SOURCE: "They Went Through This Fiction Every Day': Informed Illusion in The Old Man and the Sea" in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. XII, No. 4, Winter, 1966-67, pp. 473-77. [In the following essay, Sylvester rejects Robert P. Weeks's assessment that in The Old Man and the Sea Hemingway's "view of the world has gone soft," arguing that the "calculated fictions" of the exchanges between Santiago and Manolin in the opening and closing of the novella frame the action and reveal a complex Hemingway "code hero" who accepts his fate while concocting an informed illusion about his circumstances.]

Carlos Baker writes of what he calls Colonel Cantwell's "informed illusion" in Across the River and Into the Trees: the Colonel "well knows that the necessary thing to retain, after the loss of any illusion, is the capacity for belief which made the original illusion possible."¹ Mr. Baker then notices that in The Old Man and the Sea Santiago "loses the [physical] battle he has won," but wins the "moral victory of having lasted without permanent impairment of his belief in the worth of what he has been doing."² In his discussion of the story, however, Mr. Baker never defines Santiago's belief in the precise way he does Colonel Cantwell's. But for evidence that the fisherman's faith, like the soldier's, depends upon "informed illusion," I want to direct critical attention to the hitherto unexplored ritual the old man and the boy find it necessary to observe daily as a bulwark against the loss of resolution threatened by the poverty of their lives:

"What do you have to eat?" the boy asked.

"A pot of yellow rice with fish. Do you want some?"

"No. I will eat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?"

"No. I will make it later on. Or I may eat the rice cold."

"May I take the cast net?"

"Of course."

There was no cast net and the boy remembered when they had sold it. But they went through this fiction every day. There was no pot of yellow rice and fish and the boy knew this too.³

The boy does not know at first whether the newspaper the old man presently mentions is also a fiction (p. 18). But he does know, when he brings back the real meal and the old man says he has only needed time to wash, that the village water supply is two streets down the road and that Santiago's ablutions are a fiction (p. 22). This dialogue takes place when we first see the two together, and it colors our understanding of their relationship. Each has part of the other inside himself—the wise child and the ancient youth. Mr. Baker has noticed that the youthful part of the old man's nature—marked by his memory of the boy—recurrently tightens his resolution during his struggle at sea.⁴ And Manolin's sober acceptance in this opening scene of the facts behind the game he plays reminds us that a child's intuitive understanding of the value of pretense is so profound that he never needs to confound fiction and reality. The necessity for such confusion comes with the barrenness of age, and because Santiago has the boy always within him he does not need to identify life with the lottery he is fond of playing. There is no chance of luck (in the practical sense) when one goes out too far, and the old man knows it. Yet the fiction of hope helps one to retain his resolution when the game is lost. And what is of absolute importance to Santiago, El Campeón, is that he must, like the marlin, "pull until he dies" (p. 86); it is the way of a champion, human or fish.

If we remember the calculated fiction which is at the center of this scene between the man and boy, we can see that the last dialogue between them fittingly parallels and complements the first. When the final exchange begins Santiago has at last lost some of his hope. "Now we fish together again," says Manolin, as the old man awakes in his shack the morning after his return. "No. I am not lucky," Santiago answers; "I am not lucky anymore" (p. 137). As he left his boat the night before, the old man had paused: "It was then he knew the depth of his tiredness. He stopped for a moment and looked back and saw in the reflection from the street light the great tail of the fish standing up well behind the skiff's stern" (p. 133). This was the only time in his journey that the old man had looked back, except when his forward progress depended on it (when he was rowing, tending his lines, or fighting sharks). In doing so he had violated the system of iconography set up for him within the book (he sleeps on his face, he huddles with his chin to the bow, he refuses to look at the mutilated rear of the fish and concentrates on the intact forward part, etc.). He had "sinned"—not enough to prevent his fighting his way up the hill to his shack, but enough to weaken his resolution. (In the description of his ensuing sleep, therefore, no mention is made of his dreams; the usual appearance of the young lions would be inappropriate.) Yet the youth within the old man is so close to the surface that it quickly reappears in the presence of the boy. "The hell with luck," the boy says. "I'll bring the luck with me." Santiago responds at once, "What will your family say?" Apparently he is instantly planning another trip: "We must get a good killing lance and always have it on board. You can make the blade from a spring leaf from an old Ford" (pp. 137-138).

But when the boy tells him to get his hands well, the old man answers: "I know how to care for them. In the night I spat something strange and felt something in my chest was broken" (p. 138). There is an arresting lack of coherence between these two sentences. Some connective seems to be demanded; and as we question our reading of the passage we are maneuvered into realizing that here, as often in Hemingway's work, the meaning is in what is omitted.⁵ By leaving out an "and," "but," or even "also" at the beginning of the second sentence, Santiago is at once telling the boy that he knows how to care for the hands, but not for an old man's broken chest, and saying it in such a way as to maintain the ritualistic fiction that binds these two special fishermen together. The boy responds expertly: "Get that well too," he says of the chest. Santiago's implication that he will be able to read the papers of the time that he has been away can be seen to further the fiction, as can the boy's rejoinder that the old man "must get well fast" (p. 138). It is not, therefore, until he goes out the door and down the road on an errand, that the boy abandons his pose and starts "crying again" (p. 139) as he had been before the old man awoke.

Readers have generally supposed that the boy is crying simply because he appreciates the great suffering which is the price of the old man's gallantry, just as they have supposed that the old man will live because in the last paragraph of the story he is "still sleeping" (p. 140). We should keep in mind, though, that the old man has compared his heart to that of the great turtle he loves; it is one which "will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered" (pp. 40-41). This line near the beginning of the book reverberates chiefly in the old man's ability later to fight the sharks even though his palms have been severely lacerated by the fishline. But it also suggests that, given the kind of man he is, it would not be appropriate for us to see him die, even though we have seen him killed.

Indeed, Santiago's death following an apparent return to vitality is rendered aesthetically appropriate by the natural parallels to human experience which provide the structure of the story. The champion marlin retains enough strength after his struggle against the current and the boat to make a great leap as he dies, and Hemingway remarks: "Then the fish came alive, with his death in him" (p. 104, italics mine). The fish has achieved the most intense kind of life by meeting the lance with the same resolute aggression he has shown toward everything else nature has arrayed against him—by having lasted all the way without relaxing the "pain of life" (p. 128) even at the moment of death. And the sharks are to the man what the man, the current, and the lance have been to the fish. Led by the champion mako (who, we notice, will not accept his death, either, and who plows over the water after being fatally stabbed [p. 113]), the sharks are the final, overwhelming natural odds against which a champion must pit himself. Like the fish, however, the man lasts all the way. He fights the sharks until "something" in his chest is broken (as the fish's heart has been pierced by the harpoon) and he notices the "coppery" taste of blood in his mouth (p. 131). Yet in the concluding dialogue we have considered, even as he tells the boy of his broken chest, Santiago undergoes a resurgence of life. Like the marlin and the shark, he comes alive "with his death in him" (p. 104).⁶

Death is the final concomitant of life in a champion's combat with nature, and only by recognizing this fixed connection can we properly understand several passages of the kind critics have ignored or regarded as artistic lapses on Hemingway's part. "Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive," Santiago remarks. "The boy keeps me alive, he thought. I must not deceive myself too much" (p. 117, italics mine). His illusion must remain informed. He must remember not only that his vocation kills him. He must also remember that it is the boy who feeds him and who participates in the daily renewal of commitment that gives meaning to his inevitable death. There are additional lines that appear either cryptic or pompously "literary" otherwise, but that are revealed as specifically portentous and dramatically ironic under the present reading: "I'll fight them until I die," Santiago says of the sharks (p. 128); "Eat that, Galanos. And make a dream you've killed a man," he calls as he spits blood at the last shark to attack, the one to complete his destruction (p. 131). Nor should we forget that it is when he sees the first of the scavenger sharks that Santiago makes the sound, "Ay," "such as a man might make . . . feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood" (p. 118). If the first shark is the beginning of that ordeal which for Christ began with the nail through the hands, Santiago's crucifixion must end as did Christ's—in death. And conversely, once Santiago's fate is seen completely to parallel Christ's, there is less reason to consider the Calvary allusions forced and meretricious.⁷

But as he accepts his fate the fiction he laconically concocts with Manolin helps Santiago to surmount his enervating consciousness of inevitable finality—one of the obstacles to resolution faced only by a human champion. Thus he is able to behave once more like the great unthinking creatures he has opposed, and to pull as though there were no end. Accordingly, when he returns to sleep after his exchange with the boy, and sleeps on as we leave him, the old man is free again to dream of the lions, symbols throughout the story of that youthful confidence which had temporarily diminished the night before. The ritualistic play facilitating his "informed illusion" has done its work.

In failing, therefore, even to consider the element of fiction in the opening dialogue between Santiago and Manolin, and in thus neglecting to see that symmetry alone urges us to read the closing dialogue between them as similar in mode, criticism has done more than miss the subtle revelation of Santiago's imminent death.⁸ It has overlooked telling evidence against the fashionable contention recently echoed by Robert P. Weeks: that in The Old Man and the Sea Hemingway's "view of the world has gone soft."⁹ For we cannot responsibly interpret the second dialogue either as an argument for the possibility of practical survival,¹⁰ or as the celebration of "a cozy universe" where "cosmic camaraderie"¹¹ justifies an indomitability lacking in ironic perspective. We are too clearly invited to see that the old man's plans for a new killing lance are—like his earlier reference to the fictitious food—part of the careful language of the code hero who has had to master a delicate formula for resolute behavior in a natural world where camaraderie kills. Then, too, all other critical issues aside, there is the importance of identifying—in the way these two strategically placed dialogues frame the action, playing against each other and against the rest of the story—yet another of the formal devices operating unobtrusively to unify this extraordinary work of art.

Notes

¹Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1956), p. 273.

² Baker, pp. 293-294.

³The Old Man and the Sea (New York, 1952), p. 17. Page numbers in any text refer to this book.

⁴ Baker, pp. 305-307.

⁵ For recent comment on Hemingway's effects-by-omission, see Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain (New York, 1962), pp. 174-175.

⁶ See my "Hemingway's Extended Vision: The Old Man and the Sea," PMLA, LXXXI (March 1966), 135-136 for the substance of the foregoing paragraph in a different context.

⁷ This is a charge levelled at the story's fable generally, by Philip Toynbee in his review of Hemingway and His Critics, ed. Carlos Baker (New York, 1961) in Encounter, XV I (October 1961), 87.

⁸ To my knowledge only Verne H. Bovie has mentioned the two dialogues (comparing them to the hunting scenes embracing the action of Across the River and Into the Trees), and he concludes that in the story "the preparations made [within] the frame are for life, not death." See "The Evolution of a Myth: A Study of the Major Symbols in the Works of Ernest Hemingway," unpubl. diss. (Pennsylvania, 1955), pp. 254-255.

⁹ "Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea," College English, XXIV (December 1962), 192. For similar objections, although directed more at the story's style than at its vision, see Toynbee (p. 87) and Macdonald (p. 178).

¹⁰ Cf. Green D. Wyrick, "Hemingway and Bergson: The Élan Vital," Modern Fiction Studies, I (August 1955), 19: "The fact that Santiago survives, is happy and ready to fish again, proves for the first time that Hemingway will allow this twentieth century to sustain such men."

¹¹ Weeks, p. 192.