I don’t think Ernest Hemingway needs any introduction, but his Death in the Afternoon maybe does: it’s a 1932 non-fiction book about Spanish bullfighting, and it’s part cultural study, part travel writing, and part reflection on courage, fear, death, and art. It’s not for the faint of heart. I’m not actually recommending it.
What’s concerning us today is this:
“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough,
will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.
The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”
As we know, a writer who omits things because he doesn’t know them only makes hollow places in the writing. The theory only works in one direction. Omission is a technique for someone who has the full seven-eighths worked out and is choosing to show you the one-eighth. It is not a technique for hiding the fact that the other seven-eighths was never there.
Looking back at 1927, “Hills Like White Elephants” is a short story about an American man and a young woman, Jig, talking at a train station in Spain. The central tension is an implied decision about an abortion, told almost entirely through subtext rather than direct statement. Nothing is explained. The tension of the story lives entirely in the eighth Hemingway shows you — a beaded curtain, a warm wind, a bag with hotel labels from every place they’ve stayed and never settled — while the actual subject sits, fully formed in Hemingway’s own understanding but never surfaced, doing all its work from below the waterline.
The distinction that actually matters, then, isn’t shown versus hidden. It’s known-and-shielded versus never-known-at-all.
I think there’s a kind of storytelling, in design, that can take advantage of this perspective.
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