{"id":639,"date":"2017-12-20T17:00:27","date_gmt":"2017-12-21T00:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dh.danewhitaker.com\/?p=57"},"modified":"2017-12-20T14:05:15","modified_gmt":"2017-12-20T21:05:15","slug":"the-truth-according-to-hemingway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/f17dh\/student-posts\/the-truth-according-to-hemingway\/","title":{"rendered":"The Truth According to Hemingway"},"content":{"rendered":"I started by examining Ernest Hemingway\u2019s 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.\r\n\r\nUsing 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 \u201cwish\u201d and \u201chope\u201d are similar, but wishing is more hypothetical and non-expectant than hoping. I would conclude that Hemingway\u2019s revised and published work is less optimistic than what was published later.\r\n\r\nAt 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 \u201cwant\u201d were \u201csaid,\u201d \u201casked,\u201d \u201cdrink,\u201d and \u201cknow.\u201d Apparently Hemingway\u2019s characters say what they want, ask what others want, or respond to someone\u2019s want. Often they want to know things or have a drink, which is not very surprising. \u201cKnow\u201d was also the single largest collocate of the search terms collectively, reinforcing how much knowledge matters in a Hemingway piece of fiction. The term \u201cneeds\u201d connected to \u201cmoney\u201d and \u201cbadly,\u201d which shows the financial struggles and desperation of these characters.\r\n\r\nI also pursued the theme of communicating, with the terms said, say*, talk*, speak*, and spoke*. This didn\u2019t yield much information, but I did find a reappearance of \u201cknow\u201d and that \u201cyes\u201d is a common word spoken by Hemingway\u2019s characters. The search term \u201ctalk\u201d trended downward from the beginning to the end of the corpus, which is generally chronological. From this I guess that Hemingway\u2019s 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.\r\n\r\nSeeing 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\u2019s 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\u2019s fiction contain all of these six search terms, except for OM and SAR, both of which are lacking only \u201ctruth.\u201d 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.\r\n\r\nWhile 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 \u201ctruth\u201d and \u201ctrue\u201d may show that he regards truth with some reverence, as a rarely glimpsed object\u2014or perhaps that truth is conveyed better through concrete detail than abstraction.\r\n\r\n\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\r\n\r\nAbbreviations: 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.\u00a0OM = The Old Man and the Sea. IS = Islands in the Stream. GoE = Garden of Eden.\r\n\r\nImages from personal analysis using Voyant Tools<\/a>. Data:\u00a0combined text of Ernest Hemingway\u2019s short and long fiction.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hemingway","category-student-posts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9aQyB-aj","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/f17dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/f17dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/f17dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/f17dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/f17dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/f17dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":642,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/f17dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions\/642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/f17dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/f17dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/f17dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}