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Article Excerpt
Hemingway often used expatriation as a literary device, yet critics have overlooked the fact that Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea is an expatriate. Born in Spain's Canary Islands, Santiago moved to Cuba as a young man; this circumstance has a significant impact on his social condition. The expatriate protagonist is isolated from his countrymen, ridiculed by his adopted community, and a failure at his chosen profession. To remedy feelings of loss, the old man reminisces about his homeland and adopts Cuban behaviors in language, sport, religion, alcohol consumption, and fishing, among other things. The purpose of his actions is to pass into Cuban society and achieve a new sense of identity. This article uses an analysis of the Santiago's Spanish background and Cuban cultural rites to elucidate how his expatriation affects his actions, self-image, and perspective on his community.
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IN SEVERAL OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S NOVELS, the main character's expatriation is a principal rhetorical device and a theme which critics often neglect. In The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Hemingway employs the perspective of a Spaniard in Cuba to broaden the scope of the narrative. As the author explains in a letter to Lillian Ross, "The Old Man was born a catholic in the island of Lanza Rota [sic] in the Canary Islands" (SL 807). This origin, with its attendant national and cultural differences, makes Santiago an outsider in the Cuban fishing village of Cojimar and is a principal motivation in his actions. Santiago's "eyes the same color as the sea" (10) mark his otherness in a conspicuous and unchangeable way, setting him apart from the impoverished mulatto fishing community, and linking him to European exploitation of the island nation. Probing the political, social, and cultural contexts that would affect a Spaniard living in a former colony, this study examines Santiago's foreignness in the novella to establish how the protagonist's ethnic and national otherness affects his actions and sense of self in Cuba.
The existing critical reception of The Old Man and the Sea has overlooked Santiago's Spanish origins, an oversight that has had a profound importance on the interpretation of the work. Every critic--including Spaniard Angel Capellan--reads the novella as though Santiago is Cuban, despite the fact that he was born in Spain. An analysis of the old man's life will demonstrate that he lived in the Canary Islands long enough to forge Spanish national sentiments; this investigation will make clear that Santiago is a foreigner in Cuba attempting to associate himself with his new community through cultural rites specific to the place.
National identity is composed of cultural, social, ethnic, linguistic, and familial influences. While stating that Santiago was born in Spain's Canary Islands, Hemingway seems to leave the amount of time that Santiago lived there unclear. Before emigrating to Latin America, Santiago worked on ships that ran from the Canary Islands to the African coast, and as an old man he dreams from time to time about the lions he saw from the decks. The narrator remarks that Santiago "dreamed of Africa when he was a boy" (OMATS 24, my emphasis). Hemingway's use of the term "boy" throughout the text to refer to this period in Santiago's life does not necessarily indicate that Santiago moved to Cuba as a child. In the Spanish-speaking world, the terms synonymous with "boy"--chico and muchacho--can refer to males until they marry, even if they are still single in their 30s. As Hemingway uses the word "boy" in its Hispanic sense, the label does not indicate that Santiago left the Canary Islands before forging a Spanish national identity.
An enigmatic dialogue between the old man and Manolin helps clarify how many years Santiago lived in Spain. Manolin explains that "[t]he great Sisler's father was never poor and he, the father, was playing in the Big Leagues when he was my age" (22). Santiago responds, "When I was your age I was before the mast on a square rigged ship that ran to Africa" (22). George Sisler (the great Dick Sisler's father) first played professional baseball at age 22, and therefore Manolin should be 22 during the novella and Santiago should have been the same age when working as a foremast hand out of the Canaries.
Several critics have interpreted this dialogue with different results, (1) but Hemingway's own note concerning this phrase on the original typescript has yet to be considered in the discussion. Hemingway made a notation on the typescript to clarify the cryptic message about the age of the two characters. The initial typed draft reads: "The great Sisler's father was never poor and he was playing in the Big Leagues when he was my age" (EH Typescript). Above the text between the first "he" and "was" (located in the phrase "and he was playing"), Hemingway inserted ", the father," by hand. With the correction, the typescript reads "The great Sisler's father was never poor and he, the father, was playing in the Big Leagues at my age" (EH Typescript, my emphasis). The change insures that "he" refers to George Sisler, and because George Sisler premiered for the St. Louis Browns in 1915 at age 22, Hemingway's addition confirms that Manolin is 22 years old during the novel and that Santiago lived in Spain at least until his early twenties (if not longer). (2) When, in the first film version of The Old Man and the Sea, director Peter Viertel changed Manolin's words from "my age" to "sixteen" without the author's consent, Hemingway insisted that the narrator explain: "The boy was not accurate here" (qtd. in Fuentes 247). Hemingway also objected to casting Felipe Pazos, age 11, as Manolin, because the boy looked like a "tadpole" (Viertel 279). In both the novella and the film, then, the author took steps to underscore the idea that Santiago grew to manhood in the Canary Islands, not Cuba.
Hemingway also gave his protagonist both a name and a nickname alluding to his Spanish identity. The name Santiago evokes Spain's national hero, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar. Vivar fought with and against the Moors during the Reconquest in the 11th century and the battle-cry of his campaigns was "Santiago! Santiago!," because, according to the legend, Saint James appeared to fight for the Christians in the battle of Clavijo. Like Santiago, Vivar was an exile who never returned to his homeland in the north of Spain. As Henry Edward Watts explains in The Christian Recovery of Spain, Vivar was "closely connected with the process of national deliverance" (70). Vivar received the nickname El Cid Campeador (campeon in modern Spanish) for his role as the "man who had fought and beaten the select fighting-man of the opposite side, in the presence of the two armies" (Watts 76). Similarly, Santiago receives the nickname campeon after arm-wrestling with the negro from Cienfuegos--the strongest man on the docks--while bettors on both sides "sat on high chairs against the wall and watched" (OMATS 69). Cubans frequently designate foreigners by nicknames consistent with national origin--Ernesto Guevara, for example, was dubbed "Che" for his Argentinean speech--and thus Santiago's designation as campion, a common peninsular nickname deriving from El Cid's nickname, reflects his Spanish origins.
Santiago reminisces every night of "the white peaks of the Islands rising from the sea and then he dreamed of the different harbours and roadsteads of the Canary Islands" (OMATS 25). Apparently without nostalgia for Cuba, he constantly reminisces about his homeland. Santiago has repeated these tales so often that Manolin has grown tired of them, responding, "I know. You told me" (22). Nationality has been defined as "the sentiment of...
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