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Performative patterns in Hemingway's "Soldier's Home".

Article Excerpt
This essay focuses on the idea of "patterns" in what Hemingway called "the best short story I ever wrote." Against a theoretical background informed by the work of Judith Butler, it is argued that the protagonist, Harold Krebs, suffers from not being able to translate his war-time experiences into the patterns of normativity he encounters upon returning to Oklahoma. This leads him to become a social outsider and a tragic hero who is not likely to find a way out of his emotional predicament and back into normal family life.

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PATTERNED PICTURES

Ernest Hemingway referred to "Soldier's Home" as "the best short story I ever wrote" (SL 139). In the short story collection In Our Time, the short story does stand out if only because its protagonist, an American soldier in the aftermath of WWWI, is not, as a reader might have come to expect, Nick Adams, but the oddly named Harold Krebs. It will not do to embrace Harold Krebs as just another version of the same old Nick Adams (or, indeed, as some would have it, as yet another straightforward literary incarnation of Hemingway himself). "Readers must wonder why Hemingway chose 'Krebs' instead of 'Nick,'" David Ullrich asserts in an article dedicated to teasing out the meanings conjured up by this protagonist's name. This story is different from those featuring Nick as a protagonist; this main character is not caught by the safety net of the famous Hemingway "code"--he slips through its mazes.

The text famously opens with a description of two photographs, forced into a parallelism that brings out the significant contrast between the worlds--or the potential safety nets--that they represent:

There is a picture which shows him among his fraternity brothers, all of them wearing exactly the same height and style Collar.... There is a picture which shows him on the Rhine with two German girls and another corporal. Krebs and the corporal look too big for their uniforms. (CSS 111)

These snapshots introduce the double backdrop against which Harold Krebs's story will unfold, and they prefigure the antagonism that will direct its narrative. With reference to a theoretical framework based on the work of Judith Butler, this paper will trace how Krebs becomes an outsider to what once was his life, and how his tragedy is brought about by the conflicting social norms that govern his behavior--i.e. the norms of the respective societies represented by the aforementioned photographs.

The first picture seems to signify a traditional American schooling and education fuelled by a juvenile form of (homo)sociality: (1) there are no women in this picture, and the fraternity brothers (first-rate homosocial pleonasm) wear collars of the exact same height and style, as a token of male bonding. This American ideal of youthful masculinity clashes with the uniformed male version of the second picture--a clash announced by the story's very first sentence: "Krebs went to the war from a Methodist college in Kansas" (CSS 111). Women are suddenly present in this picture, and the hint of blossoming sexuality is highlighted by the remark that Krebs and his fellow soldier "look too big for their uniforms" (111). Though it may be far-fetched to suggest they are swollen with phallic desire, their size, their outgrowing the rigid convention of uniforms, conjures up an altered masculinity, one that is no longer strictly constrained by the limits of uniformity. That there is something out of joint in this evolution is suggested by the deadpan statement that "Thee German girls are not beautiful. The Rhine does not show in the photograph" (111). (2) This small narrative diptych is more than a chronological prologue to introduce the protagonist, as it already contains most of the topoi and tensions that will dominate the further story.

PERFORMATIVITY

This sense of "outgrowing" a uniform pattern is the main theme of "Soldier's Home." The two pictures at the beginning of this story emblematize different styles of normativity--networks or patterns of norms and regulations that shape the people they encompass. To elaborate on this interplay between normativity and subjectivity, I turn to the theoretical writings of Judith Butler, who has addressed this issue in much of her work. After Gender Trouble was published in 1990, performativity, as a "stylized repetition of acts" (Butler 1999, 179), became one of the decade's buzzwords---even if its popularity may be declining by now, probably due to overuse, misuse, and sometimes abuse. Theorizing the institution of the subject within social norms functioning as constitutive constraints has remained at the core of Butler's thought even into more recent work such as Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) (which has no explicitly gendered angle and thus seems to digress from the bulk of her earlier writing).

Reading Butler alongside Hemingway can be productive, as shown by Thomas Strychacz in his book Hemingway's Theaters of Masculinity. As the title implies, Strychacz focuses explicitly on the performative quality of Hemingway's male protagonists, most notably Francis Macomber. He proposes a "hermeneutics of performance [that] undertakes to enter the sliding ground of signification, which renders meaning contextual and constative utterances rhetorical" (48). My own project, though similar, does not want to highlight the theatricality of Harold Krebs's gender identity so much as to investigate its underpinnings.

It is certainly not the intention of this paper simply to apply a dab of queer theory to Hemingway's text and give it a pink coating. This reading is triggered by the recurrent references to "patterns" that, in this story, crop up in various guises--from geometric to social. This paper therefore analyzes the patterns and matrices, nets and mazes in which protagonist Harold Krebs attempts to live his life. (3) If the individual is always instituted, again and again, by performing the norms laid down by its environment, this may account for Krebs's difficulties in coping with the narrative of his past upon finding himself in a completely different setting.

LIES

Upon returning to his home town, wanting to talk about his war experiences, "Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie" (CSS 111). Having moved from the Methodist college in Kansas to the war in Europe and then home again, Krebs cannot retrieve the...

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