The Old Man and the Sea Author(s): Leo Gurko Source: College English, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Oct., 1955), pp. 11-15 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/495716 Accessed: 08/01/2009 13:02

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http://www.jstor.org The Old Man and the Sea LEO GuRKo

MOST of Hemingway's novels empha- the Virgen de Cobre" (The Old Man and size what men cannot do, and define the Sea, Scribner's, 1952, p. 71), but these the world's limitations, cruelties, or built- are rituals that come after the event and in evil. The Old Man and the Sea is re- have no significant relationship with it. markable for its stress on what men can In this universe, changeless and bare of do and on the world as an arena where divinity, everyone has his fixed role to heroic deeds are possible. The universe play. Santiago's role is to pursue the great inhabited by Santiago, the old Cuban marlin, "That which I was born for" fisherman, is not free of tragedy and pain (p. 44), he reflects; the marlin's is to live but these are transcended, and the affirm- in the deepest parts of the sea and escape ing tone is in sharp contrast with the the pursuit of man. The two of them pessimism permeating such books as The struggle with each other to the death, but Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. without animosity or hatred. On the con- One aspect of this universe, familiar trary, the old man feels a deep affection from the earlier works, is its changeless- and admiration for the fish. He admires ness. The round of Nature-which in- its great strength as it pulls his skiff cludes human nature-is not only eternal out to sea, and becomes conscious of its but eternally the same. The sun not only nobility as the two grow closer and closer rises, it rises always, and sets and rises together, in spirit as well as space, during again without change of rhythm. The re- their long interlude on the Gulf Stream. lationship of Nature to man proceeds In the final struggle between them, his through basic patterns that never vary. hands bleeding, his body racked with fa- Therefore, despite the fact that a story by tigue and pain, the old man reflects in his Hemingway is always full of action, the exhaustion: action takes inside a world that is place You are killing me, fish... But have static. you fundamentally a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or Moreover, its processes are purely secu- more beautiful, or a calmer or a more noble lar in character: Hemingway's figures are thing than you, brother. Come on and kill often religious but their religion is pe- me. I do not care who kills who. (p. 102) ripheral rather than central to their lives. On the homeward with the mar- In The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago, journey, lin tied to the principal figure, is a primitive Cuban, the boat and already under at- tack from his at once religious and superstitious. Yet sharks, Santiago establishes final with the that neither his religion nor his superstitious relationship fish, great of Nature: beliefs are relevant to his tragic experi- phenomenon ence with the great marlin; they do not You did not kill the fish only to keep alive create it or in any way control its meaning. and to sell for food, he thought. You killed The fisherman himself, knowing what it him for pride and because you are a fisher- is all about, relies on his own resources man. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If love it is and not on God (in whom he devoutly be- you him, not a sin to kill him. (p. 116) lieves, just as Jake Barnes, while calling himself a bad Catholic, is also a devout A sense of brotherhood and love, in a believer). If he succeeds in catching the world in which everyone is killing or be- fish, he "will say ten Our Fathers and ten ing killed, binds together the creatures of Hail Marys ... and make a pilgrimage to Nature, establishes between them a unity 11 12 COLLEGE ENGLISH and an emotion which transcends the de- To be a hero means to dare more than structive pattern in which they are caught. other men, to expose oneself to greater In the eternal round, each living thing, dangers, and therefore more greatly to man and animal, acts out its destiny ac- risk the possibilities of defeat and death. cording to the drives of its species, and On the eighty-fifth day after catching his in the process becomes a part of the pro- last fish, Santiago rows far beyond the found harmony of the natural universe. customary fishing grounds; as he drops This harmony, taking into account the his lines into water of unplumbed depth hard facts of pursuit, violence, and death he sees the other fishermen, looking very but reaching a stage of feeling beyond small, strung out in a line far inland be- them, is a primary aspect of Hemingway's tween himself and the shore. Because he view of the world. Even the sharks have is out so far, he catches the great fish. their place. They are largely scavengers, But because the fish is so powerful, it but the strongest and most powerful pulls his skiff even farther out-so far among them, the great Mako shark which from shore that they cannot get back makes its way out of the deep part of the in time to prevent the marlin being chewed sea, shares the grandeur of the marlin. to pieces by the sharks. "I shouldn't have Santiago kills him but feels identified with gone out so far, fish," he said. "Neither him as well: for you nor for me. I'm sorry, fish" (p. The of the and But the he 121). greatness experience you enjoyed killing dentuso, the of the loss are bound He lives on the live fish as you do. inevitability up thought. bound- He is not a scavenger nor just a moving together. Nature provides us with appetite as some sharks are. He is beautiful less opportunities for the great experience and noble and knows no fear of anything. if we have it in us to respond. The experi- (pp. 116-117) ence carries with it its heavy tragic price. No matter. It is worth it. When Santiago Nature not only has its own harmony at last returns with the marlin still lashed and integration but also its degrees of to the skiff but eaten away to the skeleton, value. In The Old Man and the Sea this he staggers uphill to his hut groaning is contained in the idea of depth. The under the weight of the mast. He falls deeper the sea the more valuable the crea- asleep exhausted and dreams of the Afri- tures living there and the more intense can lions he had seen in his younger days the experience deriving from it. On the at sea. The next morning the other fisher- day that he catches the great marlin, the men gaze in awe at the size of the skeleton, old man goes much farther out than the measure it to see by how much it is record- other fishermen and casts bait in much breaking, while the reverential feeling of deeper water. The marlin itself is a deni- the boy, Manolin, for the fisherman is zen of the profounder depths. Even the strongly reinforced. Everyone has some- Mako shark lives in the deep water and how been uplifted by the experience. Even its speed, power, and directness are quali- on the lowest, most ignorant level, it creates ties associated with depth. There are, in a sensation. The tourists in the last scene fact, two orders in every species: the great of the story mistake the marlin for a marlins and the lesser, the great sharks shark but they too are struck by a sense and the smaller, bad-smelling, purely of the extraordinary. scavenger sharks who dwell in shallower The world not only contains the possi- water and attack with a sly indirectness in bilities of heroic adventure and emotion demeaning contrast with the bold approach to which everyone, on whatever level, can of the Mako. There are also two kinds of respond, but it also has continuity. Santi- men-as there have always been in Hem- ago is very old and has not much time ingway-the greater men and the lesser, left. But he has been training Manolin heroes and ordinary humans. to pick up where he leaves off. The boy THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA 13

has been removed by his parents from max with the first great jump of the mar- the old man's boat because of his bad luck, lin when, for the first time, Santiago sees but this in no way diminishes the boy's the gigantic size of his prey. Hemingway eagerness to be like Santiago. The master- pays very close attention to the rippling pupil relationship between them suggests and fluting of the water, to wind currents, that the heroic impulse is part of a tradi- the movements of turtles, fish, and birds, tional process handed down from one the rising of sun and stars. One is filled generation to another, that the world is a not simply with a sense of Nature's vast- continuous skein of possibility and affir- ness, but of her enchantment. This en- mation. This affirming note, subdued in chantment adds an aesthetic dimension to Hemingway's earlier fiction, is sounded Santiago's adventure, an adventure whose here with unambiguous and unrestricted heroism invests it with moral meaning and clarity. whose invocation of comradeship and Indeed, Santiago is the clearest repre- identity supply it with emotional grandeur. sentation of the hero because he is the Within this universe, where there is no only major character in Hemingway who limit to the depth of experience, learning has not been permanently wounded or how to function is of the greatest im- disillusioned. His heroic side is suggested portance. It is not enough to have will; throughout. Once, in Casablanca, he de- one must also have technique. If will is feated a huge Negro from Cienfuegos at what enables one to live, technique is what the hand game and was referred to there- enables one to live successfully. Santiago after as El Campeon. Now in his old age, is not a journeyman fisherman, but a su- he is hero-worshipped by Manolin who perb craftsman who knows his business wants always to fish with him, or, when he thoroughly and always practises it with cannot, at least to help him even with his great skill. He keeps his lines straight most menial chores. At sea Santiago, shar- where others allow them to drift with ing the Cuban craze for baseball, thinks the current. "It is better to be lucky," he frequently of Joe DiMaggio, the greatest thinks. "But I would rather be exact. ballplayer of his generation, and wonders Then when luck comes you are ready" whether DiMaggio, suffering from a bone (p. 36). To be ready-with all one's pro- spur in his heel, ever endured the pain fessional as well as psychological re- which the marlin is now subjecting him to. sources-that is the imperative. One rea- And at night, when he sleeps, he dreams of son that Hemingway's stories are so lions playing on the beaches of Africa. The crammed with technical details about constant association with the king of ball- fishing, hunting, bull-fighting, boxing, players and the king of beasts adds to the and war-so much so that they often read old man's heroic proportions. He is heroic like manuals on these subjects-is his even in his bad luck. The story opens with belief that professional technique is the the announcement that he has gone eighty- quickest and surest way of understanding four days without taking a fish-ordinary the physical processes of Nature, of get- men are seldom afflicted with disaster so ting into the thing itself. Men should study outsized. the world in which they are born as the Heightening and intensifying these al- most serious of all subjects; they can live ready magnified effects is the extraordi- in it only as they succeed in handling nary beauty of Nature which cozens and themselves with skill. Life is more than bemuses us with its sensuous intoxica- an endurance contest. It is also an art, tions. The account of the sea coming to with rules, rituals, and methods that, life at dawn is one of the most moving once learned, lead on to mastery. passages in the story, supplemented later Furthermore, when the great trial at rhapsodic intervals by the drama of the comes, one must be alone. The pressure great pursuit. This comes to its visual cli- and the agony cannot be shared or 14 COLLEGE ENGLISH sloughed off on others, but must be en- lescent Byron spoiled Cantwell's story. It dured alone. Santiago, his hands chafed is almost totally absent from Santiago's. and bleeding from the pull of the marlin, Here we have entered a world which his face cut, in a state of virtual prostra- has to some degree recovered from the tion from his struggle, several times gaping wounds that made it so frightening wishes the boy were with him to ease the a place in the early stories. The world strain, but it is essential that he go un- which injured Jake Barnes so cruelly, accompanied, that in the end he rely on his pointlessly deprived Lieutenant Henry of own resources and endure his trial un- his one love, destroyed Harry Morgan aided. At the bottom of this necessity for at the height of his powers, and robbed solitariness, there is the incurable reliance Robert Jordan of his political idealism on the individual which makes Heming- has now begun to regain its balance. It way the great contemporary inheritor of is no longer the bleak trap within which the romantic tradition. The stripping- man is doomed to struggle, suffer, and die down of existence to the struggle between as bravely as he can, but a meaningful, individual man and the natural world, integrated structure that challenges our during the course of which he rises to the resources, holds forth rich emotional re- highest levels of himself, has an early echo wards for those who live in it daringly in Keats's line "Then on the shore of the and boldly though continuing to exact wide world I stand alone...." In modem heavy payment from them in direct pro- fiction it is Melville and Conrad who give portion to how far they reach out. There this theme its most significant shape. The is no less tragedy than before, but this mysterious, inscrutable, dramatic Nature has lost its bleakness and accidentality, into which their heroes plunge themselves and become purposive. It is this sense of in search of their own self-realization purposiveness that makes its first appear- supplies Hemingway with the scaffolding ance in Hemingway's philosophy, and sets for The Old Man and the Sea. Like off The Old Man and the Sea from his Captain Ahab, like Lord Jim, Santiago other fiction. is pitched into the dangerous ocean; for After the first World War the tradi- only there, and with only himself to fall tional hero disappeared from Western back on, can he work out his destiny and literature, to be replaced in one form or come to final terms with life. another by Kafka's Mr. K. Hemingway's The concept of the hero whose triumph protagonists, from Nick Adams on, were consists of stretching his own powers to hemmed in like Mr. K. by a bewildering their absolute limits regardless of the cosmos which held them in a tight vise. physical results gives The Old Man and The huge complicated mushrooming of the Sea a special place among its author's politics, society, and the factory age began works. It confronts us with a man who to smother freedom of action on the indi- is not only capable of making the ultimate vidual's part. In his own life Hemingway effort, but makes it successfully and con- tended to avoid the industrialized coun- tinuously. This theme of affirmation, that tries including his own, and was drawn had begun to be struck in Across the from the start to the primitive places River and into the Trees, is presented here of Spain, Africa, and Cuba. For there, much more convincingly. Colonel Cant- the ancient struggle and harmony between well of the immediately preceding novel man and Nature still existed, and the is forever talking about his heroism; San- heroic possibilities so attractive to Hem- tiago acts his out. Cantwell reminisces on ingway's temperament had freer play. At past triumphs; the old fisherman demon- last, in the drama of Santiago, a drama strates them before our eyes. The strain entirely outside the framework of modern of boastful exhibitionism that causes some society and its institutions, he was able to readers to regard Hemingway as an ado- bring these possibilities to their first full THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA 15

fruition, and re-discover, in however value because it makes possible a total specialized a context, the hero lost in the response to the demands upon the self. twentieth century. Santiago is the first of the main figures Thus The Old Man and the Sea is the in Hemingway who is not an American, culmination of Hemingway's long search and who is altogether free of the entangle- for disengagement from the social world ments of modern life. It is toward the and total entry into the natural. This creation of such a figure that Hemingway emerges in clearer focus than ever before has been moving, however obscurely, as one of the major themes in his career from the beginning. His ability to get in- both as writer and man. Jake and Bill are side this type of character without the happy only in the remote countryside out- fatal self-consciousness that mars so much side Burguete, away from the machinery literary "primitivism" is a measure of of postwar Europe. It is when Lieutenant how far he has succeeded, in imagination Henry signs his separate peace, deserts at least, in freeing himself from the famil- from the Italian army, and retires with his iar restraints of convention. love to the high Swiss mountains far re- In this movement from the confine- moved from the man-made butchery of ments of society to the challenges of Na- the war that he enjoys his brief moment ture, Hemingway is most closely linked to of unclouded bliss. The defeated writer Conrad. Conrad thrust his Europeans into in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," as he the pressures of the Malayan archipelago lies dying, laments his inability to free and darkest Africa because he was con- himself from the complicated temptations vinced that only when removed from the of money, fashion, the life of sophisti- comforts and protective mechanisms of cated dilettantism, and thinks of his lost civilization could they be put to the test. talent as resting unspoiled on the remote In his one London novel, The Secret virginal snows cresting the summit of Agent, Conrad demonstrated that suffer- an African mountain (height on land is ing and tragedy were as possible in Brix- plainly the moral equivalent in Heming- ton and Camberwell as off the Java coast; way to depth in the sea). Robert Jordan heroism, however, was not, and The must first disengage himself from the Secret Agent stands as his one major political machinery of Spain before the work that remained hero-less. This em- act of sacrificing his life for his comrades bracing of Nature has nothing of Rousseau can acquire its note of pure spiritual ex- in it; it is not a revulsion against the altation. corruption and iniquity of urban life. It The movement to get out of society and is, instead, a flight from safety and the its artifices is not motivated by the desire atrophying of the spirit produced by to escape but by the desire for liberation. safety. It is for the sake of the liberation Hemingway seeks to immerse himself of the human spirit rather than the purifi- totally in Nature not to "evade his re- cation of social institutions that Conrad sponsibilities" but to free his moral and and Hemingway play out their lonely emotional self. Since life in society is dramas in the bosom of Nature. necessarily stunting and artificial, coward- Because The Old Man and the Sea re- ice consists not of breaking out of it cords this drama in its most successful but of continuing in it. To be true to form, it gives off in atmosphere and tone oneself makes a return to the lost world a buoyant sense of release that is new of Nature categorically imperative. And in Hemingway. The story, then, may well that lost world, as The Old Man and the be less a capstone of Hemingway's ex- Sea reveals, has its own responsibilities, traordinary career to date than a fresh disciplines, moralities, and all-embracing emotional point of departure for the work meaning quite the equivalent of anything to come. present in society and of much greater