Hemingway, Trauma and Masculinity

In the Garden of the Uncanny

Stephen Gilbert Brown

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030192303
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Hemingway, Trauma and Masculinity: In the Garden of the Uncanny is at once a model of literary interpretation and a psycho-critical reading of Hemingway's life and art. This book is a provocative and theoretically sophisticated inquiry into the traumatic origins of the creative impulse and the dynamics of identity formation in Hemingway. Building on a body of wound-theory scholarship, the book seeks to reconcile the tensions between opposing Hemingway camps, while moving beyond these rivalries into a broader analysis of the relationship between trauma, identity formation and art in Hemingway.

Part IThe Love Chase

© The Author(s) 2019

Stephen Gilbert BrownHemingway, Trauma and MasculinityAmerican Literature Readings in the 21st Centuryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19230-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Entering the Garden—The Genealogy of a Reading

Stephen Gilbert Brown¹

(1)

University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, USA

Stephen Gilbert Brown

End Abstract

“Hemingway had conceived of androgynous love,” as Mark Spilka observes, “as an Edenic garden that a man must lose or leave”—which is why for Hemingway paradise was always and already a paradise lost, whether a “last good country” of nature or Eros (Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny, 4). Theories of the “wound” have dominated Hemingway scholarship since its inception. Before the posthumous publication of Garden of Eden, the war wound theory of Malcolm Cowley and Philip Young deeply informed scholarship on this subject. The publication of Garden of Eden (GOE) altered the course of inquiry, as scholars reading by the light of this posthumous work theorized an earlier, androgynous wound, dating to Hemingway’s infancy—calling into question many of the claims associated with the war wound theory. These competing wound theories have sparked a lively debate that continues to deeply inform Hemingway scholarship.

The critical assumption in Hemingway, Trauma and Masculinity: In the Garden of the Uncanny is that these two wounds (war and androgyny) are in reality the same wound: a wound of emasculation—suffered in infancy, sustained through childhood, boyhood, and adulthood, and compounded by the wounds not only of war, but love. In the Garden of the Uncanny seeks to reconcile the tensions between these competing wound theories, while investigating the traumatic origins of the creative impulse in Hemingway’s art. Building on the provocative, pioneering scholarship of Kenneth Lynn, Carl Eby, Mark Spilka, Debra Moddelmog, Thomas Styrchacz, Comley and Scholes, this inquiry selectively mines the intersection of Hemingway’s life and art in an effort to assess the traumatic origins of Hemingway’s narrative art. This study, thus, is an attempt to understand “the sickness unto death that was Hemingway’s life”—and its influence on his narrative art (Lynn 583).

The prevalence of wound theory in Hemingway criticism lends itself to a similar psycho-critical approach, in which my original interest in Rankian theory expanded into an interest in trauma theory, by which it has been further informed and enriched. The Sun Also Rises (SAR) struck me then, as it does now, as perhaps the first American novel to dramatize the effects of war-related, post-traumatic stress disorder—and as such, was half a century ahead of its time. Like many Hemingway scholars, and most notably Cowley and Young, I originally believed Hemingway’s wound began and ended with World War I, with the trench mortar that blasted his soul from his body at Fossalta di Piave. As Mark Cirino observes in Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action:

Malcolm Cowley’s influential introduction in The Portable Hemingway in 1944 located Hemingway’s fiction in the hallowed American tradition of Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne [by virtue of] a dark layer lurking beneath a restrained prose style. In 1952, Philip Young revolutionized Hemingway studies with his “wound theory” that owed much to psychoanalysis, suggesting that Hemingway spent his entire career trying to exorcise traumatic memories from being blown up as a young man during World War I. (7, my emphasis)

As James Brodie observes, Young argues that the “key to Hemingway’s personality and his art was the profound and lasting effect … of his experience in World War I, particularly his experience of being wounded.” Moreover, this “trauma is the central focus, not only of the stories but for all Hemingway’s work” (142, my emphasis). Yet in A Reconsideration, Young modifies this war wound theory, arguing that it is not the origin of Hemingway’ s trauma, but the continuation of traumatic wounds sustained in childhood and boyhood. As Young observes, “the [war] wound culminates, epitomizes, and climaxes the wounds he has been getting as a boy. Life … was really like this up in Michigan, where Nick was already well on his way to becoming a causality” (40–41).

Reading by the posthumous light of GOE, Kenneth Lynn’s “psycho-biography” (1987) I would like to drill even deeper into Hemingway’s problematic childhood, focusing on the androgynous nature of the mother-son dyad as the origin of the traumatic wound, recanting Young’s original war wound theory while “imput[ing] great significance into Hemingway’s relationship with his mother, including the apparently scarring stigma of having been dressed up in girl’s clothing as a young boy” (Cirino 7). As Lynn concludes: “All his life his mother would remain the dark queen of Hemingway’s inner world” (65). Mark Spilka’s pioneering inquiry, Hemingway’s Quarrel With Androgyny, reveals the extent to which Hemingway’s personality, life, and art were decisively shaped, not merely by the violence of a war wound in early adulthood, but by the violence of an androgynous wound in childhood. As Spilka asserts, “[t]he ‘wound’ is androgyny and not … the actual physical wounds that Hemingway himself sustained at Fossalta.” (219). Spilka continues: “[A]ndrogyny seems to have been a childhood condition … a wounding condition … a bedeviling condition … against which Hemingway’s artistic bow [was] manfully strung.” (3, 5).

Spilka concisely articulates the traditional blind spot in Hemingway criticism that invites new readings and re-readings: “critics have been reading Hemingway with one eye closed for years,” particularly regarding “his relations with women … that we also only recently and I think alarmingly are just beginning to understand” (328). Lynn comes to a similar critical assessment: “[T]he Hemingway myth was still blinding readers to the very darkest impulses that informed his work” (486). These critical re-readings called into question the “one-eyed myth” of hyper-masculinity and its aesthetic counterpart: an equally mythic, stoic style. As Spilka concludes, the androgynous “revelation in The Garden of Eden manuscript … seems to me of central importance to all future Hemingway studies.” (3, my emphasis). I agree with Spilka’s critical assessment that critics need to “take a new look at Hemingway’s life and work in terms of his recurrent concern with androgynous problems” (14). While In the Garden of The Uncanny is inspired and informed by this critical assumption, it moves beyond this recent focus on an androgynous wound, absorbing it into a broader focus on trauma theory, in which Freud’s theory of The Uncanny is informed by contemporary theories of post-traumatic stress disorder to selectively inform Hemingway’s life and art, reading by the critical light of this body of scholarship, by way of modifying, enriching, and synthesizing its competing assumptions relative to the wounds of war and androgyny.

This recent body of scholarship, to a significant degree inspired by Hemingway posthumous works, has prompted critical re-readings of Hemingway’s earlier works—and just as importantly, of his earlier experience, teasing fresh meanings into the open when read by their retrospective light and the scholarship they have produced. Hemingway’s posthumous works, and particularly GOE and “The Last Good Country,” (“LGC”) have shifted critical focus away from the trauma of war to an earlier trauma (ironically first observed by Young), by which Hemingway’s identity was informed, his personality shaped, and his art influenced. In reading this body of scholarship in conjunction with his posthumous works, one comes to realize how deeply Hemingway’s experience and art were informed, deformed, and transformed by the politics of gender identity since infancy. Before articulating the theoretical framework of this inquiry, I would like to theorize the art and practice of literary criticism more broadly.

The Interpretive Sign: A Theory of Criticism

In Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway, Debra Moddelmog raises a critical question: “What role should the author’s life play in the interpretation of his or her texts?” (12).

Hemingway is an apt case-in-point insofar as his fluid, self-fashioning, movable identity evidences the relevance of the “poststructuralist challenge to the united subject,” in which the recovery of the “historical author [serves] as an interpretative reference,” driven not by the assumption that this will unveil the “real’ author,” but rather by the assumption that what is known of the “historical author” in conjunction with textual interpretation can inform a critic’s construction of the “author”—and the meanings of an author’s texts. In this “reading” of the author by the critic, bio-criticism should not be excluded from the “interpretive act” (Moddelmog 1–2).

Because of his conflicted and complex gender identity, Hemingway’s life, far from becoming “outdated,” remains at the “updated crux of gender and sexuality debates” (Moddelmog 9). If anything, Hemingway’s art and experience are even more relevant today than when he lived, given the extent to which they foreground the tropes of gender blurring, identity formation, and post-traumatic stress disorder. If, as Moddelmog asserts, “masculine identity is born in renunciation of the feminine,” then Hemingway’s hyper-masculinity is never a free-standing identity, but one that is always and already informed by the feminine, which it never recants—but with which it carries on a clandestine intimacy, often grounded in reversal of identities.

The critic is at least partially responsible for the construction of a text’s meaning, and therefore of its author as well. With an author such as Hemingway, the possessive aggressions of interpretation are enervated by his “iceberg” mode of signification, which invites, indeed insists upon, further explication. The critic’s impulse to unveil is enervated by the author’s desire to veil meanings. Thus, the desires of the author engender the desires of the critic. As Moddelmog observes, our desires, including our erotic desires, are not “irrelevant to authorial constructions and textual interpretations” (2). The interpretive impulse, no less than the creative urge, is deeply informed by desire: and by the desire to take possession of a subject through signification as a form of self-assertion, of self-empowerment. The words that enshrine the creative self become the medium as well for the assertion of critical selfhood.

Trauma Theory and the Trauma Narrative

My inquiry is prompted by a fundamental question: to what extent might Hemingway’s narratives be selectively “read” and understood as trauma narratives—informed not only by contemporary trauma theory, but by Freud’s theory of The Uncanny (1919), and by the theories of his rebellious protégé, Otto Rank, regarding the artiste manqué in Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development (1933)? As Roger Luckhurst observes, “psychoanalysis and literature,” as mode of narration, “are particularly privileged forms of writing that can attend to the perplexing paradoxes of trauma” (The Trauma Question, 5, my emphasis). To the extent literature and psychoanalysis seek to construct narratives that “talk back” to trauma, transposing it into signs, they share a common heritage in facilitating the self’s post-traumatic survival.

Further, the recovery of a traumatic past “through the dynamics of memory and desire” drives the psychoanalytic process, as it does the narrative process (Brooks xiv). To the extent Hemingway’s art is similarly yoked to the recovery of a traumatic past “through the dynamics of memory and desire,” it re-inscribes the psychoanalytic process, functioning as his own self-medicating, “talking cure,” his own form of “narrative repair” relative to traumatic wounding. Finally, to the extent Hemingway’s life and art are informed by the wounds of emasculation (whether inflicted by family, war, or love), both can be usefully read from the perspective of trauma theory, given “trauma’s” ancient origins in the “Greek word meaning wound” (Luckhurst 2, my emphasis).

As but one of many defensive responses to trauma, Hemingway’s narratives, no less than Freud’s talking cure, help the self recover a measure of post-traumatic agency. Hemingway’s narratives, like all trauma narratives, are paradoxically about “knowing and not knowing”—are about the potency and impotency of the sign to speak the “true gen” of trauma. Thus, Hemingway’s “iceberg” mode of signification speaks to the traumatic origins of his narrative art: a deeply paradoxical mode of revelation and repression, governed by the contradictory, post-traumatic imperatives of disclosure and survival, meaning-making and mystification. It is a narrative mode that foregrounds the presence and absence of signs, alternately speaking truth to trauma and succumbing to trauma’s resistance to narrative—“Where to be,” as Derrida asserts, “is to be haunted,” and where all consciousness is consciousness of a wound.

To the extent Hemingway’s narratives float between the poles of representation and repression, signification and silence, they invite (indeed, insist upon) explication—and explication from psycho-critical perspectives in particular. From its inception, Hemingway criticism has been informed by trauma theory, as evidenced by the “readings” of Malcolm Cowley and Philip Young. As Young observes, “the woundings of Hemingway and his hero certainly bear all the marks of what is called traumatic experience”—and consequently, support a diagnosis of “traumatic neurosis” (167). Brodie underscores the most significant implication of Hemingway’s experience of trauma: “It is not the trauma, but the use to which he put it that counts; he harnessed it, and transformed it into art. With will power, hard work, and a profound sense of his calling.” (168, my emphasis).

Thus, Hemingway’s trauma narratives comprise a field guide to post-traumatic survival, modeling “how to live in it” (SAR) modeling the diverse strategies that enabled his post-traumatic survival. This, in my opinion, is perhaps his most enduring legacy—yet one almost entirely overlooked by criticism. As much as he teaches us how to write a story, he teaches us “how to live” amidst traumatic sorrows.

If his life fell prey to trauma in the end, his trauma and his suffering soul were absorbed into the art that immortalized each. As Young observes, “Hemingway’s style [was] a direct response to trauma” (210) in which the “‘callous’ Hemingway hero was painfully drawn over a deep wound as a defense against reopening it” (202). Thus, “the strictly disciplined controls which he exerted over his … ‘bad nerves’” are precise parallels to the strictly disciplined sentences he wrote, in which art becomes first and foremost a means of recuperating a measure of control over his phobias, anxieties, and demons. Brodie continues:

Hemingway’s view of the world, as embodied in his fiction, is … limited to the experience of trauma and post-traumatic adjustment. Yet, trauma furnished him with an inexhaustible store of material for his art, even as his art furnished him the surest means of coping with his trauma. (218, my emphasis)

As I hope to demonstrate in this inquiry, trauma theory provides a useful interpretive optics for selectively “reading” Hemingway’s narratives. As a species of psychoanalytic criticism, trauma theory can, as Brodie avers, “throw a good deal of light on Hemingway and his work … [I]t is the pattern of trauma that he told us about, which looks like the best key to his personality, and which affords the best single psychological insight into his work” (167). To deepen the reader’s understanding of trauma theory, and its usefulness as a theoretical optics for selectiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. The Love Chase
• Part II. The Blood Chase
• Back Matter