Bonfire of the Humanities
Your English professor is a moron, probably
The net effect of watching English professors attempting to make meaning from Hemingway is no different than watching retarded baby monkeys attempt calculus. In the end, they will fling poo and demand bananas. Then the monkeys get tenure.
There’s no shortage of starting points for the decline and fall of the humanities, but the mid-century hubbub around Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is a good start.
(If you haven’t read the story, you may find it free all over the internet (pdf here), and it’s all of 1400 words.)
Hemingway was a precision craftsman who sometimes spent hours honing a single sentence. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” demonstrates his artistic talent at its peak. James Joyce thought it one of the best stories ever written, and Hemingway pointed to “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” if asked to name his greatest accomplishment. The story demonstrates such deft precision that its beauty can elude most readers.
To better understand the story, one must first consider how Hemingway created meaning. Unlike most writers, the core of Hemingway’s craft wasn’t in the words on the page. Rather, Hemingway created depth in the spaces — between the words and story’s characters and in the silences. No writer’s punctuation was more pregnant with meaning than Hemingway’s. Look not to the words or even the story’s characters to reveal the tale that Hemingway is telling. Ladening space with meaning was not new during Hemingway’s time, though no writer achieved Hemingway’s felicity at developing a story between words.[1]
More transparent in Hemingway’s writing is the transformation of religious ritual — rites — into everyday occurrences. Hemingway could deftly trace the act of Catholic communion on top of a mundane fishing trip with lines so pure that one may not even realize what one is reading. These rites were acts of devotion, soundings of depth, and communal commitments woven into the fabric of daily routines and unexceptional excursions. And these bits of rites are breadcrumbs across Hemingway’s works that, more often than not, are the real story he’s telling.
The kerfuffle that broke out the 1950s — two decades after the story had been published — was that academics had discovered “an insoluble problem” in Hemingway’s masterwork.[2] Academics debated the “problem,” Hemingway’s papers were scoured for typos, evidence of error, clues of academic righteousness. In the end, no evidence was discovered that Hemingway intended the piece to read any other way than it had when originally published, and yet, eventually, the work’s editor (a Scribner, Jnr) re-edited the work to “fix” the “problem.”
What caused the commotion?
A casual reader may not detect the “insoluble problem,” but one may notice as one reads the dialogue, it’s not clear which speaker is speaking many lines. Eventually, the story designates a specific speaker, but if one then works back or fore from such a designation, it becomes clear that, even with the designation, it’s never obvious which speaker is speaking every line. Further complicating these scholastic pursuits is that even when one thinks one can identify the speaker for every line, it seems that sometimes the same speaker is speaking consecutive lines, thus violating the metronomic rule of written dialogue.
To a modernist mandarin, such complications are baffling to the point where one is only left with blaming the artist for making an error. To a pre-modern — or, really, to anyone who understands modernity — Hemingway had made a rather clear work of beauty.
Before exploring an artist’s reasons for obscuring the individual, let’s observe that in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” Hemingway deploys some of his usual techniques. Crucially, the story is about existential angst, the value of place, the hollowness of modern ritual, and the destruction of institutions. The café is a refuge, the brandy is the sacrament, the question is one of finding meaning in a world where institutions are stripped of value. The old man has attempted suicide, the young man defies the state to flirt with the girl (“what he’s after”), the young waiter finds value in his wife and money, the old waiter finds value in this place of café ritual. And yet, the old waiter mocks the ritual in his “Our nada who art in nada” stream of consciousness at the end. From nothing comes nothing, the waiter observes, and all that remains is insomnia.
The entire story is a pageant of modernist ritual that then acknowledges its own hollowness. It is a late Goya Black Painting devolving into an early cubist Picasso and finally resolving into Duchamp’s toilet.
And yet, that synopsis — the young waiter finds… the old waiter finds… — could never be stated with certainty because we can’t always determine who is speaking, who knows about the suicide attempt, who’s always more or less concerned with money or the old man’s family. In this, Hemingway has turned a story of existential angst that would become de rigueur after World War II — with writers, philosophers, painters and everyone else — into something extraordinarily deeper.
Hemingway disaggregated individual perspective wherein one perspective of one person may never have existed, where such a thing as an individual may not exist as anything as stable as we pretend individuals to be. Who is speaking? Depends on where in the story you start and even then you’ll always wind up stumped if you attempt to make singular sense of it all. Picasso mined these complexities and pushed visual art to its boundaries; Hemingway, of course, demonstrated that his typewriter could accomplish what a brush couldn’t.
Such meaning is not created in the place or in the people but rather between the people in the place. There is something here between Bakhtin and quantum physics and other intellectual pursuits of Hemingway’s time, but, more importantly, it is the argument that would have been made from ancient Greece up through the 18th century. The individual does not exist as a thing unto itself but rather exists in the context of other, and meaning, in this context, is developed through shared ritual. The contours of an individual are defined by the space in between.
This is a theme in much of Hemingway’s works but has been purified in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” And as Hemingway moves beyond Picasso, modernist multi-perspective of the individual moves into the dialogic, attempting to recover meaning scorched in the fires in Victorian hubris. Such themes were not unique to Hemingway but rather were thoroughly explored by other artists from Picasso and Duchamp to Dostoevsky and Saint-Exupéry. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is both a response to Crime and Punishment and an improvement on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. And, in the end, as observed by Flannery O’Connor, such artistry cannot be explained; it can only be experienced.
What Hemingway observed was that a failure to recognize the meaning generated by the in between resulted not in gaining the individual but in losing it. The inevitable outcome would be the god-blobs of mid-century art. It cannot be surprising that once Hemingway saw his ghastly prediction come true, he took his own life — which is but prologue for the culture.
And yet with so much poo-flinging from our thought-leaders, we have an artist who regularly traces the lines of holy ritual over the mundania of breakfast, searching to regain the depths of his civilization. And as we approach this plaintive song about the disintegration of the individual by the hardening of its contours and the meaninglessness of modern rites, we get experts who’d conclude that Daniel, of Book of Daniel fame, really just needed a psychoanalyst.
Meanwhile, scholars who have taught a generation of young adults about meaning and analysis, reach from the comfort of their tenure into the shallows of their learning to discover that the problem is the lack of a well-placed comma. And precisely no one was surprised that the fruit of their labor was the Me Generation, with its hardened contours of individualism desperate for meaning amidst the god-blobs.
And yet, the greatest failure of these professors is their inability to profess the truth about art: it cannot be explained in full. If it could, it wouldn’t exist. Even Hemingway did not express the truth in words. He divulged the truth in the spaces, the in between.
[1] This explains, of course, why seeking meaning in Hemingway’s characters or plots has the same net effect of Koko pouring over f(x) = p(x)/q(x).
[2] The kerfuffle’s gruesome details: THE CONTENTIOUS EMENDATION OF HEMINGWAY’S “A CLEAN, WELL-LIGHTED PLACE”. The Hemingway Review. (September 22, 1998)
