Hemingway And Camus Construction Of Meaning And

Hemingway And Camus: Construction Of Meaning And Truth Essay, Research Paper
Once we knew that literature was about
life and criticism was about fiction–and everything was simple. Now we
know that fiction is about other fiction, is criticism in fact, or metaphor.
And we know that criticism is about the impossibility of anything being
about life, really, or even about fiction, or finally about anything. Criticism
has taken the very idea of “aboutness” away from us. It has taught us that
language is tautological, if it is not nonsense, and to the extent that
it is about anything it is about itself.
-Robert Scholes
One of the fascinations of reading literature
comes when we discover in a work patterns that have heretofore been overlooked.
We are the pattern finders who get deep enjoyment from the discovery of
patterns in a text. And true to the calling we have noticed a pattern in
and around A Farewell to Arms which, to our knowledge, no one has seen
before. Although there are many editions of the novel, and as a result
the pagination is slightly different in various editions, it is the case
that all editions have forty-one chapters to be found in five books. Here
is what we have discovered: if you multiply 41 by 5 you get 205. And now
if you take the number of letters in Frederic’s name (8) and add that to
the number of letters in Catherine’s name (9) you get 17. 205 + 17 = 222.
And if you grant that the time of the events in the novel, counted properly,
is three years, then the pattern we have discovered starts to emerge as
figure on ground or as lemon juice ink on a secret message when held over
a candle. For what is the product of 222 and 3 but the infamous 666 of
Revelations 13:18?
Imagine now our delight when we discovered
a similar 666 pattern in The Outsider. If you multiply the number of letters
in Meursault’s name times the number of letters in `Albert’ times the number
of letters in `Arab’ you get 216. Add to that the 6 of `Albert’ and multiply
by 3 (which is the number one gets when dividing the number of chapters
in Part one (6) by the number of books (2) that make up The Outsider) and
surprise of surprises: the meaning revealing number `666′ once again emerges!
Clearly, when seen in this light, these
two novels take on new meaning, and this pattern discovery provides a conclusive
way to counter all earlier critics who have failed to see this talisman
of interpretation, this key to understanding the complexities of Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms and Camus’s The Outsider. `666′ offers a key to understanding
in that it clearly refers us back to the text which these texts are “playing”
with and are in some way about, if “aboutness” is a viable concept and
if they are about anything at all. “Wait a minute, here!” shouts Bickford
Sylvester, “there is some nonsense even Hemingway scholars will not condone.”
And of course this pattern of 666 is a bit of nonsense which could be discovered
almost anywhere by someone forcing the facts into the pattern. Good 666
sleuths can find that devilish number anywhere; if you don’t believe us
just ask the soap company. But what are the legitimate limits to interpretations?
Does anything count? How can we know when the interpretation we are working
on or reading has slipped into the realm of nonsense?
There are facts to be observed by the act
of looking at the text and then there are interpretations to be deduced
using those facts plus everything else one knows about what counts as a
fact and what is to be counted as important in producing a coherent and
consistent reading. Just as there are different interpretations of quantum
theory which must deal with the same facts (taking a fact to be what is)
there are different interpretations of A Farewell to Arms and The Outsider.
In fact, the difference between science and art may be teased out just
here: when a scientific interpretation becomes the accepted one it achieves
a privileged status (e.g., evolution), but in art it seems that the more
interpretations a work inspires and grounds the more privileged its status.
Gerry Brenner argues that “a masterwork is a text that generates a wide
array of divergent readings” and certainly on that criterion both of these
novels are to be counted as masterworks. In the same way that science seeks
a unifying theory to account for and predict from events in the world in
a broad general way, so too do these two works offer a broad and general
theory of the human condition and the human hunger for meaning.
What would count as “a broad and general
theory of the human condition and the human hunger for meaning”? At the
most general level only two readings are possible: we humans are special
and are a part of a meaningful divine plan which is unknown to us in detail
but is hinted at in various ways and has been delivered to us in outline
by some special text; or, we humans are the result of time and chance,
not at all special except as we create our meaning and value through our
lived and shared experience. The first reading seeks the universal and
enduring Truth or a hierarchy of values which is crowned by God. The second
reading opposes that approach and insists on subjective intensity of passion
maintaining that the individual is always becoming as the result of choices,
risks, and reactions to the experiences of the world of which s/he is naturally
related. The reader of the first text often sees death as a door; the second
reader sees death as a wall and as the inescapable and shared destiny of
all persons.
Hemingway and Camus are both writing texts
that present death as final. There are many striking similarities between
the two, although one could say they are a generation and a world apart.
Hemingway, the older of the two, presents several of the elements of their
similarity in his novel A Farewell to Arms; Camus, writing The Outsider
almost fifteen years later, picks up from where Hemingway left off. The
two share a lean, direct style; there is a shared early (in the novels)
“primitiveness” to Frederic Henry and Meursault; the two writers recognize
features of the Absurd; and they were both visitors to, or outsiders in,
Paris.
In this paper, then, we identify a few
of the congruencies between these two works, but especially ways in which
they diverge, for these are the features of difference, influence, “literary
history”, which further allow us to make meaning of the novels. An important
point in order to maintain clarity is to recognize that the first-person
narratives can create some problems because we will be talking both of
the actual author’s work (”Camus’s novel”), as well as the fictional character’s
relation of the events (as in “Frederic Henry’s narrative” or “Meursault’s
novel”). It makes sense to identify both levels of activity. Confusing
Hemingway with his characters has been common in the past, and is one thing
we want to avoid by this strategy.
One pattern which we have found helpful
in thinking of these two novels is the relationship of “Old Testament”
to “New Testament”. There is a resemblance, a coherence, of world-view,
but at the same time a continuance, a modification. There is a typology,
too, and the two protagonists, while very different in some respects, are
two generations’ attempts at the modern hero. A Farewell to Arms serves
as a precursor to The Outsider in many ways. Frederic Henry must lose faith
in the several sources of meaning which he traditionally turns to: church,
state, language, love. His experience during the war shakes his belief
in these structures and institutions, leading, ultimately, to the composition
of the novel in the Modernist mode. Meursault, on the other hand, seems
not to place much faith in those structures and institutions from the outset
of his novel (we need only observe his behavior during his mother’s funeral).
He takes for granted things which Frederic Henry must learn (or un-learn);
for example, his relationship with Marie begins with no games, no guilt,
whereas Frederic thinks he must play out a courtship, and even deceive
Catherine about his intentions if he is to succeed in sleeping with her.
The high Modern theme of loss of meaning, with a subsequent search for
an alternative certainty, which we encounter in A Farewell to Arms is replaced
by Camus’s notion of the Absurd, of the “benign indifference of the universe.”
If anything, the universe Frederic Henry reflects on at the end of Hemingway’s
novel is a malevolent force waiting to “[kill] you in the end. You could
count on that.” (p. 327) Thus, Frederic Henry must come to realize that
his own subjectivity is a crucial source of meaning, whereas Meursault
seems already to assume that position. And both characters must come to
realize that subjective meaning is always tempered by and augmented by
its relation to the Other (or to others).
In both works the first person narrator
serves as the author-ity for the reader, and in both it is only after completing
the text that the reader comes to understand that the “I” relating events
has also been evaluating those events by subtle means of selection and
emphasis. It is as a friend and teacher once said, “In the first half of
your life you have experiences and in the second half you try to determine
what they mean.” As Meursault tells his story and as Frederic Henry tells
his story, these narrators are discovering meaning in the events experienced.
And, as in “real” life, the meaning is not just an objective set of facts
to be absorbed, but is a combination of various inputs from the world and
the organization and valuing of those inputs by the creative intelligence.
Both narrators achieve a “separate peace” and finally that is all anyone
can do in the walk toward the grave. Acceptance of limits is a necessary
condition for peace.
A further characteristic of the two novels
under discussion here that allows for comparison is that both artists employ
a style that does not so much reveal meaning as a fixed and determinate
set of propositions, but instead, by suggestion and omission demands that
the reader participate in the act of making meaning. The speakable sign
and the unspeakable meaning that lies below or beside the signifiers used
are part of the techniques of Hemingway and Camus – a technique that is
often called economical, realistic, or simply `modern’. This ability to
provide the reader with “the strongly sensed presence of things omitted”1
provides the most powerful similarity between these two texts. In A Farewell
to Arms, for example, what exactly do the pronouns refer to in this famous
passage?
I tried to tell about the night and the
difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless
the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell
it now. But if you have had it you know. He had not had it but he understood
that I had really wanted to go to the Abruzzi but had not gone and we were
still friends, with many tastes alike, but with the difference between
us. He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it,
I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned
it later. (page 14)
What is the “it” that Frederic Henry had
and the priest did not? What is the “it” that he learned, but was able
to forget? What is the “it” that he did not know then but “learned later”?
And what is “the difference” between the priest and the lieutenant? The
first “I” and the second “I” are the Frederic Henry of the time of the
events while the third “I” is the narrator. The “you” functions to include
the reader who has had “it” as one of those who knows “it” and is changed
by “it” because of that knowledge. In the last two sentences the “I” is
variable over time again, referring first to Frederic Henry before the
lesson, then to Frederic Henry after the lesson, then to Frederic Henry
as a partic- ipant in the action and finally to Frederic Henry as the knowing
narrator. There can be no better narrative demonstration than this of the
changing, always-becoming, non-static self. Trying to find the referent
to these variable pronouns seems an important step in reading the novel
— what is the nature of this knowledge, hinted at, but not stated? Various
readings can be found: “Frederic learns…that spending his leave in the
city instead of the Abruzzi was symptomatic of his whole way of life,”
2 or, the multiple choice options discussed by Stoneback,3
“For several years now I have put this
passage in quizzes, asking for precise identification and commentary on
the “it” Frederic does not know at first, later learns, but sometimes forgets.
Here are the results:
1.”The nature of true love, sacrifice,
etc. – what he later finds with Catherine” (12 votes)
2.”Questions of faith” (12 votes)
3.”Love of God” (4 votes)
4.”Good hunting is better than bad drinking”
(1 vote)
5.”orderly world of good manners, i.e.,
Abruzzi, better than chaos of whorehouse” (1 vote)
6.”That he has a soul, and the overwhelming
consequences of that knowledge – death is not the end, etc.” (3 votes)
of which he particularly likes number six
because of his reading of the novel as a Catholic work. This misreading
depends in part upon another misreading, viz., the wounding scene, which
Stoneback claims “makes quite clear the main point that it is “a mistake
to think you just died.” This scene, he argues, is “the epiphany that changes
everything.”4
Perhaps a better name than “epiphany” for
the wounding scene in A Farewell to Arms would be “boundary situation,”
the term used by Jaspers to talk about any sharp focussed experience an
agent has which tends to define the agent as an individual. The emphasis
for Jaspers is on the psychological change in the individual as a result
of running into a boundary situation. Facing a serious moral choice, confronting
death, reacting to threats to one’s person or to one’s reputation – these
are all boundary situations. These moments are often unexpected, coming
anytime and in any set of circumstances (time and chance).
I ate the end of my piece of cheese and
took a swallow of wine. Through the other noise I heard a cough, then came
the chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh – then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace
door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and
on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and
I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all
the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew
I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then
I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed
and I was back.
This scene, argues Stoneback, not only
“changes everything,” but presents the ruling interpretation for the novel:
it is here that Henry has learned that he has an immortal soul. If we are
to accept this reading then Henry will indeed be changed by the experience,
for it would be a defining experience in his life. But, is this the best
reading? Without being a “nada hound” can one offer a better? We think
so. Looked at in context the lines do not stand up to that interpretation.
First, Frederic Henry utters two propositions in the key passage: “I knew
I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died.”
He is obviously wrong about the first claim, for he does not know that
he is dead which makes the compound proposition false. But, secondly, even
if we do not hold statements in novels to the strict test of logical truth
value, is the second conjunct unambiguous? If “just” means “only, merely,
simply” then Henry is telling us that death is not death and the theistic
reading will hold. But “just” is a slippery word at best just as e. e.
cummings knew so well and can just as likely mean “barely” or “scarcely”
or just about anything. Could Frederic Henry, the narrator, be saying that
we do not merely die we sometimes die painfully? And in the rest of the
wounding scene do we not see just such a painful death in Passini’s mutilated,
twitching body? (”As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill
us for their sport.”) Passini calls out in pain to Jesus and there is no
answer – only silence from the heavens and the eventual silence of his
voice and the stilling of his twitching.
There are no additional facts in the passage
that can be used to arbitrate between the two readings. Do we then flip
a coin? Or do we support our choice with powerful rhetoric?5 No, the obvious
move is to read the passage in the larger context of the complete work
— holding open the competing readings until all of the evidence is in,
just as the good scientist would do when confronted with ambiguous results.
And we get more information in the following two chapters, for Hemingway
gives us Frederic Henry in hospital visited first by Rinaldi and then by
the priest. In Chapter X Rinaldi comes to the field hospital and the talk
is of decorations, girls, and booze. In Chapter XI the priest visits and
the juxtaposition of the two chapters promises much. If Rinaldi and the
priest are representatives of the two ways of life that Henry must choose
from, then here is the perfect opportunity to indicate in the narrative
which of the two is superior. If Henry has had an epiphany, has seen the
face of God, then what better time than now while lying in a hospital bed,
visited by, and alone with the priest, to tell of his life-changing experience,
and to tell it to the one other character who will understand the experience?
The scene is set. We expect to discover what Henry has learned about death
and God and immortal souls. Instead, of course, we get a discussion of
the limits of the officers to see anything beyond immediate experience.
Expecting a revelation on the limitless we get a commentary on limits.
Here is the time and place, so carefully prepared, for Frederic Henry to
reveal his newly discovered truth to the priest. But there is no revelation
for there was no revelation.
Hemingway once said that “all stories…end
in death.” Certainly, each living person’s “story” ends that way. The interrelationship
of a narrative to a life, of the “boundary situation” of an ending, is
of vital importance to the existence of these two fictional narratives,
A Farewell to Arms and The Outsider. Death plays an important, one might
say necessary, part in both novels, too: Frederic Henry is, of course,
in war and witness to death many times, wounded himself, and loses Catherine;
Meursault’s story begins with his mother’s death, he later kills an Arab,
and then is himself tried and sentenced to death. In fact, the defining
death-confrontations (Frederic’s loss of Catherine, Meursault’s death sentence)
transform the characters into narrators; that is to say, the stories are
told because of the confrontations with death. We must recognize that the
fictive characters are attempting to provide or create an order or meaning
where it appears there is none. Or, there are pre-existing versions, meta-narratives,
which prove inadequate or unsatisfying, and which must be replaced by the
narrative each character produces. Meursault responds directly and violently
to the priest who represents one such meta-narrative for Meursault’s life.
In the crescendo of the final scene of that novel when Meursault confronts
the priest and finally re- leases the pent up anger and frustration repressed
for so long, he does experience an epiphany:
As if this great outburst of anger had
purged all of my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of
signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time
to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself,
in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still
hap- py. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my
last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution
and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.6
Underneath the surface meaning of the ruling
icons of his culture (law, religion, conventional morality) Meursault is
finally able to experience a subjective and intense “meaning” in the form
of a separate peace brought about by this surrender to the benign indifference
of the world. The skepticism raised by the famous passage in Hemingway
about the embarrassment felt by Frederic Henry when confronted with the
emptiness of the conventional vocabulary is sharpened by Camus, writing
after one more war, who condemns not only the inflated language of society,
but also its institutions, with irrelevance at least and mendacity at worst.
Frederic Henry finds “sacred, glorious, and sacrifice” to be embarrassing
because they have no referents in the world as he is experiencing it, because
these words are used in a corrupted fashion as a part of the military or
political vocabulary of manipulation and control. Meursault finds the institutions
which produce the vocabulary of control: law, religion, conventional morality
— are corrupt.
Frederic Henry, at the beginning of the
novel, is selfish and self-absorbed, but has no true sense of self as we
would think of it. He is obviously immature, accepts the teachings of the
past, indulges in carnal pleasures; probably, if we remember why he is
in the Italian army, “because he can, and he speaks Italian.” Meursault,
too, seems preoccupied with immediate, sensual pleasure or with keeping
things simple throughout Part I. For example, his response to his employer
when offered the chance to move to Paris echoes some of Frederic Henry’s
words: “I said yes but really I didn’t mind.” (p. 44) His words on marriage
further illustrate:
That evening Marie came round for me and
asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said I didn’t mind and we could do
if she wanted to.
And later
Then she spoke. She just wanted to know
if I’d have accepted the same proposal if it had come from another woman,
with whom I had a similar relationship. I said, `Naturally.’(p. 45)
An important difference between the two
novels is also shown by this passage: Frederic Henry thinks much the same
about marriage and such conventions as Marie does, whereas Meursault’s
comments remind us of Catherine Barkley’s on those same subjects. Here
we see Meursault displaying some of the same self-centeredness and inertia
as Frederic Henry, but Meursault as Camus’s character has also assimilated
some of the experience and world-weariness of Catherine. There is some
evidence that Meursault has lost a faith he once held in some of the traditional
ideals, but he chooses not to say much at all about that possibility:
When I was a student, I had plenty of
that sort of ambition. But when I had to give up my studies, I very soon
realized that none of it really mattered. (p. 44)
Indulging in sensual pleasure turns out
to be inadequate, just as religious faith would be inadequate, or concern
about social codes would be inadequate, if it is done without thinking.
Both novels revolve around thought and insight. Thought can be hard work,
it is discomfiting, it is sometimes painful – but it is necessary, too,
if one is to be totally human. Frederic may believe initially that he is
made only to eat and sleep and make love to Catherine, but finally he must
face up to experience – he must “realize” what has happened. This requires
effort, thinking, and, as an unavoidable “side effect”, it usually is painful.
We remember that the major, early on, declared that “All thinking men are
atheists,” (p. 8), and this statement begins to resonate throughout the
novel as Frederic must indeed think about his experience. The word “realize”
is used in A Farewell to Arms to indicate the subject’s coming to awareness;
not just to “know” something in the abstract, but to have it “become real”.
The war-disgust the priest speaks of must come from this “realization”
of war: the confrontation of the individual’s expectations with the actual.
Hemingway’s “realizing” strongly resembles
Camus’s definition of the Absurd. Both are relational. Both result in a
loss of faith, a perspective skewed by the actual. In our Old Testament/New
Testament paradigm, one would say that Meursault begins The Outsider already
“realizing” the things Frederic Henry has just learned by the end of A
Farewell to Arms. But there is another movement, too, and that is the “re-education”
of Meursault into the society around him. For, just as Frederic must learn
how words like “glory”, “honor”, or “courage” were obscene and “only the
names of places had dignity” (p. 185), Meursault, who, we assume, does
not give much credence to abstractions like these anyway, must learn what
abstractions do refer to when he understands “liberty” (p. 76) and later
“guilt”:
And I felt something stirring up the whole
room; for the first time I realized that I was guilty. (p. 87)
Throughout Part II of The Outsider, Meursault
begins to see that people (magistrate, prosecuting attorney, defense attorney)
are making up narratives of his life. Perhaps he begins to see that such
activity is inescapable. Gradually, we could argue, Meursault achieves
“consciousness” – he becomes aware of, he “realizes”, what it means to
be an individual self in a community. Even if one does not attribute meaning
to one’s actions, others can and do attribute meanings to what they see
us do. There is no early epiphany in The Outsider, no sudden change from
Part I to Part II; there is a gradual “realization” on Meursault’s part
of the impossibility of escaping from language, values, and narratives.
Frederic Henry learns a similar lesson, and in a similar fashion, when
he is caught in the retreat from Caporetto. After reflecting on the hollowness
of some words (p. 185), he learns of the dangers of language when he is
identified by his accent and condemned to death.
Meursault is perturbed by the ease with
which society’s institutions are able to manufacture causal explanations
for the actions of individuals. Part one of the novel is a collection of
events and actions which are then “given meaning” by (or through the eyes
of) society in the shape of law, religion, and conventional morality in
Part two. It is that fictional place outside of the text where the meaning
for the character Meursault is established and then transferred to the
reader by the text. What does it mean to drink a cup of coffee? An innocent
cup of coffee in Part one becomes evidence of evil in Part two (in the
eyes of the prosecuting magistrate) becomes an assertion of freedom in
the final reading. Camus gives artistic life to the philosophical ideas
of The Myth of Sisyphus in The Outsider, and particularly to the discussion
of the search for truth. In the Myth Camus goes through an inventory of
accepted sources for truth and finds them all lacking: first he tries religion,
but surprisingly it is too relative, for which god is god; second he tries
science, but finds that it offers not precision but metaphor (the world
is like…); third he tries logic, but finds that paradoxically it leads
to contradiction (for if “all statements are true” is true then “no statements
are true” must be one of the true statements). He is left with the “I”
— not the Cartesian “I” – but the Humean “I” (a bundle of perceptions)
as the foundation for a meaning system.
That changing, evolving, non-static “I”
is at the heart of both of these works.
John W. Aldridge, “The Sun Also Rises —
Sixty Years Later,” Sewanee Review 94 (Spring 1986): 340.
The Hemingway Review, Volume IX, No. 1,
Fall 1989.
Ibid., page 43.
Ibid., page 39.
Stoneback: “even if I were a nihilist,
atheist, devout materialist, anti-clerical Marxist-Leninist, typically
modern wishy-washy laicist, Pollyanna progressive, or social planner …I
would have to acknowledge that Hemingway is writing from the heart of the
Christian tradition…”.
Albert Camus, The Outsider, translated
by Joseph Laredo, Penguin Modern Classics, 1983, page 117.