A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

"All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife -- second class -- and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked" (4).

As A Moveable Feast is a narrative focused on Hemingway’s youth, early relationships, and his development as a writer, I though it only fitting to explore how his writing in this text hints at that growth and how his relationship with Gertrude Stein and early methods of writing informed his stylistic and rhetorical choices. In doing so, I found myself drawn to several interpretations of Hemingway’s writing as reminiscent of the Cubism movement in art. Like Cubist painters, Hemingway is not bound to copying traditional form; instead, he presents a new reality by fragmenting sentences and phrases. A large portion of the novel is dedicated to exploring Hemingway’s relationship with Gertrude Stein, who was perhaps the most successful of "Cubist" writers. She manipulated the English language in such a way that its end results reflected those of modernist painters. Hemingway’s style was almost certainly influenced by the time he spent with Stein, and that influence can be seen in A Moveable Feast; the text is defined by Hemingway’s careful enjambment of descriptive language and commentary, and seemingly innocuous and insignificant observations broken up by pointed interpretation (as seen in the sentence above). 

The passage above is a perfect example of Hemingway's definitive use of simple but often difficult to decipher sentences. This example is emblematic of the deceiving simplicity of his sentence structure; unadorned, seemingly arbitrary observations interspersed with reflection. 

By looking at the similarities between what modernist artists like Picasso were attempting to do with image and what writers like Hemingway and Stein were doing with language, can we consider Hemingway to be a “Cubist” writer? How does his abstract narrative style incorporate elements of Cubism?