Paper 10 - American Literature

Topic: Discuss Hemingway as a symbolist.

Paper:10

Submitted to:Smt.S.B.Gardi

      Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar university

Bhavnagar 

  (Gujarat-India)

 Discuss Hemingway as a symbolist.

Hemingway once said: "The dignity of movement of an Iceberg is due to only one-eight of it being abovewater." This statement holds the key to your understanding of Hemingway's novels. His novels are the icebergs. The visible areas glint with the hard factual light of the naturalist. But this is not all. The supporting structure submerged and mostly invisible, is built with a different kind of precision, that of the quite symbolist. The element of symbolism is present in all the works of Hemingway, thought the word symbolism came to be associated with Hemingway only after the appearance of his novel The old Man and the Sea. It was felt all of a sudden that he belongs not to the rank of realists but with writers like poi, Hawthorne and Melville the haunted and nocturnal writers, the man who dealt in images that were symbols of an inner world. Hemingway the realist hardly ever overshadows Hemingway the symbolist

          In a Farewell to Arms Hemingway achieves symbolic effects through a subtle process of reiterated suggestion. The three most important devices are the weather the emblematic people, and the landscapes. Anyone who read a farewell to arms with one eye on the weather will eventually marvel as he watches the author playing with falling rain as a symbol of imminent doom. Near the close of the book when Catherine is approaching her time of confinement the weather warms and the rains arrive. For a whole miraculous winter the lovers have gloried in their isolation living happily in their high mountain fast - nests surrounded by healthy cold air and clean snow far from the mud
and murk of war. Now at last the rains come the time for the lying in draws near some great change lurks just beyond the lover's limited horizon and we begin to sense that Catherine is in mortal danger, as indeed she is. The two friends of Frederic Henry also heighten the symbolic effect so do the contrasted landscapes. In the sun also rises the very injury sustained by the hero jack Barnes causing importance is symbolic of the atmosphere of sterility and frustration found in the novel. In The Old Man and the sea we find that the symbolism of Hemingway has far deeper significance than in the early novels. Here also the story is only the small visible part of the submerged iceberg built by a series of parables symbols. Hemingway himself has said, tried to make a real old man and real boy a real scene and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and sure enough they would
mean many things.

          Hemingway has borrowed a surprisingly abundant supply of facts from his own life for his novels. The books have therefore something autobiographical about them. Something of the author's character and personality is attributed to the hero of the Hemingway novel. But in The Old Man and the Sea the identification between the author and the hero is complete: and the story is an interesting personal allegory. In Santiago's story the readers is to detect the struggles of Hemingway. Fast determination and his literary with care and precision and extraordinary courage, the points of comparison are many. The old fisherman feel that he has to establish his reputation once more and
this tiered desire makes him strive fearlessly ignoring all thought of pain and suffering. Despite overwhelming difficulties Santiago triumphs over the fish though finally he is defeated by the sharks.
But he is happy that he has succumbed neither to the fish nor to the sea. The fisherman and the sea are so apt metaphors for the authors and his craft that they need almost no transformation. Guilt stream is time in the case of Hemingway and the marlin hidden in the depth of the case is the truth that the writer is tirelessly trying to grasp. In Santiago determinations to go far into the sea we see Hemingway's dining soul seeking new experiences reaching out towards the unknown while other winters remained satisfied with the region within sight where it is a safer and easier to fish. Hemingway's conception of a good writer is indeed as one who stands in majestic isolation where
no one can help man. As Robert p. Weeks has put it his image of the artist is of an isolated figure struggling alone in the face of eternity kind of cosmic Santiago courageously trying to land a
masterpieces single handed beyond time and place.

          The symbolism in the novel is not restricted, however to the personal level. More important than the personal parable is the universal parable that underlies and impregnates the action the book is the representation of life as a struggle against unconquerable natural forces in which a kind of victory is possible. Santiago message is that while a man may grow old man loses his luck he can still dare keep on striving to be proud of a kind of victory. Philips Young calls problem of right and wrong seem palmary before the great thing that is the struggle. When Santiago says man is not made for defeat a man can
be destroyed but not defeated we get the feeling that classical tragedy imports that of the grandeur of human soul and the stature a man can attain. The novel is classical not only in spirit but in technique too.hemingway his story within narrow confines and by observing the purity of design and above all by stressing the fatal flaw of pride in the protagonist makes his novel very much like the tragedies of Aeschylus Sophocles or Euripides.

          Side by side with this classical flavor their exists in the novel anunmistakable Christian strain. What Santiago does is to fight the goodfight without caring for the reward in the last stage of the fight hemurmurs I didn’t care who kills who for the most important thing asthat he must run the race and stick to the fight. The Christian symbolism is underscored by looking at a number of little details.Throughout there is Induction that Santiago is an illustration of the doctrine of Christian love despite the fact that he kills the fish for the same means st. James. Franics in him to for this man feels a keen sense of kinship with the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea. Like the ancient Mariner of Coleridge he loves all thing both great and small. He speaks of the fish as his friend and feels story that he has to kill it.  Later he says I am a tired old man but i have killed
this fish which is my brother. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brother. This compassion and natural piety and the humanity that is always in the old man are essentially Christian virtues. In spite of Santiago s repeated muttering of hail Mary he does not stricken us as a religious person. Burton he has the Christian spirit in him. The book offers several allusion to crucifixion thus accentuate the Christian symbolism. There is the same essential gallantry a kind of militancy. There is the staying power which helps him in his determinations to last to the end of whatever is to come. This image is reinforced by many passage in the book. The old man stretched on his bed in exhausted slumber is described thus. The similarity between the fisherman and the crucified Jesus is unmistakable. The symbolism gather strength in across the river and into the tree and comes to a climax in the book of Old Man and the Sea.

          Hemingway use of symbolism however is so restrained and sparing that he cannot be included whither those who are usually labeled as symbolists. Taken at face value the denomination symbolist has meanings in the common language of criticism that are quite inapplicable to him bury beyond this Hemingway uses symbolism with a sever restraint that in his good work always staunchly protects his realism. So does he use irony. It is the ambiguity of life itself that Hemingway has sought to render and if irony has served him peculiarly well it is because he sees life as inescapable ironies.