Snow - Hemingway's Juice - Timelines

Catching up after a period of unwellness has left me without time for more analysis or comments on the following. 

 I have written much about Orhan Pamuk as I think he has something to say to America in our day and age, as an empire tottering on collapse and facing the costs of our history. Jeffrey Meyers's Symbolism in Orhan Pamuk’s ‘Snow’ (TheArticle) does not touch much on this aspect of Pamuk's fiction but does offer insights into Pamuk's skill as a novelist.

Ipek first agrees to escape with Ka, then changes her mind and decides to remain.  When the snowstorm stops, Ka leaves Kars on the first train out of town.  Liberated from the horrors but weeping about the loss of Ipek, he ends in a dark mood: “All the people on the platform disappeared into the thick-falling snow.  As I looked out the window through the snow at the orange lights of the outermost houses of the outlying neighborhoods, and the last snow-covered rooftops, the thin and elegantly quivering ribbons of smoke rising from the broken chimneys at last seemed a smudge through my tears.”  Like the snow in Mann and Joyce, Pamuk’s snow is symbolic, thematic and tragic.  

 I have put “Love Stinks” off to one side, but this makes me think the delay was worth taking: Pulling Off Dual Timelines: An Exercise in Cohesive Storytelling.

Hemingway on revision and inspiration: 

INTERVIEWER

Can you dismiss from your mind whatever project you’re on when you’re away from the typewriter?

HEMINGWAY

Of course. But it takes discipline to do it and this discipline is acquired. It has to be.

INTERVIEWER

Do you do any rewriting as you read up to the place you left off the day before? Or does that come later, when the whole is finished?

HEMINGWAY

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You’re grateful for these different chances.

INTERVIEWER

How much rewriting do you do?

HEMINGWAY

It depends. I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

INTERVIEWER

Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?

HEMINGWAY

Getting the words right.

INTERVIEWER

Is it the rereading that gets the “juice” up?

HEMINGWAY

Re-reading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.

INTERVIEWER

But are there times when the inspiration isn’t there at all?

HEMINGWAY

Naturally. But if you stopped when you knew what would happen next, you can go on. As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.

And I wanted to include this just for the hell of it:

INTERVIEWER

Who would you say are your literary forebears—those you have learned the most from?

HEMINGWAY

Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgeniev, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto, Hieronymus Bosch, Brueghel, Patinier, Goya, Giotto, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, San Juan de la Cruz, Gongora—it would take a day to remember everyone. Then it would sound as though I were claiming an erudition I did not possess instead of trying to remember all the people who have been an influence on my life and work. This isn’t an old dull question. It is a very good but a solemn question and requires an examination of conscience. I put in painters, or started to, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers. You ask how this is done? It would take another day of explaining. I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.

 sch 10/27