We're going to pick up where we left off, with A Farewell to Arms. Today we're going to be using outside knowledge and research in order to analyze and interpret the text. I won't be discussing how to conduct research, which is a specialized skill of its own, but rather how to apply historical context and combine it with our close reading. You may already know a little or a lot about Ernest Hemingway. You might just know that he's famous, or that he won the Nobel Prize. Maybe you've read something of his before. Maybe you know that he owned a lot of cats. Any of this might influence your approach to the text. Whether you're expecting a certain type of narrative, or whether you approach it with respect because you know he's thought of as a great writer. In this way, general knowledge can produce a certain kind of reading. What about more specific knowledge? Hemingway himself, as a very young man, was an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy in World War I, and had a romance with a nurse, like the narrator of A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway wrote and spoke about his World War I experiences elsewhere, and we know exactly which battles and retreats he experienced. We also know something about the other historical sources that he used. For example, he made use of Charles Bakewell's 1920 history, The Story of the American Red Cross in Italy. There are also some passages in A Farewell to Arms that are extremely similar to Karl Baedeker's popular travel guide of the era. These are original copies of these two books that are in the UNC library collections. What questions might our knowledge that Hemingway was involved in World War I provoke about this first paragraph? We might identify the village, the river, or the mountains. Perhaps we might be able to come up with an exact year. Obviously, reading the novel in order to identify these should come first. But as a matter of fact, we can come up with answers for all these questions from Hemingway's life if we want to. But we don't just do research, match it to the text, and then leave it there. Or rely on a biographical interpretation. There's a literary concept called the intentional fallacy, which says that we shouldn't get caught up in the author's intentions or his or her life. There are different schools of critical thought, and some of them pay much more attention to the author. But in either case, what we need to do is use that information to inform our critical thinking. Here it could sharpen our attention to Hemingway's narrative choices. The fairy tale description that he's giving, the purposeful lack of dates. And what about other historical knowledge? Familiar American images of World War I are mostly about the horrors of trench warfare. Depending on your background, you might be surprised by the opening of this novel, which does not initially offer us something concrete or familiar. Most Americans don't usually think about World War I as troops marching down a leafy road. Instead, what comes to mind are trench images like this news reel from the war. Now, let's look at the second half of the opening paragraph again. Here we looked very closely at the imagery of the falling leaves. I suggested that it implied the future deaths of the soldiers, but it also might have a historical resonance that's already been discussed by Bryan Giemza. Kaiser Wilhelm II said to his troops that they would supposedly be home before the leaves have fallen. I.e., that Germany would win the war very quickly. It was a well known phrase, and was later used to taunt the Kaiser, since his prediction obviously turned out to be wildly incorrect. How does the knowledge of this historical illusion change your interpretation, if at all? There's no single answer here, and there's no right answer. Put all of your interpretations into conversation and think about this. Maybe the Kaiser's speech changes nothing for you. Nature serves as a contrast to the war. So it makes no sense to say that the leaves are an illusion. This might also contradict my idea, that the leaves symbolize the soldiers. On the other hand, you might say that war is everywhere, hidden in this passage, using your own careful, close reading of the text. This would make the illusion highly important and strongly political. It may even be bitterly ironic, since the narrator and Hemingway have perfect hindsight about World War I. As you can see, historical research can offer us a lot of new perspectives for our critical reading. But it's ultimately up to us to interpret this information and organize it all into a critical argument that makes sense. Critical reading can be an end onto itself, but usually it supports an argument about a text. This could be a college essay about a novel, a movie review, an op-ed about a political speech, or an assessment of medical ethics or business strategy. It's in every field and every discipline.
