THIS is the third part of a six-part essay called ‘Caveat lector’. If you have landed here before reading the other parts, it might make more sense to read the parts in sequence. Here are links to all six parts:
CARLOS BAKER compounds his inconsistency when he analyses one of those stories, Alpine Idyll (which appeared in Hemingway’s collection Men Without Women): the ‘psychological symbol-building’ is turned on its head (and it is more than puzzling that Baker did not seem to realise what he had done). The mountains, in The Sun Also Rises and a Farewell To Arms the ‘beautiful’ ‘natural’ place, now become the ‘unnatural’ place: up in the mountains (writes Baker) the Swiss peasant at the centre of the story had ‘lived too long in an unnatural situation’ and ‘his sense of human dignity and decency [had] temporarily atrophied’. When
In fact, the suggestion is not that Hemingway is at fault, but that Baker is: once Baker had elevated Hemingway to the status of ‘artist’, one suspects he felt he was obliged to find significance, meaning and artistry in every corner and aspect of Hemingway’s work and does so with verve, at the expense, it would seem, of consistency.
As for his insights, for example when outlining a
The central point is that although for some readers Baker’s analysis might well add to the enjoyment and appreciation of Hemingway’s novel, he is neither ‘right’ nor ‘wrong’ because there can be neither a ‘right’ nor a ‘wrong’ reading.
are confronted by ‘nothingness’ (‘nada’). More to the point, Gabriel begins by suggesting it as a possibility and concludes by treating it as a conclusive explanation. Baker does something similar when he spins quite ordinary events — Brett Ashley being refused entry into a place of Christian worship, being surrounded by boisterous revellers, Robert Cohn falling asleep in the back room of a wine shop, an insomniac Jake Barnes weeping at night over his impotence — into significance.
he gets down into the valley, where it is spring and the people are living naturally and wholesomely, he sees how far he has strayed from the natural and the wholesome, for spring has been established in the [narrator’s] internal monologue as the ‘natural’ place. In the carefully wrought terms of the story, the valley stands in opposition to the unnatural high mountain spring.The Sun Also Rises and the later short story, Alpine Idyll, described by Baker as an ‘apparently simple tale’, are admittedly two separate works, and Hemingway was under no obligation to adopt and repeat the ‘psychological symbol-building’ of his first novel and applying the ‘different kind of precision . . . of the poet-symbolist’ (if that was what he was doing) when writing his short story. But it is unusual, if Baker’s analysis holds, that he should reverse the symbolism of the first novel in the subsequent short story, only to revert to the original symbolism when composing his second novel.
In fact, the suggestion is not that Hemingway is at fault, but that Baker is: once Baker had elevated Hemingway to the status of ‘artist’, one suspects he felt he was obliged to find significance, meaning and artistry in every corner and aspect of Hemingway’s work and does so with verve, at the expense, it would seem, of consistency.
Thus he also detects — flatly contradicting his claim that Hemingway did not follow Eliot’s and Joyce’s ‘mythological method’ — supposed correlations between elements in The Sun Also Rises and Homer’s Odyssey and Greek and other myths. Mike Campbell quotes Robert Cohn comparing Brett Ashley to Circe (who turned men into swine), with Campbell adding ‘I wish I were one of those literary chaps’. Baker comments
All this is convincing enough for those who intend to be convinced and, proclaims Baker, it all adds up to Hemingway’s artistry. He goes further: before the fiesta week has begun, Jake Barnes, a Roman Catholic, wants to make his confession and Brett Ashley wants to go with him to hear it; Barnes tells her that would not be possible, that it would not be as interesting as she thought it might be and it would be in a language she did not understand (which, says Baker, pursuing more possible significance, is ‘the Christian language’ not Spanish or Latin). Later, as the image of San Fermin is taken from church to church and Brett and Jake go to follow it into one chapel, she is denied entrance
Was not Brett Ashley, on her low-lying island in the Seine, just such a fascinating peril as Circe on Aeaea? Did she not open her doors to all the modern Achaean chaps? When they drank her special potion of French applejack or Spanish wine, did they not become as swine, or in the modern idiom, wolves? Did not Jake Barnes, that wily Odysseus, resist the shameful doom which befell certain of his less wary comrades who became snarling beasts?Baker also chooses to hear echoes of Homer when a miserable Jake Barnes wakes at night and weeps a little over the impotence which denies him union with Brett Ashley; and he hears echoes of Homer when Robert Cohn falls asleep among the casks in the back room of a Pamplona wine shop.
All this is convincing enough for those who intend to be convinced and, proclaims Baker, it all adds up to Hemingway’s artistry. He goes further: before the fiesta week has begun, Jake Barnes, a Roman Catholic, wants to make his confession and Brett Ashley wants to go with him to hear it; Barnes tells her that would not be possible, that it would not be as interesting as she thought it might be and it would be in a language she did not understand (which, says Baker, pursuing more possible significance, is ‘the Christian language’ not Spanish or Latin). Later, as the image of San Fermin is taken from church to church and Brett and Jake go to follow it into one chapel, she is denied entrance
. . . ostensibly [writes Baker] because she has no hat. But for one sufficiently awake to ulterior meaning of the incident it strikingly resembles the attempt of a witch to gain entry into a Christian sanctum. Brett’s witch-hood is immediately underscored. Back in the street she is encircled by the chanting pagan dancers who prevent her from joining their figure: ‘They wanted her as an image to dance around.’ When the song ends, she is rushed to a wine-shop and seated on an up-ended wine-cask. The shop is dark and full of men singing — ‘hard-voiced singing’.Baker continues
The intent of this episode is quite plain. Brett would not understand the language used in a Christian confessional. She is forbidden to follow the religious procession into the chapel. The dancers adopt her as a pagan image. She is perfectly at home on a wine-cask amidst the hard-voiced singing of the non-religious celebrants. Later in fiesta week, the point is re-emphasised. Jake and Brett enter the San Fermin chapel so that Brett can pray for Romero’s success in the final bullfight of the celebration. ‘After a little [says Jake] I felt Brett stiffen beside me and saw she was looking straight ahead.’ Outside the chapel Brett explains what Jake had already guess: ‘I’m damned bad for religious atmosphere. I’ve got the wrong type of face.’Brett, says Baker,
in her own way is a lamia with a British accent, a Morgana le Fay of Paris and Pamplona, the reigning queen of a paganised wasteland with a wounded fisherman as her half-cynical squire [i.e. Jake Barnes].Well, perhaps, and perhaps not; and one should also note that despite the seeming plausibility and apparent neatness of Baker’s analysis, those readers who are ‘sufficiently awake’ might also spot that he is rather sloppy: he conveniently chooses to gloss over — or, worse, it did not even register with Baker — that at her second attempt to enter a chapel, Brett — a quasi ‘witch’ and ‘lamia with a British accent’ — is not denied entry and has no trouble getting in.
As for his insights, for example when outlining a
reigning queen of a paganised wasteland with a wounded fisherman as her half-cynical squireis Baker onto something? Or is he, conversely, badly over-egging his pudding? Far more fundamentally, did Hemingway ‘the artist’ actually intend to make these allusions? We just don’t know simply because there is no way of knowing.
The central point is that although for some readers Baker’s analysis might well add to the enjoyment and appreciation of Hemingway’s novel, he is neither ‘right’ nor ‘wrong’ because there can be neither a ‘right’ nor a ‘wrong’ reading.
Pertinently, though, and recalling Virginia Woolf’s astonishment at the ‘power of human credulity’, most of us might be more inclined than not to accept the dicta of Carlos Baker, and from there it is an easy step to treat his findings as established ‘fact’ — that he is ‘right’. After all Baker was a Princeton professor of English and he surely possessed more virtual wigs, robes and outriders than you or I could shake a stick at. But we are still obliged to tread carefully.
Then there is the dilemma the reader faces when one analysis wholly contradicts another: both might be equally plausible, but they can’t both be right.
. . .
Then there is the dilemma the reader faces when one analysis wholly contradicts another: both might be equally plausible, but they can’t both be right.
For example, Baker also makes a great deal of Bill Gorton, while up in the hills above Burguete on his fishing trip with Jake Barnes, castigating his Paris-based friend for ‘being an expatriate’ and thus turning his back on his home country and rejecting its values; after World War I and throughout the 1920s, an ever greater number of young Americans — in their tens of thousands — left uptight, puritan, Prohibition-era America to settle in Paris, attracted by an extremely favourable exchange rate as much as the promise of a more hedonistic, less constricted lifestyle.
Their parents’ generation did not approve at all, and newspaper editorials and think-pieces in learned journals portrayed their ex-patriate lifestyle as unwholesome and unnatural. They accused the young ex-patriates as betraying America and it values as much as, Baker suggests, Bill Gorton castigates Jake Barnes, and he finds tragic significance in Gorton’s condemnation of Jake Barnes: his analysis is plausible.
Unfortunately, several biographers read the scene (as well as when Gorton riffs on ‘irony and pity’ while on the fishing trip) as tongue-in-cheek and have suggested that Hemingway, who prided himself on being able to write humorously, was satirising the outrage and preoccupations of contemporary America’s more respectable men and women.
Such an analysis is equally as plausible — but it is wholly at odds with Baker’s take. So who is ‘right’: the biographers or Baker? Who knows, but more to the point, it doesn’t matter: despite the impression academia, casting envious eyes on the sciences, likes to give of being conclusive and informed, there is once again no such definitive analysis or interpretation — call it what you like — because there cannot be.
When considering what Baker and some of his academic colleagues have to say, circumspection is always advisable despite their apparent ‘exalted, inspired, infallible’ status: some of academics seem to stray perilously close to the method of one Erich von Däniken and his many, equally intellectually dubious, imitators.
When considering what Baker and some of his academic colleagues have to say, circumspection is always advisable despite their apparent ‘exalted, inspired, infallible’ status: some of academics seem to stray perilously close to the method of one Erich von Däniken and his many, equally intellectually dubious, imitators.
Von Däniken (below) was a Swiss writer (and a convicted thief and fraudster) who made a great deal of money with a series of books positing that extra-terrestrial aliens had repeatedly visited Earth; while here,
writes von Däniken, the aliens were, among other things, responsible for building the Egyptian pyramids, England’s Stonehenge, the Easter Islands statues and constructing Peru’s Nazca Lines.
Von Däniken’s method was simple: first, he asks questions and suggests explanations (‘Is it possible that . . . ?’); then a little later treats the ‘possibilities’ he has posited as ‘probabilities’ (‘As we have seen, it is quite likely that . . .’); finally, a little later still, those ‘probabilities’ are presented to the — gullible — reader as ‘established facts’ (‘We’ve seen that . . .’). Academics would certainly recoil in horror and be outraged at the suggestion that they might be thought to be adopting von Däniken’s method, even unconsciously, but all too often it certainly looks like it.
. . .
Elsewhere, I’ve highlighted the ‘insoluble problem’ presented in Hemingway’s short story A Clean, Well-lighted Place in which what might simply be — and most probably was — just a piece of carelessness by Hemingway leads to confusion. Yet rather than concede that Hemingway — ‘one of America’s greatest writers’ — might be at fault, the ‘apparent’ confusion is rationalised this way and that in an ongoing debate between academics until one academic, a Joseph Gabriel, insisted it was, in fact, deliberate.
Gabriel claimed that Hemingway, in existentialist mode, intended the confusion in the text to reflect the ‘confusion of life’ when a lonely old man who had attempted suicide and a sympathetic elderly waiter
are confronted by ‘nothingness’ (‘nada’). More to the point, Gabriel begins by suggesting it as a possibility and concludes by treating it as a conclusive explanation. Baker does something similar when he spins quite ordinary events — Brett Ashley being refused entry into a place of Christian worship, being surrounded by boisterous revellers, Robert Cohn falling asleep in the back room of a wine shop, an insomniac Jake Barnes weeping at night over his impotence — into significance.
So following the method of von Däniken and his imitators, he asks questions and makes suggestions:
Was not Brett Ashley, on her low-lying island in the Seine, just such a fascinating peril as Circe on Aeaea? Did she not open her doors to all the modern Achaean chaps? When they drank her special potion of French applejack or Spanish wine, did they not become as swine, or in the modern idiom, wolves?These are first presented as ‘possibilities’, but soon the ‘possibilities’ have evolved through ‘probabilities’ into facts:
The intent of this episode is quite plain . . . [and] in her own way [Brett] is a lamia with a British accent, a Morgana le Fay of Paris and Pamplona, the reigning queen of a paganised wasteland with a wounded fisherman as her half-cynical squire.As far as Baker is concerned quod erat demonstrandum — it is ‘quite plain’, he writes, and readers will agree, especially those who pride themselves on having ‘sympathy and a few degrees of heightened emotional awareness’.
Yet however ‘plausible’ and convincing, at the end of the day such analyses are mere hi-falutin’ speculation and nothing more; yet time and again they are tacitly represented as ‘facts’, that, crucially, are liable to be accepted as such wholesale by readers and students (and, of course, perpetuated).
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