How is [the critic] to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. The simplest explanation is usually the most likely one.W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy.Literature is that neuter . . . the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.Roland Barthes, The Death Of The Author.The simplest explanation is usually the most likely one.One of many variations defining Occam’s Razor the Law/Principle of Parsimony.
Yet however much each doctrine was championed when it came into fashion, none is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in its conclusions: broadly each simply provides us with a different, and often unusual, perspective on what we are examining.
Some specifically chose to view a work and its ‘meaning’ from the reader’s point of view, and notably some even argued that once a work has come into existence, the role of the author was of no consequence and that the role and reactions of the reader were central. (A number of Hemingway’s friends insist that beneath the braggadocio, he was essentially a shy and intellectual man, though equally on record is his blunt dismissals of talk on ‘art’ as airy-fairy nonsense, so one wonders how Hemingway might have reacted to that suggestion.)
Whatever the literary practice to which an academic, post-grad student and any of the other assorted scholars subscribe when they interpret and analyse Hemingway’s fiction and pronounce on ‘underlying meanings’, it does not seem to have been formalism.
Whatever the literary practice to which an academic, post-grad student and any of the other assorted scholars subscribe when they interpret and analyse Hemingway’s fiction and pronounce on ‘underlying meanings’, it does not seem to have been formalism.
Formalism would, for example, give short shrift to the, now conventional and accepted, doctrine that The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s first novel (which, in fact, was his second) portrayed a ‘lost generation’ of young people in despair. As Frank L. Ryan unhelpfully pointed out in The Immediate Critical Reception of Ernest Hemingway (echoing those critics who had expected something a little more exciting from Hemingway after the startling debut of his first volume of short stories)
No single factor was as illustrative of the failure of The Sun Also Rises to convince the critics that Hemingway was a great writer than its failure to convince them that it was the record of a generation and that its author was the spokesman for that generation. A year and a half after its publication, Richard Barrett spoke of the impressions which the novel was having on the younger people about him, of the young men and women who spoke so reverently of it, marked passages in it, and kept it by their beds, apparently for solace in the dark hours. But one searches in vain for this response from the reviewers who did not hear in it the mournful sounds of a lost generation.As for the now orthodox take on Big Two-Hearted River, the longer-than-usual two-part story which concluded Hemingway’s first volume of short stories (and which he had at first intended to end with his thoughts on ‘writing’), Kenneth S. Lynn, equally unhelpfully for those who revere Hemingway, noted in his biography of the writer that
the war-wound interpretation of the story was established not by textual evidence, but by what the critics knew about the author’s life — or rather what they thought they knew about his life. After he was dead, they eagerly seized on his posthumously published comment in A Moveable Feast that Big Two-Hearted River was about ‘coming back from the war’, but there was no mention of the war in it as clinching proof that they were right. They would have been better advised to wonder if a master manipulator was not making fools of them from beyond the grave, as he so often had in life.Some critics now substantiate the claim that the story did indeed depict a young, shell-shocked vet returning from war by citing the ‘the town of Seney being destroyed by fire’, the burnt landscape, Hemingway’s allusion to ‘the sinister’ and the ‘swamp’.
These claims are decidedly post-hoc and are made once the now orthodox ‘meaning’ of the story has been established. The town of Seney and its surrounding countryside had certainly been damaged by a wildfire, but these were — and are — a regular in upper Michigan (and the most recent was in 2007) and any symbolic correlation with horrors of ’the Great War’ (as it was then known) is at best wishful.
It can be argued that there is no definitive interpretation of any of Hemingway’s works of fiction because quite simply there cannot be one: just how is one to gauge which interpretation is ‘right’ and which is ‘wrong’ (or, better, misguided)?
Furthermore, a ‘formalistic’, ‘new critical’ or any other approach to interpreting and analysing works of literature is neither the ‘correct’ nor ‘incorrect’ one to take: they are all just one of the many methodologies available for undertaking that task, and each might, at best, be expected to give the reader a new perspective.
Yet insisting that a text — whether of prose or poetry — should be sovereign and should primarily be interpreted in itself is an attractive analytical method, if only because it limits the scope for woolly speculation, of which there has been quite a lot when it came to interpreting Hemingway’s work.
In their essay The Intentional Fallacy which appeared in the Sewanee Review in 1946, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley ask
The sole reference to a ‘lost generation’ is when Gertrude Stein (below) is quoted in one of the novel’s two epigraphs, and it is not even clear what point she was making. She was repeating what a French provincial garage owner had told her, and nor is it clear he was saying. He described those who had
served in the war — one assumes, given their age when the comment was made — as ‘a lost generation’ and is complaining that they have lost the work ethic.
In their essay The Intentional Fallacy which appeared in the Sewanee Review in 1946, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley ask
How is [the critic] to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence and the critic must go outside the poem for evidence of intention that did not become effective in the poem.Wimsatt and Beardsley were, admittedly, discussing poetry and their take on literary analysis will now be old hat for many (and possibly regarded by more modern practitioners as simplistic); but there seems no reason why the principle which drives their approach should not be applied to prose fiction. With that in mind the question is: does the text of The Sun Also Rises portray a ‘lost generation’ in despair?
The sole reference to a ‘lost generation’ is when Gertrude Stein (below) is quoted in one of the novel’s two epigraphs, and it is not even clear what point she was making. She was repeating what a French provincial garage owner had told her, and nor is it clear he was saying. He described those who had
The garage owner does not say why, and there is no suggestion they are somehow ‘in despair’ and given up on life. Hemingway was simply quoting Stein, and to deduce from that epigraph that the novel was intended to ‘portray a lost generation in despair’ is gratuitous.
Hemingway’s motive for writing his novel was primarily to further his fledgling literary career — he is on record as saying he knew he had to write a novel — and the two, in spirit contradictory, epigraphs were intended to give the work more ‘bottom’, more gravitas. After completing his first draft, he had spent a weekend in Chartres where he had settled on a title for his novel and the two epigraphs. He had also composed a somewhat muddled and rambling ‘foreword’, but then discarded it, perhaps because he realised it didn’t work.
Hemingway’s motive for writing his novel was primarily to further his fledgling literary career — he is on record as saying he knew he had to write a novel — and the two, in spirit contradictory, epigraphs were intended to give the work more ‘bottom’, more gravitas. After completing his first draft, he had spent a weekend in Chartres where he had settled on a title for his novel and the two epigraphs. He had also composed a somewhat muddled and rambling ‘foreword’, but then discarded it, perhaps because he realised it didn’t work.
Here is that discarded foreword (Hemingway’s own deletions are highlighted in bold):
One day last summer Gertrude Stein stopped in a garage in a small town in the Department of Ain to a have a valve fixed in her Ford car. The young mechanic who fixed it was very good and quick and skilful. There were three other mechanics all about the same age in the garage.
‘Where do you get the boys to work like this?’ Miss Stein asked the owner of the garage. ‘I thought you couldn’t get boys to work any more.’
‘Oh yes,’ the garage owner said. ‘You can get very good boys now. I’ve taken all these and trained them myself. It is the ones between twenty-two and thirty that are no good. C’est un generation perdu. No one wants them. They are no good. They were spoiled. The young ones, the new ones are all right again.’
‘But what becomes of the others?’
‘Nothing. They know they are no good. C’est un generation perdu. A little hard on them,’ he added.
I did not hear this story until after I had written this book. I had thought of calling it Fiesta but did not want to use a foreign word. Perdu loses a little something by being translated into lost. There is something much more final about perdu. There is only this to say that this generation that is lost has nothing to do with any Younger Generation about whose outcome much literary speculation occurred in past times. This is not a question of what kind of mothers will flappers make or where is bobbed hair leading us. This is about something that is already finished. For whatever is going to happen to the generation of which I am a part has already happened.
There will be more entanglements, there will be more complications, there will be successes and failures. There may be other wars. A few will learn to live perhaps one or two may learn to write or paint.
But the things that are given to people to happen to them have already happened. There will be many new salvations brought forward. My generation in France for example in two years sought salvation in first the Catholic church, 2nd communism Dadaism, third the movies, fourth Royalism, fifth the Catholic church again. There may be another and better war. But none of it will matter particularly to this generation because to them the things that are given to people to happen have already happened.
Yet it is now not just an article of faith but a doctrine in English literature departments the world over that the novel’s ‘theme’ was a ‘lost generation in despair’. We might remind ourselves of Frank Ryan’s question: so why did no one notice at the time?
The same is true of Big Two-Hearted River: until A Moveable Feast was published posthumously in 1964, 40 years after Hemingway’s short story appeared, no one ‘understood’ it essentially to be an account of a young man recovering from his bad experiences in World War I.
The same is true of Big Two-Hearted River: until A Moveable Feast was published posthumously in 1964, 40 years after Hemingway’s short story appeared, no one ‘understood’ it essentially to be an account of a young man recovering from his bad experiences in World War I.
The story was praised for its detailed description of nature and fishing and lyrical style, but the, now orthodox, interpretation wasn’t adopted until in his memoir Hemingway informed the world ‘what the story was about’. Hemingway might well have intended his story ‘to be about’ a young man recovering from bad war experiences, but if — for almost 40 years — no reader realised it, one can only conclude that the story did not succeed. Even with that ‘knowledge’ it is something of a stretch to match various elements in the story with — what Hemingway told us — was its ‘meaning’.
These are just two examples — there are others — but they do beg the question: just how ‘great’ is a writer who is obliged to ‘explain’ his work? If it is all there in the text — and a text can contain a great deal of information, much of it possibly oblique — it is fair to assume that, sooner or later, it will be spotted. (Arguably, that same question might be asked of many other writers, but discussing it is beyond the scope of this book.)
These are just two examples — there are others — but they do beg the question: just how ‘great’ is a writer who is obliged to ‘explain’ his work? If it is all there in the text — and a text can contain a great deal of information, much of it possibly oblique — it is fair to assume that, sooner or later, it will be spotted. (Arguably, that same question might be asked of many other writers, but discussing it is beyond the scope of this book.)
There will already be a chorus of objections to that question, yet those protests do little but echo the circular argument which ‘proves’ Hemingway’s celebrated literary stature. The logic remains: that ‘because Hemingway is such a great writer, it is up to us to understand what he is saying, and these stories and their themes demonstrate just what a great writer Hemingway was’. To which one might best quote Evelyn Waugh’s Mr Salter: well, up to a point, Lord Copper.
For some the attraction of restricting oneself to the text of a story, novel or poem when analysing and interpreting is the rigour it imposes. If a publisher is sent blind a manuscript to be considered for publication and is told and knows nothing about the author or the work, she or he can do little else but evaluate the manuscript solely on what is presented within its two covers. It might certainly be illuminating — later, perhaps — to acquire additional information about a writer and, say, the circumstances of a work’s genesis; but in strikes me as wisest, in the first instance, to evaluate a work in and of itself.
In his 1967 essay The Death Of The Author, the French literary theorist Roland Barthes (left) might be thought — by implication — to be reinforcing the suggestion that a piece of literature must stand or fall on its own terms. He certainly insisted that each piece is sovereign and that the author’s ownership of it ceases as soon as its composition is complete:
Naturally, neither Wimsatt and Beardsley or Barthes are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in this matter. Just how one wants to interpret a work of literature is optional and scholars are free to do so as they please: over the past five or six decades works have been analysed through many lenses; but it is still legitimate to ask why, as Frank Ryan pointed out, no one realised when The Sun Also Rises was published that it was about a ‘lost generation in despair’; and why, as Kenneth Lynn asked, no one realised for almost 40 years that Big Two-Hearted River was about a young man returning home broken by war.
. . .
For some the attraction of restricting oneself to the text of a story, novel or poem when analysing and interpreting is the rigour it imposes. If a publisher is sent blind a manuscript to be considered for publication and is told and knows nothing about the author or the work, she or he can do little else but evaluate the manuscript solely on what is presented within its two covers. It might certainly be illuminating — later, perhaps — to acquire additional information about a writer and, say, the circumstances of a work’s genesis; but in strikes me as wisest, in the first instance, to evaluate a work in and of itself.
literature is that neuter . . . the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.From this one might proceed to the notion that the biography and life experiences of ‘the author’ — and what she or he declares is the meaning of a story, novel or poem — is neither here nor there when attempting to ‘understand’ a story, novel or poem.
Naturally, neither Wimsatt and Beardsley or Barthes are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in this matter. Just how one wants to interpret a work of literature is optional and scholars are free to do so as they please: over the past five or six decades works have been analysed through many lenses; but it is still legitimate to ask why, as Frank Ryan pointed out, no one realised when The Sun Also Rises was published that it was about a ‘lost generation in despair’; and why, as Kenneth Lynn asked, no one realised for almost 40 years that Big Two-Hearted River was about a young man returning home broken by war.
Was it simply not apparent? Were the critics and readers and, latterly, the academics, scholars and post-grad students simply not reading the works attentively enough? And what are we to make of Lynn’s dig at Hemingway — who told an extraordinary number of fibs about himself and his life — that the writer offering us his ‘explanation’ of what was ‘really’ taking place in Big Two-Hearted River was simply another instance of a ‘master manipulator’ at work.
One can go on: it is equally legitimate to inquire why a man almost addicted to self-promotion and who, if the mood took him, might lie and fabricate his past sooner than breathe, would decide to play with a straight bat in matters of his work and ‘literature’?
It would here only be fair to point out Hemingway’s tendency to tell tall stories grew ever more apparent from the mid 1940s on, after he suffered yet another head injury — and was to suffer even more before his death — and both his mental and physical health declined steadily. The incessant boozing and later the bewildering mix of medication he was prescribed didn’t help.
He had been something of a romantic fantasist from an early age, claiming before he shipped to Europe in 1918 that he had slept with the girlfriend of the notorious gangster Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond. At 19 in Milan 
and recuperating from being blown up at Fossalta, he told his later close friend and British war hero Eric ‘Chink’ Dorman-Smith (right) that he had sustained his injuries going into battle with Italy’s famous Arditi troops and had been their youngest commissioned officer.
Back in the US, he had paraded around Oak Park in Italian army uniform items of which a velvet cape was the most striking and made more claims when he was asked to give a talk at his old high school and deliver other such lectures about his ‘war experiences’.
Yet, a great deal might be explained and excused as the exuberant and immature behaviour of a young man (who was, we now know, prone to manic-depression). The fabulous inventions about himself, his life and his experiences of his last 20-odd years were of a wholly different order. It was during this time that he supplied his own interpretations for some of his stories which had hitherto eluded others.We are obliged to concede that is possible, but we should also balance ‘possibility’ against ‘probability’.
The faithful might protest that whatever else he was, Hemingway was a conscientious artist (though largely because he told us he was), and it must follow that when he chose to elucidate aspects of his work — as in revealing the ‘meaning’ of Big, Two-Hearted River — we must take him at his word. Yet taking that line runs perilously close to the circular justifications for why Hemingway ‘was one of our greatest writers’.
. . .
Serious attention to Hemingway’s work from scholars and academia — as opposed to from the critics he despised — is thought to have taken off in 1944 with the appearance of Viking Press’s volume The Portable Hemingway. Malcolm Cowley had been hired to make a selection of Hemingway’s writings, and in his introduction he insisted that Hemingway’s work deserved far more detailed critical consideration than it had so far received and that he should be treated as ‘an artist’.
Cowley reinforced the point when he wrote A Portrait Of Mister Papa, his long profile of Hemingway for Life magazine in 1949, which burnished the image no end (with which Hemingway cooperated, but whose publication he came to regret). Cowley’s call resounded with some, and academics in the foothills of their
careers such as Charles Fenton, Philip Young, John Atkins and Carlos Baker, hoping to make their name, began various studies of one kind or another of Hemingway’s work.
Hemingway’s response to their various approaches was oddly ambivalent: on the one hand he appeared to warn each man off in no uncertain terms, and it seems that overall, he was not keen on his life being scrutinised. On the other he could sometimes prove to be helpful and might even be thought, tacitly, to be encouraging their attention
He eventually warmed to Baker’s suggestion when he was persuaded it would be a book about him as a craftsman — it was published as Hemingway: The Writer As Artist in 1952; but he completely opposed Phillip Young’s intended volume and was furious with Young’s suggestion that all of his work was sustained by the various physical and psychic ‘wounds’ he had suffered. Broadly, if a scholar wanted to write about his work, he was amenable. If a scholar intended writing a biography, he was — seemingly — adamant that it should not be done
Cowley’s view, that there were hidden depths to Hemingway’s work, was adopted, and in the wake of the early academic studies ever more academic papers, PhD and Masters’ dissertations and contributions to learned journals about aspects of Hemingway’s were published.
Cowley’s view, that there were hidden depths to Hemingway’s work, was adopted, and in the wake of the early academic studies ever more academic papers, PhD and Masters’ dissertations and contributions to learned journals about aspects of Hemingway’s were published.
To this day, for example, 60 years after Hemingway’s death, about a dozen articles of one kind or another, research papers on Hemingway’s work and life, and reviews of books about the writer appear in each issue of the twice-yearly Hemingway Review (which was founded in 1980). Still ongoing is work on a projected seventeen-volume collection of Hemingway’s letters from Cambridge University Press, of which so far only five volumes have been published.
Unsurprisingly, the central, more or less irrefutable, belief driving all this academic work was and is that ‘Hemingway was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century’ (or, at the very least that ‘Hemingway was a great writer’); and the tone of much of it leads one to suspect that — this is only a slight exaggeration —Ernest Hemingway is, by many, tacitly and unwittingly regarded as unimpeachable.
Unsurprisingly, the central, more or less irrefutable, belief driving all this academic work was and is that ‘Hemingway was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century’ (or, at the very least that ‘Hemingway was a great writer’); and the tone of much of it leads one to suspect that — this is only a slight exaggeration —Ernest Hemingway is, by many, tacitly and unwittingly regarded as unimpeachable.
This can lead to some curious claims when his work is interpreted and some odd contortions when scholars attempt to explain various anomalies, oddities and inconsistencies in his work.
An interesting example of the tendency for academics to tie themselves in knots rather than consider that Hemingway was not always literary perfection is what has been called the ‘insoluble problem’ in his short story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. The story first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in March 1933 and was included in Hemingway’s third volume of original short stories which appeared later that year.
. . .
It concerns two waiters in a cafe ready to shut for the night and their only customer, an old man who is lingering despite the late hour, presumably because he is lonely and doesn’t want to go home. The two waiters discuss the old man: one is impatient for him to leave so he can go home and join his wife in bed; the other is more sympathetic, because, as the reader comes to understand, he shares the old man’s loneliness.
We discover that a week earlier the lonely old man had tried to hang himself, but was saved by his niece. The story’s problem — I’m obliged to write the ‘apparent’ problem in view of the differing opinions on the matter and how various commentators deal with it — stems from what appear to be inconsistencies in what the two waiters say in dialogue.
We discover that a week earlier the lonely old man had tried to hang himself, but was saved by his niece. The story’s problem — I’m obliged to write the ‘apparent’ problem in view of the differing opinions on the matter and how various commentators deal with it — stems from what appear to be inconsistencies in what the two waiters say in dialogue.
Although at first Hemingway does not identify either waiter, they are eventually referred to as ‘the young waiter’ and ‘the old waiter’; and once we know which man is which, we can track back to what each is saying about the old man.
This is where the first alleged inconsistency occurs: from what he says, one of the waiters ‘knows’ something about the old man’s suicide attempt and comments on what he ‘knows’ which, if the to and fro of conversation is conventional, he cannot have ‘known’. It should have been the other waiter who ‘knew’ the relevant detail because of what he says at other points in their conversation.
This inconsistency was apparently not noticed by anyone for 26 years until the American literary critic and poet Judson Jerome wrote to Hemingway in 1956 pointing it out, to which Hemingway responded that he had re-read the story and it made sense to him.
This inconsistency was apparently not noticed by anyone for 26 years until the American literary critic and poet Judson Jerome wrote to Hemingway in 1956 pointing it out, to which Hemingway responded that he had re-read the story and it made sense to him.
Three years later, two English professors, independently, each published a paper in the February 1959 edition of College English, the journal of the American National Council of English Teachers, discussing the inconsistency. Crucially, the two academics — F. P. Kroeger, who described it as an ‘insoluble problem’, and William E. Colburn, did not agree on the nature of the inconsistency. Kroeger attributes the error to ‘Hemingway, or someone [being] careless’.
Over the following few years, more academics joined in the debate and eventually Hemingway’s publishers, Scribner’s, decided to emend the text for a new version of the story. This appeared in 1965, and that was when the trouble started.
The Law (or Principle) of Parsimony (which is also known as Occam’s Razor, named after the Franciscan friar William of Occam or Ockham) would have proved useful here if all those academics had resorted to applying it: Occam’s Razor states that of all possible explanations, the simplest explanation is the most likely (though, naturally, the law/principle is not and cannot be a hard and fast rule).
The Law (or Principle) of Parsimony (which is also known as Occam’s Razor, named after the Franciscan friar William of Occam or Ockham) would have proved useful here if all those academics had resorted to applying it: Occam’s Razor states that of all possible explanations, the simplest explanation is the most likely (though, naturally, the law/principle is not and cannot be a hard and fast rule).
Here the law would have stated that the most likely explanation was, as Kroeger suggested, that ‘Hemingway or someone’ had been careless. It could have been a typist transcribing Hemingway’s manuscript or a printer setting the story in type; in fact, evidence based on the original manuscript suggests Hemingway himself was partly at fault. It would seem he hadn’t kept track of his story and hadn’t noticed the discrepancy.
That explanation does, though, make puzzling his — somewhat ambiguous — response to Jerome that he had re-read the story and it made sense to him.
Yet the discrepancy was present. If Hemingway simply missed it, one unavoidable conclusion is that despite his persistent claims throughout his life that he re-wrote and revised his stories many times over, he wasn’t always as punctilious as he liked the world to believe. Furthermore, examination of the manuscript by one commentator indicates that he wrote A Clean, Well-Lighted Place in one sitting and revised it (probably just a day later) just once.
After Kroeger and Colburn published their thoughts in College English, many had their two ha’porth to add, especially in view of Scribner’s controversial ‘emendation’ in 1965: a few commentators did agree that Hemingway was probably at fault; but many, echoing the same theism which underpins the orthodox attitude to Hemingway, argued along the lines that ‘as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, he knew what he was doing and this was not an error!’
After Kroeger and Colburn published their thoughts in College English, many had their two ha’porth to add, especially in view of Scribner’s controversial ‘emendation’ in 1965: a few commentators did agree that Hemingway was probably at fault; but many, echoing the same theism which underpins the orthodox attitude to Hemingway, argued along the lines that ‘as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, he knew what he was doing and this was not an error!’
Professor Otto Reinert argued that Kroeger’s ‘insoluble problem’ was not a problem at all; that although the convention when writing dialogue was usually to start a new indented line for each fictional speaker, this was only a ‘convention’ and need not necessarily be observed. Reinert suggested that Hemingway had decided to break the convention because he wanted to indicate a ‘reflective pause’ by one of the waiters when speaking.
All the apologists seemed to tie themselves in knots to ‘prove’ that Hemingway was not at fault (and had it occurred to them, they might well have added ‘so bugger William of Occam and his bloody razor!’)
Arguably, one of the most double-edged aspects to literary commentary (or commentary of any kind, for that matter) is ‘plausibility’. If an explanation or a piece of analysis is thought ‘plausible’, it seems
. . .
Arguably, one of the most double-edged aspects to literary commentary (or commentary of any kind, for that matter) is ‘plausibility’. If an explanation or a piece of analysis is thought ‘plausible’, it seems
quietly to gain a spurious validity, and in the minds of some that very plausibility might stealthily grant it the status of ‘being true’. In fact, that an analysis or theory is ‘plausible’ means nothing more and nothing less than it is ‘plausible’. And here it would be useful to reminds ourselves of the distinction between ‘possibility’ and ‘probability’.
One notable account for the discrepancy in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is that of Joseph F. Gabriel in the Logic of Confusion (pictured below), which appeared in College English two years after Kroeger and Colburn published, and advocates of Gabriel’s explanation might certainly claim it is ‘plausible’.
One notable account for the discrepancy in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is that of Joseph F. Gabriel in the Logic of Confusion (pictured below), which appeared in College English two years after Kroeger and Colburn published, and advocates of Gabriel’s explanation might certainly claim it is ‘plausible’.
Gabriel argues that it was certainly not carelessness by a typist, a typesetter or even Hemingway that led to the ‘error’, and nor was it a break with the conventions of writing dialogue as Reinert suggested.
In fact, says Gabriel, there was no ‘error’ at all: Hemingway wanted the dialogue to confuse the reader in order to make an existential point, one which was, moreover, the essence of his short story. The reader’s confusion, Gabriel claimed, reflected the confusion and chaos of life which had driven an old man to attempt suicide and which one of the waiters also felt. This is how Gabriel puts it:
The dialogue is so constructed that the reader, in his attempt to impose order upon the chaos of inconsistency and ambiguity, is stripped of his dependence on the objective. In so far as the dialogue fails to conform to the norms of logic, the reader himself is, like the older waiter, plunged into the existential predicament and made to confront the absurd.Gabriel notes that when one waiter — at this point not identified — asked the other what had led the old man to try to hang himself, the reply is
‘He was in despair’.Gabriel suggests that in this exchange Hemingway uses the word ‘nothing’ ambiguously: the one waiter understands it to mean the old man tried to hang himself ‘for no reason’, but the other — who Gabriel then identifies as the ‘older waiter’ — takes ‘nothing’ to signify ‘the meaningless of existence’: the old man had tried to kill himself because for him life no longer had a purpose.
‘What about?’ the first asks.
‘Nothing,’ says the second.
‘How do you know it was about nothing?’ asks the first.
‘He has plenty of money,’ says the second.
Later in the story the older waiter is shown to be similarly lonely and despondent — he parodies the Lord’s Prayer, repeating the Spanish for ‘nothing’ (‘nada’) — and ‘nothing’ in the sense of ‘the meaningless of existence’ is what the story is about.
What, you might ask, does this have do to with the ‘anomaly’ in the story, Kroeger’s ‘insoluble problem’? Well, Gabriel writes, there isn’t one and the story was, in fact, ‘artfully contrived’. The alleged ‘inconsistency’ in the dialogue was intended by Hemingway and thus there is no ‘inconsistency’. He writes
What, you might ask, does this have do to with the ‘anomaly’ in the story, Kroeger’s ‘insoluble problem’? Well, Gabriel writes, there isn’t one and the story was, in fact, ‘artfully contrived’. The alleged ‘inconsistency’ in the dialogue was intended by Hemingway and thus there is no ‘inconsistency’. He writes
Thus, in addition to the two major meanings already assigned to the word nada in the story, there is a third: nothingness is synonymous with man’s radical subjectivity, with his total freedom. Indeed, man may be defined as the being who is forced to announce the idea of finding a guarantee for his existence outside himself. It is this third meaning of nothingness which partially escapes the older waiter. He is, after all, no philosopher. And he does not fully understand what he feels. In the end he wonders whether it isn’t only insomnia from which he suffers. Nevertheless, despite the limitations in the older waiter’s understanding of his predicament, Hemingway manages with consummate skill to incorporate this third meaning of nothing into the texture of the story.
Gabriel argues that
Unfortunately for Gabriel and Reinert, in January 1979 Warren Bennett published his paper, The Manuscript And The Dialogue Of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, in American Literature and takes issue with their and others’ hi-falutin’ claims. His explanation is equally ‘plausible’ and, bearing in mind the necessary distinction between ‘possibility’ and ‘probability’, arguably more ‘probable’ than some.
Since 1972, Mary Welsh, Hemingway’s widow had been donating her husband’s manuscripts to the JFK Library in Boston, and among them was the original handwritten manuscript of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. Bennett examined it.
The manuscript (of which a page is pictured below) was written in pencil and, Bennett deduced, Hemingway made slight revisions as he was writing the story, then a little later in the day, and then a day or two later. Bennett pointed out that for several reasons one can distinguish between the original body of the text and the subsequent slight revisions: the varying thickness of the pencil (or pencils) used at
In his attempt to make sense out of the story, the reader, too, is forced to assume contingency, is forced to deal with values and meanings which cannot be given objective justification, and is even brought finally to a recognition of his own radical subjectivity.Gabriel’s explanation is certainly ‘plausible’, but as suggested above, that isn’t saying very much; and one wonders what William of Occam would have made of his analysis. He might agree that Hemingway’s story is about loneliness and, with increasing age, a growing despair that the loneliness will never end; but he might also agree that the story is slight one, and the profundity attributed to it — not just by Gabriel, but by many other commentators — over-eggs the pudding to an alarming extent.
Unfortunately for Gabriel and Reinert, in January 1979 Warren Bennett published his paper, The Manuscript And The Dialogue Of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, in American Literature and takes issue with their and others’ hi-falutin’ claims. His explanation is equally ‘plausible’ and, bearing in mind the necessary distinction between ‘possibility’ and ‘probability’, arguably more ‘probable’ than some.
. . .
Since 1972, Mary Welsh, Hemingway’s widow had been donating her husband’s manuscripts to the JFK Library in Boston, and among them was the original handwritten manuscript of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. Bennett examined it.
The manuscript (of which a page is pictured below) was written in pencil and, Bennett deduced, Hemingway made slight revisions as he was writing the story, then a little later in the day, and then a day or two later. Bennett pointed out that for several reasons one can distinguish between the original body of the text and the subsequent slight revisions: the varying thickness of the pencil (or pencils) used at
Comparing this manuscript and its changes to the story as originally published, Bennett concluded that a typist or a typesetter was certainly responsible for one error, but that Hemingway was responsible for the other inconsistency. Further, Bennett sanctioned the emendation made to the published text by Scribner’s in 1965 because it did resolve one of the problems, but then Bennett pulled his punches.
He tacitly acknowledged that in writing and revising the A Clean, Well-Lighted Place Hemingway — who always stressed the immense care he took in about his writing and weighing every word — had indeed been careless, but he absolved him because the matter of the ‘insoluble problem’
. . . pictures Hemingway not as the slow perfectionist, hovering over every word and detail, but an artist ‘fired up’, and writing at considerable speed in producing what must be regarded, in spite of the flaw in the dialogue, as classic Hemingway: expressing much by showing little.With this nifty piece of footwork Bennett was able to insist there still was a God.
But his suggestion does beg a question: there’s nothing wrong with being ‘fired up’ and ‘writing at considerable speed’ — but what was stopping Hemingway, the putative slow perfectionist, taking as much time as he needed and wanted to revise the piece to ensure it was exactly as he felt it should be?
That question would, of course, rule out Gabriel’s conviction that Hemingway, in existentialist mode, was intentionally confusing the reader; and those who subscribe to Gabriel’s thesis could protest that Hemingway might certainly, as was his practice, have revised the story with his usual painstaking care, noticed the ‘inconsistency’ in the dialogue, but then realised it would add to the story’s artistic impact if he allowed it to remain, to confuse and highlight the reader’s own ‘existential dilemma’.
That question would, of course, rule out Gabriel’s conviction that Hemingway, in existentialist mode, was intentionally confusing the reader; and those who subscribe to Gabriel’s thesis could protest that Hemingway might certainly, as was his practice, have revised the story with his usual painstaking care, noticed the ‘inconsistency’ in the dialogue, but then realised it would add to the story’s artistic impact if he allowed it to remain, to confuse and highlight the reader’s own ‘existential dilemma’.
This is what was suggested by Ken Ryan in his paper The Contentious Emendation Of Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place that appeared in the September 1998 edition of The Hemingway Review. That, too, would be ‘plausible’, and it would also elucidate Hemingway’s response to Jerome that the story made sense to him. After Bennett had allowed a little daylight to illuminate the whole ‘debate’, Ryan returned to square one, his view underpinned by the theological article of faith that ‘Hemingway was a genius, he knew what he was doing [all the time] and he didn’t make mistakes’.
Equally ‘plausible’, of course, would be that Hemingway did not re-read his story as he assured Jerome, but simply brushed him off; or that he had re-read the story, but still did not notice the ‘insoluble problem’. As all too often in debate, you pays your money and you makes your choice.
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