Subject: Re: farewell to arms
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 24 2002 - 12:03:10 EDT
[Yikes, Will: You have opened an outpouring of words in response to
your simple question, and Jim has added to it. So sorry for the
length and breadth of this response, but I hope it helps clarify what
I meant.]
On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 10:47:18AM -0400, Will Hochman wrote:
> Tim, before you go to sleep, would you mind telling me the straight
> story of "Indian Camp." I've read that story often and think it is
> one of my favorites, but I also think it subverts your point.
I wondered if anyone would pick up on this, actually. You get a gold
star for this....
> You wrote " Nick and the doctor and Uncle George take the camp
> rowboat to "Indian Camp," and we get the story straight. There isn't
> much fiction that tells it as straight as that.
Interestingly, this points to what I was saying about how difficult it
is to communicate universally, even within this list!
> What's the straight story? Who is the real father? In my reading,
> this story seems to be straightforward, but I have doubts. Is Nick's
> father a good doctor or a bad teacher? Is Uncle George the real
> father of the baby? I think Salinger, like Hemingway, loved telling a
> story that later makes us ask questions and re-read the story
> differently...will
This topic came up at great length on "heming-l," the Hemingway list
to which I referred earlier. There were several people who dogmatically
held to the view that Uncle George is the father of the baby, based on
details such as how he hands out cigars to the men on the beach and
how he stays behind when Nick and his father leave.
(As for Nick's father, it is hard to say whether he is a good or bad
doctor, because if he were coming from home with a jackknife and some
fishing leader to do a C-section, that would be bad; if he were out
camping without the ability to go home for his bag, and performed a
minor miracle, it makes him a pretty good doctor in a pinch, as he
himself comments in an aside to his brother George.)
As a teacher, I think we see again and again that he's not too good
(as Nick himself says in "Fathers and Sons," his father was not so
reliable on certain matters dealing with sex, such as the definition
of "a masher" or "bugger").
Regardless of this, the point here is that Hemingway (like some of
Salinger) gives us something to consider and debate WITHIN THE PARAMETERS
OF THE STORY. You can read "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," like most
of early Hemingway, without a glossary, and more or less all the debatable
points are contained in the story from beginning to end, or they make more
sense when the stories are arranged in a timeline. This is quite unlike
Joyce, say, for whom you need to consult a half-dozen books to get the
references, "Finnegans Wake" being the ultimate example.
To phrase it more carefully, I would say that "Indian Camp" is a good
self-contained narrative that stands without the need of footnotes
roughly 75 years after it was written. That is the timeless quality
which I called a "straight story," much as is the opening of "A
Farewell to Arms." Sure -- there are images in the opening vista of
"Farewell" that echo what will happen in the novel, such as the lovely
bit about the soldiers in the rain keeping dry what they are carrying,
like (forgive the paraphrase, but I have no book handy and must do this
from memory) "a woman [eight?] months gone with child." Again, these
visual elements allow us to extrapolate meaning from image, and see
shadows of what will happen in the novel -- but I argue that the
narrative can be both "straight" and open to creative interpretation. I
don't think one precludes the other.
Within "Dubliners," in, say, "The Dead" or "Araby," Joyce writes a
narrative that is as coherent and forceful as anything Hemingway might
write (in, as Jim Rovira says, Joyce's own way). But you can get by
with a sprinkling of contextual footnotes and little more explanation
in the stories -- unlike either "Ulysses" or "Finnegans Wake."
(Not to be picky, but to indicate the complexity of the language, Jim:
there is no apostrophe in the title: "Finnegans Wake" = the "Finns Again
Wake" pun = the circularity of the narrative, which has no beginning nor
end but which loops upon itself; as far as a timeline, and Joyce's
listening to the rhythm of the Liffey, I can't say it definitively without
my huge Ellman bio, but I am fairly sure that Joyce never went back to
Dublin during the many years spent writing what was then called
"Work-in-Progress" and was ultimately published as "Finnegans Wake." If
I'm not mistaken, Joyce traveled to London several times, but after bad
experiences in Dublin with the Volta Theatre and a scheme to import Irish
tweed to Trieste, he stayed away. Nora and the kids went to Galway in, I
think, 1923, only to be caught in rebel crossfire and forced to huddle on
the floor of their train en route home. As for the 17 languages you
mention, there is also the matter of the Joyce-invented language itself,
for which he, as it appears in the 3-volume set of collected letters,
offers a couple of keys for deciphering, line-by-line and word-by-word,
certain tiny passages. I'm talking about virtually a page of decryption
for a paragraph of prose. It may be that the "Wake" has the secrets of
mankind locked in it; or it may be the ultimate loss of perspective by a
writer who falls into his own vortex. I know that for me, and for many
friends and contemporaries of Joyce, and even for his brother, who was a
perceptive reader of James's work, the "Wake" was incoherent except to the
pre-tutored. Perhaps you get out of it what you put into it, but
then there is the possibly apocryphal story in which Stanislaus asked
his brother why he would write something nobody could read. And the
answer was, supposedly, "I spent my life writing it, they can spend
their lives reading it." I believe he was also said to have commented
on "Ulysses" that he was writing to keep all the English professors
busy. I cannot attest to the accuracy of these comments, which I've
heard over the years, but regrettably can't cite. Certainly an
important part about "Ulysses" is that each chapter is written in a
deliberately different style, allowing Joyce to explore language as
surely as Bloom and Dedalus explore Dublin. And for the "Wake," it was
said by Joyce to be in the nighttime language of dreams, which makes
sense after you read his explications of passages, or hear him read
from "Anna Livia Plurabelle.")
Whew.
Will, I hope I addressed your issue of "straightness" and the issue of
a story being told directly yet still open to interpretation!
And Jim, I touched on all those clarifications not to be a nitpicker,
but to emphasize the nature of the linguistic complexity of the last
two Joyce books. He had a rationale. It's taken the rest of us
sixty years or more to catch up, and still the debate rages on. Oh,
and yes: open your Hemingway and enjoy the invigorating prose of the
stories and at least his first two novels. Nothing like it.
--tim
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