A Fish, a Lion, and an Elephant: The Presentation of Animals in the Work of Ernest Hemingway

James Ralley 040152651

The University of Sheffield BA English Literature

LIT386: Dissertation May 2007

Word Count: 9,997

Contents Introduction 1 PART ONE: Fishing in the Abyss Section One: The New Words 4 Section Two: The Old Man’s Friends 7 Section Three: The Platonic Fish 13 PART TWO: The Hunt for a Voice Section One: The Jaguar’s Body 19 Section Two: The Lion’s Mouth 23 Section Three: The Elephant’s Eye 29 Conclusion 32 Bibliography 34

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Introduction Encountering animals is unavoidable when reading Hemingway. From the bullfights

of Pamplona, to the hunting grounds of Kenya, Hemingway’s animals are there.

They are present outside of his texts also; the grounds of his house in Key West teem

with polydactyl cats. Indeed, Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in 1954 ‘for his

mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the

Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style’.1 It was this

novella about the battle between an old man and a marlin that brought him Nobel

recognition.

Whilst animals are all over Hemingway’s work, most apparent is the fact that

the majority of them exist to be killed: bulls for fighting; fish for fishing; lions,

elephant, and birds for hunting. I explore the ways in which Hemingway presents

animals, specifically the marlin in The Old Man and the Sea, the lion in ‘The Short

Happy Life of Francis Macomber’, and the elephant in ‘An African Story’. The

theorist at the core of my discussion is Jacques Derrida. His recently published

lecture, ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, deals with the ways in

which man defines ‘the animal’ as that which is not man: as other. Derrida introduces

terms that, following explication, enable me to define the specific ways in which

Hemingway writes about animals, and to ascertain just what those animals are.

1 ‘The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954’, Nobelprize.org <http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/ 1954/index.html> [accessed 20 May 2007]

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Derrida is a familiar figure in the field of animal studies, and the lecture that informs

my discussion has been used most notably by Cary Wolfe in his book Animal Rites,

and by David Wood in his essay ‘Thinking With Cats’.

To begin, I undertake a systematic explication of the key ideas present in

Derrida’s lecture. I unpick and define his dense terms, the abyss, asinanity, and

l’animot. Having established a theoretical standpoint I progress onto a close reading

of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. First I look at the physical similarities

between the old man and the marlin, and how this sets up an intimate relationship

between them. I then talk about the physical connection that the fishing line provides,

and how it seems to bridge Derrida’s abyss, and how Hemingway attempts to create

a homogeneous community between man and animal. From here I go on to explain

how this community is ultimately an illusion, and how the relationship between the

old man and the marlin is predicated on the fact that they are hunter and prey.

Through analysis of the ways in which the old man perceives his relationship with

the marlin, I describe how these perceptions actually create and sustain the

unbridgeable gap between the two. As a final site of inquiry I examine Hemingway’s

use of allegory in the novella, and ask whether the marlin conforms to Derrida’s

theory of l’animot. By addressing the prevalence of overt Christian symbolism, I

debunk Hemingway’s claim that he wrote ‘real’ characters, and that from there the

metaphorical meaning spontaneously arose. I then show how the story is like a

parable, and how it adheres strictly to ritualistic hunting codes. I end this section by

looking at the final lines of the novella and explaining their importance in erasing

any individuality that the marlin may once have possessed.

After exploring the metaphorical significance of one of Hemingway’s

animals, I move on to the ways in which he attempts to provide another with a voice.

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Returning to Derrida, I explicate the theories of ‘auto-motricity’ and

‘autobiograparaphy’, and explain how they allow animals to communicate through

movement—I also talk about how the marlin’s status as a textual animal complicates

this idea. Next, I discuss the ideas of J. M. Coetzee’s fictional character of Elizabeth

Costello, as expounded in his lecture-within-a-lecture ‘The Poets and the Animals’.

Costello focuses on Ted Hughes’s poems ‘The Jaguar’ and ‘Second Glance at a

Jaguar’; her ideas on the imaginative power of literature inform much of the

subsequent debate. Returning to Hemingway, I look at his presentation of the dying

lion in ‘Macomber’, and how he guides the reader to identification with this animal.

After revisiting the ‘shiver’ that connected the old man to his animals, I use H. Peter

Steeves’s essay ‘They Say Animals Can Smell Fear’ and Costello’s idea of ‘poetic

invention’ to identify how the site of fear displays an intersubjectivity between man

and animal, and how this allows the reader to borrow the animal’s subjectivity for a

time. Following this is an explication of Steven W. Laycock’s theory that man

imposes his own voice upon the animals he attempts to speak for—as put forth in his

essay ‘The Animal as Animal: A Plea For Open Conceptuality’. I use these ideas to

denounce Hemingway’s ability to provide the lion with a voice. Finally, I undertake

an analysis of Hemingway’s short story ‘An African Story’, in which he avoids the

‘ventriloquism’ that Laycock condemns, and allows the central animal to retain its

individuality.

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PART ONE: Fishing in the Abyss Section One: The New Words

Derrida’s lecture is replete with wordplay, and populated with new words. To

understand the ideas contained within, parts of the lecture require detailed

explication. I begin where Derrida sets up the two opposing ideas of ‘man’ and

‘animal’. In his redefinition: man/a man/men becomes that which ‘calls itself man’;

likewise, animal/an animal/animals becomes that which ‘he (man) calls an animal.’2

Derrida talks of a rift that separates these two groups. He then goes further and

expands this idea into an ‘abyssal rupture’ between the two.3 The abyss between the

two cannot be crossed. There is not just a limit at each side of this rupture, but an

abyssal limit: imagine an infinitely deep chasm, with an emblem of man standing on

one side and one of animal squatting on the other. However, the abyss—which he

accepts as utterly real—is not to be imagined as two opposing parallel lines. Belief in

this model would constitute an ‘asinanity.’4 Instead of these parallel opposing modes

of existence, the abyssal rupture must be seen as a ‘multiple and heterogeneous

border’, or a ‘plural and repeatedly folded frontier.’5 Heterogeneity and plurality are

2 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, eds. Matthew Calarco & Peter Atterton (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 251 3 Derrida, p. 251 4 Derrida, p. 253-254. This is a neologism combining the terms asinine and inane. The use of animalistic terminology (in the word asinine) is the translator’s way to emphasize Derrida’s linguistic playfulness. 5 Derrida, p. 252

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crucial to Derrida’s idea that there are countless differing borders to the abyss.

Imagine the border as a kind of infinitely complex work of origami. There is one

piece of paper—just as there is an identifiable abyss —but at every fold—or binary

opposition—there are multiple other folds, and what at first seemed simple becomes

this complex collection of concepts that exist within and outside of each other, and

can all be unfolded to reveal further structures. To elucidate by example: ‘Man’s

ability to laugh distinguishes him from animals.’ The argument may asinanely stop

there. However, if this dyad is examined more closely then the need appears to

define further the concept of laughter, of man, of animal, of joy, sound, fear: a

perpetual defining of terms begins. Derrida’s model of the abyss shows man/animal

relationships as infinitely more complex than the asinane view would define them as.

Of paramount importance is Derrida’s belief that this abyss between man and (what

man calls) animal is undeniably present.

Derrida criticizes the assumption that there is this binary pair of man and

animal. The ‘animal’ that is referred to here would in fact be, ‘the Animal’ (note the

capitalization), ‘in the singular and without further ado, claiming thus to designate

every living thing that is held not to be man’.6 An animal must be recognized as part

of what Derrida tentatively calls, a ‘heterogeneous multiplicity of the living’.7 He

denies the existence of a collective Other, out there, beyond man, that can be forced

into this general singular noun, ‘the Animal’. As a remedy to this forced

categorization, Derrida proposes a replacement for ‘the Animal’: l’animot. This

neologism is homophonous with animaux—the French plural, meaning ‘the

animals’—and yet the definite article, l’, denotes a singular grammatical

construction. Matthew Calarco describes Derrida’s term as denoting ‘a singular,

6 Derrida, p. 253 7 Derrida, p. 253

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living being that cannot be subsumed under any species concept.’8 This concept is

about recognizing the individuality of individual animals: ‘animot’ is equivalent to

the ‘I’ in human terms.

Derrida also says that the ‘suffix mot in l’animot should bring us back to the

word, namely, to the word named a noun.’9 He uses this idea to highlight one of the

borders of the abyss between man and animal: that of language. Animals are named

by humans, and in those names are collected all of the ideas that man associates with

that animal. The animal, having a name, a textual signifier, becomes a text itself. I

showed above how Derrida’s term, l’animot, leads to the view of animals as having

ipseity.10 The deliberate and self-conscious wordplay enacted in the very word

animot, shows the textuality of that which man calls animal. Derrida asks, ‘what is

said in the name of the animal when one appeals to the name of the animal’.11 What

underlies the words man uses when talking about animals? Or in this case, what is

the metaphorical significance of these textual animals in Hemingway’s work? David

Wood, in his exploratory essay on Derrida’s lecture, notes that ‘many animals are

symbolically deployed as boundary negotiating operators, servants themselves, that

is, of an abyss at least.’12 Animals are used by man to explain and interact with the

world. In his section on Hemingway in Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe explains how, what

he terms, the ‘discourse of species’ serves as a ‘crucial “off site”—an/other site—

where problems of race or gender may be either “solved” or reopened by being

8 Matthew Calarco, The Question of the Animal, <http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/ criticalecologies/animot> [accessed 15 April 2007] 9 Derrida, p. 257 10 Ipseity: Personal identity and individuality; selfhood. (OED) 11 Derrida, p. 261 12 David Wood, ‘Thinking With Cats’, in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, eds, Matthew Calarco & Peter Atterton (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 282. Here Wood alludes to abysses other than Derrida’s Man/Animal abyss. His example is a life/death abyss.

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recoded as problems of species.’13 The site of the animal is used metaphorically to

deal covertly with troubling issues.

Section Two: The Old Man’s Friends Derrida says that the ‘I is anybody at all; I am anybody at all and anybody at all must

be able to say “I” to refer to herself, to his own singularity.’14 The concurrence of

universality and individuality within this single concept of I is expressed in The Old

Man and the Sea. The novella is foremost about an encounter between a man and an

animal, specifically a marlin.15 The titular old man is named Santiago. His name is

only used four times in the novella. For the rest of the time the narrator uses ‘the old

man’, and never ‘Santiago’. This combination of the definite article, ‘the’, and the

impersonal, descriptive common noun, ‘old man’, fuses the individual and the

universal. Likewise, the narrator and the old man refer to the marlin as ‘the fish’: it

has no proper noun title. Through their shared commonality the marlin and the old

man become grammatical equals. Hemingway carves identities for the two

protagonists. The marlin becomes not what Derrida says ‘he (man) calls an animal’,

but what the narrator calls a fish.16 Conversely, the old man is able to refer to himself

as ‘old man’, and does so several times. Harnessing the power of speech he becomes

what Derrida might term ‘that which calls itself old man’, and thus in control of his

own identity.

13 Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 124 14 Derrida, p. 259 15 A very large marine food and game fish. (OED) 16 Derrida, p. 251

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The edges of this hunter/prey limit are seemingly brought closer together

through the way Hemingway constitutes the old man and the marlin. Hemingway

describes the old man with trademark succinctness:

The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection

on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his

face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords.

[…]

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the

sea and were cheerful and undefeated.17

The old man’s physical appearance is described in terms of the sea. There is likewise

no mention of his clothing in this initial description, and he remains as naked as an

animal until nine pages later when the narrator talks about his shirt that has ‘been

patched so many times that it was like the sail and the patches were faded to many

different shades by the sun.’18 The shirt, like his body, like an animal, is at the mercy

of the sun and the sea. He is exposed and vulnerable. The marlin is described thus:

He was bright in the sun and his head and back were dark purple and in the sun the

stripes on his sides showed wide and a light lavender. His sword was as long as a

baseball bat and tapered like a rapier.19

[…]

[He had] purple stripes that banded him.20

The two resemble each other physically; the cancerous blotches running down the

sides of the old man’s face, and cord-scars on his hands echo the marlin’s own purple

bands.

17 Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (New York: Scribner Classic/Collier, 1986), pp. 9-10 18 Old Man, p. 18 19 Old Man, p. 62 20 Old Man, p. 72

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The similarities between the old man and the marlin set them up as physical

equals at their respective abyssal limits. But the old man needs to do more than look

like the marlin to fully engage with it: he has to think like it. The old man connects

with the marlin through the twitches and tugs of the fishing cord, and the movement

of his skiff in the water. This is the moment at which the marlin and the old man

enter into their relationship:

He reached out for the line and held it softly between the thumb and forefinger of his

right hand. […] One hundred fathoms down a marlin was eating the sardines that

covered the point and the shank of the hook where the hand-forged hook projected

from the head of the small tuna.21

The narrative focus moves from the old man in his skiff to a hundred fathoms down

to where the marlin finally takes the bait. There is no physical disconnection between

the old man and the marlin; the line links them for the next fifty-four pages. The

‘hand-forged hook’ is the old man’s presence in the deep ocean. It is as if his hand is

holding out the tuna for the marlin to catch. As a palpable link between the two

characters, Hemingway sets up the fishing line as a symbol of their intimate

connection. In Derridean terms, it becomes a potential bridge across the abyss.

There is textual congruity between the old man and the marlin, but also with

the other animals he encounters. The narrator explains how the old man ‘was

shivering with the morning cold. But he soon knew he would shiver himself warm’.22

This is echoed in ‘the weight of the small tuna’s shivering pull’,23 and how he

clubbed a dolphin ‘until it shivered and was still.’24 The old man’s fishing equipment

also shivers: his line ‘stayed at the hardness and water-drop shivering that preceded 21 Old Man, p. 41 22 Old Man, p. 25 23 Old Man, p. 38 24 Old Man, p. 73

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breaking’,25 and he recalls ‘feeling the whole boat shiver’.26 Hemingway poses the

shiver as a universal and involuntary reaction to external forces. In the way he

constructs the old man and the animals, Hemingway creates what Derrida defines as

a ‘homogeneous continuity between what calls itself man and what he calls the

animal.’27

For Derrida, the abyss is utterly unbridgeable. Hemingway’s bridge is

likewise an illusion. The intimate relationship that he forges between the old man

and other animals is predicated on their hunter/prey relationship. As equal as they

may appear superficially, a little unfolding ultimately reveals an imbalance with the

marlin as prey and the old man as predator. Carey Voeller notes that Hemingway

often creates ‘compassionate, contemplative hunter[s].’ 28 No matter how

compassionate and contemplative the old man can be, he remains a hunter.

Garry Marvin, in his excellent essay on hunting, notes that:

[In] the case of human-animal relations, the human need and ability to kill animals

and the general acceptance of tolerance of the violence of killing is fundamental to

the creation of the social order between these sets of creatures; such killing

constructs, defines, and shapes this order.29

The killing constructs, defines, and shapes the abyssal limits. It is here that the

‘social order’ is created, within which it becomes acceptable to kill animals for food.

As close together as the fishing line seems to bring the hunter/prey boundaries, it

actually acts as an impervious barrier between the proposed ipseities on either side.

Instead of the hook becoming the old man’s hand touching the marlin underwater, it 25 Old Man, p. 71 26 Old Man, p. 12 27 Derrida, p. 251 28 Carey Voeller, ‘“He Only Looked Sad the Same Way I Felt”: The Textual Confessions of Hemingway's Hunters’, The Hemingway Review, 25 (2005), 63-76 (p. 65) 29 Garry Marvin, ‘Wild Killing: Contesting the Animal in Hunting’, in Killing Animals (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 11

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emerges as the device through which the old man enacts his violence. Just like the

‘harpoon shaft’30 that he pushes into the marlin’s heart to kill it, so the man-made,

metallic hook is thrust into the marlin’s mouth, forcing it to enter into this

hunter/prey relationship.

If the old man’s limit is unfolded further, it is revealed that he characterizes

his bonds with animals as friendships: ‘the flying fish […] were his principle friends

on the ocean’31; ‘I am with a friend’32; and ‘The fish is my friend too’.33 A friend is

‘one joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy’, and this relationship

requires reciprocation.34 These particular friendships are in no way reciprocal, or

indeed mutually benevolent. The marlin is the old man’s adversary. The old man

constructs these friendships so he does not feel alone out at sea. Ultimately, if the old

man had enough money for a radio, the animals would be replaced by the sound of

the baseball news.35 Hemingway says, in an interview with TIME magazine: ‘I

thought Santiago was never alone because he had his friend and enemy the sea and

the things that lived in the sea some of whom he loved and others that he hated.’36

This is a naïve, idealized assessment of the situation.

The old man’s relationship with the marlin complicates the hunter/prey issue.

Referring to him as a friend, and saying things like, ‘Fish, […] I love you and respect

you very much’, seems bizarre when it is followed by, ‘I will kill you dead before

this day ends.’37 Ann Putnam explains the paradox thus: ‘The heart in Hemingway’s

fiction is always divided against itself. The pastoral impulse to merge with nature is

30 Old Man, p. 95 31 Old Man, p. 29 32 Old Man, p. 55 33 Old Man, p. 75 34 OED 35 Old Man, p. 48 36 Author unknown, ‘An American Storyteller’, TIME, 13 December 1954 <http://www.time.com/ time/magazine/article/0,9171,935439,00.html> [accessed 27 February 2007], p. 10 37 Old Man, p. 54

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always working against the ‘tragic’ impulse to master it.’38 The heart itself can serve

as a neat image with which to explain this paradox. The old man plunges the harpoon

into the marlin’s heart to kill it. He reflects on this as he ties it to his skiff: ‘I want

[…] to touch and to feel him. He is my fortune, he thought. But that is not why I

wish to feel him. I think I felt his heart, he thought.’39 Key words here are ‘heart’,

and ‘thought’. The heart is both an organ and an emblem. The heart as an emblem for

desire, love, and the soul, is what the old man imagines. Whereas the heart as a basic

pump is all the marlin feels. Hemingway’s use of thought has dual meaning. Whilst

the old man literally thinks, or engages in ‘mental action’, he also constructs a ‘belief

or supposition.’40 He believes that the marlin will be his fortune, but it will not; just

as he believes that he has touched the marlin’s soul, but has not.

If the hunter is successful then the prey eventually becomes a dead animal. A

further unfolding of the border reveals that as soon as the marlin is dead the old man

becomes a seller, and the marlin becomes a product. As much as the old man praises

the marlin’s majesty and strength, the question looming over the entire operation is

one of money, of ‘what [the marlin will] bring in the market if the flesh is good.’41

The marlin’s death transforms it into a piece of meat; in fact it essentially became a

piece of meat as soon as it was forced to enter into this relationship. The old man

reflects on his catch: ‘He’s over fifteen hundred pounds the way he is, he thought.

Maybe much more. If he dresses out two-thirds of that at thirty cents a pound?’42 The

marlin becomes less a fish, less an adversary, and more like three-thousand dollars

tied to the side of the skiff.

38 Ann Putnam, in Voeller, p. 66 39 Old Man, p. 95 40 OED 41 Old Man, p. 49 42 Old Man, p. 97

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Section Three: The Platonic Fish

The Old Man and the Sea is at its core a parable. The old man is all men, and the

marlin is that against which all men struggle. Hemingway mused on the subject of

allegory in the TIME magazine interview:

I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks.

But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest

thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.’43

Also, on the subject of symbolism, he stated that:

“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand

and stuck in,” […] “[that] kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread.

Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.”44

Hemingway’s metaphor is flawed. All that he writes about, in fact anything at all, is

a symbol. This leads back to Derrida’s animot, and the fundamental textuality that is

constructed as soon as something has a name. Hemingway talks about writing ‘a real

old man’: a contestable statement. Michael Lundblad questions Cary Wolfe’s view

that there is, ‘an opposition between what [Wolfe] calls “the ontological” and “the

linguistic or textual” animal’.45 His riposte goes thus:

43 TIME, p. 5 44 TIME, p. 5 45 Onto- is from the Greek meaning ‘being’ or ‘that which exists’. (OED)

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But the question that immediately comes up, in my mind at least, is why we

must resort to this distinction; why must we maintain that “real” animals are not

socially constructed through discursive and linguistic formulations, if not literally

brought to life through a range of human actions, from breeding programs that

supply animals to be used as companion, factory-farm and laboratory animals, to

rigid “preservationist” rules that allow animals to populate national parks and

zoos?46

Lundblad’s argument is that no animal can escape social construction. In his refusal

to separate the ontological from the textual, Lundblad’s views correlate with the

concept of l’animot, which forces both the ontological animal and the textual animal

into one entity. Imagine an animot as a single sheet of paper, with ‘ipseity’ written on

one side, and ‘textuality’ on the other: they are two aspects of the same thing, and are

inextricable from one another. Hemingway’s ‘real fish’ has been filtered through his

hunter’s view of the world, and through the ideas of ‘fish’ that he was inescapably

subject to throughout his life. In this section I ascertain if Hemingway creates an

animot in the character of the marlin, or not.

Hemingway’s assertion that he wrote from some kind of objective

viewpoint—out of which arose a multiplicity of deeper meanings—is horribly

contrived. Joseph Waldmeir notes that the ‘Christian religious symbols running

through the story, which are so closely interwoven with the story in fact as to suggest

an allegorical intention on Hemingway's part, are so obvious as to require little more

than a listing of them’.47 This is the epitome of this overt Christian symbolism:

46 Michael Lundblad, ‘The Animal Question’, American Quarterly, 56, (Dec. 2004), 1125-1134 (p. 1130) 47 Joseph Waldmeir, ‘Confiteor Hominem: Ernest Hemingway’s Religion of Man’, in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999), p. 27

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He had sailed for two hours, resting in the stern and sometimes chewing a

bit of the meat from the marlin, trying to rest and to be strong, when he saw the first

of the two sharks. “Ay,” he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and

perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go

through his hands and into the wood.48

The association between the old man and Jesus continues, as he carries his mast up

the hill to his house at the close of the novel, and then falls asleep ‘on the newspapers

with his arms out straight and the palms of his (blood mushed49) hands up’,

emulating the crucifixion.50 Allegorical intention should not even be questioned.

These are the raisins in the plain bread that Hemingway so despised, yet could

seemingly not avoid. A more accurate analogy might be to compare the allegory to

the flour in the bread. Just as flour is a necessary ingredient, so allegory is

fundamental. And just as the flour is incorporated invisibly into the dough mixture,

so the allegory is stitched into the fabric of the text.

The parable of The Old Man and the Sea is about man’s universal struggle

against the Other. Waldmeir says that in Hemingway:

A man must depend upon himself alone in order to assert his manhood, and

the assertion of his manhood, in the face of insuperable obstacles, is the complete

end and justification of his existence for a Hemingway hero. The Old Man must

endure his useless struggle with the sharks’.51

Hemingway sets up the episode with the marlin as an idealized struggle. The marlin

is so big, and puts up such a fight that its status is elevated to that of the idealized

marlin: a kind of Platonic form of a marlin. As stated above, Cary Wolfe explains

48 Old Man, p. 107 49 Old Man, p. 102 50 Old Man, p. 122 51 Waldmeir, p. 30

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how the ‘discourse of species serves as an off site where problems may be reopened

by being recoded as problems of species.’52 The species battle here is a cover for

what Waldmeir calls a rigid ‘set of rules for living and for the attainment of

Manhood’.53 It is the struggle that is important, not the fact that the old man catches

the marlin. Also, what Waldmeir terms ‘the procedure’ is of paramount importance

and is present in The Old Man and the Sea. Waldmeir says that the procedure ‘is

carefully outlined; it is meticulously detailed. If no part of it is overlooked or

sloughed off, it must result in a satisfying experience almost in and of itself.’54

Hemingway echoes this sentiment in his TIME interview:

“The right way to do it—style—is not just an idle concept,” he says. “It is

simply the way to get done what is supposed to be done. The fact that the right way

also looks beautiful when it’s done is just incidental.”55

Hunting and fishing are rituals. Whilst the animal that any hunter or

fisherman attempts to kill at any one time is an individual, it is constructed by the

operation of hunting as a part of that homogenous community of the Animal, and

must necessarily remain so in the hunter’s eyes. Hemingway’s marlin is no exception.

Whilst Hemingway complicates the abyssal borders between man and animal by

writing an intimate relationship between the old man and the marlin, the marlin is

never allowed to transcend its textuality. The allegorical and universal nature of this

parable overshadows the identity that Hemingway attempts to construct. At the close

of the novella, any individuality that the marlin may have possessed is destroyed as it

is dragged by the sharks back into the sea, and back into its status as Animal. This is

how The Old Man and the Sea ends: 52 Animal Rites, p. 124 (paraphrased) 53 Waldmeir, p. 30 54 Waldmeir, p. 31 55 TIME, p. 6

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That afternoon there was a party of tourists at the Terrace and looking down in the

water among the empty beer cans and dead barracudas a woman saw a great long

white spine with a huge tail at the end that lifted and swung with the tide while the

east wind blew a heavy steady sea outside the entrance to the harbour.

“What’s that?” she asked a waiter and pointed to the long backbone of the

great fish that was now just garbage waiting to go out with the tide.

“Tiburon,” the waiter said. “Shark.” He was meaning to explain what had happened.

“I didn’t know sharks had such handsome, beautifully formed tails.”

“I didn’t either,” her male companion said.

Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still

sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was

dreaming about the lions.56

The marlin’s identity is finally eradicated. It is not even seen as a part of the species

‘marlin’ any more, let alone possessing of an ipseity. The final word of the novella is

‘lions’. This is the image that Hemingway ends with: the lions that ‘played like

young cats in the dusk’ on a beach in Africa. The old man says that ‘he loved them as

he loved the boy’, but that he ‘never dreamed about the boy.’57 The lions, appearing

only in dreams, are solely textual. The motif of the dream demands an exploration of

their metaphorical significance. Carlos Baker explores this in his essay ‘The Boy and

the Lions’. He says that the lions carry ‘associations of youth, strength, and even

56 Old Man, p. 126 57 Old Man, p. 25

18

immortality.’58 And suggests that the ‘planned contiguity of the old man with the

double image of the boy and the lions converts the story of Santiago, in one of its

meanings, into a parable of youth and age.’59 In the way that he ends on these

idealized figures of the old man’s youth, and of Manolin’s future, and uses the lions

as a site for this discussion, it must be said that Hemingway is not writing l’animot.

He complicates the abyssal border between Man and Animal; and he attempts to

bridge the abyss through the seemingly intimate relationship between the old man

and the marlin. But he fails to see that this relationship is inevitably one-sided. That

the relationship is predicated on the hunter/prey dyad proves to be an insuperable

barrier. Likewise, the allegorical nature of the novella itself means that the marlin

was never to be allowed an ipseity.

58 Carlos Baker, ‘The Boy and the Lions’, in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999), p. 12 59 Baker, p. 11

19

PART TWO: The Hunt for a Voice Section One: The Jaguar’s Body

Animals are not capable of speaking as humans do. Whilst they can undoubtedly

communicate, and certainly vocalize, complex language is restricted to the human

realm. Derrida explains how animals call attention to themselves through their ability

for volitional movement; whereas Laycock says that man must listen into the silence

that animals present him with, in order to hear their non-linguistic voices. Below, I

use Derrida and Laycock to examine the way Hemingway crafts his animals. More

specifically, I examine the way he attempts to give a voice to a dying lion, and how

this affects the reader. I draw on the ideas of J.M. Coetzee’s character Elizabeth

Costello when looking at the ability of poetic invention to allow the reader to connect

with the animal.

Derrida’s translator explains that the ‘title of the conference [at which the

lecture was given] was “L’animal autobiographique” (the autobiographical

animal)’.60 Derrida first assures us that he is not using this phrase in its colloquial

sense, in which a ‘political animal’ would mean ‘an individual who has the taste,

talent, or compulsive obsession for politics’.61 Instead he takes us back to the I and

the animot. The I, he says, has the ability to call attention to itself. When it says ‘I’, it

is saying ‘this thing that is saying ‘I’ is unique, and is aware of its own uniqueness.’

60 Derrida, p. 416 61 Derrida, p. 258

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The I separates itself from the world. The very use of ‘I’ constitutes an

autobiography. Derrida notes, that ‘by saying “I” the signatory of an autobiography

would claim to point himself out physically, introduce himself in the present’.62 For

the animal, the problem arises from the word ‘saying’. Animals are restricted to basic

‘auto-motricity’: the ability to move that distinguishes the ‘organic…inert or

cadaverous physico-chemical,’ from volitional animals.63 They cannot say anything,

and thus cannot create their own autobiography. Derrida constructs a hierarchy with

auto-motricity underneath auto-biography, and acknowledges that there is an abyss

between them. His arguments in this introductory lecture are not fully explicated, but

he suggests that an animal can write an autobiography of sorts. He says that the

animal is capable of ‘autobiograparaphing itself’.64 Meaning that the animal writes

its autobiography through its actions. The use of ‘para’—meaning both ‘alongside

of’ and ‘beyond’—suggests a mode of expression that exists in para-llel with writing,

yet remains fully distinct from it. It is the capability for auto-motricity that enables

this kind of writing. Derrida says that the animal ‘traces’ its autobiograparaphy,

rather than writing it.65 Movement is all that is required to trace a path, and all

animals are auto-motoric.

Imagine looking out of a window and seeing a bird flying overhead. A swift,

swooping and rising, darting after flies, perching on a chimney stack, taking flight

again. The swift writes its autobiograparaphy as it flies. The swift, so Derrida says,

has the ‘aptitude that it itself is, this aptitude to being itself, and thus the aptitude to 62 Derrida, p. 260 63 Derrida, p. 259 64 Derrida, p. 260. This word requires a systematic breakdown. Auto: ‘self, one’s own, by oneself, independent-ly’. Bio: ‘life, course or way of living’. Graph: ‘that which writes, portrays, or records’. Para: ‘alongside of, by, past, beyond’. To begin: the entire word autobiography is defined as, ‘The writing of one's own history; the story of one’s life written by himself.’ An intuitive transliteration that matches this, and is based on our individual definitions might be: ‘one’s own life writing.’ Therefore, autobiograparaphy might transliterate as: ‘one’s own life alongside of/beyond writing.’ (All definitions are taken from the OED.) 65 Derrida, p. 259

21

being capable of affecting itself, of its own movement, of affecting itself with traces

of a living self’.66 By simply moving, an animal becomes an individual, and forges

its ipseity. Likewise the marlin of The Old Man and the Sea writes its story as it

swims, and drags the skiff, and bites the hook, and dies at the hands of the old man’s

harpoon. However, the marlin is not just an auto-motoric entity; it possesses the

textuality (or metaphorical significance) that overshadows its animality and ipseity.

This textuality allows Hemingway’s literary animals to continue to trace some kind

of path after they are dead: after they have lost the ability for auto-motricity. The

marlin, as a symbol of man’s universal struggle, retains meaning as it is tied to the

skiff, and is eaten by sharks, and finally as its carcass lies on the beach swinging with

the tide. There is a conflict here between the ways in which animals are able to write

or define themselves, and their inevitable, and certainly in a literary context,

powerful, textuality. The theory of l’animot—as discussed in Chapter One, Section

One—informs this conflict.

In a work of literature, even the descriptions of the basic motoric functions of

animals are filtered through the medium of the author. J.M. Coetzee in his fictional

lecture-within-a-lecture ‘The Poets and the Animals’, has his character Elizabeth

Costello praise a ‘poetry that does not try to find an idea in the animal, that is not

about the animal, but is instead a record of an engagement with him.’67 She cites Ted

Hughes’s poems, The Jaguar and Second Glance at a Jaguar, as ‘a matter not of

inhabiting another mind but of inhabiting another body.’68 These poems allow a

direct connection with the auto-motricity of an animal: with its physicality and

66 Derrida, p. 260 67 J.M. Coetzee, ‘The Lives of Animals’, in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Princeton University, NJ (October 15 and 16 1997) <http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/ Coetzee99.pdf> [accessed 03 February 2007], p. 148. This lecture takes the form of a fifty-three page story, containing two lectures within it, both given by Coetzee’s recurrent character, Elizabeth Costello. 68 Coetzee, p. 147

22

presentness. The poems allow the reader see and feel the animal’s body, and to

imagine what it must be like to walk as a jaguar does.

The jaguars are no different from the marlin, or indeed all animals, in that

they are subject to the animot dichotomy of ipseity and textuality. Costello says:

When Hughes the poet stands before the jaguar cage, he looks at an

individual jaguar and is possessed by that individual jaguar life. It has to be that way.

Jaguars in general, the subspecies jaguar, the idea of a jaguar, will fail to move him

because we cannot experience abstractions. Nevertheless, the poem that Hughes

writes is about the jaguar, about jaguarness embodied in this jaguar. […] So despite

the vividness and earthiness of the poetry, there remains something Platonic about

it.69

She asserts that Hughes was ‘possessed’ by the real, individual jaguar he saw at the

zoo. Then emphasizes how it is only unfiltered contact with a singular entity that has

the power to ‘move’ people. She sets up a contrast between ‘vividness and

earthiness’, and the ‘Platonic’ modes of presentation. Like the animot, Hughes’s

poem acknowledges the corporeality and ipseity of the jaguar, as well as its

textuality. Just as the marlin’s own ipseity is buried under allegory, so the jaguar’s is

buried under his own ‘jaguarness’.70

In her discussion of the Platonic jaguar, Costello overlooks Hughes’ second

poem, Second Glance at a Jaguar. Whereas the jaguar of the first poem is referred to

as the jaguar, this is a jaguar: an individual. It is a member of Derrida’s

‘heterogeneous multiplicity of the living’.71 In this second poem the reader is in the

cage with the jaguar, and moves with him as he paces his well-worn path; the first

poem is positioned ‘at a cage where the crowd stands’, watching the ‘world roll[ing]

69 Coetzee, p. 150 70 See my discussion of the Platonic marlin in Part One, Section Three. 71 Derrida, p. 253

23

under the long thrust of [the jaguar’s] heel.’72 The jaguar is written as a primitive

demigod: harnessing fire and blood; controlling the spin of the earth; transcending

the bars of his cage through his force of being. A jaguar—in the second poem—is a

pathetic, material creature. Hughes describes it without embellishment. It has a

‘terrible, stump-legged waddle’, and a ‘gorged look,/Gangster, club-tail lumped

along behind gracelessly’. The majesty of the previous jaguar is gone, and all that is

left is this manic prisoner pacing back and forth, ‘Like a cat going along under

thrown stones, under cover’.73

Section Two: The Lion’s Mouth

In his short story ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’, Hemingway—like

Hughes—allows the reader to engage directly with an animal. It contains two

passages in which the narrative centre shifts to that of the lion under pursuit by the

titular hunter. The lion is not seen through the vision of the hunter, but filtered

directly through the narrators voice like any human character would be. Hemingway

describes the animal’s pain in visceral and minute detail. In both Hemingway and

Hughes’ texts, the reader is invited to become the animal. Costello describes this as

‘inhabiting another body.’74 Hemingway recounts the lion’s auto-motoric sensations

as the bullet tears through his body: ‘[the bullet] bit his flank and ripped in sudden

hot scalding nausea through his stomach. […] Then [the gun] crashed again and he

felt the blow as it hit his lower ribs and ripped on through’.75 The descriptions are

vivid and brutal, and oddly human. Hemingway talks about the lion not being

72 Ted Hughes, ‘The Jaguar’, in Selected Poems 1957-1981 (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 15 73 Ted Hughes, ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’, in Selected Poems 1957-1981, p. 72 74 Coetzee, p. 147 75 Ernest Hemingway, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’, in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), p. 13

24

‘afraid’, and later full of ‘hatred’: two seemingly very human emotions.76 The third-

person omniscient narration blurs the distinction between the narrator and the lion.

To begin the lion is described as ‘majestic’—from what is clearly a point of view

outside of its own—and then the reader suddenly sees Macomber in silhouette

through the lion’s own eyes.77 Hemingway uses all five senses to draw the reader in

to the lion’s subjectivity. Just as the lion does, the reader smells ‘no man smell’, sees

‘a man figure’, hears ‘a cracking crash’, feels ‘the slam’ and ‘the blow’ of bullets,

and tastes ‘blood sudden hot and frothy’.78 It is through the physics and chemistry of

the body that this connection with the lion arises.

In entering the lion’s realm of subjective experience, Hemingway counter-

balances the anthropocentric remainder of the short story, and simultaneously

denounces Macomber’s hunting ability. Hemingway notes how:

Macomber had not thought how the lion felt as he got out of the car. He only

knew his hands were shaking and as he walked away from the car it was almost

impossible for him to make his legs move. They were stiff in the thighs, but he could

feel the muscles fluttering. He raised the rifle, sighted on the junction of the lion’s

head and shoulders and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened though he pulled until

he thought his finger would break. Then he knew he had the safety on.79

Macomber loses motor-control as he stalks his prey. This lies in direct contrast to the

lion who first trots, and is able even to gallop after he has been shot. In The Old Man

and the Sea, Hemingway posed the shiver as a universal and involuntary reaction to

external forces. Here Macomber shivers—his muscles flutter—in fear. He does not

belong in Hemingway’s timeless, mythical world of hunters and prey. The old man

76 ‘Macomber’, p. 13 & 16 77 ‘Macomber’, p. 13 78 ‘Macomber’, p. 13 79 ‘Macomber’, pp. 13-14

25

shivered from the cold, the tuna in its death throes, and the fishing line and skiff

whilst battling the marlin. Macomber shivers because he is scared. The lion, in

contrast to the irregular flutter of Macomber’s muscles, lies in the high grass slowly

dying with his tail steadily ‘twitching up and down’. 80 Macomber’s hands shake, and

he fumbles with the safety catch, whilst the lion remains prone, anchored with his

‘claws dug in the soft baked earth’.81 H. Peter Steeves says of hunters:

The man who faces a deadly opponent without fear is a fool; the man who

presses forward through his fear is a hero. Courage cannot exist without fear, and

thus the hunter who admits his fear accentuates his accomplishment.82

To overcome fear is the mark of a good hunter. Steeves posits fear as a site of a

potentially intimate encounter between man and animal. He says:

Fear is a mode of state-of-mind. The dog experienced through fear is not

frightening; our relationship, our proximity, our way of being-with the dog is as

frightened. Fear is spatial. Is it not proof enough we share an intersubjective world

with animals that we can fear them? Where the dog sits snarling—Here for him,

There for me—can quickly become Here for us both.83

It is the prospect of a potential physical encounter that elicits the fear. The man and

the dog are joined in this state of being frightened. Steeves says that fear is proof

enough of an intersubjectivity84 between man and animal. He holds both parties to be

equal in this encounter.

80 ‘Macomber’, p. 16 81 ‘Macomber’, p. 16 82 H. Peter Steeves, ‘They Say Animals Can Smell Fear’, in Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, ed. H. Peter Steeves (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 135-136 83 Steeves, p. 137 84 Intersubjective: Existing between conscious minds. (OED)

26

To hunt well necessitates a certain mingling of subjects. Carey Voeller

explains how—at a point in the autobiographical Green Hills of Africa where he has

been shot—Hemingway reflects on the pain his prey must feel and ‘acknowledges a

communion between human and animal’. 85 This common-union, or

acknowledgement of intersubjectivity, requires the hunter to think themselves into

the body of their prey. To read well also necessitates a mingling of subjects: the

reader must enter into a communion with the lion. Just as Macomber should have

‘thought how the lion felt’86, so the reader must be receptive to thinking like the

animal in the text. Through what Costello terms ‘poetic invention’, the animal’s

ipseity is reflected onto the reader. Costello says of Hughes:

By bodying forth the jaguar Hughes shows us that we too can embody

animals—by the process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense in a

way that no one has explained and no one ever will. He shows us how to bring the

living body into being with ourselves. When we read the jaguar poem, when we

recollect it afterwards in tranquillity, we are for a brief while the jaguar. He ripples

within us, he takes over our body, he is us.87

The reader borrows the animal’s autobiograparaphy for a short time.

With this intersubjective communion, and the ability to intimately experience

an animal through its auto-motricity, it would seem that Hemingway has the ability

to provide the animal with a strong basis for subjective presentation. However, this

may not lead to providing the animal with a voice. Laycock, in his essay ‘The

Animal as Animal: A Plea For Open Conceptuality’, interrogates this idea of

providing animals with voices on the grounds of its anthropocentrism. This is useful

85 Voeller, p. 65 86 ‘Macomber’, p. 13 87 Coetzee, p. 149

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when determining how possible it actually is for animals to vocalize. One objection

is to the following:

[The] idealist proposal that what it would be like for us to be a bat is what it

is like for the bat to be a bat—the astonishingly audacious and human-centred

presumption that human experience is the measure, not only of all things, all

objectivity, but of all forms of subjectivity as well.’88

Laycock rejects the arrogant assumption that man can easily imagine himself into the

mind of any other being, operating under the belief that he is the core of all

experience. In Hemingway’s case there is an attempt to relate to the reader what it is

like for the lion to be a lion; and through poetic invention and an intersubjective

communion, what it is like for the reader to be the lion. Laycock goes on to describe

the forceful manner in which man imposes himself upon the animate Other

(animals):

We (man) penetrate the barrier of unknowing; we decide the undecidability

of reflection or expression; and we insert ourselves at the heart of the purported [sic]

alterior subjectivity, there to speak for the mute, to give voice to the silent—to give

(or rather impose), that is, our own voice, not to offer the animate Other a vehicle

whereby it may express itself.89

Man allows himself to speak for the animal, because the animal is silent. In

concordance with Laycock, Derrida states that ‘the most difficult problem lies in the

fact that [the animal] has been refused the power to transform [auto-motoric] traces

88 Steven W. Laycock, ‘The Animal as Animal: A Plea for Open Conceptuality’, in Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, ed. H. Peter Steeves (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 271. This essay uses Thomas Nagel’s essay, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ as its starting point. 89 Laycock, p. 277

28

into verbal language’.90 In his attempts to speak for the animal, Laycock says that

man drowns out its silence. Or rather, that by speaking for the animal he does not

then listen to what it may be saying in what he perceives as silence:

Busy imposing our own views, speaking for the animate Other, we are not

genuinely open, receptive. And it is no excuse to complain that in attending the

Other’s voice we hear nothing, that we must speak for the Other because the animate

Other cannot speak for itself, that the screen would be blank without our own

projection. Let the screen lapse into imageless blankness. […] If silence or

incomprehensibility is the expression of the animate Other, we must nonetheless

attend. And we must find a voice in this silence, this silence beyond “silence,” that is

not our own.91

Laycock says that this silence is unavoidable. He emphasizes the fact that silence

does not denote a lack of meaning or expression. The silence that animals are bound

to is a silence only in terms of speech. He talks about finding the voice of the Other

in this ‘silence beyond “silence”’, but gives no means by which to achieve this. He

concludes thus:

[W]hen the Other becomes aware of itself in us, when we offer ourselves as

the site of its own self-expression, when our gift of voice is genuine, no strings

attached, when the expression is not that of ventriloquist projection but a genuine

submission of the voice to the Other’s disposition […] this is enlightenment.92

Laycock never prescribes a method of providing animals with a voice, or of how to

listen for that voice beyond silence. Nevertheless, it highlights the inevitable

artificiality and anthropocentrism of any text that attempts to speak for an animal.

90 Derrida, p. 260 91 Laycock, p. 279 92 Laycock, p. 280

29

Behind the dying lion then, hidden between the lines of text, is Hemingway’s

ventriloquist’s hand making the lion’s mouth move: speaking for him, rather than

allowing him to speak. In writing an animal—whether giving it a voice directly, or

writing about it—the author is bound to enact this ventriloquism. No matter how

authentically and objectively the animal is written, the task is an attempt to give

language to something that cannot accept it. Using Laycock’s terminology—the

words insert themselves at the heart of the animal’s subjectivity. And to return to

Derrida’s abyss—the words seem to leap across the abyss, and bury themselves at

the centre of the animal on the other side. But the abyss is fundamentally uncrossable

and unbridgeable. What stranglehold the words had on the animal was an illusion;

they remain firmly on the side of man.

Section Three: The Elephant’s Eye Laycock’s idea of the fundamental impossibility of giving animals a voice leads back

to Derrida, and autobiograparaphy. In terms of literature then, perhaps the only

authentic representation of an animal is one that restricts itself to auto-motoric

depictions. However, the presentation of the marlin in The Old Man and the Sea is

restricted to auto-motricity, yet predicated on the hunter/prey relationship. The

marlin comes close to being an authentic representation of an animal, but its mythical

status, and participation in the hunting ritual eradicates its ipseity and forces it to be

seen as prey, as a fish, and ultimately as the Animal.93 In his short story, ‘An African

Story’, Hemingway does not submit to ventriloquism. The animal is not given a

voice, but speaks for itself through movement. The relationship between it and the

93 See Part One, Section One for my discussion of the Animal ‘claiming thus to designate every living thing that is held not to be man’. Derrida, p. 253

30

protagonist, David, is not that of hunter and prey. David recognizes the animal’s

individuality, and is captivated by its presence.

David is waiting for the moon to rise with his dog, when he sees the huge

elephant that his father will ultimately pursue and kill:

Then the elephant’s shadow covered them and he moved past making no

noise at all and they smelled him in the light wind that came down from the

mountain. He smelled strong but old and sour and when he was past David saw that

the left tusk was so long it seemed to reach the ground. […] [He] could see the

elephant’s head and the great ears slowly moving. The right tusk was as thick as his

own thigh and it curved down almost to the ground.94

‘An African Story’ is told through limited third-person narration. It never strays from

the point of view of the protagonist. Thus the elephant is always ‘the elephant as

David sees it’, never ‘the elephant as what it is feeling or thinking.’ There is no

attempt to cross the unbridgeable abyss between man and animal, but David still

attends to the elephant. He does this through silence. The elephant moves past David

‘making no noise’. Just as Hemingway drew the reader into the lion’s subjectivity in

‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ through his senses, so connection with

David is through his—although in this case he smells and sees the elephant, he does

not hear it. Sight and sound attend to the silence without drowning it out. The

moment before the elephant’s death is where David experiences his most intimate

connection with it:

94 Ernest Hemingway, ‘An African Story’, Complete Short Stories, pp. 545-546

31

[His] father raised his rifle and fired and the elephant turned his head with

the great tusks moving heavy and slow and looked at them and when his father fired

the second barrel the elephant seemed to sway like a felled tree and came smashing

down towards them. But he was not dead. He had been anchored and now he was

down with his shoulder broken. He did not move but his eye was alive and looked at

David. He had very long eyelashes and his eye was the most alive thing David had

ever seen.95

Here, sight takes precedence. The adage, ‘the eyes are the windows to the soul’,

would seem to aptly expresses this encounter. However, it is not the elephant’s soul

that David sees, it is just his eye. To call this a meeting of two souls would assume

an intersubjectivity that cannot be proved. David describes the eye as ‘the most alive

thing’ he has ever seen. He is entranced by the elephant’s immediacy, and

corporeality. The eye meets the eye in silence, and the elephant speaks to David.96

95 African Story, p. 552 96 The eye is an important point of identification between man and animal. Both Jonathan Burt—in his book Animals in Film—and Robert McKay—in his essay ‘“Identifying With the Animals”: Language, Subjectivity, and the Animal Politics of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing’, in Figuring Animals—mention the ability of the ‘look’ of an animal to force the viewer into a relationship with it.

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Conclusion In undertaking this survey of Hemingway’s animals, I make no attempt to condemn

the great man for perceived crimes against animal-kind. The TIME magazine article

describes the ‘uninhibited, wine-purpled, 100-proof, side-of-the-mouth bottle-

swigging days of the swashbuckling young Ernest Hemingway who was “the bronze

god of the whole literary experience in America’.97 This is Hemingway’s inescapably

enduring image. Despite his love of bullfights, hunting, fishing, and his ‘60-foot-long

living room’ lined with ‘heads of animals’ at his house in Cuba, he does not actively

marginalize animals in his prose.98 The most successful portrayal of an animal is

David’s elephant. This animal is a success where the marlin and the lion are failures.

It is auto-motoric, and thus is the author of its autobiograparaphy. It has an ipseity: it

is an individual in David’s (the focal point of the narrative) non-hunter’s eyes,

whereas for his father it is merely a member of the homogeneous community of the

Animal. And is never subject to Hemingway’s ventriloquist’s hand. However, this

restriction to auto-motricity does not allow for an unbiased presentation of the

animal. Every word is filtered through the pen of the author, then through the voice

of the narrator. Even its most basic movements are ultimately subject to the

prejudices of its creator.

97 TIME, p. 2 98 TIME, p. 3

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This exploration of the presentation of animals in Hemingway’s work opens

up issues regarding the presentation of animals in literature as a whole. Instinctively,

it seems that creating a fictional human character would be far easier than creating an

animal: perhaps because the author is always human, and very much not an animal.

Richard Ryder first coined the term speciesism ‘while [he] was lying in a bath in

Oxford some 35 years ago (1970).’99 Bound up in this term is the idea that the

distinction between arbitrarily defined species is akin to racism and sexism, in that it

is a ‘prejudice based upon morally irrelevant physical differences.’100 A white male

writer is ‘not black’ or ‘not a woman’ just as much as they are ‘not an animal’. This

reasoning leads to a kind of syllogism: if it is impossible to depict the reality of an

animal in literature without submitting to allegory or ventriloquism, and the

differences between humans and animals are based on morally irrelevant physical

differences; then it is surely impossible to depict the reality of a human in literature

without submitting to allegory or ventriloquism.

Cary Wolfe says that contemporary cultural studies operates by ‘repressing

the question of nonhuman subjectivity, taking it for granted that the subject is always

already human.’101 My reading of Derrida, Laycock, and Ryder suggests that the

supposedly privileged human subjectivity is no more authentic or easily written than

a nonhuman subjectivity. Wolfe says in his conclusion: ‘the only way to the “there”

in which the animals reside is to find them “here,” in us and of us’.102 Perhaps the

key to hearing animals is to find the silence beyond silence within man.103 We must

translate the language of the animals by harnessing our own animality, or perhaps by

99 Richard Ryder, ‘All beings that feel pain deserve human rights’, in The Guardian, 6 August 2005 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/animalrights/story/0,11917,1543799,00.html> [accessed 14/05/07] 100 Ryder 101 Animal Rites, p. 1 102 Animal Rites, p. 207 103 I borrow Laycock’s phrase, as quoted in Part Two, Section Two. Laycock, p. 279

34

recognizing a humanity in animals. Ultimately this demands that man attends to the

individual animal, and does not seek to repress or control it, but to erase all disparity

and to allow himself to blend into the heterogeneous multiplicity of the living.

35

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