SOURCE: "The Old Man and the Sea: A Lacanian Reading," in Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 190-99.

[In the following excerpt, Stoltzfus presents a semiotic reading, based on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, of the central words in The Old Man and the Sea, which, he contends, provide insight into Hemingway's conscious narrative as well as both Santiago's and Hemingway's unconscious desires.]

If the narrative level of The Old Man and the Sea represents the one-eighth of the iceberg above the surface of the sea, what can we find out about the seven-eighths portion of the story that is presumably there but is neither spoken nor visible? In my attempt to define it I will focus on three categories: (1) what Hemingway consciously put into the text; (2) what the reader puts into it in order to generate meaning; and (3) Hemingway's unconscious (desire) which escapes his cognition but which is unveiled by a Lacanian reading.

The first level corresponds to Santiago's unconscious (desire) which dreams of Africa and the lions, and daydreams of DiMaggio, bone spurs, and cocks; the second is the Christological tradition that Hemingway embeds in the narrative; the third is that the text taken as a whole—the displaced symptom and manifestation of Hemingway's desire —is his unconscious. In focusing first on Santiago's unconscious, which is consciously structured by Hemingway—that is, by what he put there—we should keep in mind the fact that Sigmund Freud's interpretation of dreams enabled Jacques Lacan to show that the operations of the unconscious, encompassing pictographic and linguistic analyses, are themselves a linguistic process. Like the iconic nature of dreams, language and narration have a manifest and latent content. In dreams, condensation and displacement disguise the content of the unconscious in the same way that metaphor and metonymy veil the pulsive forces of the subject's desire whenever he or she uses language. In the production of narrative (in this case it is Santiago's narrative), unconscious content is condensed as metaphor and displaced as metonymy. The reader's role is to discover how the manifest discourse veils the latent meaning, how the signifiers resolve into manifest signi-fieds and latent referents. If the dream is the iconic although masked mirror of the unconscious, fiction is its linguistic reflector.

Although Santiago's dream of the lions is the function, primarily, of his unconscious desire, the text illustrates Lacan's theory that the unconscious is structured as a language, because the word lion, as a signifier, has both denotative and connotative value. The value is an animal, but since he is also "the king of beasts," he is at the top of the animal hierarchy. We may rephrase Santiago's dream, since "the lions [are] the main thing that is left" (Old Man, p. 66), as a metaphor: Santiago is a lion. Santiago is therefore king, since dreaming of the lions is the ultimate endorsement of selfhood. However, not only does he feel unlucky, he also sees his inadequacy, old age, and incompetence reflected in the eyes of the other fishermen. "The first object of desire," writes Lacan in Ecrits (Sheridan translation), "is to be recognized by the other" (p. 58). The image of himself that Santiago sees mirrored by the group gaze is impotence, and this impotence triggers all the anxieties of a repressed primal castration that now coincide with his sense of failure. He cannot resign himself to such a state of unbearable tension and must, therefore, gamble with his luck and, if need be, die in the process: "I'll fight them [the sharks] until I die" (Old Man, p. 115).

We should keep in mind that the metaphor "Santiago is a lion" represents a semantic transposition from a present sign (lion) to an absent sign (king). The meaning of the absent or invisible sign is reinforced by references to DiMaggio, who is a champion, and to the hand-wrestling match with the negro from Cienfuegos that established Santiago as El Campeón. It is perhaps axiomatic that daydreams manifest desire more openly than dreams do, and it is appropriate that Santiago should daydream about baseball and the pain of DiMaggio's bone spur, which the old man equates with his own suffering. In these two cases the allusion to the absent and repressed referents requires substituting for the Sausurrian bar (S¹ over S²) a quasitriangular definition of the sign:

In these diagrams, although the sign (signifier plus signified) remains distinct from the referent, the referent, in its contextual and extratextual functions, dramatizes the presence of Santiago's desire. The reader constructs this referential meaning by establishing figurai and symbolic traces based on metaphorical and metonymical relationships of condensation and displacement. Condensation (or metaphor) is paradigmatic, going from a sign present to others that are absent ("love is a pebble laughing in the sunlight"), but displacement (metonymy) functions in the same way. There is a metonymical slippage in Santiago's daydream from DiMaggio to bone spur to fighting cock. As with metaphor, the substitution of one sign for another may also be diagrammed as follows:

In diagram 3 the signifier has two signifieds and one referent. In diagram 4, in which a fighting cock with spurs is the signifier, the implied and absent referent is "a fight to the death." It can be diagrammed as follows:

By superimposing diagrams 3 and 4 we begin to understand how metonymical slippage works. If DiMaggio has a spur, and if a fighting cock has a spur, and both are champions (one of two cocks will emerge victorious), then both perform to the death, in spite of the pain. That is the sign of a champion. The marlin is also a champion, and the metonymical slippage becomes a syllogism. The marlin's spear resembles a baseball bat, the marlin fights to the death, therefore the marlin, like DiMaggio and the cock, is a champion. But Santiago triumphs over the marlin, therefore he is a greater champion. There is also a metonymical slippage of identities between DiMaggio, the fighting cock, the marlin, and Santiago, and it is Santiago's daydream that sets up the syllogisms and the connections.

Because a signifier may have two or more signifieds and referents, diagram I is more complex than it first appears to be. We can rediagram it as follows:

Hemingway tells us that dreaming of the lions (pundonor) is "the main thing that is left" (Old Man, p. 66). Indeed, the last sentence of the novella is: "The old man was dreaming about the lions." Therefore, in spite of the fact that he has been destroyed physically, his dream, as a manifestation of desire and identity, suggests that his honor and pride are intact. Santiago is sleeping in his hut with his arms outstretched in a cruciform position, and his ordeal, as Hemingway presents it, with its pain and its duration, is comparable to a crucifixion. At the end of the story, the Christological imagery and the unconscious meld in order to give us a hero who assumes, that is, who accepts the meaning of his life and his death and is now resting peacefully, because he knows he has performed like a champion. He is once again a lion. Although he is dying, Santiago is happy, because he believes that the eighteen-foot skeleton has restored his identity in the eyes of the group. The gaze of the other fishermen will mirror his triumph, and indeed, the proof of his special status, in spite of his age, is manifest by Manolin, who once more ministers to his needs by bringing him coffee, the newspaper, and ointment for his damaged hands.

Santiago's potency has been restored. His reason for going out too far has paid off. The metonymical slippages within the work define him as a dying but victorious cock. Finally, as a trope, the cock functions both as a metaphor and as metonymy. As a signifier, the word cock has two signifieds: rooster and phallus. The phallus connotes potency which, for Santiago, is the unconscious sign that his male virility has been restored. Diagram 6 defines the relationships:

If Santiago is now the phallus, and the phallus, according to Lacan, is the law or, as he calls it, the name of the father, then Santiago subsumes life and death. The death of the marlin (as champion) and Santiago's immanent death are acceptable because their destinies—what they were both born for—have been fulfilled.

Santiago assumes his death even as Hemingway's discourse illustrates possible fifth and sixth dimensions in his writing. A Lacanian reading explains how these dimensions work. Indeed, the signifiers as metaphors, when superimposed, give us levels of meaning that are limited only by the number of metonymical substitutions that the reader can at any one time generate and absorb. There are layers upon layers: Santiago's dream and his daydreams, the reader's response and the knowledge he or she brings, and Hemingway's unconscious discourse are the three primary levels. When we add the metaphorical meanings of the lion, the marlin, DiMaggio, and the cock, to mention only the ones I have discussed (the Christological imagery and tradition provide additional levels), it is clear that the text is laced with connotative tracings that resonate throughout the work.

A Lacanian reading of the metaphorical slippages, although it does not differ from a conventional rhetorical poetics, does point to the overlapping images of the signifying chain as functions of Santiago's unconscious, and this is its radical newness. Hemingway's deliberate embedding into the text of these metonymical substitutions and displacements gives the narrative its layered effect and leads me to suggest that his manipulation of the reader's response, by means of these devices, may constitute the fifth and sixth dimensions to which he has sometimes alluded. His tropes function as a poetics of simultaneity. Within the associative chain one champion replaces another, each one a manifest symptom of Santiago's desire, his need to restore his honor and his sense of identity.

Having discussed Santiago's unconscious desire, it is time to focus on Hemingway's but before we do, a few expository words on Lacan's system will perhaps facilitate the process. In Lacanian theory the imaginary and the symbolic order constitute two fundamental sets of related terms. The imaginary corresponds to the preoedipal period when the child believes that it is still a part of the mother and sees no division between itself and the world. In the oedipal phase, which is the entry into the symbolic order, the father splits the mother-child unit. The phallus, which represents the law of the father and the threat of castration, forbids the child further access to the mother's body. From now on the loss suffered and the desire for the maternal must be repressed. This is what Lacan calls the primary repression. It coincides with the acquisition of language and entry into the symbolic order. This period is also referred to as the mirror phase. It opens up the unconscious and allows Lacan to say that the unconscious is structured as a language. Moreover, it is the child's desire for symbiotic unity with the mother that creates the unconscious. The unconscious, therefore, is the result of the repression of desire, due to the prohibition of the father, that is, the law. Furthermore, desire, like language, as we have already seen in the case of Santiago, slides ceaselessly from object to object and from signifier to signifier. There is no ultimate satisfaction to desire since there is no final signifier that can represent the imaginary harmony with the mother and her world that has been lost forever. Freud himself, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, posits death as the final goal of desire, the ultimate healing of the divided subject.

Santiago, who is the veiled metaphor of Hemingway's own desire, must fish, and it is this compulsion to repeat that overrides Freud's pleasure principle, because repetition, which is linked to the death instinct, is a more primitive, more elemental, and more significant drive. Oedipus at Colonus retells his story, Santiago keeps fishing, and Hemingway goes on writing. Although painful (the pleasure principle postulated the quest for pleasure and the avoidance of pain), these actions manifest themselves as preferred activities, deferrals that go beyond pleasure because something other than pleasure is at work. Fishing as repetitive behavior, or as a metaphor for narration, transcends pleasure or the need to earn a living. Santiago's compulsion to prove once again that he is a champion fisherman, like Hemingway's determination to prove that he is Nobel Prize material, is the replaying of a life usage of the death instinct—a practical, productive application of the compulsion to repeat. Santiago acts out the symbolic meaning of death, and through a recognition and assumption of its meaning comes to terms not only with death but also with his life.

On the way back to Havana, with the marlin lashed to the skiff, the sharks attack and destroy the fish, and Santiago, in turn, is destroyed fighting the sharks. Although at the end he can hardly breathe and can taste blood in his mouth, "he only noticed how lightly and how well the skiff sailed now there was no great weight beside her" (Old Man, p. 119). Santiago returns to home port late at night with an eighteen-foot skeleton of a fish—a fish whose tail is in the shape of a scythe (another example of a signifier with two signifieds). A skeleton and a scythe, by convention, connote death, and to sail lightly with death at one's side is indeed to accept death's symbolic presence.

For Lacan, the Other (with a capital O) is the split self of the child that is repressed and that becomes the unconscious. In the realm of the unconscious, Santiago and the marlin sail together, and always have, since the fish is that invisible Other that has been accompanying him since infancy, the repressed self that swims in the depths, present but unseen, until it rises to the surface (of consciousness), where Santiago thrusts his harpoon into the heart of the matter; and then "the fish came alive, with his death in him" (p. 94). Santiago narrates the fish's death as though the unconscious had, at last, been rendered visible, as though the Other, swimming through the sea of the unconscious, had finally leaped into view in one decisive, desperate, and dramatic moment in order to foreground life and death within that "glimpse of vision that he had" (p. 94) "when he had seen the fish come out of the water and hang motionless in the sky before he fell." Santiago "was sure there was some great strangeness and he could not believe it" (p. 98). The fish, as yet another example of the signified-to-signifier formula, can also be read as the symbol of the Christological tradition or, for Lacan, as the law of the father—the prohibition that Santiago is determined to overpower: "Christ, I did not know he was so big. 'I'll kill him though,' he said. 'In all his greatness and his glory'" (p. 66).

Santiago was born to be a fisherman (p. 40), as Oedipus was born to be a king. Santiago, the old man, is abandoned by his fellow fishermen, as Oedipus, the infant, was abandoned by his parents. Santiago, a man of inordinate pride, leaves the security of the coastal waters because he must restore his honor. Oedipus leaves the home of his foster parents in search of his identity, but his name, meaning "swollen foot," is symptomatic of his swollen ego, his pride and self-reliance that result in patricide and incest—his downfall. Oedipus and Santiago are destroyed, but not defeated, and they narrate their stories in order to assume the Other in themselves. According to Lacan, each man, before he dies, in order to heal the primal split, must assume his own relation to death and to the discourse of the other. Santiago, like Oedipus at Colonus, performs an analytic speech act that names his desire, recognizes his destiny, and acknowledges death, actions that give meaning to "the assumption of one's history." In the final analysis, it is the admission of each man's primal repression that explains the Oedipus myth. Moreover, according to Shoshana Felman, the acceptance of responsibility for the discourse of the Other is the ultimate endorsement of one's selfhood. "'Don't think, old man' he [Santiago] said aloud.

'Sail on this course and take it when it comes.' But I must think, he thought. Because it is all I have left. That and baseball" (Old Man, p. 103). He thinks about sin, about pride, about killing, about the fish, about Manolin, and about what it is to be a man. In short, he narrates himself, defines himself, and plays out his destiny. He thinks about baseball, the great Joe DiMaggio, bone spurs, fighting cocks, hand wrestling, the sun, the stars, and the moon. "He liked to think about all things he was involved in. . . . 'You think too much, old man' he said aloud" (p. 105). But Santiago's thoughts are Hemingway's discourse, and, in thinking out loud, Santiago, like Oedipus, narrates his life. His utterances are "the central knot of speech," and the figurai motifs he weaves are the symptoms (manifestation) of the repressed. Like Oedipus, Santiago narrates the essential bonding between death and language. And so discourse, like fishing or writing, is survival as deferral.

The oedipal tracings in The Old Man and the Sea constitute a chain of signifiers which, in addition to Santiago's compulsive fishing, include the sea as metaphor for the mother and the marlin, at yet another level, as a metaphor for the father. Santiago refers to the sea as "la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her" (p. 29); "the old man always thought of her as feminine . . . the moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought" (p. 30). "Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin" (p. 72). Words and phrases such as "la mar," "making love," and "his small line was taken by a dolphin" have sexual connotations whose imagery is barely veiled. Moreover, an angry, depressed, and desperate Santiago has set out to hook a marlin and, in the process, kills the father and discovers the Other.

It is clear, I think, although Hemingway is working within the Christian tradition, that Santiago (Saint James, the supplanter) wishes to replace its law—the father's—emphasizing meekness, humility, and self-abnegation, with more elemental virtues stressing pride, honor, and killing. The marlin that Santiago kills is both the Other in himself and the law. On one level the marlin is his brother, while on another he is the law of the father that Hemingway would supplant. Hemingway's conscious and unconscious narratives blend in order to give us the complex multiple layers of The Old Man and the Sea. But Santiago's desire, raison d'être, and the values he embodies are clearly also Hemingway's. The discourse of the Other requires only one metonymic substitution, namely writing for fishing, in order, once again, to elicit all the attributes of a champion.

Works Cited

Felman, Shoshana. "Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis." In Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory, ed. by Robert Con Davis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Pp. 1021-53.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner's, 1952.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.