| 商家名称 | 信用等级 | 购买信息 | 订购本书 |
 |
 |
Old Man and the Sea |  |
 |
|
Old Man and the Sea | |
PAPA HEMINGWAY
To a considerable degree, Hemingway was complicit in the formation of his public persona. As a young man living in Chicago and bored by pretentious drawing room talk about art and artists, he rejected out of band the role of the epicene indoor aesthete. If he were to become a writer, it was going to be at the opposite pole from Proust and his cork-lined room. Hemingway had grown up in close touch with the outdoors, and throughout his life he pursued the sports afield and astream that he had learned from his father. In doing so, Hemingway undoubtedly took some pleasure in confounding public expectations about how a writer should look and behave. The Papa Hemingway persona actually served him as a defense, protecting the more complicated person behind that mask. But once the persona took hold, it did not let go, and as a consequence Hemingway dwindled into a celebrity, which is to say a person who is famous for being famous, whose personality has been narrowed down to a few instantly recognizable trademarks. The process had the unfortunate effect of confusing Hemingway's work with his life, or rather with those parts of his life that were lived in open view; it subordinated his literary accomplishment to his personal renown.
Many readers, or would-be readers, think they dislike Hemingway before they have read a word he's written, simply because of his personal reputation. These people include those opposed to killing, whether on the battlefield or in the Gulf Stream or in the bullring. They include many women who mistrust masculine bravado. Although Hemingway is "unquestionably an artist of the first rank." Kurt Vonnegut remarked in 1990, he is also "a little hard to read nowadays," following the ascendancy of the conservation and feminist movements. Yet there is nothing new about the tendency to disparage Hemingway on the grounds of his subject matter and his style. The tendency has been there from the beginning.
Virginia Woolf, in her 1927 review of Hemingway's early work, found fault with the "self-conscious virility" of his fiction and with what struck her as his excessive use of dialogue. Wyndham Lewis, another British writer, took Woolf's reservations further in a 1934 diatribe called "The Dumb Ox," in which he accused Hemingway of creating stupid and insensitive characters and of presenting them in a kind of baby talk borrowed from Gertrude Stein. Both Woolf and Lewis acknowledged Hemingway's considerable skill, but both also assumed that in writing about such violent topics as war, boxing, and bullfighting -- and doing so in the most basic English -- Hemingway was adopting an unrealistically muscular pose. Woolf, in particular, objected to the title of Men Without Women (1927) and to the remark included in the jacket copy that "the softening feminine influence (was] almost wholly absent" from the book. When you warned a reader that this was a man's book or a woman's book, she argued, you "brought into play sympathies and antipathies" that had nothing to do with art. Actually, Hemingway's title was a misnomer, for although most of the stories in Men Without Women concentrate on death and brutality, four of the thirteen deal directly or indirectly with love and marriage gone wrong, including "A Canary for One," about the breakup of Hemingway's first marriage, and the brilliant "Hills Like White Elephants," in which the narrator's sentiments manifestly lie with a woman being coerced by her male companion into having an abortion.
In fact, in several of his stories about men and women Hemingway comes down on the side of the woman. Perhaps the most notable exception is his presentation of the difficult and demanding mother of Hemingway's character Nick Adams, a boy who grows into manhood through a series of psychic shocks recounted in In Our Time (1925), Men Without Women, and Winner Take Nothing (1933). But to assume that Hemingway's fiction is hostile to women generally is to misread his work on the basis of preconceptions about the author and the way his fiction was construed by his earliest, interpreters.
As for his supposedly narrow and limited prose style, here again Hemingway's reputation has suffered from false comparisons between the hairy chested celebrity and the virtually anonymous writer-craftsman laboring in solitude at his desk. Something of that confusion pervades the declaration, on the cover of a 1995 edition of his collected stories, that "Hemingway wrote in short, declarative sentences and was known for his tough, terse prose." Well, yes and no. Here is Nick Adams after setting up camp during his solitary fishing trip in "Big Two-Hearted River," the long concluding story of In Our Time:
Now things were done. There had been this to do. Now it was done. It had been a hard trip. He was very tired. That was done. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it. Now he was hungry.
This could hardly be said more simply, or in Lewis' terms, in a more dull-witted and infantile way. All day long Nick has been occupied in reaching his destination and preparing for the next day's fishing. The meticulous process of doing one thing after another has kept him from thinking about whatever it is in his past that has been troubling him -- the trauma of World War I, Hemingway told us in a 1959 essay. The radical plainness of the language of "Big Two-Hearted River" precisely suits the first-this, then-that ritual Nick has been going through to shut down "the need for thinking," just as the staccato sentences reflect the jumpiness of Nick's mind.
But neither Nick Adams nor his creator is a simpleton incapable of lyrical description. At the beginning of the story, Nick gets off the train to begin his hike, and from a bridge he watches some "very satisfactory" trout in the river below, as a kingfisher flies overhead:
As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.
This passage and the one previously quoted could hardly be more different in sentence structure or length. In the first, there are thirteen sentences averaging just over five words per sentence. In the second, one sentence meanders for seventy-nine words. Moreover, in the camp passage, Hemingway relies on the verb "to be" almost exclusively, so that when a verb with some suggestive value appears (as in the sentence "Nothing could touch him"), it takes on extraordinary significance. The trout passage is far more sophisticated, full of active verbs -- "moved," "shot," "marking," "lost," "caught," "float," "tightened" -- that dramatize the upstream progress of the trout. But both passages employ common adjectives and both are full of repetition: the unashamed reiteration of such nouns as "stream" and "shadow" in the second passage is particularly striking, and the verb "tightened" is powerfully echoed in the brief paragraph that follows that passage:
Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling.
Watching the trout evokes real happiness in Nick. He shares a certain kinship with the fish: to keep his mind straight, he too must hold against the current.
When critics write about a monolithic Hemingway style, they usually have his early fiction in mind -- the first three books of stories and the novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929). Yet even within "Big, Two-Hearted River," written during his most experimental period (the Paris years from 1921 through 1924). Hemingway hardly wrote in one discrete fashion. What he wanted to convey dictated the way he wrote: style and content had to work together. Then, his prose changed, as he grew older. Sentences in A Moveable Feast, written in the late 1950s and published posthumously in 1964, average twice as long as those in "Big Two-Hearted River," and many more of them are complex in form. What remained constant throughout his career was a predilection for everyday language. In both "Big Two-Hearted River" and A Moveable Feast, nearly three out of four nouns are monosyllabic.
Hemingway's limited diction represented a rebellion against the high-minded but essentially empty rhetoric he had been brought up on. His reaction was very much like that of other modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot, advocate of "the objective correlative...
编辑推荐 Amazon.com Review
Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honor to the author. In fact The Old Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway's career, which was foundering under the weight of such postwar stinkers as Across the River and into the Trees. It also led directly to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954 (an award Hemingway gladly accepted, despite his earlier observation that "no son of a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterwards"). A half century later, it's still easy to see why. This tale of an aged Cuban fisherman going head-to-head (or hand-to-fin) with a magnificent marlin encapsulates Hemingway's favorite motifs of physical and moral challenge. Yet Santiago is too old and infirm to partake of the gun-toting machismo that disfigured much of the author's later work: "The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords." Hemingway's style, too, reverts to those superb snapshots of perception that won him his initial fame:
Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air.If a younger Hemingway had written this novella, Santiago most likely would have towed the enormous fish back to port and posed for a triumphal photograph--just as the author delighted in doing, circa 1935. Instead his prize gets devoured by a school of sharks. Returning with little more than a skeleton, he takes to his bed and, in the very last line, cements his identification with his creator: "The old man was dreaming about the lions." Perhaps there's some allegory of art and experience floating around in there somewhere--but The Old Man and the Sea was, in any case, the last great catch of Hemingway's career. --James Marcus
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.
The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.
Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.
"Santiago," the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up. "I could go with you again. We've made some money."
The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.
"No," the old man said. "You're with a lucky boat. Stay with them."
"But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks."
"I remember," the old man said. "I know you did not leave me because you doubted."
"It was papa made me leave. I am a boy and I must obey him."
"I know," the old man said. "It is quite normal."
"He hasn't much faith."
"No," the old man said. "
……
