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"There were many Indians in the story": hidden history in Hemingway's "big two-hearted river".

Article Excerpt
The essay considers the importance of hidden history in "Big Two-Hearted River" and what Hemingway may have had in mind in creating a landscape that is white on the surface yet penetrated by Indian presences underneath. Hidden inscriptions of Indianness have to be searched for in the text and are part of an interior landscape in which war and insurrection have an important role to play in explaining how the story is crafted. Hemingway's knowledge of tribal landscapes and tribal histories, together with his readings in modernist anthropology, underpin a scholarly interest in primitive religion that stayed with him throughout his life.

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THE JOURNEY OF INQUIRY THAT HAS TO BE MADE when a writer enters a landscape for the first time is clearly to the fore in an early dispatch that Hemingway wrote for the Toronto Daily Star, dated 10 June 1922. The article describes a day's fishing on the Rhone Canal, a stretch of water "barely a yard wide." The day is a hot one and Hemingway looks "out across the green, slow valley" before he gets a measure of the place. The landscape is impressionistic--"cool and flickering" like "a moving shape," it contains suggestions of the world beyond, a sense of otherness that enters the valley on the afternoon breeze "from Lake Geneva." The reader feels that if Hemingway can read the landscape correctly and observe the "changes" that are taking place--the "great shadows" that come with the breeze "down from the mountain" and the shapes that accompany the angle of the sun "behind the big shoulder of the Savoie Alps"--the more successful he will be with the rod. With this in mind Hemingway bides his time on the stream and avoids the temptation to thrash around in the midday heat. He appreciates the hidden narratives that lie in wait "under the edges of the banks": the trout that come to life in the evening and are very "shy" and have to be searched for and worked "against the current." He notes the obstructions--"the willow trees near the water," the weed in the current--and even then there is always a risk of losing his line and no guarantee of success with the hook. The trout are liable to stay well hidden. At certain times and under 'certain conditions they will rise to the surface and make themselves known; if he is "lucky" he will "tire" them out and "snake" them onto the river bank (BL 48-49).

Hemingway leaves the Rhone valley as he arrives--alive to its wonders and imaginary pasts. As he walks in the direction of Aigle he begins to ponder the absorbent properties of the earth and the hidden imprints left by others. He sees a landscape in a state of change, the wind and light that are signs of the landscape's externality and an indication of its outwardness. He thinks about the French and the Romans who came before him, as well as "some Helvetian" a Celtic tribesman who "used to sneak away from the camp" to fish the stream "under the willows" in the days when the trout weren't quite "as shy." (BL 51). These outward signs tend to suggest that a writer's duty is to explore the histories that precede his arrival. Landscapes like this bring histories to life. Those that don't, more often than not, are incorrectly read by the reader or governed by narratives that serve the interests of a privatized life.

Three years later, in "Big Two-Hearted River" Hemingway re-considered the implications of the earlier challenge and decided to explore in greater detail the artistic possibilities of hiddenness and landscape. The Helvetian tribesman returns to life, not as a member of a Roman "road gang,' but as an American Indian whose multiple presences and hidden personalities have a role to play in guarding against unwarranted trespass. The Roman soldier re-appears also. He is now a World War One veteran, fishing for trout as a therapeutic release from military activity. Both characters are smuggled into a story set in upstate Michigan, a countryside more problematic and historically fraught even than that of the Rhone. For example, native presences dominate the action and additional histories that are very specific to the United States have to be accounted for. Peace in the region remains a long way off and a soldier who leaves his camp to fish is now at risk from surprise attack. Indian history is critically important in explaining the changes that have taken place and the effect they have on the war veteran, Nick Adams.

It's a statement of the blindingly obvious to say that Nick returns from the First World War with post-traumatic stress. What is often forgotten is that he shares this condition with a number of Indian soldiers who returned to states like Michigan with acute stress disorder, the result of fighting in some of the most dangerous theaters on the Western Front. Native America, says Russell Laurence Barsh, had always sent high numbers of soldiers to front-line theaters, but in the First World War the level of casualties was disproportionately high. Those who survived fared badly and on their return felt let down by the continued lack of social and economic opportunity oh the reservation. This feeling of betrayal provided the "critical momentum for a new Indian militancy." In acts of "local resistance" says Barsh, Indian veterans resorted to "witchery" and ghostly ceremonies in order to generate self-respect (377). For the Indians, spiritual transformation became a basis for personal survival at a time of social and economic decline.

The reassertion of tribal identity and the cultural revival of Indianness reached its peak in the 1920s, says Clyde Ellis, with the appearance of tribal dances, songs, and rituals "previously associated with warfare" (365). In the aftermath of war, these rituals became a "validation" of the Indian "allegiance to specific and .honorable traditions" as well as acts of regional and local importance which re-confirmed the pre-reservation status of the tribes. Indeed, writes Thomas Britten, "many aspects of traditional Indian cultures gained renewed importance" as a result of the war (qtd. in Ellis 365). Indian communities, agrees Ellis, were either "drawn to the martial ethos that defined a great deal of the past" or they "saw participation in the nation's wars" as a way of reviving their warrior ethos. Rather than feeling demoralized and defeated, some veterans gained considerable self-esteem from their war experiences and were able to use them in order "to create a context in which traditional rituals assumed a new and 'useful meaning." To an extent, the First World War culturally empowered the warrior ethic as the war's aftermath "inaugurated a flurry of celebrations" in honor of the returning servicemen. These events, says Ellis, contributed to "the first wave of a revivified dance culture" and a new spirit of tribal self-confidence (365). (1)

Tribal militancy is a pervasive feature of "Big Two-Hearted River," in stark contrast to the feelings of defeat and demoralization that we come across in earlier stories like "Indian Camp" or the fragment "The Indians Moved Away." Almost thirty-five years after he published his story, Hemingway offered a word of advice to readers and critics who had missed the point and refused to delve below the narrative surface of "Big Two-Hearted River" In a posthumously published piece composed in 1959 and titled "The Art of the Short Story," he briefly explained what the purpose had been that governed his approach: "there were many Indians in the story, just as the war is in the story, and none of the Indians nor the war appeared" (131).

The cultural critic Ella Shohat helps unravel the textual significance of Hemingway's remark. In her work on the dialectics of "absence" she invites us to consider the importance of ethnic and "marginalized groups" and the way they appear in "exclusively white" cultural texts. Shohat explains "the various ways in which ethnic presences can penetrate these [texts] without always literally being represented by ethnic and racial themes or even characters." "Big Two-Hearted River" gives us the opportunity to see a similar process of penetration at work. The story may appear white but the landscape we enter is distinctly tribal and, in Shohat's words, "textually submerged" (215). A narrative of fishing on...

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