User:Sherrilledwards/sandbox: Difference between revisions

(4 intermediate revisions by the same user not shown)

Line 62:

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|1970|p=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} 17 Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls'' (1940), title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{sfn|Auden|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

=== Notes ===

Line 75:

Line 79:

* {{cite journal |last=Auden |first=W.H. |title=September 1, 1939. |journal=Selected Poems |date=1972 | location=Ed. Edward Mendelson. Expanded ed. New York |publisher=Princeton University Press |pages=95-97|ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Adamowski |first=T.H. |title=Out on Highway 61: Existentialism in America |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |volume=74.4 |date=2005 |pages=913-933 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |location=4th ed. Princeton |publisher= Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Berger |first=Peter L. |date=1969 |title=A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural |location=Garden City |publisher= Doubleday |ref=harv }}

Line 95:

Line 103:

* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |date=2008 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |location=Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Donne |first=John |date=2003 |title=John Donne's Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels |location=Ed. Evelyn M. Simpson. Berkeley |publisher= University of California Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Fussell |first=Paul |date=1974 |title=The Great War and Modern Memory |location=Cambridge |publisher= Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Gellner |first=Ernest |date=1975 |title=Legitimation of Belief |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |title=A Clean, Well-Lighted Place |journal=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 1991: 29-33 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }}

Line 114:

Line 126:

* {{cite book |last=Jung |first=Carl |date=1955 |title=Man in Search of a Soul |location=New York |publisher=Harcourt |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=King James Bible |location=Ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=King James Bible |location=Ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press, 2008 | ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Kroupi |first=Agori |title=The Religious Implications of Fishing and Bullfighting in Hemingway's Work |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=28.1 |date=2008 |pages=107-121 |ref=harv }}

@@ Line 62: / Line 62: @@
 Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|1970|p=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.
-Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} 17 Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.
+Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.
+The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.
+In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls'' (1940), title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{sfn|Auden|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.
 === Notes ===
@@ Line 75: / Line 79: @@
 {{Refbegin}}
+* {{cite journal |last=Auden |first=W.H. |title=September 1, 1939. |journal=Selected Poems |date=1972 | location=Ed. Edward Mendelson. Expanded ed. New York |publisher=Princeton University Press |pages=95-97|ref=harv }}
 * {{cite journal |last=Adamowski |first=T.H. |title=Out on Highway 61: Existentialism in America |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |volume=74.4 |date=2005 |pages=913-933 |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos  |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |location=4th ed. Princeton |publisher= Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Berger |first=Peter L.  |date=1969 |title=A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural |location=Garden City |publisher= Doubleday |ref=harv }}
@@ Line 95: / Line 103: @@
 * {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |date=2008 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |location=Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Donne |first=John |date=2003 |title=John Donne's Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels |location=Ed. Evelyn M. Simpson. Berkeley |publisher= University of California Press |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Fussell |first=Paul |date=1974 |title=The Great War and Modern Memory |location=Cambridge |publisher= Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Gellner |first=Ernest |date=1975 |title=Legitimation of Belief |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite journal |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |title=A Clean, Well-Lighted Place |journal=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 1991: 29-33 |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003  |ref=harv }}
@@ Line 114: / Line 126: @@
 * {{cite book |last=Jung |first=Carl |date=1955 |title=Man in Search of a Soul |location=New York |publisher=Harcourt |ref=harv }}
-* {{cite book |title=King James Bible |location=Ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |title=King James Bible |location=Ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press, 2008 | ref=harv }}
 * {{cite journal |last=Kroupi |first=Agori |title=The Religious Implications of Fishing and Bullfighting in Hemingway's Work |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=28.1 |date=2008 |pages=107-121 |ref=harv }}