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: : thanks so much, i understand why the mage is so important now. how exactly does it relate modern literature? or the "modern perspective" of the time? : Ask me something easy, Y doncha? 8-) : Again, it's easier to back into an answer, so bear with me... : If I were to give you a single paragraph that explained : the entire history of the art of painting, it would be this. : Up until the turn of the last century, painters, even though : they didn't know it, tried to paint a photograph. The more : realistic the painting, the more it exactly reproduced the : subject in terms of form, color, and perspective. This made : it kind of easy to recognize a masterpiece - any of the : Madonna And [Christ] Child by Modigliano, or a bowl of fruit : on top of a table by Vermeer. But notice that in every painting : of Mary and the Christ Child there are things that the painter : knew and put in and that the viewer was expected to understand. : For example, the Christ Child always had a halo over His head, : this to signify His Godliness. Mary was always dressed in white : to signify her ity. And notice that the Child was never : quite painted as a real child. More like a small man. This was : to signify his "God made Man" aspect. And it was not unusual for : Him to be drawn with one hand raised in a pose of knowledge or : teaching. (See if you can find one to make sure I'm not making this : up). : Anyway, with the turn of the last century, painters make a conscious : break with the past and began to change the way they represented their : subject. So Pico might paint his model with a nose no longer between : her eyes, or her hair detached from her head. But a better example is his : painting of Guernica, a town in Spain which had no military value but which : was bombed by the Lufwaffe in 1937 or 1938 during the Spanish Civil War. : Pico painted a large picture with dead or dying animals and horrific, : grimacing people obviously in the throes of something awful. But there are : no bombs, no explosions, no fire. The viewer is expected to know what has : caused the turmoil. : This change, this breaking away from the past, was termed Modernism, and you can : see that any era can expirience a Modenrist movement, but the break with the past : from about 1900 to 1936 or so was so abrupt, and so many masterpieces were produced, : that the term has stuck with that time and those artists. : Now...a similar thing happened in terms of writing. There was a break with the : past in terms of how an author relates a story to the readers. Generally, the : authors who came before the moderists told thier story from a specific beginning, : a series of events, and a specific ending. (The Red Badge of Courage, for example) : The story was told in order to make some point, usually that "bad" actions are : punished and "good" people rewarded. (The Scarlet Letter, for example). But look at : The Sun Also Rises. There is a beginning and an end and a series of events, but : everyone pretty much ends up where they began. Jake is back in Paris, Brett will go : off again, Robert goes back to his fiance, etc. Has anyone learned anything? Has someone : been punished for doing something wrong or rewarded for doing something right? Has sin : and repentance entered the picture, directly, at all. Has the author in fact made any : attempt to indicate to the reader that there is a lesson to be learned by reading the : book? No. It begins and ends and unless we, the readers, understand the signs and symbols, : we get the idea that ther should be more, that we have missed something. So if we understand : the function of the bullfight or the use of the statue of Marshall Ney that Jake Barnes : pauses in frn of, *THEN* we start to understand what the novel is about. This is the break : with the past that made Hemingway a moderist writer, at least with many of the short stories : and The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. : Hemingway said that he wrote on the priciple of the iceberg; that 9/10ths of what he wanted the : reader to understand was submerged, like 9/10ths of an iceberg, underneath the words on the page. : To misunderstand how what was written related to what was unwritten but signified is to miss the : importance of th book. And to miss the affect that Hemingway had on writing. : There is more in a book called The Sun Also Rises, A Novel of the Twenties which explains much of the : symbolism and writing techniques. : Good Luck.

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