New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Page 11
Reading the story as a spatial opposition between natural fertility and its contrast incorporates the parts of the plot into a coherent design. The very opening line signals the main theme of estrangement. “There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on their way to and from their room.” This sense of cultural and social segregation and confinement in one room identifies the interaction of actants. The author repeatedly refers to “the American wife” or “the American girl” as a symptom of her isolation from the Italian hotel staff and other nationalities. Subserving the Italian proprietor’s commands, the maid’s role in bringing the cat to the wife is accordingly inconsequential. But it is not inconsequential that she is pictured with the “cat pressed tight against her and swung down against her body.” The image of instinctual intimacy between the maid and the animal at this moment allies her with the wife through their shared sensuality. The scene suggests the transcendence of cultural boundaries, and by the shift of perspective, the exclusion of George, an opponent for his lack of responsiveness to his wife’s femininity.
As a possible herald transcending boundaries, the cat’s natural element is outside. Its association with rain is implied in the title of the story. When the wife catches sight of it for the first time, it is “under one of the dripping green tables” in the garden. Though the table is the property of the hotel, it is wet like nature and has the same color as vegetation. The image suggests the integration of culture and nature. What she seeks in the cat is symbolically present in its temporary habitat, “washed bright green in the rain,” reflecting the fertility associated with the rain and park and palm trees. In terms of a spatial opposition, the green table at which the wife halts is significantly positioned directly “under their window,” thus deepening the reference to the faded greenness inside.
The wife’s instinctual needs cannot be gratified through vicarious compensation, as indicated by the kitty’s disappearance. Nor can they be expressed by her verbal realizations, but only through the quest for and mystical disappearance of the cat and values associated with it. In the same context it is significant that the escaped kitty reappears in a different apparition at the very moment she cries, “I want a cat now.”
In keeping with the structural reading laid out, the meaning of the cat cannot be defined more explicitly than as a metaphor for the wife’s instinctual desire for a vital openness to life. Hagopian’s precise identification of it as “an obvious symbol for a child” is consequently not reliable. All that can be said is that it reflects her need to experience emotional fertility and is not attached to a definable object. Nor does the text allow for the correlation of the man in the rubber cape (as a symbol of contraception) and the wife’s frustration with her husband because he is unable to give her the child she wants. As Lodge points out, there is no evidence of her being childless. Perhaps the author is in fact portraying a woman who is already pregnant? “Something felt very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small and at the same time really important. She had a momentary feeling of being of supreme importance.”
Ambiguity notwithstanding, the author is deliberately drawing attention to the question of pregnancy or lack of pregnancy. It is, in the same context, an implied probability that the man in the rubber cape is symbolically protecting himself against nature, especially in view of the conspicuously many times the wife is warned against the rain. The cape is parallel to the umbrella, but whereas the man is protecting himself, the wife is being protected—another indication of the male/female opposition in the story. Though any specific correlation between symbol and symbolized object or person is beyond verification, the wealth of indices strongly point to conflicting experiences concerning fertility, be it emotional or biological.
“Cat in the Rain” is basically a metonymic realistic story. There is an implied notion of vraisemblance which assumes a correlation between text and reality. The story aims to expose some human problem, and the referential function of the text appears to subordinate the expressiveness of an artistic form. It again presupposes an interdependence between expression and meaning. Hemingway’s technique consists precisely in creating a metonymic pattern of contiguous parts which, through its vraisemblance, encourages the reader to explain its message. By his method of omitting logical links, however, he manages to complicate interpretation while inspiring the reader’s imaginative involvement to solve the enigma. For the same reason he avoids using what W. B. Yeats calls “intellectual symbols”; they do not possess a specific denotative meaning. Rather, they function as indices creating resonances of import through implication. Temporal and spatial contiguities, compositional contrasts, and foregrounding of certain elements through selection and repetition produce significance. Import is thereby produced beyond the words, in the gap to be filled in by the synthesizing imagination.
Structuralist theories provide valuable criteria for systematizing the conditions of meaning. As in the case of the tortoise-shell cat, analysis elucidates how meaning emanates from the interaction of metaphor and context. The outside world expresses the contradictory forces that incite and give direction to the wife’s quest. It is a quest with no concretely definable end, but a quest for a more fulfilling process of Being. The tortoise-shell cat, with its animal sensuality, ultimately serves as a metaphor for the dynamic sensuality required to reconcile nature to man’s desire.
Textual Analysis
“That Always Absent Something Else”: “A Natural History of the Dead” and Its Discarded Coda
Susan F. Beegel
“A Natural History of the Dead” begins as graphic satire, with an autobiographical account of civilian and military corpses Hemingway observed during World War I’s Austro-Italian conflict. The story then shifts to an equally grim fictional account of a wounded lieutenant’s hysterical response to war’s human refuse and concludes as a dressing station’s doctor orders the raving officer restrained. In the earliest extant version of “A Natural History of the Dead,” however, the short piece continues, returning to the satirical mode with which it began. This coda, again autobiographical, describes Hemingway’s encounter with an Italian sergeant robbing Austrian corpses on the battlefield.
“A Natural History of the Dead” was originally published as chapter 12 of Death in the Afternoon and, together with the aforementioned additional ending, first appears in the bullfight book’s intermediate typescript.1 With the exception of the four-page coda, affixed to “A Natural History of the Dead” just after the final sentence “‘Hold him very tight,’” which ends the published text, this version differs only slightly from the published work.2 Apparently Hemingway added the coda as an afterthought, later rejecting the material before Death in the Afternoon was set in galley proofs.3
Writing to Maxwell Perkins in 1940, Hemingway confessed that “My temptation is always to write too much. I keep it under control so as not to cut out crap and rewrite. Guys who think they are geniuses because they have never learned to say no to a typewriter are a common phenomenon.”4 The discarded coda to “A Natural History of the Dead” is one example of Hemingway’s tendency to write too much and of his self-disciplined control of that tendency. It represents material that Hemingway labored to create, yet chose to omit from finished work in order that his published writing might have more “dignity of movement” (DIA, 192). Nevertheless, study of the discarded coda can enhance a reader’s appreciation of “A Natural History of the Dead” by revealing the craft of omission Hemingway exercised to achieve his final published product.
Before looking at the coda, it is necessary to examine its context—“A Natural History of the Dead”—the more so as there is no widely accepted interpretation of the work to rely upon. By present calculation fewer than thirty among thousands of pages of Hemingway criticism have been devoted to “A Natural History of the Dead.”5 Nor is the bulk of the existing work interpretative. For example, John Portz and John A. Yunck
, the two critics who have written at greatest length about the work, confine themselves to explication of Hemingway’s somewhat arcane allusions.6
One reason for critical neglect of “A Natural History of the Dead” may be its curious double identity, which defies generic classification. First published as a chapter in a book-length work of nonfiction and later as a short story, half satirical essay and half fiction, “A Natural History of the Dead” shifts in midstream from first-person exposition to third-person narration. Yunck in particular dislikes this combination of genres and objects to Hemingway’s using a short story as “a vehicle for miscellaneous criticism.”7 Nevertheless, by including “A Natural History of the Dead” with only minor revision in Winner Take Nothing, his 1933 anthology of short fiction, Hemingway himself suggests that the work can be read as a coherent whole in isolation from Death in the Afternoon.8
The published version of “A Natural History of the Dead” begins by satirizing four natural historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: W. H. Hudson, the Reverend Gilbert White, Bishop Stanley, and Mungo Park (DIA, 133–34).9 To Hemingway these naturalists, two of them clergymen, were notable for their efforts to elucidate the presence of God in nature. With the exception of Hudson, they had all published their natural histories well before Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared in 1859 and had little difficulty in reconciling the observable facts of nature with their faith in the unseen truths of divine creation. Hemingway paraphrases a characteristic passage from Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799) treating the reflections of the explorer, when perishing in the desert, on “a small moss-flower of extraordinary beauty”: “‘Though the whole plant,’ says he, ‘was no longer than one of my fingers, I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves and capsules without admiration. Can that Being who planted, watered and brought to perfection, in this obscure part of the world a thing which appears of so small importance, look with unconcern upon the situation of creatures formed after his own image. Surely not. Reflections like these would not allow me to despair’” (DIA, 134).10
Reared in the post-Darwinian world, Hemingway nevertheless (or perhaps necessarily) received childhood instruction on the compatibility of science and religion and on the divine creation revealed in nature. His father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, was an inventive physician who designed special forceps for spinal laminectomies, fashioned artificial ears and chins for deformed children, and proposed advanced theories of infant nutrition.11 An avid amateur naturalist, Dr. Hemingway organized Ernest’s eighth grade class into a club named for the famous naturalist Louis Agassiz and took the children for weekly nature walks in the woods along the Des Plaines River.12 At the same time, Dr. Hemingway was an unbending pillar of Oak Park’s Third Congregational Church, where he taught a Sunday school class for young men.13 Apparently Clarence Hemingway had no difficulty reconciling his scientific vocation and avocation with his religious faith and instructed his own and the neighborhood’s children accordingly. His oldest daughter, Marcelline, recalled that
Daddy always made a point of explaining to us that though God created the world in seven days, according to the Bible, and we were not to doubt that statement, nobody had ever explained how long a day was. He also told us that the men who wrote the Bible explained natural history the best they could, but that now through research we knew much more about how things must have been made thousands of years ago. He told us that our new knowledge only added to the truths we learned in Sunday school.14
Ironically, the skills of observation Dr. Hemingway taught his son on nature walks helped achieve Ernest’s ultimate disillusionment with God. The boy, who had learned to look among the branches of trees for hidden birds’ nests and beneath the underbrush for wild hepaticas and may-flowers,15 as a young man turned his sharpened eyesight on the fragmented bodies of women workers killed in a munitions factory explosion outside Milan, on corpses abandoned to swell in the Italian sun after the Austrian offensive of June 1918, and on mules and horses left broken-legged to drown during the Greek evacuation of Smyrna. While Clarence Hemingway hoped that the observant habits of a natural historian would increase his son’s reverence for divine creation, those same habits, applied to the refuse of war rather than dogtooth violets, achieved a far different result.
World War I exploded Hemingway’s childhood religious training. While Christianity depends upon a belief in life everlasting and constitutes a codified and systematic denial of death, Sigmund Freud accurately predicted that the war would render all those it touched unable to ignore death’s reality: “Death can no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in him. People really are dying, and not now one by one, but many thousands at a time, often ten thousand in a single day. Nor is it any longer an accident.”16 A Christian belief in immortality was no longer possible to Hemingway after he observed the sights, sounds, and smells of death on the Italian front. While as a child under his father’s protection Hemingway may have felt, like Nick Adams in “Indian Camp,” “quite sure that he would never die” (SS, 95), an Austrian Minenwerfer soon gave him a private lesson in personal mortality.17 Through “research” on the battlefield, Hemingway had gained a knowledge of death incompatible with the “truths” he had learned in Sunday school.
The opening satire of “A Natural History of the Dead” depends upon the ironic tension between the spiritual beliefs and positivist methods of the antique natural historians Hemingway imitates. He poses Bishop Stanley’s confidently rhetorical religious question (“With a disposition to wonder and adore in like manner . . . can any branch of Natural History be studied without increasing that faith, love and hope which we also, every one of us, need in our journey through the wilderness of life?” [DIA, 134]) and sets up a shattering answer by embarking on a study of the natural history of the dead. Parodying the expository prose of early naturalists, Hemingway catalogs aspects of the dead as a natural historian would catalog the characteristics of a plant or animal species:
Until the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day. The color change in Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in the heat, the flesh comes to resemble coal-tar, especially where it has been broken or torn, and it has quite a visible tar-like iridescence. The dead grow larger each day until sometimes they grow too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem blown tight enough to burst. The individual members may increase in girth to an unbelievable extent and faces fill as tight and as globular as balloons. (DIA, 137)
Naturalistic observation of the dead does not give Hemingway “any such thoughts as Mungo Park about those formed in His own image” (DIA, 138).
Hemingway does not name exactly what he fails to find upon observing the dead. Avoiding abstract words like “God,” “soul,” “immortality,” “everlasting life,” Hemingway says only that he has found no evidence of “that always absent something else” Mungo Park and others claim to have seen in nature (DIA, 139). Instead of finding “something,” he has found nothing, an absence of God in nature, an absence of life in death, an absence of divine concern for human suffering. In “A Natural History of the Dead,” through a pseudoscientific study of corpses decaying on an Italian battlefield, Hemingway provides positivistic proof of an absence at the heart of the universe.
At first, Hemingway tells us, “I blamed it on the war” because “I’d never seen a natural death, so-called” (DIA, 139). He purports to be confused by the semantic distinction that suggests that death from disease is somehow more “natural” than death by violence. Like “the persevering traveller, Mungo Park,” he still believes “that always absent something else,” invisible on the battlefield, may nevertheless shine through a “natural death.” This illusory hope evaporates when he witnesses a death from Spanish influenza: “In this you drown in mucus, choking, and how you know the patient’s dead is; at the end he shits the bed full” (DIA, 139).l8 The narrator learns only tha
t a “natural death, so-called” is no more natural, and no less degrading, than “unnatural” death in war.
Here Hemingway widens the satirical scope of “A Natural History of the Dead” to include Humanist literary critics Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and Seward Collins, as well as early natural historians.19 The Humanist school insisted on the duality of man and nature and felt that human experience was essentially ethical. In their view literature should avoid graphic depiction of man’s natural functions, including death and sex, unless able to relate those functions to man’s ethical experience. In “A Natural History of the Dead,” Hemingway challenges the Humanist school to prove the duality of man and nature by dying and reproducing decorously themselves, by demonstrating personal immunity to natural processes:
So now I want to see the death of any self-called Humanist because a persevering traveller like Mungo Park or me lives on and maybe yet will live to see the actual death of members of this literary sect and watch the noble exits that they make. In my musings as a naturalist it has occurred to me that while decorum is an excellent thing some must be indecorous if the race is to be carried on since the position prescribed for procreation is indecorous, highly indecorous, and it occurred to me that perhaps that is what these people are, or were; the children of decorous cohabitation. But regardless of how they started I hope to see the finish of quite a few, and speculate how worms will try that long preserved sterility; with their quaint pamphlets gone to bust, and into footnotes all their lust. (DIA, 139)20