Chapter 12 - “There’s No One Thing That’s True”

Summary

In “’There’s No One Thing That’s True’: Hemingway Criticism and the Environmental Humanities,“ Lisa Tyler examines the role of Hemingway scholarship in the rise and proliferation of ecocriticism that has accompanied growing anxieties over (and accompanying denial of) climate change since 2000. Noting in particular the groundbreaking work of Susan F. Beegel and essays by the prolific Ryan Hediger, Tyler argues that critics have been appropriately attentive to both the pros and cons of Hemingway’s awareness of nature and conservation. On the one hand he was acutely aware of the ecological devastation of industrialism and yet at the same time he was famous for traveling the world as a collector of animal trophies. Tyler also explores Hemingway’s compatibility with such core ecocritical concepts as “the mesh” and the “anthropocene” while also documenting how contemporary criticism has redefined traditional notions of his pastoralism. She concludes by noting areas that await analysis, including the relevance of climatology to his fiction and of feminist ecology to his depiction of landscape.