The Eternal Struggle in Hemingway

“A Study of The Old Man and the Sea”

S. V. University, Tirupati

A study of the ‘struggle’ in Hemingway is not a new thing. That is one of the aspects noted and commented upon by almost every critic who happened to write on Hemingway. It has been explained at different levels by many critics, his champions as well as his distractors. In a word, the struggle in Hemingway has been considered as his forte as well as his Achilles’ heel.

What I call the eternal struggle is only a shift of emphasis, a slightly modified focus of attention. Viewed from the point of view of eternal struggle, what the detractors of Hemingway call ‘defects and limitations’ of his art and what his champions call his ‘chief artistic distinctions’ and merits, appear to proceed from the same source: the nature of his vision and the particular emotions associated with it and the ‘objective correlative’ he has chosen to communicate that vision.

If we patiently collect, analyse and classify the views of his detractors we find that the character embodying the eternal struggle, has been attacked for three reasons. First, that the range of the character is very narrow: the central figure is “a dull-witted, bovine monosyllable simpletion”.¹ Secondly, he has no cultural and spiritual heritage: “has no past, no traditions, and no memories”. ² Thirdly, he has no inwardness: that is, the central character is “a creature without religion, morality, politics, culture or history”, ³ without any of the aspects we civilized cultured educated people associate with what we call “distinctively human existence.” Hence, what is called the heroic struggle in Heminway is an exclusive glorification of brute courage, strength, skill or grace. So, the whole struggle ends in ‘puerile slaughter and senile weariness,’ Literary criticism of any merit or value has nothing to do with such stuff. Therefore, Hemingway, according to these critics, cannot be called a great artist.

If we look at the brighter interpretation of the struggle, we find that his champions interpret the conflict at four levels: personal, biographical, psychological and as a mark of artistic originality that saved literature from cheap art kitch. Speaking of Hemingway, one critic says that he was “heroically and uncorruptedly, and uncompromisingly occupied day after day with writing as hard as he could and as well as he could until the day died. And when he was unable to write or was between books, he still did what he could, which was to live life to the full”.⁴  Professor Baker ⁵ interprets the heroic struggle as a symbolic reiterated suggestion of his felt experience of war, love and life, the very business of his life. According to Philip Young, ⁶ The Old Man and the Sea “is from one angle an account of Hemingway’s personal struggle, grim, resolute and eternal, to write his best with his seriousness, his precision and his perfectionism. Hemingway sees his art exactly as Santiago sees his.” Evaluating his work fromthe point of view of Christian tradition, Professor Cleanth Brooks says that “Hemingway at his best depicts brilliantly the struggle of man to be a human being in a world which increasingly seeks to reduce him to a mechanism, a mere thing”.⁷ All that has been so far, for or against Hemingway, fails to notice one thing: the meta physical significance of the struggle of a sensitive man living in the milieu and ethos of the twentieth century.

In 20th century humanity has lost the moral centrality which controlled and organised human existence and imparted significance to it. To put it very briefly, the Virgin is replaced by the dynamo. The predominant force behind modern culture is the spirit of a typical industrial society. Man has made a progressive conquest both outside and inside himself. To his dismay, man, instead of becoming the master of what he conquered, found himself a part of the reality he has created, a cog within a machine he created to which he must adapt, himself in order not to be smashed by it. When he adapts himself, he finds that there is no ultimate goal which gives meaning and significance to the life he adapted. This led to a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness, of dehumanization, isolation from the real self and alienation from the society. No wonder, then, the best minds revolted against this and we find an increasingly powerful protest against the spirit of industrialism. Hemingway was one of those artists.

As a result of this uprooting all the values by which human civilization and culture survived, glory, valour, patriotism, honour and virtue became meaningless. Man has realised that he has no choice over his birth, work or death. He finds himself born in a world in which he is not responsible for anything that exists, good or bad. But he must live in conformity with what exists. What is it, then, that makes life worth living? In this world increasingly dehumanised, Hemingway creates an image of a man struggling to realise and engage in a fight to impart significance to his existence as a man – to act, to live and thereby to prove, that he is a responsible moral being and not a mere thing drifting aimlessly.

To portray this there is little need to retell in lengthy narrative the range of man’s existence, to trumpet his inward wealth in elaborate rhetoric, and to announce in grand eloquence man’s spiritual and cultural heritage, the very things Hemingway’s detractors wanted. To verbalise these things would be mere sound and fury signifying nothing. For, to speak of man’s range, heritage, and inwardness is not to present it and to prove it. It is better to suffer the strange disease of modern life than to have such a cheap palliative of comfortable self-glorification. This remedy will be worse than the disease. All these are to be realised in terms of the objective correlative’ of the work. Literary art, as Hemmingway is fully aware, is not interior decoration but solid architecture. The temple or the church to be meaningful, must designed to represent the spirit it embodies. All decoration, interior or exterior, must be subordinated to this main end. ‘Less is more’ for this purpose. Hemingway painfully trained himself for the difficult art of knowing what one really feels, rather than what one is supposed to feel and has been taught to feel. He confined himself to the barest minimum of language, imagery and symbolism, ‘the less that is more’, to convey his vision. He revised, rewrote and reshaped to communicate his vision as faithfully as he could. The personal, autobiographical, psycliological and spiritual aspects his relevance in so far as they are de-personalized to universalize the particular emotions of his vision Hemingway is a great artist because his art is great, not because of other factors.

In The Old Man and the Sea, the old man is the prototype of man, the boat in which he fishes is the quest of an individual in the sea of eternity. He fishes for his existence, because he is a fisherman. He fishes, not as others do, but as he can. Once he was a celebrated champion, had his past, his women, his voyages. Now all that is gone. He only dreams of the lions now. The boy, who was forced to leave him, admires him. Many of the fishermen made fun of him and he was not angry. “He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility, but he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride”. ⁸ Now he launched himself on this new venture. Note the opening sentence: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the gulf stream and he had gone eighty-four days without taking a fish”. ⁹ Throughout the novel his loneliness, lack of all equipment except his skill and dedication, are emphasised. “The old man had seen many great fish. He had seen many that weighed more than a thousand pounds and he had caught two of that size in his life, but never alone. Now alone; and out of sight of land, was fast to the biggest fish that he had ever seen and bigger than he had ever heard of, and his left hand was still as tight as the gripped claws of an eagle”.¹⁰

The old man establishes a relationship more intimate than the one that exists between him and the society with all the forces and creatures of nature around him: the sky, the light, darkness, stars, waves, the sea, the sea-weed, chillness and the birds, the flying fish and the fish he hooked. He knew that “man is not much beside the great birds and beasts”. ¹¹ and the mighty forces of nature. “The ocean is very big and a skiff is small and hard to see”.¹²

But man knows and has much more than they do. Man is aware of the metaphysical. His reach is far beyond his grasp. He can do a lot, endure a lot. Pain does not matter to him. The old man is “not religious.” But he recognises the strength of man and the forces beyond man. He says ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Maries.’ He thinks of God, and of Christ. With this awareness, he shows what a man is, what a man can do and what a man can endure. A man, according to him, is not made for defeat. He says that a man “can be destroyed but cannot be defeated.” Hemingway told someone that he meant this sentence as a diacho. Both ways, it means that man’s physical death or defeat does not sum up his effort; endeavour and endurance. For a European reader these virtues that Hemingway celebrates, may appear crude and narrow from all the points of view he has been trained to look at. “The virtues that Hemingway celebrates are narrower than those celebrated by political liberalism. They are much narrower than those affirmed by Christianity. There should be no illusion about this”. ¹³ The only ground on which the European reader with a Christian culture can accommodate him is that “the virtue Hemingway celebrates are ultimately necessary to Christianity.”

If we take The Old Man and the Sea as is is, as a work of art, we find the image of a man acting like a responsible human being, not drifting according to the code of success, advantage or profit. To act like a responsible moral being is one of the ways of making one’s existence meaningful. No faith denies this. But, for a Hindu, this has a special appeal. The salvation for a Hindu is to do his best in his vocation (not occupation) unmindful of the consequences of reward. Yogam Karmasu Kousalam. ¹⁴The whole struggle of the old man is motivated by this desire to do the best he can.

Secondly, in the course of the eternal struggle Hemingway establishes a sense of mutual identification between the killer and the killed, the old man and the big fish.

“Fish!” the old man said, “Fish, you are going to, have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?”

“Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who”. ¹⁵

Once man achieved this cosmic awareness of oneness of life in all existence, there is no dichotomy between the killer and the killed. As life cannot kill and cannot be killed, there is no killer and the killed.

“Naayam hanti na hanyate”. ¹⁶
“Kam ghaatayati hanti kam”. ¹⁷

Hemingway’s presentation of bull-fighting, big-game hunting and war can be viewed as variations on the same theme of eternal struggle. As Hemingway uses these themes to convey his vision the eternal struggle, the struggle which makes life, he is perfectly right, as an artist, in confining himself to a presentation of it shorn of the so-called range, inwardness and heritage. This is not a limitation of his art because it was necessitated by his vision and proceeds from his artistic integrity and fidelity to his vision. Any ornamentation would be clouding the vision. Again, the personal aspects noted in the presentation are the human aspects universalised. Any ordinary human being, to lead a meaningful life, has be involved in this eternal struggle in one form or other. It is this eternal struggle which gives significance to man’s life on earth. The strength of Hemingway’s art lies in portraying it vividly and communicating it to his reader with a rare immediacy in a simple style.

In The Old Man and the Sea the experience is universalized. The old man is everyman, fishing for existence, asserting the fact that he is alive by fighting against all forces. Here the whole struggle is reduced to the barest facts and his style becomes the architecture of his vision and experience.

¹ Wyndham Lewis: “The Dumb Ox: A Study of Ernest Hemingway,” The American Review, III (June, 1934). P. 312.
² Sean O’ Faolain: “Ernest Hemingway,” in The Vanishing Hero (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1966). P. 144.
³ D. S. Savage: The Withered Branch (London: Eyre, 1950). P. 27.
⁴ Lilian Ross: Portrait of Hemmingway (Avon Books, 1905), P. 20.
⁵ Carlos Baker: Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956).
⁶ Philip Young: Ernest Hemingway (Minneapolis: Uni. Of Minnesota Press, 1959).
⁷ Cleanth Brooks: The Hidden God (Yale: 1963), P. 6.
⁸ Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (Penguin edition) P. 1.
⁹ Ibid. 55.
¹⁰ Ibid. 59.
¹¹ Ibid. 112.
¹² Ibid. 75.
¹³ Cleanth Brooks, The Hidden God. P. 20.
¹⁴ The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter, 2. Verse, 14.
¹⁵ The Old Man and the Sea. P. 82.
¹⁶ The Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2. Verse 19.
¹⁷ Ibid. Verse 21.