Hemingway remained sufficiently intrigued by this seminal event to ask in a 1956 letter that Walter Lord's 1955 best-seller about the wreck of the Titanic, A Night to Remember, be sent to him in Cuba (SL 858), and he also included several references to the Titanic, "sunk by an iceberg," in his posthumously published Islands in the Stream (14). The iceberg became a cultural symbol that warned against humanity's pride in technological progress. The huge, unseen presence paradoxically created a huge absence, as ship and passengers disappeared under the sea. The danger associated with the iceberg had been seared into the cultural consciousness by the 1912 sinking of the Titanic. However, he later acknowledged this danger, noting that "if a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story" (quoted in Plimpton 88). He did not recognize that his first use of the iceberg theory enabled him to omit the suicide of a failed male guide-figure, a psychologically significant and unconsciously prescient act. So I didn't put in the hanging" (SL 181). Hemingway claimed in 1925 that he omitted the guide's death because "I wanted to write a tragic story without violence. Some leave the text unfinished, confusing, and even empty of meaning-a criticism often leveled at "Out of Season" (1923). Though Rose Marie Burwell suggests that Hemingway's "iceberg theory had begun to dissolve" (54) with Robert Jordan's interiority in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Hemingway's repeated references over the course of thirty years bear witness to its continuing significance for him.Ī danger inherent in the iceberg theory is that not every omission sets up resonances in a text. He explicitly articulated this theory again in a 1958 Paris Review interview, in his unpublished 1959 essay "The Art of the Short Story," and in his posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast (1964). ERNEST HEMINGWAY FIRST DESCRIBED his aesthetic theory in Death in the Afternoon (1932), employing the metaphor of the iceberg to carry the weight of his argument.
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