SLSL "TSR" Hemingway - article extracts

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<http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0403/1_47/79208850/p1/article.jhtml?term=Hemingway>

"Scared sick looking at it": A Reading of Nick Adams
in the Published Stories.(Critical Essay)
Author/s: Howard L. Hannum
Issue: Spring, 2001
Twentieth Century Literature

[...] Hemingway's future readers will surely remember
him for his short stories, whose style of writing and
subject matter won him his initial fame and played
such a large part in the development of the modern
short story. Although Hemingway has a thriving society
of scholars to celebrate his achievements, he must
ultimately depend on general readers for his fame.
This latter group is far less likely than the scholars
to remember his work after 1945, whose structural
flaws, intrusive ego, and swollen prose at times make
it seem the antithesis of the early great fiction. 

[...] "Indian Camp," with the devastating trauma of
its Caesarian section and the suicide of the Indian
father, not only scarred Nick Adams for life but also
provided Hemingway with the framework of his metaphor
in developing Nick. The stark realism of the first
story was not something he used once and discarded. It
went a long way toward explaining Nick, and Hemingway
was not about to pass over it. What appears at first
to be Hemingway's realistic detail in describing the
Caesarian is in fact the basis for an extended system
of metaphor, running through all of the stories and
contributing greatly to their unity. Hemingway
returned to the details, supplying new ones and
integrating those of 1927 (Men Without Women) and 1933
(Winner Take Nothing) with the original ones of
1922-25 (In Our Time). He took each important detail
of the Caesarian and began a sequence of images with
it, story by story, in what Frank O'Connor called
"elegant repetition" (159), a series of leitmotifs, of
incremental metonymies, whose context s he juxtaposed
and superimposed, in ever-complicating patterns, with
Nick always the true center of experience but never
escaping the Indian camp. The night of horror
inflicted "the wound" that never healed; the physical
wound at Fossalta came too late for such effects. The
girl watching a childbirth on the Karagatch Road (71)
[2] at least got to cry, and might well have
recovered, but Nick appears never to have done so.
The boy Nick's first sight of a naked woman involved,
in rapid succession, the full form with its burgeoning
abdomen, pubes (resembling a beard), and confusing
absence of a penis; then, the piercing cut and
explosion of blood, the laying bare of internal
organs, and the tissue placed in his basin (68-69).
Later, wounded by shrapnel at the Piave River (276),
he identified with the Indian woman being held down
for penetration by the steel of his father's knife.
The Caesarian had to be severely damaging,
intensifying his natural fear of castration. Followed
immediately by the Indian father's gory
throat-slashing, the Caesarian fixed Nick's
association of blood and death with sex, and his
obsession with the separation of body and soul,
particularly at night. While life had come into the
world from the mother's body in birth, it had gone out
of the father's in suicide. Nick's mind had apparently
blocked out much of the Caesarian, but he had clearly
seen the father's head tilted back. Finally, Nick
would later rec ognize, sexual treachery also seemed
involved, in the never-resolved implication of Uncle
George's paternity of the Indian child, [3] one
possible cause of the father's suicide and of George's
abrupt disappearance. The laughter of one of the young
Indians when the mother bit George's arm was not lost
on Nick, who was to know, in "Ten Indians" (254), the
piercing laughter of the Garners at his own betrayal
on July 4 a few years hence.

The surgery and the site haunted Nick long afterward.
His association of sex with death was so strong that
he went beyond the Elizabethan notion of dying (the
fall of the blood) at the point of orgasm, to suppose
an actual separation of his soul from his body. This
occurred in his first sexual experience with Prudie
Mitchell: "something inside Nick" had "gone a long way
away"--and this happened, significantly, in the woods
up near the Indian camp. In his reverie of Prudie
(renamed Trudy) in "Fathers and Sons," Nick recalled,
at the point of orgasm, "the great bird flown like an
owl in the twilight, only it was daylight in the
woods" (376; emphasis added). He had thus
psychologically relocated his first adolescent
experience of sex in the night of the Indian camp (the
setting of the Caesarianq. The notion of the soul's
flight at the climax of sex was paralleled by its
flight at the threat of death. Nick's soul did once
leave him, but returned, as he was wounded in "Now I
Lay Me" (276). After this, he had to sl eep with a
light on, for fear it would happen again (in the same
story and in "A Way You'll Never Be"), until he
dropped into the fetal slumber at the end of "Big
Two-Hearted River," part 1. The Indian camp,
meanwhile, continued to figure traumatically as the
place Nick visited to get rid of the smell of his
father, after the episode of the "lost" underwear in
"Fathers and Sons" (375) and, again, as the site of
Prudie's infidelity with Frank Washburn in "Ten
Indians." [...]  

-Doug




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