“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.

No where does the unsaid drive drama more than in the opening line of Hemingway’s masterpiece A Farewell to Arms : It is well known among writers that drama dwells in the unuttered. Much like a painting’s white space heightens its colors or a symphony’s silences make its notes more resonant and full-bodied, what’s implied escalates tension and compels us to keep reading. What isn’t being disclosed, however, is harder to grasp but infinitely more interesting: is what a character says what she actually means ? why does she pause dramatically before she speaks? when her lover asks if she’s okay, why does she look away? In Hemingway, these uncertainties are pregnant with possibility: you have to dig beneath the narrative to get to the real story.

Most readers can decipher at this level of what is literally being divulged on the page. The narrative is the surface: character, dialogue, setting. One of my favorite professors described it this way: all novels have two levels, a narrative and a story. In much the same way the majority of an iceberg lies beneath the water where we can’t see, most of a story- he argued- operates underneath what a text says unambiguously. A revolt against the ornate artistic flourishes of the 19th century, Hemingway’s minimalist style pioneered a fiction “in which nothing crucial-or at least very little-was stated explicitly.” His philosophy- known as the “iceberg theory”- rested on the belief that a story’s deeper meaning should be intimated- not expressed directly. In the lavish prose that is her signature, Francine Du Plessix Gray defines seduction as a kind of “challenge to create a tension between the promise of gratification and the refined delay of that gratification -to intimate how much information I shall offer and how much I shall withhold.” No writer was a better master of seduction than Ernest Hemingway, whose economical writing style revolutionized English prose.

A call to arms hemingway