THREE PATHS TO RELIGIOUS INTEGRATION IN ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S WAR FICTION A DISSERTATION IN English and Humanities Consortium Presented to the Faculty of the University of Missouri-Kansas City in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by TIMOTHY JAMES PINGELTON B.A., University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1994 M.F.A., San Diego State University, 1997 Kansas City, Missouri 2018 © 2018 TIMOTHY JAMES PINGELTON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THREE PATHS TO RELIGIOUS INTEGRATION IN ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S WAR FICTION Timothy James Pingelton, Doctor of Philosophy Degree University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2018 ABSTRACT My dissertation studies religiosity in Ernest Hemingway’s war fiction in terms of how his soldier characters connect to the divine. The means to understanding this connection is in refining how the characters express the utility of this connection and how these features fit into larger structural ideals. I argue that the wartime characters integrate with the divine through various methods: by contact with nature, by enacting a ritual, or by embodying Christian manliness. I base my dissertation on relevant phenomenological theories but also considers broader structural-functional theories, and I form the approach on structuralism in that I look at both single works and at the war fiction as a whole as well as looking for connections between literature and culture. Furthermore, I look to the theories of Northrop Frye in analyzing this literature because Frye’s structuralism allows for genre-bending oeuvres such as Hemingway’s. I argue that, contrary to much literary criticism, the Hemingway wartime protagonists are theists who seek the divine in times ii of conflict, but, unlike the notion of “no atheists in the foxholes,” these characters harbor their religiosity not situationally but throughout their lives. I conclude by bringing together elements of Ernest Hemingway’s biography with mythoi of connection to nature, enacting rituals, and embodying Christian manliness to derive at a rough categorization of this religiosity. iii APPROVAL PAGE The faculty listed below, appointed by the Dean of the School of Graduate Studies, have examined a dissertation titled “Three Paths To Religious Integration In Ernest Hemingway’s War Fiction,” presented by Timothy James Pingelton, candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, and certify that in their opinion it is worthy of acceptance. Supervisory Committee Stephen J. Dilks, Ph.D., Committee Chair Department of English Language and Literature Lynda Payne, Ph.D., Co-Chair Department of History Joan F. Dean, Ph.D. Department of English Language and Literature Steve Paul Department of English Language and Literature Jeffrey S. Bennett, Ph.D. Department of Sociology iv CONTENTS ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................... vii PREFACE ............................................................................................................ viii Chapter 1. THE PREMISE FORMS ...................................................................................1 2. NATURE—THE SCARRED SACRED LANDSCAPE .................................44 3. RITUAL—INITIATION ...............................................................................108 4. CHRISTIAN MANLINESS—DIVINE MANHOOD ...................................150 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................186 REFERENCE LIST .............................................................................................194 VITA ....................................................................................................................217 v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS These are the abbreviations used primarily in parenthetical citations followed by the specific edition used in this research. These abbreviations are approved and used by The Hemingway Society. AFTA A Farewell to Arms (1929. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993) ARIT Across the River and Into the Trees (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950) CP Ernest Hemingway: The Complete Poems (ed. Nicholas Gerogiannis. 1972. Lincoln: U Nebraska Press, 1992) CSS The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition (1938. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993) FWBT For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993) IOT In Our Time (1925. New York: Scribner's, 1958) Additionally, please note that, following MLA style, movements (such as modernism or romanticism) are capitalized only when they could be confused with a generic term. This also applies to religious references (e.g., “first mover” will be used instead of “First Mover”). vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank my doctoral committee for all the academic assistance and for the friendship, too. The time we have had to chat never seems long enough. I also thank my wife Sophie and my children Ed and Maggie—three great people who always had the perfect word when I didn’t. vii PREFACE He was completely integrated now and he took a good long look at everything. Then he looked up at the sky. There were big white clouds in it. He touched the palm of his hand against the pine needles where he lay and he touched the bark of the pine truck that he lay behind. (Ernest Hemingway, FWBT 471) These are the concluding images of Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. When I first read the novel’s ending pages, I knew that, upon closing the back cover, I would flip the book over and re-enter the world of Robert Jordan, Maria, Pilar and the others hiding out in a cave in the Sierra de Guadarrama in central Spain. On the novel’s official publication day (21 Oct 1940), New York Times book critic Ralph Thompson wrote “For Whom the Bell Tolls is a tremendous piece of work. […] Mr. Hemingway has always been the writer, but he has never been the master that he is in For Whom the Bell Tolls” (Thompson). So there is some suggestion that my awe of the book’s artistry was not limited to myself. I have carried for years Robert Jordan’s act of communing with nature on that pine-covered hillside as he faces imminent death—visualizing it, thinking about it, and researching its meaning and significance. I studied Ernest Hemingway’s life and visited a few of the places he lived; I (carefully) handled his unpublished works, notes, and liquor purchase receipts. Then I turned to his critics and relevant scholarship in literature, religious studies, and philosophy. My conclusion, presented in this dissertation, demonstrates that the warrior protagonists in Hemingway’s war oeuvre connect to the divine in three manners: by connecting with nature, through ritual, or by exhibiting viii Christian manliness (as it was understood in Hemingway’s time). These new connections force new interpretations of Hemingway’s war writing and works of other modernists. They are the key to understanding religiosity in the war fiction of Ernest Hemingway; these connections mitigate and ameliorate the seeming disconnects between individual and society, atheist and monotheist, youth and maturity. This dissertation, titled Three Paths to Religious Integration in Ernest Hemingway’s War Fiction, argues that the Hemingway soldier character, in times of tumult, seeks integration with the divine by integrating with nature. The second path to religious integration is by enacting ritual that move the warriors from a state of banality to one of enlightenment. The third means to integrating with the divine is by living a life of Christian manliness (also termed muscular Christianity). The result of this integration, through whatever means, is connection with an omnipotent and immutable force, the union which provides the soldier the comfort of a reality devoid of deceitful imagination or trite dogma. This is a study of religiosity in Ernest Hemingway’s war fiction in terms of how his warrior characters connect to the divine. Their experiences link them with something profound and immutable for the purposes of solace and redemption. The purpose of the biographical chapter in this dissertation is to point to the deep empathy Hemingway seems to have had with his soldier characters. The inclusion of phenomenological aspects (meaning how both the author and his characters actually experience religiosity, á la Rudolph Otto and Mircea Eliade) may seem to stray from the more sociological approaches to religion (macro-level structuralism á la Émile Durkheim and Victor Turner) also detailed in this dissertation. While the premises of Durkheim and Turner are ix certainly relevant to this study and they are not disunited from the micro-level experience of Hemingway and his characters, Hemingway’s depictions of his soldiers transformative experiences (via nature, ritual, or embodying Christian manliness) speak to the apparent empathy the author carried for his soldiers. A starting point for discussing my use of the term “religion” can begin with Émile Durkheim as defined in his landmark work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912): “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (Durkheim 46). The kind of religion practiced by the Hemingway soldier protagonist is certainly not the primitive religion