On the surface, Hemingway and Woolf’s writing styles and techniques could appear to be polar opposites. Ernest Hemingway, is an American short-story writer famous for his Iceberg writing technique. Virginia Woolf, an English modernist writer, is known for a more impressionistic form of writing.
First, let’s talk about Hemingway. The analogy of only a small portion of the total iceberg appearing above the surface fits well with his technique of writing everything except the most important points he wants to come across. You may be confused, how will the reader know what to take away from the story if it is not written? That is the genius of this technique. It creates an atmosphere of discomfort, questions, and uncertainty. As the reader, I don’t know if what I’m thinking about the story is actually what it is about. I’ll give you an example to hopefully make it more clear. In his story Hills Like White Elephants , Hemingway tells the story of a couple on a train. The word and even the concept of abortion is never brought up, yet the reader somehow knows that this is what the story is about. Hemingway manages to make certain things very obvious and overwhelming in our heads as we read, even if on paper, it seems as if we’re not reading about it at all.
Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, employs a style of Stream of Consciousness, where every impression and thought a character has is written on the page. She attempts to directly reflect real life. Real impressions. Real thoughts. The real way we are seeing and interpreting the world. While reading her novel Mrs. Dalloway – a description of an upper-class woman in London throwing a party and all the people closest to her- I was constantly trying to figure out what was going on. In contrast to reading Hemingway, in Woolf’s writing, I felt it was the existence of too much information that overwhelmed me and made things stick in my head.
To me, both of these novelists achieve the same thing. The point of reading the story is what’s going on in my head, not the head of the character or of the narrator. What am I thinking? What is my impression of the story? How is it physically making me feel? What does it say about how I see the world?
While reading both of these, my brain is alive. In Hemingway, I’m working to figure out what is being unsaid. In Woolf, I’m sifting through the thoughts of the characters trying to make out what is most important all the while having my own thoughts about the story. I find it hard to feel fully immersed and engaged in both of these styles of writing, and I think that’s the point. When I am aware that I am reading the story, while reading it, I read it differently. I think about it differently. I question the plot, the characters, the descriptions, the details- ultimately, I question the world outside of the novel.
This reminds me of using the internet. Most of the time, I am mindlessly scrolling when I use Facebook or even when I’m reading the News. However, when I’m less immersed in the “scroll,” I tend to work to focus more. This then leads me to question the way it’s written or presented to me. I learn more. I enjoy it more.
It’s hard to know when I’m going to be completely sucked into the internet or completely sucked into a novel. All that I can predict, though, is the more uniquely a piece is written, the less immersed I will be in it, and the more I will learn!
