Hemingway – lessons in tragedy

Shafey Danish

On the 2nd of July some 48 years ago Ernest Hemingway committed suicide by shooting himself twice, with a double barreled gun. His death took away from the world one of the foremost practitioners of the art of writing, at least in the English language. But this fact would not be immediately apparent to anyone who picks up one of his books or browses through one of his short stories.

Hemingway always wrote in a deceptively simple style. His style was the style of a laconic man – one who is not given to revealing confidences; one who does not, through his garrulity, try to hold the attention of the gathering he is sitting in.

All of us meet such people, who though sensitive enough, tend to expresses themselves through silences than through speech. But such fellows hardly ever turn to writing, and it was surprising in a way that Hemingway did, fond as he was of outdoor sports, hunting, bullfighting and such like.

But it was fortunate for (English) literature. It gave us a style of writing till then not attempted; and after him attempted without success. You see, to write like Hemingway you need to have certain traits that are rarely found together. A laconic disposition, and a desire to communicate, a feeling, sensitive heart and yet an obsession with the heroic aspects of life. Those who take to writing are generally not endowed with this particular mixture of eclectic qualities.

One also needs to have come to a philosophical dead-end, to an insoluble impasse before one can write like him. You feel when you read him that he was a man who lived life more out of a sense of duty than because of any pleasure he got out of it. A thing rendered more difficult because there was assuredly a malevolent spirit waiting just beyond the horizon to cynically take away the things that you most love. A power limitless, but cruel against which you struggle without hope of ever winning.

Hemingway believed that one must struggle nonetheless – that’s what being human was all about – and it lent grace to a normally mundane life. But for how long can someone actually go on struggling in a game one is bound to lose?

It is a philosophy that seems to be gaining currency nowadays. I can name at least two films that explore the same existential themes. One is the Million Dollar Baby, another The Last Samurai. Traces of it can be found in many more films too – Troy, 300, Alexander. Others seek to escape them to a fantastical world dominated by superheroes or cute cartoonish characters.

In the Million Dollar Baby, the heroine, after almost becoming a champion against overwhelming odds, dies tragically after an accident. She is killed by the man who loves her the most… so that she may not be forced to live in the crippled state to which she is reduced to. Before he agrees to kill her at her own request, she tries to commit suicide by biting her tongue off. And this women, like a true protagonist, has all the good qualities. She nobly tries to help her family, who instead of being loving and grateful constantly cribs and taunts her.

She is brave. She struggles on doggedly even when there is almost no hope of her being able to train into a first class boxer, and so on and so on.

The Last Samurai is the story of the end of the glorious Samurai culture. Beautiful, serene and heroic, it is annihilated in the end by petty politicians.

So the question that the film forces upon us is: How can such tragic things happen to people who are inherently good?

Different writers in different ways have asked the same question. Albert Camus’ The Plague comes to mind. Thomas Hardy’s tragic novels, especially his last Jude the Obscure comes to mind.

The thing about these books and also the quality that distinguishes them from say, the Grecian tragedies, is the fact that the sufferer is nowhere blamed for his suffering. He or she often loses where others, lesser people succeed. Why is that?

This is the question that Hemingway insistently asked through his novels and short stories. Or rather he put the premise to us, as clearly as he could, that this happens to be so and leaves us to take it from there.

That is why his last work, The Old Man and the Sea, is so overwhelmingly tragic. One is tempted to say for the old man of the novel what was said about Hardy’s treatment of Jude; that Hemingway chooses to pursue and doom him beyond the point at which both fate and art would have been satisfied to leave him alone.

Tragedy of that sort of purity simply does not happen. Life for most people is tragi-comic. Which also implies that the tragedy is concocted, arising for an anguished perspective of the world rather than calm pondering; but that is another matter.

To these existential questions I have only one thing to add: if indeed loss and death are tragic - and we feel them to be so - then this tragedy is woven into the very fabric of life. Overarching above the harm of any one incident, beyond all that fate’s caprice could inflict.

We gain only to lose, and live only to die. The only thing separating us from this inevitable denouement is a certain space of time, which keeps running out even as we savour our best moments.

Hemingway’s generation was forced to ask these questions because they were witnessing the horrors of the World War II.

We have not witnessed anything on the scale of a World War, but for us the small losses, tragedies, depression, deprivations have slowly piled up to something just as catastrophic. That is why we too are asking the same questions. We too are trying to make sense out of this chaos. Maybe in this little way, Hemingway continues to be relevant.