New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  As stated, these theoretical models can serve to illuminate two characteristic types of reader-appeal in Hemingway’s works. In which sense, then, can the first type be called vertical, the second horizontal? The two types refer to two fundamental aspects of narrative composition, and they specifically emphasize one of these aspects in the communication between text and reader: the aspect of the text as a system of potential meaning and the aspect of the text as a process of potential experience. In the first case we tend to get a vertical effect in that the explicitly formulated surface of the narrative must be constantly related to the unformulated implications of the narrative to figure out its “deeper” meaning and significance. What happens on the level of narrated events is no more important than what these events signify, how they are to be interpreted and related to other elements and layers of the text. If, as in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, we have an almost pathological distance from, and indifference of the narrator toward, the narrated world, and if this world is furthermore presented as a world of stasis and futility where human action loses any meaningful direction and teleological purpose, the focus of the reader’s attention is all the more turned away (“re-fleeted”) from the reported facts toward an inner, subjective world beneath the external surface world of appearances. Of course, this reflective activity is in itself a temporal process. In reading we cannot but react to one sentence after another, following the lines of the written text. But what matters here is that the reading process in the reflective response pattern is not simply defined by the progress of fictional events but also by the gradual accumulation of interpretive data about these events. Reflection essentially occurs in a timeless mental space, because by its very nature of “turning back” upon itself it breaks up the objective flux of time and suspends the laws of temporal linearity and irreversibility, making past and present simultaneous in the potentially infinite space of subjective thought.

  This is different in Type II of the implied reader. In the daydream pattern of response the reader, instead of being confronted with his own interpretive subjectivity, is drawn into the imaginative world of the text. His psyche is brought to experience the fictitious world under the simulated conditions of “real life.” He is not primarily led to question the premises of this world but to follow the immanent logic of the developing narrative. What this means is that above all he is psychically subject to the temporal process of the fiction, to the changes and the promising or disappointing turns of events on the horizontal axis of the text. The reader is not put in a reflective position “above” the narrative (in an indeterminate mental space where each step is potentially reversible) but is implicated in its horizontal unfolding in time, which is inscribed in successively determined, irreversible steps into the narrative sequence of the text. In Hemingway’s “Macomber,” for example, the reading process is characterized not by the static wasteland effect of sterility and monotonous repetition but by sharp changes of mood and highly emotionalized climaxes of the narrative. The story dramatizes the daydream of Macomber’s rise from utter humiliation to heroic self-affirmation. This daydream is gradually built up in the reader’s expectation, is almost miraculously fulfilled in the course of the text, and is destroyed in the shock of Macomber’s unexpected death at the end of the story.

  The following analysis of selected texts demonstrates the validity of this distinction between two types of the implied reader in Hemingway; and it examines the way in which they help to shape the narrative composition of his works.

  In The Sun Also Rises, which will serve here as chief example of Type I of appellative structure, the reader experiences the world as from a painfully insurmountable distance. He is informed early in the book of Jake Barnes’s impotence which, as the physical manifestation of his psychic war trauma, becomes a more general metaphor for his inability to participate fully in the life that is going on around him. Jake’s paralysis is like a silent center of indifference, an ever-present principle of negativity which inhabits all potentially positive and meaningful experiences in the novel and taints them with the same color of a controlled but extreme disillusionment. The surface of the text is above all characterized by Jake’s desperate attempt at composure and self-control and at rigorously suppressing all signs of his wounded subjectivity. In his obsession with objectivity, he restricts his narrative largely to a neutral, almost monotonous registration of external facts, actions, and dialogues. The inner world of his subjectivity, however, which is responsible for this reduced perspective, is almost entirely excluded from the explicit text. It thus forms a kind of central indeterminacy in the novel which undermines the apparent determinateness of the textual surface as an element of constant irritation and uncertainty and puts the reader at a skeptical distance to the narrated world. As Jake Barnes mistrusts “all simple people, especially when their stories hold together,”15 the reader is led to mistrust the facade of controlled matter-of-factness and naturalistic certainty that the narrator strives to establish. No real change, no development is possible in such a constellation, neither in the external world, whose activities appear as a pointless circulus vitiosus in the light of Jake’s disillusioned subjectivity, nor in Jake’s subjectivity itself, which is imprisoned, as in a gloomy inner exile, in its paralysis. The expectation of the reader of such change and the psychodynamic potential of the temporal-horizontal tension it would create is therefore neutralized early in the novel, and what is left is a reflective, vertical tension between different levels of meaning and reality that are interrelated in a sort of negative coexistence, simultaneously defining and denying each other.

  Only at some points in the novel does Jake’s suppressed subjectivity come to the surface, creating short moments of intensity that interrupt the overall sense of objective control and frustrated emotion—for example, when in chapter 4 he lies awake in bed at night thinking of Brett and, as the strain of his depression is getting too strong, starts to cry (31); or when in chapter 17 he goes up to the hotel room of Robert Cohn—who has had a psychic breakdown—and remembers a blow on his head which he suffered when playing football in his youth. This experience is a parallel to his later war wound, as well as to the desperate situation of his weaker alter ego, Robert Cohn (192ff.). But these are only short moments in the book, signals from the deep structure of the text which do not really shape or substantially change the reading experience. They are flashlights illuminating an internal reality which is largely concealed beneath the surface of external events and which appears as a deep-rooted feeling of self-alienation and of a traumatic division from life that goes back to Jake’s earliest confrontations with the world. As the incident with Cohn is placed in the context of the bullfights in Pamplona, this psychic division from life is specifically emphasized, because the scenes of unbroken vitality at the fiesta seem strangely removed from the two isolated American expatriates, whose incommunicable emptiness and “impotence” stand in sharp contrast to the communicative celebration of life, and death, surrounding them.

  Even the bullfights, which are seen by some critics as an authentic alternative to the world of social frustration and as a “climax of the entire novel,”16 are undercut in their immediate effect by the distance and alienation implied in the novel’s narrative perspective. It is certainly true that the bullfighting scenes create moments of great intensity in the novel, which transmit some sense of Jake’s enthusiasm as an aficionado (who has projected what is left of his vital emotions into the bullfighting myth) to the reader. But they do not add up to an actualized process of experience for the reader, because the short moments of a ritualized coherence of life that they convey are sharply juxtaposed with the much longer scenes of the totally deritualized and incoherent life of the foreign group of bourgeois bohemians who, including Jake, seem strangely eccentric and out of place in the quasi-mythic world of the fiesta. The bullfights represent an idealized mythical counterworld, which we are allowed to glimpse, but which only increases our awareness of the fragmentation and
disorientation of life in the real, modern world of the main characters—and of the reader. This is mirrored in the narrative focus which, with Jake Barnes, shows a contradictory tendency throughout the fiesta to move away from the center of the action to which it is simultaneously attracted, to seek some sort of mythic identity with the community of the fiesta, and yet compulsively to withdraw into an isolated outsider-position. Although Jake admires Romero as the natural man of action and archetypical bullfighter, he remains at an impersonal distance from him. It is rather that he finds Romero fascinating as an example of that original beauty and vitality of life from which he himself is forever separated. And it may in a sense be true, as has often been maintained, that Hemingway expounds his own principle of art in his description of Romero’s art of bullfighting (167ff.). But that is only one, idealized side of his art, of which the other side is the irredeemable “break” between self and reality, consciousness and life, which through Jake’s perspective determines the structure of the novel—and of the way in which Hemingway presents the fiesta.

  As Paul Goodman has shown in an analysis of the bullfighting scenes, this is also true from a linguistic viewpoint. Through the “passive style” of descriptive objectivity, “the persons are held at arm’s length, [and] there is no way to get inside them or identify with them”; indeed, “the effect . . . is like the Brechtian ‘alienation,’ which Hemingway achieves more consistently than Brecht.”17 In other words the text calls not for the identification of the reader but embodies a specific resistance to such identification. Hemingway’s alienation effect, however, differs from Brecht’s in that this resistance is not transformed into an epic meta-discourse with the audience—and thus dissolved into rational understanding—but points to a deeper structure of textual meaning which requires continuous interpretation of the presented reality without offering any finished version of that reality.

  A similar “break” in the textual surface can be observed in the fishing episode at Burguete. As the scene is a particularly illuminating example of Hemingway’s technique of reader-guidance in the novel, it should be looked at in some detail. Like the bullfights, the fishing prima facie suggests a meaningful alternative, a return from the spiritual wasteland of modern society to natural life, and thus promises a potential emotional change or even climax for the reader. Yet again a closer look reveals that this potential is not used but is in fact deliberately counteracted by the way in which the episode is related. The fishing excursion is the first real contact with nature that Jake and his friend Bill establish after their long travel from Paris and from the anonymous jungle of the city that it symbolizes. But other than Bill, who is full of eager ambition and wades deep into the stream to catch particularly great fish, Jake—and with him the focus of the reader’s attention—again remains curiously detached from the fishing, avoiding any immediate involvement in the experience. He sits on a dam above the falls where the water “was deep” (99) and gets through with his fishing in a very economical, almost mechanical way, catching six identical trout in a row at the easiest place of the stream: “While I had him on [the first trout] several trout had jumped at the falls. As soon as I baited up and dropped in again I hooked another and brought him in the same way. In a little while I had six. They were all about the same size. I laid them out side by side, all their heads pointing the same way, and looked at them” (119).

  With this Jake’s fishing adventure is about over. Clearly, the effect here is anticlimactic, emphasizing not the dynamic element of action and experience but the static or, rather, circular element of recurrence of the same—note the conspicuous repetition of the word “same” in reference to Jake’s activities, as well as to the “result” of these activities (the trout). This is even sharper brought to light in view of Bill’s unreserved engagement in the fishing and of the far more impressive success of his efforts: “Bill sat down, opened up his bag, laid a big trout on the grass. He took out three more, each one a little bigger than the last, and laid them side by side in the shade from the tree. His face was sweaty and happy” (120). Bill has indeed had an experience, and the excited ambition and “climax” of his adventure are not only mirrored in his face but, in a nice bit of ironic imagery, in the increasingly bigger size of his trout. Yet again, the energy and adventure of active life which Bill’s fishing symbolizes are distinctly removed from the novel’s narrative center. His experience happens in absentia; it is not accessible to the reader as a subjective process but only as the “dead,” objectified result of that process. This detachment from concrete experience is underlined by the fact that while Bill, outside the novel’s narrative focus, is engaged in fishing, Jake has withdrawn under a tree to read. What he is reading is a story “about a man who had been frozen in the Alps and fallen into a glacier and disappeared, and his bride was going to wait twenty-four years exactly for his body to come out on the moraine, while her true love waited too, and they were still waiting when Bill came up” (120). This strange story of a love-relationship which contains the impossibility of its own realization, and which indicates a more general stalemate of human feelings and, indeed, of life itself, is an ironic-reflective comment on Jake’s situation in the book. It emphasizes his unrealized, self-negating relationship to Brett Ashley, with which he continues to be preoccupied even in this pastoral scene (see the ensuing dialogue with Bill, 103–4), signifying once more his psychic alienation from active life and experience.

  From the analysis of these key passages in the book, the implied reader in The Sun Also Rises clearly emerges as an example of Type I of the reader-appeal in Hemingway distinguished above. The emotive potential of fictional wish fulfillment is a priori neutralized here, because all potentially life-affirming experiences are undermined by the implicit negativity of the narrator’s consciousness which distances the reader from any immediate involvement in the fictional world. The tension created in the reader’s mind is thus not primarily dynamic but static, not primarily processual but simultaneous. Rather than an emotional tension between distinct and alternating phases of reception, it is a reflective tension between surface vs. deep structure, external vs. internal reality, explicit vs. implicit text.

  A variation of this type of reader-appeal is represented by the story “Big Two-Hearted River.” Placed at the end of In Our Time, it is significantly reduced in external action and conflict. All that happens is Nick’s journey to a river in the country, his stay there overnight, and his trout fishing on the next day. At the same time, however, there are symbolic and linguistic signals in the formulated text which, in the sense of the iceberg theory, point to a constitutive dimension of the unformulated, to deeper and more problematical levels of meaning beneath the uneventful and apparently unproblematical surface of the explicit text. Examples of such signals are the interchapters with their horrifying scenes of death and violence that are placed before Part I and between the two parts like electrifying psycho-shocks; the wasteland motif of the burnt town at the beginning; the nervous control and intensity of Nick’s activities, in which every detail seems to gain disproportionate importance; his overreaction to “deeper” areas of reality, as in the “shock” he suffers when he steps into the stream to fish18 or in the characterization of the fishing of the swamp as a “tragic adventure”;19 the symbol of the swamp itself, which is an objective correlative of the unexplored depths of Nick’s psyche. Nick’s behavior thus appears as a compulsive attempt to remain on a safe, unproblematical surface of life and to avoid, for the time being, any conscious confrontation with the experiences which lie behind him, but which, as these signals show, in fact form a constituent part of his present situation. This discrepancy between the formulated and the unformulated dimensions of the text, between the manifest pastoral idyl of a man’s ritual regeneration in nature and the latent crisis of his psyche which, in his overidentification with this idyllic pattern, he tries to suppress, creates a constant tension in the reader’s mind, provoking him to reflect on those problematical, subco
nscious implications that Nick, like Jake Barnes, tries to exclude from consciousness and communication. Nick’s effort to certify and (over-) determine the reality of his experience, by clinging to simplistic rituals and sensory details, on a level of unproblematical, “natural” action produces a paradoxical result, causing instead an irritating feeling of uncertainty and indeterminacy which all the more activates the reflective skepticism of the reader. The more Nick suppresses reflection, the more the reader is forced into it. Nick’s psyche, like Jake’s, marks a central indeterminacy of the text, a “black box” of the actions in the story which, at the same time that it motivates these actions, constantly threatens to undermine the attempt at a new life. Other examples of this type of reader-appeal are Hemingway’s “static stories” such as “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” “Cat in the Rain,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “Hills Like White Elephants”—in all of which a similar effect of emotional deadlock and reflective distance is created.

  A model example of the second type of the implied reader in Hemingway is “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” but “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” or novels like A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea are also distinctively shaped in their appellative structure by this type. As has been said, the second type, in contrast to the first, is very much defined by the horizontal aspect of reception, by the dynamic process of experience inscribed into the text. The two sides of affective reader-appeal—the daydream of an imaginative fulfillment of life and the shock of witnessing the destruction of that daydream—which are fused and mutually neutralized in Type I in favor of reflection, are separated in Type II and projected into a temporal sequence of distinct and successive phases of reception. The psychodramatic potential of this tension is fully released and pushed to the extreme here, involving the reader in a fictional experience characterized by sharp changes and contrasting climaxes of his emotional participation in the text. Indeed, the characteristic pattern of Type II quite distinctly follows the model of a daydream, which is developed as an idealizing counterfantasy out of the experience of a negative reality, is—sometimes almost miraculously—fulfilled in the course of the text and is inevitably destroyed in its clash with the reality from which it has tried to emancipate itself.20