1920s, Paris. A group of expatriate writers and artists meet in salons to discuss their artwork. They are known as the Lost Generation, and among them is Hemingway.
Ernest Hemingway was born 125 years ago in Illinois, USA. The year was 1899. He was a journalist and writer, and in the course of his life he wrote seven books and countless short stories. In 1954 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novella The Old Man and the Sea. Other notable works of his are A Farewell to Arms and Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises.
His artistic work was greatly influenced by his experience in the Great War: at the age of eighteen, Hemingway volunteered as an ambulance driver in Italy, and got badly hurt. As the war ended, he moved to Paris, where he found other Americans who shared his experience. The major themes of his work reflect the time he was living in and the struggles of his generation.
The Lost Generation
The Parisian group of expatriate writers that Hemingway belonged to was called the Lost Generation. They were artists who came of age during the First World War, and their experience of fighting in this deadly conflict greatly shaped the artwork they created. Among them were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Pablo Picasso. While the 1920s brought economic prosperity, these artists spent their days drinking and discussing their work, which was marked by a common feeling of loneliness and hopelessness for the future.
«The world is a fine place worth the fighting for.»
Ernest Hemingway
Are these writers still relevant today?
A century has passed since the prime of Hemingway’s life, when he was writing among other successful artists in Paris. Are his words still relevant today? Can the 2020s also be defined as “roaring twenties”?
The artistic movement Hemingway belonged to is known as modernism and was born as a response to the changes brought by technological progress. With the turn of the century, telephones and cars were suddenly available to the middle class. These inventions changed how people interacted, and although they improved daily life, they also brought a rising sense of dehumanization. What did it mean to be human among those growing technologies? Modernist writers were also breaking from the Victorian period and its values, and this too was reflected in their writing. Hemingway wrote about taboo topics such as sexuality and religion, and his work often presents a deconstruction of traditional gender roles.
All of these themes are still relevant today. Technology has not stopped advancing; artificial intelligence, social media, and virtual reality are only some of the innovations we struggle to come to terms with. We do not truly understand them, and so we fear them. The same sense of alienation that Hemingway and his contemporaries felt is still present today. The discourse around gender identity has also never been more current than now, and with it the exploring of sexual desires and identities. We are still trying to deconstruct the gender binary, and still fighting against the patriarchal system.
So how do we deal with all this? How have Hemingway and his contemporaries dealt with it? Maybe by creating unconventional and absurd art. Our generation is not that different from the one before us, or the one before that. Their fragmented and innovative writing has influenced many artists after them. The early twentieth century brought us cubism – what will our time offer?
We are skeptical about our future; in some areas, our world doesn’t seem much better than a hundred years ago. Climate change, war, social issues. Where is the roar of the twenties? Have we forgotten how to dance?
“The world is a fine place worth the fighting for,” wrote Hemingway in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. At the center of Hemingway’s novels are human beings, trying to understand their place in the world and the people around them, searching for connection in a fragmented time. We are all just trying to find purpose in our beautiful, strange lives. And maybe we can find comfort, or understanding, in the words of these hundred-year-old authors.
