.png "The Old Man and the Sea") |
| The Old Man and the Sea |
Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, the year before he received the Nobel Prize, and the Prize committee cited it specifically — this novella, this 127 pages, against the full body of work that included The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. The critical consensus read the citation as recognizing a return to form after the disappointment of his previous novel. It was something more considered than that: the shortest of his books was the one that stripped the Hemingway project to its essential question.
Santiago has gone eighty-four days without a fish. His apprentice, the boy Manolin, is no longer permitted to fish with him — his parents have decided, correctly by any reasonable measure, that the old man's luck has run out. The boy continues to care for him anyway: coffee in the mornings, food, the maintenance of a relationship that the novel treats with a gentleness unusual in Hemingway's work. Their affection is mutual, precise, and expressed almost entirely through practical action. This is the novel's emotional register throughout.
On the eighty-fifth day, Santiago hooks the marlin — an animal so large he cannot see it, can only feel its weight through the line. It tows him for two days and a night, and he holds on. He talks to the fish, to his hands when they cramp, to the stars. He thinks about DiMaggio, whose bone spurs he has been reading about in old newspapers, whose playing through pain constitutes a kind of argument that Santiago is making to himself about what endurance means.
The marlin is caught on the third day and lashed to the side of the skiff, too large to bring aboard. It is here that the novella's cruelest intelligence arrives: the sharks come, and Santiago fights them, and by the time he reaches the harbor there is nothing left of the fish but the skeleton. He has done everything correctly. He has demonstrated everything a man can demonstrate about skill and patience and refusal to give up. The sea has arranged the outcome it would have arranged regardless.
What Hemingway is not writing about is the injustice of this. He is not interested in whether Santiago deserved better. The question of what the old man deserves is not the novella's subject — what the old man does, what he is in the doing of it, is the subject. The skeleton on the dock is not defeat in any simple sense; it is evidence of the full exertion of everything Santiago has. The tourists who mistake it for a shark the following morning are not missing something about fishing. They are missing something about what kind of story this is.
The prose is the plainest Hemingway ever wrote, the most completely stripped. There is nothing decorative, no sentence that is not exactly as long as it needs to be. He was fifty-three and dying, though not yet diagnosed, and The Old Man and the Sea reads like a writer taking account — of what he believed, of what he had learned about how to say it, of the question that had organized his entire career: what does a person do when the world offers no terms for survival that don't also require something essential to be surrendered?
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