In the bullring, men are made or unmanned. The “kid” in the first bullfight vignette of In Our Time submits to the code of the ring and, by killing five times, reaches his majority. Then, remarks the narrator, he “sat down in the sand and puked and they held a cape over him.”¹ Such modest concealment does not satisfy the delighted crowd, which “hollered and threw things down into the bullring,” recognizing that this kid has “finally made it” to manhood. Villalta, the matador at the height of his powers, plays to the crowd more deliberately. His killing becomes a test of intense watching as he “sighted” the bull along the sword blade with the bull “looking at him straight in front, hating.” With Villalta's life and manhood on the line, the crowd watches and roars with every pass of the muleta. The vignette refers repeatedly to the spectacle of the bullfight. “If it happened right down close in front of you, you could see Villalta snarl at the bull and curse him,” begins the narrator: the observer becomes “you” the reader, and Villalta the cynosure of all eyes. At the end, Villalta's “hand up at the crowd” announces the successful completion of this ritual of manhood—and acknowledges its essentially theatrical nature.

Hemingway, as Leo Gurko neatly puts it, “made himself master of the small arena,” an observation that applies not only to the bullring but to many other symbolic spaces—houses and hotels, bedrooms, camps and clearings—that take on the characteristics of a ceremonial arena.² These arenas are rich in significance. The bullring's physical characteristics sanction—and configure—the rituals enacted there. Empty space becomes ordered space, providing necessary boundaries within which potentially chaotic action might reveal a comprehensible structure. In turn, as critics argue and Hemingway seems to suggest, the small arena permits men to display their mastery over other creatures and, perhaps more importantly, over themselves. Ritualized actions serve as index to the masculine codes practiced by the bullfighter. Villalta's “hand up at the crowd”—like Macomber's wave to Margot—is a vitally gestic part of that ritual. The gesture demands the crowd's attention and respect while reminding it of the stylized (phallic) thrust that dispatched the bull. Conversely, breaking those masculine codes disrupts the space of the ring. The bad bullfighter of Chapter XI, for instance, suffers the humiliation not only of symbolic castration (“some one cut off his pigtail”) but of the crowd invading his territory as it “came over the barrera and around the torero.”

Yet by themselves a bullfighter's actions are insufficient to affirm (or to make a travesty of) the ritual act. Space becomes arena only within the presence of an audience, which, acting as an agent of legitimation for ritual gestures made in the ring, assimilates all action to performance and invests performance with value. Part of the audience's function is to appraise rituals of manhood and bestow praise or condemnation on the protagonist—a particularly important role if we take the matador's actions as somehow representative of masculine codes of behavior. And such moments of evaluatory watching are not confined to bullrings: many different individuals or groups of characters function as audience in Hemingway's work. By the same token, the kid and Villalta are just two of many characters whose potency as men depends on their ability to transform space into spectacle; and the bad bullfighter of Chapter XI is one of many who fail to master an audience. In a paradox whose resolution is crucial to my argument, the characters who succeed and those who fail to master the arena are often one and the same, though caught in different circumstances. Continuing to elaborate my argument about “The Short Happy Life,” this chapter contends that Hemingway's logic of performance precludes consistency and stability of character in these works and that manhood-fashioning must be analyzed in terms of theatricalized arenas, audiences, shared social codes of watching and evaluation, and role-playing. Manhood for Hemingway, in short, is thoroughly gestic.

Of the five Nick Adams stories that begin In Our Time, “Indian Camp” is the most remarkable, treating with extraordinary delicacy the cultural, familial, and gender conflicts so central to the collection. Appropriately, the story concerns origins: not only birth, and not only Nick's untimely initiation into an adult world of blood and death, but the origins of a bitter racial conflict between Native and white American. The first scene of the story opens on what we soon know to be a doctor's humanitarian mission: “At the lake shore there was another rowboat drawn up. The two Indians stood waiting” (16). Yet immediately it presents an archetypal moment of a different sort. Boats beached, Indians waiting, whites debarking: the scene of whites arriving in the New World or encountering tribes within the New World is strong in cultural memories, pictured over the centuries in scores of illustrations and books. The similarities continue, for the narrative reenacts a subsequent history of dispossession, annexation, betrayal, and death. To the doctor and Uncle George, the mercy mission affords the opportunity for revisiting a form of Manifest Destiny upon the Indian camp. They play the role of the Great White Father, bringing to birth a child/nation supposedly deficient in civilized attributes. Uncle George even “gave both the Indians cigars,” thus usurping the role traditionally accorded the father in Anglo-American culture as well as iterating a long history of territories purchased by means of trinkets and other cheap gifts. Still more effectively, as the doctor deploys his medical expertise in the cabin he implies by contrast the Native Americans' ignorance of hygiene and medical procedure. His actions and words suggest their general cultural incompetence—a reading supported by the feeling of distanced superiority he shows (or at least affects) when the woman screams: “her screams are not important. I don't hear them because they are not important.” What is important, apparently, is to preserve the history of this cultural and racial domination, for the doctor proceeds to sketch out the narrative he wishes to write: “That's one for the medical journal, George. … Doing a Caesarian with a jack-knife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders.”

Though recurring images of doorways link the cabin metaphorically to the womb, the entrance of Nick's father quickly transforms womb-space into a masculine arena and associates the baby's struggles to be born with other barely repressed racial and social conflicts. In particular, “Indian Camp” concerns a struggle for masculine authority, which Nick's father tries to master by directing the visual dynamics of a space transformed from shanty/womb to operating theater. That shift in the metaphoric meaning of the cabin-space keys a series of cultural and sexual overthrows in which male midwives (three whites and three Indians) supplant the traditional roles of the “old women” (16) of the camp and in which the white doctor supplants the cultural and parental authority of the Indian father. According to the narrative, the three white characters transgress what has traditionally been an intimate female space. The doctor has been called only after customary procedures of birth, which tacitly preclude the presence of men, fail: “She had been trying to have her baby for two days. All the old women in the camp had been helping her.”

While this situation allows the doctor to demonstrate his skill, it seems to have degraded the Indian father, who has had to share his wife's experience of giving birth. After all, the “men” (not the “other men”) of the camp have “moved off up the road to sit in the dark and smoke out of range of the noise she made.” In a futile attempt to follow the appropriate masculine role, the Indian father is also smoking and will soon bury his head in blankets to summon his own darkness. Indeed, the Indian father's cultural role has been jeopardized in several ways. He cannot “father” the child in the sense of bringing it to life and consciousness, and he has lost control of his own space (the cabin). In each case, the white doctor—the “great man,” as Uncle George somewhat sarcastically labels Nick's father—symbolically usurps the Indian father's role. Even the father's posture (he lies in the other bunk with a cut that prefigures his wife's) physically aligns him with his wife. The father's presence is thus doubly problematic: helpless to escape, he symbolically occupies a female role while prevented by his sex from trying to help. The doctor, on his part, not only transgresses an age-old custom (and possesses a knowledge of the woman's sexuality previously appropriate only to the husband and the “old women”), but gives rise to the suspicion that the old customs are no longer valid and powerful anyway.

Already displaced from the authority of the other men's positions “off up the road,” the Indian father bears unwilling witness while the white doctor dramatizes his superior medical skills. Critics have defended Nick's father on the basis of his pragmatic handling of the operation, but the real point is that he constantly dramatizes his pragmatism, especially before the eyes of his son, whom he insistently invites to watch: “You see, Nick, babies are supposed to be born head first,” “See, it's a boy,” “You can watch this or not, Nick.” The doctor plays out a fantasy of being both director and star actor in his own operating theater. His expert perception and appraisal of the medical situation calls for an audience to appraise him, and his several attempts to explain and show the mysteries of birth to his son suggest less a detached interest in Nick's education than a desire to educate Nick's perception of him. Indeed, as the operation progresses the doctor's sense of his potential audiences becomes more expansive, including not only George to whom he boasts about his accomplishments, and not only the Indian father whose attention he tries to attract, but an imagined audience of his peers in some future medical journal.

Attending to the complex play of gazes in the story tells us much about relationships of power. It reveals, for instance, interesting (but oddly skewed) analogies between the paired set of fathers and sons—for the newborn child is also a boy. The Indian father who, according to Nick's father, “couldn't stand things” (19), hides his face by rolling over against the wall. And it is Nick whose actions correspond: “He was looking away so as not to see what his father was doing”; “Nick did not watch” (17). Deprived of fatherhood and manhood, the Indian father plays the inappropriate role of son to the usurping white father. The relationship between Nick and his father thus represents and articulates the unvoiced relationship between the doctor and the Indian father. The doctor revels in emphasizing the inequality of that relationship by pressuring Nick to accept his authority. When Nick answers “I know” to the revelation that “This lady is going to have a baby, Nick,” for instance, his father replies: “You don't know. … Listen to me.” Later, the doctor refers to the details of the operation (“You can watch this or not, Nick, just as you like”; “There. That gets it”) in direct proportion to Nick's unwillingness to watch. The doctor insists on his son's failure to watch rather than his putative freedom (“just as you like”). He is not inviting him to undergo a bloody initiation into a frightening adult world so much as reminding Nick (and, as a corollary, the Indian father) of the toughness and ability to “face” the adult world that the boy clearly lacks.

At other times, however, the doctor loses his grasp on the play of glances that hitherto he commanded with ease. Though the Indian father actively shuns the audience that could witness his degradation—his vision is blocked by the wall he rolls over against and the blanket that covers his head—his self-willed blindness has complex consequences. The refusal to be seen signifies his humiliation, but it also frees him from watching the doctor's performance. The doctor's subsequent move, as he “mounted on the edge of the lower bunk with the lamp in one hand and looked in” at the dead man, demonstrates the paradoxical efficacy of the suicide. The doctor's action, which suggests an attempt to force the “proud father” to acknowledge the doctor's pride in his own skill (and perhaps in the enlightened, civilizing influence he seems to feel he represents) suddenly forces him into the role of observer. Even more telling, his action switches Nick's attention from one proud father to the other: Nick “had a good view of the upper bunk when his father, the lamp in one hand, tipped the Indian's head back.” From Nick's point of view, his father has become lamp-bearer to illuminate the Indian father's final self-dramatization. (We might note that on the doctor's arrival, the role of watcher and lamp-bearer was played by an “old woman”). Though the tableau is nothing more than a symbolic victory for the Indian father, the doctor does quickly lose his “post-operative exhilaration.”

The characters in “Indian Camp,” in other words, play several roles in succession or even simultaneously as the nature of their performance and the function of the audience changes. The rapid transformation of roles in the cabin (the doctor becoming the “great man” and surrogate father to the Indian child, the Indian father becoming, as it were, both son and wife) suggests the friable, temporary, and constructed nature of masculine (and feminine) roles. Doubled characters merely emphasize this malleability of role. Though the two fathers might suggest an identity of authority and role, the fact that they possess very different standings in the play of glances that construct meaning and authority in the cabin demonstrates that paternal authority, at least, is not contingent merely on being a father. Nor can we distinguish forms of paternal authority on the basis of racial difference, for even in “Indian Camp” the doctor's authority is not absolute. It grows—and diminishes—with his precarious ability to play to an audience. Authority, it seems, is not vested in the man but in the man's role; and the role depends on how easily external factors (such as race, culture, class, medical expertise, and so on) can be brought to bear on a particular situation.

The next story in In Our Time, “The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife,” underscores this point by replaying the drama of power and humiliation contained in “Indian Camp” while reversing the earlier story's dramatic structure: three Native Americans are invited into the doctor's garden, and this time it is the doctor's authority that suffers. The doctor's garden, cleared from the surrounding forest and fenced in (as the presence of gates attests), becomes a highly charged symbolic space in which the doctor and the three Indians enact a drama of great significance for their authority as men. Like “Indian Camp,” this story describes the wielding of personal power against a backdrop of cultural conflict. The quarrel over the stolen logs, to begin with, disguises the fact that the garden (like the logs) has been expropriated from the Native Americans in the first place. The mark of the scaler's hammer in the log shows that it belongs to “White” and McNally, which gives rise to a double irony: the mark exposes the historic truth of Boulton's remark that “You know they're stolen as well as I do,” in the sense that White has stolen from the Indian, but the immorality of the act comes home to the doctor only in the idea of a white stealing from White. In “Indian Camp,” the doctor relied on superior technology to support a symbolic appropriation of the cabin-space. In “Doctor's Wife,” with the fact of appropriation suddenly evident, the moral superiority of white culture is shown to be a mere covering for an aggressive exploitation of natural resources. Tellingly, Boulton's first action with the log is to have the obscuring dirt cleaned off: “Wash it off. Clean off the sand. … I want to see who it belongs to” (24).

These moral conflicts key the cultural and racial power plays with which this story is concerned. Playing star surgeon in “Indian Camp,” the doctor transformed the Indian's camp into a metaphoric arena; Boulton, conversely, threatens to turn the doctor's garden into a real arena (a boxing ring) that will display physical strength rather than scientific know-how. Appropriately, Hemingway emphasizes the play of glances between audience and the (potential) protagonists: “Dick Boulton looked at the doctor,” Eddy and Billy Tabeshaw “looked at the doctor,” they “could see from his back how angry he was,” they “all watched him walk up the hill and go inside the cottage.” Although the doctor tries to reciprocate in kind (he “looked at Dick Boulton”), he sees only Boulton's conviction of superiority: “He knew how big a man he was.” The paradoxical nature of evaluatory watching is evident here, for whereas an audience empowered the doctor in the Indian's cabin, here it lays bare his inadequacy. Shamed by his ignominious retreat, the doctor withdraws (like the Indian father in “Indian Camp”) from the gaze of spectators, leaving the garden/ring in their possession. Doubles once more abound, this time across the boundaries of individual stories. The doctor now reprises the role of the humiliated Indian father while Boulton, playing the doctor's part, appropriates the garden for a drama of his own devising, in which he has convincingly upstaged the doctor and dispossessed him of his manhood.

Back in the cottage, the doctor pumps shells in and out of his shotgun in a masturbatory attempt to regain his lost confidence in his manhood—first to prove that he is a “man” and, second, to demonstrate his access to the cultural and technological prowess that “won the West” for white settlers. Having put away the gun, however, the doctor's humiliations continue. Sent on an errand by his wife to find Nick, he must first apologize for slamming the screen door, unlike Dick Boulton, who deliberately leaves open the gate into the woods. But the errand does give him the opportunity to reprise the father-son relationship played so powerfully at the end of “Indian Camp.” Nick's “I want to go with you” (27) allows his father to reassert an authoritative role (“His father looked down at him”) in a way that is reminiscent of “Indian Camp”: the son sitting in the stern of the boat, his father authoritatively rowing. But the likeness is only superficial. The doctor's escape into the woods merely points up his inability to confront his wife directly. Moreover, the impetus for their retreat comes from Nick, who “know[s] where there's black squirrels.” Having lost the authority he possessed while rowing and steering the boat, and having forfeited the privileged knowledge he tried to impart to Nick in the cabin and boat, the doctor follows the leader into the woods his child knows better than he.

At the end of the first section of the Nick Adams stories, “The Battler,” which features an avatar of Nick's father in Ad Francis, links together many of the functions of the symbolic arena registered so far and suggests new perspectives on the role of men within it. Bugs and Ad Francis's camp directly recalls “Indian Camp” (and “The End of Something”) and the transgressions enacted there. Once again, “The Battler” evokes disputed territories, threats of humiliation, and symbolic evictions. “Who the hell asked you to butt in here?” (59) asks Ad Francis, a question the brakeman who knocks Nick off the train might also have asked. Like Dick Boulton, both Francis and the brakeman wish to transform enclosed spaces into symbolic arenas—in this case boxing rings—in which men compete to demonstrate their manhood. Nick's poor performance on the train (the “lousy kid thing to have done”) inspires only a new devotion to self-dramatization and to that correlation between evaluatory watching and male identity. Touching his black eye, Nick, rather mysteriously, “wished he could see it,” and then apparently tries to see his reflection: “Could not see it looking into the water, though” (53). While berating himself for his immaturity, he nonetheless prizes the black eye as one sign of his initiation into manhood: “That was all he had gotten out of it. Cheap at the price.” In lieu of the hollering crowd at the bullfight in Chapter IX, Nick, another “kid,” tries to become the audience to the spectacle of his own maturation. Self-display puts him in mind of what he must remember not to do again.

The ensuing scene bears out that correspondence between manhood and performance. Nick enters the firelit clearing to find Francis using him as audience to Francis's exhibition of toughness. Francis constantly refers to the importance of visible wounds as an index of toughness, acknowledging, for instance, Nick's black eye with his first words (“Where did you get the shiner?”) before going on to dramatize his own battered face: “Look here!” and “Ever see one like that?” The echoes of the doctor's comments to Nick in “Indian Camp” are telling, for both insistently draw attention to the iconography of their professions. The doctor's surgical skill warranted the attention of the other “midwives”; and Francis's “pan,” manifesting his performances in the ring, signifies his indomitable courage to a fellow battler: “I could take it,” “They couldn't hurt me.” That delight in displaying his battered face provides a key to his behavior during the rest of the story. For his failure to get Nick's knife destroys his self-image, carefully maintained before the younger man, of the heroic prizefighter. Consequently, like the doctor who is transformed from medical marvel to lamp-bearer in “Indian Camp,” Francis becomes the frustrated but passive observer: “The little white man looked at Nick,” “He was looking at Nick” (repeated twice), “Ad kept on looking at Nick,” “He glared at Nick.” Such manic staring suggests Francis's humiliation; it also suggests the root of his humiliation. For Francis, more than anyone else in the Nick Adams stories, has been battered in the public eye: first in the ring, where he “took too many beatings,” and then in the papers, because his wife “Looked enough like him to be twins.” Like the matador who admits “I am not really a good bull fighter” (95), Francis's shame has grown because of the crowds that witness it. His compensatory solution in the clearing is to recall the scene of his most successful dramatizations of physical prowess: the boxing ring. Thus he does not swing wildly at Nick but adopts the stance of the trained boxer, stepping “flat-footed forward.” But the battler's attempt at self-dramatization merely parodies his earlier ability to dominate arenas as he falls unconscious in the most dishonorable way possible—being hit from behind.

It is tempting to read Ad Francis in terms of the archetypally beaten but undaunted Hemingway hero, avatar of Nick Adams himself. Nick, as Bugs says, has “got a lot coming to him,” and the ensuing vignette describing Nick's wounding connects him to the beatings suffered by Ad Francis. Each acts, indeed, as if the presence of marks somehow constituted proud manliness. Francis's mutilated face signifies “I could take it,” while Nick's black eye connotes for him a transition from the acts of a “lousy kid” to a new maturity: “They would never suck him in that way again.” But Hemingway confronts quite different dilemmas about masculine identity in “The Battler.” Nick knows Francis “by name as a former champion fighter,” and the narrator, at the moment when Nick refuses him the knife, calls him the “prizefighter”; Francis, it seems, has become commensurate with his role, named and remembered by and through performances enacted for others and identifying himself with a set of remembered movements. Yet identity suffers when performance no longer serves. Clubbed by Bugs in an ugly parody of a boxing match, he fails to perform the expected role and falls unconscious—indicative, perhaps, of his profound absence of self. Moreover, the story reveals the inadequacy or even inappropriateness of masculine codes of conduct that issue in Francis's confused, self-destructive courage and Nick's wavering command over his conduct. In his first conversation with Francis, for instance, Nick first admits his lack of inner resilience, denying that he is “a tough one,” then attempts to fall back on the aggressive role that Francis expects of him and that Nick deems appropriate to the situation: “You got to be tough.” In fact neither Francis nor Nick carries off the role of tough fighter: Nick is identified as a “kid,” while Francis ends with his face looking “childish” in repose. Though both Nick and Francis carry the signs of beatings, each errs in interpreting the visible marks as signifying toughness. As the next chapter shows, Nick will again be “sucked in” and still more severely wounded, while for Bugs Francis's mutilated face merely suggests the unheroic possibility that he “took too many beatings.”

Interestingly, critics persuaded by the wounded hero hypothesis read a character's marks in the heroic spirit of Nick and Francis, who are convinced that they “could take it,” rather than as a sign of foolishness. Philip Young, most obviously, constructs his compelling and influential account of Hemingway's work by universalizing the wound that Nick receives in the war. The “culminating blow in the spine,” Young writes, is “symbol and climax for a process that has been going on since we first met Nick.” It represents the psychic and physical wounds Nick has experienced and will undergo, as well as the wounds suffered by other characters, such as Jake Barnes and Colonel Cantwell. Though the wound is an “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual dis-grace,” it is nonetheless responsible for the masculine codes of discipline and restraint that for Young characterize Hemingway's adult male.³ Nick in “Big Two-Hearted River,” as Young is careful to point out, is a man rather than a boy, damaged, to be sure, but still a “man who knows his way around.”⁴ Experiences like the caesarean in “Indian Camp” and his “shiner” in “The Battler” do not imply Nick's boyhood so much as an emerging manhood; receiving the wound from which all other wounds derive meaning constellates diverse experiences into a pattern that now seems to have been present all along. The overarching trajectory of a journey to manhood now appears as the hidden meaning and value of each one of those early encounters. Put differently, we understand the hollowness of boyhood experiences by figuring back from whatever value—discipline, courage, holding tight, suffering wounds, enduring pain—is held to characterize a man. The outcome is threefold. First, boyish actions are not understood as problematic in their own right but only insofar as they fail to measure up to actions performed by a man; masculine codes themselves are not recognized as the problem boys must face. Second, a man's problems are inflicted upon him from outside sources (epitomized by the bullet that hits Nick's spine) rather than from the codes that seem to sustain him. Third, manhood emerges as a stable and solid quality, capable of being encoded and employed in many different situations.

A story like “The Battler” and other stories of the young Nick Adams, however, give little cause for certainty on any of these points. “The Three-Day Blow,” in which we find Nick pondering the wisdom of breaking up with Marjorie, demonstrates Hemingway's acute insights into the early travails of manhood-fashioning. The story portrays with a kind of relish the spartan but comfortable appurtenances of a world without women, where Nick and Bill drink, talk about sport, hunting, fishing, writing, and women, and shape a masculine paradise familiar from dozens of boys' stories of adventure. According to Leslie Fiedler's classic Love and Death in the American Novel (1959), such scenes are also familiar as the primal material of American literature in books where the male protagonist must leave behind society and the women who embody it in order to achieve freedom and self-determination. As a consequence, male characters in American literature remain boys, forever seeking a pristine boyhood paradise free of the responsibility of adult, heterosexual relationships. “Once a man's married he's absolutely bitched,” Bill states in succinct praise of Nick's breaking off “that Marge business”; with Marge around, in fact, “we wouldn't even be going fishing tomorrow” (46-47). Despite Nick's ambivalent feelings about renewing a relationship with Marjorie, the story provides evidence of the adolescent, tough posturing of which his detractors accuse Hemingway, and which, not surprisingly, has been interpreted by many feminist writers as signifying a deep-rooted hostility toward women.

There is much to recommend Fiedler's account and other critiques of Hemingway's stories insofar as they accurately describe the codes that govern Nick and Bill's behavior and conversation. But the story explores the socially constructed nature of those codes and exposes their contradictions rather than representing them as the standards to which Nick and Bill should aspire. Both Nick and Bill, for instance, resist a world of consequences, though for crucially different reasons. For Bill, the consequences of marriage are destructive and should thus be avoided, an act that leaves a man free while symbolically asserting the power of masculine agency and volition. For Nick, picking up Bill's hint that he “might get back into it again,” the consequences of the breakup appear suddenly reversible. “There was not anything,” according to Nick, “that was irrevocable.” But Nick himself has just given an example of something that is: “All of a sudden everything was over. … I couldn't help it. Just like when the three-day blows come now and rip all the leaves off the trees” (47-48). Nick here might simply be in the maudlin stages of incipient drunkenness, but his image conforms more closely than the boys' fantasies of volitional action to the world of inescapable contingencies that Hemingway depicts. The three-day blows occur in fall for a predictable length of time; they are irrevocable and consequential. They mean that it is “getting too late to go around without socks” (40) and that the “birds will lie right down in the grass with this” (49). And they inevitably limit action, for, as Bill proclaims at the end, “You can't shoot in this wind.”

Unable to shoot, the two nevertheless carry their guns when setting off to find Bill's father, determined, in spite of the storm, to conform to a masculine code of potent action. Like the shotgun in “The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife,” the guns are useless, but are powerful reminders of the (phallic) masculine authority Nick and Bill hope to inherit. The guns signify not an intention to kill but a desired form of conduct. In what has come to seem the archetypal Hemingwayesque gesture of grace under pressure, Nick and Bill value their ostensible goal less than the process of trying to achieve it. Indeed, the entire story concerns process of behavior: how to drink, how to use practical symbols in a narrative, how to love women, and even, as the intoxicated Nick struggles in with a beech log, how to pick up spilled apricots: “He laid the log down and picked up the pan. It had contained dried apricots, soaking in water. He carefully picked up all the apricots off the floor, some of them had gone under the stove, and put them back in the pan. He dipped some more water onto them from the pail by the table. He felt quite proud of himself. He had been thoroughly practical” (44-45). Nick sets the spilled apricots to rights using the kind of ritual thoroughnesss and care that seems more pertinent to the Villalta bullfighting vignette and to “Big Two-Hearted River.” But his drunken lucidity (which even includes a wonderfully slurred run-on sentence in “picked up all the apricots off the floor, some of them had gone under the stove”) imparts an unsettlingly comic feel to these scenes of heroic action. Similarly, Nick and Bill attempt to abide by paternal codes and prohibitions even when they are blatantly ludicrous. Bill, for instance, says with regard to whisky that there is “plenty more but dad only likes me to drink what's open,” because he “says opening bottles is what makes drunkards.” If opening bottles really made drunkards, of course, Bill should never open another bottle. Nick, on the other hand, had thought that it was “solitary drinking that made drunkards,” a difference of opinion that is quietly suppressed in their quest for cohesive standards of conduct. For Nick and Bill, the point is not to question the appropriateness of the injunction but to internalize the appropriateness of making codes. The story persuades us that Hemingway's intent might be parodic rather than celebratory. Nick and Bill naively and unsuccessfully try to imitate the codes of true manhood; but because those codes appear to govern even the most inappropriate and trivial situation, they testify to their own limitations.

The problematic nature of those codes becomes particularly evident in stories like “The End of Something” and “Cat in the Rain,” in which masculine roles are subtly inhabited by women. In “The End of Something,” for instance, we might read Nick's taciturn treatment of Marjorie as setting the scene for the ensuing display of precise professionalism and careful mastery of emotion that, to many, characterize the manly conduct of Hemingway's heroes. As fishing expert, moreover, Nick holds the upper hand in the play of glances that, once more, transforms this camp into an arena. At one point Nick appraises her work (“Nick looked at her fish”) and advises: “You don't want to take the ventral fin out.” So proficient is he that we may miss Hemingway's provocative critique of Nick's fumbling attempts to perform an adult masculine role. For Nick's treatment of her arises out of the threat of being out-performed. Marjorie proves every bit as adept as Nick, rowing while “holding the line in her teeth” at one point, smartly “row[ing] up the point a little way so she would not disturb the line,” then driving the boat powerfully “way up the beach.” As Nick finally admits, Marjorie is less an apprentice than an equal: “You know everything. That's the trouble. You know you do. … I've taught you everything. You know you do. What don't you know, anyway?” (32-34).

The fact that Marjorie can match Nick's expertise, experience, and toughness threatens him precisely because the acquisition of such attributes has traditionally been the prerogative of a male. As a consequence, “The End of Something” subverts the “heroic” qualities usually identified in Hemingway's male characters. In particular, the story reveals Nick's heroic pose of cool detachment to be contingent not on his authority but on a double fear of humiliation. First, Marjorie vies with Nick to possess the role he attempts to make his own. Though Philip Young makes some intriguing connections between Nick Adams and Huckleberry Finn (both are “masculine and solitary and out-of-doors … and fond of … hunting and fishing”), it is Marjorie who in this story exhibits the panache and strength of a Huck Finn.⁵ Second, and perhaps more worrying, Marjorie demonstrates that these manly characteristics do not automatically accrue to any male. To be male is not the same as being a man, but what is a man if Marjorie can possess all the requisite attributes? One might argue that Nick in adolescent fashion is only aping the characteristics that will define the true Hemingway hero. The example of Marjorie, however, suggests the opposite: that there is something deeply problematic about the way masculine codes of behavior initiate boys into manhood.

If the model of Huck Finn reconfigures our easy expectations about roles appropriate to Nick and Marjorie, the woman in “Cat in the Rain” brings to our attention the potentially malleable nature of role-playing itself. The two Americans stopping at the unnamed hotel of an unnamed Italian seaside resort “did not know any of the people” (91) at the hotel and are themselves not known. Tourists without tourism, the Americans are stripped of everything but the most rudimentary roles. George spends the story reading, his wife wishing for whatever she does not have. The narrator, moreover, constantly identifies them in the simplest and most generic way, labeling the woman “the American wife,” “the wife,” and then “the American girl,” while designating to George the position of “her husband” and then, even more indifferently, “The husband” (91-92). Tellingly, when going downstairs the American wife thinks of the padrone first as the “hotel owner” and then “hotel-keeper”; the maid, whose umbrage at the American wife's speaking English hints at depths of character never revealed in the story, remains “the maid.”

These epithets hint at a cultural baggage of stereotypical roles that circumscribe the characters' lives yet are not adequate to the task of expressing their deepest desires and fears. This is particularly true of the “American wife,” whose barely conscious feelings of entrapment and yearnings for powerful models of behavior make her one of Hemingway's most sensitive portraits of a female character. That portrait is nowhere more profound than in the rich metaphoric relationship the narrative draws between the woman and the cat. Initially the cat, which is “crouched under one of the dripping green tables … trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on,” represents the woman's own claustrophobia in the hotel room, where she stands at the window looking out. While the cat wishes only to escape the rain, however, the woman wants to break through the protective shelters that confine her. Her mission to rescue the cat reveals a fantasy of escape into the rain. Yet, ambivalently, she wishes to rescue the cat by securing it more completely within her hotel room. After her abortive venture into the rain, in fact, the fantasy she weaves around the cat suggests a longing for a traditionally feminine and maternal role: “I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel. … I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her.” The “kitty” substitutes for what she lacks: perhaps the lack of a child and certainly the complete lack of emotional and physical contact from George. The maternal woman/“kitty” relationship thus doubles for the (conventionally) romantic one between the male lover and female object of affection. The latter roles both depend on George's ability or willingness to restore a conventional paternalism.

The point, however, is not that Hemingway maneuvers the woman back into the position of “American wife,” but that none of her fantasies affords her a stable and sustaining role. Her predicament is evident in her relationship to the padrone of the hotel, which recalls and extends the tense cultural engagements of the early stories. To begin with, the wife liked the hotel keeper. She “liked the deadly serious way he received any complaints. She liked his dignity. She liked the way he wanted to serve her.” After her mission to find the cat, however, the woman's reaction is more complex: “As the American girl passed the office, the padrone bowed from his desk. Something felt very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small and at the same time really important. She had a momentary feeling of being of supreme importance” (93). The servant-to-queen relationship augments the woman's sense of superiority as a wealthy American tourist. Even more ironically, the padrone assumes the conventionally romantic gestures of the lover, bowing to the woman, catering to her every whim, and finally offering her the gift (the cat) she wanted most of all. George instructs her “Don't get wet” (92) and halfheartedly offers to retrieve the cat, but it is the padrone who actually causes the woman to be sheltered and the cat to be found. By quietly anticipating and performing every action for her, however, the padrone also ensures that her experience will remain vicarious. As surrogate lover/father, he merely confirms the uselessness of her existence. Feeling “very small,” the American girl thus becomes child to the protective father and realizes her “supreme importance” only within his strict limits. The conclusion to the story, in which the woman receives her heart's desire, is thus a brilliantly parodic fairy-tale ending. “I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can't have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat,” complains the woman, only to have a cat miraculously delivered. But with her articulated wants so comprehensively assuaged and her fantasies made real, the ill-defined and chaotic yearnings that the cat symbolizes remain unfulfilled. And worse: by getting exactly what she said she wanted, the woman loses the means for expressing metaphorically the true extent of her predicament. The problem the story poses, then, is not that George fails to measure up to the woman's romantic fantasy of being treated like a princess but that such culturally sanctioned roles are themselves not generative or appropriate to her desires. We see this most clearly when, by playing dutiful hero to the woman's fantasy of being rescued, the padrone causes her fantasy of heroic rescue to succeed.

The mock fairy-tale ending brings to ironic closure the story's dynamic of displacement and substitution most clearly figured in the relationship between woman and cat. Expatriated from their own country, prevented by the rain from being tourists, and, it appears, alienated from each other, the American tourists seem lost in a freeplay of substitutive elements. Linguistically, this dynamic is signaled by the sliding of “cat” into “kitty” and the frequent displacement of one language for another: “brutto tempo. It's very bad weather,” and the conversational sequence that goes “A cat?” “Si, il gatto.” “A cat?” But other forms of substitution pervade the story. The woman's longing for the cat, as many interpretations have pointed out, may represent a baby or perhaps, as Carlos Baker has it, “comfortable bourgeois domesticity.”⁶ Her desire for long hair substitutes for an emotional attachment to her husband; the padrone substitutes for her husband; the maid, sent by the hotel-keeper to protect her from the rain, symbolically enacts his role, while replacing the woman's yearning for escape with an umbrella-protected charade; and the woman's gazing into the rain represents a stifled desire for action.

Enmeshed in a play of substitutions, the woman struggles to express authentic and original desires as if to bring to an end the bewildering freeplay of sliding roles. In one of the key substitutions of the story, the woman wishes to discard the sense of boyishness and immaturity associated with short hair and grow the long hair that signifies womanhood. The fantasy that long hair grants access to true womanhood seems to reveal to her the truth about her frustration, which can now be explained away as having short hair, “looking like a boy,” and thus acting out an inappropriate role. The authenticity of long hair suggests that she is only metaphorically female—a substitute for a true, long-haired, and womanly self. This substitution has the power to end the play of substitutions as the woman imaginatively dons the authentic sign of womanhood, hitherto obscured by her illusions of grandeur and her perverse misinterpretation of appropriate gender roles. At this point one is tempted to read the story as a parable of expatriation in which traditional gender roles, imbued with meaningful, authentic, and regenerative codes of conduct, have yielded to inappropriate and inadequate replacements. Thus, we might argue, George, passively reading, reneges on a potent, masculine role while the “American girl” substitutes boyish fashion for her womanly prerogatives. Such unnatural pursuits condemn them, like many other characters in In Our Time (such as Krebs in “Soldier's Home” and the couple in “Out of Season”), to near-paralysis.

But “Cat in the Rain” does not imply that expatriation has divorced George and his wife from sustaining patterns of behavior. In fact, it is the traditional roles themselves that seem to force the American woman into a logic of displacement by inviting her to speak her frustration in a false language of authenticity. Though her fantasy of long hair posits a movement from metaphor (looking like a boy) to the real (being a long-haired woman), her actions imply the opposite. During her thorough survey of her face in the mirror, for instance, the woman merely engages culturally constructed types of femininity that place her squarely within the purview of objectifying gazes: “She studied her profile, first one side and then the other. Then she studied the back of her head and her neck.” Her conclusion, after asking George to observe her too, is that “I get so tired of looking like a boy.” But this traditionally narcissistic perusal of her own beauty, culminating in a claim on the “feminine” prerogative of long hair, places her as a center of attention emptied of true authority. Her attempt to command center stage merely entangles her in culturally sanctioned images; a potential power over the gaze becomes submission to the way women and men are supposed to look. Tellingly, her next action is to direct her gaze outwards—a gaze that, though empty in terms of specific motivation, suggests her yearnings for potent observation: “She laid the mirror down on the dresser and went over to the window and looked out.”

The woman, then, can only study her reflection and invite George's gaze within a theater of culturally approved appearances that is by definition out of her control; her only mode of expressing authenticity is to draw attention to a cult of beautiful womanhood whose limitations are evident in her ambivalent response to the padrone and in George's waning interest in her looks. The woman is most displaced from her amorphous desires for liberation when most assiduously performing the role expected of a woman. (Tellingly, she wants to make of that long hair a “big knot.”) Indeed, the mock fairy-tale ending wholly deflates the victory of the authentic over the metaphoric, for the arrival of the authentic and actual in the shape of the cat effectively brings to an end the frustrating but revealing course of the woman's metaphoric expression of her predicament. Though the substitutive rhetoric of longing for the “kitty” obscures the true sources of her frustration, it at least allows a series of metaphoric reflections that keep alive her sense of frustration. Her dilemma, at least in part, is how to keep the freeplay of metaphor alive.

While the woman in “Cat in the Rain” and Marjorie play relatively minor parts in In Our Time, the import of their actions is crucial to an understanding of Hemingway's work. Their actions and longings combine traditionally male and female perspectives. Marjorie, expert on the water and more resilient than Nick, makes her own proud exit from the camp. The woman in “Cat in the Rain” wants to be rescued, but also to be the rescuer; she refuses to let her husband get the cat for her, preferring to experience the traditionally masculine role of self-liberation. The fact that the padrone circumvents the woman's fragile rebellion is perhaps less important than the fact of the rebellion, which reveals that women, like men, harbor urges toward heroic action. If so, this story, like “The End of Something,” urges the possibility that identity is culturally constructed rather than biologically ordained. The American wife's paralysis might be seen more fruitfully within a matrix of social repression rather than as her biological destiny. The characters of Marjorie and the American woman, moreover, inveigh against the tendency of many critics to construct a limited classification of female types. Roger Whitlow in Cassandra's Daughters (1984) rightly condemns the propensity to categorize Hemingway's female characters and argues that they are more complex than his most influential critics (of which Whitlow provides a long list) credit. Comley and Scholes's recent Hemingway's Genders suggest that Whitlow's argument has not been entirely persuasive. They argue that Hemingway “worked all his life with a relatively simple repertory of male and female figures, modifying and individuating them with minimalist economy,” a repertory that the title of Chapter 2 defines as “Mothers, Nurses, Bitches, Girls, and Devils.” For Comley and Scholes, whatever complexity Hemingway manages in his female characters arises from a kind of elaborate cutting and pasting: what makes Brett in The Sun Also Rises “interesting as a character,” for instance, is the way that “Hemingway has assigned her qualities from both sides of his gendered repertory of typical figures.”⁷

This neo-structuralist reading of Hemingway, which sees his narrative method as selecting and combining from a paradigm class of feminine elements, underestimates the full range and depth of Hemingway's female characters. Like all typologies of Hemingway's characters, each putative category assimilates and erases all idiosyncrasies and potential points of difference. And like all typologies, it assumes the presence of qualities (such as bitchiness or devilishness) with the force of ideal essences. On the other hand, Whitlow, who tends to read those characters simply as fully dimensional human beings (he wonders, for instance, how Marjorie felt about the breakup with Nick), misses the crucial importance of role-playing in Hemingway's narrative.⁸ To read the woman in “Cat in the Rain” as simply a woman misses the specific ways in which womanhood is constructed (and found wanting), in which the woman herself assigns others to certain roles, and in which the woman tentatively inhabits roles that American and Italian cultures place out of bounds. What makes her interesting as a character, to rephrase Comley and Scholes, is her experience of the simple repertory of female roles she is expected to play, yet cannot.

These rereadings of Marjorie and the American woman parlay into a much more thoroughgoing critique of roles and role-definitions in Hemingway's work. As we have seen, until recently the most influential thrust of Hemingway criticism construed his male characters in terms of their adherence to specific categories of male experience and behavior—the code hero and tutor being the most famous, though by no means the only ones. Delbert E. Wylder, for instance, though rightly disagreeing with the easy code hero/Hemingway hero thesis, simply goes on to construct a more elaborate classification in his Hemingway's Heroes (1969): we now have the sentimental hero of The Torrents of Spring and the tyrant hero of Across the River and into the Trees, among others. Whatever the many virtues of his analysis, Wylder must still ignore or assimilate potentially disruptive aspects of a character's behavior in the process of defining what typifies it. The example of Ad Francis in “The Battler” suggests how problematic such attempts are. It is not just that Francis's tough pose masks a deep fragility, but that the story questions whether one can distinguish his pose from his authentic self. Having knocked Francis unconscious, Bugs argues that “I have to do it to change him when he gets that way.” But does Francis change from “crazy” belligerence to the “normal” man whom Nick overhears saying “I got an awful headache, Bugs”? Or does he change from a normal state of craziness, attributable to his having sustained too many beatings, to a temporary state that is merely manageable? Since Francis “won't remember nothing of it” (60), there is a sense in which his personality is fundamentally incoherent; what defines him is not so much his craziness as the changes he undergoes, which, once forgotten, cannot be assimilated into a coherent sense of identity. Nick Adams, as the analogies between him and Ad Francis suggest, experiences similar changes as he shifts from “kid” to adult (“They would never suck him in that way again”) and from victim to “tough one.” We might even argue that Nick's famous statement in Chapter VI that he and Rinaldi are “Not patriots” has something of the force of “not patriots anymore,” and that his comment thus suggests that he has been sucked into patriotism by more pernicious lies. In that case he has indeed forgotten the lessons of “The Battler.”

What used to be one of the most problematic aspects of “The Battler”—its homoerotic underpinnings—is pertinent to this question of role-playing. The story, as Philip Young coyly states, “can have only one very probable interpretation,” which is that the “tender, motherly, male-nursing Bugs is too comfortable in the relationship with the little, demented ex-fighter” and that it is “not only Ad who is ‘queer.’” This all-male colloquy in the wilderness, replete with phallic imagery of knives and a cosh that had a “flexible handle and was limber in [Nick's] hand,” certainly supports Young's point. But his contention that the theme of homoeroticism is “normally used by Hemingway as it is used here—a kind of ultimate in evil” does the story, and indeed his own reading, a disservice.⁹ For if Bugs is gay, he is also, as Young points out, motherly; and lest this association between homoeroticism and mothering be construed as portraying Bugs as one more Bad Mother in In Our Time, we should also note that Bugs addresses Nick with the respectful “Mister Adams.” (It is Francis who addresses Nick as “kid” and “Nick.”) If anything, Bugs provides an important counter to the brakeman, who exemplifies lies and brutal “masculine” aggression. And if Francis is gay, his struggles to survive the many beatings he has endured potentially mark him as heroically masculine—if, for instance, we read back from Hemingway's aphorism in Death in the Afternoon that “you will find no man who is a man who will not bear some marks of past misfortune.”¹⁰ Moreover, Nick's interest in Bugs's cosh and the proliferating analogies between Francis and Nick would suggest that Nick himself is at least symbolically implicated in the story's rich homoerotic overtones. The story presents no necessary or logical contradiction between homoeroticism and masculinity—between, that is, a “transgressive” male sexuality and “normal” manly behavior.

The story does, however, suggest that “normal” behavior contains a carnivalesque diversity of potential, and ever-changing, roles; it permits Bugs to be motherly and an avatar of the brakeman (for Bugs not only coshes Francis but has been in jail for “cuttin' a man”). But it is not only that Young's “probable interpretation” can be stood on its head so that aspects of masculinity and motherhood can be read as entangled within the purview of homoeroticism. What is truly transgressive about the story is that it refuses to specify a fundamental social and sexual role for Bugs and Francis. Because “The Battler” omits any authoritative indication of the couple's homoeroticism, it permits a constant permutation of interpretive judgments. The story can be interpreted as justifying Young's point that Nick can or should learn to construct a more complete masculine identity out of his awareness of Francis's failures, so that, for instance, Nick carries away a sense that “You got to be tough”—though tempered with a sane contempt for empty violence and abnormal relationships. Equally, the story could be interpreted as suggesting Nick's fascination with the wide range of behavioral patterns liberated by the “abnormal.” Equally, we might argue that the story simply exhibits a wide range of behaviors, none of which should be judged either normal or abnormal. The point is that each of these potential interpretations (among many others) depends upon stabilizing one foundational element out of a play of possibilities. Once a foundation has been adduced, it rigorously governs subsequent readings. In Young's reading, for instance, the assumption that Nick encounters a brutally abnormal relationship between Francis and Bugs assimilates the concept of motherliness, which is similarly made suspect by virtue of its transgressive relationship to “normal” manliness. A man, that is, should not be a mother, though a queer male might be motherly. The possibility that Bugs could be a motherly man (whether queer or not) puts in doubt the very grounds of Young's assumption—though, by the same token, the story also puts in doubt the extent to which one could construe the presence of a motherly man into an affirmative view of homoeroticism.

My point is not to castigate Young for covert homophobia but to criticize the all too overt tendency in Young and most other scholars toward assuming the stability of Hemingway's concept of manhood. Actually, the constant displacements of role in narratives like “The Battler” and “Cat in the Rain” problematize the very idea of masculinity, and not simply because Nick is fascinated by limber blackjacks, Bugs shows propensities for mothering, and the woman in “Cat in the Rain” exhibits fantasies of heroic conduct. More profoundly, these stories consistently put in question available categories of judgment. Hemingway's genius is to place constant interpretive pressure on us to make decisions about actions and values appropriate to men or women—as when Dick Boulton thinks about “how big a man he was” or when the American tourist gets “tired of looking like a boy”—while asking us to recognize how hazardous is the task of negotiating definitions that are rarely specified in the text. Categorical definitions within these stories are finalized only at the risk of ignoring the logic of narrative decentering contained within their gestic structure. What seem to be fairly straightforward representations of masculine and feminine types—Francis enduring the beatings, the woman in “Cat in the Rain” wanting long hair and a kitty—turn out to be much more complex negotiations of roles and values. Some roles that scholars have considered to represent the heart of Hemingway's concept of manhood, such as the taciturn man dealing expertly with intransigent experience, are treated ironically. Other roles possessing cultural sanction, such as the woman wishing for long hair, are exposed as inadequate shams.

The signs that construct masculine and feminine roles, in fact, are constantly shown to be transient and subject to negotiation: the Doctor who dominates the operating theater of the cabin thus suffers humiliation in the arena of his own garden, just as Ad Francis's attempt to dominate the camp suddenly changes to the image of his body in “childish” repose. Masculinity and femininity are fundamentally metaphorical in the sense that they possess no categorical or absolute value. They demand negotiation, not only in the sense that audiences within narratives need to observe, judge, and interpret the value of a man's actions, but in the sense that readers, as I argued in the case of “The Short Happy Life,” must construe the significance of actions that simply do not speak for themselves. In judging whether Bugs is a motherly man, or a motherly gay (and therefore to Hemingway not a “man” at all?), or androgynous, or a sensitive (and thus “real”?) man, we become aware of our predilection for strong definitions of masculinity and femininity that the story, just as surely, puts in question.

Conventional assessments of Hemingway's work conclude that attaining manhood—as in the numinous moments when the “kid” becomes a man and when Villalta kills—promises to deliver the true meaning of a man's life. My reading of these stories suggests instead that meaning in Hemingway's work is always negotiable. His fiction concerns both the ways in which masculine and feminine roles are performed; and it foregrounds the ways in which readers perform definitions of masculinity and femininity. Reading “Cat in the Rain” in terms of the woman's attempts to dramatize herself amid the gazes of husband, padrone, maid, and mirror suggests something of the potential malleability of performed roles. At the same time, we should recognize that to argue that the woman in “Cat in the Rain” pursues “masculine” fantasies of rescue and self-liberation is as much a construction of the evidence as to argue that Bugs demonstrates “feminine” delicacies of tenderness and nurturing. It may be that Bugs's particular quality of tenderness should not be confused with mothering or that the American wife's “masculine” longing to break out of her room should not be equated with Nick's desire to separate from Marjorie. In each of these readings a conventional interpretation of “masculine” and “feminine” has been brought to bear from outside the story itself. The result would be the same, however, if we chose to define these terms more unconventionally—through, say, Hélène Cixous's notion of linear masculinity and oceanic femininity.¹¹ My point is that Hemingway's fiction forces us to try out various constructions of masculinity and femininity while recognizing that we are merely staging significations that have no eternal or absolute validity.

JAKE BARNES AND THE “HARD-EYED PEOPLE”: MANHOOD-FASHIONING IN THE SUN ALSO RISES

In In Our Time, Hemingway turns repeatedly to the arenas where, he suggests, men act out their dramas of power and shame. Some of these characters (such as Boulton and Villalta) demonstrate the authority accruing to the successful self-dramatist. More often, exposure to the watching crowd brings humiliation: in crucial scenes, characters like Ad Francis and Nick's father reach center stage only to display their inadequacy. Audiences may be disappointing, as Nick realizes in Chapter VI, but they do play a crucial part in the fashioning of manhood. They function as legitimating agents for men's images of themselves while problematizing the articulation of a secure and stable masculine identity. These narratives displace self, as it were, into seeing, and thus disrupt a monologic representation of masculinity by way of a theatrical experience that emphasizes the stage/arena, staged actions, watching audiences, and gestic role playing. Though Hemingway is primarily concerned with masculine identity, we have also seen that female characters like Marjorie and the American wife contribute to a more general sense that human identity rests precariously on the possibilities of role playing.

Jake Barnes, in The Sun Also Rises, shares with Nick Adams the displacement of self into seeing amid a landscape of theatricalized and carnivalized actions that are, if anything, more insistently woven into the narrative fabric than in In Our Time. Jake himself is primarily responsible, as many critics have pointed out, since his role as observer-participant dominates the novel's narrative trajectory, constantly drawing attention to the multiple acts of watching that shape his identity and that lead, ultimately, to his psychological travail in the arenas where men demonstrate their potency. This sense that Jake's watching embroils him with other characters in theatricalized arenas has, however, received little attention. Critics usually construe Jake's watching as a mode of detachment, though opinions vary as to whether detachment signifies a pure and objective disinterest or an unfortunate passivity. James T. Farrell noted that Jake's occupation as journalist “tends to develop the point of view of the spectator,” and others concur. Edwin Burgum claims that Jake is a “disinterested observer,” Carlos Baker that Jake is a “detached observer looking on at aimless revels which at once amused him and left him sick at heart.” As a variation on this theme, Benson argues that Jake is a “developing character whose awareness and commitment is shaky until the end of the novel” when he finds the “bitter detachment” that other critics posit as his defining characteristic. At this point, Jake “finally becomes his own man.” The main disagreement with this sense of Jake as the fatally or successfully detached observer has come from those who, like H. R. Stoneback, argue that Hemingway is “one of the great cartographers of the deus loci” and that Jake's role as an observer-figure at sacred places adds a mythic and transcendent resonance to his spectatorial abilities.¹²

Yet the most immediate impression of Jake's watching in The Sun Also Rises suggests neither detachment nor spirituality; his watching reads as a compensatory mechanism operating within an economy of lack. Early in the novel, Jake reports, “I looked at myself in the mirror of the big armoire beside the bed,” thinking “Of all the ways to be wounded” (30).¹³ The term “myself,” interestingly, signifies in contradictory ways. On the one hand, it represents a productive combination of body and the conscious gaze. Seeing is responsible for awareness of being, though there also seems to be an “I” that precedes the act of watching (“I looked”) that is reducible neither to the imaged body nor to the act of watching. On the other hand, because “myself” also refers metonymically to the genitals—the male equipment that (supposedly) establishes a masculine self—the term also represents an absence (either of penis, testicles, or both). In this sense, Jake sees nothing at all or not enough: an absence or a lack. He faces the conundrum of watching a self into being that is simultaneously revealed to be missing or lacking. He is simultaneously “myself” and “not-myself.”

What remains to his advantage, it seems, is the act of watching and being watched, which at once represents his loss/lack of physical completeness and sexual potency and compensates for it. The theatricality of watching “myself” at least allows him to represent a lost plenitude to himself, though it is by the same token a precarious and possibly inauthentic substitute for the whole self that equivocally appears when he looks into the mirror. Watching and being watched establishes selfhood; yet it establishes selfhood in terms of loss/lack. Not surprisingly, then, Jake demonstrates a vexed relationship to the acts of seeing that sustain and, it might be said, create him. Jake remarks early on that “I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends” (13). His impotence has transformed his friends' acts into theater and himself into director, a habit of voyeurism that appears to be at once a product of and compensation for his inability to participate in his own bedroom scenes. Similarly, his self-disgusted comment that “I liked to see [Mike] hurt Cohn” (148) suggests a burden of desire, anger, and guilt cathected onto the act of seeing.

The scene at the Irati River—which critics persist in reading as an edenic interlude between the hellish scenes at Paris and Pamplona—indicates further some of the complicated roots of Jake's voyeurism. Bill, producing his haul of four trout, lays them out on the grass and asks:

“How are yours?”

“Smaller.”

“Let's see them.”

“They're packed.”

“How big are they really?”

“They're all about the size of your smallest.”

(120)

In this conspicuously phallic show-and-tell, Jake refuses the competitive display that would mark his as “smaller.” His act of looking (at Bill's trout) doubles for the display he will not make; his assessment of the size of Bill's trout relative to his own covers for the assessment he will not allow Bill. A refusal to put his (Jake's) on display thus reconfigures the play of glances around an absence (the absent trout/phallus)—with the unforeseen consequence that this absence generates both the rich rhetorical play of the passage and its fascination with a dynamic interplay of probing, competing, and revealing glances. At the same time, Jake rather slyly reserves to himself the role of evaluation. Like the earlier scene where Jake watches himself in the mirror, this moment at the Irati River suggests the equivocal dynamic of watching and being watched: watching and evaluating grants Jake a measure of authority in scenes where men compete against and test each other, yet he forfeits the self-display that seemed so problematic when “I looked at myself” in the mirror, but which characterizes the confidence of Bill and Pedro Romero.

In still another sense, Jake's “rotten habit” corresponds to that passionate witnessing which is his aficion. They “saw that I had aficion” (132), claims Jake of Montoya's friends, as if aficion is a matter of seeing true rather than of interrogation. Several other characters comment on Jake's perceptiveness. Romero remarks: “I like it very much that you like my work. … But you haven't seen it yet. To-morrow, if I get a good bull, I will try and show it to you” (174). And when Jake advises Montoya (to the hotel keeper's pleasure) not to give Romero the invitation from the American ambassador, Montoya asks Jake three times to “look” (171-72) for him. Cast as the archetypal observer by other men who accept his evaluations of their endeavors, Jake has managed to transform observation itself into a kind of powerful witnessing—though the closing scenes at Pamplona will show how flimsy his authority truly is. Not surprisingly, after Jake assists Brett to seduce Romero Montoya responds to what he perceives as the American's betrayal of aficion by refusing the gaze that signifies a commonality and community of interest: Montoya “bowed” (209) upon meeting Jake and Brett on the stairs; on departure, the hotel keeper “did not come near us” (228).

Jake Barnes is thus much more than a recording eye or a detached observer occasionally implicated in the immoral conduct of his expatriate friends. My point, though, is not simply to characterize Jake's habit of watching as less disinterested and more of an activity than critics usually grant, but to show that he employs some of the functions of gazing within a theatrical representation of manhood. His status as spectator-participant underpins Hemingway's sense of manhood-fashioning as a performance carried out before an evaluating audience. Jake's acts of gazing—as opposed to Benson's account of Jake becoming “his own man” in “bitter detachment”—can never be separated from the structure of authority and humiliation that inform his (and others') gestures toward manhood. But it would be a mistake to construe Jake's dependence on watching as signifying his lack of manhood, as though his status of observer, perpetually cut off from the activities of real men, were the consequence of his genital injury. On the contrary: Jake, as odd as it sounds, exemplifies the condition of manhood. As the above example of Bill's flaunting of his trout suggests, and as Romero's bullfighting will demonstrate still more effectively, Jake is not alone in working within a visual economy of display and spectatorship. If his habit of observing places him in the important but apparently subsidiary role of passionate witness (aficionado), the novel also draws our attention to the general economy of lack, facing all men, within which observing and being observed become functional, and within which both imply lack. Jake watches others to compensate for his sexual impotency; but the need to be observed on the part of those in the novel who are not generally recognized to be in need of support (like Romero) testifies to a situation in which the male self is never felt to be complete, authentic, and independent.

Approved by the adoring crowd as well as by Jake's expert appraisal, Romero's victories in the bullring after the beating by Cohn are not only the narrative conclusion of Book II but the focus of Jake's own attempts to redeem his impotence. Jake perceives Romero's painful trial in the ring as a testing and affirmation of the matador's spirit—and perhaps, since Jake is another survivor of Cohn's assaults, as a vicarious affirmation of his own: “The fight with Cohn had not touched his spirit but his face had been smashed and his body hurt. He was wiping all that out now. Each thing that he did with this bull wiped that out a little cleaner” (219). Romero's process of recuperation, to Jake, depends upon a complex relationship between being watched and disavowing the watching audience (Brett in particular). For Sun, and for Hemingway's early work in general, interpretation of this passage is crucial: “Everything of which he [Romero] could control the locality he did in front of her all that afternoon. Never once did he look up. He made it stronger that way, and did it for himself, too, as well as for her. Because he did not look up to ask if it pleased he did it all for himself inside, and it strengthened him, and yet he did it for her, too. But he did not do it for her at any loss to himself. He gained by it all through the afternoon” (216). Jake's conundrum of profit and loss (if Romero did it “all” for himself, what could be left for Brett?) involves, once again, the matador's intimate relationship with his audience. Unlike Villalta in Chapter XII of In Our Time, who played self-consciously to the crowd, Romero “did not look up” and thus, according to Jake, “did it all for himself inside.” Even at the end of the fight, when the crowd raises him in triumph, this most reticent of actors tries to resist: “He did not want to be carried on people's shoulders” (221). Yet by defying the rules of performance in Hemingway's quintessential arena, Romero appears to Jake to increase the potency of his actions—a formulation that seems to justify scholarly accounts of his detached heroism and to contradict those many scenes in In Our Time and Sun where a man's prestige is seen to depend on the legitimating approval of an audience.

Most critics have concurred with Jake. Few characters in Hemingway seem to fit more exactly the profile of the tutor or code hero, whose governing feature, according to Earl Rovit, is his “self-containment” (39). Lawrence R. Broer speaks of the “self-contained Romero,” Mark Spilka agrees that Romero's “manhood is a thing independent of women,” and Allen Josephs has recently written in a similar vein that Romero is “an innocent.”¹⁴ Yet Romero's mode of asserting his manhood is far more self-consciously part of a “system of authority” (185) than Jake (like the critics) perceives: he performs as close to Brett as possible; he follows the wishes of the audience when, with the second bull, “the crowd made him go on” (219), and proceeds to give a complete exhibition of bullfighting. He also holds his posture as consciously as any actor: he “finished with a half-veronica that turned his back on the bull and came away toward the applause, his hand on his hip, his cape on his arm, and the bull watching his back going away” (217). In the bullfight, Romero dispenses with the audience only because the audience is there. He never once looks up, because the arena supplies an audience that looks down, celebrating his actions for him. At the dramatic climax of the fight, the presentation of the bull's ear to Brett takes on significance precisely because it happens before an audience. As Jake describes it, Romero “leaned up against the barrera and gave the ear to Brett. The crowd were all about him. Brett held down the cape.” The crowd here is not merely an element of the scene: it is “all about,” the element that creates a scene, converting the act of giving into a ceremony and transforming these actors into celebrities.

Romero, as the scene in the café with Brett and Jake shows, is an accomplished actor. During the conversation he “tipped his hat down over his eyes and changed the angle of his cigar and the expression of his face. … He had mimicked exactly the expression of Nacional” (186). The cigar itself is a kind of stage prop marking him as one of the “bull-fighters and bull-fight critics,” who are all smoking cigars, and that continues to invest him with authority when he joins Brett and Jake. Jake intimates that Romero continues smoking despite his “very nice manners,” for the cigar, as Jake observes, “went well with his face.” Though Brett at one point tells Jake “I can't look at him” (184), Romero (in a foreshadowing of his later performance in the bullring) is eager to display himself, quickly inviting Brett to “look” and “see [the] bulls in my hand.” In the next chapter, Mike's account of Cohn's beating of Romero (learnt secondhand from Brett) attests once more to Romero's prowess at self-display. Mike casts Cohn as the villain in a melodrama of humiliation—it is Cohn who wishes to create a “Damned touching scene” (201) in making Brett an honest woman, who cries, and who wants to shake hands with Romero in a lugubrious gesture of respect and reconciliation. But Romero—whose willingness to continue the battle with Cohn despite its one-sided nature has usually been taken to signify a code of indomitable courage—plays a crucial role in this “touching scene.” The struggle, after all, is enacted before the eyes of Brett (who later recounts it to Mike for yet another dramatization). Defeated by Cohn's superior technique, Romero can only gain face by prolonging his heroic resistance to the point where an outclassed boxing performance can be seen as a gesture of pride in the face of physical defeat, and where physical loss can be transformed into a theater of evaluatory watching. Romero's sole statement during his punishment (“So you won't hit me?”), which is intended to incite a resumption of the conflict, can therefore be read as an act of profound courage—in which, as Melvin Backman writes, the “hard male core of the young bullfighter could not be touched by Cohn's punches”—or a melodramatically conceived throwing down of the gauntlet to an equally theatrical rival.¹⁵ In this latter sense, Romero's work in the bullring should be seen not so much as a “wiping … out” (219) of the beating by Cohn than as a resumption of the code of display that the scene with Cohn and Brett exemplifies.

Considering the subtle but insistent theatricality of Romero's performances, the motives behind Jake's assertions that the matador does it “all for himself inside” become more complex than critics have generally recognized. Christian Messenger is not unusual in claiming that Romero “provides Jake Barnes with a hero whom Jake can learn from and appreciate by spectatorial comprehension of the sporting rite.”¹⁶ Yet Jake's role at the ringside is actually far more than that of spectator and student of Romero's expert work with the bull. Jake represses the element of theatricality in Romero's actions because of his own failure in crucial scenes to control the way he displays himself; a more complete characterization of Jake must include the dramas of humiliation in which he plays the leading role. The key scene in which he tacitly pimps for Brett in the café, which as we have already noted features Romero's successful self-dramatization, becomes even more of a theatrical event when we figure in Jake's role. His ambiguous brief from Brett is to “see me through this” (184), and Jake literally watches the relationship between Romero and Brett into being. If Brett, through embarrassment or nerves, cannot at first look at Romero (“I can't look at him”), Jake has no such compunction: observing that Romero is “nice to look at,” Jake proceeds to give a detailed description and then notes that “I saw he [Romero] was watching Brett.” Romero twice more “looked at her across the table” (186, 187)—glances that bracket Brett's study of his hand—before Jake leaves after Romero's “final look to ask if it were understood.” “It was,” Jake comments wryly, “understood all right.”

Many things are potentially understood in this exchange of glances between Romero and Jake. Though Jake acts as consultant to an incipient love affair, his actual role and authority is ambiguous. It is unclear, for instance, whether “it” refers to a contract fashioned between men—a kind of transfer of Brett from impotent watcher to potent matador—or to Jake's understanding of Brett's desires. In either case, the inquiring glance that Romero directs at Jake only bestows on him titular authority. Acting as mediator, translator, and consultant to the desires of others, Jake takes center stage only to discover his own humiliation. For his account of the evaluatory glances at the table have thus far obscured the presence of yet another audience to his actions. On leaving the café, Jake notes that the “hard-eyed people at the bull-fighter table watched me go” and comments dryly that it “was not pleasant.” Several things are not pleasant for Jake here: the sense that Romero has usurped him sexually, and the sense that he has betrayed his tough masculine role by pimping for Brett. Above all, it is not pleasant that his failures are played out before a crowd of aficionados who watch and judge him. The whole scene thus comprises a series of actions framed by diverse glances: Romero watches Brett for signs of attraction; Jake watches Romero's victorious campaign for Brett; and the aficionados watch the entire show. In this theater of seduction, the role of watcher constantly switches function. The hard-eyed aficionados' stares come as an unpleasant shock to Jake; his watching, in contrast, appears only as a function of Romero's need for an audience. Though in some ways Jake has powerfully shaped the scene in this theater-café by directing the liaison of Brett and Romero, he does not control the play of glances. By the end of the scene, he is effectively “looked down,” and looked down upon, by Romero and the aficionados.

Jake's appreciation of Romero's disdain for the crowd in the bullring takes on a richer significance in the context of his humiliating failure to dramatize himself successfully before the “hard-eyed people.” In the café, for the first time in the novel, Jake inadvertently steps into the part hitherto enacted by characters like Romero and Dick Boulton: a man dramatizing his manhood before other men (and, in this case, Brett). Every potent action of Romero's in the bullring thus recalls a double failure on Jake's part: he fails to perform a tough masculine role in the café and then betrays, before his co-aficionados, his compensatory ability to watch and evaluate the masculine behavior of another. Such betrayals inform Jake's fascination with Romero's performance in the bullring. Romero “did it all for himself inside,” but Jake does it for Brett; Romero scripts the killing of the bull, but Jake directs in accordance with Brett's script of seduction; Romero does not look up, disdaining the audience yet inviting applause, while Jake suffers the stares of the “hard-eyed people.” Jake's fascination with Romero's display and his corresponding desire to play down the importance of self-display both arise from his humiliating lack of mastery over his own performances.

This interpretation of Jake as an interested (and failed) participant in scenes of masculine display illuminates two more aspects of the final bullfight. First, it helps to account for the long passage on Belmonte. Another man who has a “crowd … actively against him” (214) and who proves to be a secret observer of Romero (“Belmonte watched Romero too, watched him always without seeming to”), Belmonte has similar motives to Jake: both men have suffered the contempt of the crowd, and both jealously watch Romero enact what they may never again possess. And Belmonte sketches a possible role for Jake. For Belmonte, at least according to Jake, is “utterly contemptuous and indifferent” to the crowd that scorns him and, in our last glimpse of him, able to ignore the evaluatory stares altogether: he “leaned on the barrera below us, his head on his arms, not seeing, not hearing anything, only going through his pain.” But Jake's answer is to attempt to return to the aficionado role he has forfeited, telling Brett to “Watch how” and comparing his knowledge of Romero's perfect handling of the visually impaired bull with that of the “Biarritz crowd,” who misread Romero's actions as cowardice and who prefer “Belmonte's imitation of himself or Marcial's imitation of Belmonte.” In contrast to Belmonte's indifference to the crowd, Jake searches for a way to resurrect the privilege of watching, and it is telling that as this lengthy scene unfolds the crowd plays an increasingly effective and even intrusive role. It showers Belmonte with “cushions and pieces of bread and vegetables,” “made a great row” when it “wanted the bull changed,” “made [Romero] go on” fighting his last bull, and is finally “all about him” and “all around him” during the concluding celebrations. If Romero's performances represent and recall all that Jake lacks, Jake's insistence on the role played by the crowd at the final bullfight at least serves to remind us of the crowd dynamics that structure Romero's own “system of authority.”

Watching Romero typifies Jake's role in The Sun Also Rises. But the key scenes where Pedro Romero performs before the eyes of Brett and Jake—exemplified by Romero's command over the bullring—force a complete reconsideration of the usual claims about the masculine, moral, mythic, or spiritual significance of the ritual encounter, and about the psychic renewal Jake gains from it. Neither Jake's refusal to take center-stage nor his ability to transmit heroic and mythic values to his various audiences are compelling reasons for accepting at face value his role of detached, heroic witness. Instead, his expert analysis of the various arenas where men perform reveals the problematic nature of manhood-fashioning. As the mirror scene suggests, Jake struggles to construe a workable identity out of a precarious dynamic of presence/absence. Watching others substitutes for the lack of visible signs of maleness that keep him, it seems, from competing with other men in displays of masculine prowess. Lacking confidence in a masculine presence that exists prior to the play of evaluating glances, he constructs Romero as the type of man who “did it all for himself inside” while obsessively recording the details of Romero's performance. Watching, ironically, projects his unfulfilled desire for a masculine plenitude beyond the purview of watching.

But in The Sun Also Rises no man escapes from theatricality and self-dramatization into the full presence of autonomous selfhood. The point is worth emphasizing lest it seem that Jake's humiliation and the power of Romero's performance, arising from the kind of masculine show-and-tell staged on the Irati River, simply suggest the bullfighter's phallic power and the watcher's obvious lack. That Romero stages himself authoritatively while Jake (apart from his poor display before the “hard-eyed people”) manages to avoid center-stage does not in the end suggest that each character finds a different way to manhood or that the novel argues for a dialectic of man/not-man or that the novel constructs its theaters only for those who lack the full male equipment. Indeed, because Jake, lacking his “manhood,” must overtly struggle to construct a sense of masculine selfhood, it is Jake rather than Romero who exemplifies the novel's metaphorics of manhood-fashioning. Romero's and Jake's distinct roles bespeak the same structure of performance, and in that sense both confront the same peril of lacking or losing manhood.

My account of manhood-fashioning in The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time, building on my earlier analysis of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” suggests that Hemingway's fictions affirm a concept of masculinity that is multiply transformed and subject to rupture, inconsistency, and lack. This sliding of masculine identities and the inevitable deferral of a complete and autonomous masculine self, which is constantly being filled, voided, and refashioned before an audience, must, I argue, be read as a theatrical imperative experienced by men (if not women as well). Hemingway's work thus sustains a provocative interpretation of his characters' travails. Jake Barnes's obsession with Romero's performances springs from a vexed relationship with the very modes of masculine display that structure his identity. And the dynamic of man/not-man that characterizes Jake's mirror-gaze is consistent with the structural relationship between protagonist and audience experienced elsewhere in Hemingway's work. Nick's father switches from master of the operating theater to the humiliated husband of his own house and garden; Macomber voids his hollow fear to become a man, determined to display his new understanding of the code; and Wilson, giving up the “thing he had lived by” in several different misdemeanors against the logic of his own code, is thereby unmanned. It is in an effort to explore further the implications of theatricalized masculine behavior that the next chapter turns to Hemingway's theaters of war.

Notes

1. Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (New York: Scribner's, 1925), 83. This work will hereinafter be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. Parts of this chapter were first published in “Dramatizations of Manhood in Hemingway's In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises,” American Literature 61, no. 2 (1989): 245-60, and in “In Our Time, Out of Season,” in Companion to Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 55-86.

2. Leo Gurko, Ernest Hemingway and the Pursuit of Heroism (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1968), 230.

3. Young [Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1969], 13.

4. Ibid., 27.

5. Ibid., 202.

6. Baker, [Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952], 135.

7. [Nancy R. Comley, and Robert Scholes. Hemingway's Genders: Rereading Hemingway. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994], 23, 45.

8. [Roger Whitlow. Cassandra's Daughters: The Women in Hemingway. Westport; Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984], 88.

9. Young, 11.

10. Hemingway, Afternoon, 99-100.

11. See, for instance, Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith and Paul Cohen, Signs 1 (1976): 865-80.

12. James T. Farrell, “The Sun Also Rises,” in Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner's, 1962), 5; Edwin Berry Burgum, “Ernest Hemingway and the Psychology of the Lost Generation,” in Ernest Hemingway: The Man and His Work, ed. John K. M. McCaffery (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1950), 315; Baker, Writer as Artist, 77; Benson, 40; H. R. Stoneback, “From the rue Saint-Jacques to the Pass of Roland to the ‘Unfinished Church on the Edge of the Cliff,’” Hemingway Review 6, no. 1 (fall 1986): 27.

13. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner's, 1926). This work will hereinafter be cited parenthetically by page number in the text.

14. Lawrence R. Broer, Hemingway's Spanish Tragedy (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1973), 49; Mark Spilka, “The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises,” in Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels, ed. Charles Shapiro (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1958), 250; Allen Josephs, “Toreo: The Moral Axis of The Sun Also Rises,” Hemingway Review 6, no. 1 (1986), 92.

15. Melvin Backman, “Hemingway: The Matador and the Crucified,” in ed. Baker, Hemingway and His Critics, 247.

16. [Christian K. Messenger. Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981], 251.