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Banal Story | eNotes Synopsis

"Banal Story" was first published in 1926 in Little Review, and then again in 1927 in Hemingway's short story collection Men Without Women. This story mocks the banality of American culture typified in The Forum, a popular American magazine of the 1920s. "Banal Story" is a relatively overlooked work, which is surprising because its essential message is an allegory of one of Hemingway's recurrent themes/philosophies: realism vs. romance.

The story begins with the narrator (likely representing Hemingway) eating an orange, sitting by the stove at his writing table, claiming, "Here, at last was life." He imagines far off real events, real romance: a boxing match, snow falling in Mesopotamia and a cricket game in Australia. Then he turns to read The Forum, whose patrons claim it to be the new guide for the intellectual. The narrator puts down the magazine, and the story shifts to an elegy: Manuel Garcia Maera, a famous bullfighter, on his deathbed. Newspapers in Andalucia had tributes and pictures of Maera were sold to remember him. Some bullfighters were relieved that he died because he was so good: a dual sign of respect and Machiavellian selfishness. The story ends with a description of men buying pictures of Maera and thoughtlessly stuffing them in their pockets.

Hemingway was mocking the literary selections of The Forum but also its general feel. Stylistically, the magazine simply engages in pretentious name dropping as if to convey a general historical knowledge and a finger on the pulse of current/progressive issues of the day. In the end, it is just a booklet of easily conceived rhetorical questions ("Our deepest convictions: Will science upset them?"). Hemingway was satirizing its laconic sound-bite style, shallow but claiming to stimulate romance and intellectual profundity. However, it is the description (and experience) of eating the orange and the cold, hard fact of the bullfighter's death that are real, and therefore, worth reading about. There is a parallel between the stories in The Forum and the pictures of Maera: not so much that they are only trite representations of reality, but that, for many people, these evoke more emotion than reality itself. So, the "banal story" could be those stories found in so-called intellectual journals or it could be the state of things: the banality that pictures and flowery language strike a more evocative cord with the populace than, say, a real event like the death of a hero.

Hemingway mocks the "warm, homespun, American tales" whose writers "do not try to be smart and are never long-winded." This may be a prescient story or, perhaps, just a feeling common to all periods in popular culture. "Banal Story" does have something of a curmudgeonly "kids these days" message (especially in reference to the young, jealous bullfighters), but the narrator's real dismay is the shifting focus of interest (in writing and life) of substituting flashy headlines, sound bites and pictures for the genuine rawness of reality.

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