The Ernest Hemingway Companion (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS · 9 9 The Ernest Hemingway Companion. Edited by Somdatta Mandai. Salt Lake City, UT and Kolkata, India: SAS Enterprise, 2002. These eighteen essays, designedto bring"within reach ofthe Indian students ofAmerican literature some ofthe best articles written on Hemingway during the last two decades," is a somewhat curious assortment. Six ofthe pieces are reprints—four ofthose by Hemingway Society stalwarts: Scott Donaldson ("Humor in The Sun Also Rises"), Peter Hays, ("Exchange Between Rivals: Faulkner's Influence on The Old Man and the Sea"), Miriam Mandel ("A Reader's Guide to Pilar's Bullfighters"), and Bickford Sylvester (Wasteland Parallels Unifying In Our Time). The two reprinted Indian contributions are achapter fromE. NageswaraRao's ErnestHemingway:A Studyofhis Rhetoric, and"Picasso, Hemingway, and the Bull," an interesting and useful comparison byIndrani Haldar. The two other non-Indian contributions, Judy Henn's and Alexander Dupuis',arebothfocusedonHemingway'srelationshiptoTurgenev,theformer anextendedpiecewhichattemptsto establisha"dialogic"engagementbetween Turgenev's andHemingway'srespective TorrentsofSpring,whilethelatterlooks to A Sportsman's Sfatches for influences on Hemingway's style. Henn suggests thatHemingway's"unwrittengoal"inwriting TorTenfc"seemstobeamodernist manifesto, upsetting the literary consensus."And that he "mixes and matches elements ofplot, characterization, andtheme"in an effort"to better Turgenev" andtogalvanize"writerstoabandonthepost-romantictendenciesatthe endof the nineteenth century." Although I'm not sure what that means, I think it's obvious that Hemingway's Torrents hardly reduces Turgenev's by a trickle. In general, I have the impression that Henn is much more comfortable and informative in explicating Turgenev's text, introducing Hemingway's pastiche ofa parodyalmost as an intrusive obligation. Dupuis' short essaysuggests that Turgenev's avoidance ofa conventional narrative scheme in Sketchesin favor of "snapshots ofplaces,characters,situations"mayverywellhave providedsome guidanceforHemingwayinhis assemblage ofpieces forIn OurTime. Amongthe remainingessays are Chinananda Phattachary,"TheAlternate Titles of The Sun Also Rises"; Ajanta Paul, "Biblical Resonances in Hemingway 's Short Fiction"; and Amitabha Sinha's rather incomprehensible improvisation on the opening paragraph ofA Farewell to Arms. Battachary the Hemingway review, vol. 22, NO. 2, spring 2003. Copyright © 2003 The Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Published by the University ofIdaho Press, Moscow, Idaho. JOO- THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW picks up various thematic resonances from the titles which Hemingwaywas contemplatingforthe novel: "Riverto the Sea,""Two Lie Together,""The Old Leaven," "Fiesta," and "The Lost Generation." He tries to demonstrate how each projected title reflects different possible nuances on the complexities of the novel and why Hemingway finally opted for The Sun Also Rises. And Paul's essayis a somewhat Procrustean effort to argue that"the use ofChristian motifs," the "forging of consonances with Scriptural situation and mood," the "appropriation ofimages___ related to both the Testaments," as well as"the frequent adoption ofthe rhythms ofthe King James Biblei"force the reader to investigate the emotive overlay of Biblical meanings in Hemingway 's fiction. Not so surprisingly, there are four essays dealing with The Old Man and the Sea. Dipendu Chakrabart's The Old Man and the Sea and Riders to the Sea: An Inter-textual Encounter" seems to me a striking example of the problems in intertextual studies. While it is certainly true that anything can be compared with anything else, the encounter can easily be arbitrary and meaningless. More promising, I think, is Sobha Chatopadhya's "Intertextualities : The Old Man and the Sea and Islands in the Stream'' Since we know that Hemingway was trying to fuse the various components that were eventually published as Islands, including "The Sea in Being" which became The Old Man, the recurrence of themes in the two texts is natural and potentially illuminating. The third essay by Pralhad A. Kulkarni ("Santiago: A Sinless 'El Campeón'") is a brief paean to Santiago whom Kulkarni sees as a Christian champion whose struggle for humanity will lead to an inevitable crucifixion, but may consequently introduce "a world of hopes, certainty, happiness; a world without hostility, enmity and war." The final essay of this group is Priyadarshi Patnaik, "The Old Man and the Sea in Light of Rasa Theory: An Indian Reading of Hemingway." With detailed examples from various Indian texts, Patnaik explains that Rasa can be roughly understood as "aesthetic emotion or rapture"—an experience in which the properly sensitized reader/adept transcends· his own identity, his world, his...