New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Read online

  New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

  New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  Edited by Jackson J. Benson

  With an Overview Essay by Paul Smith and a Comprehensive Checklist to the Criticism, 1975–1990

  Duke University Press Durham and London 1990

  © 1990 Duke University Press

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞

  Permissions appear on pages 510–12 which represent an extension of the copyright page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last page of this book.

  Second printing, 1998

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  The Art of the Short Story

  I Critical Approaches

  Narrative Voice The Unifying Consciousness of a Divided Conscience: Nick Adams as Author of In Our Time

  Semiotic Analysis Decoding Papa: “A Very Short Story” As Work and Text

  Lacanian Reading Hemingway’s “After the Storm”: A Lacanian Reading

  Structuralist Interpretation Structuralism and Interpretation: Ernest Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain”

  Textual Analysis “That Always Absent Something Else”: “A Natural History of the Dead” and Its Discarded Coda

  Reception Theory Reflection vs. Daydream: Two Types of the Implied Reader in Hemingway’s Fiction

  Feminist Perspective “Actually, I Felt Sorry For the Lion”

  Historical-Biographical Analysis “Old Man at the Bridge”: The Making of a Short Story

  Writing a Story Instead of a Dispatch

  Transforming Facts into Fiction

  The Boundary between Fiction and Fact

  II Story Technique and Themes

  Hemingway’s Apprentice Fiction: 1919–1921

  The Troubled Fisherman

  From “Sepi Jingan” to “The Mother of a Queen”: Hemingway’s Three Epistemologic Formulas for Short Fiction

  Nada and the Clean, Well-Lighted Place: The Unity of Hemingway’s Short Fiction

  “Only Let the Story End As Soon As Possible”: Time-and-History in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time

  Appendix

  “Long Time Ago Good, Now No Good”: Hemingway’s Indian Stories

  III Story Interpretations

  Hemingway’s “Banal Story”

  “This Is My Pal Bugs”: Ernest Hemingway’s “The Battler”

  Preparing for the End: Hemingway’s Revisions of “A Canary for One”

  El Pueblo Español: “The Capital of the World”

  The Poor Kitty and the Padrone and the Tortoise-shell Cat in “Cat in the Rain”

  Hemingway’s “The Denunciation”: The Aloof American

  To Embrace or Kill: Fathers and Sons

  Wise-Guy Narrator and Trickster Out-Tricked in Hemingway’s “Fifty Grand”

  A Reading of Hemingway’s “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio”

  Gender-Linked Miscommunication in “Hills Like White Elephants”

  Hemingway’s Primitivism and “Indian Camp”

  Hemingway’s “The Killers”: The Map and the Territory

  “The Last Good Country”: Again the End of Something

  Nick Adams and the Search for Light

  “Nobody Ever Dies!”: Hemingway’s Fifth Story of the Spanish Civil War

  Hemingway’s “Out of Season”: The End of the Line

  Perversion and the Writer in “The Sea Change”

  Coming of Age in Hortons Bay: Hemingway’s “Up in Michigan”

  Crazy in Sheridan: Hemingway’s “Wine of Wyoming” Reconsidered

  IV An Overview of the Criticism

  A Partial Review: Critical Essays on the Short Stories, 1976–1989

  Critical Books

  Critical Anthologies

  Critical Articles

  V A Comprehensive Checklist of Hemingway Short Fiction Criticism, Explication, and Commentary, 1975–1989

  Preface to the Comprehensive Checklist

  Section I: Books on Hemingway’s Work Containing Discussion of the Short Stories

  Section II: Articles, Books Devoted to Hemingway’s Work, Books Not Exclusively Devoted to Hemingway, and Dissertations Containing Discussion of Several Hemingway Short Stories

  III Criticism, Explication, and Commentary on Individual Stories, Listed by Story—Including Specific Articles, Segments from Books on Hemingway’s Work, and Segments from General Books

  Notes and References

  Debra A. Moddelmog, “The Unifying Consciousness of a Divided Conscience: Nick Adams as Author of In Our Time”

  Ben Stolzfus, “Hemingway’s ‘After the Storm’: A Lacanian Reading”

  Oddvar Holmesland, “Structuralism and Interpretation: Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Cat in the Rain’”

  Susan F. Beegel, “‘That Always Absent Something Else‘: ‘A Natural History of the Dead’ and Its Discarded Coda”

  Hubert Zapf, “Reflection vs. Daydream: Two Types of the Implied Reader in Hemingway’s Fiction”

  Nina Baym, “‘Actually, I Felt Sorry for the Lion’”

  William Braasch Watson, “‘Old Man at the Bridge’: The Making of a Short Story”

  Paul Smith, “Hemingway’s Apprentice Fiction: 1919–1921”

  Kenneth Lynn, “The Troubled Fisherman”

  Gerry Brenner, “From ‘Sepi Jingan’ to ‘The Mother of a Queen’: Hemingway’s Three, Epistemologic Formulas for Short Fiction“

  Steven K. Hoffman, “Nada and the Clean, Well-Lighted Place: The Unity of Hemingway’s Short Fiction”

  E. R. Hagemann, “‘Only Let the Story End As Soon As Possible’: Time-and-History in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time”

  Robert W. Lewis, “‘Long Time Ago Good, Now No Good’: Hemingway’s Indian Stories”

  Wayne Kvam, “Hemingway’s ‘Banal Story’”

  George Monteiro, “‘This Is My Pal Bugs’: Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Battler’“

  Scott Donaldson, “Preparing for the End: Hemingway’s Revisions of ‘A Canary for One’”

  Bernard Oldsey, “El Pueblo Español: ‘The Capital of the World’”

  Warren Bennett, “The Poor Kitty and the Padrone and the Tortoise-shell Cat in ‘Cat in the Rain’“

  Kenneth G. Johnston, “Hemingway’s ‘The Denunciation’: The Aloof American”

  Robert P. Weeks, “Wise-Guy Narrator and Trickster Out-Tricked in Hemingway’s ‘Fifty Grand’”

  Amberys R. Whittle, “A Reading of Hemingway’s ‘The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio’”

  Pamela Smiley, ”Gender-Linked Miscommunication in ‘Hills Like White Elephants’”

  Jeffrey Meyers, “Hemingway’s Primitivism and ‘Indian Camp’”

  Robert E. Fleming, “Hemingway’s ‘The Killers’: The Map and the Territory”

  David R. Johnson, “‘The Last Good Country’: Again the End of Something”

  Howard L. Hannum, “Nick Adams and the Search for Light”

  Larry Edgerton, “‘Nobody Ever Dies!’: Hemingway’s Fifth Story of the Spanish Civil War”

  William Adair, ”Hemingway’s ‘Out of Season’: The End of the Line”

  Robert E. Fleming, ”Perversion and the Writer in ‘The Sea Change’”

  Alice Hall Petry, “Coming of Age in Hortons Bay: Hemingway’s ‘Up in Michigan’”

  Lawrence H. Martin, Jr., “Crazy in Sheridan: Hemingway’s ‘Wine of Wyoming’ Reconsidered
”

  Paul Smith, “A Partial Review: Critical Essays on the Short Stories, 1976–1989”

  About the Contributors

  Permissions

  For Charles M. Oliver editor of the Hemingway Review, whose vision and tireless effort have raised the standards of Hemingway scholarship and provided the information and tools which have benefited us all

  Acknowledgments

  The publication of this volume has been made possible by the generosity of the authors of the essays, and I am grateful to them and to the editors and publishers of the publications in which many of these essays originally appeared for their permissions. I have a particular debt of gratitude to Paul Smith who not only wrote the fine survey of criticism which is the centerpiece of this collection, but who also made many suggestions regarding the contents and reviewed the checklist in great detail. Finally, I would like to thank Anne Hunsinger and JoAnne Zebroski, fine teachers, writers, and researchers in their own right, for their years of work in assembling, arranging, and editing the extensive checklist at the end of this volume—heroines both.

  Introduction

  This volume is an all-new sequel to a previous collection, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays, which was published in 1975. While a few of the essays here were originally published in the late 1970s, most were published in the 1980s and many in the last few years. In the first volume the “Comprehensive Checklist” (which broke new ground by listing the criticism by story) attempted to include all of the short story criticism, in English, from the beginning through the first part of 1975. The checklist at the end of this volume attempts to list all of the short story criticism from and including 1975 (not previously listed) up to early 1990. In doing so the checklist becomes the first comprehensive bibliography of Hemingway secondary materials published since Audre Hanneman published her Supplement to Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography in 1975.

  In my introduction I spoke of the checklist in the first volume as “a monster which has haunted and nearly overcome its creator.” With this new compilation, the monster became nearly unmanageable, as I and several assistants over three years struggled with a body of Hemingway short story criticism that had grown enormous. All of the articles published in all the years prior to 1975 are roughly equal in number to those published in the decade following, and the output in the last decade is nearly double that of the preceding decade. The process of selecting the essays for this volume involved reading, evaluating, and segregating by type and topic nearly four hundred essays, published as articles or in books, from which we have been able to publish twenty-eight (plus five written just for this collection and the overview essay). Obviously, for reasons of space and distribution of topic a good many excellent essays had to be omitted.

  There are a number of reasons for the immense growth of Hemingway short story criticism. Most important, I think, has been the recognition in recent years that, despite the continued popularity of several of his novels, the short stories are Hemingway’s great contribution to our literature. In addition, the antagonism inspired by the Hemingway public persona, which had turned many academics and critics against his work, has gradually, nearly three decades after his death in 1961, dissipated. Indeed, the change in the author’s standing has been dramatic, although it has come so gradually over the last two decades that few have stood back and commented on it.

  Those of us who have written about the author for many years, however, can feel a definite shift in the atmosphere. A good number of bright young scholars are devoting some or all of their attention to Hemingway research, many more women have become involved, and several older, well-established scholars are coming back or turning to Hemingway studies for the first time. Clearly, it is no longer an embarrassment in intellectual circles to be identified as someone who has written about Hemingway, and suddenly those who write about him no longer feel the need to be as defensive of their subject as they once were.

  Beyond the elevation of Hemingway’s status and the new talent this has attracted, there are other reasons why the short story criticism has not only expanded, but improved in quality from what in the mid-1970s appeared to be a criticism that was becoming sterile, ingrown, and repetitious. Perhaps the most important of these has been the availability, in the mid-1970s, of the Hemingway papers, first in temporary quarters and then at the Kennedy library. In addition, the process has no doubt been enriched by the publication of the Selected Letters in 1981, the previously unpublished “On the Art of the Short Story” (first published in the Paris Review and now reprinted in this volume) also in 1981, and, in more recent years, a series of new biographies and the posthumous publication of Garden of Eden. One stimulus has followed another in adding to our knowledge or altering our perspective of the man and his work.

  The present volume is not only more substantial than the previous one, but its organizational pattern (which has since been imitated by other anthologists) has had to be altered to fit changes in the critical climate. The relatively recent concern with “theory” has turned our attention to methodology, the differences between critical approaches, and the philosophical underpinnings of critical processes. While the illumination of the short stories has been the primary criterion in my choice of essays, I thought it might be helpful to student and scholar, in order to respond to this concern, to display at the outset a wide variety of critical approaches, grouped together.

  This section of the book contains some approaches which, like the semiotic analysis of Robert Scholes, reflect the strict application of a theory with a specific name; others, like the essay by William Braasch Watson, were given names by me to reflect the dominant approach as I perceived it. The essay by Nina Baym does not set out to apply a specific feminist theory to “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” but it obviously applies, as many essays in recent years have, a generalized, feminist perspective to the material. Unfortunately, not every approach one might desire is represented in the section, since there are no essays on the short stories using some types of theory, such as phenomenology or deconstruction.

  Lying, as I have thought of it, halfway between critical approaches and interpretative essays on individual stories are those essays grouped under Section II which focus on techniques and themes, rather than particular stories, and which discuss ideas that can be applied to several stories or the stories as a whole. New critical approaches have been joined in recent years by what can only be viewed as a wave of revisionism, and several of the essays in this section reflect this in rebutting traditional assumptions and turning to new possibilities. For example, the essay by Kenneth Lynn questions certain long-accepted tenets of Hemingway criticism, as set forth by such early commentators as Malcolm Cowley and Philip Young, and proposes a different sort of inner landscape for the writer as reflected in his work.

  Indeed, with the new biographies by Michael Reynolds, Jeffrey Meyers, Peter Griffin, and Kenneth Lynn and with the textual research of such scholars as Paul Smith and Susan Beegel (both concentrating on the short story), a host of questions about the author and his work that once seemed settled have been opened up again, so that the atmosphere for discussion is freer and the opportunities for research more fertile than they have been for decades. All of a sudden, as Frederick Crews said recently, Hemingway criticism is fun once again.

  The purpose of this volume remains largely the same as the first: “To bring together out of [the] welter of material many of the best essays on the stories, while trying to maintain the widest possible range of commentary.” My hope is that this book will serve not so much as a collection of definitive commentaries, as a series of provocations, springboards to further discussion, while at the same time marking the way to the possibilities of new research. Again, as I said in my introduction, “Here, I would hope, we have some indication of what we have and do not have, of what we know and what we do not know.” I would only add that there is much indication here also of what we thought we knew but now will h
ave to wonder and think about further.

  In two essays on the state of Hemingway criticism, one in 1975 and the other in 1988, I pointed out that one of the persistent problems has been repetition, since so many critics have written while largely unaware of what has already been said. This problem has become in recent years even more acute in response to the explosion of material—even the most well-intentioned scholar must have some difficulty in finding and reading everything he should read as background to his criticism. This is the main justification for our checklist, for confronting the monster. Call it a civic duty. Or putting deeds where one’s mouth is.

  Jackson J. Benson

  San Diego State University

  The Art of the Short Story

  Ernest Hemingway

  In March 1959 Ernest Hemingway’s publisher Charles Scribner, Jr., suggested putting together a student’s edition of Hemingway short stories. He listed the twelve stories which were most in demand for anthologies but thought that the collection could include Hemingway’s favorites and that Hemingway could write a preface for classroom use. Hemingway responded favorably. He would write the preface in the form of a lecture on the art of the short story.

  Hemingway worked on the preface at La Consula, the home of Bill and Annie Davis in Malaga. He was in Spain that summer to follow the mano a mano competition between the brother-in-law bullfighters, Dominguín and Ordóñez. Hemingway traveled with his friend, Antonio Ordóñez, and wrote about this rivalry in “The Dangerous Summer,” a three-part article which appeared in Life.

  The first draft of the preface was written in May, and Hemingway completed the piece during the respite after Ordóñez was gored on May 30th. His wife, Mary, typed the draft, and, as she wrote in her book How It Was, she did not entirely approve of it. She wrote her husband a note suggesting rewrites and cuts to remove some of what she felt was its boastful, smug, and malicious tone. But Hemingway made only minor changes.