Friday, December 10, 2004 – The Old Man & the Sea

Friday, December 10, 2004 – The Old Man & the Sea

I just finished The Old Man and the Sea, my second reading of the last novel by the Nobel Laureate, who took his life with a shotgun in 1959. I first read the novel in my senior year 1962-1963 at Clover Park High School in Tacoma, Washington. I identified with the boy, Manolin back then. This time I identified with Santiago, the old man in the book. Hemingway influenced the generations that grew up reading his work. George Plimpton, the author of Paper Lion—if you’re like me you didn’t read the book but saw the movie with Alan Alda playing Plimpton—and editor of Paris Review, is one example. If you had one phrase to sum up the motivation of characters in any Hemingway book it would be “a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do”—I’m reminded of the circular reasoning of Gertrude Stein, “a rose is a rose…” For those of us growing up in the 1950s, Hemingway’s phrase was all too familiar. When we turned 18, we had to register for the draft or join one of the armed services. We began life with a duty and that sense of duty remained—at least for me.

Hemingway’s story is a retelling of Cervantes Don Quixote, with Santiago playing the Don and Manolin playing the ever faithful, Sancho Panza. Both writers’ main characters have undertaken an impossible task and both are unaware of the magnitude of their mission, even when it has become glaringly apparent to everyone else especially the reader. Santiago is at the end of his life and death is of no consequence to him. What is important to him is to continue doing what he has done all his life. In many ways the reader sees in the words of this, his last story, Hemingway rationalizing his view of the world in his old age. Santiago wants to die doing what he loves to do. Hemingway lacked an occupation that he could die doing—in the boat by himself, Santiago battles the Sharks feeding on his great prize and he sees in this battle the natural struggle that is living. One real possibility is that he will lose the struggle and instead of being the predator, he becomes the prey.

The notion of predator and prey is sharply drawn in the story when Santiago articulates that one fish feeds on another and that he feeds on the fish. The nature of life is that each living creature must feed off another in order to live. Humans at the top of the food chain are themselves prey to diseases, viruses, bacteria, and as carrion—in the wild—by scavengers and in the graveyard by insect larvae and then insects themselves, who continue the cycle by being consumed by higher order plants and animals. It’s a cycle of feeding that returns on itself. There is beauty in the symmetry reflected in the old man’s musings spoken aloud as he attempts to bring his catch back to the village.

There is a stream of conscientiousness, to the storytelling. You come to understand Santiago and what drives him by his compulsive conversation he engages with himself. You learn his dear wife has died, that he traveled to Africa as a young man. You learn that his dreams now are only about the lions he remembered as a young man in Africa coming down to the beach. You sense that the old man knows that he’s getting close to death though in the story there is only one mention of this acknowledgement near the end. Santiago tastes a coppery reflux that he spits into the ocean.

I began by saying that Santiago and Don Quixote are similar. For Hemingway’s old man the quest is for the great fish that Santiago does hook half way through the tale. The conflict appears to be between fisherman and fish, but in reality, the conflict is the old man’s struggle to endure. The fish is symbolic of the struggle that is life and Santiago knows that he must consume himself to endure the struggle and prevail. He relates symbols of the struggle in his reverie of the arm wrestling match with the black man that stretched into two days over the weekend, neither man wanting to relent. The black man would mount an all out effort to press Santiago arm to the table only to have his opponent rebound, and when everyone believe the match would end in a draw, Santiago launched and completed his successful attack to press his opponent’s arm to the table.

He was younger then and now here he is again being tested by other opponents. This time he is an older man and his body, calloused with age, is beginning to struggle to do the bidding of its master. Santiago talks to his two hands as if they were separate from him, chiding the right for being the weaker of the two, complaining to both of their unwillingness to do his bidding—the right hand cramps on him and resists being opened—an eager spirit but a wanting body.

The other major theme of this work is that the goal is not the point of life—as the narrative reveals, it is achieved and lost before the story completes. What remains is the quest and the struggle it entails, the battle between the old man and the enormous Marlin he has hooked that tows him out to sea and the sharks that attack his kill as he makes his way back to port. At this level, the story resembles the bullfight. The matador and bull are locked in this ritual of which the bull is completely ignorant. The matador knows the outcome—the bull will die one way or the other. The bull has to do what nature has bred him to do, charge the matador and establish his dominance. The man has the advantage but is himself expected to perform and in his performance to demonstrate his dominance over this force of nature. How well the matador performs determines if he emerges a living or dead hero, or coward. The old man knows too he is being tested in his struggle. The outcome is inconsequential only that he knows that he has performed well. The Greeks have a word for this. It’s areté, the most articulated value in Greek culture, which translates as "virtue," but, actually means something closer to "reaching your highest human potential."

In Santiago’s world, the ocean is the arena, the sea and its creatures are the opponent—the only variable in the entire venue is Santiago. The large fish is compelled to do what eventually gets him caught on the old man’s hook, the ocean is oblivious of both man and fish, and the sharks are conditioned to scavenge Santiago’s catch. The only variable in this entire scene is the old man. At any point in the story he has the option to give up and return to shore, to allow the sharks to feed unchallenged on his catch—Santiago knows that the sharks will have their way and nothing he can do will stop them, yet he persists in fighting them until he is without means to fight. He looses his harpoon in the battle with the first attacking shark, then his knife after killing three more that follow, and finally breaking his tiller handle converted into a club on the predators that follow. Weaponless and blinded by night, the old man finally allows the scavengers to have their way with his magnificent fish.

He returns to port beaten by the forces of the sea, but not defeated. He dreams of returning to do battle again. This story resembles the catholic mass with Santiago acting the part of the priest, engaging in a prolonged soliloquy, in the course of which he promises to say a set of “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” if he is allowed to catch the Marlin. For such a short work, Hemingway managed to instill within it so many levels of meaning, perhaps the cumulative synthesis of a lifetime of experience. If you read this book as a young person, you should read it again as an old one, there is much the author has to say to both of you.