Tell, Don't Show
The century of Hemingway style prose is over, and Thomas Bernhard shows what comes next
I’ve been reading Thomas Bernhard’s novels recently. I first read The Loser in college, but I re-read it last fall (after seeing someone post an excerpt here on Substack) and I was struck by how relevant it felt. Like all great literature, it managed to hold two modes in tension: a sense of timelessness and a sense of being deeply embedded in its own time.
What was most exciting about Bernhard’s work was how differently his fiction functioned, and how that difference allowed him to express a particular mood, one that seems eerily well suited to our current time. Reading Bernhard made me realize how inadequate most of our fictional apparatuses have become. What is considered “good fictional prose style” has a number of spoken and unspoken rules about it, rules that Bernhard breaks again and again, and rules that need to be broken in order to capture the unique social reality of the twenty-first century. We need a fiction that can adequately address what it is like to spend most of our time online.
Bernhard has that quality. His fiction, written mostly in the 70s and 80s before he died in 1989, uncannily predicts the texture and feeling of being terminally online in the early twenty-first century. Social algorithms, which increasingly modulate how we spend our time “socializing” are powered by engagement. Whatever content can hold attention the best gets the most attention; and what gets the most attention is anger and outrage. Social media tools, through the feedback loop of likes, comments, and re-shares, feed all your online activities into obsessive self-examination. The experience of these two forces, over time, generates constant feelings of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and envy. The blistering rants and looping preoccupations of Bernhard’s narrators are well calibrated to the social media age.
It’s no surprise, then, to find that other contemporary fiction writers are drawn to Bernhard’s style. In HouseHouseMagazine, Oscar Dorr writes that everybody wants to be Thomas Bernhard. Dorr notes a recent wave of writers working directly in the Bernhard form—Sebastian Castillo, Jordan Castro, Zoe Dubno—and argues that literature is irreducibly historical, that Bernhard’s power came from specific conditions (post-Nazi Austrian shame, a still-living aristocratic high-art culture), and that you can’t peel his form off those conditions and paste it into contemporary American life. He concludes that the imitation falls flat, is a waste of talent, and that the best contemporary novels will confront the crisis of form head-on rather than running back to a few anointed classics.
I agree that imitating another writer always falls flat, but Dorr never asks why Bernhard is such a popular choice for writers trying to capture the feeling of our present social reality. The pull toward Bernhard is not a dead end because Bernhard shows how to write compelling fiction for our time. Our social life is also increasingly disembodied. We engage less with people “in real life” and spend more time engaging with usernames, low-resolution avatars, ghost-written brand profiles, and carefully cultivated personas. Navigating this sense every day (and for hours a day) creates a new sense of social reality, one that Bernhard’s fiction captures better than the dominant realist fictional mode that remains popular. In the realist mode, characters in a story occupy a shared physical space where they move around, talk to each other, and make things happen. Bernhard dispenses with these formal trappings; his fiction has no speech quotes, almost no character descriptions, no elaborations of weather and setting, with virtually nothing happening to the flesh-and-blood characters in his “plots.” Instead, his fiction exists entirely within the looping, rambling paranoia of a mind on the brink of a major breakdown, fiction as an endless rant that goes on and on in a single, two-hundred-page paragraph. This formal approach is an early description and diagnosis of the chronically online—with its endless “scrolling,” grievance-soaked and disembodied consciousnesses—and by studying Bernhard’s methods more closely, we can see how his approach licenses new formal inventions in fiction, fiction that can better capture the unique social textures of our time.
The single scrolling paragraph
Open any Bernhard novel, and you will encounter the same odd form: one paragraph that proceeds for roughly one-hundred and fifty pages without a single break. The effect is overwhelming. Writers often use paragraphs to give readers a break and to signify when one idea has come to a natural conclusion before introducing the next idea. When Bernhard writes novels-as-paragraphs, he breaks both of these conventions at once: he denies the reader any sort of breathing room, creating a feeling of claustrophobia and reinforces the understanding that the expression of the novel circles around a single idea that cannot be broken up into smaller, related ideas, and cannot “move on” to any follow-up idea. The narrators cannot escape from these singular ideas; they are trapped in them and can only circle the idea again and again, endlessly repeating themselves, obsessively returning to the same grievances.
Which is exactly how social media algorithms function. They cannot generate new ideas but necessarily recycle the same content to you again and again, in slightly different forms. If you click on, say, a video of someone doing a home improvement project, the feed will give you more of that: an endless buffet of home renovation and restoration content, again and again, obsessively, from a million different angles.
To spend long spans of time scrolling is to encounter an unending slew of content with no natural breaks, a reflection of the Bernhardian paragraph. Since what works on social media is outrage bait, your feelings gradually and inexorably turn toward anxiety, fear, and depression—emotions that Bernhard’s characters feel acutely: a righteous resentment that simmers aggressively but doesn’t quite bubble over. Social media feeds generate a similar vibe, creating the sense that you are trapped in a dysfunctional society in which you cannot escape nor do anything about (ironically, because the feed steals time and energy from you, time and energy that could be used to address real problems).
Bernhard’s formal innovation gives one possible answer to the question that plagues fiction writers of today: how do you portray characters who spend most of their day on their phones? Trap their consciousness in a single paragraph, a single looping idea, and watch it scroll and scroll and scroll.
Nothing ever happens, or all summary and no scene
To explain the second innovation of Bernhard’s fiction, I need to define a couple of craft terms: scene and summary. A scene is a description of what is happening in fiction in real time, using action, dialogue, and sensory details. A summary tells what has happened in the past, compressing time and skipping over details. To use the language of movies, the scene is the action set piece and the summary is the montage.
In scenes, characters speak, move around in physical space, and react to each other. The writer provides sensory details (sights, sounds, smells) to help place the reader in the moment. The old maxim “show don’t tell” essentially means “more scenes and less summary.” Instead of saying that two characters “had an argument,” you are encouraged by this maxim to include raised voices, slammed doors, and barbed lines of dialogue.
Most fiction includes both scenes and summaries, with the writer fluidly and skillfully moving between the two modes. Here, for instance, are the opening paragraphs of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead.”
Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come.
It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate’s pupils that were grown up enough and even some of Mary Jane’s pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember; ever since Kate and Julia, after the death of their brother Pat, had left the house in Stoney Batter and taken Mary Jane, their only niece, to live with them in the dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island.
The first paragraph sets the scene. We are dropped in medias res and Joyce brings the moment alive with concrete details: the pantry, the overcoats, the “wheezy” hall-door bell. The characters move through the space; Lily “scampers” and Miss Kate and Miss Julia “gossip,” “laugh,” “fuss,” and “peer down over the banisters.”
After the scene is set, the story glides into a summary for the second paragraph. It zooms out from the action and provides the necessary backstory for this particular party. We are no longer in a singular moment in time, but in many different moments, occupying all the annual parties the Morkans have thrown “for years and years.” Joyce weaves between scene and summary throughout “The Dead,” creating vivid scenes and then providing the necessary context to understand them. Most fiction is like this.
But you don’t have to do it this way. You can tell a story entirely with scenes, excluding summary completely. Ernest Hemingway made this style famous. Inspired by Ezra Pound and the Imagist poets—who argued that an exact, visual image of something, using direct and sparse language, constituted a poetic statement—Hemingway developed his “iceberg method” in which only the bare simple facts of a scene are presented, shorn of abstractions or background explanations. It is a style of fiction that uses zero summary. Take the opening of his story “Indian Camp” and compare it to Joyce’s “The Dead.”
At the lake shore there was another rowboat drawn up. The two Indians stood waiting.
Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row. Uncle George sat in the stern of the camp rowboat. The young Indian shoved the camp boat off and got in to row Uncle George.
The two boats started off in the dark. Nick heard the oar-locks of the other boat quite a way ahead of them in the mist. The Indians rowed with quick choppy strokes. Nick lay back with his father’s arm around him. It was cold on the water. The Indian who was rowing them was working very hard, but the other boat moved further ahead in the mist all the time.
“Where are we going, Dad?” Nick asked.
“Over to the Indian camp. There is an Indian lady very sick.”
“Oh,” said Nick.
Across the bay they found the other boat beached. Uncle George was smoking a cigar in the dark. The young Indian pulled the boat way up the beach. Uncle George gave both the Indians cigars.
Hemingway does not provide any background information on these characters other than what can be gleaned from the action. There is nothing like Joyce’s “it was always a great affair” that places a scene in context to moments outside of it. For Hemingway, there is only the present moment, and everything outside of it can only be hinted at. Hemingway writes without summary, choosing to tell stories entirely with scenes.
You can, of course, go the other way and write entirely in summary without any scenes. That is what Thomas Bernhard did. Compare now to Hemingway the opening of Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters.
While everyone was waiting for the actor, who had promised to join the dinner party in the Gentzgasse after the premiere of The Wild Duck, I observed the Auersbergers carefully from the same wing chair I had sat in nearly every day during the fifties, reflecting that it had been a grave mistake to accept their invitation. I had not seen the couple for twenty years, and then, on the very day that our mutual friend Joana had died, I had met them by chance in the Graben, and without further ado I had accepted their invitation to this artistic dinner, as they described the supper they were giving. For twenty years I had not wanted to know anything about the Auersbergers; for twenty years I had not seen the Auersbergers, and in these twenty years the very mention of the name Auersberger had brought on third-degree nausea, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. And now this couple is bringing me face to face once more with the life we led in the fifties. For twenty years I’ve avoided the Auersbergers, for twenty years I haven’t even met them, and then I have to run into them in the Graben, I thought.
Although there are gestures towards setting up a scene—placing the narrator in a specific chair at a specific party—the scene never coheres as a scene. Notice that as soon as the narrator’s wing chair is mentioned, it becomes “the same wing chair I had sat in nearly every day during the fifties.” We are not really at this specific party, we are in all the parties the narrator ever attended at the Auersbergers over a span of fifty years. We slide right into the narrator’s mind which turns into an extended summary that will proceed unbroken for 181 pages; where time moves fluidly (from the dinner party, to Joana’s funeral, to the moment the Auersbergers extended their invitation, to the lives the characters lived thirty years and more in the past, and so on). In fact, the wing chair in which the narrator is sitting becomes something like a running joke through the novel, the line, “I thought, sitting in the wing chair,” a continually recurring phrase functioning as a constant reminder that nothing has actually happened, all “action” in the novel has taken place entirely in the narrator’s mind. All summary and no scenes.
Snapshot literature
For a hundred years, Hemingway style has been dominant in fiction writing. His style has become so ingrained in the idea of “good fiction” that it almost disappears as a stylistic choice (which writers can choose against), being transformed into a kind of edict for good prose writing (hence the maxim “show don’t tell”). When fiction is taught as a craft, it is often dressed up in Hemingway’s clothes.
But Hemingway style, too, has a history and a context, and transporting it to our present moment is a similar kind of failure to the one Dorr levies against the Bernhard imitators.
Hemingway met Ezra Pound in Paris in the 1920s. They became friends and correspondents, and Pound had a large influence on Hemingway’s writing. Pound was one of the founders of the Imagist literary movement, and he taught Hemingway the core precepts of the Imagist style: short, clear words, minimal adjectives, a relentless process of editing down to the core. Trained as a newspaper writer, Hemingway already brought a clean, simple, factual style, which Pound encouraged him to push further, resulting in the “iceberg theory” of fiction.
Pound and the Imagists developed their style in reaction to the decorative, flowery, often abstract language of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The Imagists codified their aesthetic in 1913, laying out a program: direct treatment of the “thing” (concrete reality as it is), extreme economy of language, musical rhythm, and precise diction (without useless decorative words like adjectives).
But the Imagists were not just responding to an earlier literary movement, they were adapting literature to better fit the changing times of a new century, changes that were being driven by new technologies; and at the forefront of that technological shift was the camera.
While the camera had been around for a while, it wasn’t until the first years of the 20th century that inexpensive portable cameras became available to the public. This triggered a major cultural shift: the “snapshot.” For the first time, families and individuals could capture casual moments (before then, people would usually pose for cameras, not unlike posing for a painting). This resulted in a new visual culture, where you suddenly see a flood of non-artistic, personal photos: birthdays, backyard parties, vacations, pets, and even food.
Before the camera, literature was heavily narrative and chronological, events unfolding like a play. The camera introduced the concept of freezing a single, isolated fragment of time inside a distinct frame that can be carefully studied. The Imagists explicitly tried to mimic this mechanical behavior, creating a “snapshot literature.” See how William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” is a poem masquerading as a photograph.
so much depends
upona red wheel
barrowglazed with rain
waterbeside the white
chickens
The Imagists called for a type of literature that mimicked the crisp, sharp focus of a high-quality camera lens. The words needed to have visual “exposure” creating poems with hard, clear, cleanly cut lines. Since a camera records exactly what is in front of the lens without adding opinion or moral judgment, the Imagists argued that poetry should do the same: the visual image should carry the psychological weight.
The dominant artistic movements of the early twentieth century were quite explicit in their aims. They believed that art should not, and could not, imitate reality. Instead, the artist aims to dismantle reality and rebuild it conceptually. This view was driven by technological changes (like the camera, but also the automobile, the airplane, electricity, and the radio) which were, in turn, breaking down and re-conceptualizing our understanding of “reality.”
We are now a quarter of the way through a new century, one that has introduced its own dizzying array of technological changes. Has our literature caught up to these developments? Or, is it stuck in snapshot mode, recycling the same tired techniques, while the rest of the world has moved on?
From camera mind to internet mind
Inspired (and trained) by Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway smuggled the Imagist project out of poetry and into prose fiction. His “iceberg” approach would go on to have a profound impact on fiction for the rest of the twentieth century. Hemingway owes much of his legacy to the rise of a major institution in American literature: the MFA.
The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program was invented in Iowa in 1936. Paul Engle, one of its early directors, pioneered the “workshop” system where students read and critiqued each other’s work under the guidance of a published author. Ernest Hemingway never attended or taught an MFA program, but his aesthetic was adopted by the MFA system for a few specific reasons.
First, Hemingway style was “teachable.” Before the MFA, creative writing was seen in a romantic, mystical light, the writer not unlike a spiritual guru who receives wisdom from the muses. Hemingway’s style of clean, journalistic prose stripped of ornament was “democratic,” in that it could be taught to anyone who already knew the basic building blocks of writing. It was like a formal blueprint that instructors could give to students, transforming writing from a quasi-mystical calling to a “craft” that can be practiced, edited, refined, and, most importantly, graded.
Second, the “show don’t tell” approach of using only scenes to tell a story helps the writer survive criticism in the workshop setting. Since the bulk of the emotional and psychological weight of a story is “submerged,” it leaves it open to reader interpretation, generating natural discussions in the workshop. However, to “tell” workshop readers what a story is supposed to make them feel exposes the writer to unnecessary criticism.
Third, postwar, postmodern ideology rejected ideas of grand philosophies and unified “theories of meaning.” Since Hemingway’s prose was constitutionally suspicious of abstracted language, it avoided any criticism on this front, sliding past any objections from the postwar literary professionals who saw in Hemingway style’s focus on sensations, physical actions, and immediate experiences a necessary palliative to the horrors of war (Hemingway was, himself, a veteran of World War I).
Lastly, and somewhat unceremoniously, Hemingway’s best work (and what his style was best suited to) was the short story, and since the MFA was taught in colleges using the semester system, a short story became the de facto mode of workshop writing and criticism.
MFA style is, essentially, Hemingway style, which owes its philosophical roots to the Imagist movement of the 1910s who were largely reacting to the cultural “snapshot” phenomena of the inexpensive, portable camera. But we are a long ways from the camera, and a new, strange, pervasive “democratic” technology reigns supreme: the internet. Hemingway style remains dominant, mostly because it is continually supported as “good clean fiction” by MFA programs who continue to teach it because it is easy to teach. But it’s increasingly evident that this kind of style, with its focus on discrete scenes and sensory details fails to account for how we currently live in our internet age.
We need new formal inventions. Like the Imagists pushed literature to adopt the cultural changes wrought by the personal camera, we need new formal innovations that can help our literature adapt to the personal computer—to the iPhone, to TikTok, to ChatGPT. These tools are interesting, and they have profound impacts on how we conceptualize and navigate in the world, and yet, to describe the use of these tools in a realist scene-heavy style is patently absurd. There is nothing to “show” here other than a person slouched over a screen, their thumb flicking. Everything that is interesting about the internet has receded from the world of scenes—with their concrete images active and clear sentences and simple words, all in service to active storytelling—and moved into the world of summary, into “telling.”
If we should write with vitality about our age, we may need to upend the unexamined advice of the last one hundred years. Let us embrace a new approach: tell don’t show.
And it is at this point of the essay that we come to the face
If we don’t interact with the external world anymore except through screens, then what is the value, in fiction at least, in describing what someone looks like. The literary critic Charles Baxter, in his essay “Loss of Face,” describes how contemporary writers have retreated from describing faces in their fiction. At first, he attributes this to a personal failing: “In the practice of any art, there are some procedures and practices that artists sometimes forget how to do through neglect or distaste or their inability to concentrate their imaginative forces.” Then he complicates this assertion by suggesting that perhaps the idea that we can divine inner character through the face (as if it were a window to the soul) has (rightfully) fallen out of favor: “Anyone these days is completely justified in feeling squeamish in judging a person’s character on the evidence of how that person looks. People are usually not, after all, what they appear to be at first.” Descriptions of character faces have simply fallen out of style, perhaps. However, Baxter also suggests that contemporary writers find the idea of describing people distasteful, underhanded, something quite unbecoming to the gentle image they see of themselves: “You cannot be a nice person and also judge people’s characters based on their faces.” Which then leads him to his central argument: that to describe someone’s face confers a sense of moral obligation, a commitment that writers are hesitant to accept: “The problem of seeing a face, of acknowledging its reality, its connection to a human being who has a separate identity from ours, leads to the problem of obligation, which makes many people uncomfortable.”
Baxter’s argument assumes that we see faces as we go about our lives, but we turn away from them when it comes to writing about them, when it comes to conjuring them in our imaginations. But what if the issue is more fundamental? What if we don’t actually see faces anymore? Perhaps writers lack the skills to accurately describe another human’s face because they simply don’t have much practice seeing real ones in their day-to-day lives.
Because we spend so much time today looking at screen-mediated faces, the face can no longer function as a method for accessing or describing another person’s interior state. That window is permanently closed to us, even if it was suspect to begin with. When you disagree with a stranger over the internet, you do not have the benefit of seeing them react; how they might scrunch their face in anger, how they might roll their eyes at your counterpoints, how their lips might curl in spite. You don’t know if the person you are talking to looks like a child or an old man.
Once again, Bernhard’s prose foretold this social shift. He virtually never describes any of the characters in his novels. Unsurprisingly, his obsessive narrators never stop their runaway thoughts to bother to describe what their own face looks like, but nor do they ever describe the faces of the people who surround them. Despite spending the entirety of the novel at a dinner party surrounded by people he used to know, the narrator of Woodcutters never describes the faces of his company, even as he lambasts everything about them. For Bernhard, there is no connection between someone’s moral character and their face.
It’s not just faces either; Bernhard spends little time describing the physical settings in which his novels take place. Even when these settings are a key source of the narrators’ obsessions. For example, in Old Masters, the entire novel takes place in a specific location in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna: the Bordone Room settee. The settee becomes a kind of running joke, constantly repeated multiple times a page on almost every page, becoming incantatory. However, despite appearing constantly in the novel, it is never described in much detail. Bernhard never pauses the novel’s internal rant to describe the basic building blocks of the scene in which the entire novel takes place.
In a similar move, the novel opens with Atzbacher establishing himself in the room next to the Bordone Room so that he may observe his friend Reger who is sitting on the Bordone Room settee. Despite explicitly stating his desire to “observe” Reger, Atzbacher never once takes a moment to describe what Reger actually looks like. The joke, of course, is that Reger is ostensibly sitting on the Bordone Room settee so that he may observe the art hung there, specifically Tintoretto’s painting, The White Bearded Man. But that painting (which is also mentioned constantly, on almost every page of the novel) is never described, either. Even though he has come to the Bordone Room settee every other day for thirty years, Reger is not there to observe The White Bearded Man. He comes there to think, which, as we learn in the novel, his “thinking” is an obsessive projection of his frustrations and insecurities. We then, of course, realize that Atzbacher isn’t actually there to “observe” Reger either. He’s there to project Reger’s words back at us, words that Atzbacher can’t seem to get out of his own head. In Old Masters, art is not a thing to be observed (let alone understood) but something that we can use to project our own thoughts and feelings onto. I can think of no better way to describe the absurd panopticon of our contemporary social-media-mediated life than that.
Despite spending 150 pages mired in Reger’s endlessly looping thoughts, we have no mental image of Reger’s flesh-and-blood appearance. If you’ve spent many hours reading online, you know exactly what this is like. You get stuck in the thinking process of what you see online, enmeshed in the kind of thinking that is repeated ad nauseam. You cannot see what anyone looks like, so you cannot describe them. But you know the thoughts. Intimately. Read one person over and over online, and their thinking becomes like a virus. A new post drops, and you know exactly what it is going to say before you even read it. With the rise of generative AI, that other voice in the skull isn’t even a person’s anymore, it’s a machine’s. Throughout Old Masters it becomes increasingly difficult to draw the line between what Reger thinks and what Atzbacher thinks. The separation is impossible. It’s beside the point. Everything collapses into Reger, just like time spent online collapses into internet thinking. Spend too much time reading and scrolling and watching, and your own thoughts gradually collapse.
In his essay, Dorr argues that Bernhard’s literary power can’t be lifted out of its historical conditions. But the reason Bernhard is a powerful influence today is because his formal innovations diagnose problems in today’s fiction. His work shows that the (Imagist influenced) Hemingway style “iceberg” approach to fiction fails to account for the Internet age, and what it is doing to our psyches, and shows us ways to write powerfully about the internet. Because the Hemingway style cannot capture what it feels like to scroll algorithms for eight hours a day, or how to portray characters who spend their lives thumbing content on their phones, or what it’s like to interact with people you can’t even see. Bernhard, however, provides many answers.
The path for interesting fiction in the 21st century is not to continue trotting out the Imagist mode but to find new modes of literary expression, modes better suited to our internet age. One thing that Bernhard’s writing points to is formal innovation. Fiction will need new forms to capture the unique experience of our time. One that I’m experimenting with is found document fiction. Rather than trying to write around the reality of digitally-mediated experiences, I’ve chosen to write into them. My newer stories are digital documents themselves: email exchanges, chat rooms, forum posts, newsletter essays, YouTube videos. The intended effect is like encountering these forms for real. There is something naturally compelling about reading posts online—and fiction can utilize that appeal to tell stories in a new format. Formal innovations that serve the stories that resonate in this moment in time.
We need a new fiction for a new century. The Hemingway style worked well for the last one, but it struggles to register the immediacies of lives lived through screens. The internet is a Gutenberg-like innovation, and we are still in the early shock waves of a new media revolution. The printing press gave us broadsides, pamphlets, and newspapers, and, over a century later, the novel. The internet has given us comments, threads, hyperlinks, and the infinite scrolling feed—and now, AI, a voice that can think for us. I predict that the successor to the novel will be created, and it, too, will take at least a century to cohere. But that form won’t be built by writers still arranging scenes as if they were behind a camera. It will be built by writers willing to break the old rules, writers willing to write into the times instead of against them. It’s time to flip the script: tell, don’t show.