New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  “Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.” “Of course it does. But I don’t want anyone but you. I don’t want anyone else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.”

  Note how the American responds to the plural pronoun “we” with the singular pronouns “I” and “you.” Tannen notes that the use of the singular pronoun is the standard in male speech, the use of the plural pronoun in female. Women often feel hurt when their partners use “I” or “me” in a situation in which they would use “we” or “us” (23). In traditional female speech patterns, plural pronoun use indicates that the speaker feels he/she is half of a couple, singular pronouns an independent person. Jig, who is feeling vulnerable and looking for reassurance, would recognize the American’s singular pronoun as a direct signal that no relationship existed. The American, for whom the singular pronoun is traditionally standard, would not find this switch meaningful. As Dietrich has noted, because women are relationship-oriented, they have higher social I.Q.’s than men and are more sensitive to subtleties of words. This sensitivity can backfire, as this example of miscommunication pointedly illustrates.

  In the next stage of the conflict there is simply more of the same. The repetition of key words and phrases and the circularity of issues has a tired predictability. As frustration from their miscommunication becomes more intense, each exhibits “more and more extreme forms of the behaviors which trigger in the other increasing manifestations of an incongruent behavior in an ever-worsening spiral.” George Bateson calls this “conversational disorder” “complementary schismogenesis” (Stone, 88).

  The final conflict in the story leaves the issue of abortion unresolved; the American states his intention of moving their bags to the other side of the track and Jig smiles. Politeness is a distinctive characteristic of women’s speech, a facet of their role of making others feel at ease by decreasing distance and showing a lack of hostility. Unfortunately, Jig smiles at the American at a point when common sense indicates that she should have the most hostility toward him, leaving her again vulnerable to the charge of inauthenticity and manipulation.

  In Jig’s defense it should be noted that she has used a variety of language skills in her confrontation with the American: she has been metaphorical, amusing, self-sacrificing, sarcastic, direct—and none has worked. No matter which tack she chooses, the American comes back at her with the same two sentences: “I think you should do it” and “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do.” According to Dietrich, even though traditional female language is generally more skillful and creative than traditional male language, because his is more authoritative, and powerful, the male’s best effects submission. Since our society values authority and power, the inevitable result of the American’s repetition is Jig’s silent smile.

  The final exchange between Jig and the American shows how far they are from understanding one another. When the American drinks a solitary anise at the bar, he exposes the strain that this argument has had on his facade of reason and detachment. Johnston evaluates this gesture as the prelude to many other activities the American will do without Jig, since he is tired of her emotions and dependence (237).

  The American’s final question is the most powerful gender-linked language in the story. “Do you feel better?” assumes that Jig’s pregnancy, her emotions, her desire to grow and change all are aberrations from which she must recover. As Lakoff writes, “women do not make the assumption that their ways are healthy and good ones, or the only ones; . . . women do not, on the basis of their misunderstanding, construct stereotypes of men as irrational, untrustworthy or silly” (“Stylistics,” 71). As the more powerful, the American is able to define what is healthy, even when that definition condemns him, Jig, and the land to stagnation and sterility.

  In spite of the sparse details of plot, the subtle and dramatic dialogue in “Hills Like White Elephants” reveals a clear, sensitive portrait of two strong personalities caught in a pattern of miscommunication due to gender-linked language patterns. Jig’s language covers a wide range of moods, but whether she is light, sarcastic, emotional, or deferential, her language is traditionally feminine. The American uses few words, speaks in direct sentences, effectively translates the world and achieves his goals, and is therefore traditionally masculine.

  In short Hemingway’s accurate ear for speech patterns duplicates the gender-linked miscommunications which exist between men and women in the real world. As a result of these differences, there are two Jigs: the nurturing, creative, and affectionate Jig of female language, and the manipulative, shallow, and hysterical Jig of male language. There are also two Americans: in the female language he is a cold, hypocritical, and powerful oppressor; in the male language he is a stoic, sensitive, and intelligent victim.

  Recognizing the existence of four characters in the dyad of Jig and the American in “Hills Like White Elephants” shifts emphasis from affixing blame for conflicts of noncommunication to understanding the causes—a foregrounding of the function of language in the Modernist world. For example, nowhere is gender-linked language’s inadequacy to express the range of experience more poignantly revealed than in the American’s solitary drink of anise; through the chinks in his language of power and stoicism, the American’s underlying emotion and sensitivity are betrayed. It is not that the American perversely or stupidly chooses sterility and death, it is that he cannot imagine any escape. Jig’s pregnancy, Family, Fatherhood, Love—all traditional solutions to his existential angst—are inadequate. What he does not recognize is that Jig does not represent tradition; she is “all this.” Does this make him a victim of reality or a victim of his own definition of reality? The logical result of his definition of the world is his own victimization.

  Even though the American’s language is the language of power, it is also the language of limitation. The American is proof of Miller and Swift’s thesis that masculine language’s “inflexible demands . . . allow for neither variation nor for human frailty” (Lakoff, “Stylistics,” 68). In contrast, one of the strengths of women’s language, Irigaray argues, is that it is outside of traditional dualism and may creatively discover alternatives. Language does more than describe an objective reality; the relationship between the signifier and the signified is highly subjective—language does not describe as much as create reality.

  Recognizing the subjective and creative potential of traditional gender-linked patterns at the comfortable distance afforded by “Hills Like White Elephants” verifies language’s profound imaginative power to define and shape what has always been defined as objective reality, but what is, in fact, closer to the protean fluidity of Jig’s “all this.” It is only through an understanding of such linguistic functions that there is a possibility of harmonizing its frustrating circularity and actualizing its creative potential of breaking through the confining limitations of a language in which “all [is] so simple,” so sterile, and so hopeless.

  Hemingway’s Primitivism and “Indian Camp”

  Jeffrey Meyers

  Hemingway’s “Indian Camp” (1924)—the first story in his first trade book and always one of his favorites1—has been subjected to a wide variety of interpretations, ranging from the obvious to the absurd, by critics who have recognized its power and struggled with its meaning. The story contains two shocking incidents: the doctor performs a Caesarean operation with a jackknife but without anesthetic, and the husband silently commits suicide. At least one critic has sensed that the suicide seems gratuitous—“in the context of the situation as given, it is too extreme an action”2—but did not attempt to explain the Indian’s behavior. My own interpretation, based on Hemingway’s attitude to primitive people and on his knowledge of anthropology, explains the most difficult aspects of the story: why the husband remains in the bunk of the shanty during the two days his wife has been screaming, and why he does not leave the room if he cannot bear her agonizing pain and shrieks. Despite his badly cut foot, he could have limped or been carried
out of range of the screams, if he had wished to, and joined the other men. “Indian Camp” reflects Hemingway’s ambiguous attitude to primitivism and shows his notable success in portraying the primitive.

  The interpretations of the story reveal the limitations of New Critical readings and of Hemingway criticism during the last thirty-five years. The obvious explanation of the Indian’s suicide is provided by the doctor in the story—“He couldn’t stand things, I guess”3—and has been dutifully repeated by more than twenty critics from 1951 to 1983.4 Other students of the story, bored with the manifest simplicity of this interpretation, have strained for variant readings but offered little more than subjective opinions. George Hemphill (1949) tersely blames the breech-birth: “The cause of his trouble is accidental.”5 Thomas Tanselle (1962), whose short but influential note opened a can of worms by mentioning and then dismissing the theory that Uncle George is the father of the baby, stresses the guilt the Indian feels for engendering the child (men, paradoxically, get pleasure from sex; women, pain): “His small part in the plot is itself indicative of his plight as he finds himself superfluous. . . . The Indian father not only feels de trop but also guilty for causing so much pain in one he loves. . . . [Hemingway is concerned with] a man’s helplessness and feeling of guilt during his wife’s labor.”6

  Kenneth Bernard (1965)—like Peter Hays (1971), Larry Grimes (1975), and Gerry Brenner (1983)—pounces on the theory rejected by Tanselle and claims the Indian kills himself because Uncle George is the real father of his putative son: “The new, bastard, way of life is not one that the Indian husband can tolerate; hence another reason [apart from the obvious one] for his suicide.”7 A decade later, Grimes repeats the notion that Bernard got from Tanselle:

  He has been unsuccessful as a husband and an Indian. His wife has made him a cuckold and he must witness the terrible breech-end birth. . . . The unnaturally born child could then be seen as the bastard product of the white man’s “rape” of the Indian. The Indian, unable to bear either his cuckoldry or the challenge of the white man’s ways (medical intervention in the patterns of birth and death, particularly) slits his throat.8

  This passage contains several disturbing distortions. Grimes states, but does not show, that “he has been unsuccessful as . . . an Indian.” He mistakenly asserts that the breech-birth is “unnatural.” He transforms the theoretical paternity of Uncle George into a white man’s “‘rape.’” He erroneously states the white man intervenes “in the patterns of . . . death.” And he does not explain why the Indian “must witness” the terrible birth.

  None of the critics explains why the violent Indian—who, if cuckolded, would be more likely to kill George than himself—has waited all this time to act. In “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” (also 1924), the next story in In Our Time, an Indian defies and humiliates Dr. Adams; and in “Indian Camp” there is nothing to prevent the Indian, if sufficiently motivated, to take his revenge. Indian girls are described as sexually promiscuous in “Ten Indians” (1927) and in “Fathers and Sons” (1933), where Nick sleeps with Trudy (while threatening to kill any Indian who even speaks to his sister) as Trudy’s brother encourages and watches their sexual act. But married Indian women are quite a different matter, and there is no evidence in the story that George ever slept with the squaw.

  George Monteiro (1973) offers a sociopathological explication: “It is the combination of his debilitating (even embarrassing) injury and the susceptibility (both physical and psychological) which always accompanies the sick role, I would submit, that causes his suicide.”9 The feminists—who predictably impose rather than extract a meaning—present a farfetched variant of Tanselle’s guilt theme. Linda Wagner (1975) mentions the “husband’s outspoken act of contrition” and condemns the well-meaning and helpful doctor for both his callousness and his cleanliness.10 Judith Fetterley (1978) carries Wagner’s views to an absurd extreme and twists the meaning into precisely the opposite of what Hemingway intended. Lady Fetterley’s lover is also guilt-ridden: “The lesson [for feminists] reflected in the double mirror of the two fathers [the doctor and the Indian] is one of guilt—guilt for the attitudes men have toward women and guilt for the consequences to women of male sexuality.”11 Fetterley’s exposition deliberately ignores female sexuality (the Indian did not mate with himself) and diminishes rather than enhances the significance of the story.

  Joseph Flora (1982), who has the longest elucidation of the story, twice repeats the standard interpretation and adds (but does not explain) a vicarious element: “His suicide suggests that he was dying in his wife’s place.” Flora, vaguely aware of the primitive aspect, states Nick Adams discovers that “the life of the more primitive people can teach him a great deal, for the primitive contains values [which?] that the doctor’s son needs [why?] to discover.” Instead of pursuing this fruitful line of inquiry, Flora offers a sentimental “apologies to the Iroquois” explanation: “‘Indian Camp’ conveys a great sense of their humanity, of their suffering and ability to love, and of their solidarity:”12 We might expect to find these elements in the story, but in fact Hemingway disappoints our expectations by revealing the opposite—there is no evidence of humanity, love, or solidarity. The Indians are strikingly affectless and isolated. The men moved out of range of the screams, the husband rolled over against the wall, and the only direct contact with the squaw is made by three Indians who, with Uncle George, held her down.

  Gerry Brenner (1983) adopts Bernard’s George-as-father theory and exaggerates Flora’s views into post-Wounded Knee cant. He maintains, against all reason, that the Indian’s death is positive: “His suicide aims to inflict a strong sense of guilt on Uncle George, becomes a dignified act that affirms the need to live with dignity or not at all, and lays at the feet of another treacherous white man the death of yet one more of the countless, dispossessed native Americans.”13

  Kenneth Lynn’s Freudian autobiographical interpretation (1987) relates the story to the circumstances surrounding the trouble-free birth of Hemingway’s first son in 1923. He reiterates the Indian’s demoralized apathy—“he cannot bring himself to help her in any way, or even watch the birth of his son”—and unconvincingly concludes: “when the Indian slits his throat, he acts out the thoughts of suicide to which Hemingway made reference in his letter to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas after Hadley and the baby had come home from the hospital.”14 Philip Young (1965), exasperated by the earlier bizarre interpretations, wittily claimed that he (not Uncle George) was the father and concluded: “The reason the husband cut his throat was that George had passed out all the cigars he had on him before he got to the camp.”15

  Hemingway’s attitude toward primitivism was ambiguous. In Torrents of Spring (1926) he satirized the native primitivism of Sherwood Anderson but continued to write, with infinitely more sophistication and skill, in the Lawrencean mode. When Wyndham Lewis’s Paleface (first published in his magazine the Enemy in September 1927) blasted the exaltation of Indian and Negro primitivism in Anderson’s Dark Laughter (1925), linked it with D.H. Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico (1927), and praised Hemingway’s satiric parody, Hemingway responded enthusiastically to Lewis’s work:

  I am very glad you liked The Torrents of Spring and thought you destroyed the Red and Black Enthusiasm very finely in Paleface. That terrible———about the nobility of any gent belonging to another race than our own (whatever it is) was worth checking. Lawrence you know was Anderson’s God in the old days—and you can trace his effect all through [Anderson’s] stuff. . . . In fact The Torrents of Spring was, in fiction form, performing the same purgative function as Paleface.l6

  At the time of Porgy, All God’s Chillun, The Emperor Jones, Nigger Heaven, and the cult of jazz, Hemingway rejected the fashionable assumption that the emotional and sensual life of the dark races was superior to that of the white.

  Lewis observed that The Torrents of Spring “amusingly pursues Mr. Sherwood Anderson through all the phases of his stupidity, especially stress
ing the ‘he-man’ foolishness, the ‘bursting Spring’ side of it.”17 But when Hemingway continued to portray instinctive and inarticulate characters, his former acquaintance and ally unleashed the most damaging attack ever made on his work. In “The Dumb Ox,” published in Men Without Art (1934)—a title probably derived from Men Without Women (1927)—Lewis shot barbs into Hemingway’s most vulnerable spots. Lewis emphasized his debt to Gertrude Stein, his lack of political awareness and his mindlessness, and wittily insisted: “Hemingway invariably invokes a dull-witted, bovine, monosyllabic simpleton . . . [a] lethargic and stuttering dummy . . . a super-innocent queerly-sensitive, village-idiot of a few words and fewer ideas.”18 Yet Lewis’ reductive satire, which exalted reason over instinct, ignored Hemingway’s conscious and complex use of primitivism. He had direct knowledge of the material in “Indian Camp”—it belonged to his childhood experience and was a source of his art—and had made it his legitimate subject.