Dr. Schaak
Genre Seminar
May 7, 2009
Ageless Manhood and Existential Maturity: the Attribution of Dialogue
in Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
Critical attention to Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” has dealt primarily with the attribution of dialogue and the nada prayer recited by the older waiter. Traditionally, the narrative has been understood as the story of an old man in despair, a middle aged waiter whose ripening age incites sympathy for the old man, and a naive, young waiter who unsympathetically forces the old man out of the cafe in order to leave work and return home to his wife. As Steven K. Hoffman writes, “the tale renders a complex series of interactions between three characters in a Spanish cafe just prior to and immediately after closing: a stoic old waiter, a brash young waiter, and a wealthy but suicidal old man given to excessive drink” (91). Or, as Beatriz Penas Ibanez states, “the basic conflict is generational...[it] is about three different generations represented by the old customer, the older waiter, and the younger one” (88). The generational gaps between the characters has been central to the story’s interpretation and assumptions concerning the nature of maturity (namely, that wisdom accompanies age) has directed how critics have dealt with the illogical sequence of dialogue occurring in the third conversation between the younger and older waiter in the original 1933 version of the story. That the conflict over dialogue attribution has dominated critical discussion of the story for the past fifty years and its resolution, in my view, plays a considerable role in the how the text is to be interpreted, requires that we first expound the details of this long-standing debate.
The first two conversations between the younger and older waiter introduce ambiguity for the reader as the text simply fails to specify who says what. The first line of both dialogues is attributed to “one waiter” (288)--an equivocal, and rather provocative, appellation that fails to establish each line’s speaker and foregrounds the ensuing confusion that plagues the waiters’ third conversation. The first line of the third set of dialogue is similarly designated by an equivocal “he said” (289). As we later learn, it is the younger waiter who is married, allowing us to attribute the line: “He’s lonely. I’m not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me” (289), of the third dialogue to the younger waiter. Using this reference point, we can trace the conversation backwards to discover that it is the older waiter who reveals the details surrounding the old man’s previous suicide attempt (supposing we adhere to a traditional, metronomic reading of dialogue that designates a new speaker with a line indentation). If we read forward from our reference point, however, it’s discovered that the younger waiter is apparently the one who disclosed information about the old man’s attempted suicide. The original version of the story read as follows:
Younger Waiter: “He’s lonely. I’m not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me.”
Older Waiter: “He had a wife once too.”
Younger Waiter: “A wife would be no good to him now.”
Older Waiter: “You can’t tell. He might be better with a wife.”
Younger Waiter: “His niece looks after him.”
Older Waiter: “I know. You said she cut him down.” (289)
That the older waiter declares it is the younger waiter who said “she cut him down,” contradicts the earlier part of the dialogue when the younger waiter asks, “Who cut him down?” (289). “This discrepancy,” says Ken Ryan, “seemed to go unnoticed for nearly twenty-six years, until February 1959, when articles by F.P. Kroeger and William Colburn sparked the conflict. In 1965, Charles Scribner Jr. emended the original text, thus ‘correcting’ the inconsistency” (78). The emendation changed the following lines:
Original Version (1933-1964):
“His niece looks after him.”
“I know. You said she cut him down.”
Emended Version (1965-):
“His niece looks after him. You said she cut him down.”
“I know.”
While the emendation cleared up the inconsistency, it also, according to Warren Bennett, “traded one kind of question for another kind: since Hemingway did not correct his own story during his lifetime, does that make the old text Hemingway’s story and the new text his publisher’s story? Should the critic use the old text or the new text?” (“Characterization,” 71). Bennett’s query intimates an equitable challenge: that Hemingway, putatively, a master craftsmen of literature, allowed the apparent mistake to go uncorrected (let alone made such an unfortunate slip in the first place), brings into question the validity of the emendation and summons readers to reconsider the credibility of the original text. Thus, the emendation seems to have only compounded the debate, pitting those who supported the change against those who opposed it. Critics from both sides have sought, in one way or another, to explain away the inconsistency, since.
In an article published five years after the emendation, Bennett suggested that regardless of the textual change “it is still possible to determine that the older waiter is the one who knows about the old man’s attempted suicide” (71) because the dialogue reflects the generational disparity between the two waiters. He writes, “The structure of the story is based on a consistent polarity: ‘despair,’ characterized by depth of feeling and insight into the human condition, in opposition to ‘confidence,’ characterized by a lack of feeling and, therefore, a lack of insight” (71). The older waiter’s “nihilistic concept of life” (71) enables him to identify with the old man which, in turn, is reflected by his empathetic comments; similarly, the confident naivete of the younger waiter is reflected by his insensitive and, often, cruel remarks.
Bennett suggests, for example, that the younger waiter is identifiable by his crass use of the word “kill,” noting that he says the old man “‘should have killed himself last week’” (72, Bennett’s emphasis) when addressing both the older waiter and the old man, clearly establishing “that it is the younger waiter who asks for further information: ‘What did he want to kill himself for?’...Consequently, it is the older waiter who knows the history of the old man and speaks the first line of dialogue in the story: ‘Last week he tried to commit suicide’” (72). The older waiter, who, according to Bennett, views life as “a net of illusions” (75), while empathizing with the old man, expresses his intellectual worldview in the condescending, ironic comments he makes to others. “Since verbal irony is employed,” says Bennett, “we must look to the text for hard evidence of which waiter employs it as a mode of speaking, and that evidence is in the scene with the bodega barman. It is the older waiter who uses verbal irony; he even thinks ironically” (73). When the barman asks what the older waiter will have to drink he replies “Nada” (291), alluding back to his nihilistic rendition of the paternoster moments before. Kept awake by the nothingness, or void of meaning, he perceives in the universe, the waiter mischievously remarks, “it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it” (291)--displaying ironical insight which, according to Bennett, is too sophisticated for the naive, philosophically inept youth.
In his 1976 article, Harold Hurley similarly argues that structural patterns are identifiable because of the waiters’ generational disparity, noting that the older waiter shares an “unspoken bond” (84) with the old man, recognizing him “as a fellow-sufferer [and] is reluctant to close, because he [the older waiter], too, needs the light, cleanness, and order that the cafe provides against the dark” (84). The younger waiter, again characterized as naive and self-involved, is “unconcerned with the old man and...is simply concerned with going home to his wife” (84). On top of this, Hurley also notes that the “attributions of the first and third exchanges...reveal a simple pattern: the younger waiter asks the questions and the older waiter provides terse answers” (83), indicating that Hemingway employed “the ‘one waiter said’ tag to refer to the older waiter” while “‘the waiter’ is used seven times to refer exclusively to the younger waiter” (84). Based on his assumptions about age and maturity (e.g. his assumption that the older waiter, unlike the younger waiter, has reached an advanced stage of mental and emotional development that allows him to view the old man as a “fellow-sufferer”) along with what he calls “explicit identifying tags” (85), Hurley concludes that Hemingway delineates “the waiters as distinct character types. As such, the dialogue of the disputed...speech should be read in a way consistent with the characters as revealed elsewhere in the story” (85).
Bennett addressed the problem again in 1979, this time with a more direct approach, arguing that manuscript evidence clears up “many of the questions about the original dialogue sequence” (613) and establishes the older waiter as the speaker who first reveals information regarding the old man’s suicide attempt. To preserve the “ethics and efficacy” (616) of Scribner’s editorial change, Bennett proposes that the “discovery of the pencil manuscript...reveals how the illogical dialogue sequence may have occurred; it shows evidence of two mistakes, one by a typist or typesetter, and one by Hemingway himself” (616). The many insertions and effacements evident on the manuscript along with the “thickness and texture of the pencil point” (617) in some places in contrast with the “smaller and tighter [marks of a] sharp pencil” (617) in others, demonstrate, for Bennett, that Hemingway was a “fallible human being...[writing] in a hurry” (624) and simply misplaced the line: “You said she cut him down.” The occurrence of this costly mistake, Bennett writes, “pictures not Hemingway the slow perfectionist, hovering over each word and detail” (624) but Hemingway the fervent artist, whose unfortunate sloppiness sneaked into publication.
David Kerner, in “The Mauscripts Establishing Hemingway’s Anti-Metronomic Dialogue,” notes Hemingway’s deliberate tendency to break conventional writing standards and demonstrates the generous use of anti-metronomic dialogue in his other works. Kerner, and other critics, have proposed that the lines: “He’s drunk now” and “He’s drunk every night” (289), along with the lines: “He must be eighty years old” and “Anyway I should say he was eighty” (289), of the waiters’ third conversation, are examples of Hemingway’s use of anti-metronomic dialogue. Because the second line of each pair is little more than reconfirmation of the preceding line, critics propose that each of the sets be viewed as belonging to a single speaker. For example, if the younger waiter begins the third conversation, saying “He’s drunk now...He’s drunk every night,” and we attribute the lines: “He must be eighty years old...Anyway I should say he was eighty” to the older waiter, then the younger waiter becomes the speaker who reveals the old man’s attempted suicide, the inconsistency of the waiters’ third conversation evaporates, and (ignoring the use of anti-metronomic dialogue) the text is shown to be without error. As Kerner concludes, “the authority of [the] manuscript is left intact after close examination of the forty other passages of anti-metronomic dialogue in the manuscripts Hemingway saw through the press” (396).
Ironically, varying critical attempts to make sense of the conflict have not resolved the ambiguity of the first two conversations, nor has support for or against Scribner’s 1965 emendation adequately demonstrated, for the reader who expects standard grammatical conventions to be employed, either the clarity of the third dialogue or legitimate reason to rewrite Hemingway’s original creation. That the inconsistency occurred as an integral part of his writing process, appearing in the original manuscript and afterwards preserved in “the Delaware typescript, the magazine story, and the short story collections, and because,” says Ryan, “Hemingway did not see fit to change it in his lifetime” (88), readers ought to entertain the possibility that the inconsistency was intentional and “consider whether or not Hemingway may have perceived the ‘error’ as actually strengthening the story” (88). Ryan continues,
Those still intent on seeing ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ published in its emended form have a responsibility to consider whether what they perceive as an error--and others perceive as creative genius--may have been seen by Hemingway as contributing to the story’s effect...Hemingway may have liked the way the confusion clouds the identities of the two waiters despite the difficulty it presents to the reader. (89)
Indeed, cloudiness and confused identities are more in line with the ambiguity that, in spite of critical efforts, persists in the first two conversations, and the overtly intentional “one waiter” tags introducing each of those dialogues uphold the possibility that Hemingway also intended for ambiguity to cloud the third conversation.
The first two conversations demonstrate Hemingway’s assiduity when writing as well as, in light of conflicting interpretive options, the breakdown of discrete character identities. Assuming the basic premise that the younger waiter, inexperienced and optimistic, is over-confident and naive, and the older waiter, disillusioned and calloused, has developed a wiser, albeit nihilistic, outlook on life, the first conversation could be interpreted as follows:
Younger Waiter: “Last week he tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said.
Older Waiter: “Why?”
Younger Waiter: “He was in despair.”
Older Waiter: “What about?”
Younger Waiter: “Nothing.” (He was without good reason).
Older Waiter: “How do you know it was nothing?”
Younger Waiter: “He has plenty of money.” (288) (People with plenty of money don’t have any reason to despair).
We can make sense of the conversation differently if we switch the roles of the speakers:
Older Waiter: “Last week he tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said.
Younger Waiter: “Why?”
Older Waiter: “He was in despair.”
Younger Waiter: “What about?”
Older Waiter: “Nothing.” (In light of his later rendition of the paternoster, the older waiter could here be referring to nada (“Nothing”), or the meaninglessness of life).
Younger Waiter: “How do you know it was nothing?” (Misunderstanding the older waiter).
Older Waiter: “He has plenty of money.” (His despair is not caused by material want. The reply could also be sardonic, suggesting that “plenty of money,” or the exploitation of wealth, exposes the corruption and emptiness it belies).
In the same way, the second conversation, occurring immediately after the waiters view a prostitute and soldier passing in the street, is open to conflicting interpretations:
Older Waiter: “The guard will pick him up,” one waiter said.
Younger Waiter: “What does it matter if he gets what he’s after?” (“what he’s after”--sex with the prostitute, in the eyes of a young man who, according to Ryan, is “preoccupied with sex” (83), is worth the consequences of being caught by the guard).
Older Waiter: “He had better get off the street now. The guard will get him. They went by five minutes ago.” (288)
The passage could also be read as follows:
Younger Waiter: “The guard will pick him up,” one waiter said.
Older Waiter: “What does it matter if he gets what he’s after?” (“What does it matter” could be a fatalistic response, alluding to the futility of sexual pursuits in a meaningless world; it could also suggest the very opposite: in light of life’s ultimate meaninglessness, one becomes intent on making the most of what he or she has, which, in the soldier’s case, is
ephemeral pleasures and meager indulgences).
That Hemingway follows these introductory conversations, open to conflicting interpretive glosses, with a third conversation whose length (nearly three times as long as the first two conversations combined) and nettlesome absence of dialogue attribution, makes for an entropic narrative sequence that Hemingway, undoubtedly, knew would bemuse his readers, forcing them to not only confuse speakers but also to reconsider whatever character development they had formed in their minds to that point; including the line: “I know. You said she cut him down,” disrupting either the reader’s tracking of the dialogue or previous interpretation of who first revealed the old man’s attempted suicide, at the end of this insidiously long sequence, brings into clear sight the evidence of design and Hemingway’s deliberate confusing of the waiters’ identities.
Breaking down the distinctions between the older and younger waiter brings into question their generational differences, repudiating the assumptions that have guided past decades of critical debate. What has interestingly gone unnoticed--that the waiters are never described as young or old but “younger” and “older”--betokens the possibility that these two waiters may very well differ but a year in age. The waiters could be twenty-one and twenty-two or even fifty-eight and fifty-nine, for example. Unlike the “old” man, whom Hemingway generously pins down with a fixed descriptor, the two waiters are free to roam and may even, theoretically speaking, be “older” than the “old” man. In the fourth and final conversation between the waiters, the possibility of their shared youthfulness is evident. The text says:
“You have youth, confidence, and a job,” the older waiter said. “You have everything.”
“And what do you lack?”
“Everything but work.”
“You have everything I have.”
“No. I have never had confidence and I am not young.”
“Come on. Stop talking nonsense and lock up.” (290)
While the older waiter may lack confidence, he cannot get away with denying his age. Dismissing the older waiter’s claim, “I am not young,” as “nonsense,” the younger waiter points out the peculiarity of his colleague’s comment while alluding to their generational affinity. This point is reaffirmed later when the younger waiter sarcastically says to the older waiter, “You talk like an old man yourself” (290). Thus, it appears quite possible that both waiters are young.
Forcing readers to struggle with the dialogue attribution and, consequently, the identities of the waiters, Hemingway opens the text to interpretive possibilities. In doing so, he exposes the inadequacy of a single interpretation to account for the text while incorporating an interpretive option--facilitated by his own views of age and maturity as revealed elsewhere in his works (for our purposes, in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” in particular)--which, until now, has failed to be recognized by critics. What is particularly relevant to our discussion from “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” is Hemingway’s presentation of manhood and of what, in his view, constitutes a courageous life.
Vacationing on an African safari, Francis Macomber and his wife, Margot, are led on a hunting excursion by Robert Wilson, the brutish “white hunter” (8), who, until the story’s denouement, serves as Macomber’s antithesis and foil. Like the manly Wilson, whose livelihood depends on his ability to “kill anything” (9), Hemingway disdained the “great American boy-men” (26) because he couldn’t stand their indiscreet display of insecurities and childlike timidity, embodied in the thirty-five year old Macomber whose “bloody” (8) cowardice, inability to “keep his wife where she belongs” (19), and garrulous need to talk over “emotional trash” (8), proved “that some [men] stay little boys for so long...Sometimes all their lives” (25).
Recognizing Macomber’s boyish immaturity, Ben Stoltzfus, in “Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway’s African Stories,” argues that Margot “is a controlling mother figure who wants Francis to be compliant and achieving, [and] punishes and humiliates him when he fails to meet her expectations” (208). Similarly, Bennett Kravitz explains that “according to the terms of their unwritten agreement, Margot must punish Francis every time he fails at the game of life. In this case, his failure consists of the cowardice he demonstrated during the lion hunt” (86). Though Macomber is accomplished, “very wealthy” (18), knowledgeable “about cars, about duck-shooting, about fishing, trout, salmon and big-sea, about sex in books, many books...about hanging onto his money, [and] about most of the other things his world dealt in” (18), as a generally competent and experienced adult male, he “confirms his emasculation through an infantile rejection of responsibility” (112), which, according to Susan Catalano, is finally conquered by Macomber when he “asserts [his] masculinity through the hunt--the paradigm of masculine control” (112).
Only after facing death does Macomber realize his responsibility to life and his call to manhood. As Stoltzfus writes, “The lion symbolizes death, and facing death reduces Macomber’s life to its simplest terms: to run or not to run, to be or not to be a coward” (214). Cowering in the lion’s presence, seeing life in its most graphic and unadulterated form, Macomber is forced to confront the same philosophical disturbances that appear to haunt the old man and the older waiter in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Expounding the existential relevance of these two stories, Stoltzfus explains,
Sartre views death--his own, as well as God’s--as the essential clue to facing life and living it authentically. It is this one ‘capital’ possibility, always in view from the outset, from which all other possibilities derive their status of radical contingency. What dread, or despair, or alienation reveal to every man is that he is cast into the world in order to die there. To live with death as the supreme and normative possibility of existence is not to reject the world or to refuse participation in daily events. On the contrary, it is a refusal to be deceived. To accept death is to heighten the capacity for living, and that in turn leads to a heightened sense of authentic personal existence. Macomber, during his short and happy life, learns this lesson. He confronts nothingness. (211)
The nihilistic fallacy of the old man and the older waiter is that, in the face of nada, they have jettisoned their responsibility to live life courageously. Like Macomber, who runs “wildly” (17) from the lion and seeks refuge, the alcoholic old man and the older waiter find safe havens in the clean, well-lighted comfort of Spanish cafes.
Macomber overcomes his nihilistic shortcomings in the midst of hunting “huge, black” (22) buffalos. Facing death, he is again exposed to the sheer force of existence and “For the first time...really felt wholly without fear” (24). “Francis’s transition from coward to brave hunter,” says Kravitz, “makes it clear that he is no longer afraid of life” (86). Indeed, Macomber grabs life by the horns, stares death in its “wicked little eyes” (27), and achieves “a heightened sense of authentic personal existence.”
Accounting for Macomber’s “absolutely different” (25) state, Wilson explains, “Worst one can do is kill you. How does it go? Shakespeare. Damned good...Used to quote it to myself at one time. Let’s see. ‘By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.’ Damned fine, eh?” (25). Boldly entering the hunt after reprimanding his once emasculating wife (26), speaking in a tone and terseness that now resembles Wilson’s, Macomber engages life, “fills meaninglessness with a new essence” (Stoltzfus, 206), and becomes a man by fulfilling his existential responsibility. The middle-aged Macomber conquers nada by making the most of his life--a right of passage having little to do with his “twenty-first birthday” (25).
That the older waiter of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” identifies with “those who like to stay late at the cafe...[and] need a light for the night” (290) (redolent of a child’s night-light), shows that he, like the old man, escapes to the anesthetic environment of “a clean and pleasant cafe” (290) and nurses the bottle, in order to disengage the nothingness “he knew too well” (291). Mockingly reciting the paternoster, the older waiter ironically scorns a “Father” he purportedly doesn’t believe in, evincing a rebellion and petulance that resembles a child’s temper tantrum.
Contrastingly, the younger waiter, like the courageous Macomber who anxiously anticipates the hunt (26), engages life with “all confidence” (290), seeking to make positive use of the dwindling night hours wasted in the empty cafe. Desiring to return home to his wife, the younger waiter says, “I want to go home to bed” (290)--evoking his sexual potency and symbolic dominion over life. That the old man no longer has a wife and the older waiter, ostensibly, spends his nights alone in “his room” (291), in contrast, suggests their sexual impotence, symbolizing an “infantile rejection of [their existential] responsibility.” Purposefully utilizing the “capacity for living,” the younger waiter accepts “death as the supreme and normative possibility of existence,” and, through an avid “participation in daily events,” regards every passing moment with the utmost significance. In response to the older waiter’s objection to closing early, the younger waiter replies (portraying the respective existential, not generational, maturation of himself, the older waiter, and the old man) that an extra hour is “More to me than to him” (290).
Thus, while the waiters are certainly “of two different kinds” (290), placing them in a fictional world destabilized by suggestive ambiguity and a rather insidious dialogue conflict, Hemingway opens their identities to numerous interpretive glosses, one of which, considered in this paper, challenges a history of critical review and the erroneous proverbial assumption that wisdom accompanies age.
Works Cited
Bennett, Warren. “Character, Irony, and Resolution in ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography. March 1970: 70-79. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009.
live>.
Bennett, Warren. “The Manuscript and the Dialogue of ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’ American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography. January 1979: 613-24. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009.
live>.
Catalano, Susan M. “Henpecked to Heroism: Placing Rip Van Winkle and Francis Macomber in the American Renegade Tradition.” Hemingway Review. Spring 1998: 111-117. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Macmillan, 1987.
Hoffman, Steven K. “Nada and the Clean, Well-Lighted Place: The Unity of Hemingway’s Short Fiction.” Essays in Literature. 1979: 91-110. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009.
Hurley, Harold C. “The Attribution of the Waiters’ Second Speech in Hemingway’s ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’ Studies in Short Fiction. 1976: 81-85. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009.
Ibanez, Beatriz Penas. “A Hemingway-Vallejo Analogue.” The Hemingway Review. Spring 1994: 87-96. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009.
Kravitz, Bennett. “‘She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not’: The Short Happy Symbiotic Marriage of Margot and Francis Macomber.” Journal of American Culture. Fall 1998: 83-87. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009.
Ryan, Ken. “The Contentious Emendation of Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Hemingway Review. Fall 1998: 77-91. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009.
Stoltzfus, Ben. “Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway’s African Stories.” Comparative Literature Studies. 2005: 205-28. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009.
live>.
