User:MerAtticus/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:

the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings

and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}

and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is

generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson

notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its

predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open

and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks

away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked

to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t

you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,

always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:

{{quote|After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got

a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the

one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See?

No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish

Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road

to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}

In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a

man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking

away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal

way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and

it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not

move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}} }}

The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining

five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between

the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide

in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal

of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing

“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to

the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article

begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name

for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later

“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, It isn’t me. The historian

Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming

himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name

seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting

the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the

wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating

Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,

print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology The Wound

and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War join in the

Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican

soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing

the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to The Book of the XV Brigade, and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are

a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each

winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead

will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of

@@ Line 64: / Line 64: @@
 of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
 the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
-and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}
+and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.
+Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
+generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
+notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
+predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
+and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
+away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
+to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
+you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
+always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
+{{quote|After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got
+a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the
+one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See?
+No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.
+Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish
+Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
+to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”
+“Do I know him?”
+“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”
+“Where is he?”
+“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}
+In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a
+man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking
+away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal
+way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and
+it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not
+move.
+“Where’s Raven?” I asked.
+“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}} }}
+The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
+five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
+the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
+in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
+of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
+“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
+the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
+begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
+for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
+“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, It isn’t me. The historian
+Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
+himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
+seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}
+A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
+the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
+wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
+Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
+print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology The Wound
+and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War join in the
+Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
+soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
+the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to The Book of the XV Brigade, and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
+a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
+winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
+will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of