SOURCE: Harrow, Kenneth W. “Gordimer contre Hemingway: Crossing Back Through the Mirror That Subtends All Speculation.” In (Un)Writing Empire, edited by Theo D'haen, pp. 187-202. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.

“THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF FRANCIS MACOMBER”

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” is quintessential Hemingway. The restrained, tough voice of the narrator, a narrator who sees and describes the events as though he were a big-game hunter, is counterpoised by the voices of the three main characters, Francis Macomber and his wife Margaret, and their hired professional hunter, Robert Wilson. The story is famous and has been widely anthologized, probably because it embodies the characteristic elements of Hemingway's style while successfully conveying the values he perceives in manliness: courage, verbal restraint, a sense of nobility, of beauty, and especially of self-overcoming.

The narrative has two main themes that are set up as parallel aspects of the same story. The first concerns the transformation of a coward, Francis Macomber, into a brave man. This is described by Wilson, who leads Macomber through the rite of passage as an initiation, and it is presented as a man's story inasmuch as it concerns a rite reserved exclusively for men. More especially, manhood here is reserved for white men, despite the fact that black Africans assist in the hunt that provides the occasion for the initiation. The black men remain boys, never to shoot the guns they bear, never to speak up. For the most part they do not express their sense of disapproval aloud, and their actions are always initiated by others, by white men.

The second theme concerns the relations between the two white men and the woman. The primary relationship between Francis Macomber and Margaret Macomber is completed by triangulation with the big-game hunter, Wilson. The relationship that Margaret has with the two men parallels the main theme involving manly courage, as seen in the common concern over power and courage, the manly virtues needed for one to be considered an initiated man in the first instance, or to be an appropriate mate in the second. Just as a man must conquer his fear if he is to become a hunter and prove his manhood, so must he conquer his woman, his fear of being abandoned by women, or of being controlled by them, if he is to establish his virility. As women have no manhood to prove, they are not required to face their fears, much less overcome them; nor are they required to conquer or control their men. On the contrary: they must learn to control their natural loquacity, their natural propensity to dominate men through psychological manipulations—their bitchness, or “American female cruelty”¹—and thus ideally function as accessories to the main male principle of self-fulfilment. They provide the opportunity for men to love, to hate, and to conquer—but they can also be, like Margaret who epitomizes the American bitch, “the hardest in the world, the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive” (8)—not unlike the lions and buffaloes that are hunted by the men. When the women prevail, their soft men are cuckolded and castrated. When their men prevail, the women are tamed. Similarly, when the men fail with respect to the animals—that is, when they are conquered by fear—they are emasculated; and when they succeed, it is the animals whose head, horns, and skin are removed.

Hemingway brings the two themes together when describing the change that comes over Macomber when he has conquered his fear:

He'd [Wilson] seen it in the war work the same way. More of a change than any loss of virginity. Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man. Women knew it too. No bloody fear.

(33; emphasis in the original)

It is somewhat odd to describe this transformation of the “great American boy-men,” this loss of fear, as an “operation.” The wording, “fear gone like an operation,” suggests the removal of an organ, a castration, for which an appropriate substitute—“Something else grew in its place” (33)—is made. The immediate meaning is supplied by the narrator's phrase, “com[ing] of age” (32), an occurrence that does not necessarily fall on the initiate's twenty-first birthday (“It was not a matter of their twenty-first birthday” [32]), but which is marked in African terms by the appropriate signs of initiation, circumcision followed by inclusion in the circle of the initiated. Castration is more dramatic than initiation and, even if symbolically represented in the rite of passage, conveys a complex set of fundamental psychological processes. An examination of the three phases of the Oedipus complex, following Lacan, will provide the basis for our understanding of Hemingway's major themes, and of his racial representations as well.

Bice Benvenuto describes the Oedipus complex as having three phases. In the first, the child (here especially the male child) identifies with “the mother's object of desire, the phallus.”² The phallus is not typically used by Lacan to signify the erect penis, but rather as linguistic signifier embodying desire, and at this point particularly the mother's desire. The child's relationship to the mother is marked by the subordination of the child's desire to what he takes to be the mother's desire, as a result of which the child attempts to substitute himself for the phallus she desires. The woman's absent phallus is replaced by the child with a series of objects with which he identifies, resulting in what Lacan terms the “perversion” of fetishism. The objects of identification being present, as a symbolic phallus, as well as absent, as hiding the true phallus, represent the mother's hidden phallus, her absent/present organ.

This phase would seem to characterize Francis Macomber before his transformation. Theoretically, Margaret would function as a substitute for his mother, and here she substitutes for a figure with whose desire Macomber identifies. That is, Macomber subordinates his own desire to that of Margaret, and would seek to complete her desire through an accumulation of those objects that would function as fetishistic phalluses. This is accomplished by his laying before her his accumulated wealth and all that it can supply:

He was very wealthy, and would be much wealthier, and he knew she would not leave him ever now. That was one of the few things that he really knew. He knew about that, about motor cycles—that was earliest—about motor cars, about duck-shooting, about fishing, trout, salmon, and big-sea, about sex in books, many books, too many books, about all court games, about dogs, not much about horses, about hanging on to his money, about most of the other things his world dealt in, and about his wife not leaving him.

(21)

In the terms with which he is described, one may find the same phallic values associated with both desire and worth, as if, in his close-cropped hair, his good looks, his Ivy-League associations, he embodied all that the woman could wish to possess: “Francis Macomber was very tall, very well built if you did not mind that length of bone, dark, his hair cropped like an oarsman, rather thin-lipped, and was considered handsome” (4).

However, by subordinating himself to his wife's desire, he fails to establish his own authority. His travels, his deep-sea fishing and hunting, like his court games, demonstrate the elusive nature of desire when it is both here and gone, da/fort, as with the absent/present phallus of the mother. He lacks the stuff of the castrated male who has learned to put on his father's identity and thus his authority. This weakness is demonstrated in Macomber's loss of nerve, to which allusion is made immediately after the above description: he “had just shown himself, very publicly, to be a coward” (4). It is as if the exposure of his inner character—“very publicly”—were a sort of salacious act in which that which is shown ought to be kept hidden.

In the second Oedipal phase, the child must repress his desire through the fear of castration. As the child's desire in the first phase is joined to the mother's desire, the repression or forbidding of the one entails the suppression of the other as well. This is accomplished by the appearance of the father, whose intervention takes symbolic form as the paternal metaphor. Lacan gives to this form the name “nom-du-père,” and it provides the child with a number of mechanisms. To begin with, it is responsible for the child's repression of his desire, owing to the fear it engenders. This accounts for the formation of the unconscious and, simultaneously, for the Symbolic function, the enabling condition for the acquisition of language.³ It is also the basis of the sense of Law as embodied in the figure of the father. Having entered into the discourse, the nom-du-père appears everywhere as all powerful, all judging, and all prohibiting, ending the child's identification with the desire of the mother, and opening the way to his identification with the father.

Fear and castration are, of course, major motifs in “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” The muscular account of a hunter and his charge who overcomes fear and learns to face danger is marked by the same forces and mechanisms as those used to suppress desire. The lion's roar, the buffalo's large, black horns lowered in a full charge, incite the fear, the uncontrollable panic, in Francis Macomber, and as Wilson sees to the killing of these animals, his manner of disposing of them reveals his primary role as embodiment of the nom-du-père. We can see this repeatedly throughout the story. The lion's fearful physical attributes are stripped away when it is killed: “the lion lay, with uplifted, white muscled, tendon-marked naked forearms, and a white bloating belly, as the black men fleshed away the skin” (21). As for the roar, the.505 bullet disposes of the sound when it smashes into the lion's mouth “with the muzzle velocity of two tons” (21). More strikingly, the bulls, whose manhood is figured in their “upswept wide black horns,” are “cut off” before they can reach the safety of the swamp, and finish up with having their heads “skinned out,” while the emboldened Francis Macomber, shooting high at the charging bull, strikes it at “the huge boss of the horns” (35). If the initiation of Francis Macomber brings an end to his fear, it also “meant the end of cuckoldry too” (33). Hence the irony: fear, which castrates desire, brings horns to the cuckold.

The role of fear would seem to be shot through with the same ambivalence as that of the mother's absent/present phallus. That is, it must be present in order for the child to avoid psychosis, and to learn to suppress his desire, thus entering into the Symbolic order. But it is also subject to appropriation by the child, who learns to identify with the father, thus achieving Lacan's third phase of the Oedipal conflict, that in which the little boy accedes to the paternal position; correspondingly, the little girl learns to receive the phallus “in phantasy from the father in the form of a substitute, a baby: ie she unconsciously receives the baby as a ‘symbolic gift,’ a phallic substitute.”⁴

What distinguishes Lacan's work from Freud's is his emphasis on language. This is seen in his key formulations holding that the unconscious is structured like language, that the act of repression which accounts for the unconscious also accounts for the subject's formation, for the subject's entry into the Symbolic order, and for the development of language. Lacan's redefinition of the phallus not as a symbol of male authority but as that which signifies the act of signifying—what he terms the signifier of all signifiers—places language at the centre of the subject, and opens the way for feminist re-readings of Freud to develop.

It is here, in the use of language, that Hemingway's most typical way of construing value emerges. For Hemingway, the use of male speech attests to one's having entered the community of adult men. Wilson may provide Francis Macomber with the opportunity to face his fear and to overcome it, but he doesn't really teach him how to shoot or even how to face his fear. He does, however, respond to Macomber's verbalizations in such a way as to suggest that the castrating function can be applied there as well as elsewhere—and, in fact, can be applied there more than anywhere else.

We see this when Macomber expresses his fears to Wilson, asking him to leave the wounded lions alone in the bush. Wilson responds to Macomber's fear and to his concomitant loquacity with a growing awareness of his own disapproval, thus assuming the role of nom-du-père:

Robert Wilson […], who had not been thinking about Macomber except to note that he was rather windy, suddenly felt as though he had opened the wrong door in a hotel and seen something shameful.

(17)

Wilson closes off Macomber's shameful proposal to drop the pursuit of the lion with a definitive statement of the Law: “It isn't done” (18). This fits the pattern beginning at the initial luncheon of the three whites, on which occasion Wilson responds to his African servant's unseemly curiosity, displayed when he looks at Macomber, by snapping a threat in Swahili. When Macomber subsequently expresses his apprehension that word of his cowardice would get out at the club, Wilson reassures him: “I'm a professional hunter. We never talk about our clients” (7). Wilson suggests to Macomber that he order Margaret to stay in the camp while the two men go hunting, but her voice, at least, is not to be repressed, and she refuses to obey. Macomber then sardonically suggests that Wilson and Margaret stay in the camp, leaving Macomber to go off to hunt the buffalo alone. His irony, like Margaret's “bitchy,” sweet ripostes (“Let's not have any ordering, nor any silliness” [24]), constitute verbal excess, the sign of the uninitiated: ie of women and children. Restraint is the product of circumcision; verbosity, in any of its metaphoric forms, is its opposite. Wilson speaks with the directness of the narrator's male monophonic terms when correcting Macomber's linguistic excess: “Wouldn't talk rot if I were you”; and again, in response to Macomber, “Bad word, disgusted” (24). Similarly, he corrects Macomber's excessive expression of joy after Macomber has experienced the thrill of the hunt and of overcoming fear: “You're not supposed to mention it”; and, as Macomber persists, he adds, “Doesn't do to talk too much about all this. Talk the whole thing away. No pleasure in anything if you mouth it up too much” (33).

Hemingway completes the characterization of male speech, then, as an extension of the repression and restraint identified with the nom-du-père. It marks Macomber's initiation into manhood, and signals his ascendancy into the third phase of the Oedipal complex as he identifies with the figure of the father, and speaks with his voice in excluding Margaret from the male fold: “If you don't know what we're talking about why not keep out of it?” (34). As Margaret sits back in the seat, struck silent, the men plan their attack on the buffalo.

The last complex image, before Macomber's shootout with the buffalo and his own death, combines references to speech, cutting, and emotion. The following description of the car's movement across the plain, combined with the movement of emotion across Macomber's body, suggests that he has come to embody the figure of the father in his role as figure of repression. The action of circumcisive cutting is joined, by metonymic associations, to verbal restraint:

As the car moved slowly across the open space toward the island of brushy trees that ran in a tongue of foliage across a dry water course that cut the open swale, Macomber felt his heart pounding and his mouth was dry again, but it was excitement, not fear.

(35, my emphases)

Though Margaret strikes out in rebellion against the new-found authority of her husband, it is Wilson who has the last word in imposing control on her speech. He lashes her with his tongue, cutting her as if using the whip with which he threatened his serving-boy at the outset, until she cries out for him to stop: he persists until she pleads, in due submission. The final note is that of the triumphant father. “That's better,” Wilson said, “Please is much better. Now I'll stop” (37). As had been the case with Macomber, a new symbolic phallus replaces the original uncircumcised organ, completing the third phase of Oedipal development.

For Hemingway, the story stops here, because the male authority is finally established over the woman, and this is the only story that counts. Male conquest over fear, self-overcoming, is best not mentioned, as if the magic of the transformation of boy to boy-cum-father would be dissipated by a garrulous, uncircumcised tongue. But the imposition of silence, on self, on women, doesn't stop there in colonial Africa. The threat of the whip is extended to the cheeky natives, while the larger threat of the conquering hunter and his two white charges looms over the entire black population whose absence/presence, whose erasure, is even more complete than the chastizing of Margaret's tongue or the circumcising of Macomber's fear. For them, there is no possibility of a new self to grow in place of the circumcised penis. They remain boys, essentially nameless, essentially denied access to speech, or even to the full membership in the Symbolic order. They remain black, and as such are part of the same order of being as the lion and black bull buffaloes whose whiteness can be achieved only at the price of having their skin, head, and horns removed—that is, by being rendered into a state of permanent castration. Even Margaret turns white with fear when the two men chase and kill the black buffaloes.

Though a female, Margaret is white and thus has access to the power of the gun, which she apparently turns to spiteful or careless use. Nonetheless, her race cannot mitigate the limitations of her gender, so that it is up to Wilson to put her in her place at the story's conclusion. The gun-bearer who is ordered to leave the gun where Margaret had dropped it after the death of Macomber has no more of a name, a presence, or a tongue, than at the beginning. As the title of Ferdinand Oyono's novel Une Vie de boy reminds us, the role of the African in colonial Africa, no matter what his aspirations, is to remain permanently a “boy.” In Lacanian terms, this means not only that he will never arrive at an identification with the father—all fathers are white—but that he will remain permanently ensconced in the Imaginary realm: that is, never to find the way to the Symbolic order, never to find his tongue. Radical Otherness, of which his blackness is the sign, entails permanent childishness. Having established the model of initiation, he is now denied access to its pathway. Africans can become only African men, never men.

Ironically, there is a name for the language of those [men], and it is called Swahili. It is not subject, like English, to the same penalties for excessiveness—its employment always lies outside the domain of the narrative. Its virtues are never given poetic voice: Shakespeare provides Wilson with the words for celebrating manly courage. Natives exist on the other side of language, the place Lacan associates with jouissance and death. There, in the realm of the Real, outside of the human narrative, the dark forces of ecstasy, of Liebestod, can operate. There we can place all manner of darkness and, by an excursus that takes us outside the Hemingway fold, reintegrate Macomber into a newly formed self.

What if Macomber were black—that is, black by American definitions? A light-skinned black man who passes for white. Unlike his wife who turns white with fear, or Wilson whose face is red with sunburn and white in its wrinkles, Macomber is described as tall, dark, and handsome. As Wilson's redness is remarked upon by Margaret, he responds, “Must be racial” (5). However, Francis, Margaret informs us, tongue-in-cheek, never turns red (5); indeed, his darkness belongs to another race. If he is not black, like the Africans, he is dark like the lion whose mane, interestingly enough, is not described in the usual way as tawny, but also as “dark,” just as the tip of its tail is “black-tufted” (19). A bit too mouthy, also like Macomber, the lion is castrated by a shot to its guts and a shot to its maw. Its whiteness lies underneath the skin and can be exposed only in death.

Macomber's weakness, his concern over what they will think at the club, his subordination to his castrating wife, and especially his failure to overcome his fear, can be read as the reactions of the one who is “passing,” not one who is really what he appears to be. Here the converging thematics of the story bear on the false manhood with which he tries to pass as a hunter, a deep-sea fisherman, a ball court player, as well as as a member in the club of colonizing whites. His weaknesses are all symbols, psychological and historical, of his fear of being caught out for what he is. Passing as denial creates the quintessential condition of the phallus as defined in the initial phase of the Oedipal complex, the absent/present phallus of the mother. Macomber's darkness is not meant as a darkness like that of the Africans, as otherness; and the darkness of the lions can find expression only in their fearful roaring. But as set against the two conventionally defined roles of the hunter, the manly Wilson, and the great female beauty, Margaret, it is grounded not in assertion, but in negation. Macomber's darkness is like Okonkwo's manliness, an excessive trait of the character born out of its opposite. The all-white club to which Macomber desperately belongs, and in which he continues to maintain membership, will continue to threaten him with exclusion so long as he is who he is through passing. The final irony, then, lies not in the shutting-up of Margaret, but in the fact that Macomber's act of killing the large, charging, black bull, which would have sealed his membership and guaranteed his place, is denied to him by his wife at the very moment he achieves it. She denies him his feeling of conquest because, as he shoots into the bull buffalo point blank, she shoots him, and his final experience is of a colour heat, “white-hot,” which ends all passing, and all other feeling: “that was all he ever felt” (36).

This far-fetched approach to Macomber's identity is as unreal as the absence/presence of the African, and even of Margaret, in the story. I have deliberately described Lacan's account of the Oedipus complex as focusing only on the male experience—not only because this is the story of Macomber's coming of age, but also because this is the path of understanding the complex as taken by Lacan himself. The woman's role can be understood only in terms of the male figure—and the core experiences of denial, castration, and repression are all recounted in terms of the phallus. Writing back against Hemingway, restoring the voices and presences overwhelmed by his gunshot prose, can only be achieved by reading women, as well as black men, against this phallocentrism. For this we must turn not only to a text that appears to be a deliberate riposte to “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” but to the re-readings of Lacan provided by Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément et al.

.....

“A HUNTING ACCIDENT”

On the surface, it almost appears as though Gordimer wrote “A Hunting Accident” in conscious response to Hemingway's “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” The opening line sets the stage: “She met her photographer at the Kilimanjaro in Dar.”⁵ The terseness of the phrase; the stylishness and exoticism of the setting; the off-chance coincidence of the name of the bar (echoing the title The Snows of Kilimanjaro); the mise-en-scène of the bar itself; and, finally, the meeting as preliminary to the sexual encounter, sexual conquest—all evoke, if they do not parody, Papa's prose. More broadly, the action in both stories is centered on a hunting expedition, and in both there is a glitch—mishap or accident—which tests the moral fibre of the participants.

There is also a sense of closure to both stories: Francis Macomber has passed the initiation, and the tough strength of Wilson will prevail over Margaret's bitchy sexuality, so that she, too, will emerge from the experience a properly subdued person. Most of all, the reader's implied satisfaction is what gives the story closure: Wilson's dominance over Margaret is established by virtue of his verbal attack, as a consequence of which she learns to modify her speech: “Please.” […] “That's better.” She becomes a good girl, and accepts the nom-du-père.

“The Hunting Accident” plays with almost all these features: the seduction scene in “A Hunting Accident” is almost a parody of the night Margaret spends in the tent with Wilson. Instead of a manly, forceful, big-game hunter, we have the small-boned, non-aggressive photographer, Clive, the slightest-built of the men in the party at Ratau's, who risks spoiling the mood of the festivities by asking to have the guns checked to be sure they are unloaded. In contrast to Wilson, who threatens to beat his native boys for cheekiness, Clive Neller appears a quiet shadow, especially when measured next to their host, Ratau, the younger son of an African chief, who is noisy, vibrant, and sexually ebullient. Thus, where Hemingway plays on the sexist typecasting of the American bitch, and on the manly virtues, the courage involved in big-game hunting, using the racist values of colonial Africa for his backdrop to the action, Gordimer reverses the sexism by creating a sympathetic female protagonist whose sexual approaches to Clive and to Ratau are portrayed positively, and reverses the racism by placing Ratau in a dominant social and psychological position. In place of Hemingway's manly objective prose, Gordimer's self-consciously writerly style calls attention to itself, to its uncertainties in minimally identifying the speakers of the dialogue, to its subjectivity that echoes back in the use of dissonant metaphors like “a disappearing painted ribbon” (62), in reference to the fleeing eland, or “a piece of rich cloth [that] is grasped at one end and shaken” (63), in reference to the herd's reaction to the shooting of its members.

Where Hemingway closes with order restored, with the right [masculine] words spoken, and the wrong [feminine] words brought to an end, Gordimer ends with an absence and a gap: Christie's photographer has quit the party, leaving Christie with a handwritten note, and with a sense of having been passed by; and, more emphatically, Christie is left with a sense of the gap in comprehension between herself and the African Tribunal convening before her eyes, a gap due to her own inability to understand the words being spoken, the “message” she feels is intended for her but which she cannot grasp. Gordimer's sense of irony invariably emerges in the portrayal of whites as being in an Africa to which they don't belong. Hemingway never puts the droit de seigneur, so to speak, into question; its authority is not constructed but given, not unlike that upon which the nom-du-père rests.

In none of these differences between Hemingway and Gordimer do we reach very far beneath the surface. The reversal of male-female roles or stereotypes, the reversal of racist positionings of characters, the substitution of a photographer for a hunter, or of a black chief's son for a white scion of American capitalism—in fact, all situational changes—leave intact the fundamental patriarchal roles. This is all the more true as the action transpires in an unnamed southern African country—one in which we can well imagine the isolated action of the novel to be set in a larger socio-political context totally at odds with the happy reversals of racism or sexism.⁶ This unease before Gordimer's re-writing of Hemingway is compounded by Gordimer's typical reading of character. With a deftness of touch assured by the gifted artist, she sketches for the reader the synecdochic sign that provides access to the essential qualities of her character. Thus, the Swedish girlfriend of Ratau is seen cradling a reluctant African toddler “with the holy-family reverence Swedish girls display for black children” (58). Fuller treatment is afforded Clive Neller, whose disposition is attributed to his supposed marital history (“he was certainly married: a passionate boy-and-girl love affair that was the basis of his privacy and whose transformation into domestic peace was the basis for his sympathetic detachment” [59]), and whose emotional maturity is set in contrast with young men “who talked liberation and expected [their] girls to do whatever [they] decided” (59). In short, characters are dissected and scenes are cinematically shot for us, shot with a textual grace and discernment that win us over to sympathize with the stylish, ironical sense of alienation that spills over from the most clichéd figures (Swedish blondes in quest of sexual excitement) to the most attractive. We believe Christie and her photographer's hearts are certainly in the right place, even if they wind up trapped into going on a hunt, even if their place in the sun is somehow granted by right and accepted with insouciance. We accept the famous white photographer's privileged status, providing him with entry into expensive hotels or to chief's son's retreats; and we accept the well-attached Christie, daughter of the colonial powers, and now heiress to the rights to “doss down” in the homes of university professors and chiefs' sons, or to be in London at her studies. All these assumptions about place, privilege, and freedom are barely questioned: an old African retainer emerges out of nowhere to indicate the whereabouts of the game; another old gun-bearer appears, his head described by this stylish narrative voice as “cold and tough as the feel of a tortoise's foot” (62), never previously touched by a white woman; and, finally, there are more servants and more bearers, without name or description, functioning exactly as in Hemingway as appurtenances of the privileged class.

All this is not to suggest that Gordimer fails to revise her racist, sexist predecessor, but that the essentializing in her characterization and her decontextualizing of the political space leave open a gap for a patriarchal revision to enter in. That gap, however, folds back on itself, invaginating the revision, through Gordimer's substitution of a cow for a bull, or, more precisely, through a feminine voice echoing back from the Real in place of the leonine roar, the first syllable of the nom-du-père. We would expect the liberal's reaction to Hemingway to take the form of irony: a wounded hartebeest cow mooing in its dying breath demystifies the hunter's chauvinistic prowess (ironically, Hemingway again provided the initial palimpsest, as it were, of this image with Margaret's description of the elands as “big cowy things” [10]); an intense and noted photographer capturing the moment of death undoes the dissembling pleasures of the shooters, who would like to enjoy themselves without there being any pain, without feeling or knowing about having caused any pain, without worrisome traces of awareness of the other. Masters are defined, according to Hegel, by their refusal to be aware of their slave's consciousness; and the cow's dying moo is portrayed as giving voice to the ties between slave and free, just as the cow's substance will soon be washed down with red wine in the festive orgy that will follow that night, where hunger was “as pleasurable as lust” (65). What carries this liberal revision beyond the level of mere protest is the sense that the voice that emanates from the dying beast arises from a space beyond the Symbolic, a space in which, for Lacan, the unspeakable sense of jouissance is joined to death, a space to which he assigns the term “Real.”

The feminist revision of Lacan, especially as read through Irigaray and Cixous, is to be found in their insistence on laying claim to that space beyond the Symbolic, and in assigning to it precisely those undefined values of the feminine that for Lacan remain only the “not-All.” Gordimer presents the cow's cry, its “pitiful moo” like that “of any clumsy dairy mother,” as providing the discovery that there is voice to be heard beyond the corridors of power, properly in its place beyond: “as if it were discovered to be true that at midnight on Christmas Eve dumb beasts can speak their sufferings; no one had known that these wild beings could link the abbatoir to the hunt, the slave to the free, in that humble bellow” (64).

By insisting on the gendered revision of the beast, Gordimer makes it imperative that we read this passage in terms of genderized voice—or, even more, as feminine writing. This is not because the agonizing cry carries meaning so as to transform the lives of the characters and to give them purpose, nor so as to arouse the reader's conscience, but because the space in which that maternal cry arises, the space it occupies, is outside the neatly demystifying order of a protest, and, at best, can be placed only alongside the ambiguously incomprehensible message “intended” for Christie by those who do not speak a language she can understand, the tribunal elders.

Only the violence of a radical rejection, a radical revision of established order, can open the possibility for the voice beyond the Symbolic to emerge. That is why the preferred female figures for Irigaray and Cixous, who attempt to write out of this space, to evoke this other space of writing, are witches and hysterics—speakers of a new language, of a new body. Only the violence of death and jouissance would seem to be able to reach beyond—to a realm Lacan also assigns to the mystics. The dumb beast given voice on Christmas would seem to fit as well into a realm where the dialectical opposition of master and slave is overcome.

Interestingly, Cixous defines that other space as the dark continent, the place to which the repressed return:

Here they are, returning, arriving over and again, because the unconscious is impregnable. They have wandered around in circles, confined to the narrow room in which they've been given a deadly brainwashing. You can incarcerate them, slow them down, get away with the old Apartheid routine, but for a time only. As soon as they begin to speak, at the same time as they're taught their names, they can be taught that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark.⁷

Cixous's path out of the “labyrinth,” her map to the new, beautiful, “black” feminist self, is forged by the act of writing:

Write yourself. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious be heard.

(250)

Write! and your self-seeking text will know itself better than flesh and blood, rising, insurrectionary dough kneading itself, with sonorous, perfumed ingredients, a lively combination of flying colors, leaves and rivers plunging into the sea we found.

(260)

For Hemingway, the bush in which the wounded beast lay waiting had to be braved, penetrated with powerful hunting guns. The dangers of penetration are concomitant with the risks of being eaten by the witches, of falling under the spell of the hysterics whose modern form is defined as the bitch, the crazy bitch. Cixous presents the male fears, and their subsequent call for Order, as a consequence and extension of the physical, sexual act of penetration:

Men still have everything to say about their sexuality, and everything to write. For what they have said so far, for the most part, stems from the opposition activity/passivity, from the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meant to invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of woman as a “dark continent” to penetrate and to “pacify.” (We know what “pacify” means in terms of scotomizing the other and misrecognizing the self.) Conquering her, they've made haste to depart from her borders, to get out of sight, out of body. The way man has of getting out of himself and into her whom he takes not for the other but for his own, deprives him, he knows, of his own bodily territory. One can understand how man, confusing himself with his penis and rushing in for the attack, might feel resentment and fear of being “taken” by the woman, of being lost in her, absorbed or alone.

(247 fn)

We can now see how Gordimer's “insurrectionary dough” can be viewed as a response to the Hemingway celebration of male sexuality. Irony at the sight of the penis rushing in for the attack allows for the repossession of lost territory. Gordimer's full palette of colors provides a riposte to the monotonal penile force that obliges Margaret Macomber to say “please.” But in the end, the final ironies of “The Hunting Accident” double back in impotence against the feminine space. We realize that the miracle of the hartebeest cow is purchased at the price of her agonizing death, and that Christie's yearning to extend herself beyond the company of Ratau's revellers is frustrated by her own privileged position. That is the outer border of her alienation. Desire haunts her, as the guests revel in the flesh and drink that surround her, and it is only as a glimpse of a radically Other self that the possibility of transcendence of the oppositions slave-free, abattoir-hunt, is envisaged.

Subject and object remain unchallenged as unified constructs in Gordimer's fiction, and, as long as they do so, Gordimer's insurrection will remain limited by the confines of that against which it is in revolt, no matter what the politics are that are played out on the surface of the text.⁸ The space that extends beyond begins with what Irigary terms the “‘elsewhere’ of feminine pleasure”—a space whose “duality is granted,” ensuring that the feminine is not led “right back to the phallocratic economy” (77-78). Here we are at the borders of the male language to which Gordimer has so brilliantly given her art. For the pleasures of representation, of mimetic art at its highest, remain under the sign of “phallic desire in discourse”: for Irigaray, “[feminine] pleasure is not simply situated in a process of reflection or mimesis, nor on one side of this process or the other: neither on the near side, the empirical realm that is opaque to all language, nor on the far side, the self-sufficient infinite of the God of men” (77). Rather, Irigaray evokes the site of passing-beyond, a place that is reached by “crossing back through the mirror that subtends all speculation” (77), back to the haunts of witches and to the daunting incoherencies of hysterics, where the feminine insistence on feminine pleasure is the enabling condition for responding to phallocratic logic. This is the site of “disruptive excess” within language before which Gordimer pulls up short. Like Christie, Gordimer remains outside the witches' feast looking in, as at a lost garden held in reserve for the Other.

Notes

1. Ernest Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936), in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1938): 9. Further page references from this edition are in the text.

2. Bice Benvenuto & R. Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction (London: Free Association Books, 1986): 132.

3. “Symbolic” here signifies the rational, mental order in which metonymic and metaphoric thinking takes place, and which provides for the possibility of all language.

4. Benvenuto & Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan, 134.

5. Nadine Gordimer, “A Hunting Accident” (1975), in A Soldier's Embrace (New York: Penguin, 1982): 56. Further page references to this edition are in the text.

6. Whether it is a white minority government or black majority government is immaterial as far as these larger social values are concerned.

7. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of Medusa,” tr. Yvonne Rochette-Ozzello, in New French Feminists: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks & Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken, 1980/Brighton: Harvester, 1981): 247.

8. Cf Irigaray's response to the question of how the rediscovery of a “feminine” place might suppose a “certain work on language”: “The issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which women would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoritical machinery, of suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are excessively univocal”; Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, tr. Catherine Porter (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1985): 78. Further references are in the text.

Works Cited

Benvenuto, Bice & R. Kennedy. 1986. The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction. London: Free Association Books, 1986.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of Medusa,” tr. Yvonne Rochette-Ozzello, in New French Feminist: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks & Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken, 1980/Brighton: Harvester, 1981): 245-64.

Gordimer, Nadine. “A Hunting Accident” (1975), in A Soldier's Embrace (New York: Penguin, 1982): 55-66.

Hemingway, Ernest. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936), in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1938): 3-37.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One, tr. Catherine Porter. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1985.