30 pages • 1 hour read
Indian Camp
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Background
Authorial Context: Ernest Hemingway
One of the High Modernists, Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. “Indian Camp” draws on Hemingway’s childhood experiences visiting Northern Michigan. Hemingway’s father was also a physician, which might have informed some of the story’s medical details. Throughout his life, Hemingway worked as a reporter, covering several wars, including the Spanish Civil War. He was one of many expatriate artists living in Paris, and he later lived in Cuba, Florida, and Idaho.
A leader in the Modernist movement, Hemingway collaborated with writers such as Ford Madox Ford (who first published “Indian Camp” in his literary magazine), Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As a Modernist, Hemingway broke stylistic conventions and experimented with language. He is most well-known for his signature writing style, which consists of short, direct sentences and straightforward dialogue. This led to his “iceberg theory” of writing, alluding to the fact that only a small portion of an iceberg is visible above water, its great mass concealed beneath the surface. As he explained in Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway believed that a writer who “knows enough of what he is writing about” can “omit things that he knows” and yet, the reader will “have a feeling of those things as though the writer had stated them” (Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York, Scribner, 1996, p. 19). Also called the “theory of omission,” this writing style advocated for economical language in which every word counts, hinting at a story’s hidden depths without spelling things out. With this, the gaps in a text are just as important as the words on the page. These qualities can be seen in the short length, naturalistic dialogue and vernacular, and spare, vivid details in “Indian Camp.”
Hemingway published dozens of short stories in his early career, honing the writing techniques that would usher his novels to critical acclaim. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), is considered a central text of the Lost Generation, the post-World War I American expatriates in Paris. His later novels were likewise well-received, culminating in his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. The Nobel committee cited his “mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style” (“The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954.” NobelPrize.org.) Some of the common themes in his work include meditations on nature, masculinity, and violence.
A highly successful writer in his own time, Hemingway was also a prominent cultural figure, and he was often referred to as “Papa Hemingway.” Magazines and radio programs presented Hemingway as a masculine adventurer, but his work often presented this type of stereotypical masculinity to subvert it, as he does in “Indian Camp.” Likewise, his writing on war focuses more on mortality and the complicated nature of violence rather than an endorsement of warfare.
Literary Context: Modernism
According to most scholars, literary Modernism was most prominent in the years between World War I and World War II. Although some writers began working in the style before that period, most notably Gertrude Stein, most embraced Modernism as a response to World War I’s rampant destruction. Faced with a war based on treaties instead of patriotic fervor, fought in trenches with new technologies such as machine guns and chemicals, artists felt the ideals that inspired previous generations no longer held the same meaning. In the words of poet Ezra Pound, another early leader in the movement, artists needed to “make it new.”
Writers found different ways of making it new, largely through different methods of experimenting with language. Following the lead of Gertrude Stein, poets such as Pound, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams were famous Imagists, using plain, descriptive language to express complex ideas. Wallace Stevens, Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), Marianne Moore, and T. S. Eliot wrote poetry that combined high and low forms of art, often using a fragmented style to reflect the fractured consciousness of the Lost Generation.
Gertrude Stein also influenced prose writers, including Hemingway. From Stein, Hemingway learned how to write naturalistic dialogue, which, combined with his lean, reporter-like prose, culminated in his “iceberg theory” of writing. Other important modernist novelists include F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose novel The Great Gatsby exposed the emptiness of the American Dream, and Virginia Woolf, who used stream-of-consciousness writing to interrogate the rigid gender roles of the preceding Victorian and Edwardian periods. While Hemingway’s writing focused on external storytelling aspects like dialogue and precise descriptions, stream-of-consciousness writing experiments in the opposite direction, attempting to create landscapes of human thought. Along with Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Marcel Proust were famous stream-of-consciousness writers, exploding small moments and details into lengthy, impressionistic passages.
Modernist influences can be seen not just in Hemingway’s writing style in “Indian Camp,” but also in the story’s themes. Major Modernist themes include disillusionment and isolation, and Hemingway creates a sense of isolation in “Indian Camp” by using a third-person limited narrator, separating the reader from most of the characters’ thoughts and motives in the text. Hemingway also uses the characters to challenge traditional ideas about family and stoic masculinity, to ponder mortality and the inevitability of death, and examine racist, sexist, and imperialistic power dynamics.
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By Ernest Hemingway
