> When asked about the use of symbolism in his work, and particularly in the most recently published Old Man and the Sea, he explained: "No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in...That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better....I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea, a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true."
After reading the wiki more closely, I think there's a middle ground. It seems the Iceberg Theory operated on Hemingway's omission of explicit symbols. Hemingway never outright mentioned the larger themes in his works. But the holes left were suggested by the context.
I think it's like instead of painting a mural of a deer in a forest, he'd paint a mural of (what appeared at first glance to be) an empty forest. Except on closer inspection, there would be a trail of disturbed vegetation, accompanied by fresh deer tracks.
The deer clearly exists somewhere in the scene's vicinity even though the audience never sees it. Similarly, I think Hemingway let the themes influence the story, but never let those themes manifest themselves as symbols the reader could easily point to. Instead, the themes manifested as a vibe the reader couldn't explain on a conscious level, or manifested as a series of convenient coincidences. Maybe we can compromise that Hemingway achieved symbolism without the symbols.
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I suspect much of our disagreement concerns the definition of "plot". In my mind, I can't see a short story or novel without a plot that would be very interesting. It would be equivalent of watching a film which showed nothing but paint dry for the entire duration. Even if there's no physical action, any halfway interesting movie is bound to have at least some sort of psychological action.
If there's no plot, then I would probably classify it as poetry (which "Hills like White Elephants" clearly isn't).
Maybe a better idea would be to point me to an example or two of successful stories which omit symbolism.
Separate from that: There's plenty of literature with no plot.
When I was younger I loved writing stuff with no plot. My best grades were on works with no plot whatsoever. I wanted to write a novel-length work with no plot, in part because of the challenge, in part because I immensely enjoyed reading stuff with no plot.
I haven't read "Hills like White Elephants". Maybe it's full of intentional symbolism. Maybe not. But the absence of a plot is not the evidence of symbolism.