The Iceberg Theory and Hemingway’s Technique

Lecturer: Ghufran Abd Hussein

Department of English

University of Karbala

Abstract: After the publication of The Old Man and the Sea, his last major work, Hemingway recalled that he never despised the participation and debate of both the essential literary and aesthetic issues of his age, that he often openly stated his opinions. His stories reveal the writer’s expectations as encoded in the theory iceberg: “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.” My contribution identifies the hidden part of the iceberg in selected writings.

Introduction

The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 drew the attention of the world to the danger inherent in any encounter with an iceberg. As the huge ship sank unexpectedly, carrying its passengers to the depth of the Atlantic, it brought about an equally huge absence. Thus, the physical iceberg turned into a cultural symbol and a warning against the reliance on technology. Hemingway himself was deeply marked by the tragedy of the Titanic and in his posthumously published volume Islands in the Stream (1970), one of the characters says: “I know old songs such as the loss of John Jacob Astor on the Titanic when sunk by an iceberg” (Hemingway 1970: 16).

Megan Floyd Desnoyers, commented on the paradox a reviewer is facing when approaching Hemingway’s work:

“There are three pieces to the puzzle that is this person we know as Hemingway: the life the man really lived, his writing, and the celebrity. One has to guess where one piece ends and another begins. Could Hemingway himself distinguish between the fact, the fiction, and the celebrity? As the consummate storyteller, he may not have cared which was which. But he left such a generous record of all three that biographers, literary critics, and the general public can endlessly reconfigure the puzzle—sometimes successfully, sometimes not” (Desnoyers 1992: 3).

Omission as a writing style

Omission, as a writing style, was refined and popularised in English Literature by Hemingway in the early 20th Century as an experimental way towards Modernism. Named the Iceberg Theory by its creator, the style became associated to him but its concept is not something particularly new in Literature. Poets would have made use of a similar idea when applying words to denote and connote different things at the same time. While there is very little denotation to an omission, one can find a lot of connotations to it. The principle is essentially the same but its form is completely distinct. By omitting certain characteristics of a story the writer leaves the fully understanding of it on the shoulders of the reader. An efficient technique of creating a three dimensional prose where the reader not only is thrown in a different world as an observer but also has to keep the track of changes and fill the gaps left by the writer. 

The Iceberg Theory itself rely consistently on three main characteristics, being the static sentences, the lack of internal punctuation, and sentences that are juxtaposed, building their meaning on each other. The narrative is like a collage, several pictures put together without much explanation but rather suggestions, and relying on each other to build coherence and meaning. These omissions, or lack of explanations, are not only related to a character’s mysterious behaviour, for example, or his ineptitude to explains his acts, but also to what surrounds and permeates the story. 

As Paul Smith   pointed out, “the things that a writer knows that may be omitted refer not simply to the details of a single story, but to the wider intellectual and cultural background” . Therefore it seems particularly necessary for a better understanding of such a story that the reader has some previous knowledge, or is familiarized with concepts and customs of a particular time, or culture, from where a certain story comes. 

One first example is The Sun Also Rises, to which Hemingway successfully applies the metaphor of the iceberg in presenting his protagonist, Jake Barnes—an expatriate American journalist in Paris—who suffers of impotence caused by a wound inflicted in the war. There is no visible future in the relationship between Jake and Lady Brett Ashley, and happy ending to this novel about the Lost Generation, masculinity, gender, and bullfighting, Jake’s affliction is never openly discussed, just alluded to, living the reader to decipher it from the otherwise simple plot. The end of the novel is such an example of the use of the iceberg: 

The driver started up the street. I settled back. Brett moved close to me. We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned out onto the Gran Via.

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (Hemingway 1926: 222)

Conclusions

 As formulated in Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway’s iceberg theory is an original contribution to the development of fiction writing. Hemingway’s texts are remarkable for the writer’s gift of leaving aside the seven-eighths of the matter untold, allowing the readers to make up the submerged, untold matter, using their imagination to fill in the existing gap through personal interpretation. The readers are thus actively engaged in the creative process, contributing their own knowledge of the social and cultural background of the period when the novels and short stories were written. This “theory of omission”—as it has been called—may be thought of as one Hemingway’s major contribution to fiction writing. He always tried to write according to his own “iceberg principle”, leaving only what he considered absolutely necessary to the development of the plot and character development to be seen, and the rest is the reader’s duty and obligation to infer.

References

Hemingway, Ernest. 1970. Islands in the Stream. New York: Scribner’s.

Hemingway, Ernest. 1926. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner Classics.

Desnoyers, Megan Floyd. 1992. “Ernest Hemingway. A Storyteller’s Legacy”, Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives, Vol. 24, No. 4, Winter. https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/The-Ernest-Hemingway-Collection/Online-Resources/Storytellers-Legacy.aspx?p=5 (Consulted 26 November 2016)