On the Dignity of the Iceberg
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Morning Sun by Edward Hopper
Back in college, I had a professor who was especially keen on Hemingway. While I never warmed up to Hemingway’s novels, I developed a deep fondness for his short stories, especially the Nick Adams stories. I went on to take another class on Hemingway in grad school, and I can tell you with certainty that the first thing any student of Hemingway learns, whether in high school, college, or beyond, is his “iceberg theory” or “theory of omission.”
Hemingway said, “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”
In other words, if a writer is doing his or her job, a reader can intuit the deeper meaning behind well-crafted prose. (Does anyone else feel Hemingway’s famous iceberg quote could be more succinct?) The tip of the iceberg that protrudes from the water is only about 10% of the entire proverbial iceberg. The rest of the storied mass lies beneath murky water, waiting to be excavated by literary scholars in scuba gear. (The iceberg theory was inspired by Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind. The lost generation of writers were big on Freud. They were also mostly cat people … but I digress.)
Hemingway entreated writers to get rid of “every superfluous word.” James Parker of The Atlantic argues that Hemingway revolutionized the way writers approach the craft. “In the most beautiful way, it was anti-writing,” he says.
Creative writing teachers love the iceberg theory. Back when there were chalkboards, they giddily drew sketches of pointy icebergs jutting from icy waves. They scrawled words like “figurative language” by the tip of the berg and words like “emotions,” “repressed feelings,” “experiences,” and “beliefs” beneath the surface.
In those classrooms, there’d invariably be one student who’d snicker and mutter that the iceberg looked like a boob while others would think, “Hmmm. This works in fiction, but it’s kind of a metaphor for real life, too …” And those particular students would go on to memorize The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, get a cat and name him Alfred or Prufrock or Fitz, and buy an issue of The Kenyon Review, which they would fail to ever read.
Thank goodness for submerged metaphorical icebergs. Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone's metaphorical iceberg exposed its entire self all the time? Absolute chaos. A world without nuance. I mean, the internet has shown us WAY MORE of people’s icebergs than we’d ever like to see. Every day millions of unchecked theories, delusions, and heartless truths hurtle through hyperspace, crashing into one another. It’s practically apocalyptic. Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria! And that’s just the Huffington Post comments section.
Most of us live our lives with the majority of our thoughts, feelings, and impulses safely tucked away beneath the surface, thank you very much. Even those closest to us are only granted occasional forays into our waterlogged minds.
My daughter is a different sort of iceberg. If she had been hanging out in the North Atlantic in April of 1912, the crew aboard the Titanic would have seen her from a mile away and changed course accordingly. Hemingway wouldn’t know how to write the book of Ella. His own Nick Adams was a man of few words. If Ella were a novel, her word-count would supersede any work of Dickens’. Her stream-of-conscious narrative would make Virginia Woolf’s stories seem conventional. Her blunt dialogue would have enthusiasts of anti-racist tomes squirming in their seats.
If you spend any time at all with Ella, you get direct access to her spectacular, enigmatic mind.
Ella’s IEP meeting was this morning. She recently underwent a reevaluation to determine her current special education program and service needs, a process that entails hours of testing. Ella’s goldfish-like attention span tries even the most patient of examination proctors. Engaging with Ella is like administering a never-ending Rorschach test, the inkblots replaced by any word, image, sound, or smell that captures her attention.
The proctor asks her why the word ring is a homonym. “Ring ring, banana phone!” says Ella, holding her hand to her ear with a grin.
“It smells like gym class in here,” she says in the middle of an explanation of an algebra equation.
“At one point,” the administrator said, “She started singing ‘Pop Goes the Weasel,’ even though there was no apparent association to the word pop. Or the word weasel. Or singing.”
We went over her dismal test scores. We talked about her future. Her teachers and therapist and special education coordinators used jargon I didn’t understand. They talked about vocational school, the improbability of college. They chose their words carefully as they gently redirected the hopes and dreams my husband and I have for our child. They left a lot of words beneath the surface, but I’m a good reader. I know what they were trying to say. The truth is, my daughter may never get through that algebra equation.
Ella doesn’t care for math. But she loves to dance.
Yesterday, while driving her to her dance class, Hooked on a Feeling played on my Pandora station.
“Mom. Do you even know what he means when he says, ‘yeah you turn me on?’”
“Yes, I know what it means.”
“It means …”
“I KNOW WHAT IT MEANS ELLA.”
She told me anyway. I squirmed in my seat.
Fifteen minutes later after I dropped her off, I received a text informing me Ella was having a meltdown of nuclear proportions. The class, which last semester contained only a handful of girls, now holds thrice as many students, which Ella wasn’t expecting. The din of the small crowd triggered an anxiety attack. Her beloved dance teacher was a bit stressed - understandably- because one could lose new students over things like this. Who wants to hip and hop next to a girl who wears noise-canceling headphones and wails like a banshee for no apparent reason?
She’s going to be fifteen next month, this child of mine missing a tiny piece of a chromosome - a puzzle piece that will never be found because it never existed to begin with. Its absence left physical abnormalities. A broken heart. Misshapen kidneys. A weakened immune system. Short stature. Distinct facial features. Developmental delays. Speech delays. Intellectual disabilities. Learning disabilities. I’ve listed these things again and again on many a form. Explained them to family and friends and strangers, to specialists, to teachers, to counselors. They listen, make notes, and go on with their lives. At the end of the day, I’m the one left feeling the weight of her unknown future. A lot of the time it feels like it’s just me and Ella. Ella and me. My quiet thoughts and her loud ones.
I’ve spent a lot of time these last two years begging people to give a shit about people like Ella. Facts and studies don’t seem to sway those who’ve, wrongly, made up their mind. I know a person who won’t admit her mother died of Covid because it might mean facing the morality behind her convictions.
How do you fight for the most vulnerable when there are people like that living in the world?
If you’re like me, you try to be reasonable. Then you get called names. Then you cry for a long while. Finally, you take an Excedrin Migraine for the headache and get on with it, praying every day that people you love don’t die of a disease that some of your friends don’t even think is real. I keep fighting for Ella because, despite her beautiful, incredible mind, she can’t always fight for herself.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
During IEP meetings you celebrate successes, and then you get realistic about the future. I didn’t want to do that today. I always want to procrastinate planning for the future. Maybe deal with it tomorrow. After everyone else put away their notes and exited the Zoom meeting, I cried a bit and got a headache and took an Excedrin Migraine and got on with it.
Ella wants to be a voice actor when she grows up. She also wants to be a mom, which never ceases to make me catch my breath, turn my head, hide the welling tears. She loves me - her own mom. I am by far her favorite person. At last year’s IEP meeting, Ella’s speech teacher tilted her head and said, “You know she loves you very, very much.” I cried. I always cry during the IEP meeting.
If you are fortunate to truly see the extent of someone’s love for you, love so big it could crack a huge, solid iceberg, what can you do but sob? Isn’t someone who loves that big worth fighting for?
Almost everything Ella says is true. (She’s very capable of lying. She’s a teenager and all that.) She blurts. “We’re working on the blurting!” her speech teacher says. Sometimes, it feels like I’m living in “The Invention of Lying,” a film that portrays a world where no one is capable of telling falsehoods. There are no white lies; nobody is tactful.
Sometimes it’s uncomfortable.
Sometimes, as Keats said, truth is beauty.
Ella tells me I’m beautiful. Every. Single. Day. In the morning, hair askew, in sweatpants and one of my husband’s ratty t-shirts, she tells me I am beautiful. When I apply a last swipe of lip gloss before going out she says, “You’re so beautiful. I mean, you’re just a little bit fat, but so beautiful.”
She doesn’t think I’m beautiful because I’m that good looking. I’m not. She thinks I’m beautiful because I am hers.
I hope you have someone who tells you that you're beautiful every single day.
I hope you love somebody so much that, to you, they are always beautiful, no matter their appearance.
Ella writes fiction. She is a creator of worlds. She’s imaginative. She’s smart. You’ll have to trust me. Some types of intelligence aren’t quantifiable. While Ella the person contains multitudes, her prose is sparse and straightforward, like Hemingway’s, though admittedly, it lacks the dignity of the movement of an iceberg. When she writes, she shows us the whole hulking undignified iceberg. Like her, it is real. It is true.
And there is beauty in that, too.
