New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  This pattern can be seen in an analysis of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” one of the author’s major stories, where it occurs in an almost ideal-typical form. Basically, the story can be divided into three parts, which correspond to different yet interrelated phases of reception.

  (1) The situation at the beginning is one of utter humiliation for Macomber, who has behaved like a coward at a lion hunt and is now the subject of contempt among the hunting company. Because his cowardice is the implicit center of attention to which the other characters—Wilson, the guide, and Margot Macomber—react, the reader is involuntarily placed in Macomber’s position and is made to feel, indirectly but all the more painfully, his frustration and isolation.21 This feeling is enforced and at the same time charged with an aggressive undertone by Margaret’s behavior, who demonstrates her disdain of her husband to a degree that she provokes not only Wilson’s but the reader’s sharp antipathy (16ff.). However, there are already some first signals in the text that direct the hopeful attention of the reader to the buffalo-hunt of the following day, which is repeatedly mentioned in the dialogue and is associated with the intense but diametrically opposed expectations of the couple. To Margaret it means the promise of another defeat for her husband and thus of another triumph for herself: “You don’t know how I look forward to tomorrow” (16). To Macomber it represents the desperate hope of rehabilitating himself: “Maybe I can fix it up on buffalo” (15), and “I would like to clear away this lion business” (17). Clearly, the reader is with Macomber here, although the vague hope of a reaffirmation of his virtually annihilated self that is evoked here may still seem rather unrealistic at this point. This is especially true as there follows, first of all, a further intensification of Macomber’s feeling of (self-) humiliation and a retrospective exploration of the reasons for his crisis within his own subjectivity. As he lies awake at night, he becomes aware of the extreme shame and the “cold, hollow fear” (20) which entirely dominate and paralyze his psyche. In a reconstruction of the events of the preceding day, his act of cowardice is retraced in its successive steps and is communicated to the reader in all the nightmarish intensity it gains through Macomber’s fear-ridden perspective. It is retold as a process of inevitable failure which results from his lifelong fear of death and which culminates in the scene when he runs away in panic as the wounded lion charges: “they had just moved into the grass when Macomber heard the blood-choked coughing grunt, and saw the swishing rush in the grass. The next thing he knew he was running; running wildly in the open, running toward the stream” (25). This is the first, negative climax in the reading process which is inscribed into the story. Though rendered retrospectively, it is brought alive through scenic dramatization and is thus conveyed to the reader not as a finished event of the past but as a concrete emotional experience, which is actualized in his consciousness as a determining part of the present situation. And when afterward Margaret, who has been absent from the tent during Macomber’s painful recollections, returns from Wilson’s tent, provocatively admitting her adultery, this appears as an act of final humiliation which makes Macomber’s defeat complete. At the same time, however, it psychologically prepares the reader for the dramatic change of emotion that takes place in the second part of the story.

  (2) For on the morning of the next day, Macomber’s mood is conspicuously altered. The negation of his whole personality has been pushed to a point where his self-destructive despair has been transformed into a feeling of violent aggression, which finds its first object in Wilson. “At breakfast they were all three at the table before daylight and Francis Macomber found that, of all the many men that he had hated, he hated Robert Wilson the most” (28). Macomber is in an explosive mood, in which he throws off all restrictions of social appearances. All at once, anything can be expected of him, as his paralyzed, fear-ridden state of crisis has turned into an irresistible impulse to action: “‘Going shooting?’ he [Wilson] asked. ‘Yes,’ said Macomber, standing up. ‘Yes’” (30). The reader’s identification increases as Macomber more and more seems to fill the heroic role of fearless self-affirmation that has been built up as a counterfantasy to his preceding crisis in the reader’s expectation. Indeed, the nightmare of cowardice and fear, which dominates the first part of the story, is transformed in the second part into a trancelike triumph of self-assertion, in which Macomber, as the reader’s fictional second self, feels a “drunken elation,” a moment of supreme happiness: “In his life he had never felt so good” (33). From the reader’s point of view, then, the hope of Macomber’s rehabilitation which is raised ex negativo in the first part is fulfilled in the second part in the form of a wish-fulfilling daydream which, as the positive climax of the implied reader-response, forms a symmetrical counterpart to the negativity of the preceding experience.

  (3) All the more shocking to the reader is the sudden, new turn of events shortly afterward when Macomber, boldly confronting the wounded buffalo, is shot in the head by his wife:

  he shot again at the wide nostrils and saw the horns jolt again and fragments fly, and he did not see Wilson now and, aiming carefully, shot again with the buffalo’s huge bulk almost on him and his rifle almost level with the coming head, nose out, and he could see the little wicked eyes and the head started to lower, and he felt a sudden white-hot, blinding flash explode inside his head and that was all he ever felt. (39)

  As the narrative focus is entirely on Macomber, the shot hits the reader, metaphorically speaking, as if “from behind,” disillusioning, like a vis a tergo, the euphoric fantasy of his heroic daydream. With this unexpected anticlimax, the reader is left in shock and bewilderment and is forcefully lead back to a problematical reality from which his heroic daydream has promised to take him away. Mrs. Macomber’s (accidental?) shot creates a central indeterminacy in the story that retrospectively invalidates the attempt of determining modern human reality in terms of direct, physical action which Macomber—like Wilson before him—has undertaken. Her shot thus becomes the pivotal point in the text, whose interpretation largely decides about the interpretation of the story as a whole. It forces the reader to reflect on the fictional experience he has gone through and possibly to recognize the problematical implications, the narrowness and one-sidedness of that experience.22

  This is roughly the psychodramatic pattern inscribed into the activity of the implied reader in “Macomber,” and this pattern is to a considerable extent responsible for the high degree of emotional involvement which the story provokes and which is reflected in the particularly passionate critical controversies it has set off. The reader’s reaction to the story is characterized by extreme contrasts and sharp changes of emotional mood. His participation in the text is not, as in Type I, primarily evoked by structural-reflective ambiguity but by the immediacy of a psychic experience which only afterward, after Mrs. Macomber’s shot has wakened him from his fictional daydream, is subject to the retrospective and, potentially, (self-) critical reflection of the reader. Instead of the static effect of simultaneous, largely unchanging, mutually obstructing emotions as in Type I, we have here the dynamic effect of a process of sharply alternating, mutually intensifying emotions which are transmitted through the temporal sequence of contrasting climaxes marked by the wish-fulfilling daydream vs. the shock of disillusioning reality.

  This pattern recurs more frequently in Hemingway than one would think, especially since he is a writer often labeled a naturalist and a clinical realist. In it an element of hope and affirmation of life manifests itself, as well as a high degree of sensibility for the resistance that this hope encounters in the modern world. In fact a closer look reveals that some of the author’s major works follow this or a similar model. Thus in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” Harry’s hopeless situation is transformed near the end of the story into the dream of his miraculous rescue by an airplane. To the reader, as to Harry, this waking dream, which at first is presented quite realistically and which only later, during the flight to the top of
the mountain, becomes recognizable as a mere fantasy, quite explicitly resembles the structure of a wish-fulfilling daydream. And as in “Macomber”—though in a temporally much more condensed form—the daydream is developed out of a desperate death-in-life situation, dramatizing in the reader’s psyche the rise of the wounded hero to symbolic self-fulfillment, before he is forced to witness his destruction in the shocklike clash with the disillusioning forces of reality (Harry is discovered to be dead on his cot by his wife). A Farewell to Arms also draws on the appellative potential of the daydream structure. Here it is the dream of peace and love that is evoked as a counterfantasy to the experience of war. It begins to materialize in Henry’s relationship to Catherine in the first part of the novel, is built up further in his desertion and his idea of a “separate peace,” and is fulfilled in an idealized way in the symbiotic union of the two lovers in the Utopian sphere of the Swiss mountains, before it is all the more mercilessly destroyed with Catherine’s death at the end of the book. A paradigmatic example of the structure is The Old Man and the Sea. From the very beginning the reader’s expectation is directed, by the exceptionally luckless situation of the old man (he “was now definitely and finally salao”)23 and by his wish for an all the more triumphant compensation for his humiliating lack of success, toward the Great Fish.24 With Santiago’s sailing out to sea, and with the increasing size of the fish he encounters, this expectation if further intensified finds its first climax in the actual appearance of the Great Fish, whose gigantic size borders on the fantastic, and is after a long, fierce struggle, marvelously fulfilled in the eventual defeat of the Fish. And again the reader is made to feel all the more painfully the relentless disillusionment which follows, on the way back to the harbor, with the attacks of the sharks, against whose ever-growing number the old man is powerless and who finally have left only the skeleton of the fish when he reaches home. Quite clearly, the reader’s participation in the novel is shaped by the daydream pattern, which is employed here, as in other texts, to increase the psychic intensity of the fictional experience and to activate the life-affirming tendencies in the reader’s consciousness in order to make him even more acutely aware of—and, possibly, also better able to cope with—the disillusioning facts of reality.

  As has been said, there are of course overlappings between the two types of implied reader here distinguished. The vertical tension between surface and depth, between the formulated and the unformulated dimension of the text, is also part of the reader-appeal in “Macomber” or The Old Man and the Sea; and there is the indication of a horizontal tension, of an at least symbolic development of the hero, in The Sun Also Rises and in “Big Two-Hearted River. “25 But what matters here is that one or the other of these aspects more or less clearly dominates in the texts, giving the role of the reader a distinctly different character. They represent the two basic forms of appellative structure in Hemingway that mark the endpoints of a whole range of possible combinations and variations. At the same time, they illustrate different phases in the literary development of the author in that Type I more frequently occurs in his earlier work and Type II in his middle and later work. All that can be done here is to indicate the main characteristics of these two types and to demonstrate their realization in a few selected works. A much more extensive and systematic study of the reader-appeal of Hemingway’s fictions would be necessary to arrive at a more differentiated typology, involving the careful analysis and comparison of many more texts.

  Feminist Perspective “Actually, I Felt Sorry For the Lion”

  Nina Baym

  Feminist literary critics are not responsible for the view that Ernest Hemingway’s work is deeply antiwoman in its values. On the contrary, in making this familiar case feminists have perhaps too quickly accepted the main approach of standard Hemingway criticism. Their innovation is to view this “fact” about the author as a defect rather than something to praise. In espousing the cause of a manhood displayed through male bonding and attained by participation in blood sports, the argument goes, Hemingway’s fiction casts all but the most passive, submissive, and silent women as corrupting or destructive. Only when women accept their “place” as a lower order of being than men, rightly assigned the functions of waiting on them when they are around and waiting for them when they are elsewhere, do they win authorial approval. Women can only be men’s helpers, never their allies. Men who think of women as human beings like themselves are fools.

  This long-lived and monolithic approach has been modified in recent years. We see now that stories like “Cat in the Rain” or “Hills Like White Elephants” present a woman’s point of view and attribute her plight—and there is always a plight—to a combination of male self-involvement and self-aggrandizement, a combination of which the text is aware and to which it is not sympathetic.1 “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” however, seems resistant to interpretive revision along these lines because it has been absolutely central in the standard interpretation of Hemingway and his work.

  Margot Macomber and Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises are the two outstanding examples of Hemingway’s “bitch women.” Brett, with her irresistible combination of sexual allure and sexual appetite, creates competition, hence disharmony and antagonism, among men who would otherwise be friends. Her wiles undermine the hard-boiled facade with which men should respond to social chaos and the indifference of the universe. As for Margot, she commits adultery virtually under her husband’s nose and then kills him at the very moment when his belated entrance into manhood (through blood sport and male bonding) threatens her dominance. It is not surprising that a feminist short story anthology has featured it, through four editions, as a leading example of the “bitch” stereotype.2

  There is no point in trying to reinterpret the story merely to make it and its author acceptable in changed times. Indeed, if Hemingway really “was” machismo in this story (if not in all his work), it would be unethical to present him differently. Yet, there have also been critics who argue that Margot Macomber did not shoot to kill.3 And if she did not shoot to kill, then she shot to save her husband, and the vision of Margot Macomber as a “bitch” misrepresents her. I agree with this revisionist approach, and I would add that it is not merely the character who is misrepresented; it is the story itself—its dynamics and its techniques. Hence, the misrepresentation is not only of its author’s “message,” but also of his craft. Yet I think it less important to rehabilitate “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” on behalf of its author than on behalf of its readers, who, when unconstrained by interpretations that enforce a single, correct, reading of the story, turn out to be responsive to its play of narrative voices and points of view, as well as to the twists of its plot.

  If one takes the process of interpretation as advancing a correct reading and dismissing alternate interpretations as error, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” might be read as an ironic commentary on such activity. It begins by marking out a variety of speaking subject positions and then tells a story in which all but one are silenced. Although the language of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” belongs mainly to its narrator, the story is focused through five “points of view” including an omniscient though taciturn narrator; Robert Wilson, the white hunter; Francis Macomber, his employer; Margot Macomber, the wife of Francis; and a lion’s.4 Of these the lion’s is especially important (and has been critically neglected), and the lion’s story evolves as a story embedded within the story of Francis Macomber.5

  If we were to arrange events in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” chronologically, the story would begin with the voice of the lion: “It had started the night before when he had wakened and heard the lion roaring somewhere up along the river” (110).6 Chronology is manipulated in the story so that the lion takes almost half of the narrative space to die, and when the group returns to camp after killing him (on the eighteenth page of a thirty-four-page story), the narrator self-re flexi vely marks the moment a
s a closure: “That was the story of the lion” (120). The dead lion continues to exert his presence in the story, and his point of view, through which we have seen much of the hunt and slaughter, is transferred to Margot Macomber. She registers Macomber’s cowardice, Wilson’s brutality, and the interdependence of the two as epitomized in the lion’s fate. She also recognizes that the animals in the wild are not true adversaries or antagonists, because they are so massively overpowered by the men’s technology—their guns, their cars. The safari as she sees it is a sham, its participants hypocrites. Wilson, who makes his living by manipulating the appearances of mortal danger for the titillation of his clients, is anxious to suppress her point of view, and he appears to succeed at the story’s close.

  Though he does succeed in the story’s plotline, that he does not prevail in the minds of readers we may surmise from the anxiety with which male authorities once felt bound to continue his work. Another Wilson, name of Edmund, set the tone by praising the “Short Happy Life” as “a terrific fable of the impossible civilized woman who despises the civilized man for his failure in initiative and nerve and then jealously tries to break him down as soon as he begins to exhibit any.” And later in his career the increasingly self-protective and publicity-seeking author himself adopted this interpretation, telling an interviewer in 1953—seventeen years after the story was published—that “Francis’ wife hates him because he’s a coward. . . . But when he gets his guts back, she fears him so much she has to kill him—shoots him in the back of the head.”7