The Camouflage of the Sacred in Hemingway’s Short Fiction

Abstract

Ernest Hemingway's short fiction illustrates Mircea Eliade's notion that camouflage or even occultation of the sacred and of spiritual meanings in general characterizes all crepuscular eras {Autobiography 153). In short play (Today Is Friday) and four short stories (The Killers, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, Old Man at the Bridge, and Light of the World), light imagery, biblical allusions, and the figure of Christ, reveal hidden imaginary universe. This sacral dimension casts subterranean love that pulsates beneath the terse dialogue of Hemingway's characters.Hemingway grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, town with so many churches that it was known as Saint's Rest. His parents were devout Protestants who belonged to the Third Congregationalist Church. As an adolescent, Ernest rebelled against their moral strictures, ridiculing his mother's religious material as moron literature (McDaniel 21, 40). Later, as young adult, Hemingway converted to Catholicism. Although he distrusted sonorous pieties and theological abstractions, Hemingway acknowledged that he learned to write from the Bible (Maurois 49). The biblical influence was not confined to style, for Christian imagery permeates his fiction.3 Deep down, Hemingway remained Christian, such as in his reluctance to write on Sundays because it brought bad luck (Hotchner 149).Hemingway's fiction, like life, remains elusive and inchoate. We glimpse the inner life of the characters only obliquely. In an interview, Hemingway explained this fragmentary characterization: always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven eighths of it under water, for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg (qtd. in Plimpton 34). This fictional technique is distinct feature of modernism which Peter Faulkner describes as part of the historical process of disassociation from nineteenth century assumptions that posited a stable relationship in which the writer could assume community of attitudes, shared sense of reality (1).In the late nineteenth century, the literary sense that we are transcendentally connected to one another, which had reached its apotheosis in the novel, finally began to unravel. Matthew Arnold expresses consequent feeling of loss in the final verses of Dover Beach (1867):the world, which seemsTo lie before us like land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are here as on darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night. (517-18)This sense of violence and chaos pervades Hemingway's first collection of stories, In Our Time (1925; expanded edition 1930), which borrows its title from passage in the Book of Common Prayer. Give us peace in our time, O Lord (Maurois 43). In one vignette, the narrator repeats the name of Jesus amidst the shelling, holding it close like talisman:While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you'll only keep me from getting killed I'll do anything you say. I believe in you and I'll tell every one in the world that you are the only one that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shelling moved farther up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody. (Complete Stories 109)4The narrator alternates between upper and lower case letters when he invokes the name of Jesus Christ as if mediating between intimacy and respect. …