James Joyce, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway

Mimetic: The imitation or represetation of aspects of the sensible world, especially human actions, in literature and arts.

In the arts, mimetic is considered to represent the human emotions in view ways , and so representing to the on looker, listner or reader the in herent nature of the emotions and the psychological truth of the work of art. By “mimesis” we can also understand the act of perceiving the emotions of the characters on the stage or in the book; or the truthof the figure as they appear in sculptures or in paintings; or the emotions as they are being configurated in music. All these can be recognised by the onlooker as part of the human condition.

If we think first of “Araby” we can easely discover that this is a poetic name for Arabia. Both Joyce’s stories “Araby and Clay” take place in Dublin, and as for the descriptions the narrator uses realistic ones. Joyce deals in both stories with feelings like love, far and frustration.

I Araby the narrator thinks that love can be expressed only through gifts, so when he realises that he isn’t capable of offering , one to the person he loves, he loses his hope-frustration. He even interprets his late arrival at the bazaar as an ending of his lovestory. All these feelings that we mentioned before are universal and every woman has experienced them once in her/his lifetime. The narrator not only uses realistic descriptions but the characters are also copied from the reality: simple human beings (Maria, Mangan’s sister…) who have the same women as real people (eg: the girl can’t g oto the bazaar because she has other things o attend to; his boring life as a student, the late arrival of his uncle ,buying the right plumcake, forgeting one of the pockets in the tram…)

In Clay” this time we have a name for our main character- Maria-a real girl with real name.(very small person, very long nose and very long chin, talks a litte girl through her nose)

She is also capable of expressing feelings like: love,anger,fury,happiness or sadness as a real person. (eg: when she touches the clay during the game that she plays with the children) She isn’t married and probably will never get married-If we believe in the meaning of the clay (early death).

Regarding Faulkner- both his stories have an introduction point. They show us where and when the action is taking place. Specifying from the beginning the time and place gives us the idea that those might be true stories or that the facts are about a real event.

The first and the second story are based on dualtiy. In the first one (that evening sun)- at the beginning of the story the writer shows us two different aspects of the same city- one now , in the present, and another one, fifteen years ago. The dualism is also represented by the twodifferent narrators ( in the same body but also dualism- but this time about people’s behaviour). See Emily has the representant of the high aristocracy, but in the same time she hides som edep secrets- necrophilia.

In this fiction Faulkner uses a lots of comparaisons and extended descriptions- like whe he describes the tourn of Jefferson- the one that he sees today and the one he knew fifteen years ago; or when he describes Emily’s house. Also the writer ususally jumps from a general plan to a particular one. For example, “that evening sun” in the first pharagraph he uses the general plan and in the second one he chooses the particular one. We have no more Negro-women, we have now a name – Nancy and all the action is focusing on her nour. To depict the reality evening beter way the narrator uses for Nancy a broken English, and not only for her but also for Dilsey and Jesus too.

“I anin’t studing no breakfast”

The same thing happens in “A rose for Emily” with the plans first general and then particular. But here all the characters use proper English. The only negro presentend here is more like an anonymous one: no name, no lines for him…

Both stories use juxtapositio. By juxtaposing the first thwo pharagraph in. That evening sun, Faulkner makes the difference between the past and the present and he shows us hour might affect the people. See also the difference between black people and white ones. For him the Negroes are at the bottom of the scale. They are anonymous “A rose for Emily” but sympathetically described”That evening sun”. Although they are shown from a Southern point of view, Faulkner is aware that Negroes are humn beings like himself, but ones who have suffered much more because of the color of their skin.

Nancy complains about her status : “I ain’t nothing but a niggers but it ain’t none of my fault”. She is also really scared “Can it do nobody nothing with him?” She is so scared that sometimes she looks paranoiac. The way the narrator depicts her shows how good he can be at depicting the cruel reality. At the end se acts like she is accepting finaly her condition and she is ready to meet her cruel destiny. Maybe her death brouught by Jesus. If we talk about fear simple one or that one close to paranoia- we can see that the dual points of we are showed by contrasting Nancy’s fear (of death) and the children’s fear(scary cat). Nancy is terrified by premonitions of her approaching death while the children are scared by darkness.

If we talk about contrasts in “A rose for Emily” we can find plenty of them. For example- see the contrast between the aristocrat woman and her unspeakable secrets- who form the asis of this story.

In “A rose for Emily” the unnamed narrator, which some critics have identified as ”the torn” or at least a representative from it relates key moment in Emily’s life including the death of her father and a brief love story with a yankee road paver named Homer Brown. Beyond the literal evel of Emily’s Narrative, the story is sometimes regarded as a symbol of the changes in the South during the representative period.

As for the vocabulary both stories use long sentences, a lot of adjectivs and adverbs. Most of the verbs are used in past tense. In that evening sun, if we look at the characters we can describe the like this :father- calm and detached, just like Dilsey, mother-whining and neurotic, Quentin-calm and raional, Caddy-inquisitive and daring and Jason-unpleasant and obnoxious.

The structure of the sentence is sometimes long, sometimes short but the narrator uses this show the psychological complexity of his characters.

Unlike Joyce or Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway’s fiction is totally different. The two stories here are full of symbolism and hidden significations. In the “Cat in the rain” the narrator depicts the desire for material goods of people as they can’t acquire intangible goods(like fun or affection)

The stories are simple ,with no complicated intrigue. Both stories contain dialogues that look so real. The American wife expresses feelings that any ordinary woman will do. Jig. Expresses fear against an operation –like any other human being. All this characters act so real that the dialogues between them look like normal and right at that time.

Hemingway makes us to hear and feel his characters, and he does it not only by directing our responses or summarizing those of his characters, but by putting the terrain, the objects, the equipment, the water (the rain) ,the places, the people before us in a since of cleanly defined , carefully  separated, perceptions and notations.

The narrator usually places opposite pictures side by side to keep the reader simultaneously interested in two things at once(contrast).

“The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across; on the otherside, where fields of grain and trees…”

All the information are presented indirectly. We have to find clues that reveal about feelings, thoughts and actions of characters. Throughout the story the man seems as if he left the decision whether or not the girl should have the operation. But if use read between the lines, use understands that the man doesn’t want the baby at all. The story is full of outward formalities for free choice. “I think is the best thing to do… if you don’t realy want to”.

The small informaion supplied by the author help us draw a reasonable conclusion about what characters feel or think.

At the beginning of the story, just like Joyce’s or Faulkner’s stories wehave dscriptions-where the author sets the scene and gives the reader a sense of time and place. The writer helps his characters to come alive not only by describing the way they act but by letting us hear them speak-unlike Joyce or Faulkner. Hemingway uses the dialogue a lot, so in this way the onlooker feels that he is actally witnessing what’s going on. If Hemingway is a writer who dispenses with symbolism, then Faulkner is his opposite. Where Hemingway uses the short, paratactic structure, Faulkner’s sentences may run on for a page, challenging the reader to find her way through the hypotactic hate. Where Hemingway remains on the outside, giving us only eight of the story, Faulkner shifts perspectives, moving in and out of the consciousness of various characters and representing their process.

Franz Kafka, Julio Cortazar and Jorge Luis Borges

Franz Kafka’s litrary style is so distinctive that an adjective  has been coined from his name to describe similarly style. That objective is “Kafkaesque”.

Kafka write very strange, horrifying stories his most famous novels involves the transformation of a man into a giant insect. His works are not only fantatic and symbolic , but they are often very philosophical and thought provoking. Many of his stories are allegorical or metaphorical, focusing on the nature of spiritually and the absorbing of life. Not only that, but his work is often intensely cerebral, delving deep into the minds of his characters and examining their psychology and his motivations for their actions.

Gaps and implicitness: The opposition gaps-facts is only a crude representation of the structuring of fictional words that is due to the present/absenceof texture. Both the construction texture and the constructed fictional facts our homogeneous , but finely differentiated.

The texture of Franz Kafka­- A hunger artist mentions that the artist was taken by his impresario to many cities and countries in Europe, but it is totaly silent about any specific place especially about the place of his final feat. The local of the protagonist’s death is an irrecoverable gap in the fictioanl world.

Kafka’s gapping of local of settling becames quite apparent if constructed with James Joyce-Dubliners.

The Fictioanl text is complex of explicit and implicit texture; consequently, fictional facts are constructed ot only explicitly but also implicitly.

For the semantic of fictioanl narrative, inferences regarding aspects and constituents of acting are of special significance. We know that an action has to be performed by an agent with a specific intention , motivation, authority, are so forth. If the agent is let unexpressed in an action description, for example by the device of passive construction, we infer his/her existence. Two sentences from the beginnig of the trial- provide an instructive example : “you are arrested…proceedings have been nour instituted against you”. Knowing that arrests are made on somebody’s orders, the reader infers that an anonymous person or institution is behind Joseph K’s  arrest.

There is no substance to the Hunger artist. He rises from an absence, a formely blank page, which reveals itself as a trop efor the ground of the world in which he Hungers, a literary world. All that we read here is a construction , a fiction about an event that never happened anf a figure who never existed. The book becomes real for us, that is unless we should foolish try to eat it, ant then we would face the reality and it would be bitter and pasty and in any case it would not satisfy our hunger.

With the figure of an hunger artist the starving the artist comes to mind , but why do artists starve? The hunger artist confess that he had never found anything good to eat. Not a very useful answer.

Despite the extreme odds against succes , the artist would rather starve than do sth other than art.

The hunger artist rebels only against the representation of his hungering, notaby in the photographs but even in the suggestion that his hungering could be a cause for sth other than itself. He rattles the bars of his coge like an animal when someone suggests that his sadness really appears to come from hungering. At such times, hunger artist springs up like threarened animal. The hunger artist demands truth but is countured only by get a stronger “appearance” against which he is defebseless: thephotograph, and also , we should not forget , the appearance of the story itself.

The hunger artist is crisis. He is terrifying because he shows us the horror of our existence. He reminds us of the reason for aesthetics: distence from the crisis that appears in art, in the hunger artist as much as the story about the hunger artist. The adults dry laughed it off, but the children gaped open-mouthed. They had no understanding. There was no undestandin to remember. The hunger artist has always know “ against this nonunderstanding, against this world of nonunderstanding and faced the hopeless of his art, the futility with which he practiced his craft.

He hunger artist terrifies us because he is like us, not a cat but a papertiger. We are forced to confront what we , too , are papertigers. Our lives  human lives, are literary, staging  a rase of reality so convincin that it becomes the supreme fiction. Like a Borgesian story, literature writes its author and its readers.

A literar text, like Kafka’s “ A hunger artist” does nothing other than offer a representation of something that we no longer understand, have never understood. To respond to the question of literature can be terrifying enough to keep us from ever proceeding beyond the practicalities of the institution of literature. When we sustain overself with the questions we hunger. Literature demand hunger, and we cannot fast in the precence of literature any more than use can fast on it.

In the literary scholar is not much different from he artist. In the figure of Kafka’s hunger artist we could and see ourselves, and not all piteously. The hunger artist does not pity himself. In fact, he is most content when he is finally allowed to fast without end, and that only becomes possible when no one is no longer interested in his art.

I suggest that we see the image of the hunger artist is not imetic reflection of our subjective selves, but rather an indication of who are and what we do as scholars in a field like no other.

The hunger artist is a figure for the writer , for literature itself, and for the reader because hungering, even more than fasting, manifests presence.

Kafka’s story is an allegory of our entire culture. The author obviously sees his own art as representative of the negative , Gnostic, and egoistical tendencies present in our world.

There is nouns more literal readings. There are reasons to believe that Kafka himself had anorexic tendencies.

In conclusion of Kafka’s story, the crowds lose interest in the “Hunger Künstler” who is finally swept out of his cage and replaced not by someone in the sam eline of work but by a muscular and manacling panther. This ending is often regarded, rather convincingly in my view as prophetic.

In the arts, mimesis is considered to be – perceiving the human emotions in new ways and so-presenting to the onlooker, listener or reader the inherent nature of the emotions and the psychological truth of the work of art. Mimesis is the thought of as means of perceiving the emotions of the characters on stage or in the book; as the truth of the figures as they appear in sculpture in pointing; or the emotions as they are being configured in music and of their being recognized by the onlooker as far of the human condition.