[In the following essay, Carson explores the ways in which A Farewell to Arms fuses a naturalistic approach with compressed, symbolic language.]

Edmund Wilson proclaimed in 1931 that the ‘literary history of our time is to a great extent that of the development of Symbolism and of its fusion or conflict with Naturalism.¹’ History and the course of literary criticism have proved him correct. Strangely, however, he neglected all but passing mention of Ernest Hemingway, who had already demonstrated successful fusion of these elements in A Farewell to Arms.

Hemingway's naturalism is seldom questioned, but, despite the obvious allegorical significance of The Old Man and the Sea, his use of the symbol is still questioned.² Hemingway had, nonetheless, already put into practice Mallarmé's dictum that ‘to name an object is to do away with three-quarters of the enjoyment’.³ As he tells us in Death in the Afternoon, he attempted to duplicate an emotion by describing the ‘sequence of motion and fact’ which provided the stimulus for the emotion.⁴ His description of the goring of a matador is a case in point:

When he stood up, his face white and dirty and the silk of his breeches opened from waist to knee, it was the dirtiness of the rented breeches, the dirtiness of his slit underwear and the clean, clean unbearably clean whiteness of the thigh bone that I had seen, and it was that which was important.

(Death in the Afternoon, p. 20)

As John Atkins writes, using the word wound would serve no end since the word itself is merely an abstraction, ‘an intermediate stage … between woundedness and the fact seen or felt’.⁵ What is called for is a series of symbols operating together to approximate a sense of reality greater than that created by the use of the word itself. In a simplistic psychological sense this practice may be likened to a literary gestalt or to Eliot's objective correlative, although in the latter case as Carlos Baker points out Hemingway eschews word connotations tied only to a literary tradition.⁶ The first chapter of A Farewell to Arms provides a vivid example of Hemingway's technique of symbolic suggestion which is one of the more subtly effective uses of associative symbolism in modern prose.

Critics have generally agreed that the passage from Book Five of A Farewell to Arms in which Frederic Henry discusses the death of Catherine's baby is an explicit statement of Hemingway's major theme:

Poor little kid. I wished the hell I'd been choked like that. … Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.⁷

Certainly, Frederic Henry's thoughts reflect the tragedy of man's existence in an impartially deterministic universe, but his pessimism is directed toward a rather vague they. The first chapter of the novel presages this, but it also adds further qualification to this theme. A mere two pages long, it sets the tone, mood, and thematic framework of that which is to follow.

Hemingway begins with an apparently conventional, if lean, descriptive passage laden with visible phenomena purportedly hoping only to achieve realism through density of specification:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.

(p. 3)

But there is a good deal more here than simple description. Through the phrase, ‘late summer’, Hemingway projects an instinctual image which evokes the feeling of mild despair one experiences in contemplating impending Autumn and the ominousness of Winter which it portends. The next sentence triggers the traditional human response to water, calling forth the mystery inspired by both its life-giving and deadly characteristics. The description of pebbles and boulders reinforces the water's ambivalence and provides the first occurrence of symbolic color-contrast. The stones ‘dry and white in the sun’, might suggest merely natural purity, but the image also suggests skeletal dessication as found in The Waste Land:

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song …
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

(lines 180-6)

.....Pheblas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell. …
A current under the sea
Picked his bones in whispers.

(lines 312-16)

So that the mysteries of water's deepness and darkness become intermingled with the pure and bleached-skull lightness of the rocks to create conventional tension between the lightness and darkness of each element and between the lightness (good) and darkness (bad) within each element. This contrasting evidences Hemingway's first ironical comment on appearance versus reality in the world of the novel. Through the ambiguity of these images he succeeds in juxtaposing the life-death images which permeate its deterministic world, and he, thereby, establishes the mood which points toward the novel's theme. Nature of itself is neither good nor bad but is naturally both. In two subsequent sentences Hemingway introduces the impact of man:

Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and the leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Here he moves the apprehension of Winter closer to realization and deftly connects the passing soldiers to the mood of deepening gloom. Through repetition of dust, troops, and leaves and his allusion to the whiteness of the dust, Hemingway expands the earlier thematic element and develops a cause and effect relationship between soldiers and death. They bring, in other words, an unnatural death with them. When they pass, the place where they have marched is ‘bare and white’ except for the unnatural and untimely remnants of their killing. By implication then, a world made terrible through its determinism is made even more so by the intrusion of man and his institutions or, more specifically, war.

The next paragraph presents an apparent change of pace with descriptions of the green and voluptuous plain, but the effect of the periodic antithesis achieved through contrast with the ‘mountains … brown and bare’ is to engrave doubly on the reader's consciousness the portent of the maledictions of the previous passage. This impact is made more emphatic through intentional underemphasis of the irony inherent in this new image of life-death juxtaposition, but the highest tension is achieved once again by the intrusion of civilization. The mountains already awesome are made more so by the struggle which goes on there. From bright daylight, Hemingway quickly moves to night, suggesting man's primal fears of darkness. He then superimposes the lightning imagery, arousing an awareness of even greater apprehension. But he tells us ironically that it was only ‘like summer lightning’, for ‘the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming’. So again Hemingway plays upon an instinctive human reaction to the natural world to reinforce his comment on the more horrible aspects of man's invention. The unnaturalness of the situation is heightened by a repetition of the chiaroscuro-contrast in which darkness is again shown as better than light.

In the next paragraph, Hemingway continues his exploration of the unnaturalness of the natural setting:

Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each side of their pack-saddles and gray motor-trucks that carried men, and other trucks with loads covered with canvas that moved slower in the traffic.

Certainly, none of this traffic could have been expected in rural Italy under normal peacetime conditions. Moreover, Hemingway's use of periodic construction creates the illusion that the wounded are a product of all that precedes them in the paragraph—which indeed they are in fact. It is significant, that he communicates the sense of ‘wounded, maimed, war ravaged’ through the use of loads, covered, canvas, slower.

To this point in the chapter Hemingway has achieved subtle irony through juxtaposing natural and unnatural. Hereafter he presents only the unnatural, suggesting the natural only by implication. Setting up another cause and effect relationship, he next turns to development of a perverted dionysian symbolism:

There were big guns too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of the guns covered with green branches and green leafy branches and vines laid over the tractors … and the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men passing on the road marched as though they were six months gone with child.

There were small gray motor-cars that passed going very fast … and if one of the officers in the back was very small and sitting between two generals, he himself so small that you could not see his face but only the top of his cap and his narrow back, and if the car went especially fast it was probably the King [sometimes now seeing his face and little long necked body and gray beard like a goat's chin tuft].⁸ He lived in Udine and came out in this way nearly every day to see how things were going, and things went very badly.

The traditional elements of the dionysian rites are all here, but they are all awry. The garlanded phallus is a camouflaged instrument of death. The earth mother, or nymph, symbolizing sexual joy, fecundity, and the mystery of life, is replaced with a poor masculine imitation whose false womb contains only the seeds of death. The satyr has diminished to a little, narrow-backed, long-necked goat of a king.

Here, then, is the chapter's final contrasting of the natural with the unnatural. The natural world may be an impartial and deterministic one which moves each living thing inscrutably toward death, but the unnatural determinism imposed by civilization is far the more cruel and enigmatic. It serves only to compound an already bleak human predicament. If the natural world brings death, it also brings life, but the unnatural determinism imposed by man brings only death or agony. Both determinisms in conjunction, moreover, produce situations like that with which Hemingway finishes the chapter:

At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.

And they lead toward the conclusions which Frederic Henry formulates as he contemplates the deaths of his son and wife. Henry had escaped man's determinism only to be trapped by an unnatural natural occurrence.

In less than seven-hundred words, Hemingway succeeds in establishing a mental set in the mind of his reader which prepares him for what will follow and aims unerringly at the major themes of the novel. Through heavy reliance upon associative symbols, he is able to strip his prose of the excessive verbiage characteristic of the ‘sandhill’ school of naturalistic description. Whereas Dreiser, Norris, or even James went after descriptive realism by piling up objects a grain at a time, Hemingway got a greater semblance of reality by isolating the object which would evoke the desired psychological and emotional response. As a result he achieved compression never before equalled in prose. He was one of the first prose writers to capitalize on the power of the non-allegorical symbol and was, even early in his career, one of the first novelists to succeed in fusing a naturalistic approach with elements of symbolism.

Notes

1. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870 to 1930 (New York, 1931), pp. 56-7.

2. Vance Bourjaily, ‘The Big Comeback’, New York Times Book Review (February 28, 1965), p. 49, wrote that the symbolism of The Old Man and the Sea had been inserted merely as ‘critic bait’.

3. Quoted in Axel's Castle, p. 20.

4. (New York, 1932), p. 20.

5. The Art of Ernest Hemingway, His Work and Personality (New York, 1953), p. 185.

6. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton, 1952), pp. 56-7.

7. (New York, 1929), p. 338.

8. From Chapter Two, p. 5.