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Article Excerpt
Ernest Hemingway's attitude toward hunting is often understood as having become gentler in later life, though in complex ways that are difficult to sort out. For instance, should we call his approach ethical when he generally stops killing animals for trophies but continues to kill them for meat? And how do these changes reflect upon Hemingway's broader ethical orientation? This essay approaches this problem by revising what we mean by "ethics." Rather than taking ethics simply as established law, I rely on recent ethical theory to present an account of Hemingway's ethics as centered on openness to experience and to aesthetics, driven by cognizance of mortality, and intensified in confrontations with animals.
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TOWARD THE END OF HEMINGWAY'S second African safari (1953-54), he took up his own version of a traditional Masai practice: hunting alone at night, barefoot, head shaved, and carrying only a spear. These walks are described in Under Kilimanjaro (2005) (and in the abridged True at First Light, 1999). Both versions reveal, with some self-deprecating humor, that Hemingway was "properly scared" and wished for any kind of companion, dog or human. Yet, he calls that fear "a luxury that you have to pay for and like the best luxuries it is worth it most of the time" (TAFL 271; UK 361). As the description proceeds, we understand that the reward is a complex experience of the African night, including the sounds of "night birds," "small animals,' and a lion; the sight of foxes, hares, a wildebeest, and more; and a clearer sense of himself as another animal, exposed to that sweating fear. It is tempting to call this reward aesthetic, at least in part.
Many readers note that such practices also have an ethical valence, especially in comparison to Hemingway's first safari (1933-34), depicted in Green Hills of Africa. Introducing Under Kilimanjaro, for instance, editors Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming mention Hemingway's changed attitude toward hunting, saying he "takes greater pleasure in merely watching the wildlife" than in killing (xiv). In a recent article, "'He Only Looked Sad the Same Way I Felt': The Textual Confessions of Hemingway's Hunters," Carey Voeller also demonstrates that Hemingway showed more and more sympathy toward animals on later trips, replacing his trophy-hunting mentality with a more complex view. For Voeller, these changes are part of a general shift in Hemingway's later life. Voeller's argument follows from Charlene Murphy's work, which he cites, and resembles a number of other studies that draw similar conclusions on this point. (1)
Not mentioned in Voeller's study but also relevant to this issue is Glen Love's 1987 essay "Hemingway's Indian Virtues." Love condemns excessive killing in Hemingway's personal hunting practices (e.g. 203) and finds Hemingway's Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea also too willing to kill the sharks and other animals of the sea that oppose his interests. However, Love notes signs of Hemingway's shift toward greater ecological benevolence "at about the time of the writing" of The Old Man and the Sea (209). As he reminds us, by this time Hemingway had published his belief that "it is a sin to kill any non-dangerous game animal except for meat" (qtd. in Love 209) and had spoken against other wanton killing. Love seems to deduce this as a kind of moral code for Hemingway's later hunting practices.
Love's analysis contrasts this growing sympathy with animals with Hemingway's status "as a modern and as an artist," a maker-"proclaiming of his own uniqueness, [which] also necessitated a destruction or diminishment of the natural world which he loved [...]" (205). For Love, artistic style conflicts with ethics. On this point, Love's approach resembles critical arguments heard not long after release of The Old Man and the Sea. Although the novel was greeted with high praise at first, a second wave of responses was more skeptical. Philip Rahv, for example, calls the story "supple" and "exact" but also finds it limited because of Hemingway's "chosen theme" (360). Rahv suggests that "its quality of emotion [is] genuine but so elemental in its totality as to exact nothing from us beyond instant assent" (360). Philip Young praised the book highly in his first edition of Ernest Hemingway (1952), but in the 1966 edition notes his desire to "greatly tone down the praise for The Old Man and the Sea." He proclaims that "although the tale is here and there exciting it is itself drawn out a little far. Even the title seems an affectation of simplicity, and the realization that Hemingway was now trading on and no longer inventing the style that made him famous came just too late" to Young, hence his initially high praise (274). Young heartily agrees with Dwight Macdonald, who wrote, "'Nothing is at stake [in The Old Man and the Sea] except for the professional obligation to sound as much like Hemingway as possible'" (qtd. in Young 271-72). Indeed, Young uses this discussion to reflect his belief in "the declination of Hemingway's powers--physical, mental, hence literary" (264). Such views all turn on the idea that the story's theme is insignificant and that Hemingway's use of his characteristic style is a form of "fakery," to borrow Robert Weeks's term. Style is at odds with serious, sincere writing in this critical framework.
This notion of internal conflict recalls other, more recent critical accounts insofar as they understand Hemingway to embody, in Voeller's concluding words, "contradictory and very human ideas" (75). Murphy argues that Hemingway could both love and kill animals, recasting this apparent contradiction as a "duality." Similarly, as Lewis and Fleming mark Hemingway's decreased interest in killing animals late in life, as mentioned "above, they suggest he took "pleasure" in watching animals instead. This word choice begs the question of what motivates this change (although clearly, unlike earlier critics, these readers find the theme of such works valuable). Has Hemingway merely substituted the pleasure of watching for the pleasure of killing, without significantly considering the interests of other forms of life? How are we to understand "pleasure" here? Or to frame the question more broadly, what relationship does aesthetic engagement, including experiential pleasure, have to ethics? Should we content ourselves with the familiar but unsatisfying notion that Hemingway's work and conduct regarding animals is complex because it is contradictory?
This essay approaches this problem by revising what we mean by "ethics" permitting us to find an important and principled consistency--one that develops, more fully as time passes--in Hemingway's conduct toward and writing about animals. While many critics of Hemingway's treatment of animals--Love, for example--suppose some clearcut ethical principle against which that treatment can be measured, I rely on recent theory presenting ethics as centered on openness to experience and to aesthetics. In this approach, ethical principles are subject to change based on local conditions of time and place; ethical principles and human actors are thus more fully in dialogue. 'Hemingway's rigorous attention to particulars and his lifelong stance against abstraction are therefore fundamental to his sense of ethics.
After exploring these points about ethics with reference to the safari books Green Hills of Africa and Under Kilimanjaro, this essay will examine The Old Man and the Sea to show its presentation of ethics as a rigorous, ongoing process. Santiago does not decide" upon his ethical stance towards the marlin until he has undergone the encounter. But more crucially for my argument, the novel's rigorous attention to style, to aesthetics, highlights the importance of something like deep inhabitation. The style of The Old Man and the Sea conveys Santiago's keen, embodied awareness of the Cuban marine environment and its life, and that awareness is not only valuable in itself, but fundamentally informs his ethical considerations. Crucially, this form of ethics is not some rote application of a rule about never killing animals. Hemingway is fully aware of the fact that eating requires killing. Rather, this paper argues that in Hemingway's later texts, dead animals--the number of trophies, the size of their horns, or the weight of their flesh--become less necessary as a measure or memento of his hunting of fishing experience, and ethical experience itself takes greater emphasis.
SPORT AND ETHICS
The safari presented in Green Hills of Africa can seem merely a masculine contest in killing power, measured in simple terms such as the sheer numbers of animals killed or the size of their horns. The book's ethics would therefore involve not shooting animals from moving vehicles, obeying license requirements, and doing one's best to be civilized in the midst of the struggle to best one's hunting companions. The primary plot line of Green Hills of Africa consists of a competition between Karl and the Hemingway-figure narrator for size and quality of trophies, while the book's subplot is a literary competition between forms of writing. Hemingway announces this literary competition in the Foreword: "The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action can, if truly presented, Compete with a work of the imagination" (my emphasis). In the literary asides that recur through the book, Hemingway develops this element into a...
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