Art in novels: from “Letters to a young novelist” by Mario Vargas Llosa to Rudolf Stingel’s alpine landscapes

Dear Friend,

Ernest Hemingway says somewhere that at the beginning of his writing career it suddenly occur to him that he should leave out the central event of the story he was writing (his protagonist hangs himself). And he explains that with this decision he discovered a narrative technique that he would later use often in his stories and novels. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that Hemingway’s best stories are full of significant silences; the narrator causes pieces of information to vanish, managing nonetheless to give the missing data an eloquent and insistent presence in readers’ imagination, contriving it so that readers fill in the blanks with their own hypothesis and conjectures. I’ll call this technique “the hidden fact” and quickly make clear that although Hemingway gave it a personal twist and use it often (and sometimes masterfully), he hardly invented it, since it is a process as old as the novel itself. […] The hidden fact, or narration by omission, can’t be gratuitous or arbitrary. It is vital that the narrator’s silence be meaningful, that it have a definite influence on the explicit part of the story, that it make itself felt as an absence, and that it kindle the curiosity, expectations and fantasy of the reader.

 

from Mario Vargas Llosa, Letter to a young novelist, 1997 (translation by Natasha Wimmer).

Some of this body of works by Rudolf Stingel are currently on show at Gagosian gallery, New York.

 

December 22, 2016