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Unreliable Narrator
Definition of Verbal Irony
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. When there's a hurricane raging outside and someone remarks "what... read full definition
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. When there's a hurricane raging... read full definition
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean... read full definition
Paris Sketches: Birth of a New School
Explanation and Analysis—Plank in a Sawmill:
In Paris Sketches: Birth of a New School, Hemingway tries to ignore a young man who keeps interrupting him while he is writing. Hemingway uses a simile and verbal irony to give the reader a sense of how irritating and vacuous he finds the young man:
I found I could go on writing and that it was no worse than other noises; certainly better than Ezra learning to play the bassoon.
“Suppose you wanted to be a writer and feel it in every part of your body and it just wouldn’t come.[...] Suppose once it had come like an irresistible torrent and then it left you mute and silent.”
Better than mute and noisy, I thought, and went on writing. He was in full cry now and the unbelievable sentences were soothing as the noise of a plank being violated in the sawmill.
Hemingway compares the young man's speech to the sound of "a plank being violated in the sawmill." It is loud, disruptive, dissonant, and destructive. When Hemingway writes that listening to the young man is as "soothing" as this noise, he means the opposite: listening to the young man is highly irritating, more irritating than Ezra's bassoon lessons. At this point, Hemingway can no longer tune him out.
Whereas most of Hemingway's acquaintances in Paris turn out to be famous artists or writers in their own right, this young man turns out to be conspicuously unimportant. He may or may not have been a real person, but he is a convenient stand-in for literary critics in general, whose chatter Hemingway rarely appreciated. The "New School" this chapter is named after is the school of "New Criticism," which centered around the idea that literary works should be read up close, as self-contained objects rather than as products of their authors and times. Around the time Hemingway was in Paris, the as-yet-to-be-named "New School" began to dominate over older models of literary criticism. Literary criticism also became more popular as a profession during this period.
The young man in the cafe allows Hemingway to deliver harsh criticism to the critics. He accuses them of being, on the whole, failed creatives who are taking the easy way out. He resents them for making things harder for creative writers who are still committed to their craft. The young man seems determined to break Hemingway's focus and shatter his confidence with existential questions about writer's block. When he asks what Hemingway does when the words won't come, Hemingway retorts (not aloud, but to the reader) that it is better to be "mute and silent" than "mute and noisy." This is a backhanded way of saying that the young man is spewing "noisy" words without saying anything at all. Anyone will read criticism, he argues, even if it is empty prose that sounds like "a plank being violated in the sawmill." Hemingway, on the other hand, has to get every word just right.
Related Themes:
