Hemingway's America, Africa, and the Question(Ing)

DRAWING THE (COLOR)LINE: HEMINGWAY’S AMERICA, AFRICA, AND THE QUESTION(ING) OF AUTHORITY Marc Kevin Dudley A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English Chapel Hill 2006 Approved by: Townsend Ludington Linda Wagner-Martin Kimball J. King J. Lee Greene Joseph Flora ABSTRACT Marc Kevin Dudley: DRAWING THE (COLOR)LINE: HEMINGWAY’S AMERICA, AFRICA AND THE QUESTION(ING) OF AUTHORITY (Under the Direction of Dr. Townsend Ludington) My examination asserts that Ernest Hemingway’s modernity lies beyond mere stylistic technique and aesthetic concerns and finds itself in what perhaps is an inadvertent appreciation of W.E. B. Du Bois’ prognostication that race would be the pervasive issue for a “progressive” nation looking to the first decades of the twentieth century. I contend that Hemingway not only shares Faulkner’s concerns with the issue of race in America, but that he takes them well beyond the bounds of the South or any particular region and extends them to the rest of the nation. Little to nothing has been said about Hemingway’s investment in issues of race; this examination intends to end that relative silence. Hemingway’s marked interest in race (de)formation is closely aligned to a vested national interest in and an anxiety over a rapidly changing American racial topography and issues of American (White) identity. The works in this examination become then an expression of what I will call a collective angst in the wake of a perpetually fading color line and, correspondingly, an ever-eroding Anglo power structure. Hemingway’s reaction is a simultaneous questioning of (White) self-identity and coveted authoritarian right and a marked re-entrenchment in standard racial typology. The so-called Indian stories work well to explore ideas of miscegenation (I use this term broadly to suggest race mixing and influence in a general sense) and White “vulnerability,” and they attest to the author’s ii ambivalence. Hemingway’s African American centered stories continue this exploration of color-line transgression and the deconstruction of White identity, with the added element of violence as a possible means to that end. Thus, Africa becomes Hemingway’s imaginative enclave of Anglo agency. Moreover, imperial Africa (more specifically, the metaphorical, geopolitical space inhabited by the Anglo) becomes the site within which he, as White subject-self, can control the placement, demarcation, and enforcement of that coveted color- line. This very emphatic racial awareness, nonetheless, is what also draws Hemingway into the realm of the Modern. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The journey to this point has been a long, sometimes lonely, and often arduous one. I would like to thank the several who joined me along the way. Familial support (my mother, father, and sister) and collegial guidance (Townsend Ludington, Kimball King, J. Lee Greene, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Joseph Flora) made all the difference in the world. I dedicate this work to all of you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………………...1 II. THE INDIAN CAMP STORIES AND THE GREAT (WHITE) MAN.………................26 III. BEYOND THE (INDIAN) CAMP: NATIVE AMERICAN DISSOLUTION AND RECONSTITUTED WHITENESS……………………………………………...............64 IV. BLACK MEN, WHITE HOPE(S): GROTESQUERY AND TRUTH-TELLING IN THE SQUARE JUNGLE…………………………………………………………....90 V. KILLIN’EM WITH KINDNESS: HEMINGWAY’S BLACKNESS AND THE TEMPERED STORM…………………………………………………………………..134 VI. THE AFRICAN STORIES: (RE)DRAWING THE COLOR LINE OR IMAGINING THE CONTINENT IN SHADES OF BLACK AND WHITE…………............................................................................................................157 VII.THE AFRICAN NOVELS: (RE)CONSTRUCTING THE GREAT (WHITE) MAN……………………………………………………………………………….…..191 VIII. BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………….....231 An Introduction: “You Can’t Go Home Again.” “Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Peoples by this man Goddard? . “Well it’s a fine book and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific and stuff; it’s been proved. ….Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.” F. S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby This excerpt from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby encompasses in a brief segment a pervasive race consciousness and a growing anxiety that haunted the American psyche in the early years of the twentieth century. While the featured segment, when contextualized, clearly mocks the irrationality of the consciously hyper-national Tom Buchanans of early twentieth-century America, it also expresses W.E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 proclamation in his Souls of Black Folk that the “problem of the twentieth century” would most assuredly be that of the “color line.”1 This single proclamation could not have been any truer had it been made ten years ago as an observation in hindsight as opposed to a prognostication uttered over a century ago. Du Bois made the assertion as a sociologist, a historian, and most importantly, a Black man in White America. Relatively few members of the White literary academy addressed, let alone immersed themselves in the politics and sociology of race. Fitzgerald dabbles with the idea ever so slightly in such works as Diamond as Big as the Ritz, or, as suggested above, The Great Gatsby. Perhaps more than any other twentieth-century canonical representative, William Faulkner would immerse himself in the issues of biology and ethnicity in an attempt to exorcise the demons and defeatist sensibilities haunting an entire region’s generations after the actual sectional strife ceased, generations after its unconditional surrender.2 This examination argues that race consciousness and a fixation on that color-line first proposed by the likes of Du Bois even pervades the texts of the unlikeliest of the so-called “moderns,” Ernest Hemingway. Further, I see Hemingway’s fascination with and eventual push toward the African continent, as evinced in several of his later texts, as a means of escaping the challenges to racial privilege being mounted at home, and as a way to clarify notions of racial identity and authority. With its clearly delineated sociological hierarchy, Africa becomes for him the true “land of opportunity,” and in some respects “the last good country.” No discussion of Ernest Hemingway is complete without some treatment of the author’s contributions to the American literary canon, and that invariably leads to discussion of the author’s transformation of the aesthetic landscape with both innovations in style (primarily) and form. Hemingway talked about new things, or if not new things, new ideas in a burgeoning new century. Certainly he explored these ideas in a vernacular new to the scene. His contributions to this way of writing, informed by that which came before it, but beholden to no one (or so Hemingway would have you believe; Gertrude Stein would beg to differ), form the foundations of critical reception and assessment of the writer. Mimicking the great artists of his day and before--the Cézannes and Mattisses and Picassos---Hemingway crafted a literary style that both expanded the literary landscape via syntax and pulled the image from the literary imagination via diction, often without resorting to full-fledged manifest expression.3 Critics typically point to his concern with all of the issues engendered by a new century and a nation bent on “Progress,” a nation still reeling 2 from the realities of war.4 Hemingway’s modernity, though, is found in more than his form; his aesthetically forward gaze can be seen in subject matter as well. Existentialist thought pervades Hemingway’s works. We see glimpses of this in the early stories of In Our Time; we see these ideas come to fruition in such novels as A Farewell To Arms and most especially The Sun Also Rises, all stories within which tradition and convention prove fruitless for the wayward individual in search of new definition and meaning. Furthermore, gender, as many scholars have noted in recent years, has received the most treatment in the past two decades with a resurgence of critical attention to Hemingway. However, the racial divide in America, I would argue, is the untapped resource for Hemingway scholarship.5 At first glance, Hemingway’s racial investment seems specious at best. Racial epithets color the text more than actual people of color; the minority presence is seemingly all but non-existent in his oeuvre. However, there is that repeated, seemingly sincere expression of love for Africa. When taken collectively, in the Hemingway race-centered texts—including several not discussed in this examination—there is a marked push toward Africa, so that Hemingway’s landing on the “dark continent,” his repeated literal and metaphoric return to the continent and profound fascination and “love” for it should come as no surprise.6 With racial lines of delineation at home blurring, with the old power differential between White and non-White in a state of constant flux, Africa provided the perfect locus within which to reaffirm both those once reliable racial tenets

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