At the origins of emotion: describing facts. Ernest Hemingway and journalism

When we trace the education of the most influential writer of the 20th century, we are accustomed to using a hermeneutic paradigm that is now almost undisputed. He arrived in Paris in 1921 as a reporter for the Star and the Star Weekly from Toronto, Ernest Hemingway, thanks to the influence of a group of modernist intellectuals, gradually moved away from journalistic writing to become a full-fledged writer. It was therefore necessary to break away from newspapers in order to refine a style that Francis Scott Fitzgerald would have described as “infectious”, to put in a word its contagious power. Yet by exalting the detachment from journalism, we lose sight of its absolutely decisive importance as a school of writing and life. And in fact, it was mainly thanks to the lessons he learnt in the newspaper editorial offices and thanks to the generous and simple teachings of older reporters that Hemingway learnt to deal with facts, to dig into reality, to report not emotions but what arouses emotions. Many of the famous cornerstones of Hemingway's writing are rooted in the hard work of the chronicler. One above all: to write only about what one knows.