Beauty of a Hemingway novel is in the simplicity of the characters, and not the language. They are uncomplicated human beings who are as much as primitive as the setting of the novel allows them to be. Is this a conscious effort from the side of the author? Maybe, even then he is does justice to literati. I do not want to read Truman Capote write about an Old Man, though, if he had written about Africa, it would have been altogether different Africa itself. Imagine Africa being analyzed to the last pastel or stroke of a Van Gogh sunflower. It will be good, maybe a bit too poetic, but all the more analytical poetry. This combination is good for completeness of characters, but it leaves a feeling in your mind about either superiority or inferiority towards each character depending on how author wants you to. It doesn’t let you empathize with the character. Hemingway does it in a very different manner.
I never expected
The Old Man and the Sea to be a 100 page affair (with font size almost 13). It was in same prosaic style of author. Many are the references to small affairs of men. In fact, this can be considered more chauvinistic work than "
The dangerous summer". What comes to its defense is the humility of the Old man. He takes it for granted that the Sea is a woman, and he respects it as a woman, and there ends IT. The way he writes about sea, the weeds, the plankton and the dolphins and the
bonito and the sharks all evoke waves in our heart. It will be hard not to close your eyes and imagine rolling on high seas, with not a single human soul to speak to but yet not entirely alone.
Just before it was dark, they were 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….
I have never been taken so forcibly in to scene of a prose as this particular line did to me. I haven’t seen an ocean making love. Nor have I seen a better love making scene being described. Hemingway embraces the idea of Sea being a woman, full blooded, ready to take anything inside her, devour it, but still with a fierceness which could only be defined by the frenzy of love making.
All through the book, you have thoughts of the Old man voiced with simplicity, simplicity in the way he articulates his thoughts, but his thoughts are profound. The thoughts come out in no more than few words, but he thinks profoundly. Old man finds kinship among the birds and animals of the sea. He talks with the bird that sits on his stern, with the fish that steers his boat without his will in the direction of course, and with a multitude of fishes and birds.
Old man, goes by the name Santiago but is never called so in the novel, neither in his youth nor by anyone in the present. It is wonderful to see how the name conjures an image in the mind. What the name Santiago cannot do, Old man does to the reader.
One more reason why this novel is more than a simple story is the portrayal of life described by a simple mind. The comparison of going for a hunt, supposing the game is moon, and thinking further, if it is sun, is the way the primitive mind thinks and why he reveres them as gods. It may not be implicit, but maybe if someone looks at the old Greek or
Roman societies, they feared Gods because of their wrath, not as Christians fear God. The fear is based on inability to stand against them. There is an equal respect for the great fish, as a fighter has for his opponent, but nothing stands between them when it comes to KO each other. He does not feel the same against a dolphin, though he admires its beauty. He is a simple man, who thinks after he has acted. It is his nature which makes him do things, nature which had calloused his hands and wrinkled his skin. Still, he lives on knowing that he has to prove each day to the very nature that he still deserves to be in the game.
The kill. Before Santiago gets down to killing him, he starts respecting him. It is not a respect out of faith or religion; it is the respect a man has for another man, or a fish. He thinks that it is either the fish or him, but it doesn’t matter who kills who, because to die at the hands of such a fish is great. That is the oeuvre of Hemingway. He defines manhood as a matter of life, not death. For Hemingway, all men are
matadors. The manner in which Santiago drives the harpoon into the heart of the fish while it circled around his boat is just like a matador in the ring. Unfortunately, it is true. A killing is same anywhere, be it in a ring or a battlefield. Death does not happen in slow motion. It happens in a matter of seconds. You are not allowed to think about sin at that time. You are living the nature’s way. Is it a statement in defense of all things deemed cruel by so called civilized society? We remember Hemingway as a person who supported big game hunting and bull fighting. It is in defense or defiance, but the fact remains. He stood by an idea of man which was a relic of the past. It reminds me of a dialogue in the movie
Patton...
The pure warrior... a magnificent anachronism.
We find the Hemingway through his novels. We identify with him through his characters. In the end, it is a journey together, through the snows of
Kilimanjaro, across the green hills of
Africa, and the wide expanse of the gulf. And that is the beauty of a Hemingway novel.
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