Research Master’s Literary Studies
Graduate Thesis
2018
A Modernist Moral Equilibrium: The Ethics and Literature of the American
Expatriates in 1920s Paris
P. J. M. Bond
A Modernist Moral Equilibrium:
The Ethics and Literature of the American Expatriates in 1920s Paris
by
P. J. M. Bond
Supervisor: Dhr. dr. A.K. Mohnkern Second reader: Dhr. dr. J. S. Gledhill
Date of submission: 15 June 2018 Student no.: 10268286
Tel.: +316 4164 6315
Abstract: Inspired by Martha C. Nussbaum’s claim that realistic novels are more adequate at expressing
moral standpoints than certain abstract and analytic philosophical works are, this thesis argues that the modernist writings of the American expatriates living in Paris of the 1920s — or the Lost Generation — offer a particular approach to morality and ethics. Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) are taken to offer a modernist moral equilibrium, which aspires to balance man’s capacity for selfhood, for action, and for a Jamesian “felt life” with the “modern condition” of mankind (or the abyssal qualities of post-war “bare life”).
Keywords: Modernism, Morality, Lost Generation, Non-Conceptual Ethics, Moral Equilibrium
This MA thesis was written in accordance with the thesis and plagiarism guidelines stipulated by the University of Amsterdam: http://student.uva.nl/mlit/az/item/thesis-regulations.html.
Table of Contents
Introduction……….…………..……….….……….…………..4
i. Ethics and Literature………..……….4
ii. The American Expatriates in 1920s Paris.…….…….……….………..…6
iii. Modernism and Morality………..………8
Chapter I: The Secularization of Violence and Death in A Farewell to Arms……….…11
i. Writing Truly..……….……..………11
ii. The Legitimacy of Violence in the Retreat of Caporetto……….……..………..13
iii. “They” and the Modern Condition.………16
iv. Hemingway’s Anti-Idealism……..……….……….20
Chapter II: Post-War Morality in The Sun Also Rises……….……….24
i. A Crippled Generation.……….………24
ii. Nature and Natural Man..………..……….……….………27
iii. Jake Barnes’s Moral Epiphany………..……….…30
iv. “How to Live in It”……….32
Chapter III: Non-Conceptual Ethics in The Great Gatsby.……….………35
i. The Imperfectability of Moral Man………..………..…………..…35
ii. The Morality of Fiction……….………..………….…38
iii. Beyond the Commentary………40
Conclusion……….……….…………..43
i. The Modernist Moral Equilibrium………43
ii. One-Hundred Years After the Lost Generation………44
Introduction
i. Ethics and Literature
Ever since Martha C. Nussbaum published her collection of essays in Love’s Knowledge (1990), the question of whether, and if so, how, literature can improve our sense of morality has resurged as the subject of much debate. Nussbaum claims that realistic novels are more adequate at expressing certain moral views than conceptual, ‘armchair’ approaches to ethics are, and that therefore the study of these novels belongs within moral philosophy: “I imagine, instead, a future in which our talk about literature will return, increasingly, to a concern with the practical—to the ethical and social questions that give literature its high importance in our lives. […] In short, a future in which literary theory (while not forgetting its many other pursuits) will also join with ethical theory in pursuit of the question, “How should one live?” ” (Love’s Knowledge 168). The two main philosophical protagonists of Nussbaum’s argument are Aristotle and Henry James. Aristotle, for his focus on human nature, and his insistence on the singularity of a humanity that does not generally live in accordance with those ‘false’ premises of abstract and principle-based approaches to moral, social and political thought — as untied to, and unnourished by “the realities of concrete individual lives” (Diamond 140). In other words, those ethical convictions which inspire Nussbaum’s appeal to “particularity,” on the one hand, and her formulation of a “perceptive equilibrium,” on the other (Love’s Knowledge 168-194). Such an approach refutes a Kantian ethics (which Nussbaums links to John Rawls’s “reflective equilibrium” (174)), and a Benthamite utilitarianism, in favour of appreciating the complexity of the whole of moral relations — a “happy though perplexed immersion in the adventure of living” (180) — which cannot be resolved a priori, but require an actual involvement in moral life, whereby “the end is practice, not just theory” (173).
The American author Henry James emerges as the logical pioneer of such an equilibrium for his elaborations on the connection between moral activity and the creative imagination of the artist — between moral life and moral language —, as well as for his focus on the importance of any novelist’s immersion into a “felt life.” In his preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1881), James remarks the following:
There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth in this connexion [between morality and the novel] than that of the perfect dependence of the ‘moral’ sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist’s prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its ability to ‘grow’ with due freshness and straightness any vision of life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected morality. That element is but another name for the more or less close connexion of the subject with some mark made on the intelligence, with some sincere experience. (6-7; my emphasis)
Joseph Riddel (1965) explains that “James found the moral sense dependent on, if not identical to, the aesthetic sense” (332), and as such, the author has a moral responsibility, for the fictional method of imagination may act as a test case for different modes of moral experience. Consequently, Nussbaum
considers Henry James to embody an Aristotelian view, for in his novels, the intellectual judgment of modern moral man relies on a perceptive evaluation of a good life, (which Nussbaum finds personified in the adventurous, warm-hearted protagonist of James’s The Ambassadors (1903), Lambert Strether) rather than on a rational, principled, cold and detached judgment of rights and wrongs (as personified in The Ambassadors by Mrs. Newsome, who is “all fine cold thought,” “impervious to surprise, idealistic and exceptionless in her justice” (Love’s Knowledge 176)). 1
Nussbaum’s interest in different modes of engagement with morality as offered by philosophy, aesthetics, and literature has invited many contemporary critics to enter the debate, such as R. M. Hare, Cora Diamond, Hilary Putnam, Richard Wollheim and Alasdair MacIntyre, and not everyone agrees with Nussbaum’s claim. In the past, too, we find disagreement, for instance in Oscar Wilde: “[t]here is no such 2
thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray). However, Nussbaum’s claim for a marriage between ethics and literature cannot simply be dispelled, for it offers literature as superseding (moral) philosophy at its best, and offers us new insights into the plethora of gestures, manners and approaches to morality that make up society at large, at its worst. After all, well-written works of fiction — or well-made artworks in general — are never just there, they confront us with an immersion into the world conceived by their creator, or provide contrasts to our personal convictions. Also, they may lead us to empathize with its characters, or to cope with the messy morality of certain tricky situations, thus offering moral, creative, or philosophical insights in different ways than certain theoretical, abstract works do. As such, literature continues where the limits of moral philosophy lie, namely in the particular application of the good life, whereby man’s moral sensitivity determines their ethical convictions, rather than their detached, abstract assessments of hypothetical situations. This is one of the main claims of this thesis, and it shall be tested by means of the literary canon of a group of writers that was particularly concerned with the morally complicated — and ethically challenging — spirit of their times. The American expatriate authors living in post-war Paris of the 1920s were pre-occupied with “the
Cf. Bethurum, “Morality and Henry James” (1923); Reilly, “Henry James and the Morality of Fiction” (1967).
1
Cf. R. M. Hare (1954), who considers that “no work of fiction can be about a concrete individual,” and famously
2
remarks that “[w]hat are novels anyway but universal prescriptions?” (qtd. from Diamond 129). By contrast, Cora Diamond (1993) insists that the novel as a philosophical text might offer new possibilities for thought, for novels proceed to engage in “the shaping of the language of particularity” (153), there where “ordinary philosophical language” might fail to “look beyond” (“Martha Nussbaum and the Need for Novels 152). Cf. Putnam (1983), who condemns Nussbaum “derogatory attitude” towards rules and the Kantian account (“Taking Rules Seriously: A Response to Martha Nussbaum” 193), and considers that Kant’s two main normative, ethical principles — the formal (categorical) imperative, and the principle of the highest good — are in fact productive tools to formulate (an idealistic) morality. What is more, Putnam alerts us that “the work of fiction must not be confused with the “commentary” ” (199), echoing Richard Wollheim’s (1983) critique of Nussbaum’s reading of James’s The Golden Bowl, and of the plausibility of literature as moral philosophy in general. Cf. Richard Posner in “Against Ethical Criticism” (1997), who similarly insists on the “separation of the moral from the aesthetic” (2); if literature could make us better people and could act as “a source of insight into human nature and social interactions” (9), then judges and lawyers should be forced to read literature in order to increase their knowledge of human nature. Contrary to Nussbaum, James, or Diamond then, Posner considers that “[t]here is neither evidence nor a theoretical reason for a belief that literature provides a straighter path to knowledge about man and society than other sources of such knowledge, including writings in other fields, such as history and science, and interactions with real people” (9-10).
ever-recurrent problem of the artist in the modern world—or, in broader and more humanistic terms, the role of the artistic conscience in a world from which an absolute order, and even most of the provisional forms, have defected” (Riddel 335). Indeed, this Lost Generation (as these expatriates came to be known) had become suspicious of the possibility of moral certainty, and with the visions that the novelist provides in the spiritual and moral waste land that comprised post-war society, with some of its most famous representatives being Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald (and of course Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, Sinclair Lewis, and Malcolm Cowley, alongside many others). The works of the Lost Generation are particularly fascinating from a literary-critical perspective because their attitudes to philosophical, ethical and aesthetic problems — as well as their explorations of the general tensions between philosophical and literary-critical approaches to morality — arose in a time of moral crisis, and as such, offer invaluable insights into at least two important questions. First of all, into the question of how reading the literature and poetry of the American expatriates may be useful in the process of interpreting morality and the possibility of living a “good life” (both in their own time, and in the 21st century), and
secondly, how such a reading helps us to understand how works of fiction and poetry contribute to moral-philosophical debates in general.
ii. The American Expatriates in 1920s Paris
In Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, a young writer finds himself transported to the slopes of the Parisian Montparnasse of the 1920s, and sits across Ernest Hemingway in restaurant Le Polidor, where the two continue to discuss their shared struggles as aspiring authors. Gil Pender (portrayed by Owen Wilson) is led by Hemingway through the dimly lit streets of the Latin Quarter, until they end up in an elegant soirée, where Cole Porter plays “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love)” in the background, and where Pender shakes hands with F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, both notoriously drunk. Scattered throughout Paris we find James Joyce, Salvador Dalí, Djuna Barnes, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Henri Matisse; and Pender is privileged enough to discuss literature with Gertrude Stein in her studio at 27 rue de Fleurus, poetry with T. S. Eliot, painting with Pablo Picasso and writing with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, only to wake up and find out his nocturnal adventures were physically unreal, but were mentally as real as anything. If anything, Woody Allen’s film demonstrates the persistent pull of the 1920s Jazz Age Paris: its rowdy nightlife, the ambient and good-natured atmosphere of its fashionable (and less fashionable) cafes, and most importantly, its flamboyant inhabitants: a generation of young American “exiles” who saw in the capital of France a new aesthetic frontier.
Paris intrigued these American expatriates, not only because of its history and intellectual inhabitants, but also for its financial situation and prospects: they “live[d] and work[ed] under the benison of twelve francs to the dollar” (Baker 19). Indeed, for any broke, and determined artist trying to make a living off their craft, post-war Paris was the place to be. However, much of the extravagant self-indulgence that characterized the Parisian lifestyle was also a means for a generation to discover their identity, and to reassert their position in a world torn by the Great War, which had engulfed Europe between 1914 and 1918.
Gertrude Stein famously deemed these American expatriates to be a “lost generation,” for they were all young people who appeared disillusioned, blown off balance, and painfully “conscious of belonging nowhere,” as John Peale Bishop writes in “The Missing All” (1937). But they were also the first real literary 3
generation as such: “[t]here had been groups before, but they were not united by a communion of youth, a sense of experiences shared and enemies encountered simply because they happened to have been born within certain years” (§5). These authors and poets were jointly forced to confront the question of “how to live a good life” anew, now that the years between 1914 and 1918 had exposed war to be senseless and gruesome, rather than glorious and laudable, and death in war to be utterly meaningless.
Indeed, World War I had been unlike any other conflict before it: “in place of fire there was mud; in place of heroes there were faceless masses of men butchering each other with little or none of the personal tests celebrated in epics reaching back to the origins of language itself. There were no identifiable gestures of nobility in this war,” (8) as Stanley Cooperman writes in World War I and the American Novel. Its scale dwarfed all previous wars” (376), writes David Lundberg (1984), and, due to its industrial and technological character, “[v]ictory was gained not by individual acts of bravery or heroism but by the use of machines— artillery, machine guns, tanks” (“The American Literature of War” 376). As a result, a new literary mindset was required after World War I:
New forms of writing were needed. Indeed, a new literary consciousness was required. […] Gone were the lofty sentiments and inflated rhetoric of the Victorian and Edwardian periods which glorified war and sanctified death. War was now portrayed as horrible and senseless; death as brutal and meaningless. Suffering and destruction were described in an ironic, detached manner. A mood of bitterness and outrage ran through all these writings. (Lundberg 377)
American and British World War I literature became rather suspicious of the glories previously ascribed to war, and basically of all transcendental orders and principles. This suspicion was further invigorated by the fact that some of its authors perished while fighting in the European trenches, thus sealing their aesthetic lament. Wilfred Owen, for instance, whose poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” ends with the lines: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori” (25-28). Hemingway echoes Owen’s sentiment in a bitter poem called “Champs d’Honneur,” written for Poetry Magazine in 1923:
Soldiers never do die well; Crosses mark their places— Wooden crosses where they fell,
Stuck above their faces.
Cf. Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (posthumously published in 1964) on how Gertrude Stein adopted this term after
3
hearing a Parisian garagekeeper ascribe a young, blundering mechanic to une génération perdue. “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.” “Really?” I said. “You are,” she insisted. “You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death…” ” (61).
Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch— All the world roars red and black; Soldiers smother in a ditch,
Choking through the whole attack.4
Similarly, Fitzgerald expresses a Nietzschean nihilism in This Side of Paradise (1920): “Here was a new generation […] grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken . . .” (261). 5
The survivors of a war-fighting generation had hit moral bedrock, and were left with the rudiments of a bygone morality, after so many young people appeared to have died for no discernible purpose whatsoever. “The war made the traditional morality in-acceptable,” Bishop writes, “it did not annihilate it; it revealed its immediate inadequacy. So that at its end, the survivors were left to face, as they could, a world without values” (“The Missing All” §7). Such was the gargantuan task faced by the Lost Generation as they emerged from the hollowness and hopelessness of a belligerent quadrennium and slid into the Roaring Twenties: the moral questions that encumbered their minds, as well as the post-war disillusionment with which they had become infused, required new approaches to ethics and aesthetics, new attitudes to death and violence, and finally, new perspectives on how to live, and how to write about life.
iii. Modernism and Morality
After 1918, all orders of legitimacy, no matter whether political, moral, or psychological, had become questionable, and had come to a point of crisis. As a result, many critics and philosophers saw the Great War as the inauguration of a new era, such as Ernst Jünger (“This war is not the end but the beginning of violence” (qtd. from Gerwarth (2016)), Hannah Arendt (“[t]he first explosion seems to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop” (Imperialism 147)), and Walter Benjamin, who argues in “The Storyteller” that experience had declined in value as a result of the war, entailing immense consequences for both mankind’s external world, as well as our inner, moral world:
A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (Illuminations 84)
Cf. Hemingway’s “Notes on the Next War” (1935): “They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for
4
one’s country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. […] No one wins a modern war because it is fought to such a point that everyone must lose. […] In a modern war there is no Victory.”
Cf. Pound in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920), which poem describes the war as having been fought “For an old
5
bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization, / […] / For two gross of broken statues, / For a few thousand battered books” (V. 3-8; 64). In this poem, Pound also refers to Wilson’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est”: “Died some, pro patria, / non “dulce” non “et decor” … / walked eye-deep in hell / believing old men’s lies, then unbelieving / came home, home to a lie, / home to many deceits, / home to old lies and new infamy” (V. 1-7; 64).
The literary modernist movement, facing this crisis, became determined to react against the elaborate style of Romanticism and the 19th century writers, and attempted to “break away from bourgeois moral values and the utilitarian ethic characteristic of Victorianism” (Halliwell 2). Broadly put, the modernists set to the task of defining a new approach to both aesthetics and ethics, whereby Paris was chosen as the preferred place of exile, serving as a stimulus for exploring alternative identities to those endorsed by American Progressive values. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound were all very much affected by the First World War, directly or indirectly: Hemingway enlisted as an American Red Cross ambulance driver at the Italian front and was seriously wounded by Austrian mortar fire in July of 1918, for which he received the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery (Baker 3); Fitzgerald enlisted in the army the month after America joined the war, in April 1917, but the war ended before he could be shipped overseas (Prigozy 39); and Ezra Pound became deeply disgusted by the war after his friend and fellow artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in the muddy trenches of France in 1915, something which he would later describe as “the greatest individual loss which the Arts have sustained in war.” 6
In an effort to look to the future, Pound famously urged his Left Bank colleagues to “Make it New!” and they all followed suit, in one way or another: Ernest Hemingway in his experimental small prose and first novels, respectively titled in our time (1925), The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), and F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby (1925). Hemingway’s two novels and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby shall be the focus of this thesis, for they embody core elements of the ethics advocated by the Left Bank expatriate modernists of the 1920s, and in essence all address the same question: what does a “good life” look like in a post-war waste land? Hemingway’s straightforward style, and Fitzgerald’s romantic, highly symbolic prose are equally inspired by a weariness with, and a suspicion of, modern authoritative history and the possibility of transcendental orders, and both authors place a high value “on the integration of the individual, subjectivist view of life” (Butler 61). As such, a modernist approach to morality becomes characterized by a private subjectivism and a dissentient attitude towards society (Butler 42), which gives rise to the question what such a moral approach would look like.
Part of the present project is inspired by Martin Halliwell’s claim in Modernism and Morality (2001) that the modernist authors renounced any moral certainty (16) and subsequently discovered a new way to mobilize a moral sensibility: “[i]t is precisely in the realm of experiential morality, rather than the abstract sphere of ethics, that modernists attempted to discover a passage between personal value and social action” (3). At the same time however, this work disagrees with, and attempts to supersede Halliwell’s main claim (“I argue that modern protagonists are troubled by […] the sense that a moral position must be ventured, but accompanied by a simultaneous realization of the impossibility of doing so” (3)) by arguing that the literary efforts of Hemingway and Fitzgerald in fact do offer a moral resolution to, what I shall call, their “modern condition,” as informed by the writings of Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. Alasdair MacIntyre’s work After Virtue (1981) may also inspire such a resolution, for in this work, MacIntyre proposes that in our modern times, the Enlightenment project of an abstract, rational ethics cannot be
See Dias, B.H. “Art Notes: Gaudier-Brzeska.” The New Age, vol. 23, no, 4, May 1918, pp. 58-59.
successful due to, in the first place, the historically accumulated heterogeneity and incommensurability of virtue concepts, and in the second place, its failure to consider the individual as situated within a social framework — instead, MacIntyre proposes a neo-Aristotelian theory of virtue ethics that takes into account practices of virtue, and the development of a “true historical narrative” (12). As such, MacIntyre’s argument may be located in the debate between the critics and Nussbaum, and her focus on a perceptive equilibrium as inspired by Aristotle and Henry James. In turn, I shall propose a “modernist moral equilibrium” that is inspired by Nussbaum’s equilibrium, but differs from it in several ways; also, rather being than abstract and conceptual, it constitutes a balancing act between man’s moral sensitivity and man’s modern condition.
Nowhere does this project aim to enter into the highly conceptual conversations concerned with all of the ‘-isms and -logies’ that make up abstract moral philosophy. Instead, the literature of Hemingway and Fitzgerald shall be the direct starting point for the discussion of moral life as found in the 1920s, and as linked to the early 21st century. First, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) serves to explore how Hemingway’s characters deal with violence and death in a world at war. With the retreat of Caporetto, Hemingway turns the war into his moral laboratory, in which the limits of a normative morality are tested, laying bare the incommensurability between man’s modern condition and an idealist or normative approach to ethics. The secularization of death and violence require the “Hemingway hero” to define a new moral code through action, which answers for the concrete limits of an abstract, symbolic moral order as made urgent by man’s modern condition. Second, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) demonstrates how the post-war generation of expatriates living in Paris learned to redefine a moral integrity, as instigated by an encounter with amoral nature and “natural man” as embodied in the Spanish bullfight. The result is a modernist moral equilibrium, characterized by a perceptive, dissentient approach to morality, and defining a new moral sensitivity in light of a dysfunctional old. In this context, the concept of a Jamesian “felt life” is of particular value to the modernist novel. Chapter three reads F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) as a critique of principle-based approaches to ethics (as found in the Kantian tradition), for their failure to take into account the imperfectability, and the linguistic imprecision, of modern moral man. It shall be argued that the modernist literary work is particularly suitable to address man’s modern moral crisis, and the modern condition, for its recognition of a need for a non-conceptual approach to both language and morality.
Finally, the conclusion aims to answer the following question: how does the Lost Generation — as represented by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald — treat morality in their writing, and what ethical dimensions can be discovered in their literature and poetry on a larger scale? It shall be argued that the moral attitudes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald are characterized by a focus on the novelist’s implementation of a Jamesian “felt life,” which may act as an antidote to the incommensurability between abstract, idealistic and transcendental conceptions of morality and modern man’s moral experience. Consequently, the literature of the American expatriates living in Paris advocates a non-conceptual approach to morality, resulting from the secularization of violence and death, on the one hand, and the renewed appreciation of the singularity of experience, on the other. The result is a modernist moral equilibrium, which requires man to balance their moral sensibility with their modern condition — or the abyssal qualities of our post-war, “bare lives.”
Chapter I: The Secularization of Violence and Death in A Farewell to Arms
i. Writing Truly
“They say that if you can prove you did any heroic act you can get the silver. Otherwise it must be the bronze. Tell me exactly what happened. Did you do any heroic act?”
“No,” I said. “I was blown up while we were eating cheese.” Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
It is the mark of the true novelist that in searching the meaning of his own unsought experience, he comes on the moral history of his time.
John Peale Bishop, “The Missing All” (1935)
Part of Ernest Hemingway’s post-war disillusionment resulted in the author’s self-proclaimed determination to write “truly,” which, together with his experiences as a journalist and a war correspondent, have imparted his writing with an unusual authority. Through this “true” writing — or as Hemingway himself called it, “the way it was” (Baker 48) — the author “keep[s] his eye trained on the thing in itself and the effect of the thing in himself” (Baker 58). It is as Hemingway remarks in his introduction to Elio Vittorini’s novel In Sicily (1949), when he talks about any good writer’s sensitivity for actual, lived life:
[…] such a writer finds rain to be made of knowledge, experience, wine, bread, oil, salt, vinegar, bed, early mornings, nights, days, the sea, men, women, dogs, beloved motor cars, bicycles, hills and valleys, the appearance and disappearance of trains on straight and curved tracks, love, honor and disobey, music, chamber music and chamber pots, negative and positive Wassermanns, the arrival and non-arrival of expected munitions and/or reinforcements, replacements or your brother […] porcupine quills, cock grouse drumming on a basswood log, the smell of sweetgrass and fresh smoked leather and Sicily. (ix-x)7
This passage is typical of both Hemingway’s aesthetics and ethics for its involvement with the immediacy of the world around us, and with the world as a physical space to engage with: for Hemingway, there is a moral dimension to the way we perceive and experience life in itself. Although Otto Friedrich (1957) criticizes this aspect of Hemingway’s writing for being “free from any subtlety that might remain unheard beneath the surface of physical reality” and “necessarily limited to surfaces” (523), one should instead see it as part of the author’s quest for new foundations of phenomenological legitimacy, as well as of moral integrity.
Hemingway’s fixation on observable events, and the effects of things on himself, are important aspects of his “true” writing, an example of which is his semi-autobiographical novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), set during the Italian campaign of World War I, and recounting a love story against the backdrop of the atrocities of war, violence and death. Its protagonist, Frederic Henry, is an ambulance driver on the Italian
See Hemingway’s epilogue to Death in the Afternoon (1932) for a similar example.
front, like Hemingway himself was during the First World War. By infusing the narrative with a life which Hemingway knew from first-hand experience, the author creates a style to which Frederick Busch (1992) refers as “responsible writing”: “a writing that is about the essential transaction between writer and reader. It is about being human in a time of despair” (“Reading Hemingway Without Guilt”). This responsible writing can also be traced through Hemingway’s other 1920s works: in our time (1925), which showcases Hemingway’s project of writing “slices of life,” and The Sun Also Rises (1926), based on Hemingway’s own experiences as an expatriate living in post-war Paris, and on his knowledge of the Spanish fiesta of San Fermin. As Carlos Baker astutely points out:
It was once remarked […] that the province of esthetics is the true and the beautiful, the province of morality the good. Of Hemingway as a moral writer there will be much to say. It is clear that the strongest conviction in Hemingway the esthetician […] is the importance of telling truth. (The Writer as Artist 58-59)
This is exactly what this first chapter is involved with: Hemingway as a moral writer, as informed by his motivation to write both truthfully and beautifully. After all, if we believe Henry James when he asserts that the novelist’s moral sense is dependent on — and perhaps even identical to — their aesthetic sense, the moral compass of any author is to be searched for in their aesthetics and style. As for Hemingway, his attitude towards the “good life” is determined in part by his efforts to write “truly,” resulting in an unmitigated experience of violence and death in the particular literary work.
Notwithstanding the above, critics have often accused Hemingway of lacking a proper attitude to humanity and morality, and of writing for the wrong reasons. Eugene Goodheart (1956), for instance, argues that the cultural admiration of Hemingway as an American author has overshadowed the quality of his works as a result of which his “serious deficiencies” (212) as a novelist have not been properly accounted for. According to Goodheart, “[t]he surface of Hemingway’s morality is yet to be cracked” (212), for the moral issue at stake in Hemingway’s writing is always “a kind of fluent animal energy that Hemingway somewhat illicitly calls heroism or manliness” (213), faced by unintelligent characters, devoid of feelings and emotion. Nothing could be further from the truth, for the moral power of Hemingway’s prose lies exactly in the mono-syllabic, stoic and individualistic, no-nonsense attitudes of his characters, so often condemned by the critics, as shall be argued below. Another critic, Otto Friedrich (1957), accuses Hemingway of having written 8
novels sheerly with a view to become rich and famous, and of corrupting the stoicism of the “code hero into inarticulate belligerence, and finally into a hatred of the very idea of thought or expression” (“Joy Through Strength” 530).
Two important authorities who counter the accusations from critics like Goodheart and Friedrich, and who do find value in Hemingway as a moral writer, are Edmund Wilson and Robert Penn Warren. Wilson, although critical of the author and his occasional “trashy moral attitudes” (388), disagrees with those
Cf. Posner (2014), who points out that the criticism of Hemingway’s fiction as being monotonous (“one thing after
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another”) is misplaced. Instead, Hemingway’s style is the Homeric style: “highly effective in conveying a sense of detachment and resigned, nonjudgmental acceptance” (“Hemingway and the Decline of Manhood” 20).
who have accused Hemingway’s fiction of being indifferent towards society and instead concedes that Hemingway’s “whole work is a criticism of society: he has responded to every pressure of the moral atmosphere of the time, as it is felt at the roots of human relations, with a sensitivity almost unrivaled” (“Gauge of Morale” 388-389). Warren, too, in his prestigious essay in the Winter 1947 issue of The Kenyon Review, counters the charge that Hemingway’s fiction was “immoral or dirty or disgusting” — such in response to critics like Robert Herrick, and others in favour of banning Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms at the time of its publication — and points out that Hemingway’s works are seriously involved with “moral and philosophical” issues. Warren’s essay crucially stipulates the existence of the “Hemingway hero,” who is not just a brainless, murderous muscle, but instead possesses a “self-imposed discipline” (11) in terms of which these heroes
make one gallant, though limited, effort to redeem the incoherence of the world: they attempt to impose some form upon the disorder of their lives, the technique of the bull fighter or sportsman, the discipline of the soldier, the fidelity of the lover, or even the code of the gangster, which, though brutal and apparently dehumanizing, has its own ethic. (“Hemingway” 11)
This way, Hemingway’s novels remedy the destruction of traditional heroism by the Great War, through their foraging for new approaches to a “moral code” and to morality in general. In regard to A Farewell to Arms, Warren insists that the novel “embodies a moral effort and is another document of the human will to achieve ideal values” (25), and therefore deserves our attention and can be deemed a moral achievement. Indeed, the singular and unique explorations of life and death in Hemingway’s novels and short stories, and his explorations of heroism and moral codes continue to provide insights into morality — and the role that literature plays with respect to moral philosophy — today.
ii. The Legitimacy of Violence in the Retreat of Caporetto
A Farewell to Arms demonstrates the incommensurability between a normative, or idealist, approach to ethics, on the one hand, and the moral instability of a world at war, on the other, when the protagonist of the novel, Frederic Henry, participates in the ordered retreat from Caporetto, when the Italian front ceased to be “subject to the traditional rules of “honorable” warfare” (West, “The Biological Trap” 147). Malcolm Cowley, in his 1929 review of A Farewell to Arms, praised Hemingway’s description of the Italian retreat after the battle of Caporetto, “with its sleeplessness, its hunger, its growing disorganization, its lines of tired men marching in the rain,” calling it “perhaps the finest single passage that Hemingway has written” (5), and Edmund Wilson rendered it “Hemingway’s best sustained piece of narrative” (“Gauge of Morale” 378). The scene is instrumental in demonstrating the breakdown of a traditional approach to morality in the novel, and after reading it, one wonders under what conditions it is “right” to use violence, or even to kill a disobedient ally. Early on in the novel, Henry already remarks that “[w]hen people realize how bad it is they cannot do anything because they go crazy. There are some people who never realize. There are people who are afraid of their officers. It is with them the war is made” (43). Officers may apply to the fear of their subordinates to
inspire them to march to the front line, and Henry realizes that the active participation of all men is required for war to have any effect at all, or as his friend Manera remarks: “If everybody would not attack the war would be over” (42). Ironically, during the Caporetto retreat — an extensive retreat that took a total of four 9
days, with the Austrian forces at the heels of the allied forces — Henry’s own active participation in the upholding of the war is tested. When Henry and his men meet two Italian sergeants who are also in the process of retreating, they decide to move on together via the rain-soaked backroads. However, when one of their trucks gets stuck in the mud and the situation looks terribly hopeless, the two Italian sergeants decide to make a run for it. Now, Frederic Henry’s military resolve is tested in front of his subordinates:
“I order you to cut brush,” I said. They turned and started down the road.
“Halt,” I said. They kept on down the muddy road, the hedge on either side. “I order you to halt,” I called. They went a little faster. I opened up my holster, took the pistol, aimed at the one who had talked the most, and fired. I missed and they both started to run. I shot three times and dropped one. The other went through the hedge and was out of sight. (176-177)
Henry’s resolve is clear, if these two sergeants are not with him, they must be against him, thus legitimizing his cold and detached resolve to murder them. To add insult to injury, the dead sergeant is subsequently undone of his cape and coat, so that they can be put under the wheels of the car. When Henry eventually decides to leave the car behind, he coldly observes how the desecrated body of the sergeant “lay in his dirty long-sleeved underwear” (178), face down in the mud.
Shortly afterwards, Henry finds himself in a strikingly similar situation when he crosses a bridge over the Tagliamento river, and is roughly taken aside by the carabinieri, or the Italian “battle police,” who are executing any officer who dares to retreat from the front line (despite their orders to do so) and “abandon” their troops:
“It is you and such as you that have let the barbarians onto the sacred soil of the fatherland. […] It is because of treachery such as yours that we have lost the fruits of victory.”
“Have you ever been in a retreat?” the lieutenant-colonel asked. “Italy should never retreat.” (193)
In the Caporetto retreat, disloyalty, or the violation of “the war’s high idealism” (Colvert 376), is punished, and rather severely so, but Frederic Henry realizes soon enough that this is not a natural state of affairs, it is not right that his individual value as a human being is not taken into account; the glory and honour that Henry seemingly displayed as an American soldier participating in a war that was — in some way — not his, are irrelevant to these Italian carabinieri. Now Henry, by providing a portrait of his adversaries, who were
Cf. Hemingway’s “Notes on the Next War” (1935): “If war was fought by those who wanted to fight it and knew what
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they were doing and liked it, or even understood it, then it would be defensible. But those who want to go to the war, the élite, are killed off in the first months and the rest of the war is fought by men who are enslaved into the bearing of arms and, are taught to be more afraid of sure death from their officers if they run than possible death if they stay in the line or attack.”
supposed to be his allies, in fact provides a very accurate picture of himself, just hours ago: “The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it” (194).
It appears that what Henry and the battle police had in common up until now, is a moral code based on traditional attitudes towards heroism and idealism, but as James B. Colvert (1995) accurately points out, it is now that “the Hemingway hero realizes the full significance of the moral abandonment which is cloaked in irrelevant idealism” (“Ernest Hemingway’s Morality in Action” 376). Here, on the banks of the Tagliamento, a clash of moralities takes place: one in favour of the war its traditional high idealism and absolute value realities, and another in favour of a proper life seen in perspective. The former conviction belongs to the 10
patriots, those whom Robert Penn Warren deems to be without the proper discipline, those who are “decided by the big words”: “[t]hey are the messy people, the people who surrender to the flow and illusion of things.” Through their traditional moral convictions, they provide the context of the novel, against which the “Hemingway hero” becomes aware of what is really at stake in the world (“Hemingway” 23-24). The second conviction belongs to Frederic Henry, who has realized the lack of sacredness in his condition as he is about to be executed, and “illegitimately” so. Although they appear opposed in terms of moral convictions, Henry and the Italian carabinieri share what Warren calls the “code.” Warren writes that violence in Hemingway’s writing appears “in terms of discipline, a style, and a code” (11) which allows the “violent man” to redeem the incoherence of one’s world:
[T]he code and the discipline are important because they can give meaning to life which otherwise seems to have no meaning or justification. In other words, in a world without supernatural sanctions, in the God-abandoned world of modernity, man can realize an ideal meaning only in so far as he can define and maintain the code. The effort to define and maintain the code, however limited and imperfect it may be, is the characteristically human effort and provides the tragic or pitiful human story. (“Hemingway” 3)
If violence allows man to give meaning to life, as Warren argues, we find that it obtains a paradoxical quality in the world of A Farewell to Arms: in order to undo the acceleration of death in a belligerent world, one must commit oneself to one’s ideals — without resorting to the possibility of external, supernatural intervention or impositions — in order to “define and maintain” a moral code, which code possibly includes the use of violence against those who act in defiance of it. Violence thus obtains legitimacy in A Farewell to
From a morally conceptual standpoint, such a clash simultaneously endorses and criticizes a Kantian approach to
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ethics: on the one hand, Henry realizes the injustice in being treated as an end rather than as a means (“Always act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of others, as an end, and not as a means” (qtd. from MacIntyre 54)), which also entails a failure on the part of the categorical imperative in an extreme situation like the present one. On the other hand, the Italian carabinieri are resolutely fulfilling their duty while holding true to their moral maxim: “Italy should never retreat” (FTA 193). Cf. MacIntyre’s critique on a Kantian conception of morality (After Virtue 52-59); or Halliwell (2001): “From a pro-modernist perspective, moral problems cannot be classified as either legitimate or illegitimate in reference to a set of universal standards (what Kant called his ‘categorical imperative’); rather, moral valency is influenced by social and historical forces which are impossible to transcend” (Modernism and
Arms through the moral code of man at war, and through the resultant detached judgment over life and death. In other words, in a world at war, violence may act as a moral principle, and is justified if one has to defend a private moral proposition (“I order you to halt,” or “Italy should never retreat”), whereby one man’s death defines another man’s moral code. 11
Ensnared in this paradoxical relation to morality, Frederic Henry realizes that man can either submit to war — and therefore to the demands that it places on himself and his moral code — or run from it and attempt to find a new significance outside of it. Facing this moral crisis, Henry makes the critical decision to leap into the cold Tagliamento river, rather than to wait around for his execution (not unlike the two Italian sergeants on the muddy highroad near Udine did earlier). Henry feels that his individual value is of greater interest than the deceptive heroism and moral code upheld by the battle police, but this conviction also entails his personal farewell to arms. As Stanley Cooperman has argued, the war has deserted Frederic Henry, “and after the Caporetto retreat punitive execution reduces whatever remains of military duty to a final absurdity” (World War I and the American Novel 80). Similarly, James B. Colvert notes that Henry here realizes “the full significance of the moral abandonment which is cloaked in irrelevant idealism,” finally seeing “that the war after all is only a violent surface manifestation of a moral rupture splitting the whole social body” (376). Indeed, as long as it insists upon a moral double-standard, society itself must be rejected “if there is to be any hope for a reconstruction of values” (376).
Through personal experience, and their idea of action and sensation, the Hemingway hero profanes the transcendental dimensions of violence and death, and of morality and heroism, as demonstrated through Frederic Henry’s slippery roles as victim—perpetrator, and hero—deserter. Indeed, facing the extreme circumstances of a world at war, the Hemingway hero encounters directly how violence and death have become “obscene” in the modern world. It is through moral crisis that a new moral integrity is defined, which must somehow answer for the secularization of violence and death. In other words, what Warren refers to as “the code” is a secular approach to morality from the ground up, rather than inspired by transcendentally, or historically imposed commandments. Those who have realized this, Warren calls the “initiate,” as opposed to the “uninitiate” (23). Here, on the banks of the Tagliamento, Henry — through a direct confrontation with the morals and manners of the uninitiate, or those who are unaware and undisciplined (like he himself was) — enters the realm of those who are aware and disciplined: the group of the initiate.
iii. “They” and the Modern Condition
Frederic Henry soon discovers that the disorder of war has infected the entire modern world; his failure to truly escape the war demonstrates that the whole Western world has become subjected to — what I shall call — a “modern condition.” After fleeing from the chaos of Caporetto, Henry pulls the stars off his uniform, concluding that “[i]t was not my show anymore” (200): “I was going to forget the war. I had made a separate
Such a principle echoes the post-war ideas on violence proposed by Georges Sorel in Reflections of Violence (1908),
11
peace” (211). However, once Henry has safely reached his hotel in Stresa, he wonders whether he can ever truly leave the war behind: “The war was a long way away. Maybe there wasn’t any war. There was no war here. Then I realized it was over for me. But I did not have the feeling that it was really over. I had the feeling of a boy who thinks of what is happening at a certain hour at the schoolhouse from which he has played truant” (213). Elsewhere, Henry remarks that he feels like a masquerader in civilian clothes (211). “[I]n the modern sense, all happiness is a form of truancy,” writes Ray B. West (1990), insisting that modern man can at best postpone his fate, but never outrun it (“The Biological Trap” 147). In this world at war, in this condition of modern man, death is shown to be inevitable, and happiness to be incidental, as becomes clear when Frederic Henry reconvenes with his lover, Catherine Barkley, a nurse whom he impregnated in Milan. After his escape from the front lines, Henry finds Catherine, and the two then flee to Switzerland by boat, in an attempt to escape the war and conceive their child in a country at peace. However, both Catherine and the baby die in childbirth, only to emphasize the fact that Henry’s conviction that he can escape the war by signing a “separate peace” is as illusory as his hope that he can prevent his family from dying (West 148). The war has inevitably caught up with the two lovers, leaving Henry to face the world alone. “What the novel says, finally, is that you cannot escape the obligations of action,” West remarks, “you cannot say “farewell to arms,” and you cannot sign a separate peace. You can only learn to live with life, to tolerate it as “the initiated” learn to tolerate it” (151) — echoing Robert Penn Warren’s writing on a secular moral code as defined by the initiate. To slightly alter this statement, one might add that Henry must learn to live with death; he must realize that his life, and the lives of his contemporaries, are inextricably bound up with the ongoing war. Indeed, the condition of life is death, which pervades everyday life with an equitable sleight 12
of hand, something which Frederic Henry discovers as the narrative unfolds.
Henry expresses his attitude towards a secularized, ubiquitous death in one of the most famous passages of the novel, when he is lying in a dark hotel room in Stresa, and his mind starts to wander:
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. (216)
After having turned his back on the atrocities of war, Henry continues to be confronted with the inevitability of death, of being broken by the world: even Catherine and the baby with which she is pregnant, in their innocence, cannot escape the cruelty that Henry deems to be typical of the world in itself. Shortly before 13
Cf. Wilson (1941): “the brutality of life is always there, and it is somehow bound up with the enjoyment. […] The
12
condition of life is pain; and the joys of the most innocent surface are somehow tied to its stifled pangs” (“Gauge of Morale” 374); Bishop (1936): “[t]here is no destiny but death” (“Homage to Hemingway”); Gelfant (1963): “[in A
Farewell to Arms] the inescapable reality of life is death” (174).
Cf. Solow (2009): “Frederick Henry, the reluctant deserter, loses his lover and stillborn child in childbirth. […] In A
13
Farewell To Arms, the escape from war into life and love, only to end in death, seems like an end to hope” (“A Clash of
she dies in that hospital in Switzerland, Catherine also submits to this cruel world in words, echoing Frederic Henry’s earlier statement that “the world breaks every one”: “I’m not brave anymore, darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me. I know it now. [...] They just keep it up till they break you” (276). So Catherine, too, must die by the hands of whoever is responsible for so many deaths in the world.
Here and elsewhere, the blame is put on the epicene singular pronoun “they,” for instance when Henry just hears about his stillborn child:
That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you. (280)
The question of to whom “they” refers has occupied many critics. Carlos Baker, for instance, insists that “[t]he anonymous “they” is nothing but a name for the way things are” (100), which argument finds agreement with Sandra Whipple Spanier (1990), who similarly argues that “they” must be seen as “invisible and arbitrary” (91). Baker and Spanier profess that we are no victims of “an actual malevolent metaphysical power,” nor is there anything to blame called fate, instead humanity itself is responsible for the evil it has inflicted on itself (Baker 100). Although it is tempting to consider “they” as referring to mankind itself as being solely responsible for a self-inflicted pain, it ignores the fact that Henry also realizes that Catherine is in no way responsible for the excruciating pains she suffers while giving birth, save for the fact that their sexual immediate pleasures imply consequences that transcend their innate momentariness: “This was what people got for loving each other. […] So now they got her in the end. You never got away with anything. Get away hell!” (274; my emphasis), which religious interjection is repeated when Henry contemplates on whether Catherine might die or not: “And what if she should die? […] She can’t die. […] Don’t be a fool. […] It’s just nature giving her hell” (274). “They” is therefore not invisible and arbitrary, nor simply a referent implying powerless resignation to the world as created by humanity itself, but more accurately designates a notion of death as paradoxically embodied in life itself. “They” points to the non-metaphysical structure of the world, and the lack of metaphysical certainty in life. With the notion of “they,” Frederic 14
Henry and Catherine Barkley forfeit their authority over death, the same way Henry earlier forfeited the
Harry, the dying protagonist of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), similarly laments: “[J]ust then, death had come
14
and rested its head on the foot of the cot and he could smell its breath. ‘Never believe any of that about a scythe and a skull,’ he told her. ‘It can be two bicycle policemen as easily, or be a bird. Or it can have a wide snout like a hyena.’ It had moved up on him now, but it had no shape any more. It simply occupied space. ‘Tell it to go away.’ It did not go away but moved a little closer. ‘You’ve got a hell of a breath,’ he told it. ‘You stinking bastard’ ” (495). Here, “they” simply occupies space, and does not refer to a God, or a grim reaper, to whom one can paradoxically turn in times of pain. Death is shown to be embodied in a lived life, in the “they” that surrounds us.
possibility of an authoritative moral position on the banks of the Tagliamento. It is as Catherine says with 15
her last breath: “I’m not a bit afraid. It’s just a dirty trick” (283), realizing that nothing exempts her from her vulnerability as a human being, and admitting her defeat. 16
Walter Benjamin, the pre-eminent modernist critic, recognizes that the realization of this vulnerability is an essential part of being human in modern times, as argued in his “Critique of Violence” (1921):
Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him, no more than with any other of his conditions and qualities, not even with the uniqueness of his bodily person. However sacred man is (or that life in him that is identically present in earthly life, death, and afterlife), there is no sacredness in his condition, in his bodily life vulnerable to injury by his fellow men. (299)17
For Catherine, this might be taken quite literally, for she never coincides with the “naked life” [bloßes Leben] inside of her. As for Henry, he has been deprived of a communal, public experience of morality, and he must face his loss, and the modern world alone. Thus, to blame the epicene “they” is to dethrone death as a transcendental force, it secularizes the act of dying, and of being killed. “They” points to the bare life of all humanity, to the horizontal, equal distribution of gratuitous death and violence among all men and women, and the lack of sacredness in our condition — Hemingway shows that the modern condition of mankind is that we are all “they.” In this modern condition, man is thrown upon himself, without reason or ideals to inform him how to cope with a relentlessly ideal-less environment, as becomes clear in the final scene of A Farewell to Arms: “ “You get out,” I said. “The other one too.” But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” (284). 18
Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century — who
Cf. Glicksberg (1971), who similarly discards the possibility of “they” as referring to “[t]he forces of Nature, the
15
irrational rules of life, the brutal and stupid oppression of the world” (90), and instead insists that “they” refers to a lived life itself: “a trap, a blind, feverish rushing hither and thither, only to drop finally into the immolating fire,” with “no moral law at work punishing the sinful and rewarding the virtuous” (“The Hemingway Cult of Love” 91).
Cf. Spanier (1990), who rightly points out that Catherine has already realized the world’s modern condition — or
16
man’s failure to coincide with the “mere life” in him — way before Frederic Henry did. Indeed, Henry’s moral development is marked by his realization of war, something which Catherine had already undergone before the novel even began: “[h]er faith in traditional values was blown to bits offstage” (“Hemingway’s Unknown Soldier” 84).
The German title of Benjamin’s work is “Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” in which context “Kritik” does not necessarily refer
17
to a criticism, but rather to an evaluation in the Kantian tradition of judgment. Also, “Gewalt” must be understood beyond the singular English definition of ‘violence,’ as it can be taken to mean force, (legitimate) power, domination, authority and violence in the German (philosophical) tradition.
One of the numerous endings that Hemingway wrote to A Farewell to Arms is referred to as “The Nada Ending”:
18
“That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you” (FTA
Appendix I 303). Incidentally, in light of this knowledge, Friedrich’s critique of the “meaningless” ending of A Farewell to Arms is unfair (“Catherine’s death is simply the old-fashioned storyteller’s conventional way of ending a
story” (522)). Cf. George Plimpton’s interview with Hemingway: “I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before is was satisfied” (qtd. from Glasser 454).
was at times equally provocative in her rhetoric as Ernest Hemingway was (for instance, in “On Violence” (1970)) — offers an important insight in The Human Condition (1958). In this work, she identifies a modern state of mankind that resembles both Benjamin and Hemingway’s writings on post-war life, for according to Arendt, individual life has been deprived of its immortality through an inevitable process of secularization:
Individual life again became mortal, as mortal as it had been in antiquity, and the world was even less stable, less permanent, and hence less to be relied upon than it had been during the Christian era. Modern man, when he lost the certainty of a world to come, was thrown back upon himself and not upon this world; far from believing that the world might be potentially immortal, he was not even sure that it was real. (320)
The modern condition then has become all the more apparent now that the war has destroyed all faith in the possibility of traditional values, of idealism, and of religion; “[a] world of violence has rejected all the rituals of love and violence alike, and the result is total defeat” (Cooperman 185). Facundo Vega (2017), when 19
talking about the “tragedy of the modern condition” (in relation to the theologico-political) similarly identifies a loss of meaning and faith in post-war society, which he considers to be a persistent force in the writings of Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss: “the abyssal character of modernity, that is, the absence of incontestable principles that justify life-in-common and the persistence of political orders” (697-698). More specifically, in a moral sense, this “tragedy” as identified by Vega entails the deconstruction of a ‘symbolic’ order, as a result of which the individual must face the world — as well as one’s losses — alone, and on their own terms.
iv. Hemingway’s Anti-Idealism
Ernest Hemingway’s aforementioned obsession with “writing truly” allows the author to explore the limits of ethical idealism under extreme circumstances: the war is Hemingway’s moral laboratory, in which any normative ethical parameters are challenged to the extreme. The quote by John Peale Bishop that opened this chapter obtains validity throughout A Farewell to Arms, for Frederic Henry (who may be argued to act as an extension of Hemingway’s own war experiences) encounters first-hand how unheroic (technological) warfare actually is, and how “the world breaks every one” impartially, and how death may come as a “dirty trick” to some: “Did you do any heroic act?” Rinaldi asks Henry, so that he may be awarded the medaglia d’argento. “No,” I said. “I was blown up while we were eating cheese” (55). Also, most of Henry’s friends die gratuitously: Aymo by friendly fire (184), Rinaldi by syphilis (280), Catherine and her child in childbirth
Cf. West (1990), who writes that in A Farewell to Arms, the war becomes “a symbol for the chaos of nature,”
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(283). Henry’s ultimate solitary predicament demonstrates that humanity cannot transcend their vulnerable, 20
physical existence. This, Warren calls Frederic Henry’s “final awareness”:
The final awareness means, as we have said, that the individual is thrown back upon his private discipline and his private capacity to endure. The hero cuts himself off from the herd, the confused world, […] And from the waters of the flooded Tagliamento arises the Hemingway hero in his purest form, with human history and obligation washed away, ready to enact the last phase of his appropriate drama, and learn from his inevitable defeat the lesson of lonely fortitude.(“Hemingway” 24)
Henry’s move from the class of the uninitiate to the class of the initiate — or those aware of man’s modern condition — is situated in his personal realization of the “obscenity” of virtue and heroism, and in his private submission to the secularization of violence and death. Henry has been effectively cleansed from the possibility of a historically informed, public experience of morality. Such through what Malcolm Cowley identifies as a rite of “baptism” (qtd. from Warren 24): “Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation,” Henry remarks, “[a]lthough that ceased when the carabiniere put his hands on my collar” (200). Even though Henry’s coming-to-terms with his “awareness” does not happen after his plunge in the Tagliamento (as Warren and Cowley argue), but rather at the very end of the novel, the outcome is the same. The critical result of Henry’s realization of man’s modern condition is a dissentient, secularized, and anti-idealist attitude towards both violence and death, and ultimately, towards morality. 21
Some critics have referred to this as Hemingway’s anti-intellectualism (Warren 13; Colvert 377), but it is more specifically an anti-idealism. Certainly, in the “God-abandoned world, the world of Nature-as-all” (Warren 4) of Hemingway’s works, devoid of “meaning and certitude” (18-19), one can identify a disillusioned modern man, who bases his quest for morality “upon a principled approach to life, upon the idea that the best values are those which are emotionally or psychologically satisfying” (Colvert 377). However, the following passage — explained by Warren as “Hemingway’s indictment of the intellectualism of the past,” revealing “the mire and blood of 1914 to 1918 [as] a pack of lies leading to death” (13) — points out that Hemingway’s characters possess a persistent faith in the concreteness of actual experience, which condemns the empty abstractness of idealism, rather than of intellect:
Cf. Gelfant (1963): “[Frederic] has learned of the gratuitousness of death in war […] he knows that death strikes
20
without discernible reason. Death is merely inevitable, not rational” (“Language as a Moral Code in A Farewell to
Arms” 175). Cf. Bishop, who similarly notes that the war “destroyed the tragedy of death” (“The Missing All” §7).
Cf. Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” (1925), which tells about another member of the class of the initiate named
21
Harold Krebs, a young war veteran who is unable to participate in his “old” life and the community to which he belonged prior to the war. Krebs cannot pray: “I’m not in His Kingdom” (337), and to the frustration of his parents, cannot find the energy to try and be a “credit to the community”: “ ‘[Y]ou haven’t got a definite aim in life. Charley Simmons, who is just your age, has a good job and is going to be married. The boys are all settling down; they’re all determined to get somewhere; you can see that boys like Charley Simmons are on their way to being really a credit to the community.’ Krebs said nothing” (338). He has ceased to believe in the promise of pride, and the certainty of a happy future in an unchanged, unaware society: “He did not want any consequences. He did not want any consequences ever again. He wanted to live along without consequences” (334). Harold Kreb’s “faith in the old values has been destroyed by his combat experience,” writes Colvert (1995), “Krebs cannot accept the values proposed for him” (374).
