The hidden element

By: Mario Vargas Llosa
Translated by: Luan Canaj

Ernest Hemingway tells somewhere that in his literary beginnings, while putting down a story on paper, he suddenly shot it to extinguish the main event, the one where the protagonist hangs himself. He said that he thus discovered a narrative mode, which he would use more and more in the future to protect his own novels and short stories.

Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Hemingway's most accomplished narratives are studded with telling silences, with the cryptic bits of a shrewd narrator who manages to make the data he cloaked in silence nevertheless be as expressive as possible and necessarily stimulate the reader's imagination. Thus, the latter must fill these holes of history with conjectures and speculations of his own mind.

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Let's call this method "the hidden element" and immediately specify that, although Hemingway has made this a personal and multiple (sometimes masterful) work, he is not the one who invented it, since this is a technique of as old as the novel itself.

However, it is true that very few modern writers have used it with the courage of the author of "The Old Man and the Sea". Do you remember that master novel, perhaps Hemingway's most famous, entitled "The killers"? The most important thing of the story is this big question: why do those two rascals, with their forgotten couples, enter the small restaurant "Henry's" in that unnamed province and want to kill the Swede Ole Anderson? And why does this secret Ole Anderson, when the boy Nick Adams warns him that the two killers are looking for him to rob him, refuse to run away and notify the police, but blindly obey his fate?

We will never find out.

If we want an answer to these two questions, the axis of the story, we have to create it ourselves as readers, starting from the small particles that the narrator - aware of everything that is not his own - gives us here and there: before he came to this town, the Swede Ole Anderson was apparently a boxer in Chicago, where he did something (that didn't turn him on, he says), which signed the death sentence.

The hidden element or external narrative is not vain or arbitrary. It begs that the silence of the narrator is significant, that it exerts a prominent influence on the clearly expressed part of the story, in order that this absence is clearly felt and incites longing, waiting with suspended breath and imagination in the reader.

Hemingway was an incomparable master in the use of this narrative technique, as is evident in The Murderer, a prime example of narrative economy, a text that is but the tip of an iceberg, an indiscernible plot that allows the whole story to be amazingly interwoven. anecdotal, which he actively supports, but which is hidden from the reader. Confessing while remaining silent, by means of insinuations that transform introspection into lively anticipation, prompting the reader to actively intervene in the flow of the narrative through similes and own conjectures, is a frequent use among narrators, to interject self-experienced subjects into their weaves, that is, endow them with persuasive power.

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Do you remember the great hidden element of Hemingway's best novel (in my opinion) And the Sun Rises Again? Yes, that one: the impotence of Jake Barnes, the novel's narrator? It is never given openly: it suddenly emerges - I almost dare to say that the reader, enthralled by what he reads, takes it away from the character - from a telling silence, this strange physical distance, the chaste, pitiful connection that unites him with the beautiful Brett, the woman who makes his heart flutter and who maybe even loves him or who could have loved him, was therefore only an obstacle or a ban, about which we have never been precisely aware. Jake Barnes' impotence is a strikingly stark silence, an absence that becomes more and more expressive the more the reader is puzzled by Jake Barnes's unusual and defiant attitude toward Brett, until the only possible explanation of the discovery of his impotence remains. Little passed over in silence or perhaps precisely because of the way it is, this hidden element gilds the fabric of the novel And the sun rises again with a very special sparkle.

Finally, I would like to repeat to you a comparison, which I have made from time to time while pondering Faulkner's "Shrine". Let's say that the "complete" narrative of a novel (consisting of elements included or omitted) is a cube. And that each particular novel, stripped of its superfluous and redeemable elements, to obtain a definite effect extracted from this cube, takes a definite shape: this object, this sculpture, reflects the novelist's originality . Its shape is carved with the help of different tools, but without the slightest doubt, one of the most used and extremely valuable for the work of weeding the ingredients, while drawing the profile of the graceful and compelling figure that makes us our own. , is exactly the hidden element (if you don't have any other more driving name to give this tool). /Palimpsest/