Ernest Hemingway Literature Criticism

Table of Contents BookRags Literature Criticism....................................................................................1 Ernest Hemingway................................................................................................1 Copyright Information..........................................................................................1 Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay..........................................................................2

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BookRags Literature Criticism

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Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay SOURCE: Lindsay, Creighton. "Hemingway's Nexus of Pastoral and Tragedy." CLA Journal 43, no. 4 (June 2000): 454-78. In the following essay, Lindsay suggests that Hemingway fuses the traditions of the pastoral and tragedy in his writing. Less than three weeks before his death by suicide in the summer of 1961, Ernest Hemingway wrote to the ailing son of a friend that he was "very cheerful about things in general."1 The discrepancy between Hemingway's chatty tone and the inner turmoil of his life in his final days stands as a poignant symbol of the ironies and contrasts, the opposition of macho surface and fragile psyche, that we have come to see as so representative of his life and fiction. Hemingway had been staying at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and had enjoyed the countryside that surrounded the town and the nearby Mississippi River, and it is noteworthy that the better part of one of his last letters is taken up with consolation through enthusiasm for the natural landscape: "Saw some good bass jump in the river. I never knew anything about the upper Mississippi before and it is really a very beautiful country and there are plenty of pheasants and ducks in the fall" (921). One senses here a spontaneous and first-hand confidence that nature affords solace during convalescence, as if Hemingway wished to convey his own deeply held conviction that nature, even nature recalled and described, functions in a variety of rites of passage and perhaps especially last rites. Hemingway's rhetoric of confidence in nature's salvific power stands as paradigmatic of American pastoral to mid-century, a paradigm that is questioned by Leo Marx at the end of The Machine in the Garden as "unsatisfactory because the old symbol of reconciliation is obsolete."2 Pastoral reconciliation is an immensely complicated issue, made more difficult by the idiosyncracies of American pastoral. But in general Marx refers to the way the pastoral middle ground, the ideal place located between society and primitive retreat, ceases to function as a viable alternative, as a site to reconcile Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay

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the problems of the other two extremes. In Hemingway's case, the failure of reconciliation often leads to tragedy, but what is unsatisfactory about the tragic resolutions of his fables is the role the pastoral plays in the tragic scheme. We are able to see from the dubiously privileged position of an ecologically threatened fin de siecle America that the natural landscape is not the enduring, permanent backdrop against which Hemingway played out his tragic or pastoral fictions. Yet Hemingway's limitations of vision should not urge us to dismiss him as anachronistic; to the contrary, his amalgam of tragedy and pastoral allows us to see in high relief how a mix of metaphysics, scientific idealism, and literary convention can illuminate central problems that have only recently come to seem most urgent. Hemingway's struggle with the paradox inherent in both the tragic and the pastoral modes has, in Marx's words, "clarified our situation." Arriving at how Hemingway fuses pastoral and tragedy requires a look at the history of those two conventions with an eye toward where they intersect. Hence, what follows is intended to demonstrate the convergence of pastoral and tragedy through representative examples drawn from history, literature, and selected scholarship. The point of convergence, as I think the following discussion will demonstrate, is that pastoral and tragedy often share three qualities: an inextricable dependency on the natural landscape, unavoidable paradox, and a multivalent sense of irony. Hemingway carries on a long tradition of fusing pastoral and tragedy by exploring these qualities in his best fiction. The variety and number of theories concerning the essential natures of tragedy and pastoral are daunting, but a selective survey of them reveals some overlapping impulses. Critics and historians disagree over the precise origin of tragedy, although the larger share seems to concur that tragedy as dramatic event grew out of choral songs celebrating Dionysus, the Greek god of vegetation. Exactly when and how the urge to celebrate became an urge to dramatize is up for grabs, yet what seems fair to observe about that historically out-of-focus transformation is that human beings found in their cognition of the "mystery of sex and nature"3 something not only wonderful but deeply troubling. Friedrich Nietzche's famous theory of the origins of tragedy Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay

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explains this troubling component as deriving from the human identification of self-destructive urges, causing the early Greeks to see themselves as not far removed from, to use Nietzche's phrase, "the most savage beasts of nature."4 The paradox, then, is an old one, rooted in cognition itself. The ancient Greeks find consciousness an ambiguous cause for celebration. At once they marvel at their difference from nature and worry about their likeness to it. The triumphant moment, according to Nietzche, is when the Greeks decide to allow the equally powerful Apollonian instincts of control, form, and order to guide the unruly Dionysian side into an artistic act: drama, sculpture, music. For Nietzche, the essence of tragedy is located in the way antithetical impulses are worked out through that artistic process, a resolution we have to come to think of as mythopoesis. Other theories of the etiology of tragedy have focussed on the way different sets of opposing inclinations of the human mind (optimism versus pessimism, good versus better, family versus state, individual versus society) come to bear on the development of tragedy as an art-form, yet all of them presuppose the same connection of the tragic impulse to some human reaction to nature and nature's cycles. Even Oedipus Rex--a play overtly concerned with human, cultural, political, and metaphysical issues--has as its foundation a myth rooted in the complex attitudes toward what is natural and unnatural. The theme of incest--such an integral part of this archetypal tragedy--reflects subtle attitudes toward nature that predate the mythopoetic moment seized by the Greeks in Nietzche's triumph of art, as J. G. Frazer reminds us: Among many savage races breaches of the marriage laws are thought to blast the fruits of the earth through excessive rain or excessive drought. Similar notions of the disastrous effects of sexual crimes may be detected among some of the civilized races of antiquity, who seem not to have limited the supposed sterlizing influence of such offenses to the fruits of the earth, but to have extended it also to women and cattle.5 The attitude that seems to propel the Greek mind toward mythopoesis is the multivalent paradox that nature presents the conscious being: On the one hand, nature Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay

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is predictable and bountiful; on the other, it can surprise and deprive. The Homeric hymn to Dionysus betrays a concurrent trust and hope that reflect human incapacity to reason through this multivalent paradox: "So Hail to you, Dionysus rich in grape clusters; grant that we may in our joy go through these seasons again and again and again for many years."6 The celebration so evident in the testimonial aspects of this paean is attenuated by a kind of desperate hope behind the repetition of "again." Behind the common doxology lies a fretful anticipation. That the substance of tragedy is linked inextricably to the natural world might thus seem a given, yet theorists have consistently either overlooked the connection or underplayed it. In his philosophical investigation into the fundamentals of tragedy, for example, Lucien Goldmann confidently asserts that "it is nevertheless a fact that all forms of tragic vision have one feature in common: they all express a deep crisis in the relationship between man and his social and spiritual world."7 The ontological and epistemological bias of Goldmann's research causes him to overlook the other "deep crisis" that has been a part of tragedy for as long as the tragic impulse has been with us: the crisis in the relationship between humans and their natural environment. If that crisis seems particularly evident in the Hellenistic tradition (as the inherent ambiguity of human interaction with Dionysus suggests), it is also present in the Babylonian tradition, in which the tragic sense of crisis is also interestingly revealed in the tragic epic of Gilgamesh, where the story's tragedy seems to be defined by, among other things, a sense of loss that is first explored in Enkidu's loss of empathy with and understanding of the natural world: [Enkidu] was innocent of mankind; he knew nothing of the cultivated land. … Enkidu ate grass in the hills with the gazelle and lurked with wild beasts at the water-holes; he had joy of the water with the herds of wild game.8 Enkidu is lured away from this idyllic epistemology by a conscious human society that mistrusts his powers: "Enkidu was grown weak, for wisdom was in him, and the thoughts of a man were in his heart."9 Gaining consciousness is a two-edged sword for Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay

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Enkidu. It provides the intellectual wherewithal to experience friendship and devotion (as in his relationship with Gilgamesh), but these human capacities come at the price of his previous ability to dwell among the beasts. (Later, in the nineteenth century, Thoreau--in Walden--would explore the paradox inherent in human consciousness by calling the intellect a "cleaver,"10 which--in his characteristically punning manner--he means both to sever and to join, as in to "cleave to" something or someone.) As a result of this essential loss of understanding, the decimation of the cedar forests (a critical element of Gilgamesh's structure) presents itself as a kind of social and cultural confession, a cathartic exploration of the guilt associated with the power of humans to overlook their relationship to the natural world and to do damage to it. Some recent scholarship suggests that the origin of the turn of mind in Western Civilization that has caused it to be particularly irresponsible regarding the natural environment comes to historical fruition in Judeo-Christian anthropocentrism, deriving from the belief in an almighty God who adjures the human species to multiply and dominate the earth. Lynn White, for example, argues that "by destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feeling of natural objects."11 Max Oelschlaeger makes a similar argument about the earlier Hebraic tradition when he suggests that "the Hebrews desacralized nature and viewed it as the creation of a transcendent God who had given them an exclusive claim to the land."12 Although there is substance to this line of reasoning, it would be a mistake to lay all of the blame on the Judeo-Christian tradition for our current ecological short-sightedness. Oelschlaeger himself admits that "clearly the Bible conditions but does not determine the modern idea of the relation of humankind to nature."13 What becomes very clear, then, if we view the nature of tragedy as, at least partly, a crisis in the relationship between humans and their natural environment is that the Judeo-Christian tradition is not all that far removed from the Hellenistic one in the way it uses nature in the tragic dynamic. The apprehension regarding the natural world that Frazer contends serves as a defining psychological element of Oedipus, for example, also serves as a fundamental tension in the story of Job. Both Job and Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay

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Oedipus can be seen as tragic heroes because they find themselves in a state of crisis on three fronts, the first two of which demonstrate Goldmann's notion of the crisis being rooted in social and spiritual realms. In the social sense, both Oedipus and Job find themselves in problematic positions vis-a-vis their family and fellow citizens. Oedipus must struggle with the realization that he seems to have been chosen as the scapegoat, as the one who must through self-sacrifice allow the social catharsis to occur. Job, similarly, must contend with the unfathomable randomness of his descent into misery. Socially, he becomes an outcast for reasons he cannot begin to comprehend. There are differences, of course: Oedipus, for example, has the baggage of ancestral lineage that explains some of the vicissitudes of fate. There is no sense of indebtedness for the sins of the fathers in the story of Job (in fact, part of our fascination with Job derives from the sheer "unfairness" of God's treatment of him). Yet the fact remains that the two protagonists share crises on a very social level. Oedipus and Job also share crises in the spiritual realm. Oedipus questions the veracity of the Oracle at Delphi (perhaps as much from wishful thinking as anything else), but nevertheless he questions the ultimate nature of the powers of the universe, which constitutes blasphemy. And at least one way of interpreting the play is to accept Oedipus' fate as doctrinal divine retribution. Job, too, questions his God, but God's answer is profoundly ambiguous compared to the terrible consequences that befall Oedipus. Nevertheless, both protagonists experience tragic doubt in spiritual matters. Goldmann's emphasis on the social and spiritual aspects of the tragic crisis is illuminating, but social and spiritual crises do not occur in an environmental vacuum; they must happen in some landscape, and often that landscape defines a third kind of crisis that works systematically with the social and spiritual to form the complete tragic design. In Oedipus, for example, one must listen to the Priest's litany of environmental scourges that have beset Thebes: "A rust consumes the buds and fruits of the earth; / the herds are sick."14 And similarly in Job: "there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house" (Job 1.19). Although it would be an overstatement to suggest that all tragedies feature crises rooted in the natural landscape, a cursory glance at those stories most often considered tragic will Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay

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reveal that very many of them have hovering about them the question of the protagonist's relationship to his natural landscape. Even Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman struggles with the barrenness of his backyard garden, revealing that at least part of the tragedy of Willy's life is symbolized by the way the earth is incapable of growth. Although the play concerns itself most overtly with the eroding fabric of American culture, at least part of Willy's crisis is defined by a similar erosion of nature. If pastoral and tragedy share an inherent impulse to explore relationships between humans and the natural landscape, they also share in an equally inherent way the impulse to explore paradox. The paradox that clusters around pastoral and tragedy is multivalent, but one way of seeing it as cohesive or unified is to expose both pastoral and tragedy to a third mode: primitivism. When the pastoral and tragic protagonists find themselves forced by circumstances to act, to decide, to engage, primitivism often emerges as a choice or urge. The paradox arises in that although the primitive impulse presents itself as an extension of both the tragic and pastoral design, it cannot comprise the protagonist's ultimate action, choice, or engagement, for to do so causes the tragic or pastoral to evaporate, to be replaced by the merely primitive. Bringing the primitive impulse to bear on the pastoral and tragic modes is revealing. The pastoral mode depends on the tension that exists between the complexity of the urban environment and the relative simplicity of the garden. But the garden is not the natural world of the primitive being. The pastoral protagonist is either the character who finds himself in the garden or the reader who succumbs to the rhetorical charm of the representation of the garden (or both). But in either case, the protagonist cannot maintain the tension that is so crucial to the pastoral impulse if he allows the primitive impulse to become a reality. In other words, the pastoral impulse depends on the paradox that the pastoral design cannot last; it is inherently transitory. To give in to the desire for the primitivist state melts the very essence of pastoral, which operates on the assumption that the primitive state has problems of its own (danger, hardship) but that those problems would not be perceived as such. They would be absorbed into the general tendency to view human relationship to the natural world as "continuous."15 Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay

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Hemingway is often characterized as a primitivist writer or at least as a writer who seems to value archetypal primitivism. Critics often point to the worth Hemingway ascribes to Native American traits (physicial strength, sensitivity to nature, animistic belief systems) in his series of Nick Adams stories. Joseph Flora, for example, interprets "Indian Camp," one of Hemingway's earliest Nick Adams stories, as a coming-of-age account in which the young Nick "will discover that the life of the more primitive people can teach him a great deal."16 Recent critics have used an anthropological perspective to frame their discussions of Hemingway's treatment of Native Americans. This perspective tends to deflect the focus of interpretation from traditional concern with the role of the protagonist to a more context-bound concern with just how accurate Hemingway's portrayals of Native Americans are. Jeffrey Meyers points out, for example, that most explications of the chief plot function in "Indian Camp," the Indian husband's suicide during his wife's labor, overlook the importance of the anthropological notion of couvade, "in which a man ritualistically imitates the symptoms of pregnancy and the moans during delivery."17 Rather than stress Nick's coming-of-age, Meyers sees the story as a primitivist ritual interrupted by white men, the result of which is the death of the Indian husband, who commits suicide because he takes to an extreme his imitation of the birthing process (which involves a Caesarean operation performed by Nick's father). Meyers' interpretation of "Indian Camp" illustrates the way primitivism brings paradox to bear on the pastoral situation. Nick's camping trip takes him away from the civilized world, but as long as he remains in his camp, he has not ventured away from the pastoral landscape into a primitive one. When he does accompany his father and Uncle George to the Indian camp, the primitive landscape, he must come to grips with the paradox revealed by circumstance: "the contrast between the squalid and the clinical shows that the Indians need the white man's skill, but are also destroyed by it."18 The squalor of the primitive life highlights by contrast how artificial and tentative the pastoral landscape of Nick's camp really is. And Nick's hopeful, although trumped-up, confidence at the end of the story that "he would never die" (95) seems yet another metaphor for a longing for the permanence of the pastoral state, which paradoxically cannot last.

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But coexisting with the pastoral aspects of "Indian Camp" is an equally redolent sense of tragedy, although that tragedy never actually coalesces. The heart of tragedy is human struggle, and although the tragic protagonist often resorts to violence in his struggle (which often serves to remind us of our more animal instincts), that violence typically grows out of very human impulses. Thus Oedipus' violence to himself, his self-blinding at the end of the play, is not a succumbing to a primitive impulse or a forsaking of consciousness; rather, it is a tragic reaction motivated by very human emotions. In this sense, we return to Goldmann's notion of the social and spiritual aspects of tragedy. Although Nature is typically a third component of the tragic design, tragedy cannot exist in Nature exclusive of the social and spiritual aspects. A primitivist abandonment to animism, anthropomorphism, and simplistic cognition causes the tragic atmosphere to disappear. If we perceive a protagonist's fate as experience in blind acceptance of a primitive continuum, the apparent grand design of Nature, the sense of struggle becomes attenuated and the consequences take on the air of a fait accompli. That tragedy can have about it inevitability is clear, but the protagonist must be aware of his struggle against that inevitability. The primitive protagonist does not perceive his struggle as perculiarly human or social, and if he did think of his struggle as spiritual, it would not be spiritual in distinctly human terms. The paradox highlighted by bringing primitivism to bear on tragedy is that although tragedy must engage nature to some degree, it cannot give itself over to nature completely. In this sense, then, it is difficult to think of the suicide in "Indian Camp" as a tragic act. The husband's death seems sadly poignant, perhaps ironic, in some ways pathetic--but not tragic. The human struggle in the story--the struggle most imbued with the social, spiritual, and natural aspects we have been looking at--seems to be going on in Nick himself. But Nick's retreat from reality, his disengagement at the end of the story, his choice to idealize the future in his certainty that he "would never die" (95), denies the story tragic elevation. And if the story functions as a pastoral, it does so as sentimental pastoral, in which, as Leo Marx remarks, people "turn way from the hard social and technological realities."19 But Hemingway's story endures because of the ironic distance between the narrative and Nick's pastoral retreat. The narrator Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay

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seems to be suggesting that there is something missing in Nick's internalization of the story's events. Hemingway uses tragedy and pastoral, consciously or otherwise, as rhetorical figures to demonstrate the limitations of these conventions when they are exposed to primitivism. Thus tragic and pastoral protagonists share a mutual paradox. They are stuck with their consciousness; they must acknowledge the human aspects of their struggles even as they realize the way nature frames both problem and solution. Their consciousness forces them to reconcile themselves to their situation, and this reconciliation is, at least in classical literature, where tragedy and pastoral have diverged. Tragic protagonists typically reconcile themselves through enormous self-sacrifice--typically death; pastoral protagonists, on the other hand, reconcile themselves through various forms of consolation. Mourning shepherds must console themselves with their songs. Or we, as the audience rhetorically captured in the pastoral paradox, must wistfully accept that the pastoral garden is temporary. There is a sense of the unresolved about the pastoral: Virgil's Tityrus and Meliboeus in Eclogue One end ambiguously with Meliboeus disenfranchised and homeless, his only consolation having been his conversation with Tityrus regarding his predicament. Tragedy, on the other hand, seems to end conclusively through cathartic release: Oedipus blinds himself. In the classical sense, tragedy builds tension in order to release it while pastoral ignores tension in order to point to its presence, made apparent by rigorous avoidance of climax and denouement. The rhetorical effect of much of Hemingway's fiction is to collapse these two disparate tendencies so that what seems like tragic catharsis is actually pastoral tension, as at the end of "Indian Camp," where the apparent purgation caused by the Indian's suicide actually leads to Nick's troubling denial of life's complexity. The role of nature in this collapse of tendencies is revealing. Hemingway's best fiction often manages to effect a sense of purgation as it simultaneously thrusts the characters and readers into a troubling world of tension, and that tension often emerges as a result of the sacrificial roles Hemingway designs for nature. In Hemingway's stories, tragedy and pastoral blend at great cost to nature. Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay

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In 1923, as foreign correspondent for The Toronto Star Weekly, Hemingway covered his first bullfight. The dispatch is interesting for a variety or reasons. For one, it illustrates his characteristic eye for the rich tapestry of experience surrounding sport. It also gives us an early example of the distinction Hemingway would make often in his career between mere sport and sport imbued with something else: "At any rate bull fighting is not a sport. It is a tragedy, and it symbolizes the struggle between man and the beasts."20 For Hemingway, bull fighting is fraught with meaning, an event that somehow transcends sport by the way it manages to capture the intrinsic disparity yet symbolic similarity between man and nature. Earlier in the same dispatch, Hemingway suggests that one of the things that makes the bullfight a tragedy is "the death of the bull,"21 suggesting that he was able, at times, to view nature in the role of tragic protagonist. This distinction between sport and tragedy and the tendency to evoke a vague animism by placing nature in tragic circumstances appear often in Hemingway's fiction as rhetorical signals that human characters are confronting their own challenges or struggles. And judging from the way nature recedes at these very moments, it would appear that Hemingway would like his reader to focus on the ways his human characters respond to those challenges and struggles. But seen through the lens of a world in ecological peril, the reader can not help but notice the way nature gets reduced to rhetorical ploy. One of the earliest examples of this trade-off occurs toward the end of "Big Two-Hearted River," the two-part masterpiece that concludes the short story collection In Our Time. As most critics point out, it is important to place "Big Two-Hearted River" in the context of the other stories in the collection dealing with Nick Adams, the first of which is "Indian Camp." As a whole, these stories chronicle Nick's psychic collapse and apparent renewal, beginning with his pastoral denial at the end of "Indian Camp" and culminating in his return to nature and wholeness in "Big Two-Hearted River." Throughout the Nick Adams stories, Hemingway makes repeated references to Nick's war experiences, and at least part of the rebirth that happens during the pastoral retreat in "Big Two-Hearted River" is depicted as recovery from the deep psychological wounds of human conflict.

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"Big Two-Hearted River" is a catalog of ritual, a methodical account of the deliberate, careful, and ceremonial exercises Nick goes through on a fishing trip in the Michigan woods. In part, Hemingway intends the roteness of the ritual to illustrate the healing process: that Nick is able to recall and act out the various tasks involved in the outing symbolizes his return from chaos to familiarity. Structurally, the story could have been set in any commonplace scene containing a series of habitual exercises. But clearly Hemingway accentuates the importance of nature in the process of renewal by causing Nick to regain familiarity with himself in the equally familiar surroundings of the woods. Rhetorically, this is a classic pastoral moment: the disenchanted man of the world seeks spiritual healing in the tranquility of pristine nature. Nick's river is not the tended garden, but the tidy and comfortable camp Nick methodically constructs indicates that the pastoral place is not wilderness either, at least not in the primitivist sense. Nick's fishing trip is not a foray into danger, not a primitivist attempt to lose consciousness. Rather, it is an undertaking designed to allow Nick to reconnect with a part of his very human consciousness that the war has caused him to forget. If we perceive Nick's fishing trip as an extended pastoral retreat, during which Nick regains through ritual a state of psychological well-being, Hemingway's clearest signal to his readers that Nick has initiated that process of psychic renewal occurs at the end of the story where Nick eschews fishing in the dark and difficult swamp: Nick did not want to go in there now. He felt a reaction against deep wading with the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in places impossible to land them. In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. (231) The standard interpretation of this passage is that Nick equates the complexity of fishing in the swamp, where the trout are large but fishing conditions are difficult, Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay

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with the war experiences he is trying to exorcise. As Wirt Williams suggests, "The reasonable inference is that Nick wants to defer an immediate return into experience that has been painful and stamped with some aspects of tragedy."22 In Hemingway's mind, the fishing Nick has done to this point in the story has been sport, while the fishing he abjures in the swamp is tragic. Curiously, the tragic elements of bull fighting, which so entranced Hemingway, became something to be forsworn regarding fishing in the story "Big Two-Hearted River." In choosing not to wade into the swamp, Nick effectively renounces the worst aspects of worldliness, the tragic engagement associated with war. His pastoral retreat has afforded him the opportunity to meditate on the human condition, and there is a nice symmetry to the way the swamp is not distinct or separate from the tributary he has been fishing, effectively suggesting that Nick's new awareness is not a simplistic pastoral idealism but rather a mature sense of how problematic his return to civilization will be: the tragedy of the swamp literally flows with the reconciling waters of the tributary. Yet in Hemingway's pastoral design (one in which both primitivism and tragedy appear to have been renounced), Nick's next move is, at the very least, deeply ironic. Having "whacked" (231) the two fish he had caught earlier, Nick proceeds to clean them, slitting them from the vent to the tip of the jaw. All the insides and the gills and tongue came out in one piece. They were both males; long gray-white strips of milt, smooth and clean. All the insides clean and compact, coming out together. (231) Joseph Flora has suggested that this clinically frank description of Nick cleaning the fish represents Nick's embracing of life upon repudiating the darkness of the swamp: "The way to check the call of the deep woods or the dark swamp is to resort to action,"23 drawing an analogy between the way Nick breaks free from his tragic revery and the way Frost's persona in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" "must put Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay

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his horse back into motion towards the fulfillment of his obligations."24 What is ironic about Nick's "resort to action," however, is that it resembles the very thing he has renounced. At what point does the tragic struggle of the swamp, which Nick abnegates, differ from the pastoral "sport" of fishing in the tributary, which Nick enjoys? And how does the killing associated with the "tragic" struggle in the swamp differ from the ritualistic cleaning of the fish? Why is it that the "tragic adventure" of the swamp is something Nick feels a "deep reaction against" while simultaneously he seems indifferent to the death throes of the two fish he is about to clean, noting with satisfaction that they are "fine trout" (231)? Somewhere in Hemingway's pastoral and tragic ethic there appears to be a blind spot. To suggest that there is this blind spot is not to deny a very real sense that part of Nick's renewal comes from the denial of wholesale slaughter; that is, Nick's epiphany, in part, is that the two fish he has caught will suffice as sustenance, which obviates the gratuitous "tragedy" of fishing in the swamp. Yet Hemingway undercuts this logic slightly by suggesting in the final line of the story that "there were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp" (232). To note the ironies and apparent disjunctions in the story is to point out that it is overdetermined, that it not only supports a variety of conflicting interpretations but also resists categorical explication. This is, of course, one of the story's strengths. But this overdetermination also reveals an almost cavalier attitude toward the role of nature in Hemingway's pastoral and tragic designs. Looked at from an ecocritical perspective, Hemingway seems unsystematic regarding what he wants nature to stand for in his pastoral and tragic stories. On the one hand, nature is supposed to represent not merely an arena in the tragic drama played out between man and fish. In this sense, the fish takes on the same importance as the bull in Hemingway's dispatch from Madrid. Fishing in the swamp is not a sport but a ritualized representation of the mysterious struggle between man and nature, a struggle in which, according to Hemingway's configuration, the fish dies in a fateful yet somehow noble way. The nobility of the stuggle, and what apparently makes fishing in the swamp a struggle, is the relative difficulty of the fishing:

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It would not be possible to walk through a swamp like that. The branches grew so low. You would have to keep almost level with the ground to move at all. You could not crash through the branches. (231) The danger of the bullfight is replaced by the difficulty of the fishing, and in some way Hemingway equates this difficulty with turning the mere sport of fishing into a dramatic, ritualized event. On the other hand, there is the sport of fishing in the open stream, the pastoral place that allows Nick to recover enough from his psychic wounds to renounce the tragedy of fishing in the swamp. Unlike the tragic drama of fishing in the swamp, which as readers we never experience, the sport of open-stream fishing is described in rich detail. What characterizes it is excitement as Nick first hooks a trout, disappointment as he loses it, cunning and agility throughout. However, what also characterizes the sport of fishing is the death of the fish. Hemingway manages to effect a rhetorical sleight of hand by representing swamp-fishing as materially different from the stream fishing. Whereas Hemingway wants to represent the swamp as a tragic arena that Nick uses in pastoral renewal, the truth is that if tragedy exists at all in the story, it is most apparent in the death of the two fish he has caught. But this is true only if we accept Hemingway's vague sense of tragedy. What seems more reasonable to suggest is that both stream and swamp represent pastoral places of renewal and that it is only Hemingway's rhetoric that imbues this pastoral with tragic dimension. It also seem fair to note that Nick's pastoral renewal comes at some cost to nature, the two trout in this story. Hemingway's rhetoric would have us believe that Nick derives psychic health from the pastoral garden, and to some extent this is certainly the case; after all, Nick will return to society with a renewed sense of hope and faith in the human experience. But he does not leave the pastoral garden without having altered its ecological balance.

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The two fish sacrificed in "Big Two-Hearted River" do not seem a high price to pay considering Nick's pastoral renewal. Moreover, Nick's incantation that he "did not care about getting many trout" (228) and the fact that he stops at two illustrates a faint acknowledgement of nature's economy. But other stories display no such acknowledgement. On the contrary, many of Hemingway's fictions indicate a wanton disregard for wildlife as the human protagonists seek either pastoral renewal or tragic elevation. Hemingway claimed, in a frequently cited letter to Maxwell Perkins, that The Sun Also Rises "was a damn tragedy with the earth abiding forever as the hero,"25 implying that his characters' concerns, which he saw as representative of a generation he had little respect for, were petty compared to the great permanence and humble abundance of nature. Yet a scrutiny of Hemingway's sense of tragedy and the way he attempts to blend the tragic urge with the pastoral reveals a confusing picture. We often find in Hemingway's stories, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is one example, that the pastoral retreat merges with the tragic impulse to create a curious blend. And despite his claims about the point of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway typically creates a tragic conflict in which the overt hero is a human protagonist who assumes the earth "abideth forever" despite his exploitation of it in achieving his tragic status. Francis Macomber is one such protagonist. Getting at precisely what makes him tragic is elusive, but his tragic stature certainly has something to do with the price he is willing to pay, and eventually does pay, for achieving courage. Wirt Williams, in his influential work on Hemingway's tragic vision, focuses on how Macomber emotes this willingness as the chief characteristic that makes him tragic: Despite the psychic and ethical narrowness of Macomber's triumph, the quality of the writing gives it the conviction of importance. Facing with exaltation a Cape buffalo about to kill him may not be a particularly profound or intelligent act on the face of it, but Macomber feels it to be supremely profound. And it becomes so, in the framework. He is willing to die for the concept and he does die, thus becoming a tragic figure.

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Ernest Hemingway Literature Criticism

(126-27)26 Williams is astute here in acknowledging the importance of death in Hemingway's tragic design. The significance of death to tragic elevation remains intact for Hemingway in 1936, when this story was published, demonstrating a consistent notion of the mode since his dispatch from Madrid thirteen years before in which he proclaims with confidence that bull fighting is tragic because of the "death of the bull." Had Macomber been merely gored by the buffalo or maimed by his wife, he would not have achieved tragic stature. But there are other deaths in this story, the deaths of many wild beasts; moreover, these deaths occur in the context of a traditional pastoral retreat. Once again, Hemingway merges the two modes to create a fascinating yet problematic hybrid. Macomber's pastoral retreat may skirt the wild, but his foray into nature is certainly not a complete abnegation of civilization, no primitivist resignation of humanity. The Macombers and their guide, Wilson, have created a garden outpost for themselves in the wild, where they sip gimlets and hunt their quarry from the relative security of an autombile. Morever, the Macombers seek the pastoral garden not for the meditative renewal that Nick pursues by the banks of the Big Two-Hearted River but for the acquisition of the symbols of that garden--taxidermal trophies. Nick returns to civilization, we imagine, with memories of the garden; the Macombers want to return with memorabilia. Studies of pastoral in the European tradition point out the way the mode often works by creating a sensitivity, either in the characters or in the reader, to disparities. At its most psychologically complex level, the disparity can be between what the character or reader wishes for--solace, renewal, peace--and what is unavoidable outside the garden walls. This disparity is, in fact, fundamental to the workings of the mode. The solace of the garden, as Harold Toliver puts it (using Kenneth Burke's phrase), "habitually calls forth an opposite and promotes a variety of "perspective by the incongruity.""27 In "Big Two-Hearted River," the reader senses the same incongruities that Nick does: that the pastoral garden is unlike the world outside it. In this sense we applaud his denial of the tragedy that fishing in the swamp would represent because it would be incongruous with the circumstances and tone of Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay

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Ernest Hemingway Literature Criticism

Nick's purpose for being there. In "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," however, we feel a different kind of incongruity which derives from the reader's discomfort caused by the Macombers' presence in the garden to begin with. Toliver's list of typical incongruities is revealing when applied to the pastoral design of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber": Whether the scene is an explicit Arcadian society or some place of enclosed quiet, it is likely to be exposed to such things as industrialism, death, unrequited love, unjust property division, or merely an opposing idea of perfection.28 The pastoral landscape the Macombers create for themselves takes on characteristics both of Arcadian society and of an enclosed, quiet place. And this landscape is exposed--by story's end--to most of the things Toliver lists as incongruous phenomena. What Toliver intends by "Arcadian society" is a generalization for a complex set of characteristics. Strictly speaking, the Arcadian society is comprised of shepherds, who live a life largely unencumbered by physical want and whose role in the pastoral design is to show by contrast the incongruities of Toliver's list. In this sense, the Macombers fit the bill with ironic intensity. Certainly the wealthy and idle Macombers suffer from little or no physical want. And although the action of the story ventures into the dangerous wild, much of the framing of the narrative takes place in the "quiet enclosure" that the Macombers have created for themselves in that wild: their camp is comfortable, they have bearers for all their gear and provisions, a cook provides them with their meals. This ironic Arcadian society and portable "enclosed quiet" highlight by contrast many of the types of things Toliver notes as incongruous, some as incidental as industrialism (the car and high-powered rifles), others (death) more fundamental to the story itself. There is no sense of perfection in the life or society represented by either the Macombers or Wilson, but compared to the trivial lives these Arcadian inhabitants live, an "opposing idea of perfection" does emerge--the realm of nature itself. And it is in this arena that the true tragedy of the story occurs. Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay

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Ernest Hemingway Literature Criticism

In turning to a discussion of tragedy in this story, it is natural to focus on Francis Macomber as a tragic protagonist. He is, on the face of it, the one who sacrifices the most in a seemingly fierce struggle to avoid an inevitable fate. But Macomber offers us little to admire beyond his desire to achieve courage. If anything, we balk at the price nature must pay for him to gain his goal. At least part of our reaction is due to the historical reality of how wildlife in Africa has become endangered precisely because of people like Macomber. It is certainly possible to derive great pleasure from Hemingway's stylistic command, development of character, and subtle manipulation of the tragic mode in this story. But it seems fair to suggest that in a time when the very species Hemingway writes about are threatened by extinction the reader must also factor in the terrible way Macomber contributes to the current environmental dilemma. In a recent article, concerned primarily with Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, Glen Love points to a paradox confronting Hemingway's tragic heroes: [T]ragedy depicts an earth which, although it may be present only metaphorically in the drama, must yield up its nobility to a human hero whose usurping of that nobility is accompanied by profound misgivings.29 Those misgivings seem particularly poignant in Santiago's case, as Love illustrates, but Macomber exhibits very little in the way of misgivings regarding the toll on wildlife his climb to tragic stature takes. Ironically, it is Macomber's wife who eventually kills her husband because she cannot accept his courage, who comes the closest to uttering any misgivings: "Just because you've chased some helpless animals in a motor car you talk like heroes" (33). Yet Mrs. Macomber's concern here really is not focused on the plight of wildlife; rather, her misgivings hinge on her own growing anxiety over her husband's newfound fearlessness. Her chiding of Wilson and her husband is nothing more than a taunt.

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Ernest Hemingway Literature Criticism

What is certainly absent at Macomber's moment of truth is any sense of "misgiving." Macomber has no awareness of the terrible cost to nature his heroic quest has exacted. In the moment before his death, Macomber exhibits no sympathy for the bull he is about to kill. Instead, Hemingway's narration, from Macomber's point of view, describes the animal as having "little wicked eyes." Macomber here seems to need to position himself against something evil in order to bolster his courage. Ultimately, Hemingway's hero and narrative design have nothing to do with a primitivist animism, which would be characterized by an awareness of, if not outright empathy with, the animal. As Love points out, "Hemingway's was essentially not an Indian but a mountain-man mentality in its relationship to the wild."30 Fundamental to Leo Marx's idea of "complex pastoralism" is the notion that the pastoral garden, what Marx calls the "symbolic repository of meaning and value," concomitantly makes the reader or protagonist "acknowledge the power of a counterforce."31 This counterforce is akin to Toliver's idea of "incongruity." In the traditional pastoral and particularly in American pastorals before the twentieth century, the counterforce was typically a machine of some kind. Technology is an important counterforce in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," but Hemingway complicates this traditional formula by creating a counterforce out of human insensitivity. The result is a curious hybrid of tragedy and pastoral, in which the modern reader reacts perhaps differently compared to Hemingway's contemporaries, who believed--with Hemingway--that the tragic struggle between individuals and fate could be played out against a backdrop of a natural world that would abide forever. Notes 1. Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: The Selected Letters, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner's, 1981) 921. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford UP, 1979) 364. 3. Mark P. O. Morford and Robert Lenardon, Classical Mythology (New York: Longman, 1991) 263. Critical Essay by Creighton Lindsay

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4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy: History and Problems, trans. Samuel Enoch Stumf (New York: McGraw, 1971) 379. 5. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1991) 113. 6. Morford 261. 7. Lucien Goldmann, "The Tragic Vision: the World," Moderns on Tragedy, ed. Lionel Abel (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1967) 273. 8. N. K. Sandars ed., The Epic of Gilgamesh (London: Penguin, 1972) 63. 9. Sandars 65. 10. Henry David Thoreau Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, ed. William Rossi (New York: Norton, 1992) 67. 11. Lynn White, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Science 155 (10 March 1967): 1205. 12. Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991) 45. 13. Oelschlaeger 373. 14. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, in The Oedipus Cycle, trans. Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt, 1949). 15. Michel Bell, Primitivism (London: Methuen, 1972) 9. 16. Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner's, 1966) 25. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 17. Jeffrey Meyers, "Hemingway's Primitivism and "Indian Camp,"" New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, ed Jackson J. Benson (Durham: Duke UP, 1990) 306. 18. Meyers 308. 19. Marx 5. 20. Ernest Hemingway, "Bull Fighting a Tragedy," By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, ed. William White (New York: Scribner's, 1968) 84. 21. Hemingway, "Bull Fighting a Tragedy" 84. 22. Wirt Williams, The Tragic Art of Ernest Hemingway (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1931) 38.

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23. Joseph M. Flora, Hemingway's Nick Adams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1982) 174. 24. Flora 174. 25. Hemingway, Selected Letters 9. 26. Williams 126-27. 27. Harold E. Toliver, Pastoral Forms and Attitudes (Berkeley: U of California P, 1971) 1. 28. Tolliver 1. 29. Glen Love, "Hemingway's Indian Virtues: an Ecological Reconsideration," Western American Literature 22.3 (November 1987): 206. 30. Love 209. 31. Marx 363.

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