New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  The story begins on the waterfront with a fight between two men: the narrator and his assailant. The aggressor is choking the narrator, but the latter manages to free himself by slashing the other man with a knife. In the mistaken belief that he has killed his opponent, the narrator-fugitive hides out and with his skiff tries to salvage what he can from a sunken ship that has gone down in the storm. The man dives repeatedly, first with a wrench, then with a grapple, in a vain attempt to break the porthole of a cabin in which he sees a woman with flowing hair and rings on her fingers. Meanwhile, sea birds are feeding on pieces of flesh that rise to the surface from a hole in the ship’s hull. Unable to salvage anything, the narrator returns to shore where he is informed that the man with whom he had fought is not dead. The storm resumes, and the narrator describes how and why the ship sank. When he returns again to the sunken vessel, he discovers that she has been cleaned out by the Greeks. The narrator, the ship, and the place itself have no names. Mango Key, Sou’west Key, and Eastern Harbor are identified, but they may be useful only to sailors familiar with the region. For the general reader, since the Florida Keys are not referred to, these names are vague enough to be almost anywhere.

  This deliberate vagueness gives the story a special aura that belies its realism. Moreover, “It wasn’t about anything” is the narrator’s first utterance, and he goes on from there to describe events that are, at best, ambiguous. He thinks he has killed a man, but he has not. He tries to salvage something from the sunken ship, but he can’t. When he finally does return to the wreck, it is too late. The narrator is misinformed, ill-equipped, and frustrated. Nothing works, he has nothing, and he is left with nothing. The reader, like the narrator, is left with a pervasive feeling of emptiness and failure. The real tragedy is and should have been the sinking of the ship at sea and the loss of all life on board, but this event is anterior to the ones being described and is not the center of narrative focus. The narrator describes the sinking in two pages only, as a flashback at the end of the story. Nonetheless, the storm and the sinking grow in importance as the title of the story and the “nothing” of the opening sentence begin to cast their lengthening shadows across descriptions of events that, on the surface, seem clear and uncomplicated. But the original clarity, like the water in which the narrator-diver swims, becomes progressively opaque.

  What is going on? Are we seeing only one eighth of the iceberg? Should we try to account for the seven-eighths which, like the sunken ship, are below the surface? Is there an unverbalized metaphorical level that is about something? Can we perform a salvage operation on the story that will give us the riches that the Greeks retrieved but were beyond the grasp or ken of the narrator? Can we “grapple” with the discourse in order to “wrench” meaning from a narrative in which these two words are used primarily as nouns? Fortunately, Jacques Lacan’s work serves as the basis for a theory of narration within the context of an unconscious discourse that provides insight and answers to these questions. A Lacanian reading of “After the Storm” reveals a weave of metaphors whose meaning is veiled and whose connotations are repressed.

  According to Lacan every narrative (“After the Storm” is no exception), like Oedipus in search of his history and destiny, manifests desire. In order to understand what the function of desire is, we need to look briefly at the structure of the Oedipus complex. As Sigmund Freud and Lacan define it, it is a blockage of a need that demands satisfaction. In addition to the blocked and repressed desire for the mother, it postulates two fantasized or imaginary visions of death. One is the father’s death (imaginary murder), and the other is the subject’s death (imaginary castration). The Oedipus complex is eventually resolved through the child’s identification with the father, and this constitutes his superego. According to Lacan, the resolution is made possible by means of the introjection of the father’s Name, the non/nom du père, which embodies the Law of incest prohibition and which, in time, also constitutes a portion of the child’s unconscious. The father’s No and Name is the first linguistic sign and symbol, and it coincides with the repression of sexuality, the beginnings of language, and the emergence of identity. The father’s Name displaces the desire for the mother, in effect incorporating the child’s assumption of his own death as a condition for his renunciation. This replacement of desire is the symbolic castration and death of the self that is repressed, thereby constituting the unconscious.

  This triangulation is a critical moment for the child at a time when s/he accedes to language, confronts the Imaginary in the mirror, during the so-called mirror phase, and sees this self as Other. This misrecognition of self is due to the mediating presence of the mother (desire) and the interference of the father (prohibition). The ego is constituted as a fiction of sliding surfaces composed of the Imaginary (self), the Symbolic (father), and the Real. Although Lacanians have some difficulty defining the Real, discourse or storytelling (like neurosis) is a metaphorical substitute for blocked desire. Whatever the Real may be, narration is the manifestation of a primordial self that has been displaced and decentered. Thus, the father’s Name, in addition to all subsequent signs and symbols, forms a chain of linguistic substitutions (metaphorical and metonymical) that are the signs and symptoms of the child’s renunciation.

  Lacan’s analysis of narration begins with language and proceeds to rediscover the “discourse of the Other” that is embedded in speech which, in “After the Storm,” is the narrative. The blockage of desire, along with its corollary, repression, produce a neurosis whose narrative symptoms are metaphorical. In the production of narrative (the sailor’s story of his fight, the hiding out, and the salvage), unconscious content is condensed as metaphor and displaced as metonymy. These discoveries prompted Lacan to say that “the unconscious is structured as a language.” The narrative process embodies the same characteristics of Freud’s dream-work, only differently. It remains for the literary critic to determine how the manifest discourse veils the latent meaning, that is, how the signifiers resolve simultaneously into manifest signifieds and latent referents. If the dream is the iconic, although masked, mirror of the unconscious, fiction is its linguistic reflector. Lacan’s focus thus enables us to understand, as Robert Con Davis phrases it in his “Introduction” to Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory, “how language in literary texts is constituted, buoyed up, permeated, and decentered by the unconscious” (848).

  If we accept the premise that the unconscious is structured as a language, then all speech (every text) contains repressed material that manifests a never-ending dialog with the Other—that fictitious self made up of the melding of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The symbolic is the Law, the father (le non/nom du père), eventually all doxa. The Imaginary is that displaced self that has to come to terms with the postponement of satisfaction, the repression of desire, the nurturing of discontent, in short, the maturation and acculturation that civilized adults claim to value. In this context “After the Storm,” like every narrative, is the melding of language and the unconscious.

  Moreover, Freud’s interpretation of dreams enabled Lacan to show that the operations of the unconscious, encompassing the extremes of pictographic and linguistic analyses, are themselves a linguistic process. Like the iconic nature of dreams, language and narration have a manifest and a latent content. In dreams condensation and displacement disguise the content of the unconscious in the same way that metaphor and metonymy veil the pulsive forces of the subject’s (author’s) desire whenever s/he uses language.

  Let us next apply Lacan’s theory to Hemingway’s “After the Storm.” If the summary at the beginning of this essay gives the story’s manifest content, then the fight, the choking, the storm, the sea, the sunken vessel, the wrench, the grapple, and the fragmented bodies inside the wreck must all have latent value and metaphorical meaning. If so, they become the displaced and condensed images of the author’s unconscious. On the manifest level the events describe an adventure of action and would-be
plunder, but on the latent level they reveal impotence, death, and desire.

  If we accept Lacan’s premise that every narrative is a manifestation of the unconscious, then the metaphorical symptoms of its discourse reveal the workings of desire. In a post-Freudian era the author’s conscious manipulation of Freudian symbols may disrupt this process, and so, inevitably, the question arises, did Hemingway consciously imbue his text(s) with Freudian symbols or not? Although his work after 1950, particularly The Garden of Eden, suggests a Freudian connection, I agree with Gerry Brenner who, in Concealments in Hemingway’s Works, states that although “Hemingway was fixated upon his father,” he “seems unconscious of how extensively father-son dynamics empowered his writing” (17). This would also apply to Hemingway’s relationship with his mother. In any case the repressive forces of the Law that come into play during the “mirror phase” of the child’s development relate to the incest taboo in society at large, whether the father is present or not, whether he is dominant or submissive, and it is the mother, by virtue of this societal taboo, who distances herself from the child. It would be simplistic to assume that in Hemingway’s case the repressive forces of the “mirror phase” were not at work or that the father-mother roles were reversed as a result of his father’s diffidence or his mother’s dominance and abrasiveness, of which Hemingway was fully conscious.

  Although it is probable that Hemingway did read Freud sometime before he died, there is no evidence that I can find to suggest that Hemingway had read him before 1932, when he was writing “After the Storm.” Although “After the Storm” belongs to the mature period of his short story writing (“Fathers and Sons,” “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio,” “God Rest you Merry, Gentlemen”), when almost everything in Hemingway’s craft was conscious and controlled, evidence for the deliberate use of Freud is lacking. Even if he had read Freud, he would have concealed his symbols. In the December 13, 1954, issue of Time magazine he compares the writing process to putting raisins in bread: “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” (72). Even if these symbolic omissions are deliberate, and there is no reason to think that they are since Michael S. Reynold’s inventory of Hemingway’s reading between 1910 and 1940 does not list any of Freud’s works, the omissions function as unknowns. They are concealed the way the discourse of the unconscious is concealed. It is this concealment, whether conscious or not, that gives “After the Storm” its strange dreamlike aura. The manifest content belies the latent content.

  It is perhaps worth noting that nonpsychoanalytic explorations of Hemingway’s works can also point toward suppressed sexuality, the nada, the winner-take-nothing syndrome, and the failure of love. It should, therefore, be good news to everybody that a Lacanian exploration of metaphor and the metaphoric process of veiling confirms conclusions reached by other means. Perhaps it is useful that a Lacanian reading, which claims to be more “scientific” in its approach to the creative process, should support readings that tend to be intuitive and impressionistic.

  Lacan’s discourse of the Other thus makes it possible to list a series of equivalencies that structure the story’s conscious and unconscious levels. The storm that sank the ship, the fight, and the choking are metaphors for the primal scene. Like Oedipus killing his father, Laius, on the road to Corinth, over “nothing” (a simple dispute over the right of way), the narrator’s desire to kill his assailant over “nothing” is the symptom of anger and hostility directed at the Law. “What the hell you want to choke me for?” says the narrator, adding, “I’d have killed him” (372). The imagined death of the assailant precipitates the narrator’s guilt and his hiding from the authorities. It corresponds to the repression that occurs when the Law prohibits the child’s desire for the mother. The narrator’s attempt to get at the woman floating in the ship that “looked a mile long under the water” (374) is the sign of this prohibition and the symptom of desire. The narrator’s failure to pry the woman away from the ship, even in death, confirms the overriding Law of the Phallus. Failure is synonymous with castration and the perceived death of the self.

  In this story almost every detail reveals a latent meaning. Moreover, because discourse veils the presence of the Other, that is, repressed desire, “innocent” nouns, references, and utterances take on special significance. The sea on which the narrator is sailing is alternately “as white as a lye barrel” and as “white as chalk” (372–73). The homonymous connotations of the nouns “lye” and “chalk” easily refer to the deception and the veiling that are inherent in every narrative. Fiction is a lie that somehow manages to write the truth on the surface of the sea where, metaphorically speaking, the conscious and unconscious worlds come together.

  For Lacan the act of writing posits the enticement of textuality, thereby acknowledging, unconsciously, the child’s “wound” and alienation. To produce a text, whatever its conscious modes and operations, is also to relive the process by which an affective charge—a cathexis—is released from its generating poles. The writer, and eventually the reader, directs this charge, imbuing it with the Reality that both produces and attracts it. Fiction (fantasy) thus has the power to link the conscious and unconscious systems. The writer’s need to repeat, rather than simply remember, repressed material illustrates the need to reproduce and work through painful events from the past as if they were present. Writing, like psychoanalysis, repeats the discontent of what never took place during that “time-event” referred to as the primal scene. The so-called fantasy of desire, incest, castration, death, and repression reenact not what took place, but what did not. Nonetheless, it is this scene that is replayed and reenacted on the stage of discourse as the metaphorical actors put on their veils and perform their masked ritual.

  After the fight and “after the storm” are therefore synonymous. The storm is a metaphor of shipwreck, actual as well as psychological. Not only is the title a metaphor for tragedy and trauma, the story itself is a metaphor of repression, death, and desire: a death of the self, a death wish against the father (the Law), and desire for the mother. Lacan maintains that in the aftermath of the splitting of the self during the so-called “mirror phase,” misrecognition of one’s identity is inevitable. “You couldn’t recognize the shore” (373), says the narrator in describing the storm’s aftermath. He is in his skiff on the white water looking toward a shoreline that is beyond recognition. It is as though Hemingway were giving us an objective correlative of cleavage: “There was a big channel blown right out through the middle of the beach. Trees and all blown out and a channel cut through and all the water white as chalk and everything on it; branches and whole trees and dead birds” (373). Psychologically it is a landscape of devastation in which the subject feels dead but is not dead because “inside the keys were all the pelicans in the world and all kinds of birds flying” (373). For narrative purposes, and in order to carry the full weight of double impact, realistic descriptions and inner states of mind are fused: the visible and the invisible overlap. The story describes a “real” hurricane and “real” events, but they are also the pretext for the unveiling of a portrait of the unconscious that confirms Lacanian theory with uncanny precision.

  The law of the hurricane is death to birds on the high seas, but “they must have gone inside there [the keys, that is, the unconscious—“the key” to the narrative] when they knew it was coming” (373). We all carry within us the emotional storm of the primal scene when the child’s desire is proscribed by the Law of the father: the choking episode may be read as the father’s prohibition while the wrecked shoreline is the image of the subject’s symbolic death. The mother-infant unit that constituted the child’s sense of wholeness is split by the Phallus (the storm) during the mirror phase. The big channel down the middle of the shore—a shore that was once whole—is the visual equivalent of the repression that cleaves the self and pro
duces the Other. Hemingway’s short story, like the workings of the unconscious mind, functions simultaneously on a realistic level of descriptive detail and on a symbolic level of covert desire. The narrator may be out to salvage what he can from the wrecked ship of the self, but in the glaucous depths of his unconscious lurk the images of failure.

  Pieces of flesh float to the surface from a hole in the hull of the sunken liner “way down below near the bottom” (374). These pieces are like dream images that appear when the so-called censor is asleep and the opening between our conscious and unconscious worlds permits an exchange between the two. Consciousness is above the surface where the birds feed on the pieces that float into view. But “you couldn’t tell what they were” (374). You have to go below the surface to find out, and even then insight is not immediate. Although, at first, with the aid of the water glass, the narrator can “see everything sharp and clear” (374), it is not until later that he finds out that all the crew and passengers were dismembered by the exploding boilers when the water rushed in.

  The sunken liner plays a double and ambivalent role. On the one hand it is the Phallus that is “a mile long” (374) and “as big as the whole world” (373), and on the other it is a “she.” The narrator drifts over “her” (373), and when he uses the heavy grapple in order to try to break the porthole, he “slides along the curved side of her” and has to let go lest he drown (375). The liner is thus the combined symbol of the father-mother unit that excludes the child. His “head felt cracked open” (375) from the depth and the exertion. The narrator rests in his skiff and his nose stops bleeding and he looks up into the sky where he sees “a million birds” (375). In spite of the birds that died in the storm, many have survived, and so has he, but he is bleeding and he was choked, and he feels guilty even though he has killed no one.