[In the following essay, Baskett provides a detailed analysis of the symbolic detail in The Old Man and the Sea—from biblical allusions to Santiago's aura of "strangeness" — which he says contributes to Hemingway's "fifth dimensional prose," or writing that "communicates the immediate experience of the perpetual now."]

Although the protagonist of The Old Man and the Sea vows "to make a pilgrimage to the Virgen de Cobre if I catch [this fish],"¹ it is unlikely, since "In the night I spat something strange and felt something in my chest was broken" (p. 138), that he will live to keep his promise.² In a sense, however, Hemingway kept it for him, donating his Nobel Medal to the Shrine of our Lady of Charity of Cobre, Patron Saint of Cuba,³ a pilgrimage, it would seem, not necessarily in recognition of a Christian victory, but of a literary victory—the fictional achievement he had ambiguously formulated in Green Hills of Africa. "The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if anyone is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension that can be gotten."⁴

What Hemingway may have meant by this statement, and indeed whether he had a precise meaning in mind, has been the subject of considerable speculation, particularly in regard to a fifth dimension. The most convincing explanation of the term has been offered by F. I. Carpenter, who understands Hemingway's "fifth dimensional prose" as his attempt "to communicate the immediate experience of 'the perpetual now.'" In Hemingway's "best fiction,"

A brief, immediate experience, observed realistically, is described first as it occurred "in our time". . . . this immediate experience recalls individual memories of other, similar experiences, or historic memories of parallel experiences in the history of other nations, or mystical, "racial" memories. . . . And these fragmentary remembrances of similar experiences, by relating the individual to other people, places and times, suggest new meanings and forms. Finally this new awareness of the patterns and meanings implicit in the immediate, individual experience, intensifies it, and gives it a new "dimension" not apparent at the time it actually happened.⁵

Carpenter describes in some detail how this "radical intensification of experience" results in "an ecstasy transcending the traditional limitations of time and self in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but he concludes that it was not until The Old Man and the Sea that "the idea became at last incarnated and the mysticism completely naturalized." Surprisingly, since he saw Santiago's story as Hemingway's most successful effort in this direction, Carpenter was content to leave his statement without substantial development or documentation.⁶ If his judgment is accurate, however, the particulars of "how far prose can be carried" in The Old Man and the Sea —the devices Hemingway used to carry it—should illuminate more fully the achievement in what Faulkner called simply, "His best."⁷ Accordingly, I would like to consider some of the ways by which Hemingway provides a "radical intensification" of Santiago's experience and thus directs The Old Man and the Sea toward the highest literary goal envisaged by the author, a "fifth dimension."

I

This intensification is prepared for by repeated statements which unmistakably invest the old man and his world with an aura of strangeness. He is a "strange old man" (p. 15) with "strange shoulders, still powerful although very old" (p. 19), who fishes "Beyond all people in the world" (p. 55) where he must prove again the strangeness he has proved a thousand times before (p. 73). The light is "strange" (p. 38), the fish is "wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is" (p. 53). Remembering the fish "with his death in him" (p. 104), "he was sure there was some great strangeness and he could not believe it" (p. 109). These statements are reinforced by others throughout the book. The old man "liked to think about all things he was involved in" (p. 116), and he touches again and again upon the question of the strangeness in which he moves, beyond the "clenched surface"⁸ of the novel.

Manolin is the one character who has a significant appreciation of Santiago's difference. "There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only you'" (p. 25). The two times that the boy addresses the old man by his Christian name—"Santiago" occurs only three times in the novel—he is asking to continue the relationship, not merely of learning boy to functioning man, but of novice to master. "'Santiago. . . . I could go with you again'" (p. 10) are his first words. Santiago recognizes the boy's "faith," but he declines, saying he is no longer lucky, although he does accept the substitute "offer" of a beer "on the Terrace" (p. 11). The earth, implied in this name, is "pleasant and sunny" for the time being, since the wind is in the right direction to keep away the smell from the shark factory; and the boy makes another offer. '"Santiago. . . . Can I go out to get sardines for you for tomorrow? . . . I would like to serve in some way'" (p. 12). The special quality which the boy recognizes in Santiago is implicit in these remarks; but this quality is gradually being obscured by the inescapable fact of Santiago's aging. Thereafter, the boy no longer asks to serve a master, but takes charge to protect a loved but weakening man. It is not until the very end that the reverential tone beyond solacing affection is again introduced: "'You must get well fast for there is much that I can learn and you can teach me everything. How much did you suffer?'" (pp. 138-39) There is affectionate compassion in this remark, but there is also Manolin's awareness, emphasized by the apparent non sequitur, that the "everything" involves suffering in a dimension beyond the skillful fishing that the boy has already learned. "'It is what a man must do'" (p. 28), Manolin says on getting up when Santiago awakens him. But Manolin moves toward the understanding that to be the "strange old man" that Santiago is, a "man" must do more.

The "normal" (p. 11) people "down the worn coral rock road" (p. 139)—the old man is "Up the road, in his shack" (p. 140)—have even more difficulty in seeing the special quality of the old man, now that he is no longer able to be "Santiago El Campeón" of the hand game. The "tourists" are pilgrims of the sort who cannot tell a shark from a marlin. The boy's father, whether one of the fishermen who made "fun" of the old man's bad luck, or one of those who were "sad" (p. 11), "'hasn't much faith.'" Moreover, he is so lacking in understanding that he judges by quantity rather than quality of experience. He considers McGraw to be the best manager "'Because he came here the most times,' the old man said. 'If Durocher had continued to come here each year your father would think him the greatest manager'" (pp. 24-25). Even Martin, the charitable owner of the Terrace, is more concerned with the physical fish than the old man. "'What a fish it was. . . . There has never been such a fish.'" Then he adds casually, moving even further away from true cognizance of the dimensions of the old man's exploit, '"Those were two fine fish you took yesterday too.'" "'Damn my fish"' (pp. 135-136), returns Manolin, whose name translates "God with us," his words effectively separating the superficial, even "damned," concerns of the world of the Terrace from the "everything" "Up the road" in the old man's shack.

Thus the explicit remarks of Santiago and Manolin, together with the imperceptiveness of the others, provide abundant suggestion that the old man is somehow more than "normal." His difference is also underscored by what in effect becomes his name: he is rarely the man, but almost always, over two hundred times, the old man. The last eight times Manolin addresses him, it is as "old man." The third and last time he is referred to as "Santiago" it is made clear that he was the old man when he was not an old man: the negro "had the old man, who was not an old man then but was Santago El Campéon, nearly three inches off balance. But the old man had raised his hand up to dead even again" (p. 77). In a number of instances, "oldness" is specifically related to "strangeness." His "strange shoulders" are "very old." The fish is "wonderful and strange and who knows how old." He wishes that he could show the fish "what sort of man I am. . . . Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so." A little later, "But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures. 'I told the boy I was a strange old man,' he said. 'Now is when I must prove it'" (pp. 70-73). Manolin expressly brings all of these related qualities together when following Santiago's early statement, "'I am a strange old man," he responds with another apparent non sequitur that links oldness, strangeness, the natural, the more than natural: '"But are you strong enough now for a truly big fish?'" (p. 15) Later, when Santiago is fishing "Beyond all people in the world," he also unites diverse dimensions in a triple analogy which illuminates the nature of his person and his vocation, an analogy to the fish, to man, and to the "more man than I am," the strange old man he wills to be. "You were born to be a fisherman as the fish was born to be a fish. San Pedro was a fisherman as was the father of the great DiMaggio" (p. 116).

The some two hundred references to Santiago as "the old man" have the cumulative effect of suggesting that he is preternaturally old. Moreover, in the passage just quoted, there is the implication that the old man's struggle acquires meaning from its relation to the struggle of others outside his immediate acquaintance, his country, his vocation, his time, and, through the overtones of the New Testament, his natural dimensions. There are a number of similar passages throughout The Old Man and the Sea which seem designed to extend the implications of Santiago's experience by the use of what might be called unnatural connections. His scars are "as old as erosions in a fishless desert" (p. 10). Just how old are such erosions and why raise the question, in "natural" circumstances, of the fishlessness of a desert? There is no rational answer, but if the scars are as old as the time it has taken to convert a sea with fish into an eroded, fishless desert, the impression has been conveyed that these are more than natural scars. He has proved his strangeness "a thousand times" and now he must again. Such proof seems more than can be expected from one man, an implication reinforced by the millennial echo. The mingling of different dimensions is provocatively suggested by the double simile, "the fish's eye looked as detached as the mirrors in a periscope or as a saint in a procession" (p. 107)—the World War II submarine in the water and in the air, the saint of and not of the world. Santiago feels "that perhaps he was already dead," and twice he assures himself sequentially that he "knew he was not dead" (pp. 128-29), if only from his pain. This blurring of the distinction between life and death is expressed most vividly when "the fish came alive with his death in him." The fish also appears suspended in time and space. "He seemed to hang in the air above the old man in the skiff." Significantly, the previous sentence calls attention to the multiple dimensions of what appears in retrospect as "some great strangeness" (p. 109), for the fish shows "all his great length and width," but more than that, "and all his power and beauty" (p. 104). The experience of the dimensions of a fish that will "keep a man all winter" (p. 122) is intensified by yoking that experience with an appreciation of his "power and beauty," an order transcending mere length and width.

II

In this manner, by various direct Statements and by "poetic" similes and images, Hemingway has made the visible a little hard to see. This suggestiveness of something beyond the immediate eye is closely related, however, to the natural experiences which are happening or have happened to Santiago.⁹ Less immediate to him are several clusters of allusions to traditional accounts of the mystical experience of others. The most striking, both in number and in implication, are the many references to Christ, what has been called the "non-Christian use of Christian symbolism."¹⁰ The Christian resonance of Santiago's struggle would seem to have been so widely discussed as not to require recapitulation. Two major clusters of Biblical allusions have not been recognized, however. They concern the dream of the lions and the reverberations of the old man's apostolic name.

When Santiago wonders why the lions are "the main thing that is left," he answers himself, "Don't think, old man. . . ." His strangeness, his essential quality, is not to be comprehended by thought; it simply is. And so the lions have remained a somewhat personal allusion, more difficult for the reader to enter fully than, say, the traditional allusions, although by now a number of helpful interpretations have been offered. Among the most satisfactory are the different but complementary readings by Carlos Baker and Arvin Wells, who have shown how the lions do function as one of the "main things" of the book. Briefly, Baker sees the lions as having a multiple role. They "carry the associations of youth, strength, and even immortality." Also, "The planned contiguity of the old man with the double image of the boy and the lions pulls the story of Santiago, in one of its meanings, in the direction of a parable of youth and age." Moreover, the repeated references to the lions contribute to the "rhythm" which is based on "stress-yield, brace-relax alternation."

For the boy and the lions are related to one of the fundamental psychological laws of Santiago's—and indeed of human—nature. This is the constant wavelike operation of bracing and relaxation. The boy braces, the lions relax, as in the systolic-diastolic movement of the human heart.¹¹

Arvin Wells suggests that the lions in coming out from the jungle to play on the golden and white beaches "have put aside their majesty and have grown domestic and familiar," indicating

a harmony between the old man and the heroic qualities which the lions possess and the giant marlin possessed and which the old man has sought to realize in himself. Most simply, perhaps, they suggest an achieved intimacy between the old man and the proud and often fierce heart of nature that for him is the repository of values.¹²

In sum, both Baker and Wells point to a vision of harmony in which the lions play a part. But still, in a work in which so much of the symbolism is traditional rather than personal, why are the lions "the main thing that is left," even to the final sentence of the book? The significance of the lions, as a central symbol of the old man's "strangeness"—a strangeness that transcends his personality, his individual sense of the universe—is most apparent in the sequence of three dreams on the second night after he has hooked the marlin. He first dreams of "a vast school of porpoises that stretched for eight or ten miles and it was in the time of their mating" (p. 89)—a dream of birth, of life, of the sea of the title.¹³ "Then he dreamed that he was in the village on his bed and there was a norther and he was very cold and his right arm was asleep because his head had rested on it instead of a pillow"—a dream of the old man and his inevitable natural death, as suggested by the metaphors of coldness and sleep, the malfunctioning of his "good" arm, the anticipation of the final conversation with Manolin, the "heavy brisa" (p. 138), and by the final lines of the book. The third dream follows. "After that he began to dream of the long yellow beach and he saw the first of the lions come down onto it . . . and then the other lions came . . . and he waited to see if there would be more lions and he was happy." He is happy for this is the dream reconciling the separate dreams of life and death, a dream of his faith in an ultimate harmony. Certainly this is a harmony of the old man and nature, of youth and age, of bracing and relaxing, but beyond such reconciliations, a dream of complete harmony consonant not only with the old man's experience and understanding, but also with Isaish's prophecy of a time when "it shall come to pass . . . That the Lord shall set his hand. . . . to recover the remnant of his people . . . (Isaiah 11:11).

And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots:

And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord;

And shall make him of quick understanding, in the fear of the Lord: and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears. . . .

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fading together; and a little child shall lead them.

And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. . . .

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11: 1-3, 6, 7, 9).

The two visions of harmony are clearly not identical: in Santiago's, only the lions play "like young cats" (p. 27) in the presence of the boy Santiago and his love for Manolin—he loved the lions "as he loved the boy"; whereas in Isaiah, a little child leads other animals that "shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain"¹⁴ as well as "the young lion." Hemingway's Biblical allusions are rarely strained into exactness, however, and there is indeed a general resemblance between the two pictures of "a peaceable kingdom"¹⁵ which has, in each instance, materialized out of a situation where fear and discord might have naturally prevailed. Given Hemingway's well-established knowledge of the Bible,¹⁶ the resemblance could scarcely have escaped his attention, even if he did not initially fashion Santiago's dream from that knowledge; and in any event, the loose parallel between the old man's "main thing" and the much larger traditional dream serves to carry Santiago's lions to a dimension beyond the idiosyncratic and the immediate. Two additional echoes of Isaiah in The Old Man and the Sea add weight to the supposition that this Biblical reinforcement and extension of Santiago's dream is intentional. Immanuel, of which Manolin is a derivative, is the prophetic name by which the humanity of the Messiah was revealed to Isaiah (7:14). In this connection, it is interesting to observe again that the lions and the boy are drawn together in an expression of love: "They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy." Moreover, Isaiah's prophecy concerning the "root of Jesse" has bearing on the extension of Santiago's immediate experience, for that "root" was to eventuate in Christ and his disciple, who was possibly his kinsman, the namesake of the old man.

That Santiago is Spanish for Saint James and that Hemingway's character bears a kind of resemblance of the apostle was early established. Baker has pointed up Hemingway's interest in the connection between the two in an informative and discerning statement which also serves to keep before us the fact that Santiago is not a Christian saint in any conventional meaning of the term—here, as throughout, the Biblical overtones are greatly secularized.

For many years prior to the composition of The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway had interested himself in the proposition that there must be a resemblance, in the nature of things, between Jesus Christ in his human aspect as the Son of Man and those countless and often nameless thousands in the history of Christendom who belong to the category of "good men," and may therefore be seen as disciples of Our Lord, whatever the professed degree of their Christian commitment.

Baker thus associates the old man with his namesake as one of those relatively "nameless" "good men" who yet share the "category . . . of disciples." Melvin Backman goes somewhat further: "the old man is more richly endowed than most primitives: bearing the name of Saint James, who was fisherman and martyr, he strangely unites the matador and the crucified."¹⁷ As Hemingway has attempted to enrich the implications of the old man's experience, he has perhaps drawn more on the background of Santiago's namesake than has been appreciated. The Biblical record of Saint James may be quickly summarized. He and his brother John were fishermen, sons of a fisherman, who were called by Jesus to become fishers of men. Considered, with Peter, closer to Christ than the other apostles, they witnessed the Transfiguration on the Mount. They accepted Christ's challenge to "be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with." James was with the other disciples who saw Christ after the Resurrection and presumably was with those who "worshipped him" rather than the "some" who "doubted." And he was martyred "with the sword" by Herod in 44 A.D.

Hemingway has adapted, with varying degrees of explicitness, aspects of each of the above incidents of Saint James's discipleship: the "baptism," the Transfiguration, the Resurrection, and James's martyrdom, key experiences in the life of the Apostle that serve to intensify crises in Santiago's secular struggle. Matthew gives the story of the mother of James and John requesting of Christ that her sons might sit on his right and left hand in his kingdom.

But Jesus answered and said, Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? They say unto him, we are able.

And he saith unto them, Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with . . . (Matthew 20: 22-23).

Much earlier in A Farewell to Arms, as many have observed, Hemingway had used the rite of baptism to suggest the change in Fred Henry's life. In The Old Man and the Sea, the imagery is again explicit.

Then the fish came alive, with his death in him, and rose high out of the water showing all his great length and width and all his power and his beauty. He seemed to hang in the air above the old man in the skiff. Then he fell into the water with a crash that sent spray over the old man and over all the skiff (p. 104).

Immediately following, "The old man felt faint and sick and he could not see well" (p. 104), but he calls himself to the task. "'Get to work, old man,' he said. He took a very small drink of water" (p. 106). He is now able to reach the fish which

had turned silver from his original purple and silver, and the stripes showed the same pale violet colour as his tail. They were wider than a man's hand with his fingers spread . . . (pp. 106-07).

The entire passage thus not only contains reminiscences of Christ's challenge of baptism to James and John but also images somewhat suggestive of a transfiguration. Wells has noted "The transfiguration that is at the heart of the story," but he emphasizes that it "is no Christian mystery; it is 'in the manner of it,' fundamentally and essentially pagan." Yet, he adds, "This is not to say that there isn't something of the Christian saint about Santiago," indicated by his true humility and his Franciscan concern with the small bird. More pointedly, the "pagan" manner includes a variation of aspects of Matthew's account of the Transfiguration, which suggest additional implications to the experience Santiago is undergoing. These aspects include color, the cloud, the fear and consequently impaired vision of the disciples in the face of the mystery they are encountering, and the promise of healing.

And [Jesus] was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. . . .

While he yet spake, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.

And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their face, and were sore afraid.

And Jesus came and touched them, and said, Arise and be not afraid.

And when they had lifted up their eyes, they saw no man, save Jesus only. (Matthew 17: 2, 5-8).

The imagery used to describe the "great strangeness" Santiago encounters is at once in keeping with the state of mind of the three disciples and with the natural circumstance in which the old man finds himself. As soon as he has cleared the harpoon line following the death of the fish, "and let it run slowly through his raw hand," he sees that

the sea was discolouring with the red of the blood from [the fish's] heart. First it was dark as a shoal in the blue water that was more than a mile deep. Then it spread like a cloud. The fish was silvery and still and floated with the waves.

The old man looked carefully in the glimpse of vision that he had (p. 104).

When the fish is tied to the skiff, Santiago reflects,

At one time when he was feeling so badly toward the end, he had thought perhaps it was a dream. Then when he had seen the fish come out of the water and hang motionless in the sky before he fell, he was sure there was some great strangeness and he could not believe it. Then he could not see well, although now he saw as well as ever.

Now he knew there was the fish and his hands and back were no dream. The hands cure quickly, he thought. I bled them clean and the salt water will heal them. The dark water of the true gulf is the greatest healer that there is (p. 109).

Thus the "transfiguration" witnessed by Santiago, although impressive—"he could not believe it"—remains natural. And such healing as he will experience will come from the "cloud" of "the dark water of the true gulf," not the voice of God announcing the advent of His Son.

The echo of Saint James's martyrdom is both more explicit and more conjectural since the connection largely depends on the reading of the express sword imagery used to describe the big Mako shark—recalling Saint James's execution by Herod "with the sword" (Acts 12:2)—although the motifs of the matador and the crucified are also significant here. Everything about the shark suggests cutting as he is described:

His back was as blue as a sword fish's and his belly was silver and his hide was smooth and handsome. He was built as a sword fish except for his huge jaws which were tight shut now as he swam fast, just under the surface with his high dorsal fin knifing through the water without wavering Inside the closed double lip of his jaws all of his eight rows of teeth were slanted inwards. . . . They were shaped like a man's fingers when they are crisped like claws. They were nearly as long as the fingers of the old man and they had razorsharp cutting edges on both sides (p. 111).

Although the description is of a shark attacking a fish, the suggestion of the martyrdom is strengthened by the human qualities given the shark and by Santiago's transference of the attack to himself. "I cannot keep him from hitting me but maybe I can get him"; and later, "When the fish had been hit it was as though he himself were hit" (pp. 112-13. Italics added).

Yet another possible Jacobean reinforcement of Santiago's experience is implicit in a passage constituting a variation on the theme of Christ's appearance to the disciples after the Resurrection: "And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted." (Matthew 28: 17) The essential theme of this final passage of the book following the old man's return after three days is the possible resolution of conflicting "worship" and doubt. This scene has been carefully prepared for in the initial exchange of Manolin and Santiago when the boy offers to go with him again, although it has been eighty-four days since he has caught a fish. He reminds Santiago that earlier he had gone eighty-seven days without fish before catchiung "big ones" every day for three weeks.

"I remember," the old man said. "I know you did not leave me because you doubted."

"It was papa made me leave. I am a boy and I must obey him."

"I know," the old man said. "It is quite normal."

"He hasn't much faith."

"No," the old man said. "But we have. Haven't we?" (pp. 10-11)

Santiago, like Saint James, does have faith, even after eighty-four days of failure; he is not one who doubted. Nor is the boy, at least as he attempts to appear to Santiago. "Yes," he answers immediately and makes the "offer" of a beer. "'Why not?' the old man said." Then, showing his understanding of the boy's brave front of faith in the face of doubt in the old man's remaining strength—perhaps a fiction he is going through every day—Santiago adds gently, "'Between fishermen.'" The issue of faith and doubt in Santiago's ability to continue to function as a fisherman, which was resolved once before after eighty-seven days, is once more at hand.

This scene lays the base for Manolin's attitude toward Santiago on his return, and the two scenes are connected by Hemingway's apparently arbitrary manipulation of days. Santiago, without fish for eighty-four days, hooks the marlin on the eighty-fifth day, brings him to the boat at noon on the eighty-seventh day, goes through the suffering with the sharks, and returns after midnight of the eighty-seventh day without fish. Returning "in the dark . . . he felt that perhaps he was already dead" (p. 128), and he thinks about those who may have "worried." "There is only the boy to worry, of course. But I am sure he would have confidence. Many of the older fishermen will worry. Many others too, he thought" (p. 127). The faith, on whatever level implied by the conversation between Manolin and Santiago, that had been tested by eighty-seven fishless days before, must be tested now, after another eighty-seven days, when the old man returns. Faith, despite fishless days, is Santiago's goal—and perhaps the "everything" that Manolin believes he can learn from him (p. 139)—hence the scars that "were as old as erosions in a fishless desert" (p. 10). The motif of the mystical Resurrection has been translated into Santiago's return from the sea after three days. But informing the final conversation between Manolin and the old man are the issues expressed by the disciples toward the Resurrection—in what sense has there been a reappearance? Both Santiago and Manolin are resolved not to doubt. Despite Santiago's acknowledgement that he has been beaten and despite Manolin's tears which indicate his awareness of the impending death, they both contemplate the future opened up, their shared faith will have it, by the return.

These naturalized echoes of aspects of the mystical experience of Saint James are characteristically only vaguely evocative of the Biblical passages. In particular, the scenes involving general implications of the Resurrection are as loosely suggestive of Christ as they are of Saint James. Yet the significance of these loose allusions lies in their provocative vagueness as they serve to intensify the sense of awe implicit in Santiago's realization of "some great strangeness and he could not believe it." With other aspects of the novel they function to elevate a story of an attempt to catch a fish into something beyond Hemingway's initial 1936 account, a telling that remained "in our time."¹⁸

III

The dimensions of Santiago's struggle are augmented by one other aspect of his name. In 1927 Hemingway spent the last two weeks in August in Santiago de Compostela, which he called "the loveliest town in Spain."

He watched the small hawks hunting in the deep shadows at the top of the nave of the cathedral and was amused when a peasant woman hurried up to him and asked where she should go to eat the body of Jesus. "Right over there, lady," said Ernest delightedly.

Two summers later he was back for an even longer visit. Although he complained about the level of the trout streams in the mountains, he was much affected by his stay. In September, after visiting Chartres, he wrote that it had seemed "'a pretty cold proposition' to one who had spent most of August near the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela."¹⁹

Given these two extended visits and his appreciative awareness of the Cathedral, Hemingway must have been entirely familiar with the stories of the journey of Saint James to Galicia following his martyrdom, the miraculous discovery of his relics in the ninth century, the proclamation of the Apostle as the Patron Saint of all Spain by Alfonso II, and the subsequent miracles performed against the Moors in which in one battle the Saint, having undergone a kind of resurrection, single-handedly slew sixty thousand Moors, eventually becoming known as Santiago Matamores, "the Moor-slayer." In the conquest of New Granada, the Spanish were accompanied by the Saint, many of the galleons bearing his name on their bows. "Santiago" was the war-cry of the Spaniards used against the Indians, and the Apostle was even seen in battle on horseback. Cortez rallied his forces in Mexico with "Santiago y a ellos" (Saint James and at 'em").²⁰ There would seem to be little of this war-like Saint, so different from the Biblical Saint James, in the Cuban fisherman, except for the dreams of "fights" (p. 27), the memory of the hand contests, and his implacable determination to kill not only the sharks but also the great fish. It is worth noting, moreover, that Santiago is the Patron Saint of Spain and that the old man in a most literal sense is directly related to the successes against the Moors and on the Spanish Main under the aegis of Santiago Matamores.

But the Spanish version of the Apostle is not solely militant. He is also the Pilgrim whose sanctuary has been the goal of such masses of pilgrims that their progress along the network of routes from all of Europe as well as England to Compostela was said to resemble the stars of the Milky Way. Dante, in fact, writes in the Vita Nuova that "in the narrow sense, none is called a pilgrim save he who is journeying towards the sanctuary of St. James of Compostela or is returning therefrom." After the sixteenth century there was a decline in the prestige of Santiago de Compostela, and the place of the relics seems to have been lost sight of. In 1884, however, Pope Leo XIII issued an Apostolic Letter confirming the rediscovery of the relics and the validity of the Spanish Jacobean story; and since that date the pilgrimages "have grown in popularity not only in Galicia, but also throughout the Catholic World." In 1940, Pope Pius XII stated that after the Tabernacle, Palestine and Rome,

there is perhaps no place where all through the centuries such a number of devout pilgrims have gathered as the historical capital of Galicia, Santiago de Compostela, where according to an ancient tradition rest the relics of the Apostle St. James.

Again, in 1948, the Pope

recalled the ancient rites of Compostela, saying that so far from being relegated to a historical memory the pilgrimages to St. James had been made a reality by the faith of the young people of today: "And thus it had to be; because if the pilgrim was an indispensable figure on the chess board of the mediaeval world; if the pilgrimage had then the noble function of consolidating the people's faith, of drawing together the most divergent nations, of relieving the unfortunate and comforting all, surely amid the vast sorrows and sufferings of the present hour they will continue to be a blessing for the world.

The devout pilgrims who have come to the Patron Saint of Spain, then, have sought communion with a victim who has passed beyond suffering, rather than support from the violent Moorslayer and Indian killer of previous eras. Starkie describes Santiago's statue at the Gate of Glory "which for the past hundred years has been the Portus Quietis of countless pilgrims after their weary tramping along the Jacobean road." In contrast to the majestic, impressive statue of Christ, "At the feet of our Lord sits St. James the Apostle leaning on a tau-staff. His throne rests on the backs of lions, but under his bare feet is green grass, and in contrast to the remote majesty of the Saviour, he is benign in expression."

Santiago is indeed "richly endowed" with the Biblical name of Saint James as Backman has observed, and in both there can be seen the "strangely united" motifs of the matador and the crucified; but most immediately he bears the name of the Spanish Saint James, Santiago de Compostela, Moorslayer and Pilgrim, who even more explicitly than the Biblical Saint combines these motifs:

The matador represents a great force held in check, releasing itself in a controlled yet violent administering of death. The crucified stands for the taking of pain, even unto death, with all of one's courage and endurance so that it becomes a thing of poignancy and nobility.

IV

In sum, then, although it may not be possible to say with finality that Hemingway meant by "a fifth dimension" the communication of "the perpetual now," it is possible to point to a number of rather dramatic albeit deeply imbedded devices in The Old Man and the Sea by which the author suggests "another intensity" in which the old man moves. The Biblical and Spanish reverberations of his Christian name, the allusion to Isaiah's vision of harmony, the direct and indirect rhetorical suggestions of "strangeness" are some of the ways by which the prose carries Santiago's experience beyond "the captive now"²¹ of Hemingway's early heroes. But Hemingway's technique in pointing toward the ultimate dimensions of Santiago's experience is not always this dramatic. Perhaps his simplest device to imply the full nature of that experience is one that also adds weight to Carpenter's thesis that Hemingway was attempting to communicate "the perpetual now." That device is the word now, repeatedly used in contexts that extend it beyond the temporal limitations of the immediate moment. Carpenter has called attention to the passage in For Whom the Bell Tolls when the hero generalizes concerning the ecstatic union with Maria he has experienced with the resultant substitution of "the value of intensity . . . for that of duration." Robert Jordan speculates:

I suppose it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years; granted that your life has been full up to the time that the seventy hours start and that you have reached a certain age. . . .

So if your life trades its seventy years for seventy hours I have that value now and I am lucky enough to know it. . . . If there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise. . . . Now, ahora, maintenant, heute.

The "now" of the seventy hours²² of a "very old" man is praised less directly, more subtly and more extensively in The Old Man and the Sea than in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The word now is used some sixty times in a short book. Well over half of the usages emphasize the word by its position at the beginning of a sentence; over a quarter by its position at the beginning of a paragraph. Far from an unobtrusive neutral adverb, in Hemingway's handling the word becomes, although still unobtrusive so carefully is it woven into the text, almost a refrain signalling the immediate yet far-reaching dimensions of the old man's present experience. The meaning of the term is never pointed to, as in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The more subtle cumulative effect builds throughout the story, but individual provocative instances in which the word seems to carry substantive as well as adverbial connotations may be cited.

Then he could not see well, although now he saw as well as ever.

Now he knew there was the fish and his hands and back were no dream (p. 109).

Now, he said to himself. Look to the lashing on the knife. . . . Then get your head in order because there still is more to come (p. 121).

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is (p. 122).

But in the dark now and no glow showing and no lights and only the wind and the steady pull of the sail he felt that perhaps he was already dead (p. 128).

Now it is over, he thought (p. 130).

He knew he was beaten now finally . . . (p. 131).

He was past everything now . . . (p. 132).

Now (Manolin said) we must make our plans. . . . Now we fish together again." (p. 137) (Italics added)

As evidenced in some of the instances above, the refrain is reinforced by a similar emphasis on another adverb of time, then, often occurring in the same context as now, a total of some fifty usages, with over four-fifths of these beginning a sentence. On one page, "Then the fish came alive. . . . Then he fell into the water. . . . Then (the blood) spread like a cloud" (p. 104). The effect of this subdued but nonetheless insistent contrapuntal emphasis on then and now is to blend the two together, to bring the outside to the center, to extend the immediate moment beyond itself.

Contrasting the original two-hundred-word "On the Blue Water" with The Old Man and the Sea, Baker observed, "What makes the difference is the manner of the narration." I have called attention to certain distinctive aspects of that manner which serve to carry the prose of the finished work of art from the limited, three-dimensional world of the anecdote. To his praise of that work as Hemingway's "best," Faulkner added, "This time, he discovered God, a Creator." Whereas previously Hemingway's "men and women had made themselves. . . . this time he wrote about pity: about something somewhere that made them all"—the old man, the fish, the sharks. Faulkner concluded, "It's all right. Praise God that whatever made and loves and pities Hemingway and me kept him from touching it any further." Such "discovery" as Hemingway made in The Old Man and the Sea, however, is integrally related to that skillful "touching"—"tricks" Santiago might have called it—Hemingway's craft in suggesting, without ever leaving the three dimensions, another dimension, which Faulkner recognized in his own terminology.

Notes

¹ Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (New York: Scribner's, 1952), p. 71. Subsequent references are in the text.

² See Bickford Sylvester, "'They Went Through this Fiction Every Day': Informed Illusion in The Old Man and the Sea." Modern Fiction Studies, 12 (Winter 1966-67), 473-77. To the convincing evidence cited by Sylvester as indicative of the approaching death, I would add that the last two times Manolin addresses Santiago as "old man," he in effect gives a requiescat. "'Lie down, old man. . . . Rest well, old man'" (pp. 138-39). Only these two times is "old man" set off from the rest of Manolin's address by a comma, a detail adding a further note of finality after he learns that "something . . . (is) broken" in the old man's chest. See pp. 19, 20, 26, 29, 30, 138, 139.

³ Leo J. Hertzel, "Hemingway and the Problem of Belief," The Catholic World, 184 (October 1956), Editor's Note, 30.

⁴ Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (New York: Scribner's, 1935), pp. 26-27.

⁵ Frederic I. Carpenter, "Hemingway Achieves the Fifth Dinension," in Hemingway and His Critics, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), pp. 193 ff. Carpenter traces the definition of "the fifth dimension" as "the perpetual now" back to P. D. Ouspensky in 1931. He notes that Ouspensky, "a mystic, was an admirer of Bergson and of William James," and that all were concerned with "the difference between psychological time and physical time." Moreover, Gertrude Stein, who had been a pupil of James, "had adapted [these ideas] for literary purposes." The strongest evidence, however, that Hemingway had followed this pattern of ideas is "internal."

⁶ Carpenter notes generally that "the exact techniques of fishing make real the occasional mysticism of The Old Man and the Sea. . . . Santiago . . . performing realistically the ritual techniques of his trade, goes on to identify the intensity of his own suffering with that of the great fish he is slaying" (pp. 200-01).

⁷ William Faulkner, "Review of The Old Man and the Sea," Shenandoah, 3 (Autumn 1952), 55.

⁸ Nathan Scott finds Hemingway "at bottom, a 'spiritual writer,' for the drama being enacted just beneath the clenched surfaces of his fiction is that of the soul's journey in search of God." Ernest Hemingway (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1966), p. 40.

⁹ Following Hemingway's comment about "a fourth and fifth dimension" in Green Hills of Africa, Kandisky says, '"But that is poetry you are talking about.'" Hemingway rejoins, "'No. It is much more difficult than poetry. It is a prose that has never been written. But it can be written, without tricks and without cheating. With nothing that will go bad afterwards'" (p. 27). Carlos Baker has observed that "The Dichtung in Hemingway might be provisionally defined as the artist's grasp of the relationship between the temporal and the eternal," Hemingway. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press), p. 290.

¹⁰ Arvin R. Wells, "A Ritual of Transfiguration: The Old Man and the Sea," The University Review, 30 (Winter 1963), 100.

¹¹ Baker, Hemingway, pp. 308 ff.

¹² Wells, p. 101.

¹³ An earlier reference to a male and a female porpoise around the boat anticipates this dream. "'They are good,' he said. 'They play and make jokes and love one another. They are our brothers like the flying fish'" (p. 53). This scene of harmony and love is interrupted, however, by his memory of the hooking of a female marlin whose mate remained with her until she had been killed and hoisted aboard. "That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. The boy was sad too and we begged her pardon and butchered her promptly" (p. 55).

¹⁴ In this context, perhaps the "holy mountain" has some bearing on "the great brown mountains" (p. 27) of Africa down from which the young lions come into Santiago's vision. The echo also extends vaguely, but provocatively, it might be suggested, back to Green Hills of Africa in which Hemingway declared his belief that prose could be carried to "a fifth dimension," as was noted previously.

¹⁵ Isaiah's vision was the subject of repeated pictures by Edward Hicks (1780-1849), whose widely known works gained him the title, "Painter of the Peaceable Kingdom." See Alice Ford, Edward Hicks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952).

¹⁶ During high school, Marcelline Hemingway Sanford has reported, she and her brother entered a Bible reading contest. "We passed a detailed test on the Bible reading and we both learned a lot." At the Hemingways (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962), pp. 134-35.

¹⁷ Melvin Backman, "Hemingway: The Matador and the Crucified." Modern Fuction Studies, 1 (August 1955), 11.

¹⁸ Baker states that Santiago's story was "outlined" in "On the Blue Water," published in Esquire, April, 1936. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner's, 1969), p. 339.

¹⁹ Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, pp. 186, 203-05.

²⁰ Walter Starkie, The Road to Santiago (London: John Murray, 1957), pp. 16 ff.

²¹ Sean O'Faolain, The Vanishing Hero (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956), p. 142.

²² In addition to the fact that Santiago's age, since he is "very old" yet still strong, might approximate the Biblical three score and ten, his experience at sea lasts for approximately seventy hours. He leaves with the other fishermen and returns somewhat before that time of morning, after midnight and after "the lights of the Terrace were out" (p. 133) three days later.