One last time the narrator tries to break the porthole with the wrench lashed to a grains pole, but it is too light and too small and slips off and sinks into the quicksand below (376). “I couldn’t get into her” (374) says the narrator in words whose sexual connotations are unmistakable. His instrument is not up to the task. Either the wrench is too small or the grapple is too heavy. His tools are inadequate. He is impotent. However, the reader can grapple with the text and wrench meaning from it, metaphorically, using the narrator’s tools, provided s/he uses the water glass in order to decipher the letters of the ship’s name—letters that lie below the surface. Although the narrator-diver stands on them to buoy himself, he does not and cannot recognize “the letter of the unconscious,” Lacan’s euphemism for desire and the discourse of the Other. “I stood on the bow of the liner with my bare feet on the letters of her name and my head just out” (375). The narrator’s feet are in touch with the letter(s) of the unconscious, even as he tries repeatedly but without success to break the porthole in order to get the rings from the woman’s fingers.
The name of the ship is “the letter of the unconscious,” and this is the name that embodies Lacan’s system. His system gives us the tools with which to get at the latent meaning (and into the ship) that is embedded in quicksand and that only the Greeks could plunder. They blew “her open and cleaned her out. . . . She carried gold and they got it all. They stripped her clean” (376). The very vagueness of the epithet “Greek” allows us to write Oedipus on the ship’s prow because Oedipus symbolizes the conditions that are present during “the storm,” when we run aground on the father’s Law and into the quicksand of desire. “Oedipus” in Greek means swollen foot, and it is the narrator’s feet that are standing on the ship’s name.
In the last two pages of “After the Storm” (376–78), Hemingway’s narrator provides plausible realistic details with which to explain the ship’s sinking. He describes her grounding and the treacherous effects of the quicksand. We learn that whatever is rising to the surface from a hole in the vessel was caused by exploding boilers. Except for an allusion to the captain and his mate who may or may not have been together on the bridge when they died, these details add little to the psychological impact of the narrative that precedes it. They function as a denouement, whereas the “meat” of the story, so to speak, is to be found in the latent meaning of the fight, the choking, the attempted salvage, and the letters of the ship’s name.
In French the word dénouement can mean the undoing of a knot. Noeud is the word for “knot” but, as Jane Gallop points out in her book Reading Lacan (156), noeud is also a crude term for “penis.” Since all discourse veils the Phallus, the real denouement in “After the Storm” depends on the reader’s willingness to use the water glass in order to produce meaning by going beneath the surface of appearances. The primal scene produces an emotional knot that must be untangled if we are to lead productive lives. Writing fiction is a process of untangling the knot. As a collaborator in the process the reader must engage in a recreative endeavor in order to break the porthole (metaphorically speaking) to get at the woman (again metaphorically speaking). Since the narrator is unable to break the porthole and gain access to the woman, he cannot experience the bliss (jouissance) of incest, although he is happy that he has at least cracked the glass.
“It is natural,” says Lacan, “that everything would fall on Oedipus, since Oedipus embodies the central knot of speech” (S-II, 269). If writers write because they have to, then a discourse that dramatizes the exteriorization of desire goes to the very heart of language. It is a discourse within which the author reassembles the fragments of the self and projects them onto the mirror of fiction where we, in turn, recognize the author’s metaphorical image of himself as the image of the Other. Although fiction is a mirror that distorts, it is, nonetheless, a mirror of the self. But this image, like the glass of the porthole, will forever remain cracked. This discourse of the self, which is always a discourse of desire, seeks to retrieve the lost object, be it breast or mother. Because language manifests the presence of the mother tongue, writing, in recovering an absence, tends to be incestuous. Because the narrator’s actions are directed toward retrieving the lost “mother,” “After the Storm” asks to be read as a metaphor of desire.
Freud talks of dreams being structured as a rebus, and Lacan applies the same principle to fiction. The gold is there for us to retrieve provided that we use the water glass as a window onto the unconscious. The glass reveals the mother, the father, and the child all knotted together with the discursive weave. A Lacanian reading of the narrator’s repressed images reveals the story’s latent content that comes into focus as metonymical structure and metaphorical discourse. Like the narrator, we the readers are also buoyed up by the letters of the ship’s name. The difference, once we discern her origin, is in what we do with the knowledge.
Structuralist Interpretation
Structuralism and Interpretation: Ernest Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain”
Oddvar Holmesland
The question raised in this essay is whether modern structuralist theories offer a valuable model for critical reading of texts. Structuralism is not a new critical method which discovers or assigns meanings. Structuralism seeks to define the conditions of meaning. It is based on the recognition that actions and objects only make sense with respect to a set of institutional conventions. Culture is seen to consist of a set of symbolic systems, and the meaning of language depends on a whole system of constitutive rules. The study of literature must accordingly be an attempt to explain how these systems work and what conventions make literature possible.
A related question is to what extent analysis of narrative structure, in turn, aids interpretation of theme, or whether it merely imposes abstract academic clichés on the representation of reality. The conclusion arrived at here is that applied structuralism offers genuine guidance to settle interpretative problems. However, the principles by which different structuralist methodologies operate may produce contradictory answers. It follows that analytic theory is far from attaining the status of science. The balancing of contradictory methodologies must ultimately be guided by sound subjective judgment in relation to individual texts.
Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “Cat in the Rain,” has been selected for examination for several reasons. It contains ambiguities which demonstrate the validity, but also the variability, of a structuralist approach. Moreover, another critic, David Lodge, has already applied the relevant methodologies to a critical reading of this text, which will serve as useful background to interpretation.1 Finally, Hemingway’s story condenses the component parts of the novel into greater prominence, which facilitates a lucid analysis of structure and narrative techniques. Every detail of conversation and description carries significance for the understanding of the whole.
A realistic text like “Cat in the Rain” requires a special angle of analysis to match its characteristics. The story is realistic in that it centers on the dramatization of a problem in human relationships, located to a particular time and place, and purports to reveal some truth about the situation. A convincing realistic plot depends on the creation of vraisemblance, a semblance of reality, through the right combination of signs. This objective involves interaction of two planes: the author must reproduce actuality as accurately as possible by way of descriptions and plausible conversations; but creation of thematic meaning requires at the same time that language used to record reality must also have a denotative or connotative form counterpointed to actuality, in order to act as commentary on life. Since the text of “Cat in the Rain” becomes the grid through which we experience reality, meaning derives from the tension between our conceptualized recognition of natural life and its modification by the rhetorical technique.
This interaction coincides with the distinction between “fabula” and “sjuzet” (or story and discourse) defined by the Russian formalists.2 The former is the neutral, matter-of-fact continu
um of connected events corresponding with our innate or culturally conditioned tendency to apprehend objects and events in a chronological and spatial relation. The latter has to do with the way in which a story is narrated and possibly modified by stylistic devices according to the author’s private evaluations. Different aspects of the story may be accentuated through shifting points of view or perspectives, contrasts, repetition, distortion of durational time, gaps in logic, etc.
The fabula of “Cat in the Rain” runs as follows: A young American couple is presented alone in a hotel room looking out on an empty square. From the hotel window the wife sees a cat crouching under a rain-dripping garden table. She declares that she will go down and fetch the “poor kitty.” The husband, lying on the bed reading, offers to do it but does not rise. As she opens the door, she sees a man in a rubber cape crossing the empty square in the rain. The maid then comes and holds a protective umbrella over her, but when she gets to the table, she discovers that the cat is gone. On her returning to her room, George only briefly diverts his eyes from the book. When she resumes her position at the window and restlessly expresses her many wants, including a cat, he tells her to shut up and find something to read. There suddenly is a knock at the door, and the maid appears with a big tortoise-shell cat for the wife.
Hemingway’s characteristic method of creating sjuzet on “a new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”3 Omission of units in the logical chain mystifies the reader, inviting a greater imaginative involvement in the life presented. But his synthesizing efforts will be frustrated in seeking to deduce the meaning along a traditional narrative line of complication and denouement. Meaning will instead have to be inferred from the total form in which the ending constitutes only one of the many indices. The final return of the cat, for example, does not confirm the resolution of conflict because we do not know how the characters are going to react. To identify this interpretative problem, it is useful to adopt the terminology of J. A. Greimas.4 All narrative, he stipulates, centers on the transfer of an object or value from one “actant” to another. The functions of actants in a story are those of Subject or Object, Sender or Receiver, Helper or Opponent. Greimas distinguishes between different performative tasks in which the actants are involved. The pattern of “Cat in the Rain” is disjunctional since it deals with the disappearance and return of a cat (object) to the American wife (subject).
The ambiguity of the ending, Lodge suggests, hinges on the mystery of the tortoise-shell cat’s identity. We do not know whether it is the “kitty” the wife spotted outside and so do not know whether she will be pleased to get it. The fact that it is only seen from the husband’s perspective accounts for this ambiguity: George did not stir from the bed to look out of the window at the cat his wife wanted and consequently has no possibility of knowing whether the two are identical. Accordingly, he perceives the tortoise-shell cat as “a” cat and not with the definite article as a sign of recognition. Conversely, “a” cat seen from the wife’s point of view would have clarified that it is a different cat.
Greimas points out how ambiguous disjunctional endings may be by opposing “departure” to “incognito arrival,” “arrival” to “return” (since we do not know whether the tortoise-shell cat is the one that disappeared, we do not know whether the ending means arrival or return), and “negative return” to “positive return.”5 Confirmation of the common identity of the cats would have opened certain interpretative possibilities, while excluding others. If the wife’s desire for the cat were viewed as compensatory for lack of marital fulfillment (as indeed most critics see it), the ending might thus have served as an ironic crack at the husband’s lack of deference for his wife. If the big tortoise-shell animal is definitely not the kitty she wants, the irony might turn against her unrealistic longings and irrational discontent.
It is doubtful whether the enigma of the cat’s identity can be solved, considering the wealth of contradictory indices. The critic needs different criteria for explicating Hemingway’s method. There is at the heart of the story not simply the mystery of what will happen after the story ends. The notion of resolution implied in Greimas’s definition of the disjunctional plot cannot embrace all levels of significance: the wife wants a cat and after some difficulties, gets a cat. One needs to find out more about what kind of plot this really is. Its action is definitely not strictly linear; the revelation of a state of mind and a state of affairs is an equally essential part. Analysis of the “symbolic systems” may clarify how much the comprehension of a state of mind depends on the retroactive illumination of the ending.
The cat initiates and sustains the main action of the story. Though its full meaning cannot be paraphrased, its function as a symbol around which the whole story centers may be analyzed. An understanding of what symbolic level the cat pertains to provides vital insight about the appropriate symbolic level at which to read the entire plot. The climactic condensation of story and cat symbolism in the final scene significantly reduces the number of possible interpretations. Here is the situation acted out: previous to the final incident the wife’s pleading request for a cat is broken off by the author’s snapshot of the state of affairs. From the angle of a disengaged observer, he pictures the scene in a few terse sentences: “George was not listening. He was reading his book. His wife looked out of the window where the light had come on in the square.” It is at this moment the perspective shifts again to add a poignant finale: “Someone knocked at the door. ‘Avanti,’ George said. He looked up from his book. In the doorway stood the maid. She held a big tortoise-shell cat pressed tight against her and swung down against her body.” It takes some openness of mind to perceive the poetic force of this coda. The suddenness and unexpectedness of the cat’s appearance in the doorway makes it loom with Imagist immediacy. This big animal is “pressed tight against her [the maid] and swung down against her body.” Its heavy, animal sensuality is unmistakable. Seen against the background of marital triteness and the quest for a cat to compensate needs, it looms as a metaphor of the wife’s deeper, unfulfilled desires. This link is rooted in the structuralist concept of binary oppositions. Opposition here means an intuitive logical operation by which the presence of one term or image inevitably generates its opposite in our mind. It is impossible, in this context, to conceive of the provocative sensuality of the cat without sensing its contrast. Hemingway’s technique of omitting parts of the narrative does not make ambiguity normative. He is more than anything else the master of calculated implications. This implied opposition significantly evokes the kernel state of affairs.
If the big cat is conceived of as a poetic metaphor, its identity becomes irrelevant. The wife gives evidence to this point. As a matter of fact, she does not necessarily require “the” cat; she repeatedly declares: “I want a cat.” This detail is crucial not only because it signals that any specimen of cat may do, but also because it raises the object of quest from a metonymic to a metaphoric stature. This distinction pertains to Roman Jakobson’s definition of the poetic function of language as “the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.”6
In verbal communication we select certain units from a store of possible equivalents and combine them into larger or more complex entities. The relation between the selected segments and their equivalents is one of lexical or syntactic similarity (the metaphoric principle). Combination of units into larger ones presupposes a common code of meaning for communicative purposes. How expressions and their meanings may be combined depends on social conventions, based on a codified contiguity between expression and content. The metonymic principle thus builds on association of part and whole, and contiguity of time, space, and cause and effect. The distinction between poetic and practical language can hence be characterized as a difference between similarity and contiguity in the relation between expression
and content. Poetic combination is governed by similarity and does not subserve the codified contiguity. It may be apprehended as a series of open systems containing meaning instead of only referring to meaning. The metaphoric principle of equivalence thus creates a sense of immediacy between the expression or image and the content, stressing the symbolic significance of the unit.
Determination of the big cat’s identity is consequently only important at the metonymic narrative level. It would provide the resolution required for seeing the story as a coherent pattern of cause and effect. By a metonymic reading the kitty might be viewed as part of a whole range of other things the girl desires to gratify some private need: “And I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes.” Carlos Baker bases his interpretation on the principle of contiguity when assuming the cats to be identical and that it “somehow stands in [the wife’s] mind for comfortable bourgeois domesticity."7 His notion of a resolved plot is not shared by John V. Hagopian who applies a different version of metonymic reading: “the sum total of the wants that do reach consciousness amounts to motherhood, a home with a family, an end to the strictly companionate marriage with George.”8 To this sum of maternal desiderata, Hagopian adds the “kitty, now an obvious symbol for a child.” According to this reading, the ending is deeply ironic, for “the girl is willing to settle for a child-surrogate, but the big tortoise-shell cat obviously cannot serve that purpose.” To use different terms, he finds the story ironic because only a little “kitty” fits into the metonymic group of contiguities he defines, with an innocent little baby as its center.
New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Page 9