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Hemingway's Extended Vision: The Old Man and The Sea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Bickford Sylvester
Bickford Sylvester*
Affiliation:
California State College, Hayward
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Extract

Cleanth Brooks wrote recently that the early story, “Fifty Grand,” “presents Hemingway's basic theme quite as well as The Old Man and the Sea.” “Nor do I think,” he continued, “that Hemingway in his most recent story now finds the world any more meaningful than he once found it.” For once Mr. Brooks was following rather than initiating opinion. Ever since The Old Man and the Sea was published, critics have admitted that in its effect upon the reader the book is somehow different from Hemingway's earlier work. Those who like the difference and those who do not have tried to account for it in many ways, most of them familiar to readers of the early reviews and of the surprisingly few later readings of the story. But to a man commentators have assumed that whatever the story's new impact—whatever the nature of that affirmative power most readers have felt—it reflects no essential change in Hemingway's view of an inscrutable natural order in which, ultimately, man can play no part. I want to suggest, on the contrary, that The Old Man and the Sea reveals Hemingway's successful achievement at last of a coherent metaphysical scheme—of a philosophical naturalism which, although largely mechanistic in principle, embraces the realm of human affairs and gives transcendent meaning to the harsh inevitabilities Hemingway has always insisted upon recording.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , March 1966 , pp. 130 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966

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References

1 The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren (New Haven, 1963), p. 14.

2 It is only fair to say that Leo Gurko has provocatively referred to the world of the story as “no longer a bleak trap ... but a meaningful integrated structure”: “The Old Man and the Sea,” CE, xvii (October 1955), 14. Yet this suggestive remark is unfortunately so undeveloped as to be enigmatic, and I am reluctant to classify it.

3 “The Old Man and the Sea: Hemingway's Tragic Vision of Man,” AL, xxxi (January 1960), 446–455. Further references are included in my text.

4 “Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea,” CE, xxiv (December 1962), 188–192. Falling prey to the same logic, Philip Toynbee grows shrill as he reviews comment in Hemingway and His Critics, ed. Carlos Baker (New York, 1961): The Old Man and the Sea “is meretricious from beginning to end, ... the archaic false simplicities of its style are insufferable, ... the sentimentality is flagrant and outrageous and ... the myth is tediously enforced.” See Encounter, xvii (October 1961), 87. Dwight Macdonald agrees in “Ernest Hemingway,” Encounter, xviii (January 1962), 121: The Old Man and The Sea is simply “The Undefeated,” “transposed from a spare, austere style into a slack, fake-biblical style which retains the mannerisms and omits the virtues” of the earlier work.

5 In Hemingway and His Critics, pp. 259–268, and Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels (New York, 1962), pp. 150–155.

6 Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (New York, 1952), p. 121. Further references will be included in my text accompanied by the designation OMAS.

7 Gurko, p. 12.

8 “Hemingway's Ambiguity: Symbolism and Irony,” AL, xxvii (March 1956), 3.

9 Death in the Afternoon (New York, 1932), p. 148.

10 See especially Robert Gorham Davis' review in The New York Times Book Review, 7 September 1952, p. 1, and J. Donald Adams, “Speaking of Books,” The New York Times Book Review, 21 September 1952, p. 2.

11 The carefully reported navigational details of the marlin's progress, scrupulously distinguishing as they do between the direction in which he is facing and the direction in which he is actually moving at key points in his run, reveal that the current, moving at a speed greater than his and at a forty-five degree angle to his initial heading, gradually peels him off to the east (OMAS, pp. 49, 50–51, 58, 74, 93, and 94). His heading in relation to the current is thus presented as a gauge of his vitality. And the fact that he comes up to die when he is at last facing exactly in the direction of the flow suggests that for him congruence with nature is tantamount to death, just as opposition to her equals life.

12 Santiago has always had a significant affinity for the evening sun: “It has more force in the evening too. But in the morning it is painful” (OMAS, p. 36). Attuned to the strenuous purity of experience objectified by the intense evening light, he finds the unconcentrated and diffuse morning light alien and distasteful.

13 Santiago remarks, “Once I could see quite well in the dark. Not in the absolute dark. But almost as a cat sees” (OMAS, p. 74). This reference to relative darkness reverberates in the “blackness,” the diminution of corporeal sight, that later overcomes Santiago as he kills the marlin, yet permits the glimmer of spiritual insight which (as I shall consider presently) is his reward for having immersed himself in opposition to nature. Such insight is, of course, beyond the “younger fishermen,” who never extend themselves against the sea. It is their conventional vision, in which the sea as mother should reward an exploitative relationship based upon passive cooperation with her moods and currents, that leads them to deny her maternity—to speak of her as masculine—because she disappoints their expectations (OMAS, pp. 32–33).

14 “Hemingway Achieves the Fifth Dimension,” PMLA, lxix (September 1954), 717. Cf. two subsequent analyses of Hemingway's use of time: Keiichi Harada, “The Marlin and the Shark: A Note on The Old Man and the Sea,” in Hemingway and his Critics, pp. 274–276, and Earl Rovit, Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1963), pp. 130–146 esp.

15 For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York, 1940), p. 159. Further references will be included in my text accompanied by the designation FWBT.

16 Santiago's wonder and his admiration for his victim echo especially Hemingway's description of his response to the kudo he has killed in the climactic scene of Green Hills of Africa (New York, 1935): cf. “I stooped over and touched [the kudo] to try to believe it” (p. 231), and Santiago's “I want ... to touch and to feel him ... he could not believe his size ... he could not believe it” (OMAS, pp. 105–106, 109). Cf. also Hemingway's initial refusal to watch as his quarry is skinned (Green Hills of Africa, p. 235), and Santiago's reluctance to look at his mutilated catch (OMAS, p. 121).

The matador motif in the story has been discussed, in contexts different from mine, by Melvin Backman, “Hemingway: The Matador and the Crucified,” MFS, i (August 1955), 2–11, Joseph Waldmeir, “Confiteor Hominem: Ernest Hemingway's Religion of Man,” PMASAL, xlii (1957), 354–355, and Robert O. Stephens, “Hemingway's Old Man and the Iceberg,” MFS, vii (Winter 1962), 301–302. Backman (p. 10) calls attention to some similarities between the moment of the marlin's death and that of the bull's, but there are several specific details he overlooks. The calm deliberateness of both man and fish gives the entire conclusion of the struggle a ritualistic quality; Santiago's foreknowledge and premeditation of his every act, especially once the fish starts to circle, make his execution of the last stage of the combat as stylized and inevitable as that of the faena. The fish has been guided from his original position one-hundred fathoms away through progressively tighter circles until he is made to pass close by the old man several times, much as the bull is drawn in by the matador during the final series of passes (see Stephens, p. 302). As the two figures are at last united, the man directs his weapon behind the great chest fin that rises “into the air to the altitude of the old man's chest” (OMAS, p. 103). At the crucial moment, then, each reaches for the other's heart, as do the matador and the bull—the one with the sword and the other with the menacing horn. And the description of the death-thrust itself (when in accord with the story's theme of complete extension Santiago can touch the marlin's heart—achieve a union of love—only by pushing a second time on the shaft [OMAS, p. 105]) verbally echoes a celebrated passage in Death in the Afternoon. Cf. “He felt the iron go in and he leaned on it and drove it further and then pushed all his weight after it” (OMAS, pp. 103–104), and “The beauty of the moment of killing is that flash when ... the sword goes all the way in, the man leaning after it” (Death in the Afternoon, p. 247).

17 Cf. Theodore Bardacke, “Hemingway's Women,” in Ernest Hemingway, The Man and His Work, ed. J. M. McCaffery (Cleveland, 1950), p. 350: the love between Jordan and Maria is “of the social conflict rather than in opposition to it.”

18 The role of procreative love would seem to be both threatened and threatening, for example. This is an implication, not only of the present study, but of Verne H. Bovie's searching analysis of the male and female principles in Hemingway's work. See “The Evolution of a Myth: A Study of the Major Symbols in the Works of Ernest Hemingway,” unpubl. diss. (Pennsylvania, 1955), Ch. viii esp.

19 It is perhaps worth remembering also that while Christ did not die at noon, His ordeal began then, as does the marlin's, and that the observers of His death also had a strange vision.

20 See also OMAS, p. 71: Santiago is “comfortable but suffering” as he rides out the last night of the chase. Further emphasis upon the ultimate harmony implicit in intense suffering is subtly embodied in minor statements of the Calvary motif. “Rest gently now against the wood,” Santiago tells himself as he huddles in the bow (OMAS, p. 73, italics mine); and the great Negro's hand is described as having been forced down until it “rested on the wood” (OMAS, p. 77). In the context of this story, of course, Christ is seen to have been comfortable in His agony. Cf. Backman, pp. 10–11.

21 We notice here that the champion shark also “would not accept” his death, and plowed over the water after being fatally stabbed (OMAS, p. 113).

22 Ernest Hemingway, pp. 89–90.

23 Ibid., p. 88.

24 Ibid., p. 90.

25 P. 159.

26 Although restrictive, such a conception of human uniqueness adequately accounts, I think, for the provisional title “The Dignity of Man,” which Carlos Baker reports Hemingway to have considered for the story. See Baker's introduction in the collection, Three Novels (New York, 1962), p. vii. Nor should we overlook Hemingway's probable awareness of the implication that man is most dignified when he accepts and exploits in himself those traits most universal in nature.

27 For a recent discussion of the humanists' reservations about Hemingway see John A. Yunck, “The Natural History of a Dead Quarrel: Hemingway and the Humanists,” SAQ, lxii (Winter 1963), 29–42.

28 “The Dangerous Summer,” Part i, Life, 5 September 1960, p. 94.

29 Ibid., p. 86 [italics mine].

30 Ibid.

31 For example, the following remark by J. Novicow is especially relevant to the synthesis I have attributed to Hemingway: “The apologists of war are quite right in this, that struggle is life. Struggle is the action of the environment upon the organism and the reaction of the organism upon the environment, therefore a perpetual combat. ... Without struggle and antagonisms societies would indeed fall into a state of somnolency, of most dangerous lethargy.” See War and its Alleged Benefits, trans. T. Seltzer (New York, 1911), pp. 102–103, and quoted by Pitirim A. Sorokin in his Contemporary Sociological Theories (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1964), pp. 315–316. Novicow specifically departs from the quintessential vision of The Old Man and the Sea, however, when he adds: “Besides the physiological struggle, humanity has economic, political, and intellectual struggles, which do not exist among animals. It may even be stated that the physiological struggle, the dominant form in the animal kingdom, has ended among men, since they no longer eat one another” (p. 103). For recent and variant views of the psychological and sociological significance of struggle see Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston, 1955), and Norman 0. Brown, Life Against Death (Middletown, Conn., 1959).

32 Weeks, p. 192.

33 Perhaps, indeed, in suggesting that Hemingway's essential method is a restrained, realistic exploitation of irony (rather than the free use of symbolism Carlos Baker finds), Mr. Halliday has confused matters by opposing symbolism and irony (Halliday, p. 22). I have assumed that it is paradox and irony which are appropriately opposed devices, differing in the direction of their operation—paradox stressing an unexpected unity between things conventionally considered different (as I have shown in discussing The Old Man and the Sea), and irony emphasizing unexpected differences between things conventionally considered together (as in Hemingway's earlier work). Symbolism, on the other hand, merely has to do with representation, I should think, and depending upon its use can emphasize either distinction or identification, either division or unity. For other objections to Halliday's approach see Bern Oldsey, “The Snows of Ernest Hemingway,” WSCL, iv (Spring-Summer 1963), 195–198 esp. The issue is a significant one, as Philip Young has remarked in an evaluation of recent Hemingway criticism: “Our Hemingway Man,” KR, xxvi (Autumn 1964), 695.

34 The most forthright recent assertions of Hemingway's intellectual emptiness are those of Toynbee and Macdonald: Hemingway “had no extractable views on man's nature and destiny which bear a moment's scrutiny” (Toynbee, p. 87); “his one great talent” was for “aestheticism unsupported by thought or feeling” (Macdonald, p. 121). For succinct arguments supplementing the evidence I have presented against the validity of this persistent critical assumption see Baker's introduction to Hemingway and His Critics, pp. 14–18, and Rovit, pp. 165–173.