Hemingway Critique, Silver Linings Playbook

7 thoughts on “Hemingway Critique, Silver Linings Playbook”

1. I’m so excited – I finally get to see this movie next Tuesday!

   But I stopped by to comment that I can’t help but agree with Bradley Cooper’s character (with less breaking of windows, naturally). I know, I know, suffering is so human and exquisite and deep – but sometimes I almost feel like killing off a beloved character or refusing to let them be happy is the easy way forward in a plot. My husband and I have coined the phrase, “Writers are assholes,” which gets said almost every time we turn on a TV drama in our house. If I’m naming names, Joss Whedon is the *worst*.

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   1. I think Hemingway kills her because a) it allows the protagonist (forget his name) to experience sublime/heroic tragedy and b) absolves him from the domestic obligation of being a husband and father (freeing him up for more adventure). This motif plays out again and again, especially in American lit by male authors.

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      1. Thanks for the insight. I’m sure you’re right, but – while I know Hemingway was a product of a different time – the idea that you can’t continue adventuring *with* a partner/family is so sadly limiting. I need to start a list of books with a different take on that!

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         1. Yeah, I agree—it’s an imaginative limitation; we could also take it back to Hamlet or Lear or Oedipus or whatever—tragedy placed above comedy and the deepest tragedy is loss of family.
            Even Mark Twain, who Hemingway famously called the father of American lit, had his characters duck familial responsibility. William Faulkner’s characters are terrified of even the prospect of fatherhood. There are like maybe three women who speak in Moby-Dick, and Melville’s domestic novel Pierre imagines family as literal incest (impossible, nongenerative). The Scarlet Letter seems to reimagine family—it’s perhaps more productive, even though Hester and Pearl have to live on the outskirts of civilization.

            I think the way many American women writers handle the problem of domesticity is often equally grim—Flannery O’Connor who breaks up or kills families, Kate Chopin who tends to kill her heroines, or Zora Neale Hurston, whose most famous heroine Janie Starks kills her husband!
            But maybe I’m just picking and choosing here. I’m sure there are counter examples.

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            1. That was a beautiful rundown! Lacking anything close to your familiarity with literature, I had to turn to Google. :) This piece from the Wall Street Journal examines eight novels with “happy families,” although I still can’t tell how many of them are truly “adventuring.” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203893404577098751604430024.html

               Off the top of my head, “I Capture the Castle” by Dodie Smith (who later wrote The Hundred and One Dalmations) does a beautiful job of illustrating how one’s family can both subdue and illuminate life.

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               1. Thanks for the link, Jennie. Not really familiar with many of the novels on the list, other than the Zadie Smith. And I don’t know the Smith, but I’ll look into it.

                  To turn it back to David Russell’s film—which I loved despite (because of?) some faults—I think that contemporary American storytellers have gotten better at imagining adventurous family spaces. Silver Linings Playbook succeeds, as have other Russell films like The Fighter, Flirting with Disaster, and even I Heart Huckabees. And in literature, I think DeLillo’s White Noise is clearly an example of a family novel. Also Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Maybe Pynchon’s Vineland. Even Denis Johnson’s novel Angels, which isn’t pretty, but still posits a constructive/positive view of family. Okay, I’m riffing here. You’ve fueled some thoughts. Thanks.

                  I hope you dig SLP.

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2. Martin and Osa Johnson is an exception. Perhaps we should invert this argument and argue instead for widely different variations of what it means to be and/or have a family. The nuclear family is prohibitive of adventure and exploration. IMO it is the family as capitalism defines it that holds back the thinking of writers on this topic.

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