Hemingway

Marcel Proust wrote in a hypotactic style; in the entry above by A. E. Hotchner we have the paratactic Ernest Hemingway defend the editing of his writing for hypotactic or Proustian reasons.  I would like to see what Hemingway cut out of the Life article.

For me the definitions* are of little use in remembering the difference  between the terms, not being a student of Greek and Latin, but recalling recent authors who are famous for using the different styles is more meaningful.

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Perhaps the most consistent, philosophically reasoned paratactic style in our time has been written by Ernest Hemingway. Here is the famous tight-lipped syntactic reserve:

Now in the fall the trees were all bare and the roads were muddy. I rode to Gorizia from Udine on a camion. We passed other camions on the road and I looked at the country. The mulberry trees were bare and the fields were brown. There were wet dead leaves on the road from the rows of bare trees and men were working on the road, tamping stone in the ruts from piles of crushed stone along the side of the road between the trees. We saw the town with a mist over it that cut off the mountains. We crossed the river and I saw that it was running high. It had been raining in the moun­tains. We came into the town past the factories and then the houses and villas and I saw that many more houses had been hit. On a narrow street we passed a British Red Cross ambulance. The driver wore a cap and his face was thin and very tanned. I did not know him. I got down from the camion in the big square in front of the Town Mayor's house, the driver handed down my rucksack and I put it on and swung on the two musettes and walked to our villa. It did not feel like a homecoming.

A Farewell to Arms, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929.

Analysing Prose, Richard A. Lantham, 1983.

*Edward Morris wrote in 1901 that the term (parataxis) was introduced into linguistics by Friedrich Thiersch in his Greek Grammar (1831). The concept has expanded since then, and a number of definitions have emerged, often conflicting. From Wikipedia.