Sense.

What Hemingway captured, in other words, was the familiar, personal, very un-Jamesian experience of processing the world directly in time. His work of this period connects with our animal habits of consciousness. And the struggle it brings to the foreground is the struggle to make sense of—to find a line of narrative through—this disordered experience. Hemingway’s insight was to understand that this struggle was not just a literary one. It’s a fundamental part of how people themselves perceive and try to make sense of the world.

That insight shaped most of his finest writing, from the slow-focusing dialogue of his stories (like “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” a story about a writer’s fears that he’s failed to capture his crucial experiences on paper) to the stunning opening of A Farewell to Arms (1929), in which the narrator describes the movement of troops through their effect on the late-summer landscape he knows well. Yet slowly, under the mantle of fame and, perhaps, his own need to experiment, Hemingway’s writing moved away from this pellucid reporting and began to don the raiment of high style. It was not always for the best. Compare the vigor and clarity of The Sun Also Rises with this, from his last published novel (or novella), The Old Man and the Sea, describing the old man’s internal life:

He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on. He urinated outside the shack and then went up the road to wake the boy. He was shivering with the morning cold. But he knew he would shiver himself warm and that soon he would be rowing.

Almost everything here is backward and vague. What are “great occurrences”? Why do we see “places” and lions before we’re introduced to the beach, the setting? The final piece of information in the dream description is that it’s dusk—though that’s the first evocative detail we need in order to envisage the scene. And the old man has woken up, dressed, gone outside, and urinated before we have any sense what time of day it is. This sort of writing is more common than one might like in Hemingway’s later work. In Islands in the Stream (written around the same time and published posthumously), we get sentences such as “Out of all the things you could not have there were some that you could have and one of those was to know when you were happy and to enjoy all of it while it was there and it was good.” This is, in fact, not so good—in part because it takes a simple, not particularly fresh idea (embrace happiness when it comes; it won’t last long) and filters it through a distortion lens of style. Rather than using the progress of experience to shape the words on the page, Hemingway was using his voice to shape the sentences.

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