to scrap their current beliefs on how to write, to be ready to radically alter their present modes of writing– to be willing to change the way they view the art, because one way or another, from this corner or another, artistic change IS coming.

postcard-big-pop-11-page-001

Not “Literature.” Instead: POP LIT.
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-Karl Wenclas, New Pop Lit NEWS