Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

255 Pages·2008·1.3 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Ernest Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: The Old Man and the Sea—New Edition
Copyright © 2008 Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2008 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ernest Hemingway’s The old man and the sea / [edited by] Harold Bloom. — New ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-147-5 (acid-free paper) 1. Hemingway, Ernest, 1899–1961. Old
man and the sea. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series.
PS3515.E37O52 2008
823’.912—dc22
2008007061
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Dynamics of Narration: Later Novels 5
P.G. Rama Rao
The Old Man and the Sea:
The Culmination 31
Wirt Williams
The Later Fiction: Hemingway
and the Aesthetics of Failure 53
James H. Justus
The Angler 69
Gregory S. Sojka
Contrasts in Form: Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea and Faulkner’s ‘The Bear’ 81
David Timms
Up to the End 95
Peter L. Hays
Psychology 109
Gerry Brenner
vi Contents
Inside the Current: A Taoist Reading
of The Old Man and the Sea 125
Eric Waggoner
Of Rocks and Marlin: The Existentialist
Agon in Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus
and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea 143
Dwight Eddins
Santiago and the Eternal Feminine:
Gendering La Mar in The Old Man and the Sea 153
Susan F. Beegel
The Self Offstage: “Big Two-Hearted
River” and The Old Man and the Sea 179
Thomas Strychacz
Ernest Hemingway, Derek Walcott,
and Old Men of the Sea 213
Edward O. Ako
Chronology 225
Contributors 229
Bibliography 231
Acknowledgments 235
Index 237
Editor’s Note
My introduction rather sadly judges The Old Man and the Sea a period piece,
an involuntary self-parody, and an unfortunate allegory in which Santiago is
Christ is Hemingway.
Almost all the essayists gathered here seem to me to have read some
book other than the one they purportedly discuss. P.G. Rama Rao praises The
Old Man’s skill in narration, while Wirt Williams finds nothing grotesque in
Hemingway’s other tepid allegory, in which the sharks are unfriendly critics.
James H. Justus does see the psychological strain reflected by
Hemingway’s later fictions, after which Gregory S. Sojka praises The Old
Man’s heroic pathos.
Faulkner’s “The Bear,” far superior aesthetically to Hemingway’s The Old
Man, is juxtaposed with it by David Timms, while Peter L. Hays sees that the
story is thin and weak yet commends its prose.
Gerry Brenner improbably terms The Old Man “a masterpiece,” after
which Eric Waggoner invokes the Tao as appropriate to Hemingway’s
allegory.
Camus is contrasted to The Old Man by Dwight Eddins, while Susan F.
Beegel refreshingly offers an enlightened feminist reading.
Thomas Strychacz finds a dialectic of masculine and feminine strains in
the narrative, after which Edward O. Ako traces a possible influence of The
Old Man upon Derek Walcott.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
H
emingway’s greatness is in his short stories, which rival any other master
of the form, be it Joyce or Chekhov or Isaak Babel. Of his novels, one is
constrained to suggest reservations, even of the very best: The Sun Also Rises.
The Old Man and the Sea is the most popular of Hemingway’s later works, but
this short novel, alas, is an indeliberate self-parody, though less distressingly
so than Across the River and into the Trees, composed just before it. There is a
gentleness, a nuanced tenderness that saves The Old Man and the Sea from the
self-indulgences of Across the River and into the Trees. In an interview with
George Plimpton, Hemingway stated his pride in what he considered to be
the aesthetic economy of the novel:
The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages
long and had every character in the village in it and all the
processes of the way they made their living, were born, educated,
bore children, etc. That is done excellently and well by other
writers. In writing you are limited by what has already been
done satisfactorily. So I have tried to learn to do something
else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to
conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has
read something it will become part of his or her experience and
seem actually to have happened. This is very hard to do and I’ve
worked at it very hard.
Anyway, to skip how it is done, I had unbelievable luck this
time and could convey the experience completely and have it be
1