Hemingway's Theaters of Masculinity.

Curnutt, Kirk

Hemingway's Theaters of Masculinity by Thomas Strychacz. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. 284 pp. Hardcover, $59.95. Paperback, $24.95.

The heart frankly wearies at the prospect of yet another full-length volume on Hemingway and gender. Nearly twenty years after the appearance in expurgated form of the hanky-panky purveying The Garden of Eden--not to mention Kenneth Lynn's revisionary biography--the subject has so come to dominate Hemingway studies that scholars who entered the field after the mid-1980s can hardly imagine a time when such once keystone concerns as war, the code hero, expatriation, and generational malaise were ever examined on their own merits rather than through the refracting lens of sexual difference. This is not to say the interest has been unfounded: scholars who challenge us to appreciate the complexities of Hemingway's representations of man- and womanhood have shown that beneath the author's unflappably macho facade lay a variety of conflicted emotions and impulses, from androgynous titillation and empathetic femininity to kinky fetishism and homosocial escapism. Yet one increasingly senses that imitation has ossified this formerly limber branch of study, what with dozens (if not hundreds) of essays now available on the significance of Brett Ashley's boyish hair, Jake Barnes's maimed genitalia, and David and Catherine Bourne's erotic role reversals, to name but a few. This abundant interest in gender, many feel, risks obscuring equally relevant issues and perpetuates the rather unfair impression that Hemingway was more tortured in this area than his contemporaries. As such, the appearance of a new book advertising itself as "an entirely new approach to the question of masculinity in Ernest Hemingway's work" may tempt scholars who feel drowned out by the tsunami-like intrigue with the topic to voice a plea: can we please please please please please please please talk about something else?

Thankfully, Thomas Strychacz's thorough study cautions us against assuming that the issue has been exhausted. With an interesting methodology drawn from performance studies, it reminds us that there are as many new things to say about Hemingway and masculinity as there are new ways of reading. Beginning with a complex analysis of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and proceeding through discussions of the major, works (though not, excepting The Garden of Eden, the posthumous ones), Strychacz offers counterintuitive interpretations of the gestures of manliness. Not all readers Will agree with his assessments of the social symbolism of what it means to act like a man (emphasis on act), but that disagreement, interestingly enough, reinforces an important component of the book's thesis. As Strychacz insists, "Masculinity [is] temporary and subject to abrupt change rather than stable and permanent; [it is] relational and contingent rather than self-determined; [it is] the function of insubstantial codes and evaluating audiences rather than constitutive of an essential identity" (8). In other words, there is no definitive, fixed meaning of manhood, only patterns of behavior that aspire to that condition (and often fail because of its contradictory criteria). Because being a man means many different things to many different people, the behavioral negotiation of trying to be recognized as one means some "evaluating audiences" will accept the performance as authentic, while others will dismiss it as a pose. To accuse Hemingway of hiding his fears behind a mask of self-conscious, belligerent virility--as countless critics and biographers have done--is to overlook the interpretive dynamic that allows an audience to deem that persona contrived. Instead of resorting to "codified essential concepts of manhood" inferred from "narrative evidence that ... is by no means overwhelmingly in its favor" (9), Strychacz encourages a more fluid mode of reading that emphasizes the multivalent meanings and paradoxes that compose ideas of masculinity.

As the "Macomher" chapter specifices, the hermeneutic justification for this approach rests in Bertok Brecht's concept of the social gest, a compound of gesture and gist meant to isolate the "gist of human behavior within an ensemble of social relations" without abstracting it into a "metaphor for the human condition" (45). Actions are meaningful, Strychacz argues, but not universal; their significance arises from the social complex rather than any innate substance. As Brecht insisted, the goal of "gestic theater" was to defamiliarize "mundane obvious- and natural-seeming social practices" through the Verfremdungseffekt (the alienation effect), by which he meant odd performances of them in strange contexts that would show "that their obviousness is a result of repetitive performances rather than some universal essence." In Strychacz's view, Hemingway accomplishes something very similar: with "insistently theatrical strategies of stage-managing," he "displace[s] and hollow[s] out the naturalness" of his characters' behavior to reveal how an ostensibly "manly" act "calls a masculine self into being and calls it into question with the same gesture" (48). Whether a seemingly unimportant act such as Francis Macomber waving to wife Margot before facing a charging buffalo or one more heavily freighted with symbolism--the Indian father's suicide in "Indian Camp," for instance--the gist of human interaction proves to involve "creative freeplay" rather than the display of a "whole, coherent, hypostasized" identity (52). Equally important is the role of audiences who observe these performances: as Strychacz notes, "audiences call acts of theater into being ... [for] watching uncovers the mode of doing something, demonstrating that the meaning of actions is derived from socially constructed and agreed-upon [or contested] codes" (50).

The approach provides for several provocative rereadings of various Hemingway texts. A chapter on trophy hunting in Green Hills of Africa (portions of which originally appeared in The Hemingway Review in 1993 and 2000) explores how Hemingway knowingly depends on an audience (whether Pop the white hunter, P.O.M. the wife, or the Masai guides) to validate his masculinity. The 52-inch kudu horns he shows off signify his prowess only until hunting companion Karl Thompson unveils his 57-inch rack, a humiliation that reveals (apropos of A Moveable Feast) that manliness is always a matter of measurements that are always themselves relative. For Strychacz, Hemingway's willingness to' acknowledge that signs of masculinity are meaningful only in context exonerates him from charges of posturing; his often thwarted attempts to dramatize his manhood are self-deprecating admissions of its unstable nature. Similarly, the much derided passages of literary pontification--his blowzy dismissals of critics as "angleworms"--aren't egotistical bombast but "an elaborate oration ... designed to run rhetorical circles" around interlocutors who naively accept the Hemingway legend as gospel truth (182). A similar case for narrative irony is made for Death in the Afternoon, which attempts to subvert the notion that Hemingway's minimalism embodies manly authenticity by exploring the rhetorical contexts in which he states his aesthetic principles. Foremost among these contexts is the matador metaphor that equates "true" writing with bullfighting. Rather than take for granted the aesthetic purity of the suerte (as most critics do), Strychacz emphasizes the connotations of theatrical staging inevitably associated with it--not the least of which is Hemingway's own translation of suerte: "It means act" (Strychacz 135, DIA 16). Unpeeling the layers of performativity in Hemingway's own delineations of torero ritual reveals "a book riven and fragmented with contradictory statements masquerading as confident truths, so that elements of doubt and undecidability intrude into 'what appear to be the most fundamental rules governing aesthetic, moral, psychological, and bullfighting experience" (144).

The most interesting chapter, for this reader at least, is "Hemingway's Theaters of War." Here Strychacz offers a complexly layered reading of For Whom the Bell Tolls that draws analogies between the gaze of masculine dominance and "the fetish of militarism" (108) embodied by totalitarian regimes like Franco's. Armed with industrial tools of warfare, Robert Jordan, whatever his political affiliation, is an intermediary of a "new and panoptic space in which the directors control everything through their gun-sights and other technologies of supervision, in which the 'actors' are never aware of the watched space within which they move, and in which, under the scrutiny of anonymous eyes, there exists no mechanism" for enacting the Brechtian gest. Only by entering the guerilla world of Pablo and Pilar and participating in "cave theater" is Jordan reminded of how power is socially negotiated at the level of human interaction. To whatever degree Jordan feels his role is to encourage or impose rigorous standards of discipline upon the ragtag fighters, he discovers that "performance ... always compromises [his] moves toward establishing a panoptically complete supervision of terrain and character ... [by] upset[ting] absolute knowledge and the clear-sighted gaze, leaving [him] and us to guess at the meaning of [Pablo's] handshakes in the dark" (121). The marvelous ambiguity of the novel's ending, Strychacz writes, is to celebrate Jordan's awareness that he must act within this theater while acknowledging that "fascist supervision operates by way of invisible efficiency and abstract surveillance that erases any productive exchange between (male) character and audience" (121), thereby conveying the ominous threat that totalitarianism posed in the late 1930s-and continues to pose today.

This study concludes with another commendable chapter that contrasts "Big Two-Hearted River" to The Old Man and the Sea. In the former, Strychacz challenges the critical commonplace that Nick Adams achieves masculine self-reliance by sheltering himself from the world of human complication. Far from recuperative, Nick's fishing expedition exasperates his condition by "denying [him] his opportunity to perform for an evaluating audience" (230). Without a human arena within which to perform, Hemingway's hero continues to suffer "psychological displacement" best evinced by the sudden intrusion of the first person in a narrative otherwise rigorously told from an exterior perspective ("By God, he was the biggest one I ever heard of"). As the author decides, "this intrusion into interior monologue forces us to the disconcerting possibility that the entire narrative turns upon an erasure of the self-possessed I/eye.... The interruption of T suddenly makes us aware of the kind of self-reflexive consciousness that might have been present ... had not Nick carefully choked off the thoughts and memories (and his actual voice) that would force him to become aware of himself" (234-235). In Old Man, Hemingway resolves this condition by granting Santiago his "evaluating audience," even though he himself is unaware (and even indifferent) to it: "The narrative invites us to watch, admire, and judge the trophy and the fishermen's responses to the trophy while Santiago lies sleeping in his shack," thus allowing his epic battle with the fish "to be retrospectively ... judged as a performance without his ever appearing on stage" (257).

Such insights demonstrate how cleverly (I don't use the term in a derogatory way) Strychacz develops nuanced interpretations that do justice to the many levels of meaning in Hemingway's work. If I were to make one objection to the study's methodology, it is that for a book that so insistently argues that manhood's meanings are socially bound, there is a curious absence of historical context here--Strychacz infers various masculine significances without integrating his analyses within a discussion of the cultural styles of manhood from the 1920s to the 1950s. Perhaps we must wait until his forthcoming volume on the masculine preoccupations of Hemingway's modernist peers (promised in his concluding paragraph) for these insights. In the meantime, Hemingway's Theaters of Masculinity will serve the admirable task of making even those scholars who feel they've heard it all before when it comes to Hemingway and gender lean forward and lend an ear.--Kirk Curnutt, Troy State University Montgomery