Generally
speaking, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea may be seen as a culmination of
his long-drawn
experiment spanning over 25 years and speculations towards
finding out the means through which the “closed
literature” can be converted
into “an open one”, that is, to universalise the significance of the themes. He
was very much aware of the danger in and difficulties with “closed literature”
which in its factual texture, so lightly woven, presents such opacity of vision
that the reader is unable to see through it any larger implication and that he
may even “find himself squirming with aesthetic claustrophobia”. Hemingway
revolted against these stylistic limits which factualistic naturalism
necessarily imposes on the sensibility of an artist. In Death and the Afternoon
he asserted that the writer of prose ought to aim at “architecture, not
interior decoration”; in other words, to provide the particular kind of fenestration
through which the reader is able to catch glimpses of larger implications of
the world. Compared with his contemporaries, for instance, Faulkner, Hemingway
deliberately avoids elaborations of technique through which the modernists
chose to present the complexity and disjunctions of modern experience and loss
of value in their interpretation. There can be found little in his works in the
way of those large presentational strategies by which they created the
impressions of flux and plurality of contemporary
consciousness, but that
consciousness is there in Hemingway’s works...more>>