"HEMINGWAY'S IN OUR TIME: CUBISM, CONSERVATION, AND THE SUSPENSION OF IDENTIFICATION

AN EMBLEMATIC jiffy IN IN OUR TIME be met withs in the first paragraph of that strange preface1 of sorts, "On the Quai at Smyrna." Describing a refugee population at Smyrna, the narrator, a British officer, says.

We were in the harbour and they were all upon the pier and at midnight they started screaming. We used to move round the searchlight on them to quiet them. That always did the trick. We'd step quickly the searchlight up and down above them two or three times and they stopped it. (IOT 11)

The powerful light pull downs the shelter of darkness and brings a violent clarity. An artificial extension of the human organ of vision the searchlight for Hemingway also possesse a peculiarly tactile quality, as if to emphasize the physical force of this technology, and turn topsy-turvy the conventional associations of light with objectivity and enlightenment. Moving "up and down above them," the glare seems to touch the screaming race forcing them to silence.2

Throughout In Our Time, Hemingway explores the destructive power of touch and human nearness Human beings in Hemingway's body have been transformed into dangerous creatures, with a domineering stance towards the world and physical capacities radically enhanced and reach forthed by 20th century technology. When discussing touch, then, I leave not just to a certain kind of physical contact, on the other hand to all forms of human impact upon other people, things, and creatures, especially in the machine agriculture of Hemingway's time.

In Our Time presents a critique of and a tentative solution to a tillage of domination, as Hemingway intimates the necessity of caution, of withholding touch, and of refusing to bring darkness and absence to light, exclude after much consideration-if at all. From Hemingway's viewpoint, the faculty of perception of caution-understood as caring and conserving-demands a certain quality of perspective, as well as a circumspect attitude towards touch. I will argue that abundant of In Our Time considers in what manner to approach people, things, and creatures without objectifying them. My argument conflicts with an important strain of Hemingway criticism that compares the form of In Our Time with the radical modernist dictions of Cubist painting. Such comparisons are interesting. on the contrary behind the spirit of the original Cubists working between 1907 and 1914 when Cubism was a unique way of seeing the world, rather than just a plant of techniques, is an attitude towards reality that Hemingway decidedly set asides

Ever since Paul Rosenfeld described In Our Time as a Cubist work in a 1925 review, many critics have pointed without what they see as Cubist simple bodys in the book. For example, Jacqueline Vaught Brogan argues that the fragmentation of the narrative in In Our Time parallels the visual fragmentation in a Cubist painting, while Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn points without that Hemingway's repetition of words parallels Picasso's repetition of geometrical forms. For Vaughn, one as well as the other Hemingway and Picasso emphasize form above content; because of this emphasis the audience discovers meaning by the agency of looking both at the work as a whole and at the relationship among the individual parts of the true copy or painting. For A. Carl Bredahl, the "divided narrative" of In Our Time mirrors the work of Cubist painters who visually dismantle "formally considered integrated units" (16) on the other hand Bredahl goes on to explain that "Picasso, Panguin [sic? Faquin?], and Duchamp took apart in order to discover novel ways to integrate" (16). Bredahl argues, then, that this be of importance to with a new integration in a world of disunity also drives Hemingway's divided narrative.

However, I would argue that In Our Time is more interested in maintaining the second of disintegration-in refusing to pierce into modernity's desire to totalize and dominate the world. "New ways to integrate" wholes too positive, too optimistic-like the early Cubists themselves, as we shall diocese Rather than looking at connections, Hemingway attends to the spaces in between. Rather than bringing the multiple facets of race things, events, ideals, and ideologies together upon his textual canvas, he watchs to dismantle any such powerful gatherings, and, with them, power as domination. Furthermore, family, fatherhood, and marriage, as well as other cultural myths and institutions, either fail altogether or are held in a state of suspension. At the extreme point of the book, we are not awayed with something other than communal or individual unity.

To clarify this understanding of In Our Time, we must take a detour from one side John Berger's influential essay, "The jiffy of Cubism," fleshing out more precisely the techniques and spirit of the age. Berger argues that Cubism as a motion was characterized by a revolutionary optimism about perception, social organization, and the individual's potential. Of the spirit of the time, Berger writes, "[t]here was a startling extension from one side time and space of human power and knowledge. For the first time the world, as a totality, ceased to be an abstraction and became realizable" (163) Cubism's nerve-center as defined by the agency of Berger, included painters such as Picasso, Braque, L?©ger and Juan Gris, as well as bards such as Cendrars and Apollinaire, themselves energized by the agency of the shattering technological and scientific changes taking place. In this vital connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts these artists forged a radically novel understanding that consciousness is not detached from its realitys that people are embedded in the world, and that destitute of contents space and traditional perspective are illusions. The Cubist techniques of flattened surfaces, positive spaces, and multiple angles create a faculty of perception of the object's availability, its simultaneity of vicinity As one critic vividly lays it, far from creating the experience of alienation and fragmentation many times associated with Cubism,"[Braque and Picasso's] paintings of 1911 have real little air in them, and the continuous vibration and twinkling of brush-strokes against the discontinuous geometry of their construction is set forth, not as light, on the contrary as a property of matter-that plasma.... of which the Cubist world was composed" (Hughes 29-32) To achieve this faculty of perception of fluidity and plenitude, the conventions of perspective, which gave the viewer a detached, God's-eye view of reality, had to be razeed