New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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Significantly, the problems that the soldier and Krebs have adjusting to life after the war center as much on women as on making the transition from a military to a civilian lifestyle. The soldier had been ready to change his life radically upon returning to America. He was going to give up both alcohol and his friends; all he wanted was to get a job and get married. He blames Luz for destroying that dream. Krebs “would have liked to have a girl” (IOT, 71), but he dreads the consequences, that is, the complications involved in close relationships. The difficulties that these two men have with women prepares us for the three non-Nick stories preceding “Cross-Country Snow,” the so-called marriage group of In Our Time. In these stories—“Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” “Cat in the Rain,” and “Out of Season”—we observe the disintegration of three marriages. And although each relationship is falling apart for its own reason, the disintegration always hinges on an awareness of the disparity between the ideal and the real.
This awareness is revealed directly in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” for both partners had kept themselves “pure” but were equally disappointed on their wedding night. The physical insufficiency of their lovemaking is more than just sexual frustration. Despite their efforts, they cannot conceive what they most desire: a child. In “Cat in the Rain” and “Out of Season,” the general cause of the couples’ discontent is more subtly conveyed, but a key phrase indicates that, once again, it comes down to unfulfilled expectations. The wife in the former story compares herself to the cat outside her hotel window when she declares, first, that “It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain” and, then, that “If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat” (IOT 93, 94; my emphasis). Like the cat in the rain, she feels shut out, unwanted, unnoticed, unloved; she and her husband do not make each other happy anymore. In “Out of Season” the husband voices a similar sentiment when he sends his wife back to the hotel with: “It’s a rotten day and we aren’t going to have any fun, anyway” (IOT, 101; my emphasis).The concentration in both stories on a lack of fun recalls Nick’s reason for breaking up with Marjorie in “The End of Something”: “It isn’t fun any more” (IOT, 34). “Isn’t love any fun?” Marjorie asks. “No,” Nick answers, and so might the couples in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” “Cat in the Rain,” and “Out of Season.”
Thus, the marriage group, “A Very Short Story,” and “Soldier’s Home” present us with a series of portraits of failed love and/or overall dissatisfaction with male-female relationships. Such a consistently unflattering picture of love calls into question the state of Nick’s own marriage. In the dropped ending to “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick says that when he married Helen he lost all his old friends “because he admitted by marrying that something was more important than the fishing” (NAS, 214). Although this sounds like a positive statement about his marriage, Nick contradicts himself when he says that he loved his fishing days “more than anything” and admits that he has nightmares about missing a fishing season: “It made him feel sick in the dream, as though he had been in jail” (NAS, 215).
Nick makes one other seemingly positive remark about marriage in this monologue when he says that he remembers the horror he once had of marriage: “It was funny. Probably it was because he had always been with older people, nonmarrying people” (NAS, 215). But even this confession does not indicate Nick’s true feelings; marriage might not be a horror, but it also might not be a piece of cake. In “Cross-Country Snow” Nick’s alter ego is similarly ambiguous. When George says—about life in general, including marriage, parenthood, responsibility—“It’s hell, isn’t it?” Nick responds, “No. Not exactly” (IOT, 111). Not exactly? Why not “Definitely not”?
In fact, the most important thing we learn about Helen may be that she’s never about. In “Cross-Country Snow” Nick and George ski the mountains of Switzerland without Helen. In “Big Two-Hearted River” Nick takes his fishing trip alone. This habitual absence of Helen combined with the attitude toward relationships revealed in Nick’s stories suggests that Nick’s marriage is one of those “other needs” which has motivated his journey to the Michigan woods in “Big Two-Hearted River.” A later Nick Adams Story, “Now I Lay Me,” shows Nick and his orderly, John, discussing the advantages of marriage. Although Nick doesn’t instantly agree with John that marriage “would fix up everything” (NAS, 134), he promises to think about it. Significantly, the patterns implied by and within In Our Time indicate that Nick has married soon after his return from Europe, but has since discovered that far from healing everything, as John guaranteed, marriage actually aggravated his pain. Nick’s feelings about Helen thus make up the darker depths of the swamp he must one day fish.15
In Our Time reveals one final other need which has possibly sent Nick to the river and which seems to be among those darker depths of his own mental swamp: the duties of fatherhood. As I have noted, Nick was greatly upset by his meeting with the pregnant woman on the road to Karagatch, and the horror of that scene is, of course, enough to explain Nick’s preoccupation with it. But, in fact, the several other references to pregnancy and children in the book indicate that this preoccupation has expanded into a generalization. The British narrator of “On the Quai at Smyrna” cannot forget the Greek women who were having babies, particularly those who refused to give up their dead babies. They were the worst, he declares (IOT, 11). Mr. and Mrs. Elliot try, without success, to have a child, even though Mrs. Elliot obviously finds sex with her husband distasteful or painful—or both. In “Cross-Country Snow” Nick assumes the German waitress is unhappy because she is pregnant but unmarried. Nowhere in In Our Time are the joys of pregnancy and young children described. Whenever mentioned, children and having babies are associated with suffering, unhappiness, an end of freedom and innocence, even death. As Jackson J. Benson puts it, “we are brought back again and again to pain, mutilation and death in connection with birth, sex, and the female.”16
A likely source of this association for Nick was his encounter with the woman in Asia Minor, but given this view, he would certainly face the prospect of fatherhood with great trepidation. “Cross-Country Snow” exhibits that fear both directly and obliquely. Nick tells George that he is glad now about Helen’s pregnancy, a distinction which points to his initial displeasure. However, the lie of that assertion is shown in his reaction to the pregnant waitress: he fails to notice her condition immediately and wonders why. The psychological answer is that to do so would mean allowing the reality of his married life to interfere with the happiness of his skiing excursion. Once again, in writing about himself, Nick reveals a desire to avoid those adult responsibilities which inhibit freedom and complicate life. To have a child means one can no longer be a child.
Neither “Big Two-Hearted River” nor its original conclusion contains any explicit evidence that Nick is or is about to become a father. Yet if we see these various references to children as representative of Nick’s feelings about fatherhood and if we assume that “Cross-Country Snow” is based in Nick’s experience, then perhaps the lack of evidence itself is important. In other words, through his silence Nick could be revealing just how painful the whole matter of children has become; he does not even trust himself to think or talk about it. Thus, his impending or actual fatherhood is the most recent need that urged Nick’s trip to the Michigan woods, even the one that may have directly motivated it. Interestingly, “Big Two-Hearted River” is immediately preceded by “My Old Man.” Although this story depicts a strong father-son relationship, the positive image is offset by the story’s conclusion with the father dead and the son feeling assaulted by life’s realities. The characters form a composite of Nick, who seems near to a spiritual death, burdened by anxieties that include his memories of war, married life, and fatherhood. He thus turns to the one great pleasure which has never failed him, the one activity he knows will allow him to escape the world that is too much with him: fishing.
This explanation of Nick’s actions in “Big Two-Hearted River” may make
him sound much like the character he writes about who shares his name: constantly running away from suffering and responsibility. And Nick definitely possesses that desire; his fiction shows that he wishes there were some kind of escape hatch, a way out, a way back to a more carefree, careless time. However, we must be careful not to confuse Nick the writer with Nick the character. And here is where approaching In Our Time as if Nick were its author begins to change our understanding of both the book and Nick Adams. In “Fathers and Sons,” a later Nick Adams story—both in terms of when it was written and when it takes place—Nick announces, “If he wrote it he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them” (NAS, 237). Although this confession is anachronistic in reference to my present study, writing often serves as catharsis. If we view Nick’s work as partly an act of exorcism, then we can assume that the Nick who has written a story is one step further on the road to health than the Nick who writes the story and two steps ahead of the Nick who is described in the story.
But we should not be overly generous in formulating this assumption, for the patterns I have found throughout In Our Time indicate that Nick also has not been able to heal himself in the space of one or two tales. In fact, what begins as an act of purging can end as an act of control, an attempt to contain the emotions that are playing havoc with one’s insides. The repetitions of loss, suffering, violence, and general unhappiness in Nick’s fiction suggest that his recent experiences have dug so deeply into his psyche that he must continually bring them out, look them in the face, and thereby convince himself that by controlling them, they are not controlling him. And even though Nick has yet to admit to others—and possibly even to himself—that he fears such things as marriage and fatherhood, his fiction reveals that at some level he recognizes these anxieties. Such awareness is the first step toward conquering his fears.
The escape that he typically shows his namesake seeking is, therefore, not a real option for Nick the writer. Nick’s fiction is his greatest effort to face life and himself. In fact, had Hemingway kept the original ending to “Big Two-Hearted River,” we would have had a much clearer picture of the artist as hero. In the last scene of this conclusion, Nick returns to camp to write a story which will describe the country like Cézanne had painted it, a story very similar to the one we have just read. Lest we underestimate the significance of that enterprise—and with Nick’s announcement that he writes because “It was really more fun than anything” (NAS, 218) it would be easy to do so—we should remember that writing is not only one of those needs from which Nick was seeking relief, but it is also an activity that will undoubtedly engage him in another need he had hoped to escape: thinking. To put this another way, in the act of writing Nick will have to fish that symbolic mental swamp, an effort which, in the final version of “Big Two-Hearted River,” he is not quite ready to make. Of course, just how honestly and fully Nick will confront what troubles him (especially those “other needs” which are so new and sensitive that he cannot even name them, as if to do so would be to admit their reality and his own limitations) is another matter and one we cannot gauge since it occurs outside the pages and time period of In Our Time. The book is a record of how Nick has been and is, not how he will be.
At this record of Nick’s recent mental history, In Our Time should thus be seen as a novel, not merely a collection of short stories. D. H. Lawrence, one of the book’s first reviewers, came close to making this assessment when he called In Our Time a “fragmentary novel,” and Young once proposed that it was “nearly a novel” about Nick.17 However, as I have argued, although Nick’s mind is fragmented, confused to pieces by his accelerated entry into adulthood, In Our Time is not at all fragmentary. It is a complete work, unified by the consciousness of Nick Adams as he attempts to come to terms through his fiction with his involvement in World War I and, more recently, with the problems of marriage and his fear of fatherhood. Furthermore, reading the book from this perspective removes our focus from Hemingway’s biographical sources, a focus which has too often caused critics to juggle the sequence of the stories in an attempt to make their chronology match the order of events in Hemingway’s life or to state simply that In Our Time lacks structural unity. To the contrary, the stories are ordered precisely to reflect the actual history and the pyschological state of Nick Adams. As F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested in 1926, In Our Time does not pretend to be about one man, but it is.18
Finally, though, we do come back to Hemingway. For while this analysis of In Our Time has separated Nick Adams’ history from Hemingway’s in ways that are important to our understanding of the book, it has also revealed that Nick’s inner life is similar to that of his creator in areas that readers have often failed to notice. First of all, although two of Hemingway’s most recent biographers, Jeffrey Meyers and Kenneth Lynn, challenge earlier conclusions about the effects of Hemingway’s participation in World War I on his psyche, there can be no doubt that at some level he was significantly affected.19 Both point out that Hemingway was obsessed by the fear of loss; as Lynn puts it, Hemingway always sank into a depression “whenever he lost anything, whether good or bad.”20 It seems possible that this obsession grew out of his experiences in the war, or at least increased after that time. Second, and just as important, Meyers and Lynn both show that Hemingway was afraid that marriage and fatherhood would change his life drastically, and for the worse. According to Meyers, “he was too emotionally immature (despite his wide experience) to accept domestic and paternal responsibility.”21 Thus we can claim for Hemingway what we have claimed for Nick, that, as Lynn argues, “Uncertain to the point of fear about himself, he was compelled to write stories in which he endeavored to cope with the disorder of his inner world by creating fictional equivalents for it.”22
Yet it is Hemingway’s initial inclination to turn over his stories to Nick that gives us our most fascinating look into his psyche. Besides the possibility that Hemingway recognized that making Nick the author of his stories would help unify In Our Time, we can also infer that by this plan he could add another layer of insulation between himself and the truths contained in his stories. Apparently the distance provided by a fictional persona was not enough room for a man whose greatest fiction was rapidly becoming the lies he passed off to friends, relatives, critics, and himself as the truth about his life.23 Hence, in his original conclusion to “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway was engaging Nick Adams in the new capacity of author to run interference for him, to block out what he had disclosed about himself to himself (and others) in the writing of his fiction.
However, despite Hemingway’s desire, which increased as he got older, to deny that he was troubled, immature, or anything less than a courageous man, In Our Time suggests—as it does for Nick—that finally he could not deceive himself. Norman Mailer once said that “It may even be that the final judgment on [Hemingway’s] work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself.”24 Hemingway’s public image still persists as that of a brave man constantly proving himself in battles with both men and animals. In Our Time reveals, through the unifying consciousness of Nick Adams, a more substantial kind of bravery, for it indicates that the greatest opponent he wrestled with was himself.
Semiotic Analysis
Decoding Papa: “A Very Short Story” As Work and Text
Robert Scholes
The semiotic study of a literary text is not wholly unlike traditional interpretation or rhetorical analysis, nor is it meant to replace these other modes of response to literary works. But the semiotic critic situates the text somewhat differently, privileges different dimensions of the text, and uses a critical methodology adapted to the semiotic enterprise. Most interpretive methods privilege the “meaning” of the text. Hermeneutic critics seek authorial or intentional meaning; the New Critics seek the ambiguities of “tex
tual” meaning; the “reader response” critics allow readers to make meaning. With respect to meaning the semiotic critic is situated differently. Such a critic looks for the generic or discursive structures that enable and constrain meaning.
Under semiotic inspection neither the author nor the reader is free to make meaning. Regardless of their lives as individuals, as author and reader they are traversed by codes that enable their communicative adventures at the cost of setting limits to the messages they can exchange. A literary text, then, is not simply a set of words, but (as Roland Barthes demonstrated in S/Z, though not necessarily in just that way) a network of codes that enables the marks on the page to be read as a text of a particular sort.
In decoding narrative texts, the semiotic method is based on two simple but powerful analytical tools: the distinction between story and discourse on the one hand and that between text and events on the other. The distinction between story and discourse is grounded in a linguistic observation by Emile Benveniste to the effect that some languages (notably French and Greek) have a special tense of the verb used for the narration of past events. (See “The Correlations of Tense in the French Verb,” chapter 19 of Problems in General Linguistics. See also Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse.) This tense, the aorist or passé simple, emphasizes the relationship between the utterance and the situation the utterance refers to, between the narration and the events narrated. This is par excellence the mode of written transcriptions of events: histoire or “story.” Benveniste contrasts this with the mode of discours or “discourse,” in which the present contact between speaker and listener is emphasized. Discourse is rhetorical and related to oral persuasion. Story is referential and related to written documentation. Discourse is now; story is then. Story speaks of he and she; discourse is a matter of you and me, I and thou.