Doubts concerning "A Farewell to Arms"

[Dionido]

I've been reading A Farewell to Arms, I'm about half way through the novel, and it's the first time I read any Hemingway.
Mostly, I've been liking it very much; the albeit rare descriptive sections in their clean yet evocative and nostalgic tone; the strength and momentum that the application of hemingway's "Iceberg thory" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory) gives to the narration and the way it contributes to elevating the deeper values of the novel.

However frequently I find myself quite perplexed when reading some of the dialogue.
In some cases, especially between Catherine and Fred, not only does it seem to me cold, impersonal, and quite unrealistic, but I don't really understand what kind of idea the author is trying to convey with them, what they're supposed to "mean".

Here are a couple of examples:

“You’re such a silly boy.” She kissed me. “That’s all right for the chart. Your temperature’s always normal. You’ve such a lovely temperature.”
“You’ve got a lovely everything.”
“Oh no. You have the lovely temperature. I’m awfully proud of your temperature.”
“Maybe all our children will have fine temperatures.” “Our children will probably have beastly temperatures.”

“Isn’t there anywhere we can go?”
“No,” she said. “We have to just walk here. You’ve been away a long time.”
“This is the third day. But I’m back now.”
She looked at me, “And you do love me?”
“Yes.”
“You did say you loved me, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I lied. “I love you.” I had not said it before.
“And you call me Catherine?”
“Catherine.”
We walked on a way and were stopped under a tree.
“Say, ‘I’ve come back to Catherine in the night.”
“I’ve come back to Catherine in the night.”
“Oh, darling, you have come back, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I love you so and it’s been awful. You won’t go away?”
“No. I’ll always come back.”
“Oh, I love you so.




It just sounds plain awkward to me.
Anyway I wanted to ask you guys your opinion on this subject, because I just might be missing the "tone" of these conversations. And also I would like to try to appreciate this work fully, since I know it is widely considered one of the greatest masterpieces by one the most widely appreciated innovators of American and international literature.

Thanks!

[kelby_lake]

I didn't mind the conversations actually. I thought they were supposed to be quite simple- their relationship isn't going to be the passion that shook the battlefield exactly is it?

Hemingway didn't really go in for poetry.

[LitNetIsGreat]

You might be interested in this recent thread on Hemingway:http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=43852

Granted it doesn't cover "A Farewell to Arms" (new browser won't allow me to do italics for some reason?) exclusively but it covers a good discussion we have just recently had on Hemingway, I think so anyway.

As for your particular post I don't really have time to give it a full answer, and although I rate Hemingway highly I wouldn't rate him as high as you obviously do when you say he and AFTA is "one of the greatest masterpieces by one the most widely appreciated innovators of American and international literature" but I suppose that is neither here nor there.

One point I would make is that maybe as opposed to seeing the male character here as uncaring and unrealistic he is rather coming across as a "man's man" (ouch) as someone who has come through a war and is not to open to widespread sensitivity in the modern sense of the word. I actually enjoy the dialogue in the scene above but confess that it is far from his best novel as I stated in the other thread I posted.

Perhaps what we see here is a wounded man in more sense then being physically wounded, and his perceived lack of emotion is just an extension of that. His short sharp replies only back that up in my mind. It does seem to give the power in the conversation to the male figure too.

That is just one thought, but I am tied down with exam prep so I won't be writing much on here for a few weeks, :bawling: so keep it real folks; the Neelynator will be back. :thumbs_up :)

[Emil Miller]

I've been reading A Farewell to Arms, I'm about half way through the novel, and it's the first time I read any Hemingway.
Mostly, I've been liking it very much; the albeit rare descriptive sections in their clean yet evocative and nostalgic tone; the strength and momentum that the application of hemingway's "Iceberg thory" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory) gives to the narration and the way it contributes to elevating the deeper values of the novel.

However frequently I find myself quite perplexed when reading some of the dialogue.
In some cases, especially between Catherine and Fred, not only does it seem to me cold, impersonal, and quite unrealistic, but I don't really understand what kind of idea the author is trying to convey with them, what they're supposed to "mean".

Here are a couple of examples:

“You’re such a silly boy.” She kissed me. “That’s all right for the chart. Your temperature’s always normal. You’ve such a lovely temperature.”
“You’ve got a lovely everything.”
“Oh no. You have the lovely temperature. I’m awfully proud of your temperature.”
“Maybe all our children will have fine temperatures.” “Our children will probably have beastly temperatures.”

“Isn’t there anywhere we can go?”
“No,” she said. “We have to just walk here. You’ve been away a long time.”
“This is the third day. But I’m back now.”
She looked at me, “And you do love me?”
“Yes.”
“You did say you loved me, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I lied. “I love you.” I had not said it before.
“And you call me Catherine?”
“Catherine.”
We walked on a way and were stopped under a tree.
“Say, ‘I’ve come back to Catherine in the night.”
“I’ve come back to Catherine in the night.”
“Oh, darling, you have come back, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I love you so and it’s been awful. You won’t go away?”
“No. I’ll always come back.”
“Oh, I love you so.




It just sounds plain awkward to me.
Anyway I wanted to ask you guys your opinion on this subject, because I just might be missing the "tone" of these conversations. And also I would like to try to appreciate this work fully, since I know it is widely considered one of the greatest masterpieces by one the most widely appreciated innovators of American and international literature.

Thanks!

Your question is interesting. I haven't read A Farewell to Arms but reading your extracts from the novel it seems to me that the awkwardness in the dialogue that you dislike is very natural between two people who are in love. In such circumstances people say things they otherwise wouldn't say.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Your question is interesting. I haven't read A Farewell to Arms but reading your extracts from the novel it seems to me that the awkwardness in the dialogue that you dislike is very natural between two people who are in love. In such circumstances people say things they otherwise wouldn't say.

Yes. What is "real" when two people are in love comes to us via the Hollywood narrative anyway. What people really say when they are in love is probably very different, I don't know, I can't remember! :bawling::lol:

[mayneverhave]

You might be interested in this recent thread on Hemingway:http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=43852

Granted it doesn't cover "A Farewell to Arms" (new browser won't allow me to do italics for some reason?) exclusively but it covers a good discussion we have just recently had on Hemingway, I think so anyway.

As for your particular post I don't really have time to give it a full answer, and although I rate Hemingway highly I wouldn't rate him as high as you obviously do when you say he and AFTA is "one of the greatest masterpieces by one the most widely appreciated innovators of American and international literature" but I suppose that is neither here nor there.

One point I would make is that maybe as opposed to seeing the male character here as uncaring and unrealistic he is rather coming across as a "man's man" (ouch) as someone who has come through a war and is not to open to widespread sensitivity in the modern sense of the word. I actually enjoy the dialogue in the scene above but confess that it is far from his best novel as I stated in the other thread I posted.

Perhaps what we see here is a wounded man in more sense then being physically wounded, and his perceived lack of emotion is just an extension of that. His short sharp replies only back that up in my mind. It does seem to give the power in the conversation to the male figure too.

That is just one thought, but I am tied down with exam prep so I won't be writing much on here for a few weeks, :bawling: so keep it real folks; the Neelynator will be back. :thumbs_up :)

We didn't cover the novel in extreme depth, but in that thread I did bring up the very same issue that the OP of this thread is bringing up. The simplicity of the conversation between Katherine and Frederick Henry - really the simplicity of Katherine as a character, in general.

[Tyler Self]

Hemmingway almost never used adverbs in any of his writing. This does always make dialogue a bit akward because you don't know how the characters are speaking. A good example of this is in his short story "Hills Like White Elephants."

I think what he meant to aim for in this is that he wanted readers to decide for themselves how the characters acted.

[dfloyd]

two people who lived about 90 years ago. And Hemingway never thought, when he wrote his novels, that he would be subjected to such anaylisis by critics. He just wrote some damn good stories. Quit trying to read something into the novel. Just read it as an excellent story about two people in love in the midst of the war to end all wars.

This is one of the novels of Hemingway which was brought to the screen successfully by Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. Watch the movie to get more out of the novel. Also, Aldolph Menjou has a good role as the Italian doctor. Don't watch a later version with Rock Hudson.

Hemingway didn't write death defying prose every time he sat down to write, and culturally, you can't be expected to understand things as they were in 1915 or so. Or to feel what these two people felt in a long ago time.

[mayneverhave]

two people who lived about 90 years ago. And Hemingway never thought, when he wrote his novels, that he would be subjected to such anaylisis by critics. He just wrote some damn good stories. Quit trying to read something into the novel. Just read it as an excellent story about two people in love in the midst of the war to end all wars.

This is one of the novels of Hemingway which was brought to the screen successfully by Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. Watch the movie to get more out of the novel. Also, Aldolph Menjou has a good role as the Italian doctor. Don't watch a later version with Rock Hudson.

Hemingway didn't write death defying prose every time he sat down to write, and culturally, you can't be expected to understand things as they were in 1915 or so. Or to feel what these two people felt in a long ago time.

This novel was published in 1929 - hardly an extremely remote period from 2009. To borrow from Northrop Frye when he said that if Shakespeare were alive today he would not understand Shakespearean criticism only holds true to a degree with Hemingway. Criticism and literary theory existed in his time - you cannot say he "did not intend to write in depth literature", because, A. he is a serious writer and not a writer of fluffy romance, and B. we cannot make a judgement call on a writer's intention.

Secondly, it is not only our own time that we are comparing Hemingway's dialogue with, but other novels from the 1920's which portray contemporary dialogue. Honestly, I'm not concerned with whether Joyce, Hemingway, or Faulkner portayed more realistic dialogue in their novels, but whether their dialogue fits what they're portraying. In this novel's case, the dialogue seems ridiculous compared to the otherwise realistic setting of the novel.

[dfloyd]

but Hemingway got the input for it when he was an amubulance driver in the first part of WWI, say aound 1916. I am certainly glad I had read all of Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald before attending college. That way I was insulated from all the garbage promulgated by litarature professor and others of their ilk.

[mono]

Welcome to the forum, Dionido.
A Farewell to Arms seems probably one of the better novels to start, perhaps next to The Sun Also Rises or For Whom the Bell Tolls, but you will see this trend in all of his novels - a vague distance between many of the characters, and also, as cliché as it sounds, a character's distance from one's own psyche in the form of internal dialogues (common in The Old Man and the Sea). This distance seems mostly unintentional, and a reader expects it the more and more s/he reads Hemingway.
As Neely said, the main character of A Farewell to Arms, as well as almost every other main male character in Hemingway's novels, comes across as hard, firm, impervious, and devoid of all emotion. Many female characters will also have similar characteristics in his novels, with a few exceptions, as seeming delicate, emotional, sometimes witty, balancing the two extremes of submissiveness and domination, and warm. I will not spoil the novel, if you have not finished it yet, but this distance, as simply demonstrated in this dialogue, overcomes itself, and a reader will find that no matter how unyielding and cold a Hemingway character may seem, their insides appear as soft and vulnerable as porcelain.

Hemmingway almost never used adverbs in any of his writing. This does always make dialogue a bit akward because you don't know how the characters are speaking.
Hmmm, interesting observation - I never noticed this until now. Perhaps I will look into it a bit myself.

And Hemingway never thought, when he wrote his novels, that he would be subjected to such anaylisis by critics. He just wrote some damn good stories. Quit trying to read something into the novel. Just read it as an excellent story about two people in love in the midst of the war to end all wars.
Writing this on a literature forum, where we discuss literature, seems a bit self-condescending and makes the forum somewhat obsolete, because what other use should one have a membership and screen-name here than to discuss and analyze literature?
I do not know what Hemingway thought, and will not claim that I do, but we speak of a man who wrote hundreds of timeless works, who won both a Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize, and worked as a journalist. Someone cannot convince me that he did not appreciate at least a bit of the attention for his obvious talent; if he hated the critics enough, he would likely have stopped writing.

[Big Al]

The idea that Hemingway was simply "trying to tell a good story" is absurd. If that were the case, his works would not be as highly regarded as they are.

[Eryk]

Quit trying to read something into the novel.
Literature. Forum.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Quit trying to read something into the novel.

Hmm, it is the job of the reader and critic do such things and without being funny, it's quite an amateurish angle to take. It's the sort of thing that people who don't read books say to people who do.

[kelby_lake]

two people who lived about 90 years ago. And Hemingway never thought, when he wrote his novels, that he would be subjected to such anaylisis by critics. He just wrote some damn good stories. Quit trying to read something into the novel. Just read it as an excellent story about two people in love in the midst of the war to end all wars.


Ah, but that's passive reading- sit back, question nothing, form opinion, toss it in pile. Reading should be active- questioning, re-reading, discussing...like theatre :) Writers could learn a lot from theatre.

I understand what you mean, sort of- not giving a trite explanation of it, thus condemning it to one interpretation.

[mono]

Hmm, it is the job of the reader and critic do such things and without being funny, it's quite an amateurish angle to take. It's the sort of thing that people who don't read books say to people who do.
This reminds me of one of Mark Twain's seemingly lesser-known quotes - perhaps others have heard it, too . . . ?

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Yes I like that one, I think Stlukes uses that as part of his signature.