The Truth According to Hemingway

I started by examining Ernest Hemingway’s living vs. posthumous fiction. At a surface level, I saw that Hemingway would have cringed to see a 64% increase in the vocabulary density from the living to the posthumous. Assuming that the editorial work added few or no words not written by the author, this suggests that Hemingway instinctually drafted with more complex prose and revised to make it more simple.

Using the Links and Mandala tools, I searched for terms about desire: want*, desire*, care/cares/cared, need/needs/needed, and wish*. Mandala arranges the search terms in a circle and plots the documents in the corpus in proximity to the terms with the highest frequency. Living fiction fell closer to wish*, while posthumous fiction fell closer to hope*. No other proximities stood out to me. Both “wish” and “hope” are similar, but wishing is more hypothetical and non-expectant than hoping. I would conclude that Hemingway’s revised and published work is less optimistic than what was published later.

At this point I stopped distinguishing between living and posthumous fiction and regarded it as a whole. In Links, I found that the strongest collocates, or nearest words (within 5), of “want” were “said,” “asked,” “drink,” and “know.” Apparently Hemingway’s characters say what they want, ask what others want, or respond to someone’s want. Often they want to know things or have a drink, which is not very surprising. “Know” was also the single largest collocate of the search terms collectively, reinforcing how much knowledge matters in a Hemingway piece of fiction. The term “needs” connected to “money” and “badly,” which shows the financial struggles and desperation of these characters.

I also pursued the theme of communicating, with the terms said, say*, talk*, speak*, and spoke*. This didn’t yield much information, but I did find a reappearance of “know” and that “yes” is a common word spoken by Hemingway’s characters. The search term “talk” trended downward from the beginning to the end of the corpus, which is generally chronological. From this I guess that Hemingway’s emphasis on communication decays through the fiction he wrote, picking up again in the posthumous publications. This begs more research to be sure, but it appears that he becomes less interested or more disillusioned in the theme of communication or the lack thereof.

Seeing that knowing was so central in Hemingway fiction, I chose to pursue the themes of thought, knowledge, and truth. Using StreamGraph, Mandala, and Trends, I searched for the terms know*, knew, think*, thought*, true, and truth. These themes grow during Hemingway’s literary career, maximizing in AtR and OM. There is generally a correlation between thinking and knowing, and in OM the thinking far exceeds the knowing. In the Mandala tool I realized all volumes of Hemingway’s fiction contain all of these six search terms, except for OM and SAR, both of which are lacking only “truth.” Curiously enough, these two works are also the most polarized on the thinking-knowing spectrum. OM falls towards thinking and SAR falls towards knowing. In fact they mirror each other almost perfectly in their coordinates. THHN seems to be the most balanced between thinking, knowing, and truth.

While this analysis only observes the patterns of verbs, it has some relevance. I tentatively conclude that Hemingway sees thinking and knowing as related activities which are not entirely associated with truth. The relative infrequency of “truth” and “true” may show that he regards truth with some reverence, as a rarely glimpsed object—or perhaps that truth is conveyed better through concrete detail than abstraction.

Abbreviations: SS = Complete Short Stories. ToS = Torrents of Spring. SAR = The Sun Also Rises. AFTA = A Farewell to Arms. THHN = To Have and Have Not. FWBT = For Whom the Bell Tolls. AtR = Across the River and Into the Trees. OM = The Old Man and the Sea. IS = Islands in the Stream. GoE = Garden of Eden.

Images from personal analysis using Voyant Tools. Data: combined text of Ernest Hemingway’s short and long fiction.