New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  Undergirding Roger’s willful need to freeze Paco’s character in a stereotype are three labels by which Roger invokes moral censure of Paco, labels that further show Hemingway’s use of extratextual reversal: maternal reverence, financial responsibility, and manly pride. Roger gets exercised over Paco’s failure to pay the fee necessary to bury his mother permanently. And when Paco’s failure results in the mother getting dumped into the common boneheap, Roger is morally outraged. Indeed, this is morally reprehensible, an act of gigantic filial disrespect. Or so it is if one is convention-bound and honors community and cultural norms. But if Paco is a homosexual, his deviation from sexual norms should measure other behaviors as well. Hemingway’s formula challenges readers to understand Paco when he tells Roger of his happiness over his mother’s being turned out of her private grave, declaring that she is dearer to him now that her body has been put in a “public boneyard.” He was saddened by thoughts of her being buried in a single place: “‘Now she is all about me in the air, like the birds and the flowers. Now she will always be with me.’” Paco’s statements, echoing Wordworth’s Lucy poem, suggest that his maternal reverence outstrips conventional and routine forms of it, and suggest that he is a pantheist, someone with truly a different “kind of blood” in him than that which sloshes through Roger’s veins. Paco seems to know his “business” in this matter, even though it differs significantly from the clichéd views of busybody Roger.

  Paco also views money and financial responsibility differently than Roger. To Roger a man must pay debts, must not spend money around women as a pretense of manliness, and must not play the bigshot with down-and-out townsmen. But Paco heeds not these cultural norms. He has his reasons for not paying the debts that Roger alleges Paco owes him. But most, Roger fails to view Paco’s act of doling out fifty pesos to a townsman as anything other than a strutting, self-aggrandizing gesture. Roger assigns to Paco the egoistic motive that would actuate Roger, little understanding that Paco’s act arguably has a genuine Samaritan impulse within it. Indeed, it is not just that the “paesano” needs money, but that he needs it to return home and attend his very ill mother. Significantly, then, to Paco’s fraternal feelings are wed his filial feelings for a fellow man whose “distress” centers on regard for his mother.

  Finally, Roger is justifiably perplexed by Paco’s failure to carry himself with sufficient manly pride to defend his honor when assailed by an antagonistic enemy. When Roger insults Paco, Roger expects at least some fight or swapping of insults. Again, Roger is the moral and behavioral norm, the man who expects conventional behavior, predictable reaction. But unlike the grudge-carrying Roger, Paco is a pacifist, a man of equable civility and politeness, despite Roger’s goading and slanderous remarks. And while Roger would have us share his moral censure of Paco for such “womanishness,” the story invites a moral reversal that finds favor in Paco’s behavior, standards, and ethic—if not in his courage to be open about his homosexuality, as well.

  Roger’s story of Paco is intensely personal. But it is also representative, for it symbolizes the human tendency to shrink a complex person into a tidy term, to shortchange the diversity of what a person does in favor of labeling what a person is—in the eyes of the labeler. Paco transcends the label of what he is in Roger’s eyes—a queen—partly because of the epistemologic formulas upon which the story is structured. They lead a reader to ask the searching questions that any epistemologic philosopher would ask of Roger’s story: how do we know what we know, and how do we know that what we know is true? When we ask those questions of other Hemingway characters and stories, we find that that they too transcend their assigned labels, are truly knowable as complex and contradictory entities that tenaciously resist quick and easy identification. They resemble their author, who fought early and late against labelers, be they his mother, whose female epithet so angered him, or his early biographical critics, whose reductionist theories bewildered and vexed him.22

  To call Hemingway a formula writer may offend his enthusiasts, agreeing, as it seems to, with Faulkner’s conclusion: “He learned early in life a method by which he could do his work, he has never varied from that method, it suited him well, he handled it well.”23 But to call an author a formula writer need not consign him to the ranks of potboiler, harlequin-romance, and pulp-fiction hacks. All writers rely upon formulas that, like cooks’ recipes, enable them to turn out a piece of work with some expedition and to control the quality of the product. Foolish would be writers who, discovering a formula that allows expression of their vision, promptly discard it against the time a fresh formula or another original inspiration arrived. That Hemingway came up with three formulas, overlapped them, added them to his already strong sense of irony, and crafted them with an acclaimed and imitated style bespeaks a higher level of formula writing than customarily accrues to the epithet. And surely the strong resemblance among his stories’ formulas runs deeper than preoccupations with frequent themes or techniques: with code heroes and a pared-down style, with machismo and understatement, with Hispanic values and polysyndeton, with tutor-tyro characters and true sentences.

  To be attuned to the epistemologic formulas in Hemingway’s short fiction may not help readers either better recognize its synecdochic and symbolic resonance or better cleave to the generalizing particulars that elevate seemingly insignificant matters into enlarged philosophic issues aesthetically clothed. But it may help readers avoid mistreating a story as Kenneth Lynn does “The Sea Change.” In it, he writes, “a tale largely made up of cutting exchanges in a Paris cafe between a man and a woman who are breaking up because the woman has taken another woman as her lover, the dialogue has some of the pace and desperate energy of the talk in ‘Hills Like White Elephants,’ but the setting is incomparably less memorable.”24 Such a reading blithely sails past the epistemologic problem of how people, in a common public setting with at least one onlooker, deal with new information. The young woman’s problem is how to conduct herself with her present sexual partner when she has just discovered something radically unsettling and exciting about herself, when she has just acquired new knowledge of her sexual identity and realizes that it requires forsaking one relationship and set of values for another. The man’s problem is equally grave, for he is unable to come to terms with such knowledge of his sexual partner, tries to browbeat her with morally censorious terms, releases her sarcastically, and then swaggers before the barman, desperately trying to save face by ironically claiming, “‘You see in me quite a different man.’”

  But Lynn’s dismissal of the story is certainly forgivable. After all, all readers are lucky if they misread only a couple of handfuls of Hemingway’s stories, those puzzles that seem readily solvable, those icebergs whose small peaks point one direction, whose enormous bases point quite another. And whether puzzle or iceberg, readers are hindered both by what Hemingway admittedly omitted and by the epistemologic smokescreen within which, without admitting it, he shrouded artful stories.

  Nada and the Clean, Well-Lighted Place: The Unity of Hemingway’s Short Fiction

  Steven K. Hoffman

  One of his most frequently discussed tales, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is justly regarded as one of the stylistic masterpieces of Ernest Hemingway’s distinguished career in short fiction. Not only does it represent Hemingway at his understated, laconic best, but, according to Carlos Baker, “It shows once again that remarkable union of the naturalistic and the symbolic which is possibly his central triumph in the realm of practical aesthetics.”1 In a mere five pages, almost entirely in dialogue and interior monologue, the tale renders a complex series of interactions between three characters in a Spanish café just prior to and immediately after closing: a stoic old waiter, a brash young waiter, and a wealthy but suicidal old man given to excessive drink.

  Aside from its well-documented stylistic achievement, what has drawn the most critical attention is Hemingway’s detailed consideration of the concept of nada. Although the old waiter is the
only one to articulate the fact, all three figures actually confront nothingness in the course of the tale. This is no minor absence in their lives. Especially “for the old waiter,” Carlos Baker notes, “the word nothing (or nada) contains huge actuality. The great skill in the story is the development, through the most carefully controlled understatement, of the young waiter’s mere nothing into the old waiter’s Something—a Something called Nothing which is so huge, terrible, overbearing, inevitable and omnipresent that once experienced, it can never be forgotten.”2 Because the terrifying “Something called Nothing” looms so very large, and since “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” appeared in a 1933 collection in which even “winners” take “nothing,” critics have generally come to see the piece as a nihilistic low point in Hemingway’s career, a moment of profound despair both for the characters and the author.3

  If this standard position does have a certain validity, it also tends to overlook two crucial points about the story. First is its relation to the rest of Hemingway’s highly unified short story canon. In the same way that two of the three characters in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” meet nada without voicing the fact, all of the major short story characters also experience it in one of its multiple guises. Thus “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” a rather late story written in 1933, is something of a summary statement on this recurrent theme; the tale brings to direct expression the central crisis of those that precede it—including the most celebrated of the Nick Adams stories—and looks forward to its resolution in the masterpieces that come later, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936) and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936).

  Second, because nada appears to dominate “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” it has been easy to miss the fact that the story is not about nada per se but the various available human responses to it.4 As a literary artist, Hemingway was generally less concerned with speculative metaphysics than with modes of practical conduct within certain a priori conditions. The ways in which the character triad in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” respond to nada summarize the character responses throughout the canon. The fact that only one, the old waiter, directly voices his experience and manages to deal successfully with nothingness is also indicative of a general trend. Those few Hemingway characters who continue to function even at the razor’s edge do so in the manner of this heroic figure—by establishing for themselves a clean, well-lighted place from which to withstand the enveloping darkness. For these reasons, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” must be termed the thematic as well as the stylistic climax of Hemingway’s career in short fiction.

  Although the difficulty of attributing certain individual statements in the tale creates some ambiguity on the subject, it is clear that the young waiter’s use of the term nada to convey a personal lack of a definable commodity (no thing) is much too narrowly conceived. In his crucial meditation at the end, the old waiter makes it quite clear that nada is not an individual state but one with grave universal implications: “It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too” [my italics].5 According to William Barrett, the nada-shadowed realm of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is no less than a microcosm of the existential universe as defined by Martin Heidegger and the existentialist philosophers who came before and after him, principally Kierkegaard and Sartre.6 Barrett’s position finds internal support in the old waiter’s celebrated parody prayer: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada” (383). The character’s deft substitution of the word nada for all the key nouns (entities) and verbs (actions) in the Paternoster suggests the concept’s truly metaphysical stature. Obviously, nada is to connote a series of significant absences: the lack of a viable transcendent source of power and authority; a correlative lack of external physical or spiritual sustenance; the total lack of moral justification for action (in the broadest perspective, the essential meaninglessness of any action); and finally, the impossibility of deliverance from this situation.7

  The impact of nada, however, extends beyond its theological implications. Rather, in the Heideggerian sense (“das Nicht”), it is an umbrella term that subsumes all of the irrational, unforseeable, existential forces that tend to infringe upon the human self, to make a “nothing.” It is the absolute power of chance and circumstance to negate individual free will and the entropic tendency toward ontological disorder that perpetually looms over man’s tenuous personal sense of order. But the most fearsome face of nada, and clear proof of man’s radical contingency, is death—present here in the old man’s wife’s death and his own attempted suicide. Understandably, the old waiter’s emotional response to this composite threat is mixed. It “was not fear or dread” (383), which would imply a specific object to be feared, but a pervasive uneasiness, an existential anxiety that, according to Heidegger, arises when one becomes fully aware of the precarious status of his very being.8

  That the shadow of nada looms behind much of Hemingway’s fiction has not gone entirely unnoticed. Nathan Scott’s conclusions on this issue serve as a useful summary of critical opinion: “Now it is blackness beyond a clean, well-lighted place—this ‘nothing full of nothing’ that betrays ‘confidence’; that murders sleep, that makes the having of plenty of money a fact of no consequence at all—it is this blackness, ten times black, that constitutes the basic metaphysical situation in Hemingway’s fiction and that makes the human enterprise something very much like huddling about a campfire beyond which looms the unchartable wilderness, the great Nada.”9 The problem with this position is that it tends to locate nada somewhere outside of the action, never directly operative within it. It is, to William Barrett, “the presence that had circulated, unnamed and unconfronted, throughout much of [Hemingway’s] earlier writing” [my italics].10

  The clearest indication of nada’s direct presence in the short stories is to be found in the characters’ frequent brushes with death, notably the characteristic modern forms of unexpected, unmerited, and very often mechanical death that both Frederick J. Hoffman and R. P. Warren consider so crucial in Hemingway.11 Naturally, these instances are the climactic moments in some of the best known tales: the interchapters from In Our Times, “Indian Camp,” “The Killers,” “The Capital of the World,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” But death or the imminent threat of death need not be literally present to signal an encounter with nada. What Philip Young and others have called Nick Adams’s “initiation” to life’s trials is actually his initiation to nada.12 In “The End of Something” and “The Three Day Blow” Nick must cope with the precariousness of love in a precarious universe; in “The Battler,” with the world’s underlying irrationality and potential for violence; in “Cross-Country Snow,” with the power of external circumstance to circumscribe individual initiative. In several important stories involving the period in Nick’s chronology after the critical “wound,” nada, as the ultimate unmanageability of life, appears as a concrete image. In “Big Two-Hearted River” it is both the burnt-out countryside and the forbidding swamp; in “Now I Lay Me,” the night; in “A Way You’ll Never Be,” a “long yellow house” (evidently the site of the wound).

  Other imagistic references to nada appear in the non–Nick Adams tales. In “The Undefeated” it is the bull, a particularly apt concrete manifestation of active malevolence in the universe, also suggested by the lion and buffalo in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” These particular images, however, are potentially misleading because nada does not usually appear so actively and personally combative. An example to the contrary may be found in “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” where nada is the distinctly impersonal and paralyzing banality of life in an isolated hospital, as well as the constant “risk” of a gambler’s uncertain profession. Regardless of its specific incarnation, nada is always a dark presence which upsets indivi
dual equilibrium and threatens to overwhelm the self. And, as Jackson Benson has pointed out, “A threat to selfhood is the ultimate horror that the irrational forces of the world can accomplish.”13 In that each story in the canon turns on the way in which particular characters respond to the inevitable confrontation with nada, the nature of that response is particularly important. The only effective way to approach the Void is to develop a very special mode of being, the concrete manifestation of which is the clean, well-lighted place.

  Again, it is the old waiter who speaks most directly of the need for a physical bastion against the all-encompassing night: “It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity” (382). In direct contrast to the dirty, noisy bodega to which he repairs after closing and all the “bad” places that appear in Hemingway’s fiction, the pleasant café at which the old waiter works possesses all of these essential attributes: light, cleanness, and the opportunity for some form of dignity. Perhaps the most direct antithesis of this legitimate clean, well-lighted place is not even in this particular story but in one of its companion pieces in Winner Take Nothing, the infernal bar in “The Light of the World” (1933). Here, light does little more than illuminate the absence of the other qualities, the lack of which moves one of the characters to ask pointedly, “‘What the hell kind of place is this?’” (385). Thus, in an inversion of the typical procedure in Hemingway, Nick and his companion are impelled outside where it is “good and dark”

  Evidently, well-lighted places in Hemingway do not always meet the other requirements of the clean, well-lighted place. Moreover, since the café in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” must eventually close, even the legitimate haven has distinct limitations. These facts should be enough to alert us to the possibility that tangible physical location is not sufficient to combat the darkness. The clean, well-lighted place is not actually a “place” at all; rather, it is a metaphor for an attitude toward the self and its existential context, a psychological perspective which, like the café itself with its fabricated conveniences and electric light, is man-made, artificial. The “cleanliness” of the metaphor connotes a personal sense of order, however artificial and temporary, carved out within the larger chaos of the universe, a firm hold on the self with which one can meet any contingency. By “light” Hemingway refers to a special kind of vision, the clear-sightedness and absolute lack of illusion necessary to look into the darkness and thereby come to grips with the nada which is everywhere. At the same time, vision must also be directed at the self so as to assure its cleanness. With cleanness and light, then, physical locale is irrelevant. Whoever manages to internalize these qualities carries the clean, well-lighted place with him, even into the very teeth of the darkness. The degree to which the Hemingway character can develop and maintain this perspective determines his success (or lack thereof) in dealing with the Void.