A Poet and a Stylist
In the last analysis Hemingway will be remembered for his fictional technique, his dialogue consisting of short, concrete statements, his concentration on the physical world of violent action, his passionate search for the exact word which will express an exact and limited truth, his experiments with prose rhythms which have transformed the staccato rattle of his early writing into the liquid, cadenced ripple of some of his later work. The truth is that Ernest Hemingway is a stylist and a fine one. He is also a poet. His sensitivity to the light, colour, form and atmosphere of particular places, is lyrical; his ability to suggest an emotional atmosphere usually of an elementary sort is remarkable. Mr. Hemingway is unquestionably a master literary craftsman. What his mind can conceive his typewriter will transfer to paper with superb skill.
The rules arc build upon the great abstractions mentioned above. They are so bound up with the procedure for their application that the procedure itself might be considered to be a rule or better, that neither rules nor procedure exist without one another. Hemingway’s philosophy of manhood is a philosophy of action; a man is honest when he reacts honestly, he is humble when he acts humble, he loves when be is loving or being loved. Thus, taking an awareness of abstractions for granted, Hemingway concerns himself primarily with the presentation of procedure. The procedure is carefully outlined; it is meticulously detailed. If no part of it is overlooked or sloughed off, it must result in a satisfying experience almost in and of itself.
The Bull Fight
This procedure, this ritual—for such is what the procedure actually amounts to is most clearly evident in Hemingway’s treatment of the bullfight. Death in the Afternoon is devoted to an evaluation of the Manhood of various bullfighters on the basis of their ability to abide by the rules, and to a description of the ritual by means of which they prove possession and communicate the satisfaction to be gained from a proper performance of function to the spectator. War, the prize-ring, fishing, hunting, and making love are some of the other celebrations by means of which Hemingway’s religio-philosophy of man is conveyed. But the bullfight is the greatest, because besides possessing, as the others do also, a procedure inviolate, intimately related to the great abstractions, it always ends in death.
It assumes the stature of a religious sacrifice by means of which a man can place himself in harmony with the universe, can satisfy the spiritual as well as the physical side of nature, can purify and elevate himself in much the same way that he can in any sacrificial religion. The difference between Hemingway’s religion of man and formal religion is simply—yet profoundly that in the former the elevation does not extend beyond the limits of the world, and in the latter Christianity for example, the ultimate elevation is totally otherworldly.
Other Examples
It is not only in his treatment of the bull fight that this second aspect of Hemingway’s total work is evident though there it may be most immediately apparent. The abstractions, the rules, the ritual, the sacrifice dominate the details of the Old Man and the Sea as they dominate those of The Undefeated and The Sun Also Rises. We are told carefully, painstakingly how the Old Man performs his function as fisherman; how
he prepares for the hoped-for struggle:
“Before it was really light he had his baits out and was drifting with the current. One bait was down forty fathoms. The second was at seventy-five and the third and fourth were down in the blue water at one hundred and one hundred and twenty-five fathoms. Each bait hung head down with the shank of the hook inside the bait fish, tied and served solid and all the projecting part of the hook; the curve and the point, was covered with fresh sardines. Each sardine was hooked through both eyes so that they made a half-garland on the projecting steel. Each line as thick around as a big pencil was looped onto a green sapped stick so that any pull or touch on the bait would make the stick dip and each line had two forty-fathom coils which could be made fast to the other spare coil so that, if it were necessary, a fish could take out over three hundred fathoms of line.”
We are told how he hooks the fish and secures the line, waiting suspensefully for the fish to turn and swallow the bait, then waiting again until it has eaten it well, then striking, “with all the strength of his arms and the pivoted weight of his body”, three times, setting the hooks; then placing the line across his back and shoulders so that there will be something to give when the fish lunges, and the line will not break. We are told specifically, in terms reminiscent of such descriptions of the bull fight, how the kill is made:
The old man dropped the line and put his foot on it and lifted the harpoon as high as he could and drove it down with all his strength he had just summoned, into the fish’s side just behind the great chest fit that rose high in the air to the altitude of the man’s chest. He felt the iron go in and he leaned on it and drove it further and then pushed all this weight after it.”
Conclusion
The immanence of death for the sacrificer as well as for the sacrificed, and his total disregard of its possibility, are made clear at the climax of the struggle when the old man thinks, “You are killing me, fish. Come on and kill me. I do not take care who kills who.”
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