A Reading of Hemingway’s “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio”
Amberys R. Whittle
In looking through Louis MacNeice’s Varieties of Parable, first presented as Clark Lectures at Cambridge shortly before the author’s death, one finds a typical reluctance to admit the allegorical nature of some modern American literature. MacNeice is willing to say that “one very valuable kind of parable, and particularly so today, is the kind which on the surface may not look like a parable at all. This is a kind of double-level writing, or, if you prefer it, sleight-of-hand.”1 Length has nothing to do with the definition of parable, as MacNeice uses the term (there is a lengthy discussion as to why it was chosen). It is rather a matter of technique and intention, and “the writer of parable literature, whether it is novel, short story, poem or play, is, by contrast with other types of writer, engaged in projecting a special world.”2
Being more specific, MacNeice considers each of Golding’s first three novels “a parable of the human situation today. The Lord of the Flies approaches Kafka, in that its island run by little boys is a frightening parody of modern society.”3 He is willing to accept Moby-Dick as a parable but wishes to “exclude the bulls and big game of Hemingway, even though a case could quite well be made for their inclusion.”4 With this judgment, as stated here, I would agree—though if Moby-Dick is accepted, why should The Old Man and the Sea not be included? It is, however, with Hemingway’s short stories that I am primarily concerned, and these are not even considered by MacNeice, even though they are among the best in the language, and a significant number of them cannot be fully understood except as modern forms of parable.
I wish to concentrate primarily, but not exclusively, upon one story to prove the point, that is, that under any reasonable definition of the term, Hemingway did in fact write parables. “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” (1933) has, I think, not been accepted entirely for what it is, though certain aspects of the story have been adequately discussed. Philip Young of course points out the contrasts between the way Mr. Frazer faces his situation and the stoicism of the gambler with his “code.” Young also contends that “it is in this story that rock bottom in Hemingway’s pessimism is reached in the familiar passage: ‘Religion is the opium of the people . . . and music . . . and sexual intercourse . . . and bread is the opium of the people.’”5 In like vein, Maxwell Geismar writes of “a nihilistic spiritual world that reached its own perfection in such of his ‘first forty-nine’ stories as ‘The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio.’”6
It will be noticed that both Young and Geismar, like most critics, assume a close connection between the attitudes of Mr. Frazer and that of his creator. There is some reason for this. In 1930 Hemingway was involved in an automobile accident with John Dos Passos near Billings, Montana. Hemingway’s right arm was badly broken, and the recovery was quite painful and slow. Many of the people Hemingway met in the hospital later went into the creation of the characters in the story.7 In “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” Mr. Frazer uses his radio as a kind of “opium,” as had Hemingway, and like his creator he is able to “get rid” of things (the phrase is used by Nick Adams in “Fathers and Sons”) by writing about them, under more favorable circumstances. However, it is his leg that is broken by a fall from a horse, and by this change, as minor as it may be, Hemingway suggests that Mr. Frazer is not just a mirror image of himself.
What, then, is the story “about,” if it is not merely autobiographical material interestingly presented? An answer to that question might be suggested by an episode in which the doctor, “who was a most excellent doctor,” pulled Mr. Frazer’s bed toward the window so that he could see pheasants in the snow but forgot about the reading light on the bedstead: “Mr. Frazer was knocked out by the leaded base of the lamp hitting the top of his head. It seemed the antithesis of healing or whatever people were in the hospital for, and every one thought it was very funny, as a joke on Mr. Frazer and on the doctor. Everything is much simpler in a hospital, including the jokes.”8
First, the jokes. While the story is ultimately disturbingly serious, there is enough humor in it to make one question whether it represents the bottom of Hemingway’s own “pessimism.” There is humor not only in the passage just quoted but in the opening altercation between the detective, the interpreter, and Cayetano; this perhaps reaches its climax when the interpreter insists that “he don’t know who shot him. They shot him in the back.”
“Yes,” said the detective. “I understand that, but why did the bullets all go in the front?”
“Maybe he is spinning around,” said the interpreter.
Humor is implied in comparing the actions of characters with those in movies and comic strips, in Sister Cecilia’s readiness to pray for things great and small and in her discovery that becoming a saint is difficult in this world, in the complaint of the citizens that the hospital’s “X-ray machine” “ruined” the morning reception of their radios, in having Cayetano serenaded by friends of the man who wounded him, and in the description of the carpenter “who had fallen with a scaffolding and broken both ankles and both wrists. He had lit like a cat but without a cat’s resiliency.” There are other examples, but for some reason readers are slow to respond to Hemingway’s jokes, perhaps because they are often associated with violence. In this story the jokes help to create a sense of completeness. As Horace Walpole once said, “life is a comedy to the man who thinks and a tragedy to the man who feels.” Comedy implies a logical response to life, tragedy an emotional one. Both responses are found in the story and are centered in Mr. Frazer. It will be observed that this kind of humor, given the setting and situation, approaches that of the theater of the absurd, a type of drama which often attempts to present an image, however distorted it may appear to be, of life in general, of life which is held to be philosophically absurd.
“Everything is much simpler in a hospital, including the jokes.” That statement suggests that Hemingway is using the setting as a microcosm for a parable, “the kind which on the surface may not look like a parable at all,” to use MacNeice’s language. Beginning with jokes, turning to a contrast of characters and their responses to their situations in life, including the various kinds of “opiums” all men use to support themselves against the darkest realities, the story at its end describes the plight of all mankind as it is threatened by world revolution and tyranny.
John Killinger argues that the opiums, “a means of escape from the self,” represent “bad faith, . . . a concept common to the thinking of all the major existentialists, . . . [which] means generally any acceptance of a way of living incognito, or of losing one’s self in a larger entity, so as to slough off all personal responsibility for one’s choices and actions.”9 This seems to me an extreme view, based upon a failure to understand Mr. Frazer. It is Mr. Frazer’s thinking (the idea is insisted upon; the word repeated) about his own suffering after his nerves have gone bad and about the suffering of mankind in the early 1930s that so tortures him. Cayetano is much more seriously ill, but he is, though a small-town gambler who will cheat to win, “a poor idealist. I am the victim of illusions.” His hope is that his luck will change; his has been bad so long that if it ever changes (and should remain good as long) he will get rich. Another victim of illusions is the thin Mexican, who was an acolyte when a boy but who has rejected religion as the opium of the poor: “Now I believe in nothing. Neither do I go to mass.” He does, however, believe in revolution, without thinking. His lack of logic is represented by the sentence just quoted, and near the end of the story he has to confess several times that he cannot follow Mr. Frazer’s line of thought, when Mr. Frazer is trying to make him realize the consequences of his naive faith in revolution.
We should recall the history of the period, what was happening in the lives of people in the outside world, to which the radio in the story is a channel of communication. Hemingway’s own accident took place in 1930; the story was published in 1933. In 1931 the Japanese invaded
Manchuria. In reaction to a Chinese boycott of goods, the Japanese militarists bombed Shaghai in 1932, killing and injuring many civilians. Japan left the League of Nations in this same year, when her aggression in Manchuria was condemned. In January 1933 the National Socialist German Labor party led by Hitler was firmly in control of Germany. Italian fascism was becoming increasingly aggressive. The United States itself was in the midst of a dreadful depression and elected Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932, though he would not take office until March 1933. In 1927 President Coolidge had sent troops to Nicaragua, and in that same year a temporary compromise was worked out between the United States and Mexico concerning the properties of American petroleum companies in Mexico. Many in Latin America still denounced Yanqui imperialism and would continue to do so. Briefly, this was the state of affairs with which most knowledgeable citizens would have been familiar. It was a rather grim picture.
Lying awake in the hospital, Mr. Frazer recalls the Mexican revolutionary’s hatred of religion as the opium of the people: “He believed that, that dyspeptic little joint-keeper.” Notice that Mr. Frazer’s tone is one of anger, not of approval. Mr. Frazer continues thinking, with relentless logic stripping away all possible forms of illusion, and not with pleasure. Music is another opium, and economics, “along with patriotism the opium of the people in Italy and Germany.” Then there is sex, drink, and his own radio, gambling (including Cayetano’s), ambition, “along with a belief in any new form of government.” How can it all be reduced to “the real, the actual, opium of the people”? His conclusion, given with self-mockery, is that “Bread is the opium of the people.” This conclusion startles Mr. Frazer so much that he asks to have the revolutionary sent to him right away. Why? Because bread is not only the opium of the people. It is, according to the aphorism, the staff of life. In other words life cannot exist without some form of support. The Mexican, who reenters speaking of “the tune of the real revolution,” would take cruelly from the people these supports of “opiums.” “‘Listen,’ said Mr. Frazer. ‘Why should the people be operated on without an anaesthetic?’” Mr. Frazer, having forced himself to strip away all illusions to understand the consequences, would not have the people of the world operated upon without an anesthetic; he would not have them face worldwide revolution without something to believe in. “Revolution, Mr. Frazer thought, is no opium. Revolution is a catharsis; an ecstasy which can only be prolonged by tyranny. The opiums are for before and for after. He was thinking well, a little too well.”
In the midst of this situation, and despite what others have said of him, Mr. Frazer’s frame of mind is basically that of the modern humanitarian consciousness. The original title of the story, “Give Us a Prescription, Doctor,” is a kind of secular prayer for all that the story encompasses, a plea for the plight of modern man. Mr. Frazer neither likes nor accepts all that he knows. The opiums are slow to act for him, and, we might assume, once he is able to write again, he can put distance between himself and the world or “get rid” of it by putting it into proper form and pattern.
There is a passage in Emerson so like the scene of this story that I cannot help wondering if Hemingway knew of it. It appears in his essay, “Illusions,” philosophically and psychologically one of the most profound of all of Emerson’s essays: “When we break the laws [the moral laws of the universe], we lose our hold on the central reality. Like sick men in hospitals, we change only from bed to bed, from one folly to another; and it cannot signify much what becomes of such castaways, wailing, stupid, comatose creatures, lifted from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the nothing of death.”
“In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations.” This is an image of the loss of faith that one might more readily expect of Dostoevsky than of the almost constitutionally optimistic Emerson. It mirrors the world in which we live even more, and “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” is its modern analogue.
Nevertheless, I am not arguing that Mr. Frazer has lost all faith; he has been appalled by his self-enforced attempt to see what his world looks like without any form of hope. He has compassion for those whom the revolution would operate on without an anesthetic. The prayer is “Give Us a Prescription, Doctor.” In our era of multiple crises and almost instantaneous communication, who has not at times thrown up his hands in frustration? If Mr. Frazer is finally forced to do this, at the end of the story, he is no different. The parable still describes our time.
There are, of course, other of Hemingway’s stories that are parables or parablelike to some degree. ‘The Killers” is an initiation into an awareness of the impersonal nature of violent death in the modern world and of the inhumanity of the times. “The Battler” presents a young man with the vision of a fallen hero mercilessly destroyed in the struggle that is life. “A Way You’ll Never Be” gives a vivid picture of the horror and illogic of modern war. “The Capital of the World” in the form of Madrid, center of the bullfight, is the capital of death, even when death is mocked; illusion and reality may be one and the same. The older waiter in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” with his belief in an existential Nothingness, is intended to be representative (the café itself is a kind of secular temple, and he is its priest): “He would lie in bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”
One could mention other stories or go on to the novels, especially The Old Man and the Sea and A Farewell to Arms, one basically positive, the other negative in its view of the struggle that is life. The point, however, is that a good deal of Hemingway’s fiction is cast in the form of modern allegory. (Traditional wooden allegory, with the strings on the puppets showing, has for the most part dropped to the level of children’s stories.) Failure to admit this has caused some strange (and partial) readings, especially of some of the short stories, which because of their representative nature and brevity should be called parables. There is no reason why one should be embarrassed to consider Hemingway a writer of parables or allegory because in its disguised forms, or as MacNeice calls it “sleight-of-hand,” it is a form of narrative very much alive today, and it will continue to flourish so long as man tries to comprehend his world in terms of broad but important concepts and “representative” situations.
Gender-Linked Miscommunication in “Hills Like White Elephants”
Pamela Smiley
Like a Gregorian chant in which simple musical phrases elucidate intricate poetic lyrics, so does the simple, straightforward plot of “Hills Like White Elephants” frame its subtle and dramatic dialogue. The dialogue contains the essence of the story’s power; for to read Jig’s and the American’s conversation is to recognize the powerless frustration of parallel interchanges—in different words, in different places, and on different topics, but all somehow the same. It is to recognize both the circular noncommunication of strong gender-linked language differences and the consequent existential limitations and creative power of language.
The notion that men and women have difficulty communicating is not new. What is new is research, much of it from the 1970s, which indicates that men and women miscommunicate because they speak different languages (Key, 124). If Hemingway’s male and female characters are each clearly gender-marked—speaking as traditional American men and women would be expected to speak—then there are four distinct characters in the dyad of Jig and the American: Jig and the American as evaluated through the standard of traditional female gender-linked language patterns and Jig and the American as evaluated through the standard of traditional male gender-linked language patterns.
What is gender-marked language? Robin Lakoff has drawn a sketch of the typical male and female speaker. The male speaker’s
contribution is precise and to the point—utterly straightforward—and tells us as little as possible about the speaker’s state of mind and his attitude toward the addressee. We expect . . . a low pitch, flat intonation, declarative sentence structure, no h
edging or imprecision, and lexical items chosen for their pure cognitive content, not their emotional coloration. (“Stylistic,” 66)
The female speaker’s language is
profoundly imprecise. There is a sense that the audience does not really know what she is talking about (nor does she), but that she is very concerned with whom she is talking to, concerned with whether he is interested in her and whether his needs are being met. . . . She uses interjections and hedges freely and her dialog is sprinkled with “I guess” and “kinda.” (“Stylistic,” 67)
When broken down into a more generalized paradigm, research indicates that there are three major areas of gender-linked differences in language: how, about what, and why men and women talk. This may seem all-encompassing, but as Tannen notes: “male-female conversation is cross-cultural communication. Culture, after all, is simply a network of habits and patterns based on past experience—and women and men have very different past experiences.” (22)
Conversational patterns differ and miscommunication results because of intolerance for the opposite gender-marked language. The tendency is for speakers to tenaciously hold on to the irrefutable logic of their own language and refuse to entertain the possibility that alternative translations exist. “[T]rouble develops when there is really no difference of opinion, when everyone is sincerely trying to get along . . . this is the type of miscommunication that drives people crazy. It is usually caused by differences in conversational styles” (Tannen, 21). Lakoff has pointed out that many of the descriptive differences between male and female language become evaluative judgments since men are the dominant cultural group and women are “other” (Miller, 4–12), everything that man is not: emotional rather than logical, yin rather than yang, passive rather than active, body rather than intellect. The effect of this otherness is that many feminine characteristics—language included—are devalued in comparison to their male counterparts. Because women’s language in general, and Jig’s in particular, focuses on emotions rather than facts and objects, it is judged more ambiguous, less direct, and more trivial than masculine speech. If Jig is flighty, trivial, and deferential, then it must be remembered that all of those terms are judgments which depend on a foreign standard of maleness.
New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Page 39
