Le Paris d’Hemingway : une question de style

Hemingway’s representation of Paris in The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast has held many a reader in thrall. It steers clear of traditional description as the author prefers to "make" the city rather than "describe" it. This article analyzes Hemingway’s style in the light of this enigmatic aesthetic statement. The author’s idiosyncratic syntax tends to blur the semantic frontiers between juxtaposed words, and his use of repetition enhances the musicality of sentences, which constitutes the city as an object of experience rather than of mere significance. The author also favors vague subjective adjectives over precise descriptive terms, which elicits the reader’s active participation in building an image of Paris. Finally, in The Sun Also Rises the narrator presents streets, cafés and restaurants as familiar places instead of introducing them for the benefit of the (unknowledgeable) implied reader; this closes the cognitive gap between narrator and reader, thus imparting greater immediacy to the latter’s sense of the city