New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  The coda’s ending is neater and more direct than the published ending, yet it has its own poetic quality, and it does nudge the reader to an interpretation of the story he is left to infer with more difficulty from the doctor’s “‘Hold him very tight.’” Its last four sentences are lyrical with repetition and call individuals like Mungo Park and Bishop Stanley, who saw divinity in nature, severely to account: “Ah, Mungo Park, you should have seen the dead. You should have seen them, Bishop. All of you naturalists should have seen the dead. You should have seen them.” It echoes the words of the doctor, his eyes red and swollen with tear gas: “‘What about these eyes?’ He pointed the forceps at them. ‘How would you like these?’” (DIA, 144). And as it echoes the doctor, the coda’s lines express the overall purpose of “A Natural History of the Dead"—to give the reader Hemingway’s scorched and scorching vision. It asks the reader to look realistically at war and death and to abandon all romantic notions of them. It figuratively flings a saucer of iodine into the eyes of its readers; it gives them an agonizing vision of nothing; it assaults their placid moral assumptions.

  By contrast, the published ending defies closure. The doctor’s “‘Hold him tight. He is in much pain. Hold him very tight’” opens the story by refusing to interpret it. The reader is left to speculate about the physical and mental anguish afflicting the lieutenant, about the doctor’s motives for blinding him, about this story’s relationship to the satiric exposition that preceded it.56 The published ending relies on the “theory of omission”: Hemingway assumes (and assumes safely) that he has written his tale truly enough to give his readers a feeling for these things as truly as if he had stated them.

  The coda of “A Natural History of the Dead” exemplifies some of Hemingway’s characteristic traits and thematic interests, but it could have been omitted for one, several, or all of a number of reasons. In some places it is repetitive, anticlimactic, overly digressive, and even embarrassingly narcissistic. The opening sentence, with its many repetitions, is a clumsy and monotonous patch job. To return, as the coda returns to satirical exposition from fiction, is to treat the story of the dying soldier as a digression from the main purpose of “A Natural History of the Dead,” rather than the final, and most climactic, expression of that purpose. To return to satirical exposition only to ponder the already pondered indignities of sex and death, and then to break again into narrative, is simply disruptive. To dwell, particularly in the first person, on the horrors and unresolved conflicts of one’s youth is at least self-indulgent. Finally, to end with a “the wheel has come full circle” conclusion that interprets the story for the reader is to destroy the story’s frightening and resonant ambiguities.

  That Hemingway omitted the coda is doubtless a tribute to his literary judgment and self-discipline. With his “theory of omission,” Hemingway was too shrewd a writer to spoil a story’s drama by revealing the backstage machinery of personal experience that generated the fiction. Yet finally, the coda’s worth lies precisely in the glimpse it gives of its author’s life. “Late on a July afternoon in the summer of 1918,” Ernest Hemingway was nineteen years old and just days away from his wounding. As Philip Young has demonstrated, the trauma of that wounding is responsible certainly for the content, and perhaps for the very existence, of Hemingway’s fiction.57

  The coda, which shows the ground being paved for the enormity of Hemingway’s trauma, reinforces Young’s view. Working in the battlefields of the Piave, the adolescent Hemingway, still physically unscarred, observed the dying and the dead and learned that dying in war, however heroic, could also be agonizing; that death for one’s country, however dulce et decorum, was also pointless. He learned too that death was final, that decay was unavoidable, loathsome, and ignominious. In this little sequence on the Piave, the reader sees young Hemingway’s preparation for the wounding that exploded him into manhood, if not into maturity. Life in the ambulance corps was rubbing his young nose in death’s most gruesome realities, stripping him of childish beliefs. When an Austrian Minenwerfer brought him suddenly and horribly to an adult recognition of his own mortality, his head had already been filled with Bosch-like images of death, his psyche already emptied of the patriotic and religious faith that might have prevented those images from permanently occupying his imagination.

  In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Sigmund Freud seeks an explanation for the terrifying and recurrent battle dreams of veterans and finds one in an observation of children at play:

  the unpleasurable nature of an experience does not always unsuit it for play. If the doctor looks down a child’s throat or carries out some small operation on him, we may be sure that these frightening experiences will be the subject of the next game; but we must not in that connection overlook the fact that there is a yield of pleasure from another source. As the child passes over from the passivity of the experience, to the activity of the game, he hands on the disagreeable experience to one of his playmates and in this way revenges himself on a substitute.58

  Freud goes on to argue that children do this because through imaginative repetition of a traumatic experience “they can master a powerful impression far more thoroughly than they could by merely experiencing it passively,” and he adds that the recurring nightmares of soldiers may serve a similar function.59 Freud further draws an analogy between such play and “the artistic imitation carried out by adults,” which, when the art is tragedy, does not spare the audience “the most painful experiences.”60 Like the child assuming the role of doctor and “operating” on a playmate, the tragic artist becomes the controlling agent of trauma, rather than its passive victim.

  Certainly “A Natural History of the Dead,” which Hemingway confessed was designed “to give calculated and . . . necessary shock” and “to make the person reading feel it has happened to them” is tragic art springing from the impulse Freud describes—an author’s desire to inflict his own “most painful experiences” on an audience.61 Read in the light of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the discarded coda reveals the origin of the story’s cruelly graphic author in the innocent and soon-to-be-wounded Lieutenant Hemingway, revulsed by the sights and smells of the battlefield and terrified by the absence at the heart of the universe they imply.

  In addition, the authorial experience exposed in the coda is clearly the source of the published story’s artist fable. The doctor-artist of “A Natural History of the Dead” scorches the eyes of the hysterical lieutenant not only as painfully as his own have been scorched, but also as remorselessly as the Hemingway-artist of “A Natural History of the Dead” masters his own horrifying experience of war by inflicting it on his readers. Knowledge of the coda helps readers to locate both the doctor’s and Hemingway’s half-sadistic creative impulse in the fictive lieutenant’s (and Lieutenant Hemingway’s) terror of death’s emptiness.

  By omitting the coda to “A Natural History of the Dead,” Hemingway rendered the short story a more compelling fiction and disguised its autobiographical sources. Yet the preservation of the discarded four pages allows readers to penetrate beneath the iceberg of “A Natural History of the Dead” and to see the submerged experience that gives the published story the authentic ring of horror.

  Reception Theory

  Reflection vs. Daydream: Two Types of the Implied Reader in Hemingway’s Fiction

  Hubert Zapf

  The role of the reader in Hemingway’s works had attracted the attention of critics even before the rise of modern reception theory made such attention part of a more or less established methodology of literary scholarship. The strange emotional intensity of his fiction vis-à-vis the objective, decidedly nonemotional quality of his style pointed to a paradoxical tension in his writing which could be resolved only by interpolating what was in effect the dimension of an “implied reader” in the texts, whose “involuntary subjective response” was recognized as an essential part of the author’s literary technique.1 The most conspicuous elements of this technique were the use of emotional und
erstatement; the extreme reduction of language, style, and fictional world; and the deliberate strategy of leaving out relevant information, that is, of providing blanks in the textual surface that have an appellative function, calling upon the reader’s activity to supply the missing context.2 Hemingway himself described his technique metaphorically in the famous comparison of his writing with the movement of an iceberg, of which only the smallest part is visible on the surface.3 Beneath the delusively factual surface of realistic description and objective report there was recognized, especially after the reconsideration of Hemingway as a symbolist and even expressionist writer, a deep structure of potential significance which required the intense imaginative participation of the reader in the constitution of the text.4 This deep structure presented, in the language of reception theory, an implicit dimension of indeterminacy which allowed for a great variety of symbolic, ironic, emotional, or reflective realizations of the text.

  However, the iceberg metaphor and similar concepts for describing the specific mode of communication between text and reader in Hemingway designate only one aspect of the implied reader in his fiction. This aspect could be called “vertical,” as it considers the texts primarily from the vertical tension expressed in the spatial metaphor of surface vs. depth. The other equally important aspect is the “horizontal” aspect of the text as a temporal process in which the expectations of the reader are built up, modified, fulfilled, or disappointed in successive steps in the course of the text. Little attention has been paid in criticism to the psychodynamic structure of this process, although it is highly operative in producing the strong emotional effect that Hemingway’s works, perhaps because of their carefully controlled surface realism, communicate to the reader.

  These two aspects of reception (the vertical aspect of the implied reader as defined by the indeterminacy of a suggested deep structure of the text and the horizontal aspect of the implied reader as defined by the process of experience inscribed into the text) represent two different types of appellative structure in Hemingway’s fiction. The first appeals to the reader’s sense of discovery and cognitive coherence, to his ability to detect, connect, and interpret implicit, ambiguous, or incomplete textual information. It therefore involves a predominantly mental, reflective activity of the reader. The second type appeals to the reader’s sense of empathy with significant human fate, building upon the psychic tension of expectation vs. result, desire vs. reality, hope vs. disappointment. It involves a predominantly emotional, psychological activity. The first reception type is essentially spatial and circular, the second essentially temporal and linear. The one is characterized by the structural simultaneity of opposing elements of meaning, the other by the dramatized succession of opposing phases of psychodynamic development. The one leads to reflective distance, the other to emotional identification. In many texts, of course, these types occur in mixed form and with varying emphasis. But they nevertheless can be distinguished as two contrasting, ideal-typical variants of the implied reader in Hemingway which mark the range of possible responses evoked by his works.

  Type I will be exemplified here by The Sun Also Rises and “Big Two-Hearted River.” Type II will be exemplified by some of the best known works of Hemingway’s middle and late periods of composition—"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea.

  Before going to concrete textual analyses, however, it seems useful to determine on a theoretical level what is meant here by the vertical and the horizontal axes of Hemingway’s texts and how they are related to “reflection” and “daydream” as predominant reader-responses. For clarification of these concepts it is helpful to consult two of the most influential theories of reader-response, Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological reception theory and the psychological theory of Sigmund Freud.

  Iser, who introduced the implied reader as a critical category, defined it not in the sense of a concrete, historical reader but as the characteristic activity of reading as it is generated by and inscribed into what he calls the “appellative structure” of literary texts.5 How is this structure conceived in Iser’s theory? A guiding assumption of his reception aesthetics, which has become widely popular in recent criticism, is the idea of the indeterminacy of the literary text. The text presents itself to the reader not as a finished whole but only in the form of “schematized views,”6 It consists only of reduced, incomplete outlines and “component parts” of an imaginary world which must be completed and put together in the reader’s mind to be fully realized.7 Because literature is a highly indirect, nonreferential mode of speech, there results a constant tension between the explicit statements on the textual surface and the implicit connotations, symbolic cross-references, ironic undercurrents which, though not directly formulated, make up the truly “literary” quality of the discourse. Literary communication is thus defined by the tension between what is stated and what is left out, between what is formulated and what is left unformulated in the actual text. And it is particularly the dimension of the unformulated that decisively stimulates the reader’s activity. “Thus by reading,” as Iser states, “we uncover the unformulated part of the text, and this very indeterminacy is the force that drives us to work out a configurative meaning while at the same time giving us the necessary degree of freedom to do so.”8

  It can be seen here that the underlying concept of literature in this theory is essentially a concept of negativity. Literature is defined by what it is, says, and does not say, by techniques and strategies that negate the reader’s expectations of coherence and consistency. It becomes a medium that distances the reader from immediate experience, that subliminally counteracts his tendency of illusion-building and emotional identification. It defamiliarizes the familiar and thus irritates any affirmative views of man and the world.

  What kind of receptive activity does this model imply? In the final analysis it turns literature into a medium of reflection. The typical activities of Iser’s implied reader remind one of an aesthetical version of the reflective consciousness which philosophy distinguishes from the naive consciousness and its “natural attitude” toward reality.9 In the act of reflection the subjective consciousness “turns back” upon itself, distancing itself from immediate experience and questioning all apparent certainties and determinacies of the everyday world. By radically suspending habitual values and “prejudgments,”10 the reflecting consciousness becomes aware of its own constitutive role in the structuring and interpretation of the “objective” world. One need only replace the “world” by the “text” to see that Iser’s implied reader, in a similar way, is conceived as an all-pervading critical consciousness which explicates itself in progressive acts of (self-) reflection. Indeed, the very negativity that Iser attributes to literature, as well as the emancipatory effect that this negativity assumes in the sense of an increased self-awareness and thus self-realization of the reader’s subjectivity, corresponds to the most distinctive features of reflection as it has been defined in philosophy. According to Walter Schulz, “It is the interest and intention of all reflection to negate the given as the substantial, to suspend its objective validity, and to incorporate it into one’s own subjectivity.”11

  Sigmund Freud’s theory of reading is quite different from Iser’s. Indeed, one could say that Freud emphasizes precisely those aspects of the reading activity that are neglected in Iser’s reception aesthetics. To Freud the reading of fictional literature is not an act of hermeneutic (self-) reflection but like the enactment of a symbolic daydream.12 Reading—like writing—is the fictive realization of a wish-fulfilling fantasy, which to Freud is the primary motive and content of all daydreams. “Wish-fulfillment” should not be understood here in any fixed, narrow sense—such as referring only to sexual fantasies or to a regressive reenactment of primal childhood scenes—but in the sense of a basic anthropological desire for idealization, for the imaginative correction of a deficient reality, which manifests itself in m
any different forms.13 The scenarios of fictional daydreams can range from more simple forms of heroic self-aggrandizement and of all sorts of erotic, professional, and other success fantasies to more elevated fantasies of moral greatness and humane self-realization.

  Instead of Iser’s emphasis on the negativity of literature, then, Freud’s emphasis is on its “positivity”—in a thematic as well as in a structural sense. What induces the reader’s reaction is not what is “left out” or remains indeterminate but what is “put in” and is determined by the immanent logic of the world of the text as the author has symbolically projected it. Literature here is not primarily a means of criticizing or negating existing systems of sociocultural reality but an imaginative counterworld which offers a possible escape from or alternative to reality. The act of reading is not conceived as the cognitive enactment of a highly mediated, secondary form of experience but as the emotional enactment of an immediate, lifelike form of primary experience. Instead of the self-reflective detachment of the reader from the narrated world, Freud postulates the reader’s psychological involvement in it.

  Although at first sight these two models appear to be contradictory, they should nonetheless be seen as complementary. Instead of universal concepts which can be applied to all texts indifferently, they should be viewed as specific, analytical concepts which describe two different dimensions of the act of reading and, correspondingly, two kinds of appellative structure in literature. The response-patterns of reflection and daydream should not be considered primarily as projections of the reader’s subjectivity but as inherent possibilities of fictional texts.14 They gain hermeneutic value only if they are viewed as dimensions of the implied reader, that is, of the dynamics of response as it is inscribed within the structure of the narrative itself.