The story quite literally leaves its protagonist wounded in his sex by contact with a woman. From the bed in Padua to the back seat in Lincoln Park our hero is carried from wound to wound. We never hear the accents of his voice or the intonations of his prose. We do not have to. The text speaks for him. Its voice is his. And its reticence is his as well. In this connection we should look once again at a passage in the second paragraph: “they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the anaesthetic holding tight on to himself so he would not. . . .” Up to this point in the second sentence we are not aware that there has been a change of topic from that which closed the earlier sentence. The language of oral retentiveness coincides neatly with that of anal retentiveness. Logorrhea and diarrhea are equally embarrassing. Enemas are enemies and to “blab about anything during the silly, talky time” (to finish the sentence) would be as bad as to discharge matter freely from the opposite end of the alimentary canal. As Hemingway put it on another occasion: “If you talk about it, you lose it.”
The point of this discussion is that the text reveals the principle behind its reticent prose style through an impartial and equal distress at the idea of excessive discharge of either verbal or fecal matter. It is an anal retentive style, then, in a surprisingly literal way. And through this style the text presents us with a lesson about women. Luz first gives our retentive hero a literal enema and then she metaphorically emasculates him by making him renounce alcohol, friends, and all the pleasures of life. The salesgirl from the loop merely administers the literal coup de grace to his already figuratively damaged sexuality.
Having come this far with a semiotic analysis, we can begin to distinguish it more precisely from New Critical exegesis. In doing so we must begin by admitting that the two approaches share a certain number of interpretive gestures. We must also recognize that no two semiotic analyses or New Critical exegeses are likely to be identical. The major differences in the two critical approaches can be traced to their different conceptions of the object of study: for New Criticism, the work; for semiotics, the text. As a work, “A Very Short Story” must be seen as complete, unified, shaped into an aesthetic object, a verbal icon. The pedagogical implications of this are important.
The student interpreting “A Very Short Story” as a “work” is put into an interesting position. Like many of Hemingway’s early stories, this one presents a male character favorably and a female unfavorably. In fact, it strongly implies favorable things about masculinity and unfavorable things about feminity. It does this, as our semiotic analysis has shown, by mapping certain traits on to a value structure. The good, loyal, reticent male character is supported by the discourse, through its covert first-person perspective and the complicity of its style with those values. The bad, treacherous, talkative female is cast out. Even the carefully established point of view is violated in the last paragraph so that the narrator can track Luz through eternity and assure us that she never married her major “in the spring, or any other time.” But for the most part Hemingway’s control over his text is so great that the anger at the root of the story is transformed into what we may take as the cool, lapidary prose of the pure, impersonal artist.
And there definitely is an anger behind this story, to which we shall soon turn our attention. For the moment we must follow a bit further the situation of the student faced with this story in the form of a “work” to be interpreted. The concept of “the student” is one of those transcendental abstractions that we accept for convenience’s sake and often come to regret. We can begin to break it down by reminding ourselves that students come in at least two genders. Actual students read this story in different ways. Most male students sympathize with the protagonist and are very critical of Luz—as, indeed, the discourse asks them to be. Many female students try to read the story as sympathetic to Luz, blaming events on the “weakness” of the young man or the state of the world. This is a possible interpretation, but it is not well supported by the text. Thus the female student must either “misread” the work (that is, she must offer the more weakly supported of two interpretations) or accept one more blow to her self-esteem as a woman. Faced with this story in a competitive classroom, women are put at a disadvantage. They are, in fact, in a double bind.
By New Critical standards the narrator is impersonal and reliable. The words on the page are all we have, and they tell us of a garrulous, faithless woman who was unworthy of the love of a loyal young man. But semiotic analysis has already suggested alternatives to this view. Seen as a text that presents a diegesis, this story is far from complete. There are gaps in the diegesis, reticences in the text, and highly manipulative use of covert first-person narrative. There are signs of anger and vengefulness in the text, too, that suggest not an omniscient impersonal author but a partial, flawed human being—like the rest of us—behind the words on the page.
As a text, this story refers to other texts: to the fairy tale it is so definitely not, to other stories of betrayal (like Troilus and Criseyde, in which the Greek Diomedes plays the part of the Italian major), and to the other stories that surrounded it in Hemingway’s In Our Time. But it also must be seen as a text among a particular set of other texts by Hemingway that present very similar diegetic material. These are, in chronological order, a manuscript called “Personal” (Young and Mann, The Hemingway Manuscripts [University Park, Penn., 1969], 11C), “chapter 10” in in our time (Paris, 1924), and various drafts of a novel that was finally published as A Farewell to Arms in 1929. All of these texts generate diegesis centered on a nurse in an Italian hospital. From Hemingway’s letters and various other texts, including reports of interviews with the principals, yet another diegesis can be generated. In this one a nineteen-year-old American Red Cross worker named Ernest Hemingway meets a Red Cross nurse named Agnes Hannah von Kurowsky, a twenty-six-year-old American woman, at a hospital in Milan, and falls in love with her. She calls him Kid and he calls her Mrs. Kid. When she volunteers for service in Florence during an influenza outbreak, he writes her many letters. (“He wrote to her daily, sometimes twice a day. She answered as often as her duties would allow.” Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway [New York, 1980], 71.) They continue to correspond when she moves to Treviso near Padua to help out during another epidemic. He travels around in Italy, but his wounds prevent him from returning to the front. He sees Agnes a few more times before leaving Italy for the States.
He describes one of these visits in a letter to his friend, Bill Smith:
But listen what kind of a girl I have: Lately I’ve been hitting it up—about 18 martinis a day and 4 days ago I left the hospital and hopped camions 200 miles up to the Front A.W.O.L. to visit some pals. Ossifers in the R.G. A. British outside of Padova. Their batteries are en repose. They gave me a wonderful time and we used the staff car and I rode to the hounds on the Colonels charger. Leg and all.
But Bill to continue. We went in the staff car up to TREVISO where the missus [Agnes von Kurowsky] is in a Field Hospital. She had heard about my hitting the alcohol and did she lecture me? She did not.
She said, “Kid we’re going to be partners. So if you are going to drink I am too. Just the same amount.” And she’d gotten some damn whiskey and poured some of the raw stuff out and she’d never had a drink of anything before except wine and I know what she thinks of booze. And William that brought me up shortly. Bill this is some girl and I thank God I got crucked so I met her. Damn it I really honestly can’t see what the devil she can see in the brutal Stein but by some very lucky astigmatism she loves me Bill. So I’m going to hit the States and start working for the Firm. Ag says we can have a wonderful time being poor together and having been poor alone for some years and always more or less happy I think it can be managed.
So now all I have to do is hit the minimum living wage for two and lay up enough for six weeks or so up North and call on you for service as a best man. Why man I’ve only got about 50 more years to live and I don’t want to waste any of them and every minute that I
’m away from that Kid is wasted. (Carlos Baker, ed., Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters 1917–1961, New York, 1981, 20)
When Ernest leaves Italy from Genoa in January 1919, the romance is still sexually unconsummated (according to Agnes von Kurowsky herself and the best judgment of Michael Reynolds, who reports this in Hemingway’s First War [Princeton, 1976] and Carlos Baker, who discusses these events in Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story [New York, 1969].) Hemingway in fact goes home believing that when he gets established in a job that will support two people, Agnes will return and marry him. What she believed at that time cannot be determined.
At home Ernest saw many of his friends and partied a good deal. After one of these parties in his parents’ home the unconscious bodies of two friends were stumbled over by Ernest and his older sister as they closed up the house. They agreed that the “Italian celebrations had gone too far.” He still did not have a regular job when a letter from Agnes arrived in March 1919. This is the way his sister Marcelline describes the event:
For days Ernie had been watching the mails. He was irritable and on edge with the waiting. Then the letter came. After he read it he went to bed and was actually ill. We didn’t know what was the matter with Ernie at first. He did not respond to medical treatment, and he ran a temperature. Dad was worried about him. I went up to Ernie’s room to see if I could be of any help to him. Ernie thrust the letter toward me.
“Read it,” he said from the depths of his grief. “No. I’ll tell you.” Then he turned to the wall. He was physically sick for several days but he did not mention the letter again.
Ag, Ernie told me, was not coming to America. She was going to marry an Italian major instead.
In time Ernest felt better. He got out among his friends again. (Marcelline Hemingway, At the Hemingways, Boston, 1962, 188)
By the end of April Ernest had recovered sufficiently to jest about his situation in a letter to an old Red Cross buddy: “I am a free man! That includes them all up to and including Agnes. My Gawd man you didn’t think I was going to marry and settle down did you?” (Baker, Selected Letters, 24). But before that he had written to another nurse from Italy, Elsie MacDonald, “telling her the news and adding that when Agnes disembarked in New York on her way home, he hoped that she would stumble on the dock and knock out all her front teeth” (Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 81).
In June he received another letter from Agnes, in which she told him that her Italian lieutenant’s (his actual rank) aristocratic family had forbidden the marriage, so she would be coming home unmarried after all. Ernest did not answer this letter but wrote a buddy from the ambulance unit about it:
Had a very sad letter from Ag from Rome yesterday. She has fallen out with her Major. She is in a hell of a way mentally and says I should feel revenged for what she did to me. Poor damned kid. I’m sorry as hell for her. But there’s nothing I can do. I loved her once and then she gypped me. And I don’t blame her. But I set out to cauterize out her memory and I burnt it out with a course of booze and other women and now it’s gone. (Baker, Selected Letters, 25)
This diegesis we are constructing from various texts is not yet finished. It goes on for some time. After Ernest marries a woman about the same age as Agnes and moves to Paris, living mostly off her income, he writes a friendly letter to Agnes and receives a friendly response in December 1922: “You know there has always been a little bitterness over the way our comradeship ended. . . . Anyhow I always knew that it would turn out right in the end, and that you would realize it was the best way, as I’m positive you must believe, now that you have Hadley” (Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 136). A few months later he writes a sketch for a collection of vignettes that will be published in 1924 as in our time. Sometime before the final version is delivered to the Three Mountains Press in Paris (the date of composition is not known), he had begun a draft called “Personal.” A pencil copy exists among the Hemingway papers. In Philip Young and Charles Mann’s catalog of the manuscripts it is described as beginning with the words “One hot evening in Milan they carried me up onto the roof” (The Hemingway Manuscripts, item 11C). For the published volume this sketch was rewritten in the third person. It appeared as “chapter 10” in in our time, and it was virtually identical to what we know as “A Very Short Story,” but the nurse is called “Ag” instead of Luz in this version, and the hospital is located in Milan instead of Padua. In short this text gives us a diegesis closer to the one we can construct for Ernest Hemingway himself from the letters and other documents than does the later version. When the American publication of In Our Time was arranged, the little vignettes of the original in our time were used to separate the longer stories in the new volume and two of the original set were promoted to the status of stories. In this way the tenth vignette became “A Very Short Story,” and Ag became Luz, Milan became Padua, and The Fair became a Loop department store. The changes were made, Hemingway said, to avoid possible libel suits: “Ag is libelous, short for Agnes,” he wrote to Maxwell Perkins (discussing the 1938 publication of his collected stories—see Baker, Selected Letters, 469).
Brooding still over this episode, Hemingway began a novel called “Along With Youth,” in which Nick Adams, the hero, was to be followed in his adventures as an ambulance driver “to a love affair with a nurse named Agnes” (Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 191). This manuscript stopped at page 27, with Nick still on a troop transport headed for Europe. But Hemingway continued to brood over this episode of his youth until he finally transformed Agnes into Catherine Barkley and laid her to rest in A Farewell to Arms.
Many texts, many diegeses. What can we say about them? First of all, it is clear that we are not dealing with an impersonal artist constructing aesthetic wholes here, but with a dogged human being trying to produce texts that will pass as works, drawing upon one of the most painful events of his life for his material. As interpreters what are we to make of the shift from Milan to Padua for the location of our diegesis, since nothing else is changed? Every Italian city has a duomo. The name Padua or Milan is there to generate with its apparent specificity “the effect of the real” as Roland Barthes calls it, though the precise city is not important. The fictional diegesis has a tidiness, of course, that actuality rarely assumes and a sexuality that extends well beyond the events from which it derives. The need to add carnality to an affair that really was a “boy and girl” romance is especially notable now. Those words of Luz about the “boy and girl affair” are absurd when written by someone who had waited in bed while her crippled lover did her hospital work for her. As the words of Agnes von Kurowsky—which they may or may not actually be—they could be simply accurate.
We can also note that in life the Kid did not go back to the front; she did, in effect, by volunteering to help with an epidemic. And he wrote her at least as often as she wrote him. At one point five of his letters reached her in the same batch (Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 71). The gonorrhea, of course, which shocked Ernest’s father so deeply that he mailed his copies of in our time back to the publisher, saying he “would not tolerate such filth in his house” (At the Hemingways, 219), was apparently an invention. About “friend or enema” we can only speculate.
The text produced by Hemingway responds to a double motivation. It wants to be art, to be a work that is complete in itself. But it also wants to rewrite life, to make its surrogate protagonist more triumphant as a lover, more active as a soldier, and more deeply victimized as a man than was the author himself.
Where does this leave the critic, the teacher, the student of literary texts? I hope it leaves them suspicious and flexible. I chose this Hemingway text for discussion because it is a very short story and it had interested me since I first read it as an undergraduate. I began to study it not knowing what I would find. I did the analysis first, then the scholarship. My work is not done. My own text is incomplete. So be it. My purpose, too, is perhaps unachieved, but lest it be misinterpreted as well, let me restate it here.
I do not wish to suggest that we
jettison the critical ingenuity we have learned from the New Critics. Certainly I will not give up my own. But I do wish to suggest that we approach fictions as texts traversed by codes rather than as formal artifacts. A semiotic approach, it seems to me, allows critic, teacher, student, and reader more scope for thought, more freedom and more responsibility, than a merely exegetical one. This Hemingway text is neither the greatest story ever told nor a horrible example. It is, in miniature, a model of all fictions—better than the man who made it because he worked hard to make it that way, but still flawed, still a communication to be tested and weighed, not an icon to be worshiped. For all forms of idolatry, whether of gods, men, or literary works, teach us finally the worst of all lessons: to bend the knee and bow the head, when what we must do instead is examine everything before us freely and fearlessly, so as to produce with our own critical labor things better than ourselves.
Lacanian Reading
Hemingway’s “After the Storm”: A Lacanian Reading
Ben Stoltzfus
“After the Storm” is ostensibly a “true story” told to Ernest Hemingway in 1928 by Eddie “Bra” Saunders, a Key West charter-boat captain, about a conch-fisherman’s account of the sinking off the Florida Keys, in the late summer of 1919, of a Spanish steamer, the Valbanera. The genesis of the story has been fully documented by Susan Beegel in her book Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples, in a chapter entitled “Just Skillful Reporting? Fact and Fiction in ‘After the Storm’” (69–88). For the most part, however, commentators have paid little attention to the story, and there are no Freudian or Lacanian readings of it.
New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Page 7
